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<s>[INST] if anyone that was gonna happen to, it was her for sure. So you were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009? Okay. And like we said, you were in a great, no, perfect, physical shape. Fucking epic shape. Epic shape, six pack, or, I mean. Yeah, okay. So you could do a lot of pull-ups and push-ups. Yes, yeah. Okay. And well-trained, would you say? Were you already what, like? No. [/INST] No. Fucking epic shape. Yeah, okay. No, no. I'll argue that point till I'm blue in the face. I spoke to recently, I actually spoke to my sergeant. He's not a sergeant anymore, but Sergeant Mark LeBlanc, he's in Africa right now on a deployment. He gave me a call the other day and I remember talking to him about this. And it's frustrating because we were at an active war, we were, sorry, we were involved in an active war where we, the units that I were in were tagged red, which meant they needed people. So when you need people, things go quick, whether or not that's right. I mean, you could argue that's the similar thing to what's happening in the world right now. We needed a vaccine. We got a vaccine. Is it the best it could be? Could it be better? Could it do more things? Sure, probably, but with the time that we had, we did the best that we could. That's my logic on that. For me, I joined the military in November of 2007. I was in basic training in January of 2008. I was graduated basic SQ, which is all your weapons training. Your DP one, which is your trade specific training. So whatever trade you're gonna go into, whether it's infantry, armored, artillery, medic, whatever, that's your DP one. It's called different things in different units. And then I got posted to my unit in September. So January to September, I had done all my training and I'm an English speaking individual. I got posted to a French unit that only speaks French and had to learn all of the weapons systems, everything again that I just learned </s><s>[INST] in that short timeframe in French. This part of your story that you're telling this to Jaco is one way to say is very impressive, that you had to learn all of this in French. So there's also the camaraderie, the social aspect of it, which is difficult, probably. [/INST] It didn't have any, that's. It didn't have any, that's. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it didn't have any. But it also would make you a more effective soldier to be socially for that cohesion to be there, right? But also just understanding the basic terminology. [/INST] Correct, the right way to say something on the radio, the right way to run a gun, the right way to, because you got to move with those guns, you got seven people, it's really magical. I'll send you a video. When we did some live fire and workup training in Texas before we left, we did a competition between the other gun to see who could fire 10 rounds faster. Wow, wow. It is truly beautiful to watch an artillery unit fire a gun because it's like a symphony. Everyone has their parts and everyone knows and everyone's yelling, but they know why they're yelling and everyone, this guy's got to do this in order for this guy to load the round. It's just, it's beautiful, it really is. </s><s>[INST] It is gorgeous to watch, I miss it deeply. Is there, by the way, for a gun, is there like one person responsible for the aim and the, or like the specification of the location and somebody else that pulls the... The lanyard. Is that the lanyard? [/INST] Is there a button? It's the lanyard. Is that the lanyard? It's better than a button, you'll like it. I'll tell you in a second. There's your sergeant in charge and then they have their two IC. And so the comms come in to the sergeant and the sergeant is the, or your master bombardier, a bombardier chef... Sorry, what? </s><s>[INST] Okay, sorry what? Bombardier chef, what? Bombardier chef. Bombardier chef, oh that's [/INST] the French. Master bombardier. So it goes like private in the north, like in infantry or in a regular unit, it's like private corporal, master corporal sergeant. In artillery it goes gunner, bombardier, master bombardier, sergeant and off like that. So you have two people but the Sarge is like, you don't move till he says move, you don't fire till he says fire, like he's your guy, he'll give you the coordinates, he'll feed him to the guy that's doing the GPS, that portion, I really never did it much. I wasn't tall enough to see it, like legitimately the weight, how high it is </s><s>[INST] up on the gun, like it was, I couldn't see clearly enough, it was not good. So obviously you have a big personality, you're a strong person. You don't say. And you have a big hat currently. I always wear a hat. Okay, it seems like your height and your size was a factor. Oh for sure. How were you able to step up in all [/INST] those moments and how difficult was it? I always wear a hat. Oh for sure. I don't know that I'd realize it was difficult while I was doing it because that's just the way it's been. I've always been a short person, that's life, nothing I can do to fix that. So there was no point, when am I gonna whine about it? I'm gonna break my femurs and insert things to make me grow a little bit. Maybe, maybe since you're in robotics you can figure that out. Okay. That's your task now. Make me be five foot three? That'd be great. For artillery, really what it came down to was the Unidite when I got there, there was only a couple people who spoke any sort of English and my sergeant was not one of them. But once he kind of started to get to know me a little bit the best that he could, he started to put effort into making sure I could lift the round, make sure my capacity to do my job was there. And so he took me under his wing in that aspect, so he would take me to the gym with him and he would show me exercises that would specifically help me load the round. So pick the round up from the ground, pick it up like a trick to put your knee under it use your legs. Instead of just pick it up use your back, pull your back out, he would work on that. And then depending on the position I was running the gun in, if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I'll explain that in a second, but if I was running the side that had the charge bags, I could step up onto the gun. And if I leaned inward enough with my right hand with the charge and I kind of kicked off, I could kind of jump </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, the covers and I, for myself, I was thinking, what is the song for me [/INST] and what is that? I think, </s><s>[INST] Uh, I think that changes day to day two. I was realizing that, but for me, somebody who values lyrics as well and the emotion in the song, by the way, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen was a close one, but the number one is uh, johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, that is uh there, there's something so powerful about that song, about that cover, about that performance. Maybe another one is the cover of Sound of Silence. Uh, maybe there's something about covers for me. [/INST] So, who's covers? Because Simon and Garfunkel, I think did the original recording. Right, So which cover is it that </s><s>[INST] there's a cover by uh, disturbed the metal band, which is so interesting because I'm really not into that kind of metal, but he does a pure vocal performance. So he's, he's not doing model performance is, I would say is one of the greatest people should see it. It's like 400 million views or something like that. It's probably the greatest live vocal performance I've ever heard is disturbed, covering sound of silence and [/INST] do it as soon as I get home </s><s>[INST] and that song came to life to me in the way that Simon Garfunkel never did. There's no for me with Simon and Garfunkel, there's not a, there's not a pain, there's not an anger, there's not uh like uh power to their performance. It's almost like this uh melancholy, I don't know. [/INST] Well, there's a lot, I guess there's a lot of beauty to it, like objectively beautiful and I think I never thought of this until now, but I think if you put entirely different lyrics on top of it, unless they were joyous, which would be weird. Um it wouldn't necessarily lose that much. It's just a beauty and the harmonizing, it's soft and you're right, it's not, it's not, it's not dripping with emotion. The vocal performance is not dripping with emotion, It's dripping with harmonizing, you know, technical harmonizing brilliance and beauty. </s><s>[INST] Now, you should compare that to disturb cover or the johnny Cash's hurt cover when you walk away. There's a few, it's haunting, it's uh it stays with you for a long time, there's certain performances that will just stay with you to where Yeah, like if you watch people respond to that and that's certainly how I felt when you listen to the disturbed performance or johnny Cash hurt. There's a response to where you just sit there with your mouth open kind of like paralyzed by it somehow. Um and I think that's what makes for a great song to where you're just like, it's not that you're like singing along or having fun, That that's another way a song could be great, but Where you're just like what? This is your aw, if we go to uh listen.com and that whole fascinating era of music in the in the 90s, transitioning to the arts. The so I remember those days, the napster days when piracy, from my perspective, allegedly ruled the land. Um what do you make of that whole era? What what are the big was first of all your experiences of that era? And what were the big takeaways in terms of piracy in terms of what it takes to build a company that succeeds in that kind of, in that kind of digital space in terms of music. But in terms of anything creative. [/INST] Well, um, so for those who don't remember which is going to be most folks, um listen dot com created a service called Rhapsody, which is much much more recognizable to folks because Rhapsody became a pretty big name for reasons I don't get into in a second. So, um for people who aren't, you know, don't know their early online music history. We were the first company. So I founded, listen as a lone founder and um Rhapsody was, we were the first service to get full catalog licenses from all the major music labels uh in order to distribute their music online. And we specifically did it through a mechanism which at the time struck people as exotic and bizarre and kind of incomprehensible, which was unlimited on demand streaming, which of course now, you know, it's a model that's been appropriated, Buy Spotify and apple and many, many others. So we were pioneers on that front. What was really, really, really hard about doing business in those days was the reaction of the music labels to piracy, which was about 180° opposite of what the reaction quote unquote should have been from the standpoint of preserving their business from piracy. So napster came along and was a service that enabled people to get near unlimited access to most songs. I mean truly obscure things could be very hard to find on napster. But most songs with a relatively simple, you know, one click ability to download those songs that have the Mp three's on, on their hard drives. But there was a lot that was very messy about the napster experience. You might download a really god awful recording of that song, you may download a recording that actually wasn't that song with some prankster putting it up to sort of mess with people. Um you could struggle to find the song that you're looking for, you could end up finding yourself connected was peer to peer, you might randomly find yourself connected to somebody in Bulgaria doesn't have a very good internet connections. You might wait 19 minutes only for it to snap, et cetera, et cetera. And our argument, well, actually, let's start with how that hit the music labels. The music labels had been in a very, very comfortable position for many, many decades of essentially, you know, having monopoly, you know, having been the monopoly providers of a certain subset of artists and given label was a monopoly provider of the artists and the recordings that they owned. And they could sell it at what turned out to be tremendously favorable rates. And the late era of the C. D. Um, you know, you were talking close to $20 for a compact disc that might have one song that you were crazy about and simply needed to own That might actually be glued to 17 other songs that you found to be sure craft. And so the music industry had used the fact that it had this unbelievable leverage and profound pricing power um to really get music lovers to the point that they felt very, very misused by the entire situation. Now along comes napster and music sales start getting gutted with extreme rapidity and the reaction of the music industry to that was one of shock, an absolute fury, which is understandable. You know, I mean industries do get gutted all the time, but I struggle to think of an analog of an industry that got it got gutted that rapidly. I mean we could say that passenger train service certainly got gutted by airlines, but that was a process that took place over decades and decades and decades. It wasn't something that happened, you know, really started showing up in the numbers in a single digit number of months and started looking like an existential threat within a year or two. So the music industry is quite understandably in a state of shock and fury. I don't blame them for that. But then the reaction was catastrophic both for themselves and almost for people like us who were trying to do, you know, the cowboy in the white hat thing. So our response to the music industry was look what you need to do to fight piracy. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, you can't switch off the internet even if you all shut your eyes and wish very, very, very hard. The internet is not going away. And these peer to peer technologies are genies out of the bottle and if you God don't, whatever you do, don't shut down napster because if you do Suddenly that technology is going to splinter into 30 different nodes that you'll never ever be able to shut off. We suggested to them is like look what you want to do is to create a massively better experience to piracy something that's way better that you sell at a completely reasonable price and this is what it is, don't just give people access to that very limited number of songs that they happen to have acquired and paid for or Pirated and have on their hard drive, give them access to all of the music in the world for a simple low price. And obviously that doesn't sound like a crazy suggestion, I don't think anybody's years today, because that is how the majority of music is now being consumed online. But in doing that, you're going to create a much, much better option to this kind of crappy kind of rickety kind of, you know, buggy Process of requiring MP three s. Now, unfortunately, the music industry was so angry about napster and so forth, that for essentially 3.5 years they folded their arms, stamped their feet and boycotted the internet. So they basically gave people who were fervently passionate about music and we're digitally modern. They gave them basically one choice if you want to have access to digital music. We, the music industry insists that you steal it because we are not going to sell it to you. So what that did is it made an entire generation of people morally comfortable with swiping the music because they felt quite pragmatically well they're not giving me any choice here. It's like a 20 year old violating the 21 drinking age that they do, that they're not going to feel like felons, they're gonna be like, this is an unreasonable law and I'm skirting it right? So they make a whole generation of people morally comfortable with swiping music, but also technically adept at it and when they did shut down napster and kind of even trickier tools and like twiki er tools like asana and so forth, came along, people just figured out how to do it. So by the time they finally grudgingly it took years, allowed us to release this experience that we were quite convinced would be better than piracy. We had this enormous hole had been dug </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, yeah, right, right. Grant me the serenity to accept the things that cannot change, the courage to change the things that can, and the wisdom to know the difference. [/INST] Yeah, see, those three properties are really important right now. Some aspects of this, we know absolutely what we can work on, cutting vulnerability. Energy transitions take time. Science can help us discriminate the difference. And that's an iterative changing landscape going forward. But at the same time, science, I personally on climate modeling or narrowing how hot it's going to get, or more clarity on when an ice sheet is going to collapse, I think those are what I call known unknowables. So being able to, I've seen enough evidence that those are deeply complex problems that we're not going to get there quickly. So then that gives you a landscape to act on. And that, whether you bring God into the mix is irrelevant. It's really know what you can change, know what you can't, and know what that gives you the quality to work on them. And serenity is comfort with that this is transitory, that the human journey, like anyone's individual journey, will have some end. That doesn't mean it has to be near. This Anthropocene that I've been writing about for decades can still be a good Anthropocene, or at least a less bad one in terms of how we get through it. </s><s>[INST] And you're also a musician. So in context, one of my favorite songs of yours, an album, a very fine line. I should mention that with the stroke coming close to death, the lyrics here are quite brilliant, I have to say. Oh, yeah. It's a very fine line between winning and losing a very fine line between living and dying a very fine line. By the way, people should listen to this. I can't play this because you two will give me trouble. a very fine line between loving and leaving. Most of your life you spend walking a very fine line and the rest of the lyrics are just quite brilliant. It is a fine line Yeah, I'm glad you walked it with me today, gentlemen, You're brilliant, kind, beautiful human beings. Thank you so much for having this quote-unquote debate that was much more about just exploring ideas together. Bjorn, thank you so much. [/INST] And Andy, thank you so much for talking today. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, these kinds of extended conversations are the more of it, the better. And finding ways to spread that capacity just to get people out of this win-lose thing is really important. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for what you're doing here. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Bjorn Lombard and Andrew Refkin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Henry David Thoreau. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. [/INST] Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. </s>

<s>[INST] that's [/INST] right voluntarily, right? It's like and what's so cool about that is that even though the person you're dealing with is full of snakes, if you offer your hand in trust and it's real you will evoke the best in them. And that's true. Even I've dealt with people who are pretty damn criminal, criminal and pretty psychopathic and sometimes dangerously so and you tread very lightly when you're dealing with someone like that, especially if they're intoxicated and even then your best bet is that alert trust. It's the it's the only fact the only thing I know that I had one client who was a paranoid, he was paranoid psychopath, that's a bad combination. He was a bad guy man, He had like four restraining orders on him and restraining orders don't work on the sort of people that you put restraining orders on and he used to be harassed now and then by you know a bureaucrat in a bank with with delusions of power and he would say to them, he used to kind of act this out to me when I was talking to him, he'd say I'm going to be your worst nightmare and he meant </s><s>[INST] it and [/INST] he would do it, he had this obsessional psychopathic vengeance that was just like right there paranoid to the hilt and paranoid people are hyper acute so they're watching you for any sign of Deceit or manipulation and they're really good at it because like they're 100%, that's what paranoia is, it's 100% focused on that. And even under those circumstances, if you step carefully enough you can maybe you can avoid the acts. That's a good thing to know if you ever meet someone truly dangerous. </s><s>[INST] Absolutely. I believe in that that being fragile. Nevertheless taking that leap of trust towards another person, even when there are dangers, especially when they're dangerous. If you care if there's something there in those hills you want to find then that's probably the only way you're gonna find is taking that risk. I have to ask you about gulag archipelago by soldiers that speak to this very point. There's so many layers to this book. We could talk about it forever. I'm sure in many ways we are talking about it forever. But there is sort of one of the themes captured in a few ways that was described to the book is that line between good and evil that runs through every human being. As he writes, uh the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being during the life of any heart. This line keeps changing place. Sometimes it is squeezed one way too exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish one and the same human being is at various ages under various circumstances, a totally different human being at times. He's close to being a devil at times to sainthood, but his name doesn't change. And to that name, we ascribe the whole lot good and evil. What do you think about this line? What do you think about this thing where we talked about if you give somebody a chance, you actually bring out the best in them? What do you think about this other aspect that throughout time that line shift inside each person and you get to define that shift? What do you think about this line? Are we all capable of evil? [/INST] Well, you know, the cosmic drama that's satan versus christ. It's like, well, who's that about? If it's not about you? I'm speaking just as a psychologist or as a literary critic. Those are characters at least there that well. Are they human characters? Well, obviously, well, are they architectural human characters? Yes. What does that mean? Cosmically and biologically? I don't know because the world is story maybe. </s><s>[INST] But the way stories are often told is the characters embody [/INST] those are those are unsophisticated. Not great literature though, it's very rare and great literature, what you have in great literature generally is the internal drama, right? And as the literature becomes more pop, I would say the characters are more unitary. So there's a real bad guy and he's all bad and there's a real good guy and he's all good and that's not as interesting. It's not as sophisticated when you reach dostoyevsky in heights in literary representation or Shakespearean heights you can identify with the villain. And that's that's when literature really really reaches its pinnacle in some sense. </s><s>[INST] And also the characters change throughout the shift throughout their unpredictable, throughout taking the speaking of Russia more seriously recently and I've got to talk to translators of the and toast oh and um check of and those kinds of folks and you get the one of the mistakes that translators made with Swarovski for the longest time is they would [/INST] quote </s><s>[INST] unquote fix the chaotic mess. That is the story of Ski because there was a sense like he was too rushed in his writing. It seemed like there was tangents that had nothing to do with anything. The characters were unpredictable and not inconsistent. There's parts of phrases that seem to be incomplete, that kind of stuff. And what they realized that is that's not that's actually crafted that way. It's not, it's you know, it's like editing James Joyce like Finnegan's Wake or something because it doesn't make any sense. They realized that that is the magic of it that captures the humanity of these characters that they are unpredictable. They changed their all time. There's a bunch of contradictions on which point I gotta ask, is there a case to be made that Brothers Karamazov, Is the greatest book ever written? [/INST] Yeah, there's a case to be made for that, I don't know, is it better than crime and punishment. </s><s>[INST] Yes. Yeah. You [/INST] think so, why do you, I'm not arguing with you. Why do you think that? </s>

<s>[INST] That's funny. I hope will become a scientific discipline of consciousness and consciousness is in some sense connected to maybe what the meaning of the word soul used to be. And I think it's a fascinating open question. Like what is conscious and so on. Maybe we'll touch on a little bit. Well, yeah, anyway, back to our [/INST] religions being adaptive. I think that Christianity probably helped us um become better people to each other as we moved into a more global society. And also it goes along with my book which is basically making the argument that belief in non human intelligence or E. T. S. Or U. F. O. S. U. A. P. S. Whatever you wanna call them is a new form of religion. </s><s>[INST] And how does that work with the scientific method? Do you think there's always this role of religion as being in his broad definition religion as being a compliment to our sort of very rigorous empirical pursuit of understanding reality. There's always going to be this coupling will always define redefine the new eras of civilization of what that religion actually looks like. So you talk about technology and so on. Being the modern set of religious beliefs are on that. So is that always going to his religion? Is religion always going to kinda cover the space of things. We can't quite understand what science yet, but we still want to be thinking about, [/INST] oh, I see what you're saying. That's a great question. When you say religion, I would, I would use the word religiosity because I think that we're moving out of the dogmatic types of religions into more of a hate to put it this way. But in X files type religion where we can say I want to believe or the truth is out there, but we don't know that it's out there, or we don't we don't know yet what it is, but we know it's out there, so there's this um this kind of built in capacity for belief in something that we don't have evidence for yet, and that's a sort of faith. So, I would say yes to that question. Absolutely. I think it's adaptive in that way. We're moving into a new, I mean, heck, we've already moved into this culture. Most people have not caught up with it yet. I see that in the school systems, you know, and I think that, um I'm hoping we can catch up fast because really it's moving faster than we are. </s><s>[INST] So, I mentioned to you offline that I'm uh finishing up on the rise and fall of the third Reich, I'm not sure if you have anything in your exploration interesting to say, but the use of religion by dictators or the lack of the use of religion by dictators, whether we're talking about Stalin, which is mostly a secular, I apologize if I'm historically incorrect on this, but I believe it's a secular and Hitler, I think there's some controversy about how much religion played a role in his own personal life and in general, in terms of influencing the, using it to manipulate the public, but definitely the church played a role, um do you have a sense of the use religion by governments to control the populations, by dictators for example? Or is that outside of your little explorations as a religious scholar? [/INST] It's not outside of my framework. Absolutely not. Um, I think that it's done routinely propaganda. It's done routinely, especially there's nothing more powerful than religion to get people to act. I think um, I have my mother is jewish and my father is was roman catholic okay, from irish extraction. And so both um members, both, both great grandparents came here under duress because they were being, what would you call it? Uh, there was an act of genocide on both sides being done by other cultures. Okay, so on the one hand, obviously we know about the holocaust. Okay, so they came the great grandparents came here to avoid that and they made it. On the other hand, uh, there was an english um genocide. We just have to say it of the irish. Um it was called famine, but it wasn't fun. It was a staged thing. And so, um millions of irish left Ireland on coffin ships is what they called them because they usually wouldn't get here. Mine happened to get here. Okay, so those, that's the context that I'm coming from. So in each case, for one thing, the irish weren't considered, you know, there was Catholics weren't considered, they were considered to be terrible. And there was a lot of anti catholic rhetoric here in the United States, which is kind of strange because one of the, in fact, the most wealthy colonial family were the carols in Maryland and they were catholic. So when you look at the United States are history and you see the separation of church and state, do you want to know where that came from? That came from those guys? They convinced George Washington and thomas jefferson, I mean, they couldn't vote yet. They had they had they had their names on the constitution. Is that not a strange contradiction? So here, here, you can see how propaganda works. There was anti catholic propaganda, there was anti jewish propaganda. Um, and all of, and a lot of it was that, you know, these people weren't human, they weren't human beings. Another thing I'd like to say is that when the irish did come here, they were indentured a lot of times indentured servants. But that's a, that's terminology, then debt, what is an indentured servant </s><s>[INST] slave? [/INST] Pretty much </s><s>[INST] so, in that sense, religion can be used [/INST] derogatorily </s><s>[INST] derogatorily as a useful grouping mechanism of saying this is the other. [/INST] And, you know, it's powerful too, because behind it is a force of, um, you know what people couldn't tend to be sacred, a sacred force, right? So, you know, it's up to God to decide who's, you know, so you have to go along with what God says, of course. Well, that's basically, um, that's not the contact event, You know, the contact event is usually some type of very specific legitimate event that a person has with something that is non human or considered divine. Um, but when, when religions become um narrative eyes, I would call it by different institutions, that's when you're in danger of getting propaganda, </s>

<s>[INST] So how do we uh solve this thing, how do we get out of this pandemic? What's like if you had like a wand or something or uh you could really implement policies, What's the full cocktail of solutions here? [/INST] It's a full cocktail. It's not just one thing In our own country here in the us, it would be getting those 64 million reluctant people to actually go ahead and get vaccinated or </s><s>[INST] 64 million people who didn't get vaccinated [/INST] Adults, not even counting the kids 64 million that astounding. Uh get the kids vaccinated. Hopefully their parents will see that as a good thing too. Get those of us who are due for boosters boosted because that's going to reduce our likelihood of having breakthrough infections and keep spreading it convince people that until we're really done with this and we're not now that social distancing and mask wearing indoors are still critical to cut down the number of new infections. But of course that's our country, this is a worldwide pandemic. I worry greatly about the fact that low and middle income countries for the most part not even gotten started with access to vaccines and we have to figure out a way to speed that up Because otherwise that's where the next variant will probably arrive and who knows how bad it will be and it will cross the world quickly as we've seen happen repeatedly in the last 22 months </s><s>[INST] I think I'm really surprised annoyed, frustrated that testing uh rapid at home testing from the very beginning wasn't a big big part of the solution it seems first of all, nobody is against it. That's one huge plus for testing it's everybody supports second of all like that's what America is good at is like mass manufacturer stuff like like stepping up, engineer stepping up and really deploying it. Plus without the collection of data is giving people freedom is giving them information and then freedom to decide what to do with that information. It's such a powerful solution. I don't understand. Well now I think the biden administration is uh I think emphasized like the scaling of testing manufacturer. So, but I just feel like it's an obvious solution. Get a test that costs less than a dollar manufacturer because less than a dollar to buy. And just everybody gets tested every single day. Don't share that data with anyone. You just make the decisions and I believe in the intelligence of people to make the right decision to stay at home when the test is positive. [/INST] I am so completely with you on that. And NIH has been smack in the middle of trying to make that dream come true. We're running a trial right now in Georgia indiana Hawaii. And where's the other 1? Oh Kentucky basically blanketing and community with free. </s><s>[INST] I'm testing. [/INST] That's beautiful. And look to see what happens as far as stemming the spread of the epidemic and measuring it by wastewater because you can really tell whether you've cut back the amount of infection in the community. Yeah, I'm so with you. We got off to such a bad start. Was testing uh and of course all the testing was being done for the first several months in big box laboratories where you had to send the sample off and put it through the mail somehow and get the results back? Sometimes five days later after you've already infected a dozen people. It was just a completely wrong model. But it's what we had and everybody was like, oh we gotta stick with PcR because if you start using those home tests that are based on antigens, lateral flow probably there's going to be false positives and false negatives. Okay sure. No test is perfect but having a test it's not acceptable or accessible is the worst setting. So we NIH with some requests from congress got a billion dollars to create this program called rapid acceleration of diagnostics red X. And we turned into a venture capital organization and we invited every small business or academic lab that had a cool idea about how to do home testing to bring it forward. And we threw them into what we called our shark tank of business experts, engineers, technology people, people understood how to deal with supply chains and manufacturing. And right now today there are about two million tests being done based on what came out of that program including most of the home tests that you can now buy on the pharmacy shelves and we did that and I wish we had done it faster. But it was an amazingly speedy effort and you're right. Companies are really good Once they've gotten FDA emergency use authorization and we helped a lot of them get that they can scale up their manufacturing I think in December we should have about 410 million tests for that month ready to go. And if we can get one or two more platforms approved and by the way we are now helping FDA by being their validation lab we can get a couple more of these approved. We could be in the half a billion tests a month, which is really getting where we need to be. </s><s>[INST] Wow. Yeah, that's a dream. That's a dream. For me. It seems like an obvious solution engineering solution. Everybody's behind it at least to hope versus division. I love it. Okay. [/INST] Happy story. </s><s>[INST] Happy story [/INST] Was waiting for one. Yeah. </s>

<s>[INST] and fascinating that yeah, that's, we've created rules based on which we all behaved. But underneath there, you know, there's things that doesn't, there's motivations and forces that don't play by the rules were still there. Nature is metal is under the surface. [/INST] Seriously. And again, I pulled out my phone and I'm basically saying like, hey, I'm gonna, you're gonna get caught. But really I'm further antagonizing you rightly or wrongly, you know what I mean? Like, and that that's an interesting thing. And I feel like just people need to remember any of us need to remember just for any reason. Just that's, that's one step away at all at all times you ever, I've had people say to me before like, oh, I don't feel safe, but you're not safe. I'll kill you before I get out of this room. Nothing you do stop that. Nothing. I mean, but don't worry, you can do the same to me, which means I'm like, oh thank goodness can you imagine, like how many guns are there are in this country? Like, I mean everywhere, I mean seriously everywhere, but that's a heartening thought, not the other way because people usually freak out and go, oh my God, gun violence, gun violence and gun violence is like, really not a serious issue in United States compared to what it could be, because it means that with the amount of guns and the amount of bullets that are out there that are in circulation, can you imagine if, like, one in every 1000 was used in anger each day? I mean this would be a terrifying place to live. You couldn't go anywhere. So, I mean, although you could say, hey, this is more than we'd like or X Y Z, it actually means that people are much more reasonable and sane than they were saying then, or then I then sometimes I might I might argue. So I guess what I mean is like, oh man, I walked to 7 11 and I didn't get stabbed, I'm like oh well that's good because not because I protected myself with my karate, it's basically no one decided to run over and stab me because I wasn't protecting myself. It's they stopped. So I guess we're all fortunate to live in a society that that like you said, nature being metal doesn't become that big of an issue all the time. But it is funny when you get people in the ring and you go, hey, let's peel back from Mr Tyson many layers of that and say, hey now it's okay, </s><s>[INST] and it's cool that, I mean, that's what society is doing. So, I've lived in Harvard Square for a while and we add extra layers of what safe means. Like now there's a discourse about safe spaces about like ideas being violence or or like, you know, like Yeah, but the ideas or minor slights against your personality being violence, but that's all like, extra layers around the nature is metal thing that it's cool, that's that's what progress is. But we can't forget that, like underneath it is still and still the thing that will murder at the at the drop of uh in any at any moment if uh if aroused. [/INST] One thing that I find funny though are ironic maybe about the uh the you know, words of violence, you know, offenses, violence thing is that of course, that if that the belief in that then justifies my violence. Like my and whether maybe maybe not physical violence, but my response to my my aggressive response to things and I guess like which again, big red begets a further aggressive response and like a you know, kind of a tip for tat sort of situation or or it goes to like, well there's 10 of me and there's one of you, so we'll get you and you can't do anything about it, but that's not morality, that's That's just saying that might makes right. So I guess again, you can understand why people do it and there are certain there is a progress aspect to it. But again, I guess without proper examination, I'm effectively with my 10 friends, you know, and, and the force of the law, Mike Tyson in people, but not admitting to myself what I'm doing. And at least Mike Tyson again is honest. </s><s>[INST] Are you afraid of death? [/INST] I mean, it's easy for me to say no, as I sit here, probably not about to die. But </s><s>[INST] is this like the UFC question, can you defeat any [/INST] opponent? The answer, the answer is of course, yes. And uh, I don't have. They're not, they're not here, are they? Exactly. But </s><s>[INST] I mean, you uh, do you ponder your own mortality? Maybe another context of that. As you mentioned, two deaths for martial artists? [/INST] I think that's actually why. Honestly, even though at a relatively young age, I think mortality is something that I'm aware of maybe more than the average person. I think probably most athletes can speak to this and anyone that ted so I've managed to slide out of a couple near death experiences personally. You know, mostly river related. Um, because I'm an idiot. But um, I regret nothing. But uh, yeah, but thank God, we're, but yeah, it isn't in our seeing, seeing the end and seeing going, well, what's going to happen. I guess. I think it comes back to kind of what we're discussing about belief structure and belief system. I think a lot of times if I recognize that no matter what I do, it's all gonna end one day and then you go, well, why were we here? What would I do? Am I gonna make it to 40? I have no idea. I'd like to hope so. I had no idea that I was gonna make it to, to the age that I am now. Um, am I gonna make it to 80? How much of that is in my control? Much of it is not. I mean it's so funny. It's an interesting like back to the belief structure again, like locus of internal and external locus of control. You know what's facilitated versus what's true and you know, I think accepting personal responsibility for more than is in my control is, is probably a positive, but at the same time recognizing that much of much is not in my control. I was fortunate enough to be born in the United States, fortunate enough to, you know, to not knock on wood have have a serious disease that I'm not aware of right now. Um, I didn't do any of that. I just showed up. That was really fortunate and I guess that doesn't diminish the fact that I try to make decent choices, but it works in concert with it. And I guess um, when I, when you go is death what I want right now? No, no, I should think not. And again, it's easy for me to be relatively calm about it. I'm not staring in the face. But what I would care a lot more about is how you live. That's what's in my control and I can't control it. As I walk out of this building, a helicopter falls on me worrying about that. I can't control. Maybe I maybe I have cancer now and I don't know it. And I really hope not. But </s>

<s>[INST] so the boost you get from performance enhancing drugs could be tiny relative to the stuff we have in the future. You might be the last generation of like natural unmodified humans that were running. [/INST] Who knows, maybe that's already over, who knows who's, who's modified that. That's true. </s><s>[INST] You might, we might be living through that transition to the new Nike shoe, but broadly defined. Yeah. So you'll be, uh, in some sense, in, in the history books as, uh, humans used to run without any modifications, [/INST] used to destroy their body and let it recover and then do it again. And they used </s><s>[INST] to be impressed with with an 11 hour, 100 mile time when we can do it in under an hour now. So, but nevertheless, it isn't, the four mile, The four minute mile was incredibly impressive. Uh, I really love the 11 hour mark for the 100 miler and the two hour marathon by most people for the longest time will start to be impossible? You know, there's still people that think it's impossible under certain constraints. So, Elliot Kipchoge of Kenya, as you mentioned, ran a one hour, 59 minutes, 42 marathon, but he had, like you said, the prototype shoes and he had the pacesetters? I don't know how essential that is, but it seems quite essential. Do you think it's possible? First of all, what do you think about that accomplishment? Uh, and he is one of the greatest, if not the greatest marathon runners of all time. What do you think about that accomplishment? And do you think it's possible to run a two hour marathon without any assistance. [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I think there's no question about it regardless of technology. He's world class, if not the best. Um, the, I think he, I think he could go under two hours, Someone equivalent to him could go under two hours with, with the shoe technology. Probably what it will take is it'll take a fast course. Of course. That has like very few tangents because like, you know, turning on, of course they have to make ads about a percent to the, to the distance. So, you know, when we're talking about a marathon, you're getting up to like a quarter mile extra running. You know, that alone could potentially put you down near near to flat based on what you know, we're seeing because I mean, he's got a, was it to a 140, I believe this is actual world record where it's actually like certified. So, I mean, he's right on the door, knocking, knocking on the door there. Um, Yeah, the prototype you had since then they put on a regulation where you can't stack a shoe for the roads more than 40. So you can only have so much of that energy returning foam and you can only have, I think one carbon played in there now. Uh, so that puts a little bit of a ceiling on that technological thing. Uh, but, but who knows what else will come out and that and to be honest, who comes out with it? Because the fact that Nike came out with this technology is the reason why it's being allowed to be be used if it would have been like, you know, another running company that came out with it. I'm sure the regulations would've been slapped down on it immediately and they would have probably just throwing it out altogether. Would have </s><s>[INST] been in politics. [/INST] Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, and I mean you can go, you can go super like, you know, negative with that and say like, hey, like this is like this is terrible or this is like super nefarious when in reality it's like, you know, you have a company that has, you know, billions of dollars and is interested enough in the sport that otherwise doesn't generate a ton of revenue to pick up a big tab and support like track and field and things like that. But you know, with that, you know, if you want to be the guy who says, yeah, thanks for the millions and millions of dollars, but we're gonna all those years and money you spent on that phone, you wasted it. We're not gonna let you use it. But you know, if you're another company who uh, you know revolutionized the sport and potentially a negative way, uh, you know, maybe maybe you say no to them. So it gets interesting. That's the way that's how it always happens. Yeah, There's really no way around </s><s>[INST] film effort tone. I think it's him that he wrote a book about a two hour marathon. What are the limits? How fast can we run? And I think he puts it like an hour and 42 minutes, something like that or 40 something minutes. It's kind of interesting question of what are the limits. Uh, do you think, do you think we'll just keep pushing the limits of what humans are capable of in the ultras in the marathon? Is this just like the way, uh, the way of [/INST] sport and I think ultra for sure because that is a fastly growing sport and it's, there's, there's a lot of potential for much bigger pot or much pool bigger pool of talent to pull from. Uh, that could really push the needle down on some of these performances and things like that, especially as it becomes more popular. If people start realizing or I shouldn't say realizing, but if a scenario happens where like, oh, I'm one of the best endurance athletes in the world. I make more money running ultra marathons than I do running the marathon. Then, you know, all of a sudden we see every record get broken in a matter of a couple of years. But the, for the marathon, I mean it's going to get faster I think, but like to what degree is so hard to know, it's very hard to know and it's the one hour </s>

<s>[INST] it's fascinating because you're making me think of something um that I aligned with you very much of how I consume deep thinkers currently. So what happens is somebody who thinks deeply about the world will write a book uh Jordan Peterson example and instead of reading their book, I'll just listen to podcast conversations of them talking about the book, which I find to this is really sad. But I find that to be a more compelling way to think about their ideas because they're often challenged in certain ways in those conversations and they're forced to after having boiling them down and really thought to them enough to write a book. So it's almost like they needed to go through the process of writing a book just so they can think through convert the language in their minds into something more concrete and then the actual exchange of ideas, the actual communication of ideas. What the public happens not with the book, but after the book with that person going on a book tour communicating the ideas. [/INST] Well there are two meanings I I make of why not too many people spend much of their time reading anymore. 11 interpretation is that we've lost our attention spans to our phones. People can't concentrate on a page if it takes them a minute to read, we're too busy, you know, watching take talks or whatever people do. Um The other interpretation would be that language and verbal communication has as well as some amount of communication which is done through facial expression, tone of voice etcetera. These are means of communication that have evolved along with humanity over thousands and thousands of years. So um we know that we are built to communicate in this way. Uh we have had writing for much less time. It is a system that we invented not a system which evolved and is innately part of uh you know humanity or the human mind. Um and so we are designed to consume conversation by our own evolution. We are designed to consume writing ah by some process of symbols that's evolved over a couple 1000 years. Um It makes sense to me why many are much more compelled to listen to podcasts for example than they are to read books. It could be that this is simply a technological uh progression which has displaced uh, reading conventionally instead of some sort of mala adaptation of our minds, which has uh, corrupted our attention spans. Likely there's some combination which determines why people spend much less time reading. But I don't think it's necessarily because we're all broken. It may simply have to do with the fact that we are designed to listen and through our years and speak through our mouths. And um, we're not innately designed to communicate uh, over a page. So </s><s>[INST] yeah, there's an exciting coupling to me between like a few second Tiktok videos that are fun and addicting and then a 34 hour podcast which are both really popular in our current time. So people are both hungry for the visual stimulation of internet humor and memes, huge fan of and also slow moving deep conversations and that might, you know, it's, there's a lot of, I mean, it's part of your generation to define what that looks like moving forward. Were a lot of people like joe Rogan is one of the people that kind of uh, started accidentally stumbled into the discovery that this is like a thing. And now people are kind of scrambling to figure out why is this a thing, like why is there so much hunger for long form conversations. And how do we optimize that medium for further further expression of deep ideas and all that kind of stuff. And Youtube is a really interesting medium for that as well. Like video sharing videos. Mostly Youtube is used with a spirit of like the tick tock spirit if I can put it in that way, which is like how do I have quick moving things that even if you're expressing difficult ideas that should be quick and exciting and visual and switching, but there's a lot of exploration there to see what can we do something deeper and nobody knows. And you're part of the you have a Youtube channel releasing one video every few years. Um so, so your momentum is currently quite slow but perhaps it will accelerate, but you're you're, you're one of the people that get to define that medium is that, do you enjoy that? The visual Youtube medium of communication as well. [/INST] I know that when the topic of conversation or the means by which a conversation is communicated or an idea is communicated, if that is sufficiently interesting to me, um I will read a book on it, I would listen to a podcast on it, I would watch a video uh on it. I think if I'm very curious about something uh I will consume it. However possible, I think when I have to consume things which really don't interest me very much. Uh I am indeed much more ready to consume them through some sort of video or discussion that I am through like a long, tedious book. </s><s>[INST] So for the, for the breadth of acquiring knowledge, video is good for the depth the medium doesn't matter. I think it'd be fun to ask you about some big philosophical questions to see if you have an opinion on that. Uh Do you think there's a free will or is free will? Just an illusion? [/INST] Well, I think classical mechanics would tell us that if we are, if we were to know every piece of information about a system and understand the rules which govern that system, we would be completely able to predict the future with complete accuracy. So if something could know everything about our lives, it could freeze time and and understand the position of every neuron in my mind about about to fire. Um No decision could be uh unpredictable. There in some sense, there is that sort of, that's sort of fate. I think that doesn't make the decisions we make illegitimate. Even if some grand supercomputer could uh understand what decisions we would make beforehand with complete certainty. I think we're making legitimate systems within a system that has no freedom </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] What's the difference between splitting and copying? Do you think? Like in terms of a lot of this is uh an interpretation that that helps us sort of model of the world. So perhaps shouldn't be thought of as like, you know philosophically or metaphysically. But even at the physics level, do you see a difference between sort of generating new copies of the world or splitting? [/INST] I think it's better to think of in quantum mechanics in many worlds, the universe splits rather than new copies because people otherwise worry about things like energy conservation and no one who understands quantum mechanics worries about energy conservation because the equation is perfectly clear. But if all you know is that someone told you the universe duplicates, then you have a reasonable worry about where all the energy for that came from. So a preexisting universe splitting into two skinnier universes is a better way of thinking about it. And mathematically it's just like, you know, if you draw an X and Y axis and you draw a vector of length one 45° Angle, you know that you can write that vector of length one as the sum of two vectors pointing along X and Y. Of length one over the square root of two. Okay, so I write one arrow as the sum of two arrows, but there's a conservation of baroness right? Like there's now two arrows, but the length is the same, I just describing it in a different way. And that's exactly what happens when the universe branches the way function of the universe is a big old vector. </s><s>[INST] So to somebody who brings up a question of saying, doesn't this violate the conservation of energy? Can you give further elaboration? [/INST] Right, so let's just be super duper perfectly clear. There's zero question about whether or not many worlds violates conservation energy, it does not. And I say this definitively because there are other questions that I think there's answers to, but they're legitimate questions right? About, you know, where does probability come from? And things like that? This conservation of energy question, we know the answer to it and the answer to it is that energy is conserved. All of the effort goes into how best to translate what the equation unambiguously says into plain english, right? So this idea that there's a universe that has that the universe comes equipped with a thickness and it sort of divides up into thinner pieces, but the total amount of universe is conserved over time is a reasonably good way of putting english words to the underlying mathematics. </s><s>[INST] So one of my favorite things about many worlds is uh I mean I love that there's something controversial in size and for some reason it makes people actually not like upset but just get excited. Why do you think it is a controversial idea? So there's there's a lot of, it's actually one of the cleanest ways to think about quantum mechanics. So why do you think there's a discomfort a little bit amongst certain people? [/INST] Well, I draw the distinction of my book between two different kinds of simplicity in the physical theory. There's simplicity in the theory itself, right? How we describe what's going on according to the theory by its own rights. But then, you know, theory is just some sort of abstract mathematical formalism, you have to map it onto the world somehow. Right? And sometimes like for Newtonian physics, it's pretty obvious like, okay, here is a bottle and has a center of mass and things like that. Sometimes it's a little bit harder with general relativity curvature of space, time is a little bit harder to grasp. Quantum mechanics is very hard to map what you're the language you're talking out of wave functions and things like that on to reality. And many worlds is the version of quantum mechanics, where it is hardest to map on the underlying formalism to reality. So that's where the lack of simplicity comes in, not in the theory, but in how we use the theory to map onto reality. In fact, all of the work in sort of elaborating many worlds, quantum mechanics is in the effort to map it on to the world that we see. So it's perfectly legitimate to be bugged by that right to say like, well, no, that's just too far away from my experience. I am therefore intrinsically skeptical of it. Of course you should give up on that skepticism. If there are no alternatives and this theory always keeps working, then eventually you should overcome your skepticism. But right now there are alternatives that are that people work to make alternatives that are by their nature closer to what we observe directly. </s><s>[INST] Can you describe the alternatives? I don't think we touched on it. So, the Copenhagen interpretation and uh the many worlds, maybe there's a difference between the ever have already in many worlds and many worlds as it is now like has the idea of sort of developed and so on. And just in general, what is the space of promising contenders? We have Democratic debates Now there's a bunch of [/INST] candidates, 12 candidates, </s><s>[INST] 12 candidates on stage. What are the quantum mechanical candidates on stage for the debate. [/INST] So if you had a debate between quantum mechanical contenders, there'll be no problem getting 12 people up there on stage, but there would still be only three front runners and right now the front runners would be Everett hidden variable theories are another one. So the hidden variable theories say that the wave function is real, but there's something in addition to the wave function, the wave function is not everything is part of reality, but it's not everything. What else is there? We're not sure. But then the simplest version of the theory, there are literally particles. So many worlds says that quantum systems are sometimes our wave like in some ways and particle like in another because they really, really are waves, but under certain observational circumstances they look like particles. Whereas hidden variables says they're they look like waves and particles because there are both waves and particles involved in the dynamics. And that's easy to do if your particles are just non relativistic Newtonian particles moving around, they get pushed around by the wave function roughly. Uh It becomes much harder when you take quantum field theory or quantum gravity into account. The other big contender are spontaneous collapse theories. So, in the conventional textbook interpretation, we say, when you look at a quantum system, its wave function collapses and you see it in one location, a spontaneous collapse theory says that </s>

<s>[INST] yeah, like I was waiting for you to come and you said that you're running a few minutes late and I was like, um I was like, I'll go get a coffee because I can't possibly be the one who's early. [/INST] I can't </s><s>[INST] I don't understand. I'm always late to stuff and I know it's disrespectful in the eyes of a lot of people, I can't help it. You know, you know what I'm doing ahead of it. It's not like I don't care about the people I'm often like, you know, for like this conference will be preparing more like it's it's like I obviously care about the person, [/INST] but it's misinterpreted it is like there, I mean there are some people that like show up late because they like kind of like that quality in themselves and that's a dick right? There's a lot of those people, but more often it's someone who shows up frazzled and they feel awful and they're furious at themselves. So regretful. Exactly. I mean, that's me and I mean, also you all you have to do is look at those people alone, running through the airport, right? There's they're not being disrespectful to anyone there, they just inflicted this on themselves. </s><s>[INST] Like yeah, you've tweeted a quote by James Baldwin saying, I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they is because they sense once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the pain. What has been a painful but formative experience in your life or what's the flavor of the shape of your pain that fuels you. [/INST] I mean, honestly, the first thing that jumped to mind is my own, like battles against myself to to get my work done because it affects everything when I I just took five years in this book and granted it's a it's a beast. Like I probably would have taken two or three years, but it didn't need to take five and that was a lot of, not just, you know, not just that I'm not working instead, I'm I'm over researching, I'm making it I'm adding in things I shouldn't because I'm a perfectionist, you know, being a perfectionist about like, oh, well I learned that now I want to get it in there. I know I'm gonna end up cutting it later just, you know, or, or I over outline, you know, something, you know, until, you know, trying to get it perfect when I know that's not possible, it's making a lot of immature, kind of, like, I know I'm not actually that much of a writing amateur I've written, including my old blog, I've been a writer for 15 years, I know what I'm doing, I could advise other writers really well, and yet I do a bunch of amateur things that I know while I'm doing them, it is, and I know I'm being an amateur, so that a it hurts the actual product it makes, you know, it's be it's waste your precious time, see when you're mad at yourself and your in a negative, you know, self defeating spiral, it almost inevitably will, you'll be less good to others, like, you know, I'll just, just, I used to, you know, early on in my now marriage, um one of the things we always used to do, as I used to plan mystery dates, you know, new york city, great, great place for this, I'd find some weird little adventure for us, you know, it could be anything, and I wouldn't tell her what it was, I said, I'm reserving you for thursday night, you know, at seven, okay, and it was such a fun part of our relationship, I started writing this book and got into a really bad, you know, personal space where I was, like, in my head, I was like, I can't do anything until this is done, you know, like, no, and I just stopped, like, ever valuing like, like joy of any kind, like, I was like, no, and I know that's when I'm done and and that that's a trap or very quickly, you know, you know, because I always think, you know, I think it's going to be a six months away, but it actually five years later, I'm like, wow, I really wasn't living fully and for five years is not that we don't live very long, like, talk about your prime decades, like, that's like 1/6 of my prime years, like, wow, like that's a huge loss. So to me that was excruciating and you know, and and it was a bad um pattern, a very unproductive, unhelpful pattern for me, which is I'd wake up in the morning in this great mood, great mood every morning, wake up thrilled to be awake for the whole day ahead of me. I'm gonna get so much work done today, and but you know, first I'm going to do all these other things and it's all gonna be great, and then I ended up kind of failing for the day um with those goals sometimes miserably, sometimes, only partially, and then I get in bed probably a couple hours later than I want to, and that's when all of the real reality hits me, suddenly, so much regret, so much anxiety, furious at myself wishing I could take a time machine back three months, six months a year or just even to the beginning of that day. And uh, just tossing and turning now. I mean, this is a very bad place. That's what I said, suffering real procrastinators suffer in a very serious way. So, look, I, you know, I know this probably sounds like a lot of like first world problems and it is, but it's real suffering as well. Like it's um, so to me, it's like, it's painful because you're not being, you're not being as good a friend or a spouse or whatever as you could be. You're also not treating yourself very well, usually not being very healthy in these moments. You know, you're often and you're not being, I'm not being good to my readers. So it's just a lot of this. Um, And it's like, it feels like it's one small tweak away. Sometimes it's like that's what I said, it's like you just suddenly or just doing that 9-12 and you get in that habit, everything else falls into place. All of this reverses. So if I feel hopeful, but it's like it is a have not figured I haven't fixed about yet. I have some good duct duct tape </s>

<s>[INST] And somehow have fun in the process because we do create a lot of fun things along instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things that create somehow. There's like um fun nous to it and perhaps that has to do with the finite nous of life, the finite nous of all these experiences, [/INST] which </s><s>[INST] is what makes them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this uh whatever it is falling in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a, I don't know, just the, the businesses that do that, that, that build something or solve something. The fact that it is born and it dies um somehow embeds it with [/INST] fun </s><s>[INST] with joy for the people involved. I don't know what that is. The finite nous of it. It [/INST] can do. Some people struggle with the, you know, I mean, a big thing, I think that one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And uh in terms of like projects and so on, right, people cling onto things beyond what they're meant to be doing, you know, beyond what is reasonable. Um, </s><s>[INST] and I'm going to have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoyed talking to you. I think it's obvious as we've talked about many times, you should be doing a podcast. You should you're already doing a lot, a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which is awesome. And your great educator, you're great, mind your great into like, But it's also this whole medium of just talking is also it's a fun one. [/INST] It really is good and it's it's just it's nothing but like, it's just so much fun and you can just get into so many. Yeah, there's a space to just explore and and see what comes and and emerges and yeah, </s><s>[INST] to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others, to understand them better and together with them. I mean, you should do your you should do your own podcast, but you should also do a podcast with C. As you talked about, the two of you have such uh different minds that like melt together and just hilarious ways, fascinating ways. Just the tension of ideas there is really powerful, but in general, I think you've got a beautiful voice. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me with this conversation with your valuable time. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this conversation with library. To support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is. As far as I can tell, Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] So, yes, and I just spoken with Gnome chomsky who basically was part of uh dismantling the behaviors movement, but and I'm with that 100% for studying human behavior, but I am one of the few people in the world who has made room bas scream in pain and uh I just don't know what to do with that empirical evidence because it's hard to sort of philosophically, I agree, but uh the only reason I philosophically agree in that case is because I was the programmer. Well, if somebody else was a programmer, I'm not sure I would be able to interpret that well. So it's uh I think it's a new world that uh I was just curious what your thoughts are for now you feel that the display of the what we can kind of intellectual say is a fake display of suffering is not suffering. [/INST] That's right. That would be in my view, but that's consistent of course with the idea that it's part of our nature to respond to this display if it's reasonably authentically done uh and therefore it's understandable that people would feel this. Um and maybe as I said, it's even a good thing that they do feel it and you wouldn't want to harden yourself against it because then you might harden yourself against beings who are really suffering. </s><s>[INST] But there's this line, you know, So you said once a artificial general intelligence system, a human level intelligence system become conscious, I guess if I could just linger on it now, I've wrote really dumb programs to just say things that I told them to say, but how do you know when uh when a system like Alexa was just officiate complex that you can't introspect the hot works, starts giving you signs of consciousness through natural language. That there's a there's a feeling there's another entity there that's self aware that has a fear of death, immortality, that has uh awareness of itself that we kind of associate with other living creatures. It I guess I'm sort of trying to do the slippery slope from the very naive thing where I started into into something where it's sufficiently a black box to where it's starting to feel like it's conscious, Where is that threshold or you would start getting uncomfortable with the idea of robots suffering? Do you think? [/INST] I don't know enough about the programming that we go into this really to answer this question, but I presume that somebody who does know more about this could look at the program and see whether we can explain the behaviors in a parsimonious way that doesn't require us to suggest that some sort of consciousness has emerged, or alternatively, whether you're in a situation where you say, I don't know how this is happening, the program does generate a kind of artificial general intelligence which is autonomous, starts to do things itself and is autonomous of the basic programming that set it up. And so it's quite possible that actually we have achieved consciousness in a system of artificial intelligence </s><s>[INST] sort of the the approach that I work with most of the community is really excited about now is with learning methods. So machine learning and the learning methods are unfortunately are not capable of revealing. Which is why somebody like no child criticizes them. You have created powerful systems that are able to do certain things without understanding the theory, the physics, the science of how it works. And so it's possible if those are the kinds of methods that succeed, we won't be able to no exactly sort of try to reduce uh try to find whether there this thing is conscious or not. This thing is intelligent or not. It's simply giving when we talk to it it displays wit and humor and cleverness and emotion and fear. And then we won't be able to say where in the billions of nodes neurons in this artificial neural network is the fear coming from sort of in that case. That's a really interesting place where we do now start to return to behaviorism and say [/INST] yeah, that's that's that is an interesting issue. Uh I would say that if we have serious doubts, I think it might be conscious, then we ought to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. Just as I would say with animals, we I think we can be highly confident that vertebrates are conscious but when we get down and some invertebrates like the octopus. But but with insects it's much harder to be to be confident of that. I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt where we can, which means, you know, I think it would be wrong to torture an insect, but this doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to sniper mosquito that's about to bite you and stop you getting to sleep. So I think you you try to achieve some balance in these circumstances of uncertainty </s><s>[INST] if it's okay with you, If you can go back just briefly. So 44 years ago, like you mentioned, 40 plus years ago, you've written animal liberation, the classic book that started that launched it was the foundation of the movement of Animal liberation. Did can you summarize the key set of ideas that underpin that book? [/INST] Certainly the key idea that underlies that book is the concept of species is um which I did not invent that term. I took it from a man called Richard rider who was in Oxford when I was and I saw a pamphlet that he'd written about experiments on chimpanzees that used that term. But I think I contributed to making it philosophically more precise and to getting it into a broader audience. And the idea is that we have a bias or prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not members of our species just as in the past, Europeans, for example, had a bias against taking seriously the interests of Africans racism and men have had a bias against taking seriously the interests of women. Sexism. So, I think something analogous, not completely identical, but something analogous goes on, and has gone on for a very long time with the way humans see themselves visibly. Animals. We see ourselves as more important. We see animals as existing to serve our needs in various ways. And you can find this very explicit in earlier philosophers from Aristotle through the account and others. Uh and um either we don't need to take their interests into account at all, or we can discount it because they're not humans. They can a little bit, but they don't count nearly as much as humans do. Uh my book, I used that that attitude is responsible for a lot of the things that we do to animals that are wrong, confining them indoors, and very crowded, cramped conditions in factory farms to produce meat or eggs or milk more cheaply using them in some research that's by no means essential for survival or well being a whole lot. You know, some of the sports and things that we do to animals. So, I think that's unjustified, because I think uh the significance of pain and suffering does not depend on the species of the being who is in pain or suffering any more than it depends on the race or sex with the being who is in pain or suffering. And I think we ought to rethink our treatment of animals along the lines of saying if the pain is just as great an animal then it's just as bad that it happens as if it were a human. </s>

<s>[INST] I think there's no better place to end than a discussion of the meaning of life erIC thank you so very much. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] organizations that extensively U. C. Plus plus. Yes because it's basically all individuals or individuals. I mean it's uh it's a bunch of people in the room deciding the design of a language based on which a lot of the world's systems run. [/INST] Right? Well I think most people would agree it's better than if I decided it or better than if a single organization like H and C decides it. I don't know if everyone </s><s>[INST] agrees to that. By the way. Bureaucracies have their critics to. [/INST] Yes there that look standardization is not pleasant. It's it's it's horrifying </s><s>[INST] democracy. [/INST] But we exactly as Churchill says democracy is the worst way except for all the others, right? And it's I would say the same reform standardization. But anyway so we meet and we we have these votes and that determines what the standard is. A couple of years later we extended this so it became worldwide we have standards organizations that are active in currently 15 to 20 countries and another 15-20 are sort of looking and voting based on the rest of the work on it. And we meet three times a year. Next week I'll be in cologne Germany uh spending a week doing centralization and we'll vote out the committee draft of C plus last 20 which goes to the National Standards Committee is for comments and requests for changes and improvements. Then we do that and there's a second set of votes where hopefully everybody votes in favor. This has happened several times. The first time we finished, we started in the first technical meeting was in 1990. The last was in 98. We voted it out. That was the standard that people used till 11 or a little bit past 11. Um and it was an international standards. All the countries voted in favor. Um It took longer with 11, I'll mention why, but all the nations voted in favour. Uh and we work on the basis of consensus that is, we do not want something that passes 60 40 because then we're good in case you get dialects and opponents and people complain too much. They all complain too much. But basically </s><s>[INST] it has [/INST] no real effect. The standards has been obeyed. They have been working to make it easier to use many compilers, many computers and all of that kind of stuff. And so the first that it was traditional with I. S. O. Standards to take 10 years. We did the first one in eight, brilliant. Uh and we thought we were going to do the next one and six because now we're good at it right. It took 13. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it was named O [/INST] X. It was named O X. </s><s>[INST] Hoping that you would at least get it within the single within the arts the single day. [/INST] I I thought we would get I thought would get 6, 7 or eight. </s><s>[INST] The confidence of youth. [/INST] That's right. Well, the point is that this was sort of like a second system effect. That is we now knew how to do it. And so we're going to do it much better and we've got more ambitious and it took longer. Furthermore, There is this tendency because it's a 10 year cycle or each doesn't matter just before you're about to ship somebody has a bright idea. And so we really, really must get that in. We we did that successfully with the STL. We got the standard library that gives us all the STL stuff that that basically, I think it saved Plus Plus it was beautiful. </s><s>[INST] Uh [/INST] and then people tried it with other things and it didn't work so well they got things in, but it wasn't as as dramatic and it took longer and longer and longer. So after C plus plus 11, which was a huge improvement. And what basically what most people are using today, we decided ever again. And so how do you avoid those slips? And the answer is that you ship more often so that If you if you if you have a slip on a 10 year cycle By the time you know it's a slip, there's 11 years till you get it. Now with a three year cycle There is about 34 years till you get it. Like the delay between feature freeze and shipping. So you always get one or two years more. And so we shipped 14 on time. We shipped 17 on time and we ship We will ship 20 on time. It's it will happen. And furthermore this allow this gives a predictability that allows the implement urz, the compiler implementer is the library implementer. They have a target and they deliver on it. 11 took two years before most compilers were good enough 14, Most compilers were actually getting pretty good in 14, 17. Everybody shipped in 17. We are going to have At least almost everybody ship almost everything in 20. And I know this because they're shipping in 19, predictably this is good, delivery on time is good. And so yeah, </s><s>[INST] that's great. That's how it works. There's a lot of features that came in in C Plus plus 11. There's a lot of features at the birth of C Plus plus that were amazing and ideas with concepts in 2020. What to you is the most just just to you personally. Beautiful or mm just you sit back and think, wow, that's just nice clean feature of C Plus plus. [/INST] I have written two papers for the history of Programming languages conference which basically ask me such questions and I'm writing a third one which I will deliver at the History of Programming Languages conference in London next year. So I've been thinking about that and there is one clear answer constructors and instructors the way a constructor can establish the environment for the use of the of its hype for an object and the destructor that cleans up any messes at the end of it. That is the key to C Plus plus. That's why we don't have to use garbage collection. That's how we can get predictable performance. That's how you can get the minimal go ahead in many, many cases and have really clean types. It's the idea of constructive destructive pairs. Sometimes it comes out under the name R I Ai. Resource acquisition is initialization which is the idea that you grab resources and the constructor and release them in destructor. Um It's also the best example of why I shouldn't be in advertising. I get the best idea and I call it resource acquisition is initialization. Um not the greatest naming I've ever heard. </s>

<s>[INST] And yeah, so it's all been a challenge. Is there still room for simplification? [/INST] Oh yeah, much more, much more. And, you know, these are really just the first generation of these machines. We're already thinking about what the next generation of Spot's going to look like. Spot was built as a platform. So you could put almost any sensor on it. You know, we provided data communications, mechanical connections, power connections. And, but for example, in the applications that we're excited about, where you're monitoring these factories for their health, for their health, there's probably a simpler machine that we could build that's really focused on that use case. And that's the difference between the general purpose machine or the platform versus the purpose-built machine. And so even though, even in the factory, we'd still like the robot to do lots of different tasks. If we really knew on day one that we're going to be operating in a factory with these three sensors in it, we would have it all integrated in a package that would be easier, more, less expensive, and more reliable. So we're contemplating building, you know, </s><s>[INST] a next generation of that machine. So we should mention that, so Spot, for people who are somehow not familiar, so is a yellow robotic dog, and has been featured in many dance videos. It also has gained an arm. So what can you say about the arm that Spot has? About the challenges of this design [/INST] and the manufacture of it? We think the future of mobile robots is mobile manipulation. That's where, you know, in the past 10 years, it was getting mobility to work, getting the leg of locomotion to work. If you ask, what's the heart problem in the next 10 years? It's getting a mobile robot to do useful manipulation for you. And so we wanted Spot to have an arm to experiment with those problems. And the arm is almost as complex as the robot itself, you know, and it's an attachable payload. It has, you know, several motors and actuators and sensors. It has a camera in the end of its hand. So, you know, you can sort of see something, and the robot will control the motion of its hand to go pick it up autonomously. So in the same way the robot walks and balances, managing its own foot placement to stay balanced. We want manipulation to be mostly autonomous, where the robot, you indicate, okay, go grab that bottle, and then the robot will just go do it using the camera in its hand and then sort of closing in on the grasp. But it's a whole another complex robot on top of a complex-legged robot. And of course we made it, the hand look a little like a head, you know, because again we want it to be sort of identifiable. In the last year, a lot of our sales have been people who already have a robot </s><s>[INST] now buying an arm to add to that robot. Oh, interesting. And so the arm is for sale. [/INST] Oh yeah, oh yeah. </s><s>[INST] It's an option. What's the interface like to work with the arm? Like is it pretty, so are they designed primarily, I guess just ask that question in general about robots from Boston Dynamics. Is it designed to be easily and efficiently operated remotely by a human being? [/INST] Or is there also the capability to push towards autonomy? We want both. In the next version of the software that we release, which will be version 3.3, we're gonna offer the ability of, if you have an autonomous mission for the robot, we're gonna include the option that it can go through a door. Which means it's gonna have to have an arm and it's gonna have to use that arm to open the door. And so that'll be an autonomous manipulation task that you can program easily with the robot, strictly through, you know, we have a tablet interface. And so on the tablet, you know, you sort of see the view that Spot sees. You say, there's the door handle. You know the hinges are on the left and it opens in. The rest is up to you. </s><s>[INST] Take care of both of you. Take care of it. So it just takes care of everything. [/INST] Yeah. So we want, and for a task like opening doors, you can automate most of that. And we've automated a few other tasks. We had a customer who had a high powered breaker switch, essentially, it's an electric utility, Ontario power generation. And they have to, when they're gonna disconnect, you know, their power supply, right? That could be a gas generator. It could be a nuclear power plant. You know, from the grid, you have to disconnect this breaker switch. Well, as you can imagine, there's, you know, hundreds or thousands of amps and volts involved in this breaker switch. And it's a dangerous event because occasionally you'll get what's called an arc flash. As you just do this disconnect, the power, the sparks jump across and people die doing this. And so Ontario power generation used our Spot and the arm through the interface to operate this disconnect in an interactive way. And they showed it to us. And we were so excited about it and said, you know, I bet we can automate that task. And so we got some examples of that breaker switch. And I believe in the next generation of the software, now we're gonna deliver back to Ontario power generation. They're gonna be able to just point the robot at that breaker. They'll be out, they'll indicate that's the switch. There's sort of two actions you have to do. You have to flip up this little cover, press a button, then get a ratchet, stick it into a socket and literally unscrew this giant breaker switch. So there's a bunch of different tasks. And we basically automated them so that the human says, okay, there's the switch, go do that part. That's right. In an interact, that right there is the socket where you're gonna put your tool and you're gonna open it up. And so you can remotely sort of indicate this on the tablet </s>

<s>[INST] The Higgs is already a decade ago. [/INST] I think it is, yeah. Wow, time flies. Well, but you better check me on that, yeah. That's true, but so much fun has been happening. So much fun has been happening. And so that's all pretty well understood. There are some things that might or might not around the edges of that, you know, dark matter, and neutrino masses, some sort of fine points or things we haven't quite measured perfectly, and so on. But it's largely a very complete theory, and we don't expect anything very new </s><s>[INST] conceptually in the completion of that. Anything contradictory by new, because can't you- Anything contradictory, yeah. I'll have some wild questions for you on that front. But yeah, anything that, yeah, because there's no gaps, it's so accurate, so precise in its predictions, it's hard to imagine. [/INST] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything contradictory. For you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was all based on something called, let me not explain what it is, let me just throw out the buzzword, renormalizable quantum field theory. They all fall in the category of renormalizable quantum field theory. </s><s>[INST] I'm going to throw that at a bar later to impress the girls. Good luck. [/INST] Thank you. They all fall under that rubric. Gravity will not put that suit on. So the force of gravity cannot be tamed by the same renormalizable quantum field theory to which all the other forces </s><s>[INST] so eagerly submitted. What is the effort of quantum gravity? What are the different efforts to have these two dance together effectively to try to unify the standard model and general relativity and kind of model of gravity? [/INST] Sort of the one fully consistent model that we have that reconciles, that sort of tames gravity and reconciles it with quantum mechanics is string theory and its cousins. And we don't know what or if in any sense string theory describes the world, the physical world, but we do know that it is a consistent reconciliation of quantum mechanics and general relativity and moreover one which is able to incorporate particles and forces like the ones we see around us. So it hasn't been ruled out as an actual sort of unified theory of nature, but there also isn't, in my view some people would disagree with me, but there isn't a reasonable possibility that we would be able to do an experiment in the foreseeable future which </s><s>[INST] would be sort of a yes or no to string theory. Okay, so you've been there from the early days of string theory, you've seen its developments. What are some interesting developments? What do you see as the also the future of string theory And what is string theory? [/INST] Well, the basic idea which emerged in the early 70s was that if you take the notion of a particle and you literally replace it by a little loop of string, the strings are sort of softer than particles. </s><s>[INST] What do you mean by softer? [/INST] Well, if you hit a particle, if there were a particle on this table, a big one, and you hit it, you might bruise yourself. But if there was a string on the table, you would probably just push it around. And the source of the infinities in quantum field theory is that when particles hit each other, it's a little bit of a jarring effect. And I've never described it this way before, but it's actually scientifically accurate. But if you throw strings at each other, it's a little more friendly. One thing I can't explain is how wonderfully precise will the mathematics is that goes into describing string theory. We don't just wave our hands and throw strings around and, you know, there's some very compelling mathematical equations that describe it. Now, what was realized in the early 70s is that if you replace particles by strings, these infinities go away and you get a consistent theory of gravity without the infinities. And that may sound a little trivial, but at that point it had already been 15 years that people had been searching around for any kind of theory that could do this. And it was actually found kind of by accident. And there are a lot of accidental discoveries in this subject. Now, at the same time, it was believed then that string theory was an interesting sort of toy model for putting quantum mechanics and general relativity together on paper. But that it couldn't describe some of the very idiosyncratic phenomena that pertain to our own universe, in particular the form of so-called parity violation. </s><s>[INST] Our world is- Ooh, another term for the bar later tonight. [/INST] Ooh, one- </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah. [/INST] Parity violation. So, if you go to the bar and- </s><s>[INST] I already got the renormalizable quantum. [/INST] And you look in the mirror across the bar. Yes. And the universe that you see in the mirror is not identical. You would be able to tell if you show the lady in the bar a photograph that shows both the mirror and you- There's a difference. If she's smart enough, she'll be able to tell which one is the real world and which one is you. Now, she would have to do some very precise measurements. Yes. And if the photograph was too grainy, it might not be possible. But her principle is possible. </s><s>[INST] There's a difference. But her principle is possible. Why is this interesting? Why is it- does this mean that there is some not perfect determinism? Or what does that mean? [/INST] There's some uncertainty? No, it's a very interesting feature of the real world that it isn't parity-invariant. And string theory, it was thought, could not tolerate that. And then it was learned in the mid-80s that not only could it tolerate that, but if you did things in the right way, you could construct a world involving strings that reconciled quantum mechanics and general relativity, which looked more or less like the world that we live in. And now, that isn't to say that string theory predicted our world. It just meant that it was consistent, that the hypothesis that string theory describes our world can't be ruled out from the get-go. And it is also the only proposal for a complete theory that would describe our world. Still, nobody will believe it until there's some kind of direct experiment. And I don't even believe it myself. </s>

<s>[INST] Right. Because well unless the robot had a model a causal model of the world. [/INST] Right. Right. I'm </s><s>[INST] sorry I have to linger [/INST] on this but now we have to link it and we have to see how do how do we do it? How do </s><s>[INST] we build? Yes. How do we build a cause a model without a team of human experts [/INST] running around? Why don't you go to learning right away? We have too much involved with learning </s><s>[INST] because I like babies, babies learn fast and figure out how they do it. [/INST] Good. Yeah that's another question. How do the babies come out with the counterfactual model of the world? And babies do that. They know how to play with in the crib. They know which balls hits another one and they learned it by playful manipulation of the world. There are simple world involve only toys and balls and chimes. But it's a if you see about the complex world </s><s>[INST] we take for granted how complicated [/INST] kids do it by playful manipulation plus parents guidance, pew wisdom and he'll say they meet each other can they say you shouldn't have taken my </s><s>[INST] toy and they these multiple sources of information they're able to integrate. So the challenge is about how to integrate, how to form these causal relationship from different sources of data. So how how how much information is it to play, how much causal information is required to be able to play in the crib with different objects. [/INST] I don't know. I haven't experimented with the crib. Okay. Not a crib picking up. It's a very interesting manipulating </s><s>[INST] physical objects on this very opening the pages of a book. All the task, the physical manipulation tasks give us a sense because my senses the world is extremely complicated. [/INST] So complicated. I agree. And I don't know how to organize it because I've been spoiled by it's a problem such as cancer and death. First </s><s>[INST] we have to [/INST] start easy the easy in the sense that you have only 20 variables and they are just variables are not mechanics. Okay. It's easy. You just put them on the graph and they they speak to you. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And you you're providing a methodology for for letting them speak. [/INST] I'm working only in the abstract knowledge in knowledge. Out data in between. </s><s>[INST] No. Can we take a leap to trying to learn in this very when it's not 20 variables but 20 million variables trying to learn causation in this world. Not learn. But somehow construct models. I mean it seems like you would only have to be able to learn because constructing it manually would be too difficult. You have ideas of [/INST] I think it's a matter of combining simple models for many, many sources for many, many disciplines in many metaphors, metaphors are the basics of human intelligence and basis. </s><s>[INST] Yes. How do you think of about a metaphor in terms of its use in human [/INST] intelligence, metaphors is an expert system. Mhm. An expert. It's mapping problem with which you are not familiar. Two a problem with which you are familiar. Like I give you a good example. The greek believed that the sky is no picture. It's not really a infinite space. It's no pig shell and the stars are holes poked in the shell through which you see the eternal light. It was a matter for why? Because they understand how you poke holes in the shelves. Okay They're not they're not familiar with infinite space. Okay. And so and we are walking on a share of the total and if you get too close to the head you're gonna fall down too hard this or whatever. Yeah and that's a metaphor. It's not true. But this kind of metaphor enabled are restored penis to measure the radius of the earth because he said come on, if they were working on a turtle shell then a ray of light coming to this angle will be different. This place will be a different angle that come into this place. I know the distance. I'll measure the two angles and then I have them radius of the shell of the of the total. And he did. And he found his measurement we're very close to the measurements we have today Through the uh what? 6010 700 700 km there. That's something that would not occur. Two Babylonian astronomer even though there but bologna experiments were the machine learning people of the time. They fit curves and they could predict the eclipse of the moon much more accurately than the greek because they fit curve. Okay uh that's a different metaphor. Something that you're familiar with the game. A total shell. What does it mean if you're familiar familiar means that answers to certain questions are explicit. You don't have to derive them. </s><s>[INST] And they were made explicit because somewhere in the past you've constructed a model of that [/INST] you're familiar with. So the child is familiar with billiard balls. So the child could predict that if you let loose of one ball that the one will bounce off. These are you you obtain that by um familiarity, familiarity is answering questions and you store the answer explicitly. You don't have to derive them. So this is the idea of a metaphor all our lives All our intelligence is built around metaphors mapping from the unfamiliar to the familiar. But the marriage between the two is a tough thing which I which we haven't been able to algorithmic ties. </s><s>[INST] So you think of that process of because of using metaphor to leap from one place to another. We can call it reasoning is that kind of reasoning? [/INST] It's reasoning by metaphor metaphor and by metaphor </s><s>[INST] do you think of that as learning? So learning is a popular terminology today in a narrow sense. [/INST] It is it is it is definitely so </s><s>[INST] you may not be the [/INST] right one of the most important taking something which theoretically is dry viable and store it in accessible format. Give you an example. Chess okay. Finding the winning winning starting moving chairs. It's hard but ah it there is an answer either there is a winning move for white or the recent or the either draw. Okay so it is the answer to that is available through the rule of the games but we don't know the answer. So what are the chess master have that? We don't have he has told explicitly an evaluation of certain complex patterns of the board. We don't have it. Ordinary people like me, I don't know about you. I'm not a chess master. So for me I have to derive things that for him is explicit. He ascended before. Well you've seen the pattern before. Similar patterns of metaphor. Yeah. And he generalized and said don't move in a dangerous move. </s>

<s>[INST] But how do we get that understanding? It's so it's so incredibly difficult. I mean, you would have to mean one promising direction. I'd love to get your opinion on this. Um I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Deepmind and alpha fold with protein folding and so on. Do you think it's possible that that will give us some breakthroughs in biology. Trying to basically simulate and model the behavior of trivial biological systems as they become complex biological systems. [/INST] I'm sure it will. The interesting thing to me about protein folding is that for a long time, my my understanding is not what I work on. So I may have got this wrong, but my understanding is that you you take the sequence the sequence of a protein and you try to fold it in and there are multiple ways in which you can fold and to come up with the correct confirmation is not a very easy thing because you're doing it from first principles from a string of letters which specify the string of amino acids. But what actually happens is when a protein is coming out of the ribosomes is coming out of a charged tunnel and it's in a very specific environment, which is going to force this to go there now and then this one to go there and this one to come back and so you're forcing a specific confirmation set of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome. So by the time it's fully emerged, it's already got its shape and that shape depended on on on on the immediate environment that it was emerging into one letter on 111 amino acid at a time. And I don't think that the field was looking at it that way. And if that's correct, then that's very characteristic of science, which is to say it asks very often the wrong question and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses on something, having never thought to actually think well what is biology doing? And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment that forces you to be this way. Now did deepmind come up through patterns with some answer that was like that, I've got absolutely no idea. It ought to be possible to deduce that from the shapes of proteins. It would require much greater, much greater skill than the human mind has, but the human mind is capable of saying, well hang on, let's look at this exit tunnel and try and work out what shape is this protein going to take and they can figure that out. </s><s>[INST] That's really interesting about the exit tunnel, but like sometimes we get lucky and are like, just like in science, the simplified view or the static view uh will actually solve the problem for us. So in this case it's very possible that the sequence of letters has a unique mapping to a structure without considering how it unraveled. So, without considering the tunnel. And so that seems to be the case in this situation with the cool thing about proteins, all the different shapes that can possibly take, It actually seems to take very specific unique shapes given the sequence that's [/INST] forced on you by an exit tunnel. So the problem is actually much simpler than you thought. And and then there's a whole army of of proteins that which changed the conformational state chaperone proteins and they're only used when, when there's some presumably issue with how it came out of the exit tunnel and you want to do it differently to that. So very often the chaperone proteins will go there and will influence the way in which it falls. So how there's two ways of doing it Either you can you can look at the structures and the sequences of all the proteins and you can apply an immense mind to it and figure out what the patterns are and figure out what or you can look at the actual situation where it is and say, well, hang on, it was actually quite simple, it's got a charged environment and is forced to come out this way and then the question will be, will do different ribosomes have different charged environments. What happens if a chaperone, you know, you're asking a different set of questions to come to the same answer in a way, which is telling you a much simpler story and explains why it is rather than saying it could be this is one in a billion different possible conformational states that this protein could have, you're saying, well, it has this one because that was the only one it could take given its setting. </s>

<s>[INST] It's sad to think that uh I mean, I'm sure we'll eventually send a spacecraft with efficient propulsion. Like some of the stuff you work on out that travels just really far with some robots on it and with some, with some DNA in the Petri dish and then human civilization destroys itself and then they'll just be this floating spacecraft that eventually get somewhere or not. That's a sad thought. Like this lonely spacecraft just kind of traveling through space and humans are all dead. [/INST] Well, it depends on what the what the goal is. Right. Another way to look at it is we've preserved. It's like a little time capsule of knowledge DNA, you know, that we've, that will outlive us. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. How [/INST] I sleep at night. </s><s>[INST] So you also mentioned that you wanted to be an astronaut. [/INST] Yes. </s><s>[INST] So even though you said you're unusual in thinking like it's nice here on Earth and then we might want to be sending robots up there. You wanted to be a human that goes out there. Would you like to one day travel to mars? You know, if it's if it becomes sort of more open to civilian travel and that kind of thing. Like are you uh vacation wise? Like if you talk, if we're talking vacations, would you like to vacation on earth? Their vacation on mars. [/INST] I wish that I had a better answer. But no, I wanted to be an astronaut because I first of all I like working in labs and doing experiments and um I wanted to go to like the coolest lab, the I. S. S. Um and do some experiments there. Uh that's being decommissioned which is sad but you know, there will be others. I'm sure um </s><s>[INST] the ISS has been decommissioned. [/INST] Yes. I think by 2025 it's not going to be in use anymore. But I think there are, there are private companies that are going to be putting up stations and things. </s><s>[INST] So it's primarily a research lab essentially research lab in space. That's a cool way to say. It's like the coolest possible research lab. [/INST] That's what I wanted to go. And now though my risk Profile has changed a little bit of three little ones and um I won't I won't be in the 1st 1000 people to go to mars, let's put it that way. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, Earth is kind of nice. We have our troubles, but overall it's pretty nice. Again, it's the netflix. Okay, let's talk rockets. Uh, how does the rocket engine work? Or any kind of engine that can get us the space or float around in space? [/INST] The basic principle is conservation of momentum. So, um, you throw stuff out the back of the engine and uh, and that pushes the rocket and the spacecraft in the other direction. So, uh, there are two main types of rocket propulsion. Um, the one people are more familiar with is chemical because it's loud and there's fire, um, and that's what's used for launch and is more televised. So, um, in, in those types of systems, you usually have a fuel and an oxidizer and um, they react and combust and really stored chemical energy. Um, and, and that energy heats, um, heats the resultant gas. And, and that's funneled out the back through a nozzle directed out the back. And then that momentum exchange pushes this basic craft forward. </s><s>[INST] It's an interesting difference in liquid and solid fuel in those contexts. [/INST] They're both lumped in the same. So, uh, chemical just means that the release of energy from, from those bonds essentially. So, a solid fuel works the same way. Uh, and the other main categories electric propulsion. So instead of chemical energy, you're using electrical energy, um, usually from, you know batteries, or solar panels and uh, in this case the stuff you're pushing out the back would be charged particles. So, um, instead of combustion and heat, you end up with charged particles and you force them out the back of the spacecraft using either an electrostatic field or electromagnetic. Um, and, but it's the same momentum exchange and, and same idea stuff out the back and everything else goes forward. </s><s>[INST] Cool. So those are the big two categories. What, what's the difference? Maybe in like the challenges of each? The use cases of each and how they're used today? The physics of each and where there used all that kind of stuff. Anything interesting about the two categories that distinguishes them besides the, The Chemical one being the big sexy flames and [/INST] fire </s><s>[INST] fire [/INST] chemical is very well understood. Um, you know, a, In its simplest form, it's like a firework. So it's been around since 400 BC or something like that. Um, so that even the big engines are quite well understood. I think, you know, one of the, one of the last gaps there is probably, um, yeah, what exactly are the products of combustion, um, are modeling abilities kind of fall apart there. Um, because it's hot and gasses are moving and uh, you end up kind of having to venture into, um, lots of different interdisciplinary fields of science to try to solve that and that's quite complex, but we have pretty good um, models for some of the more like emergent behaviors of that system anyways, but that's, I think one of the last unsolved pieces, um and really the kind of what people care about their is making it more fuel efficient. So the chemical stuff, um you can get a lot of um instantaneous thrust, but it's not very fuel efficient, it's much more fuel efficient to go with the electric type of propulsion. Um, so that's where people spend a lot of their time, um, is trying to make that more efficient in terms of thrust per unit of fuel. And then um there's always considerations like heating and cooling, it's very hot, which is good if it heats the gas is, but you know, bad if it melts the rocket and and things like that. So there's always a lot of work on heating and cooling and the engine cycles and things like that. Um, and then on electric propulsion, I find it like much more refreshingly poorly understood, uh lots more mysteries. Yeah, I think so, one of the classes I took in college, I spent, we spent 90% of the class on chemical propulsion and then the last 10% on electric and the professor said, like we only sort of understand how it works, but it works, kind of and like that's that's </s>

<s>[INST] and uncomfortable feelings and all those sorts of things. You are an ultra marathon runner. Yes, yes. What are you running from? [/INST] No, what? This is the right, is the funny thing is, so I'm an ultra marathoner and I've done 13 Iron Mans. And people say, oh my God, that's amazing. 13 Iron Mans. And what I always say, no, one Iron Man is impressive. 13 Iron Mans, there's something effing wrong with you. </s><s>[INST] We just need to figure out what it is. Yeah, there's some demons you're trying to work through. I mean, while you're doing the work though, most people just kind of let the demons sit in the attic. No, what have you learned about yourself, about your mind, about your body, about life, from taking your body to the limit in that kind of way, [/INST] to running those kinds of distances in the attic? No. Well, it's a great question. And I know that you are also kind of exploring the limits of the physical. And so for me in doing the Iron Mans and the ultra marathons, it's always the same kind of lesson, which is just when you think you have nothing left, you actually have a ton left. There are a lot of resources that are there if you call on them. And the ability to call on them has to be cultivated. It really, and so for me, especially in the Iron Man, and Iron Man in many ways is harder than the ultra marathons. I'll be at, I mean, it's 140 miles, I'll be at a mile 120 having done the swim and then the bike and I'll be whatever, six miles into the run. And I'll think, I feel like shit. I have nothing left. How am I possibly gonna run 20 miles more? But there's always more. And I think that for me, these extreme sports, are my process of exploring what's possible. And I feel like it applies in so many different areas of life where you're kind of pushing and it feels like the limit. And one of my friend of mine, who I just have so much respect for, who actually be a great guest if you haven't already interviewed him is Charlie Engel. And Charlie, he was a drug addict. He was in prison, his life was total shit. And somehow, and I can't remember the full story, he just started running around the prison yard. And if it's like Forrest Gump, he just kept running and running. And then he got out of prison and he kept running. And he started doing ultra marathons, started inspiring all these other people. Now he's written all these books. As a matter of fact, we just spoke a few months ago that he's planning on running from the Dead Sea to somehow to the top of Mount Everest from the lowest point to the highest point on Earth. And I said, well, why are you stopping there? Why don't you get whatever camera in and go down to the lowest part of the ocean? Go to the lowest part of the ocean and then talk to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and go to the kind of the highest place than the stratosphere you can get. But it's this thing of possibility. And I just feel like so many of us and myself included, we get stuck in a sense of what we think is our range. And if we're not careful, that can become our range. And that's why for me in all of life, it's all about, like we've been talking about, challenging the limits, challenging assumptions, challenging ourselves. And hopefully, we do it in a way that kind of doesn't hurt anybody. When I'm at the Ironman, they have all these little kids and they'll have these little shirts and it'll say like, my dad is a hero and have the little Ironman logo. And I want to say it's like, no, your dad is actually a narcissistic dick who goes on eight mile bike rides every Sunday rather than spend time with you. And so we shouldn't hurt anybody. But for me, and also I just find it very enjoyable and I hope I'm not disclosing too much about our conversation before we went live, where you're doing so many different things with running and your martial arts. And I encouraged you to do ultra marathons because there's so many great ones in Texas. It's actually surprisingly a very enjoyable way </s><s>[INST] to spend a day, like hurt anybody. How would you recommend, so yeah, for people who might not know, I've never actually even run a marathon. I run 22 miles in one time at most. I did the four by four by 48 challenge with David Goggins where you run four miles every four hours. Is it different, it has less to do with the distance and more to do with the sleep deprivation. What advice would you give to a first time ultra marathoner like me, trying to run 50 or more miles or for anybody else interested in this kind of exploration [/INST] of their range. What I always tell is the same advice is register. Pick your timeline of when you think you can be ready. Make it, depending on where you are now, make it six months, make a year, and then register for the race. And then once you're registered, just work back from there, what's it going to take? But one of the things for people who are just getting going, you really do need to make sure that your body is ready for it. And so particularly, and particularly as we get older, strengthening is really important. So I'll do a plug for my brother, Jordan Metzl. He's a doctorate hospital for special surgery, but his whole thing is functional strength. And so, and people know about, and you can actually even go to his website, you can just Google Jordan Metzl, IronStrength, but it's all about like burpees and just building your muscular strength so that you don't get injured as you increase. And then just increase your mileage with, in some steady way, make sure that you take rest days and listen to your body, because people like you, who are just very kind of mind over matter, like you were telling me before about you have an injury, but you kind of run a little bit differently. And we need to listen to our bodies because our bodies are communicating. But I think it was kind of little by little, magic is possible. And what I will say is, I also do, I've done lots and lots of marathons, and I always tell people that the ultra marathons, at least the ones that I do, and I shouldn't misrepresent myself. I mean, there are people who do 500 mile races. The ones that I do are 50K mountain trail runs, which is 32 miles. So it's, I do the kind of the easier side of ultras, but it's actually much easier than a marathon because some of the mountain ones, sometimes it's so steep that you can't, you have to walk it because walking is faster than running. And every four or five miles in the supported races, you stop and eat blintzes and foiled potatoes. It's actually quite enjoyable. But as I started to tell you before we went live, so I've done for lots of years, these 50K mountain trail runs, and I was going to Taiwan a number of years ago for something else. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun to do an ultra marathon in Taiwan? I looked and that the weekend after my visit, there was a marathon. It was called the, I mean, ultra marathon, it was called the Taiwan beast. And I figured, oh, beasts, what are they talking about? It's 50K mountain trail run. I've done a million of them. And then I went to register, and then as part of registration, they said, you need to have all of this equipment. And it was all this like wilderness survival equipment. And I was thinking, God, these Taiwanese, but what a bunch of whims. Way too dramatic. Gary, give me a break, 50K mountain trail. So I get there and the race starts at like 4.30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere. And you have to wear headlamps and everyone's carrying all this stuff. And you kind of go running out into the rainforest. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my, it took 19 hours. There were maybe 15 cliff faces, like a real cliff. And somebody had dangled like a little piece of string. And so you had to hold onto the string with one hand while it was in the pouring rain, climb up these cliffs. </s>

<s>[INST] today is the day [/INST] that the rise of the ocean stop words to this effect. I mean, uh, those who doubted that we </s><s>[INST] could do it that tonight [/INST] is your answer. This was going to be a new day. It was going to be a new regime. Well it wasn't a new day and it wasn't a new regime. It was american politics more or less as usual. </s><s>[INST] Barack Obama turns [/INST] out not to be the messiah. Maybe there should be no surprise in that race relations got setback during Obama's tenure. </s><s>[INST] Um, my beef with [/INST] Obama is that </s><s>[INST] you're okay, you're [/INST] black. You say you're black, you're </s><s>[INST] black, you [/INST] got elected now we have a black president, a </s><s>[INST] black president, [/INST] you can do stuff that nobody else could do. You're a black president. You could tell the people burning down the city to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it. </s><s>[INST] You [/INST] know, you could tell the race hustlers the Al Sharpton to the world. Not only has our time come for those who supported my campaign, your time is over </s><s>[INST] for those who want to [/INST] carry on </s><s>[INST] uh a [/INST] advocacy rooted in racial grievance, the election of myself to this highest office proves that </s><s>[INST] the institution of [/INST] the state are legitimate and open to all comers. </s><s>[INST] I think Barack [/INST] Obama when the S. H. I. T. Hit the fan. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon I deeply regret that he said </s><s>[INST] that he's [/INST] president of the United States, the </s><s>[INST] color of his skin [/INST] and the color of Trayvon skin. </s><s>[INST] The correlation between those two [/INST] things. If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon now he says when he said it, he only meant to sympathize with the parents, but in fact when he said it from the highest office in the land and then sent his attorney general eric holder out to enforce this narrative, </s><s>[INST] he doubled [/INST] down on a racial narrative that I think is </s><s>[INST] actually false. [/INST] I think the story that systemic racism in America as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people because of the color of their skin is demonstrably </s><s>[INST] false. [/INST] I think that the central threat to black lives is violent </s><s>[INST] crime perpetrated largely by [/INST] black people against other black people. I think there is such a thing as police brutality and I think there are reasons to have regulations of police, but I think it is a second order issue in terms of the quality of life of african americans. I think Obama could have told the people who after Freddie gray died in police custody in a van in Baltimore and who undertook to burn that city down to get their asses off the street and go back to their apartments and stop it. I think he could have said in the aftermath of Michael Brown being shot dead by Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri and there was a grand jury deliberation that elected not to indict </s><s>[INST] officer Wilson [/INST] and people took the streets in that city and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on. </s><s>[INST] He could have told [/INST] them, we don't mob around courthouses in this country. We respect the rule of law, get your butts off the streets and back into your apartments. He didn't do that. Uh, so </s><s>[INST] to push back a little bit. [/INST] Yeah, good pushback. </s><s>[INST] I think you're asking Barack Obama, the [/INST] first </s><s>[INST] black president of the United States to do the thing that I think should be done by the second [/INST] black President of the </s><s>[INST] United States. I [/INST] think his very </s><s>[INST] example given the color of her skin uh was the most powerful thing. And um actually doing some of these hard thomas soul type of glen larry type of [/INST] strong </s><s>[INST] words about [/INST] race. It </s><s>[INST] may be too much to ask given the nature of modern day [/INST] politics. </s><s>[INST] He is a politician, [/INST] he is a politician. </s><s>[INST] He needed to get [/INST] elected, he needed to get reelected. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Um [/INST] it was in his second term where </s><s>[INST] most of what I'm talking [/INST] about happened. So he wasn't facing further election, but </s><s>[INST] Obama was what 40 [/INST] six or 47 when he was inaugurated. </s><s>[INST] He served [/INST] for eight years. So he's in his mid fifties, </s><s>[INST] he's got [/INST] Another half century or 40 years of life. God willing his post presidency </s><s>[INST] I think was what was [/INST] primarily on his mind not getting elected to </s><s>[INST] anything but [/INST] being enshrined in a certain </s><s>[INST] way and then the [/INST] persona that he is now embodying, which depends upon um a racial narrative that I and thomas soul and others object to I think was very much in the forefront of his mind when he made decisions as the chief executive officer of the country uh that </s><s>[INST] we've all now have [/INST] to live with. Yeah, but </s><s>[INST] the fact is he opened the [/INST] door in </s><s>[INST] a way that hasn't been done in the history of, of of this, the United States [/INST] that </s><s>[INST] I don't see there being a, even a significant discussion when an uh an african american, a black man or a black woman runs for president, maybe a black man let's say because they're still hasn't been a woman president. I just see that that broke open the possibility of that, that's not even a discussion [/INST] and that that example </s><s>[INST] by itself, I mean to me, the role of the president isn't just policy [/INST] is to inspire, </s><s>[INST] It's to do the um, [/INST] it's </s><s>[INST] to do the Doctor King thing, which is, I have a dream. And Barack Obama is an example of somebody that could give [/INST] one Hell of a Speech. </s><s>[INST] It got you. [/INST] Obama is a smooth operator without any question. He's a master of his craft. He, you know, he did the impossible, I mean he beat Hillary clinton in that </s><s>[INST] primary fight. [/INST] Um </s><s>[INST] and uh he [/INST] beat john McCain in the general election and hats off to him and moreover, he remains uh iconic figure in american culture. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Let me </s>

<s>[INST] And basically to do this kind of stuff while you should be using the best tools for the job. Right now, the special financing is back. You can head to net suite that's any T S U I T E dot com slash lex to get their one of a kind financing program that's net suite dot com slash lex net suite dot com slash lex this is the lex Fridman podcast and now Dear Friends Here's Oliver Stone. Mhm. You're working on a documentary now about nuclear energy. [/INST] So it's </s><s>[INST] interesting to talk about this energy is such a big part of the world, About the geopolitics of the world, about the way the world is. What do you think is the role of nuclear energy in the 21st century [/INST] Question? and 1st of </s><s>[INST] all, obviously everyone's talking about climate change. Right? So here I wake up to that a few years ago [/INST] and </s><s>[INST] clearly were concerned. Uh [/INST] I </s><s>[INST] picked up a book by Josh [/INST] Goldstein and </s><s>[INST] his his co [/INST] Author Who's Swedish. Those two </s><s>[INST] wrote a book called Bright Future. A Bright Future came out a few years ago [/INST] and I </s><s>[INST] lapped it up. It was a book, fact [/INST] based </s><s>[INST] clear, [/INST] not too </s><s>[INST] long and not too technical. [/INST] And uh it </s><s>[INST] was very clear that they were in favor of all kinds [/INST] of uh renewables, </s><s>[INST] renewable energy. Yes, [/INST] they hated made it very </s><s>[INST] clear how dangerous [/INST] oil </s><s>[INST] and gas were [/INST] methane and made it </s><s>[INST] very clear to the layman [/INST] like me and at the same time said </s><s>[INST] that this renewables can work so far. But the gap is enormous [/INST] as to how much electricity </s><s>[INST] that the world is going to need [/INST] in 20 </s><s>[INST] 50 and [/INST] beyond two </s><s>[INST] 3, 4 times. We don't even know the [/INST] damage, but we have India, </s><s>[INST] we have china, we have africa, we [/INST] have Asia </s><s>[INST] coming onto the scene wanting more and more [/INST] electricity. So </s><s>[INST] they addressed the problem as a global [/INST] one, not just as often in the United </s><s>[INST] States, you get the [/INST] ethnocentric </s><s>[INST] United States point of view [/INST] that we need, we need we know we're doing </s><s>[INST] well, blah blah blah, we're [/INST] not doing well, but we </s><s>[INST] we we we sell that [/INST] to people that we're comfortable. We </s><s>[INST] spend more energy than [/INST] anybody in this </s><s>[INST] country per per [/INST] capita </s><s>[INST] than anybody. And at the same time [/INST] we don't seem </s><s>[INST] to understand the [/INST] global picture. So that's what they did. </s><s>[INST] And they made me very [/INST] well. So the only way to close </s><s>[INST] that gap, the only [/INST] way in their mind is </s><s>[INST] nuclear energy and talking about a gap of building [/INST] a huge amount </s><s>[INST] of reactors over the next 30 years and starting [/INST] now, uh they </s><s>[INST] make that point over and over [/INST] again. </s><s>[INST] So [/INST] obviously this country, the United States is not going to go in </s><s>[INST] that direction because it's [/INST] just is incapable with it of </s><s>[INST] having that kind of will political will [/INST] and fear is a </s><s>[INST] huge factor. And still a lot of [/INST] Shiva less. </s><s>[INST] A lot of [/INST] myths about </s><s>[INST] nuclear energy [/INST] have </s><s>[INST] confused and confounded the landscape. The [/INST] environmentalists have played a huge </s><s>[INST] role in [/INST] doing good things, many good </s><s>[INST] things, but also confusing [/INST] and confounding </s><s>[INST] the landscaping, [/INST] making accusations </s><s>[INST] against nuclear energy that were exaggerated. [/INST] So taking all these </s><s>[INST] things into consideration, we said about making this documentary, which is [/INST] about finished now, almost finishing it's an </s><s>[INST] hour and 40 [/INST] minutes and that was the </s><s>[INST] Hard part getting it down from about three [/INST] 1/2 hours to about this. Something </s><s>[INST] more manageable. And is it interviews, it's [/INST] interviews among </s><s>[INST] others. But essentially we went to [/INST] Russia. We went to France </s><s>[INST] which is the most [/INST] perhaps advanced </s><s>[INST] nuclear country in the world. Russia. [/INST] Yeah. </s><s>[INST] And the United States, we [/INST] went to the Idaho </s><s>[INST] laboratory and [/INST] talk to </s><s>[INST] the scientists there as well [/INST] as the </s><s>[INST] Department of Energy people that are [/INST] handling this. Idaho is </s><s>[INST] one of the experimental labs in the United States is probably one of the most advanced and they're doing a lot of advanced nuclear [/INST] there. We also we studied, well, Russia gave us a </s><s>[INST] lot of insight. We're very cooperative because [/INST] they have some of the most advanced </s><s>[INST] nuclear actually the probably most advanced nuclear reactor in the world at risk of the Ural Mountains. So [/INST] we did an </s><s>[INST] investigation there [/INST] and </s><s>[INST] uh in France, they [/INST] haven't, they have some very advanced </s><s>[INST] nuclear [/INST] reactors and their building </s><s>[INST] and now they're building again [/INST] they had </s><s>[INST] a little, the Green Party came [/INST] into power </s><s>[INST] just not into power [/INST] but became a </s><s>[INST] factor in France. And there was a motion when Holland [/INST] was president, they started </s><s>[INST] to move away from it actually. They were beginning [/INST] to just abandon </s><s>[INST] uh they [/INST] let not complete </s><s>[INST] there. In other [/INST] words let closed down some of the </s><s>[INST] nuclear reactors. There was talk of [/INST] that but </s><s>[INST] thank God France did not do that And [/INST] Macron came </s><s>[INST] in and [/INST] recently reversed it reversed </s><s>[INST] it and they're building as fast as they can now, especially with the Ukraine [/INST] war going on, </s><s>[INST] there's an awareness that [/INST] Russia will not be </s><s>[INST] providing, may not be providing the energy europe [/INST] needs. </s><s>[INST] So, [/INST] and then China is the other one too. That's the other </s><s>[INST] factor I'm talking about the big [/INST] boys, </s><s>[INST] they have [/INST] doing tremendous work </s><s>[INST] and fast, which is very hopeful. [/INST] But of course china is building in </s><s>[INST] all directions at [/INST] once. Coal </s><s>[INST] continues [/INST] to be huge </s><s>[INST] in china [/INST] and </s><s>[INST] um [/INST] methane </s><s>[INST] too. But basically coal, coal [/INST] in India in china </s><s>[INST] have the biggest users [/INST] of coal. </s><s>[INST] Um, and we know as you know, Germany went back to cole a few years ago. So all these [/INST] factors, it's fascinating </s><s>[INST] picture globally. [/INST] So we try to achieve </s><s>[INST] a consensus that where nuclear can work [/INST] and where it will be </s><s>[INST] working, where it will [/INST] be used more and more. The question is how much carbon dioxide </s><s>[INST] china and [/INST] Russia will be putting out France is the only one that's not </s><s>[INST] putting it out. The [/INST] United States has not </s>

<s>[INST] So it gives you the context of- How honest they're being. [/INST] The state of the person is their answer. How honest they're being. Yeah, yeah, they're honesty. How forthcoming they're being </s><s>[INST] and how accurate they're being. And then the result of the classification [/INST] based on the test are these code types. Right, well, so you have these clinical scales as well. You have 10 clinical scales that look for different kind of primary clinical pathology issues. This test doesn't tell you anything good about yourself. At best, it just tells you that you're not responding in a way that is dishonest and that you are kind, not hugely problematic, but there's, you know, it's not looking for strength. So you have these 10 clinical scales that look for variations above the mean of the population in certain areas, anywhere from, you know, depressive symptoms, manic symptoms, physical complaint, anxiety, nervousness, aggression, social engagement, whole scope of human experience. And then there are much more nuanced scales from those, so little sub scales. And then the real power though of the MMPI-2 is in, as you said, these code types. And these code types are additional patterns that have been detected that really can be more defining of a personality. So you look for peaks. There can be either two extreme peaks or three typically that make a code type. And those peaks are higher scores on these personality traits and specific code types can give you a very nuanced picture of a person's general approach to life and their personal relationships, </s><s>[INST] just their personality. So you can build on top of those code types an understanding, yeah, how that person's going to deal with different kinds of situations. And then there's, by the way, a lot of code types. There are a lot of code types. [/INST] I was looking at them. They're pretty interesting. There are a lot of code types. I was looking at them. They're pretty interesting. </s><s>[INST] They are a lot. I want to take this. Truly fascinating. I want to take this test. [/INST] I wanted to see which one I would- I have given it to some people in my life. </s><s>[INST] It's just phenomenal. How hard is it on your side [/INST] of the table to give the test. Oh, it's easy. You just proctor, you just make sure that somebody, there's no distraction, that they're well rested, they are sitting there and they can </s><s>[INST] just take it in front of you. So I guess the question is because the questions are well designed and that it's hard to mess with them. [/INST] You just give the. </s><s>[INST] It's very hard to beat it, you just hand it to them. [/INST] And it's yes and no. </s><s>[INST] It's yes and no. [/INST] Okay. But I should also add to this that this test, as much as I love it, and it is the most researched and widely used personality assessment in the world, it is not in and of itself definitive. So you use it like you already have sort of a hypothesis and you use this for clarification. And it has a ton of value for showing somebody's response or their approach, how forthcoming they're being. But other than that, you really need to consider it as a piece of the puzzle. You had said stitched together earlier and that was just one of those points you made </s><s>[INST] that was perfect for describing this. There's probably no one perfect test, right? [/INST] For personality? </s><s>[INST] No. I wonder, especially with advancements of AI, there could be more and more sophisticated ways of measuring, of collecting data about your behavior. Absolutely, there could be. And being able to measure some kind of more productive kind of, especially not in a forensic context, but more in trying to figure out how to improve your lifestyle, improve your relationships, all that kind of stuff. So the results of the test with Amber Heard, if you can speak to the public stuff, your behavior. Absolutely, there could be. You said that the results of Ms. Heard's evaluation supported two diagnoses, borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder. Can you speak to each one of those? What are the basic characteristics [/INST] of borderline personality disorder? Sure, well, so right now, the DSM-5, which is sort of the Bible for mental disorders, it's what we go to our diagnostic manual, it classifies personality disorders according to clusters. And cluster B is one that involves the emotionally erratic, interpersonally erratic emotional disorders. And those include histrionic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and anti-social personality disorder. Eventually there's been some research on this and a lot of support for us, eventually moving into a more spectrum type approach to considering personality disorders, where you'd essentially be looking at dysfunction in different domains of somebody's functioning that has persisted over time. And again, the really important part is it seems to be a stable trait part of their personality that it's in their interpersonal relationships, it's in how they handle their own life, their own functioning, their mood, and it's not just situation-based, it seems to be all areas. I don't love the title, histrionic personality disorder. I think its history, it's pretty controversial and there's some misogyny in it. But that all being said, as a servant to the court and somebody who is there to just provide the science as it exists today, my job is to relay, and in this specific case, I was ordered to provide my diagnostic impressions, a diagnosis, and I don't get to decide which diagnosis, whether I like a certain diagnosis or not, ultimately, if the criteria are met, that diagnosis is given. So as we have it right now with the current personality disorder categories, histrionic personality disorder is probably the most controversial. Some people believe that it is narcissistic personality disorder-lite. So a less obvious, a less malicious version of narcissistic personality disorder. And I think that will probably get sussed out if we do move to a more spectrum-based approach cause then you would be describing sort of a personality disorder and then you would add the traits to it. So you know, with issues in interpersonal functioning and et cetera. So you could be a little bit more specific rather than having to just put somebody in a category. </s>

<s>[INST] United States of America. [/INST] Exactly, exactly. But the United States of America in a sense, you can say that it was a very successful. Well, it remains to be seen how successful </s><s>[INST] continued [/INST] to be to that, that was basically invented, created that You would have this sense of in in the case of an old nation which has been on the map of the world for 3000 years, 2500 years. This, this is not an exaggeration. I'm not a nationalist per se. But I mean if you look Persian on the map of the world in ancient times is still there as it is today. Very few countries in the world are like that that they would have that kind of continuity over the course of time. And that's not without a reason because there was this sense of uh center versus periphery that had found some, there's a huge amount of tension but there is also a sense of belonging to something and state is very much at the center of it. I mean that's why the concept of a state matters for the creation for the shaping of this culture. What happened is therefore you can see that today in answer to your point about traveling blindfolded is that you would be surprised to see how much uh people share And in terms of, I just give you one anecdote in 1968, I believe must have been, I traveled to Azerbaijan. I used to travel and actually photograph </s><s>[INST] not blindfolded mostly. [/INST] Well, yeah, not so I went to the bazaar in the city of Hoi which is in the northwestern Iran on the border with what is today, the Republic of Turkey. And I went to the bazaar and I was interested in the kind of a leather work that they produced. Um So I tried to buy some stuff and they were surprised to see that how few people knew Persia So they could not communicate in Persian with you either. They have to ask somebody from some other store to come and translate for you. This is 1968 </s><s>[INST] 96. So even though the official language [/INST] was Persian </s><s>[INST] of the country, there's still, [/INST] yeah, so </s><s>[INST] what are they teaching school? So it doesn't matter [/INST] special, but this guy </s><s>[INST] doesn't, he [/INST] Hasn't been to the school or it was not fully exposed to it and usually are very conservative places. So it's stuck in my mind now in recently in 2004 I was traveling to the same area, not to the same city but to the same area and I was amazed to see how the youth as soon as they would know that you are coming from opening conversation with you talking about the latest movies that was produced in the west. And it's not only Hollywood of course there's a huge amount of fascination with Hollywood and western cinema. Cinema is a major thing. Filmmaking is a major thing. So these kids in the city of bihar they're asking me, we're having lunch, they're asking me, okay then what do you think about this producer, not producer, this director or that actor </s><s>[INST] american [/INST] american european as well. But mostly America where </s><s>[INST] they speaking Persian [/INST] or as a complete person that I would converse with, </s><s>[INST] they speak english too interested. [/INST] Yes. Actually you would be surprised to see what percentage of the Iranian youth at least in big cities are fascinated with learning language and for a reason because they think that's the way to get access either on social media or eventually leave Iran unfortunately. And and because they don't see a future for themselves in the country, either you have to be part of this part of this regime or if you hate them and you don't like the way of their life. You look up outside. You know I was having drivers to drive me around the country in the cities around Iran and the guy was a young, extremely well educated, well dressed and we would have looked at him, we could have found him in any street in any country in the western world and his major concern knowing that I'm from outside major tell me which would be a better place for me to go. What's wrong with the place that you're in right now you are in your own country, you speak your own like no this is no good. I have to have a better future. This has no future for me. </s><s>[INST] Well it's really interesting because the thing I feel about the protest right now is there's a large number of people that instead of giving into cynicism about, you know, this government is no good. They're actually getting this like uh energy, this desire to for revolution, uh in in the sort of non violence in the in the democratic sense of that, let's let's actually find ideas. Let's let's build a great nation here. This is a great nation, this is my nation. Let's build something great here. [/INST] Well, </s><s>[INST] that's my hope. That's [/INST] Well, yeah, </s><s>[INST] yeah, that's what I'm [/INST] hoping for. I share your aspiration, but I'm fearing that I hope it's not a wishful thinking. Certainly that's what they want. Certainly that's what they want to create. But the historian always tells you from where they start to where they finish, there's going to be a huge kind of a Change. And in this particular case, I wouldn't be, I I would very much hope that it's not going to be a revolution like 1979 Islamic revolution. And I have my hopes in that. For one thing, this is a revolution that doesn't have a leader. Okay. And it seems that they're comfortable with that at least so far because we're the sixth week of this movement and I hope it's not going to be actually a revolution, as I pointed out before. I hope it's going to be more of a sense of trying to come to some compromise and gradually moved toward change rather than the collapse of this regime and replacement with what </s>

<s>[INST] isn't that just on the positive end amazing to you. Like isn't an email amazing. Like in those early days, like just a frictionless communication, I mean email is awesome. Like people say that there's a lot of problems with emails, just like people say a lot of problems with twitter and so on. It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note. [/INST] It was a miracle, right? This was so I so I I wrote a there's originally was a new yorker piece from a year or two ago called was email a mistake and then it's in the book too. But I go into the history of email like why did it come along and it solved a huge problem. So it was it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication and it was a problem did not exist until I got large offices. We got large offices. Synchronous communication like let's get on the phone at the same time, there's too much overhead to it. Just too many people you might have to talk to asynchronous communication. Like let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready, took too long and it was like a huge problem. So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the C. I. A headquarters there is such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built a pneumatic powered email system. They had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers. So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location, you would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go. And my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work. Show how important fast asynchronous communication was large offices. So when email came along it was a productivity silver bullet. It was a miracle. I talked to the researchers who are working on computer supported collaboration in the late eighties trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more productive? And they were building all these systems and tools, emails showed up, it just wiped all that research off the map. There's no need to build these custom internet applications, there's no need to build these communication platforms, email could just do everything right? So it was a miracle application which is why it spread everywhere. That's one of these things where okay, unintended consequences, right? You have this miracle productivity Silver bullet, it spread everywhere, but it was so effective. It just, you know, I don't know like a drug, I'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here, analogy here of a drug, like it's so effective at treating this, that it also blows up your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick, but well </s><s>[INST] ultimately it probably significantly increase the productivity of the world, but there is a kind of hump that it now is plateau owed. And then what were the fundamental question you're asking is like, okay, how do we take the next, how do we keep increasing the product [/INST] section now? I think it brought it down. So my, my think so my contention and uh so again there's a little in the book, but I have a more recent wired article that put some newer numbers to this, I subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. So yeah, it helps productivity at first, right, when you could do fascinating close communication, but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts. Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email. I think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non industrial productivity and I think the only reason why, so it certainly has not been going up that metrics been stagnating for a long time now while all this was going on, I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books. I'm going to work for three hours in the morning, I'm going to work for three hours at night and only that I think has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non industrial growth, we should have been shooting up the charts. I mean this is miraculous innovations, a computer networks and then we built out these $100 billion ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets where we can talk to anyone at any time, like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts? Because our brain can't context, which once every six minutes. </s><s>[INST] So it's fundamentally back to the context switching is the poison in Contact switching is poisonous. The what is it about email that forces contact switching is in both our psychology that drags us in [/INST] expectation of. Yeah. Right, right. Because it's not, I think we've seen this through a personal personal will or failure lens recently, like am I addicted to email? Uh I have bad etiquette about my email. No, it's the underlying workflow. So the tool itself, I will exonerate. I I think I would rather use pop three than a fax protocol. Right? I think it's easier. The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow. So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people With back and forth, unscheduled messaging, I have to tend those conversations, right? It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables and when the balls come back across you have to pretty soon hit it back or stuff actually grinds to a halt. So it's it's the workflow. That's the problem. It's not the tool is the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration, let's just send messages back and forth, which means you can't be far from checking that because if you take a break, if you batch, if you try to have better habits, it's going to slow things down. So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow, the tool is fine, I don't want the tool to go away, but I want to replace the hyperactivity of my work, but I think this is going to be one of the biggest value generating productivity revolutions of the 21st century, like quote, an anonymous Ceo is pretty well known. Who says this is going to be the moon shot of the 21st century is going to be of that importance. There's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed because we just figure things out on the fly and email that as we figure that out. I think it's going to be uh hundreds of billions of dollars. </s>

<s>[INST] Well because you have to experience you have to listen to it. So I think white noise is uh this is this has to do with music. I think there's different colors as pink noise. And I think that has to do with uh like the frequencies like the white noise is usually uh less Basie brown noise very basey. So it's more like like versus like like that that makes sense. So like it there's like a deepness to it. I think everyone is different. But for me uh I I was was when I was uh was a research scientist m I. T when I would especially when there's a lot of students around. I remember just being annoyed at the noise of people talking. And one of my colleagues said, well you should try listening to brown noise, like it really knocks out everything because I used to wear your earplugs to like just see if I can block it out. And like the moment I put it on something, it's as if my mind was waiting all these years to hear that sound. Everything just focused in. I was, makes me wonder how many other amazing things out there they're waiting to discover it from my own particular, like biological for my own particular brain so that it just goes, the mind just focuses in, it's kind of incredible. So I see that as a kind of meditation maybe uh I'm using a performance enhancing uh sound to achieve that meditation. But I've been doing that for for many years now and running and walking and doing um cal Newport was the first person that introduced me to the idea of deep work. Just put a word to the kind of thinking that's required to sort of deeply think about a problem, especially if it's mathematical in nature. I see that as a kind of meditation because what it's doing is you're you have these constructs in your mind that you're building on top of each other and there's all these distracting thoughts that keep bombarding your from all over the place. And the whole process is you, you slowly let them kind of move past you and that's the meditative [/INST] process. It's very meditative. That sounds a lot like what Sam talks about um in his meditation app, which I did use to be clear for a while of just letting the thought go by without deranged in your derangement is one of Sam's favorite words, as I'm sure, you know. Um but uh brown noise, that's really intriguing. I am I am going to try that as soon as this evening. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. To see, to see if it works, but very well might not work at all. So yeah, I think the interesting point is, and the same with the fast thing in the diet is uh I long ago stopped trusting experts or maybe taking the word of experts as the gospel truth And only using it as uh an inspiration to try something to try thoroughly something. So uh fasting was one of the things when I first discovered I've been many times eating just once a day. So that's a 24 hour fast. It makes me feel amazing and at the same time eating only meat, putting ethical concerns aside, makes me feel amazing. I don't know why it doesn't. The point is to be an end of one scientist until nutrition science becomes a real science to it where it's doing like studies that deeply understand the biology underlying all of it. And also does real thorough long term studies of thousands, if not millions of people versus uh versus a very small studies that are kind of generalizing from, from very noisy data and all those kinds of things where you can't control all the elements, [/INST] Particularly because our own personal metabolism is highly variant among us. So there are going to be some people, like if brown noise is a game changer for 7% of people is 93% odds, then I'm not one of them. But there's certainly every reason in the world to test it out now. So I'm intrigued by the fast thing. I like you. Um, well I assume like you, I don't have any problem going to one meal a day and I often do that inadvertently and I've never done it methodically. Like I've never done it. Like I'm going to do this for 15 days. Maybe I should and maybe I should. Like how many, how many days in a row of the one day, one meal a day? Did you find brought noticeable impact to you? Was it after three days of it was months of it? Like, what was it? </s><s>[INST] Well, the noticeable impact is day once me folks because I, I eat a very low carb diet. So the hunger wasn't the hugest issue. Like there wasn't a painful hunger, like wanting to eat. So I was already kind of primed for it. And uh the benefit comes from a lot of people that do intermittent fasting that's only like 16 hours fast and get this benefit to is the focus. This is the clarity of thought. If my brain was a runner, it felt like I'm running on the track when I'm fasting versus running in quicksand. Like it's much [/INST] Crisper. And is this your 1st 72 hour fast </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, he's kind of trying to break apart internet communication from first Principles, like it does so many other problems. It's kind of fascinating to watch. I know he's been uh he's taught me quite a bit about communication and uh at least for me it's been liberating to not give a fuck about the old school way of things. I've been always bothered by a place I deeply admire, which is M. I. T. But there's problems, bureaucracies and hierarchies that hold back innovation, brilliant minds and um in that sense does is a kind of f you to the system that's kind of positive but also uh kind of. Uh but it was also an f you. So in that sense, I think Ellen has a perspective on the world is similar to Bitcoin folks, which I really like, which is like thinking long term how visionaries think is like how if I take these ideas, what and the ideas hold true, What will the world look like in 2030, 50 years and think about everything in that [/INST] way? Yeah, I like bazookas view, which is uh is essentially how do you minimize regret, how do you accelerate your life mentally and go to 80 90 100 150 years, whatever we end up being, you know, fortunate to live too and then look backwards and say this decision that I'm going to make, I have two options which one is going to be the one that at least regret and if you continue to make decisions that way one, you have that long term view kind of built things, you're working backwards two, you are ultimately going to optimize for minimal regret. But also three is Even if you only look forward 10 years, that's much much further than most people do. And so it gives you a significant advantage and I think that Bitcoin has kind of this like um, you know, proxy for time as we talked about uh inter plant planetary travel where there's multiple steps from creating a reusable rocket to landing it to, you know, all this stuff all the way to simple things, just like If you're simply trying to figure out where the world is going to be 30 years from now, You know, Bill Gates says that we overestimate what we can do in one year. Underestimate what we can do in 10. Well, To me, it's a um kind of degree of uh mistake if you will 10 years, maybe you're off by 10%. Well, if that line of progress continues 20 years, you may be off by 100 And 30 years, you may be up 5,000% right, like, like almost the further you go out, the more inaccurate you become. And so I think that people who want to iterate their way to success, there's a common thing in the startup world, end up actually following kind of the bread crumbs to where the world is taking them. But people like Elon musk, Jeff Bezos, a Jack Dorsey all the way down the line, all these innovators, they actually say to themselves, there is a point in time in the future where there is a world I want to construct and then they go and they construct it regardless of the short term iterations and incentives, it is just they're driving towards that point and I think that it's this whole idea of having this like, you know, kind of set vision and this refusal to kind of move or budge off of that, that's what makes them special. </s><s>[INST] One of the things that garnered a lot of excitement in the crypto community is N. F. T. S. I have no idea really. The depths, the fundamental technological froze, solid gold depths of the second of this technology, whether this is just like a little bit of a fad or there's some deep lessons to learn whether it's Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency in general about it. You have thoughts about like the long lasting, fundamental aspects of N. F. T. S. [/INST] I think there's probably both things happening fad and things to learn, right? And if we just start with like what is an N. F. T. It's a non fungible token meaning that um there's no fund ability and fund ability is a fancy word. Um I always describe it as if I took $100 bill and I put it on the table with a bunch of the $100 bills and we mix them up and I just grabbed $100 bill and left. I'm no worse as long as they're all you know official $100 bills because as long as I have $100 500 dollars I don't need that exact same bill back. So that means that those $100 bills are fungible. Non fungible would be like art if I took a Picasso and I put it down on the table and you brought three artists that no one's ever heard of before and we mix them up and it took any random piece of art. It wasn't the Picasso I lose because the Picasso is really important there. Right? So the non fungible it is important in art. What these non fungible tokens essentially are doing is they are creating scarcity and originality in a digital environment. And what I mean by that is um take a music file. If I had a music file and you wanted it you said send it to me. I press send it essentially creates a copy and you get one music file, I get another. We don't care. You can listen to music, I can listen to music. We're super happy if I instead though have a digital file. That entire premise is based on scarcity and I hit send and you get a copy and I keep the original or you get the original, I get a copy. There's a problem. And so ultimately what I think is playing out with N. F. T. S is it's a technology regardless of where it plays out from block chains or what in communities or environments that just brings true digital scarcity to the internet. And so naturally what people do, they look at the legacy world and they say, well what's scarce there that has value? How do we bring that to the digital? So art is a perfect example, right? And you know, frankly last year I started to look at this because it felt like this was gonna be really, really big. And the conclusion I came to was just as Bitcoin is going to be bigger than gold, right? The digital application of something is going to be bigger than the analog application. The same thing is gonna be true in art. The digital art world is even bigger than nutritional art world. People think that sounds crazy at first, until you start to realize very, very similar, the yard is more portable, it can be divisible, right? It's got a larger demand market in terms of the internet rather than an auction, right? All this kind of stuff when you display it, it can have motion and music and all of these aspects to it that are better than the traditional art. What the traditional art market has, that the digital art market has not had is the narrative narrative based world scarcity kind of in digital sense. And so what I think the entire world is going through right now is an exploration of how do we use this technology to create new things? Frankly, we're not going to be good at it for a while. And so the only place I've really focused on is digital art itself. And I've always been interested in art, but I wasn't gonna go buy a painting and hanging on the wall, right in the sense of uh that's how I was going to store value. What I find fascinating though is that I now can take that concept, which most of the wealthiest people in the world have a significant portion. Some, you know, some people have 20% in terms of, you know, a number of billionaires, 20% of their wealth is in art and you bring to this digital realm, which is much more um kind of natural to a digital native. And so the best way to describe the importance is imagine a serial number being placed on something. Take the Eiffel Tower, the only Eiffel Tower that has value is the first one, Every replica of it regardless of size location you know who made it, where they sent it, they have no value. Eiffel Tower 001 is the most important and so I think that's ultimately what we're starting to see here and What we're looking at probably 1% of what is going to grow into, </s>

<s>[INST] It's an east M electrical stimulation device that I've been using a lot for muscle recovery recently, mostly for my shoulders and legs. As I've been doing the 1000 bodyweight reps and six miles every day as I just finished. They call it the smart muscle stimulator, which is true Since the app that goes with it is amazing. It has 15 programs for different body parts and guides you through everything you need to do. I take recovery really seriously these days. And power dot has been a powerful addition to the whole regime of stretching, ice, massage and sleep and diet that I do. It's used by professional athletes and by slightly insane but mostly normal people like me. It's portable so you can throw it in a bag and bring it anywhere. Get it at power dot com slash lex And use Cold Lex checkout to get 20% off on top of the 30 day free trial and to support this podcast. And now here's my conversation with Ian Hutchinson. Maybe you'd be nice to draw a distinction between nuclear physics and plasma physics. What is the distinction? [/INST] Nuclear physics is about the physics of the nucleus and my department Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT is very concerned about all the interactions and uh reactions and consequences of things that go on in the nucleus, including nuclear energy, fish and energy, which is the nuclear energy that we have already. And fusion energy, which is the energy source of the sun and stars, which we don't quite know how to turn into practical energy for humankind at the moment. That's what my research has mostly been aimed at. But plasmas are essentially the fourth state of matter. So if you think about solid liquid gas, plasma is the fourth of those states of matter. And it's actually the state of matter which one reaches if one raises the temperature. Um So cold things, you know, like ice are solid, um liquids are hotter water and if you heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, it becomes gas. Uh Well, that's true of most substances. And um plasma is a, is a state of matter in which the electrons are unbound from the nuclei, so they become separated from the nuclear and can move separately. So we have positively charged nuclei and we have negatively charged electrons. The net is is uh still neutral, electrically neutral. But a plasma conducts electricity as all sorts of important properties that are associated with that separation. And that's what plasmas are all about. And the reason why my department is interested in plasma physics very strongly is because most things, well, for one thing, most things in the universe are plasma. The vast majority of matter in the university's plasma, but most particularly stars and the sun are plasmas because they're very hot and it's only in very hot states that nuclear fusion reactions take place and we want to understand how to implement those kind of phenomena on earth. </s><s>[INST] Maybe another distinction we wanna try to get at is the difference between fission and fusion. So you mentioned fusion is the kind of reaction happening in the sun. So what's vision and what's fusion? [/INST] Well, fishing is taking heavy elements like uranium and breaking them up. And it turns out that that process of breaking up heavy elements releases energy. </s><s>[INST] What does it mean to be a heavy element? [/INST] It means that there are many nuclear particles in the nucleus itself, neutrons and protons in the nucleus itself. So that in the case of uranium there are 92 protons in each nucleus and even more neutrons. So that the total number of Nucleons in the nucleus nucleons is short for either a proton or a neutron. Um the total number, you know might be 235. That's you to 35 or it might be 238. That's you to 38. So those are heavy elements. Light elements by contrast have very few nucleons. Protons or neutrons in the nucleus, hydrogen is the lightest nucleus. It has one proton. They're actually slightly heavier forms of hydrogen. Isotopes. Deuterium has a proton and a neutron and treaty um has a proton and two neutrons. So it has a total of three nucleons in the in the nucleus while taking light elements like isotopes of hydrogen and not breaking them up but actually fusing them together, reacting them together to produce heavier elements. Typically helium. Okay which is helium is a nucleus which has has two protons and two neutrons that also releases energy and that and that or reactions like that. Making heavier elements from lighter elements is what mostly powers the sun and stars. Both fusion and fission release approximately a million times more energy per unit mass than chemical reactions. So, a chemical reaction means take hydrogen, take oxygen, react them together let's say and get water that releases energy. The energy released in the chemical reaction like that or the burning of coal or oil or whatever else is about a million times less per unit mass than what is released in nuclear reactions. </s><s>[INST] So, but it's hard to do. [/INST] It requires very high energy of impact. And actually it's very easy to understand why. And that is that those two nuclei, if they're both, let's say hydrogen nuclei, one is let's say deuterium and the other is let's say treaty. Um they're both electrically charged. And so they and they are positively charged. So they like charges, repel everyone knows that, right? So basically to get them close enough together to react, you have to overcome the repulsion the electric repulsion of the two nuclei from one another. And you have to get them extremely close to one another in order for the nuclear forces to overtake the electrical forces. And and actually form a new nucleus. And so one requires very high energies of impact in order for reactions to take place. And those high energies of impact correspond to very high temperatures of random motion. </s>

<s>[INST] it, but I don't even think it's just engineering, it's also science. One thing that I find um kind of interesting talking to physicists is a little bit, yeah, there's uh a little bit of hubris. So some of the most brilliant people I know are physicists, both philosophy and just in terms of mathematics in terms of understanding the world, but there's a kind of either hubris or what would I call it? Uh like a confidence that if we have a theory of everything, we will understand everything like this is the deepest thing to understand. And I would say, and like the rest is details, Right? That's the, the old rutherford thing. Uh but to me, there's like, this is like a cake or something, There's layers to this thing and each one has a theory of everything, like at every level from biology, like how life originates that itself. Like complex systems like that in itself is like this gigantic thing that requires a theory of everything. And then there's the, in the space of humans psychology, like intelligence, collective intelligence, the way it emerges among species, that feels like a complex system that requires its own theory of everything on top of that is things like in the computing space, artificial intelligence systems like that feels like and using the theory of everything and it's almost like um once we solve, once we come up with a theory of everything that explains the basic laws of physics that gave us the universe even stuff that's super complex, like how like how the universe might be able to originate, even explaining something that you're not a big fan of like multiverses or stuff that we don't have any evidence of yet. Still we won't be able to have a strong explanation of uh why food taste delicious. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. No, no, anyway, I yeah, I agree completely. I mean this there is something kind of completely wrong with this terminology, a theory of everything. It's not um it's really in some sense, very bad, very hubristic and bad terminology because it's not, this is explaining this is a purely reductionist point of view that you're trying to understand certain certain very specific kind of things which, you know in principle, other things, you know, emerged from, but to actually understand how anything emerges from this is, it can't be understood in terms of this, this underlying final theory is going to be hopeless in terms of kind of telling you what about this, um this various emergent behavior and as you go to different levels of explanation, you're going to need to develop new, different, completely different idea is completely different ways of thinking and I guess there's a famous kind of Phil Anderson's slogan is that, you know, more is different. Yeah, so, and it's just, it's just even once you understand how, what a couple of things, if you have a collection of stuff and you understand perfectly well how each thing is interacting with it with the other, is what the whole thing is going to do is just a completely different problem. It's just not and you need completely different ways of thinking about it. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about this? I got to ask you a few different attempts at a theory of everything, especially recently. Absolutely. I've been for many years a big fan of cellular time enough complex systems and obviously because of that, a fan of Stephen Wolfram is work on in that space, but he's recently been talking about a theory of everything through his physics project essentially. Uh what do you think about this kind of discreet theory of everything? For like from simple rules and simple objects on the hyper graphs emerges all of our reality or time and space are emergent, basically everything we see around us is um [/INST] I have to say. Unfortunately, I'm kind of pretty much zero sympathy for that. I mean I don't um I spent a little time looking at it and I just don't see, it doesn't seem to me to get anywhere and it really is just really, really doesn't agree at all with with what, what with what I'm seeing this kind of unification of math and physics that I'm talking about around certain kinds of very deep ideas about geometry and stuff. This if you want to believe that that your things are really coming out of selling atomic at the most fundamental level, you have to believe that everything that I've seeing my whole career and as as beautiful, powerful ideas that that's all just kind of a mirage, which is kind of randomly is emerging from these more basic, very, very simple minded things. And I you have to give me some serious evidence for that. And I'm saying nothing </s><s>[INST] So mirage, you don't think there could be a consistency were things like quantum mechanics could emerge from much, much, much smaller, discreet like computational type system. I think from the [/INST] point of view of certain mathematical point of view of quantum mechanics is already mathematically, as simple as it gets. It really is a story about really the fundamental objects that you work with and when you write down a quantum theory are in some in some one point of view precisely the fundamental objects at the deepest levels of mathematics that you're working with. They're exactly the same. So and cellular automata or something completely different, which don't fit into these structures. And so I just don't see why any anyway, I don't see it as a promising uh, you know, probably something to do. And then just looking at it and saying, does this go anywhere? Does this solve any problem that I've ever that I didn't does this solve any problem of any kind of? I just don't see it. </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, me too. Yeah. It's it's a cool it's a it's a virtual hug. [/INST] I think it's like I was just listening to something about </s><s>[INST] the [/INST] different Russian writers. I was mentioning him to you this academic, his name is Gary saul Morson and he studies Russian literature and he was talking about, I don't know if I'll be able to get this right, but basically that people misunderstand a work like anna Karenina, him </s><s>[INST] and that [/INST] we think of it as telling us that you're supposed to live, you know, you're supposed to have like these grand, tempestuous romances that might end in death or despair or whatever it is, but you know, you should be in it for the intensity of the emotion. And he's saying actually that's not that's exactly not what Tolstoy was saying, that actually it was the opposite that he was really making, he was really advocating for everyday life. He was saying, it seems from every day, like he was juxtaposing anna Karenina with all these other couples who are just living happily and quietly day by day. And that was what he believed was the ideal. So as as opposed to the grand rush and as opposed to the intensity, </s><s>[INST] is there a uh, a depth is there a romance? It's just the day to day. [/INST] Don't get don't </s><s>[INST] get distracted by the dopamine roller coaster ride of the Grant romantic notions [/INST] and enjoy it while it's happening because those are life experiences also, but not to mistake those for being everything. </s><s>[INST] Where is he from? [/INST] He's a professor at Northwestern </s><s>[INST] Northwestern [/INST] and apparently his lectures are like the most popular on campus </s><s>[INST] people love him. Gary saul Morrison is an american literary critic and Slob Ist. He's particularly in over his scholarly work on the great Russian novel lists Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor dostoevsky Morrison is Lawrence the professor in the arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Wow. And there's a lot of incredible work and then I'm sure looking through the lens of Russian literature and the romance of all of that, he's looking at modern at the modern world. [/INST] Yeah, I think you should have him on your podcast </s><s>[INST] and quiet flows the vodka or when Pushkin comes to shove the curmudgeons guide to Russian literature and culture. This is one of the silly books he has on the list. Okay, cool. Oh [/INST] no, I was just saying, yeah, like I find that when I take photos on my phone, I hardly ever take photos at the moment, you're supposed to like everybody's gathered for some event. I'll forget to take the photo, but I take a lot of like scenes from everyday life because that's what I actually want to remember in the end. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah, I'm the same the same. It's actually concerning because it's bad for productivity because I love everyday life so much. Then why why do any ambitious big thing. [/INST] Your productivity is pretty good. I don't know that you have to worry about </s><s>[INST] it. I do. So I want to launch a business, You know, I have, I have a dream outside, this is like a fun side thing that, you know, I wanna, there's been a lifelong passion anyway, that's a, I like building, I like building stuff and I haven't been doing that as much as I would like. That's because largely because I like sitting in silence and enjoying the beauty that is just nature and life and when there's people, there's people, I love people, I love everything. And so when you love everything, why go through hell to build a company? [/INST] Yeah, it's a valid question. I mean, I think you have to have a really good reason for wanting to do </s><s>[INST] it, but then your heart calls you for the certain, sometimes you look out into the mountains and you say for some reason I long to go there even if it means leaving the tribe and putting yourself in danger and doing stupid shit, that's a human, um, imperative for exploration. [/INST] Yeah, absolutely. Like when we were talking about, um, you know, this idea of longing being like the source code of humanity, I think that's also the source code of our creativity. It's a, it's the same logging for Eden. It's like you're always reaching for something that you want to get to you or that you want to build. It's the best of us. </s><s>[INST] What do you think? Uh, you've read about creativity and sadness, You practically speaking, how should we leverage sadness for creativity is that sort of in the artist domain, in the writer's domain, in the engineering domains and so on. [/INST] It's definitely in those domains, but it's in all domains. Um, you know, we're all going to face pain in this life at some point and we all have the ability to weather it and withstand, withstand it and live with it for a bit and then try to transform it into something that we find beautiful. Um, you know, and it's very easy to, to notice the grandeur of like the, you know, the painting hanging on the gallery wall or the new company that's just been created. But it takes 1000 different forms, right? You know, you could bake a cake or like </s><s>[INST] in [/INST] the wake of the pandemic, we've had more people applying to medical school and nursing school And after 9-11, you had people applying for jobs as firefighters and teachers. So there's something in the human spirit that takes pain and turns it into meaning when we're at our best and when we're not at our best, we deny the pain and then take it out on ourselves and on other people. So there's a kind of fork in the road what to do with it. But we know, I mean there's all these studies that I go through in the book. Like there was one, um, where the researchers had people watch different movies, like happy movies, sad movies, bittersweet movies and they found when people watched Father of the Bride, which is like the ultimate bittersweet. You know, you're walking your daughter down the aisle kind of feeling that was they would give them creativity tasks after watching these different movies. And the people who had been primed for bittersweetness were the most </s>

<s>[INST] You have like. [/INST] What did you just use? </s><s>[INST] So then you could just maximize the awesomeness of the experience. [/INST] The awesomeness of the experience. Yeah, I guess I don't have a tone like that. You don't have a try war ery. Exactly. necessarily isn't. I love war ery. Exactly, yeah. I think that the important thing I think for everybody to realize is there's always pros and cons to everything. Like my lifestyle like, obviously I get to have a lot of fun experiences, that's like a huge pro and that's super cool. And if you're like abell manogamy brain person, you're not gonna get those experiences. But, for your manogamy brain person, like when you're sharing that special moment at a time with somebody else, like that moment can be really, really, really special because now it's a thing that you're showing yourself and open yourself to another person and they're only trusting you to do that. And that's like a really special thing that only the two of you are sharing with each other. So I mean, like, there's always like pros and cons to everything. I think we both would say like like doing an open relationship is probably not like we would not recommend it. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I think we would know. Yeah, I recently fasted for three days and ate a chicken breast at the end of that. And it was like the most delicious food I've ever eaten. So like there's some aspect of fasting and scarcity and so on that like you have to figure out what for your own psyche, what works the best. [/INST] It's good. It's good to be a little bored. or like not do something or like work because you can just enjoy the time when you're doing something really fun. It's more fun, otherwise you're just gonna get numb </s><s>[INST] in general with everything, yeah, work. Yeah, I personally just never get bored. Like, I guess the boring thing is exciting to me. [/INST] It's just like- </s><s>[INST] You're like me, because everything I like is boring. I gotta ask you, we talked about massaging in the, he's trying to battle it out on the internet. What's your sense as a woman about the level of massaging in the internet [/INST] and the streaming community and how to fight it? For me, because I guess I get it every single day, somehow, like because I have an online, like I have a chat that's live, right? But I have like mods moderating that all the time, so I don't really need to see much of it. I think it's just pretty annoying because you get to like see it all the time. So it's become like background noise? Yeah, a little bit. And it's like the same comments over and over again. But it's usually for me, I don't personally care that much. I understand that other people do, especially when it comes into like when there's like a lot of sexism and stuff. And when there's a lot of like men not taking women seriously. Like I definitely get that. And I used to get that even more like a few years ago with my accent and everything. And like I used to be blonde as well like a few months ago. So I feel like people wouldn't take me seriously because of that. That's a bit annoying, but I feel like it's pretty easy to like see through when someone acts that way. And for me personally, I don't really care. but it's a bit annoying like being online and like getting stuff every single day. I would say like probably the worst thing is when you feel like you put in a lot of effort into some sort of work, everyone is just gonna say you just got that because you're a woman and you're attractive and that's probably like </s><s>[INST] the worst thing. But- [/INST] Is there a way to fight that you think? Yeah, I don't think you can. I think it just comes up all the time. It's just like, it is what it is, I guess. You just got to keep doing whatever you do and not let it like emotionally control you somehow. I think having more women in those spaces is always good. It's probably good, yeah. Like a lot of the guys you can tell them online, they don't have— It's probably good, yeah. They don't have— They don't bring on the worst ones then, Stephen and Jordan. She's being with CJC? She just did it! She's being with CJC? She just did it! She did the misogyny thing! By having some bad women on, she's saying all women— Well, you know it's true. Right? </s><s>[INST] I disagree with you, and I'm older than both of you, and therefore wiser, right? [/INST] Yeah well combined we're older than yourself, where we're only matronomy. We've got combined age. It could be the same thing like... Also the age thing in Like The Woman Thing, a lot of people think that I'm just copying every single thing that he says, which I think has been annoying as well. So I can never really like... Or it could be... A sonic Dreams Yeah, which has been annoying. Yeah, which has been annoying. It was about the defending police. Like my dad was a cop? </s><s>[INST] My dad was a cop! friendship, camaraderie, and love and respect, which you both have had for a time and have lost it, and I would like you to regain it. Let's try to increase and decrease the amount of love in this space. What do you think about some of the harshness of his language, which we talked about? Our word in the past when he used N word, [/INST] all of that kind of stuff. </s><s>[INST] When he used to do, I mean. No, like what do you think about it? [/INST] Like do you give him advice? </s>

<s>[INST] the kernel of the idea is first put on paper. Yeah, that's where. [/INST] Right, and I'll write maybe five programs a week. Uh of course literate programming. And uh these are before I describe something in my book, I always program it to see how it's working. And I tried a lot. So for example, I learned at the end of January, I learned of a breakthrough by four japanese people who had extended one of the, one of my methods in a new direction. And so I I spent the next five days writing a program to implement what they did and then I, you know, but they had only general is part of what I had done. So then I had to see if I could generalize more parts of it and then I and I had to take their approach and I had to I had to try it out on a couple of dozen of the other problems I had already worked out with with my old methods and so that took another couple of weeks. And then, you know, then I then I started to see the light and I uh and I started writing the final draft and uh and then I would uh you know, type it up, involve some new mathematical questions and so I wrote to my friends and who might be good at solving those problems and they solve some of them. And so I put that in as exercises. And and so a month later I had absorbed one new idea that I that I learned and uh you know, I'm glad I heard about it in time, otherwise I wouldn't put my book out before. I heard about the idea. On the other hand, this book was supposed to come in at 300 pages. I'm up to 350 now. That added 10 pages to the book. But if I learn about another one, I probably wasn't going to shoot me </s><s>[INST] well. So in the process in that one month process are some days harder than others [/INST] are some days harder than others. Well, yeah, my work is fun. But I also work hard and every big job has parts that are a lot more fun than others. And so many days I would say why do I have to have such high standards, Why why couldn't I just be sloppy and not try this out and you know just just report the answer. But I but I know that uh people are calling me to do this and so okay, so okay, don I'll get my teeth and do it and and and then the joy comes out when I see that actually, you know, I'm getting good results and and and I get and I even more when I see that somebody is actually read and understood what I wrote and told me how to make it even better. I did want to mention something about the uh about the method. So I got this tablet here, we're do the first, you know the first writing of of concepts. Okay, so </s><s>[INST] so and what language? Right, [/INST] so take a look at it. But you know here you random say explain how to draw such skewed pixel diagrams. Okay, I got this paper about 40 years ago when I was visiting my sister in Canada and they make tablets of paper with this nice large size and just </s><s>[INST] the right very small space between life. Yeah, maybe. Uh [/INST] show it. Yeah. Yeah, Wow. You know, I've got these manuscripts going back to the 60s. Mhm. And and and those are getting my ideas on paper. Okay. But I'm a good typist. In fact I went to typing school when I was when I was in high school and so I can type faster than I think. So then when I do the editing and stand up and type, then I then I revised this and, and it comes out a lot different than what, you know, for style and rhythm and things like that. Come out at the at the typing stage, </s><s>[INST] a new type in tech [/INST] and I type in tech. </s><s>[INST] And can you, can you think in tech? [/INST] No. So to a certain extent, I have, I have only a small number of, of idioms that I use, like, you know, I'm beginning with their um I do something for display equation, I do something and so on. But but I I have to see it </s><s>[INST] and in the way that it's on paper here. So, for example, Touring wrote what the other direction, you don't write macros, you don't think in macros [/INST] particularly, but when I need a macro, I'll go ahead and these are and do it. But the thing is the I also write to fit, I mean, I'll change something if I can, if I can save a line, you know, it's like haiku, I'll figure out a way to rewrite the sentence so that uh it looked better on the page And I shouldn't be wasting my time on that, but, but I can't resist because I know it's only another 3% of the time or something like that. </s><s>[INST] And it could also be argued that that is what life is about. [/INST] Ah Yes. In fact that's true. Uh like like I worked in the garden one day a week and that's that's kind of a description of my life is getting rid of weeds, you know, removing bugs for programs. And </s>

<s>[INST] Hopefully both are useful, interesting and even entertaining at times I ask for your patience as I learn to have better conversations. This is the artificial intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on youtube, give it five stars on itunes, support on Patreon or simply connect with me on twitter at lex Friedman spelled F R I D M A M. And now here's my conversation with Gary Marcus. Do you think human civilization will one day have to face an Ai driven technological singularity that will uh in a societal way modify our place in the food chain of intelligent living beings on this planet. I [/INST] think our place in the food chain has already changed. So there are lots of things people used to do by hand that they do with machine. If you think of the singularity is like one single moment, which is I guess what it suggests, I don't know if it'll be like that, but I think that there's a lot of gradual change and ai is getting better and better. I mean, I'm here to tell you why, I think it's not nearly as good as people think, but, you know, the overall trend is clear. Maybe, you know, maybe records while thinks it's an exponential and I think it's linear. In some cases it's close to zero right now, but it's all going to happen. I mean, we are going to get to human level intelligence or whatever you want what you will artificial general intelligence at some point. And that's certainly going to change our place in the food chain because a lot of the tedious things that we do now, we're going to have machines doing a lot of the dangerous things that we do now, we're going to have machines do. I think our whole lives are gonna change from uh people finding their meaning through their work through people finding their meaning through creative expression. </s><s>[INST] So the the singularity will be a very gradual, in fact, removing the meaning of the word singularity will be a very gradual transformation in your view. [/INST] I think that it will be somewhere in between. And I guess it depends what you mean by gradual inside. And I don't think it's gonna be one day. I think it's important to realize that intelligence is a multidimensional variable. So people sort of write this stuff as if like I. Q. Was one number and you know the day that you hit 262 or whatever you displace the human beings. And really there's lots of facets to intelligence. So there's verbal intelligence and there's motor intelligence and there's mathematical intelligence and so forth. Um machines in their mathematical intelligence far exceed most people already and their ability to play games they far exceed most people already in their ability to understand language. They lag behind my five year old, far behind my five year old. So there are some facets of intelligence, the machines of graphs and some that they haven't and you know we have a lot of work left to do to get them to say understand natural language or to understand how to flexibly approach some you know kind of novel macgyver problem solving kind of situation and I don't know that all of these things will come once I think there are certain vital prerequisites that we're missing now. So for example machines don't really have common sense now so they don't understand that bottles contain water and that people drink water to quench their thirst and they don't want to dehydrate that they don't know these basic facts about human beings. And I think that that's a rate limiting step for many things, its a great limiting step for reading for example, because stories depend on things like, oh my God, that person's running out of water, that's why they did this thing, or you know if they only they have water, they could put out the fire. So you know, you watch a movie and your knowledge about how things work matter um into a computer can't understand that movie if it doesn't have that background knowledge, same thing if you read a book. And so there are lots of places where if we had a good machine interpret double set of common sense, many things would accelerate relatively quickly. But I don't think even that is like a single point. There's many different aspects of knowledge and we might for example, find that we make a lot of progress on physical reason and getting machines to understand, for example how keys fit into locks or you know, that kind of stuff or or how this gadget here works and uh and so forth. And so on, machines might do that long before they do really good psychological reasoning because it's easier to get kind of labeled data or to do direct experimentation on a microphone stand than it is to do direct experimentation on human beings to understand the levers that guide them. </s><s>[INST] That's that's a really interesting point actually, whether it's easier to gain common sense knowledge or psychological knowledge, [/INST] I would say that common sense knowledge includes both physical knowledge and psychological knowledge that the and the argument was physical versus psychological, physical versus psychological. The argument I was making is physical knowledge might be more accessible because you could have a robot for example, lift a bottle, try putting on a bottle cap on it, see that you know, falls off if it does this and see that it could turn it upside down and so the robot could do some experimentation. Um we do some of our psychological reasoning by looking at our own minds. So I can sort of guess how you might react to something based on how I think I would react to it. And robots don't have that intuition. And they also can't do experiments on people in the same way or we'll probably shut them down. So, you know, if we wanted to have robots figure out how I respond to pain by pinching me in different ways, like that's probably it's not going to make it past the human subjects board and you know, companies are going to get sued or whatever. So like there's certain kinds of practical experience that are limited are off limits to two robots. And </s>

<s>[INST] direct, it's not like reading books by famous people, It's like real [/INST] people, it's real people and they make mistakes and fascinating little stories. I was looking at how the nazi tobacco industry had their own denial campaign which was pro Nazi, but in pro tobacco, even though the Nazi regime was anti tobacco and they developed a lot of these rhetorical tricks that were later used by the americans like, oh you can't trust that evidence, it's merely statistical, can't trust the animal experiments because all it proves is that mice should not smoke. But I noticed just in passing these remarkable stories, little hints, there's a report from a Japanese military man in one of these tobacco journals, tobacco industry journals in the Nazi period and they're talking about this brotherhood of all men through cigarettes and the tragedy that the chinese and the japanese who are fighting each other in a way that wanted nothing more than to smoke together. And the chinese would sneak up to the Japanese forts to try to find a japanese cigarette that had been thrown away and they'd be glowing and the Japanese knew this and they would throw their cigarettes out, The chinese would come and then the Japanese would kill these chinese and then this guy is poetically lamenting the fact that even though the all they want is a smoke, they nonetheless end up in the crosshairs and in death. And so it's just weird and I'm reading this translate from the japanese into german in a Nazi tobacco industry newspaper. I mean the layers of weirdness are really fascinating and touching, but, </s><s>[INST] and those very kind of brotherhood stories actually resonated later because I mean, that's how I feel about cigarettes. Some of my favorite moments in early life is about people connecting over a cigarette [/INST] of course, </s><s>[INST] and that, you know, that works that that's those narratives movies, movies meet [/INST] cute, the tobacco industry when they put cigarettes into a movie, they put it in right at the moment where Boy meets girl. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you, just in all the research you've done with Nazi Germany. Just for me from a conversational perspective, I was I was listening to a bunch of holocaust survivors recently, just on Youtube. But listening to interviews. Um, also listening to Nazi ss soldiers like they're still alive or were recently, some of them especially the ones that deny many aspects of the holocaust. It's so interesting to watch because they're [/INST] still </s><s>[INST] still it's so fascinating. Anyway, I in your research, are there interesting people to talk to their still alive, are they mostly that part of history is no longer living? Is in the books? [/INST] It is mostly no longer living. And that's one reason In the 1980s, when I started working on Nazi science, I really did interview quite a few people and elderly people people who had sort of slipped through the cracks, maybe even should have been prosecuted. So few people got prosecuted. Um, but these were people who had racial theories who published yeah. You know on these topics and they were guarded, but these were the lives they lived and you know, mainly they wanted people not to be talking too much about this. So it gets sealed off and walled off. And that's why the reading the medical literature itself was so much more valuable </s><s>[INST] because there's no self censorship is just there. [/INST] I'm sure there's some censorship, but it's what they said is what they said. And it's it's immense. It's immense and largely unread the, as I said, there are hundreds and hundreds of Nazi medical journals and people have not been reading those before. I really started looking at them. </s><s>[INST] Given that you studied these really difficult parts of human history and human nature with big tobacco and just these mechanisms and manipulation. What gives you hope about the future? [/INST] All kinds of thanks give me hope. The forest gives me hope that we can Wikipedia gives me hope. Space, exploration gives me hope. All kinds of things give me hope. They had this insight. The other day I walked through all of these giant redwoods which were almost all cut. They're not very far from here. Just you know, half an hour straight west of where we are now. You end up in redwood country and I had this idea that you know, they're growing back now and every year they had how many, you know cubic miles of wood. If you count California as a whole, but not only that the roots are all old growth if you think about it, these are re sprouting, they're not from seeds, these are re sprouting. And so they have this tremendous resource underground that even the loggers couldn't kill. Right? And so from these stumps you get what are called fairy rings, which are like five trees coming in a ring around it, each one competing to be the successor. So they've seen this story before and they noted to to to re sprout. And that I think is a very hopeful thing is that the roots are old growth and hopefully in 100 203 100 years it won't peak until around 1000 years from now. You'll get these restoration of all of this magnificent all growth. Um, but so many other things, you know, give me hope and you know, we have to have hope and I think that if the world is infinite, there's infinitely many ways for it to become fixed. I mean obviously we have some problems need to be fixed, but they're fixable. </s><s>[INST] That's really beautifully put. That is a really hopeful idea that nature that life, even human civilization is resilient to all the mistakes we make. So the roots are there. So it outlives us. It's patient with our adolescent fuckups. I [/INST] mean we're a thin layer on the crust </s><s>[INST] and [/INST] you know, eventually the earth will be swallowed by the sun and humans won't, it will have long gone extinct by then. Um But yeah, there's all kinds of around grounds for hope. </s>

<s>[INST] uh belief, you just believed in yourself. Is there something to that where um you have to try to [/INST] like </s><s>[INST] be your own source of belief flame the fire within yourself? Was that it, was that something difficult to do? Like, um [/INST] that was just very natural for me. I said, you know, you can surround yourself with great people that is extremely important. Don't surround yourself with failures because they will, they're not going to push you to, you know, they don't know what it is, how to get there. I mean, everybody knows, but it's when you surround yourself with winners, you know, you know what? It took them to get their used them as an example. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there's a certain kind of aura to people that just achieve great things and being around them. But it's still, it's hard to find people that, especially the early stage, [/INST] any, any area. Yeah, any </s><s>[INST] area. That's right, yeah, Greatness has a certain, I think it's almost humbling just to see, okay, any human, like at least that's the lesson I learned almost any human can do can be great. I [/INST] mean, one I've used Muhammad Ali is a great example. Look at his belief, look at how much he believed himself before he was Muhammad ali look at the, you know, determination he had, the way the confidence he had fighting even on his loss, they never changed him. </s><s>[INST] No, [/INST] when he fought foreman George foreman, I'm not, not one person in the world thought he was gonna win that fight by himself. He never doubt himself. Everybody else did. He won over all odds against. So it's, I mean when you look at people like that, you can, you don't have to be a boxer to try to, you know, follow his example, but </s><s>[INST] see those are like epic giant battles, but I feel like you fight the same kind of battle when you're young and your parents tell you that, you know, just with their whole energy that this is silly. Don't be silly, don't don't be silly to chase. [/INST] It's harder, It is harder. But as a kid is harder to deal with that because I mean to go against adults, especially parents telling you otherwise. Like the the the amount of strength you need is it's gigantic. I don't even know how much strength you need because that was not my case. So I can understand what you have to go through with the force of your parents telling you, you know otherwise, but it's how much you want, you will dictate how far you're gonna go, where you gonna go. So it's you know, if you can break through that, you get over it. It's that simple. And </s><s>[INST] actually one of the really nice things the internet does that I would give advice to young people is like, you can find, even, even if your parents are not a source of that, your teachers, your community, you can find people on the internet will believe in you. It's kind of cool. It's, it's kind of cool how the internet opens the possibility of like a community of like 10, 11 year olds like building ship. And I see this all the time engineering. And they, I mean they're fueled by belief. They want to, um, they want to be like, they want to create the next trillion dollar company, right there. There's a fire in their eyes and not for the money obviously, but to do something really impactful. And I think that fire is extinguished often by teachers and, and uh, parents because I think the logic that parents have and teachers, they look at a kid and they don't on the surface level, they don't see greatness, right? They just see kind of mediocrity. And so to them, it's like no, right? The world is more complicated than that in order to get great. You have to like, like they somehow kind of always try to be reasonable with you. And in so doing extinguish the flame. It's weird. [/INST] I think most people afraid so to even try. So you can call them cowards for not trying because you are a coward for not trying, not putting yourself at risk, right? So I would say a big part of society, a coward's for never trying, never pursuing what they really want is So it's there is, you know, </s><s>[INST] uh, [/INST] weight of pressure everyone, Most people, a lot of people will say around you that because they were afraid to try. They don't incentivize people to do so because they want everybody to be like them. Because imagine if everybody around you suddenly, I'm not afraid that everyone is trying and you look yourself in the mirror and say I was too scared. I've never tried. So you feel really bad about yourself. So it's easier to have people around you that think exactly like you than otherwise. So they reflect a lot on the kids. It's, you know, society almost like Preston down to be like everybody else to have a normal life, normal job. It's, you know, don't take risk because you can lose it all. I mean, that's the worst thing. You can tell everybody take all the risks, lose it all a few times. That's how you're gonna build things. </s><s>[INST] Especially when you're young. Yes, [/INST] exactly. What's what's the what's the point of not trying. You should try and you will lose everything doesn't matter what, what, what, what it matters to lose everything. It does matter. You will teach, you can resilience. You know, try harder, go after. You know, it's don't don't live a normal life because otherwise, you mean what we're here for? Yeah, take </s><s>[INST] big risk, take a lot of [/INST] 1000 times until you succeed and then you're gonna be the most proud of yourself like this, This did not be priceless. It's then we'll change the world. </s>

<s>[INST] think the question is whether there is a threshold that could be crossed. That's one question and I can answer this because I think it's different from person to person, but the chess engine is not at all trying to, um, to cross that threshold. Let's just start there. And, and to me the personalization, which is what's the difference like a friend that you meet, you've shared all these memories and the way they look at you will convey in the things they say will convey that they've shared those memories with you. They'll be able to uh, speak in in the shared humor and the language. But really the memories is the big one of having gone through things together. I think I would have more and more trouble for example, turning off a system that I have been through things with like and by turning off, I mean delete all of its memory. If me and the toaster have gone through a bunch of dramatic events and that toaster remembers. There's a [/INST] certain level </s><s>[INST] to where like it's just me and the toaster in this together at this point. And uh, just to talk about sanctions. I don't know, but you know, I don't [/INST] know. It's according to the scripture can't live by bread alone. But I would, I mean, I know that I know that there's no way to, there's no way to determine this, but it's still about what you feel. </s><s>[INST] Yes. But isn't that what human relations are also though? [/INST] Yes, but </s><s>[INST] we make each other feel [/INST] true, but it's true that I have the assumption that you feel somewhat like I do, I mean obviously I don't, you know, and that could be illusion. And I don't know and and I know that you don't feel exactly as I do. Um But I think we have a long at least to me, we have a long way to go before the detached part of our brains. That is the objective evaluating part as opposed to the emotive it feels this way part believe that that machine has consciousness. </s><s>[INST] I think it's at least without arriving at conclusions, it's at least possible that one day we will look back and realized that we have yet once again formed another tribe and that um scripture all along had in it the the ability for humans and robots to have a deep meaningful connection and that through the robot that the life that enters the body of another robot. What's the difference between a biological body and a mechanical one? And then we will see that the fundamental thing is about the whatever you want to call it sentience, whatever can permeate an object. That was that was the thing all along. [/INST] So I I mean </s><s>[INST] and then you'll get canceled one more time because because [/INST] I denied it, I was going to preach, I'll preach to the robots. I look I first of all depends how quickly you do it and how much longer I have to live. Um I resisted tremendously. But I am also enough of a student of history to know that my instinctive resistance has nothing to do with whether it will come about. Um I have a hard time believing it. We'll see, </s><s>[INST] can I ask you about this? Um maybe you can educate me. I I tend to believe that you mentioned suffering that there is a connection between consciousness and suffering. That suffering is a fundamental part. [/INST] The </s><s>[INST] capacity to suffer is the fundamental part of being human. I [/INST] mean, if you look at when you're not conscious, you don't suffer. You know, we've had operations where we've been put under anesthetic, we're not conscious and we don't suffer during the operation if we were conscious we would. Um but there's also, I mean there's a non physical suffering that is very much tied to consciousness. I can think of things right now that will cause me suffering like pain that I've caused or pain that other people I care about have felt or so on. So I don't see how um I think that way, I think it's equally true of joy. Joy is also a product of consciousness </s><s>[INST] all tied in in some beautiful messy way with memory and so on that we can re experience that when we recall the memories. Um but why is there suffering you mentioned evil? Why is there evil in the world? You can uh tell stories about this. Why is there suffering? Why is there evil in the [/INST] world if </s><s>[INST] there's a God that [/INST] cares, let's assume for a minute that every everything was a primitive robot, there would be no suffering. But there would also be no growth and and that implies choices. Like one of the things that I that I have said that I know I know why it hurts people and I don't mean it quite the way that, but I will say it nonetheless is the holocaust presents the exact same theological question as somebody who gets shot on the streets of a city in Los Angeles, which is God, why do you allow some people to do bad things to other people? It's on an unimaginable scale, but it's the same question and the answer has to be you either allow people to have free will or you don't, you can't say as God, I'm going to have let everybody have free will but not nazis. Nazis don't get free will because cambodians, they can kill each other. Rwandans kill each other. But but the nazis don't get to do that. So That's one part piece of the puzzle. And what makes it unfathomable is when you're actually faced with suffering. These kinds of explanations are obscene. They just are, you can't, I mean when somebody is actually suffering, oh the rabbi said, God gave people free will, that's just awful. But there is a second piece to this also, which is that there is natural suffering like Children were with diseases or earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever. Um and and here my argument is that in some way suffering has to be random in the world because when people say why do bad things happen to good people? Well if only good things happen to good people, everybody would be good. But it would it would have no moral content. The only way you can be good and it have moral content is say I know that I can live a really good life and have really terrible things happen to me nonetheless. So </s>

<s>[INST] What does it take to get a black belt in jiu jitsu? [/INST] Very little to show up, Pay your fees. Don't set your goals low. Okay, don't even ask yourself that question. No one cares if you got a black belt. Okay. The only thing that counts is the skills you have. I know plenty of black belts that suck. Okay, there's a lot of them out there. Um, don't lower your standards by saying, I want to get a black belt, ask yourself something much more important. How good do I want to be? You want to be damn good, right? You want to do something, invest time and you wanna be the best you can, we're in a belt around your waist? Doesn't guarantee that build skills, Focus on that. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you about the fourth thing in facet face of jujitsu, which is self defense, let's say the bigger things. I don't know if you, you know, I don't know why it's called self defense, It's called street fighting, Let's call it fighting. Okay, maybe maybe you can contest us that terminology. [/INST] How about non sport fighting? </s><s>[INST] Non sports [/INST] fighting? Like street fighting? What happens if you go out on the playground? You're fighting on grass because they're no longer street fighting. It's </s><s>[INST] like tennis, you have like Wimbledon grass courts and it's a whole nother thing. Uh No, is there, what do you think is the best martial art for street fighting? What is the best set of uh we talked about advice for white bows to advance in and uh grappling in jiu jitsu, what is the set of techniques? Maybe martial art that is best for street fighting? [/INST] Okay, um again you're you're you're asking some truly fascinating questions here. Um the way this gets framed as a question is often condemns you to bad answers from the stop, this is uh </s><s>[INST] as a questioner, I'm trying to achieve a symmetry of power and I'm [/INST] winning. Um </s><s>[INST] put you in a bad position, [/INST] Don't worry so much about people always gonna say, you know, is this martial art better or is this martial arts better? The truth is uh, there's only one way to say this, uh huh Combat sports are your best option for self defense. There are many martial arts and there is a rough divide between the two, those that fall into combat sports and those that fall into non sporting martial arts where there's no uh, competitive live sparring element where most of the knowledge is limited to theoretical knowledge reinforced by passive drilling. If you have a choice between a combat sport vs. A non sporting art based around theoretical knowledge and passive drilling, go with a combat sport, nothing will prepare you for the intensity of a genuine altercation better and combat sports. Many people, as I say, these words are probably horrified to hear me say this and uh, immediately going to rebut and say no, combat sports is exactly the wrong thing for you to do because they have safety rules etcetera etcetera, which would easily be exploited in a real fight. And if I fought a world championship boxer, I would just poke him in the eye or kick him in the groin, etcetera, etcetera. You heard these arguments 1000 times. Um, yes, there is some validity to these things. But as a general rule, if you ask me to bet and any form of street fight, call it what you want between a combat sport adherent versus someone who simply trains with drills and talks in terms of theories of what they would do in a fight. I'm going to go with the combat sport guy every single time. Now, having said that combat sports need to be modified for the use of self defense, street fighting. We haven't agreed on a term yet. We'll figure it out later. Um, what does this modification consist of? Well, some of it is technical. Okay, for example, um, a boxer in a street fight now has to punch without wrapped or gloved hands and that's problematic. Okay, your hands are not really designed for heavy, extended use of clubbing, hard objects is a very high likelihood of breaking your hands. Mike, Tyson was one of the finest punches that ever lived, but in one of his more famous street fights against mitch green In the late 1980s, he broke his hand with one punch that he threw his opponent hit the wrong part of the head and broke his hand. And he was one of the most gifted punches of all time. If he can do it, you'll certainly have trouble protecting your hands when you go to throw blows. Um, nonetheless, this was easily modified and so a box you can throw with, with open hands or with elbows and so just a small modification and technique can overcome that problem. So what you'll find is that the general physical mental conditioning and skill development that comes from combat sports allied with technical modifications and then the most important of all tactical modifications will provide your best hope in altercations outside of sports in the street or wherever you find yourself. Mhm. The least effective approaches to self defense that I have observed in my life have been those where as I said, people talk to theory drilled on passive opponents and generally had no engagement in live competition or sparring and their training programs. The most effective by a landslide. With those that put a heavy emphasis on live sparring and sporting competition modified both technically and tactically for the circumstances in which they found themselves. People talk for example about how, you know, um and with some validity that that weapons will change everything in a street fight. There's absolute truth to that, but this extends into weapons as well. Okay, the most effective forms of knife fighting that you'll see will be those who come from a background and fencing because it has sparring and a competitive sport aspect to it. But would pure fencing be the appropriate thing? Of course not you have to modify it but the reflexes, endurance, physical mobility that you gain from the sport offense and could easily be modified the blade craft in a fight situation, what you want to look for with regards street and self defense is not. Okay, which style should I choose? Should I choose taekwondo? Should I choose karate? Should I choose this variation of kung fu? No focus on the most important thing, does it have a sport aspect to it. Then, once you've made sufficient progress in the sport aspect of that marshal on, start asking yourself what are the requisite modifications and technique and tactics that I have to, to use or uh, to input to make it effective for street situations? That's always the advice that I give. </s>

<s>[INST] Because that's the way to acquire knowledge. I would say a huge benefit of reading is to think deeply now if you want to get the knowledge. I think services like blankets are just amazing because you can get the key ideas from the book without spending a humongous amount of time reading the book. Anyway, go to blankets dot com slash lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a blink is premium membership. That's blankets dot com slash lex spelled B L I M K I S T Blinken ist dot com slash lex. This is the lex Friedman podcast And here is my conversation with the r um Brooke and your um zoning. I attended the excellent debate between the two of you yesterday. Ut Austin the debate was between ideas of conservatism represented by your Amazonia and ideas of individualism represented by Yaron brook. Let's start with the topics of the debate your arm. How do you define conservatism? Maybe in the way you were thinking about it yesterday. What do you are some principles of conservatism, [/INST] let me define it. And then we can we can get into principles if if you want, When I when I talk about political conservatism, I'm talking about a political standpoint that regards the recovery, elaboration and restoration of tradition as the key to maintaining a nation and strengthening it through time. Okay, so this is something that if you have time to talk about it, like we do on the show, it's worth emphasizing that conservatism is not like liberalism or Marxism, Liberalism and Marxism or both kind of universal theories. And they claim to be able to tell you what's good for human beings at all times in all places. And conservatism is a little bit different because it's going to carry different values in every nation and every tribe, even every family, you can say has somewhat different values and these loyalty groups, they compete with one another. That's the way human beings were. So </s><s>[INST] it's deeply rooted in history of that particular area of land? [/INST] Well, I wouldn't necessarily say land, you're right that many forms of conservatism are tied to a particular place. </s><s>[INST] So how does the implementation of conservatism to you differ from the ideal of conservatism? The implementations you've seen of political conservatism in the United States and the rest of the world, just to give some context because it's a loaded term, like most political terms. So when people think about conservatives in the United States? they think about the Republican Party, what can you kind of disembodied, you ate some of this, What are we supposed to think? [/INST] Yeah, that's a really important question. Um usually the word conservative is associated with Edmund Burke and with the uh with the, the english common law tradition going back centuries and centuries, there's kind of a classical english conservative tradition that goes Fortescue hooker, uh coke Selden hail burke, Blackstone before burke. Um if you take that kind of as a, as a, as a benchmark and you compare it, then you can compare it to things like uh the american Federalist party at the time of the american founding is in many respects, very much very much in keeping with that tradition as you go forward, there's increasing mix of liberalism into conservatism and I think, I think by the time you get to the 19 sixties with William, buckley and frank meyer, you know, the jargon term is fusion is um by the time you get there, it's arguable that their conservatism isn't very conservative anymore, that it's kind of a a public liberalism mixed with a private conservatism. So a lot of the debate that we have today about what does the word conservatism actually mean? A lot of the confusion comes from, that comes from the fact that um that on on the one hand we have people used to use the term, I think properly historically to refer to this, this common law tradition of which burke was a spokesman, but but there are lots of other people who, when they say conservatives, they just mean liberal. And I think that that's a big problem. I mean, it's a it's a problem just to have an intelligent debate is difficult when when people are using the word almost in two antithetical, </s><s>[INST] what would you say? The essential idea of conservatism is time? You mentioned, your father is a physicist. So a lot of physicists when they form models of the universe, they don't consider time. So everything is dealt with instantaneously, a particle is represented fully by its current state, velocity and position. You're saying? So you're arguing um, with with all of physics and your father as we always do uh that their time matters uh, in conservatives, that's the fundamental element, is the full history matters and you cannot separate the individual from the history from the roots that they come from. [/INST] The parallel in political theory is is what's called rationalism. I guess we'll probably talk about that. Some rationalism is kind of an instantaneous timeless thing. Before I mentioned that liberalism and various enlightenment theories, they don't include time at all. Their goal is to say, look, there's such a thing as a universal human reason. All human beings if the reason properly will come to the same conclusions. If that's true, then it removes the time consideration. It removes tradition and context because everywhere where you are at any time, you ought to be able to use reason and come to the same conclusions about politics or morals. So that's a that's a theory like immanuel Kant or john locke is an example. Hobbs is an example that kind of political theorizing it really does say at a given instant, we can know pretty much everything that we need to know, at least the big things and conservatism is the opposite. It's a it's a it's a traditionalist view. Exactly as you say, that that says that history is crucial. </s><s>[INST] So you're on, you say that history is interesting but perhaps not crucial if in the context of individualism. [/INST] No, I mean, I think, I think there's a false dichotomy he presented here. And and that is that one view holds that you can derive any anything from a particular historical path and kind of an empirical view. And if we know the history, we know where we should be tomorrow, we know what where we should stand today. And the the other path is we ignore history. We ignore facts. We know what's going on. We can derive from some a priority axioms, we can derive a truth right now, and both are false. Both of those views in my view of false and, you know, I ran and I I reject both of those views. And I think the better thinkers of the enlightenment did as well, although they sometimes fall into the trap of appearing like rationalists and um and I agree on one thing and that is that contest is one of uh you know, we've we've we've talked about this in the past lex but we both hate comments. We both think Kant is is I at least think contest probably the the most destructive philosopher since Plato who was pretty destructive himself. But um and part of the problem is that can't divorces reason from reality. That is the divorces reason from history. He divorces reason from experience because we don't have direct experience of reality according to Cartwright were removed from that direct experience. But I view contest the anti enlightenment that is I've Yukons as the destroyer of good enlightenment thinking and and your um and uh and acknowledge a lot of history of philosophy, of people who do history, philosophy, if you can't as the embodiment of the enlightenment, that is the ultimate. But but I I think that's a mistake. I think both was so and can't a fundamentally the goal, their mission in life is to destroy the unite mint. So my view is neither of those options are the right option. That is the true reason based reason is not divorced from reality. It's quite the opposite reason is a tool. It's a faculty of identifying and integrating what its identifying integrating the facts of reality as as as as we know them through sense perception or through the study of history through what actually happened. So it's the integration of those facts. It's the knowledge of that history and then what we do is we abstract away principles based on what's worked in the past. What hasn't worked in the past, the consequences of different ideas, different past different actions. We abstract away principles that then can be universal. Not always we make mistakes, right? We can come up with a universal principle. It turns out that it's not, but if we have the whole scope of human history, we can derive principles as we do in life as individuals. We derive principles that are then truths that we can live by. But you don't do that by ignoring history, you do that by learning history by understanding history, understanding in a sense of tradition and where it leads to and then trying to do better. And I think good thinkers are constantly trying to do better based on </s><s>[INST] what they know about the past and what they know about the president. What's the difference between studying history on a journey of reason and tradition? So you mentioned that Berke understood that reason begins with inherited tradition yesterday. So what's the difference between studying history but then being free to go any way you want and tradition where it feels more? Um no, I don't want to say a negative term like burden. But it's uh there's more of a momentum that forces you to go the same way as your ancestors. [/INST] It's the recognition that people are wrong often are wrong and the parents, including your parents, including your your teachers, including everybody, everybody is potentially wrong and that that you can't accept anybody just because they happen to come before you. Uh that is you have to evaluate and judge and you have to have a standard by which they valued and judge the actions of those who came before you, whether they are your parents, whether they are the state in which you happen to be born, whether they are somebody on the other side of planet earth, you can judge them if you have a standard and my standard and I think the right standard is human well being. That is that which is good for human beings, quite human beings uh you know, is the standard by which we judge. I can say that certain periods of history were bad, they happened. It's important to study them, it's important to understand what they did that made them bad. So we cannot do that again. And I can say certain cultures certain periods of time we're good. Why? Because they promoted human well being and human flourishing. That's the standard and then derive from that, okay, what is it that made a particular culture good? What is it that made that particular culture positive in terms of human well being and human flourishing? What made this bad and hopefully from that, I can derive a principal, okay, if I want human flourishing and human well being in the future, I want to be more like these guys unless like those guys, I want to derive, what is the principle that will guide me in the future? That's I think how human knowledge ultimately develops, I think people often make a mistake. Just, I'm not saying you're wrong, but lots of people, you know, don't actually read the original sources. And so what happens is, uh, people will attack conservatives, assuming that conservatives think that whatever comes from the past is right. And actually it's, it's very difficult to find a thinker who actually says something like that. The Selden or burke, the big, the big conservative theorists hooker there. They're all people who understand that the tradition carries with it mistakes that were made in the past. And uh and and this is actually, I think an important part of, of their empiricism is that they see the search for truth as something a society does by trial and error. And what that means is that at any given moment, you have to be aware of the possibility that things that you've inherited are actually false. And the job of the political thinker or the jurist or the philosopher is not to dig in and say, you know, whatever it is that we've inherited is right. The job is to look at the society as a whole and say, look, we have this job of, first of all, first of all conservation just making sure that we don't lose good things that we've had and second seeing if we can repair things in order to to improve them where it's necessary or where it's possible. And that process is actually a creative process. That this is a way in which I think it is similar to your own philosophy that you take the inherited tradition and you look for a way that you can shape it in order to make it something better than it was. That's that's a that's a baseline for what we call conservatism in the </s><s>[INST] comments of the trial and error. The error is you're proud of the errors. It's a it's a feature, not a bug. So the you mentioned trial and error a few times yesterday. It's a really interesting kind of idea. It's basically accepting that the journey is going to have flaws as opposed to saying. I mean, the, the conclusion there is, the current system is flawed and it will always be flawed and you try to improve it when you listen to you're on talk, there's much more of optimism for the system being perfect now or potentially soon or it could be perfect. And to me, the way I heard it is almost like accepting that the system is flawed and through trial and error will improve and uh you're on says no, we can have a perfection now. [/INST] That's what it sounds to me. Yeah. And I think that's right. I think the difference is that at some point, just like in science, I think one can stop the trial and error and say, I can now see a pattern here. I can see, you know, that that certain actions lead to bad consequences. Certain actions lead to good consequences. Let me try to let me try to abstract away what is it that is good and what is it that are bad and build a system around what is good and and reject what is bad. I think ultimately, if you if you read the Founding fathers and whether we call them conservatives, individuals, what the Founding fathers actually did. All of them, I think is study history. They all did. They all talk about history? They will talk about examples of other cultures with its whether they go back to to the republican venice or back to the ancient Greeks. So, um, they they studied these, they learned lessons from them, They try to figure out what has worked in the past and what hasn't and try to do our principles now, in my view, they got pretty close to what I would consider an ideal, But they didn't get it completely right. And and here we sit, 200 and something years after the declaration and after the constitution, I think we can look back and say, Okay, well what did they get right, what did they get wrong based on how is it done and where the flaws and where the, and we can improve on it. Um, I think we can get closer to perfection. Um, and uh, and, and based on those kind of observations based on that kind of abstraction, that kind of discovery of, of what is true. Just like at some point you do the experiments, you do the trial and error and now you come up with a scientific principle. It is true that 100 years later, you might discover that hey, I missed something. There's something, but to not take the full lesson to insist on incrementalism, to insist on, we're just going to tinker with the system instead of saying, no, there's something really wrong with having a king. There's something really wrong with, uh, not having any representation or whatever the standard it needs to be in the name of. We don't want to move too fast, I think is a mistake. And the problem with trial and error, politics is that we're talking about human life, right? So, so there was a big trial around communism. And you know, 100 million people paid the price for the trial. I could have told them in advance, as did many people that it would not work. There are principles of human nature, principles of that. We can study from history, principles about economics and other aspects of what we know. It's not gonna work. You don't need to try it again. You know, we've, we've had communal arrangements throughout history. There was an experiment of fascism and and they've been experiments with all kinds of political systems. Okay, we we we've done them sad that we did them because many of us knew they wouldn't work, we should learn the lesson. And I think that all of history now converges on one lesson, and that is what we need to do is build systems to protect individual freedom. That is the core. That's what ultimately leads to him and flourishing in human success and and and, and human achievement. And to the extent that we place anything above that individual, whether it's the state, whether it's the ethnicity, whether it's the race, whether it's the bourgeois, whether its whatever it happens to be the class or whatever. Whenever we play something above the individual consequence of negative, that's one of these principles that I think we can derive from studying To, you know, 3000 years of civilization. Uh, and, and it's tragic, I think, because we're going to keep experimenting and sadly, I I see it right. I'm not winning this battle. Uh, I'm losing the battle. We're gonna keep experimenting with different forms of collectivism and we're gonna keep paying the price in human life and in missed opportunities for human flourishing and human success and human wealth and prosperity. Well, look, if we let's take communism is a good example. None of the major conservative thinkers would say, you know, what's a good idea, good idea would be to experiment by raising everything that we've inherited and starting from scratch. I mean, that's the conservative complaint or accusation against uh, rationalists. I mean as opposed to empiricism means using rationalism, let's take, you know, let's take a cart kind of as a, as a benchmark. You </s><s>[INST] also may be defined rationalism. [/INST] Yeah, These are two terms that are in philosophy, especially in epistemology there often compared to one another. You're on said that it's that it's a false dichotomy and, and, and maybe it is a bit exaggerated, but that doesn't mean it's not useful for, for conceptualizing the domain. So rationalist is somebody like Dick Hardt who says, um, I'm going to set aside, I'm gonna try to set aside everything I know everything I've inherited. I'm going to start from scratch. And he explicitly says, you know, in evaluating the, the inheritance of the past. He explicitly says, you take a look at the histories that we have, they're not reliable. You take a look at the moral and the scientific writings that receive, they're not very good. His baseline is to look very critically at the past and say, look, I'm evaluating it. I think all in all, it's just not worth very much. And so whatever I do, going beginning from scratch is going to be better, as long as, and he hears his caveat that's as long as I'm proceeding from, from self evident assumptions from self evident premise is things that you can't argue against. I </s><s>[INST] think therefore I am [/INST] right. And then from there deducing what what he calls infallible conclusions. So that model of self evident premise is to infallible conclusions. I'm calling that rationalism. I think that's kind of a kind of a standard, you know, academic jargon term. And it's supposed to empiricism, which is a thinker. I I think in universities, usually the, you know, the empiricist is david hume and David hume will say we can't learn anything the way that dick hearts. I mean, there is nothing that's that's self evident and that infallible. So, so um proposes based on uh Newton and and boil and, you know, the the the the the new physical sciences. So, um um proposes a science of man and the science. Man sounds an awful lot like what you're on just said, which is we're going to take a look at human nature, at the nature of societies, human nature, we're going to try to abstract towards fixed principles for describing it. Human societies. We're gonna try to do the same thing. And from there we get, you know, for for for example, contemporary economics, but we also get, you know, sociology and anthropology, which which cut in a different different directions. So that's rationalism versus empiricism. Can I just go ahead please just I agree with that. I think I think it's I think empiricism. The one thing I disagree is I think Empiricism rarely comes to these abstractions. I mean, they want more facts. It's always about collecting more evidence in the in the But this is where you know, I think I knew hand is so unusual and where I think there's something new here. Right? And and and and that's a bold statement given the history of philosophy. But I think I am rand is is something new and and and she so she says, yes, we agree about rationalism and that's inherently wrong. Empiricism has the problem of of okay, where does it lead? It's it's you never come to a conclusion. You're just accumulating evidence. There's something in addition, there's a third alternative which he is positive, which is using empirical evidence, not denying empirical evidence, recognizing that there are some axioms, there's some actions that we all at the base of all of our knowledge that that that that are starting points, we're not rejecting axiomatic knowledge and integrating those two. And identifying the fact that based on these axioms and based on these empirical evidence, we can come to truths just again, like we do in science, we have certain axioms scientific axioms. We have certain experiments that we want and then we can come to some identification of the truth and that truth is always going to be challenged by new information by new knowledge. But as long as that's what we know, that is the that that is the truth. The truth is contextual, in the sense that it's contextual? It's based on that knowledge that that surrounds and </s><s>[INST] so forth to change? If you [/INST] get new facts, it's always it's always available to change if the facts that you get. And and they really I mean, that the burden of of of of changing what you've come to the conclusion of truth is high. So you have to have real evidence that it's not true. But that happens all the time. So it happens that science, right? We discovered that what we thought was true is not true, and and and it can happen in politics and ethics, even more so than in science, because they're much messier uh, fields. But the idea is that you can come to a truth, but it's not just deductive, Most truths are inductive. We learn from from observe observing reality, and and again, coming to principles about what works and what's not. And here, I think this is ein rand is different. She she doesn't fall into the and she's different in her politics, and she's different in her epistemology. She doesn't fall into the conventional view. She's she's an opponent of human, she's an opponent of the cards. And she's certainly an opponent of cons. Um, and uh and, you know, I think she's right, right? So, </s><s>[INST] if it's okay, can we walk back to criticism of communism, you're both critics of communism, socialism, why did communism fail? You started to say that conservatives criticize it on on the basis of like rationalism that you're throwing away the past? You're starting from scratch. Is that the fundamental description of why communism failed? [/INST] I think the fundamental difference between rationalists and empiricist is the question of whether you're throwing away the past, That's the argument and it cashes out as a distinction between abstract, universal rationalist political theories and empirical political theories, empirical political theories are they're always going to say something like, look, uh, there are many different societies. We can say that some are better and some are worse. But the problem is that, you know, that that that there are many different ways in which a society can be better or worse, that there's an ongoing competition and we're learning on an ongoing basis. What are the ways in which societies can be better and worse? That creates a kind of, I'd say, a mild skepticism, a moderate skepticism among conservatives, I don't think too many conservatives have a problem looking at the at the soviet union, which is brutal and murderous ineffective in its economics, totally ineffective, you know, spiritually and then collapsed. Okay, so, so, so I think it's easier for us to look at a system like that and say, you know, what on earth, what should we learn from that? But the main conservative tradition is pretty tolerant of a diversity of different kinds of society and is slow to insist that France is so tyrannical. It just needs a revolution because what's going to come after the revolution is going to be much better. The assumption is that there's lots of things that are good about most societies and that a clean slate leads you to uh to throw out all of the inherited things that you don't even know how to notice until they're gone. </s><s>[INST] Could I actually play devil's advocate here and address something you also said, Can we as opposed to knowing the empirical data of the 20th century that communism presented? Can we go back to the beginning of the 20th century? Can you empathize or steelman or put yourself in a place of the soviet union where the workers are being disrespected, and can you not see that the conservatives could be pro communism? Like communism is such a strongly negative word in modern day political discourse that you can't like, you have to put yourself in the mind of people who like red colors, [/INST] who </s><s>[INST] like it was, it's all about the branding, I think [/INST] um </s><s>[INST] just but also like the ideas of solidarity of nation, of togetherness of respect for fellow man. I mean, all of these things that kind of communist represents. Can you not see that this idea is actually uh going along with conservatism? It is in some ways respecting that the deep ideals of the past, but proposing a new way to raise those ideals implement those ideals in the system. [/INST] Yes, I'm going to try to do it what you're suggesting. But historically we actually have a more useful option, I think for both of our positions, instead of pretending that we like the actual communists, we have conservative statesman like Disraeli and bismarck who initiated um social legislation, right? The the the the the first step towards saying, look, we're one nation were undergoing industrialization, that industrialization is important and positive, but it's also doing a lot of damage to a lot of people. And in particular, it's doing damage not just to individuals and families, but it's it's doing damage to the to the social fabric, the capacity of Britain or german to remain cohesive societies is being harmed. And so it's these two conservative statesmen, Disraeli and bismarck who actually take the first steps in order to legislate for, you know, for what today we would consider to be minimal social programs, pensions and disability insurance and those kinds of things. So for sure, conservatives do look at industrialization as a rapid change and they say we we do have to care about the nation as a whole and we have to care about it as a unity. And and and I assume that you're on will say, look, that's the first step towards the catastrophe of communism. But before you're on drives that nail into the car, let me try to make a distinction because when you read Marx you're reading an intellectual descendant of Deckert, you're reading somebody who says um look every society has consists of oppressors and oppressed right? And and and that's an improvement in some ways over liberal thinking because at least he's seeing he's seeing groups as a as a as a real social phenomenon. But he says every society has a oppressor class, an oppressed class. There are different classes, There are different groups and whenever one is stronger it exploits the ones that are weaker. Alright, that is the foundation of a revolutionary political theory. Why? Because the moment that you say that the only relationship between the stronger and the weaker is exploitation, the moment that you say that then you're pushed into the position and Marx and Engels say this explicitly you're pushed into the position. We're saying when will the exploitation end? Never until there's a revolution. What happens when there's a revolution? You eliminate the oppressor class? It's annihilation ist I mean you can immediately when you read it see why it's different from from Dick Harter bismarck because they're trying to keep everybody you know somehow at peace with one another. And Marx is saying there is no peace that oppressor class has to be annihilated and and then they go ahead and do it and they and they and they kill 100 million people. So I do think that despite the fact your question is is good and right there are certain similarities and concern but still I think you can tell the difference that </s><s>[INST] extra step of revolution to you is where the problem comes like that extra step of let's kill all the oppressors. That's the problem. And then to you, you're on the whole step one is the problem. [/INST] Well, it's all a problem. But first, I don't view communism as um something that radical in a sense that I think it it comes from a tradition of collectivism. I think it comes from a tradition of looking at groups and and measuring things in terms of groups. It comes from a tradition where you expect some people to be sacrificed for the greater good of the of the whole. I think it comes from a tradition where mysticism, revelation as as the source of truth is accepted. I view Marks is, in some sense, very christian. I I don't think he's this radical rejecting. I think he's just reformatting Christianity in a sense, he's replacing in a sense, he's replacing God with the proletarian uh knowledge. You know, you have to you have to get knowledge from somewhere. So you need the dictatorship of the proletarian, you need somebody the Stalin and Lenin who who somehow communes with the spirit, the spirit of the proletarian, there's no rationality, not rationalism, there's no rationality in Marks, there is a lot of mysticism and there was a lot of hand waving and there's a lot of sacrifice and a lot of original sin in the way he views humanity save you Marks as as one more collectivist. So, in in a whole string of collectivist. So, you know, and I think, I think the the bismarck in response, which bismarck, I mean, I know less about Disraeli, so I'll focus on bismarck bismarck is really responding to political pressures from the left and and and he's responding to the rise of communism, socialism, but what best Mark is doing, he's putting something alternative, he's presenting an alternative to the proletarian as the standard by which we should we should measure the good and this and what he's replacing it is the state, he's replacing the proletarian with the state. And and that has exactly the same problems. That is, first, that requires sacrificing some to others, which which is what the welfare state basically legitimizes. Um it it places the state above. Also, the state now becomes, I think the biggest evil of bismarck and I I definitely view him as a negative force in history, is public education. I mean, I mean, the Germans really diggin on public education and really develop it. And really, the american model of public education is, is copying the the german, the Prussian </s><s>[INST] by smoking in public education real quick. Why the public education is such a route of moral evil for you. [/INST] Well, because it now says that there is one standard, and that standard is determined by government, by by a bureaucracy, by whatever the government deems is in the national interest and bismarck is very explicit about this. He's training the workers of the future. Uh, you know, they need to catch up and, and, you know, with England and other places and they need to train the workers and there's gonna be a he's going to train some people to be the managerial class is going to train other people to be and he decides, right, the the government, the bureaucracy is going to decide who's who and where they go. There's no individual choice. There's no individual, uh, showing an ability to break out of what, what the government has decided. Is there little box? Uh, there's very little freedom. There's very little, you know, ultimately there's very little competition. There's very little innovation. And this is the problem we have today in american education, which we can get to is there's no competition and no innovation. We have one standard fit all. And then we have conflict about what should be taught and the conflicts now, not pedagogical, they're not about what works and what doesn't, nobody cares about that. It's about political agendas, right? It's about what my group wants to be taught and what that group wants to be taught rather than actually discovering how do we get kids to read? I mean, we all know how to get kids to read. But there's a political agenda about not teaching phonics, for example. So a lot of schools don't teach Tronics, even though the kids will never learn how to read properly. So it becomes politics. And I don't believe politics belongs in education. I think education is a product, it's a service and we know how to deliver products and services really, really efficiently, at a really, really low price, at a really, really high quality. And that's leaving it to the market to do. </s><s>[INST] But your fundamental criticism is that the state can use education to uh further its authoritarian [/INST] aims well, or whatever the aims. And I mean, think about the Conservative Today critique of american educational system. It's dominated by the left. Yeah, what did you expect, Right? If you leave it, if you leave it up to the state to fund their going to fund the things that promote state growth and state intervention, and the left is better at that. It has been better at that than than the right. And and and they now dominate our educational institutions. But look, if we go back to bismarck, my problem is placing the state above the individual. So if if communism places the class above the individual, what matters is class individuals are nothing that cogs in a machine bismarck, the certainly the german tradition, much more than the british tradition of the american tradition. The, the german tradition is to place the state above the individual. I think that's equally evil. And and the outcome is fascism, and the outcome is the same. The outcome is the deaths of tens of millions of people when taken to to its ultimate conclusion just like socialism. The ultimate conclusion of it is, uh, communism, uh, you know, nationalism in that form kind of the smoky inform the ultimate conclusion is, uh, is nazism or some form of fascism because you don't care about the individual individual doesn't matter. I think this is one of the differences in the anglo, you know, anglo american tradition where the anglo american tradition, even the conservatives have always acknowledged. And it goes back to a especially the conservatives, the conservatives were there first they acknowledged, Well, you've, you've defined conservatives to include all the good thinkers of the distant pants and they're all good thinkers. We agree on that. I'm defining conservatism the way that burke does. I'm just look, this is a very simple observation. Burke thinks when you open burke and you actually read him, he starts naming all of these people who is defending and it's bizarre. I'm sorry, it's just an intellectual sloppiness for people to be publishing books called Burke, the first conservative, the founding conservatives. I mean, this is nonstop, it's a it's a it's a view that says Burke reacts to the french revolution. So conservatism has no prior tradition. It's just reacting to the french revolution? And this is, I mean, this is this is just absurd to ask a quick </s><s>[INST] question on conservatism. Are there any conservatives that are embracing of revolutions? So are they ultimately against the concept of revolution? [/INST] Yes, Burke himself embraces the polish revolution, which takes place almost exactly at the same time as the french revolution. And the argument is really interesting because there's a common mistake is assuming that Burke and conservative thinkers are always in favor of slow change. I think that's that's also just factually mistaken. Um Burke is against the french revolution because he thinks that there are actually tried and true things that work things that work for human human flourishing and freedom included as a very important part of human flourishing. Um He, like many others, takes the takes the uh the british, the english constitution to be a, a model of something that works, you know, so it has a king and has various other things that that, you know, maybe your own will say, well that that's a mistake, but still for centuries it's the leader in many things that I think we can easily agree our human flourishing. And Burke says, look, what's wrong with the french revolution? What's wrong with the french revolution is that they that they have a system that has all sorts of problems, but they could they could be repairing it and instead what they're doing by over by by overthrowing everything is they're moving away from what we know is good for human beings. Then he looks at the polish revolution and he says the polls do the opposite. The polls have a nonfunctioning traditional constitution. It's it's two democratic, it's impossible to get to to raise armies and to defend the country because of the fact that every nobleman has a veto. So the the polish revolution moves in the direction of the british constitution, They repair their constitution through a quick rapid revolution, they install a king along the model that looks a lot like Britain and burke supports this. This is this is a good revolution. So it's it's not um the need to quickly make a change in order to save yourself that that's not what the conservatives are objecting to, what they're objecting to is instead of looking at experience in order to try to make a slow or quick improvement, a measured improvement too, achieve a particular goal instead of doing that, you say, look, the whole thing has just been wrong and what we've really got to do is annihilate a certain part of the population and then making completely new laws in a completely new theory that that's what he's objecting to. That's the french revolution and that then becomes, you know, the model for for communist revolutions. And for me that, I mean, the french revolution is clearly a real evil and wrong, but it's not that it was a revolution and it's not that it tried to change everything. I mean, let's remember what was going on in France at the time and people were starving and the monarchy in particular was completely detached, completely detached from the suffering of the people and something needed to change. The unfortunate thing is that that's uh the change was motivated by a an egalitarian philosophy, not egalitarian in the sense that I think the funny fathers talked about, but egalitarian sense of real equality, Equality of outcome, motivated by a philosophy by Rousseau's philosophy. And it inevitably lead, you could tell that the ideas we're going to lead to this to two massive destruction and death and and annihilation of a class. You can't annihilation is never an option. That is, it's not true that a good revolution never leads to mass death of just whole groups of people because a good revolution is about the sanctity of the individual. It's about preservation, liberty of the individual. And and again, that that goes back to and and the french revolution denies and russo denies really that in civilization there is a value and a thing called </s><s>[INST] the individual. I think this is a good place to have this discussion. The Founding Fathers of the United States, are they um individualists or the conservatives? So in this particular revolution that founded this country at the core of which are some fascinating, some powerful ideas. Were those Founding Fathers, were those ideas coming from a place of conservatism or did they put primary value into the freedom and the power of the individual. What do you think [/INST] they were both? I mean, this is this is something that's a little bit difficult for sometimes for for for americans, I mean, even very educated americans, they they talk about the founding fathers as though it's kind of like this, this yeah, this this collective, you know, entity with with a single brain and a single single value system. But I think at the time that's not the way they, not the way any of them saw it. So roughly there's two camps and they map onto the rationalist versus traditionalist empiricist dichotomy that I proposed earlier and the um so on the one hand, you have real revolutionaries like jefferson and Paine. These are the people who burke was writing against. These are the people who supported the french revolution. So when </s><s>[INST] you say real, so when you say Pain, you're referring to revolutionaries in a bad way like this is a [/INST] problem. These are people who will say history up until now has has has been, you know, with with Dick Heart, but applied to politics. History up until now has been, you know, just a story of ugliness, foolishness, stupidity and evil. And if you apply reason, we'll all come to roughly, it will all come to the same conclusions. You know, and a pain, writes a book called The Age of Reason and the Age of Reason is a manifesto for here is the answer to political and moral problems throughout history. We have the answers and it's in the same school as Rousseau's social contract, you don't like that. Not at all. I </s><s>[INST] think that the opposite. Okay, [/INST] so let me just throw </s><s>[INST] a question on jefferson and Paine do you think America would exist without those two figures? So like how how important is spice in the in the flavor of the dish you're making? [/INST] I don't want to try to run the counterfactual, you know, I don't have confidence that I know the answer to the question, but it's so much fun. You know what I'm going to offer something that I think is more fun, more fun than the counterfactual is. America had two revolutions, not one. Okay, at first there is a revolution that is strongly spiced with this kind of, this kind of rationalism. And then there's a 10 year period after the declaration of independence. There's a ten-year period under which America has a constitution, its first constitution, which today they called the articles of the confederation, but there's a constitution from 1777. And that constitution is based on in a lot of ways, on the hottest new ideas it has instead of the traditional british system with a division of powers between, you know, an executive and a bicameral bicameral legislature instead, instead of that traditional english model, which most of the states had as their governments instead of that, they say, no, we're going to have one elected body. Okay, and that body that Congress it's going to be the executive, it's going to be the legislative, it's going to be, it's going to be everything and it's going to run as a big committee. These these are the ideas of the french revolution. You get to actually see them implemented in in pennsylvania, in the pennsylvania constitution. And then, and then later in the National Assembly in France, it's a disaster. The thing doesn't work. It's completely made up. It's not based on any kind. It's neither based on historical experience, nor is it based on historical custom, on what people are used to and what they succeed in creating with this first constitution is it's wonderfully rational, but it's a complete disaster. It doesn't allow the raising of taxes, it doesn't allow the mustering of troops. It doesn't allow giving orders to soldiers to fight a war. And if it if that had continued, if that had continued to be the, the, the, the, the american constitution, american never would have been an independent country. There aren't willing to do that counterfactual what happens during those years where, uh, where uh Washington and J and knocks and Hambleton and Morris, there's like this group of conservatives, there, mostly soldiers and lawyers other than Washington. Most of them are from, you know, from northern cities. And this group is much more conservative than uh, than the than the tom Paine and Jefferson school. You some, some historians, some historians call them the Nationalist Party. Historically. They give up the word nationalism and they call themselves the federalists, but they're basically the Nationalist Party. What does that mean? It means on the one hand that their goal is to create an independent nation independent from Britain. But on the other hand, they believe that they already have national legal traditions, the common law, the forms of government that have been imported from, from Britain. And of course, Christianity, which they considered to be part of their inheritance. This Federal Federalist Party is the Conservative Party. These are people who are extremely close in in ideas to burke. And these are people who wrote the constitution of the United States, the second constitution, the second Revolution in 17 87 when Washington leads the establishment of a new constitution, which, you know, maybe maybe technically legally it wasn't even legal under the old constitution, but it was democratic. And what it did is it said, we're going to take what we know about english government. What we've learned by applying applying english government in the States, we're going to create a national government, a unified national government that's going to muster power in its hands, enough power to be able to do things like fighting wars to defend a unified people. Those are conservatives. Now, it's reasonable to say, um well, look, there was no king. So how conservative could they be? But I think that's a reasonable question. But don't forget that the American colonies, the the English colonies in America by that point had been around for 150 years. They had written constitutions. They had already adapted for an entire century, adapted the English constitution to local conditions where there's no aristocracy and there's no king. You know, I think you can see that as as a positive thing. On the other hand, they have slavery, that's an innovation that that's not english. So it's a little bit different from the english constitution. But those, those men are conservatives, they make the minimum changes that they need for the to the english constitution. And and they they largely replicate it, which is why the jeffersonians hated them so much. They called them apostates. They say they've they've betrayed uh equality and liberty and fraternity by adopting an english style constitution. </s><s>[INST] So I would imagine Aaron you would put emphasis of the success of the key ideas that the finding of this country elsewhere at the at the freedom of the individual. So the supposed to the tradition of the british [/INST] empire. I mean, the one thing I agree with you on is the fact that yes, the founding fathers were not a monolith. I mean, they argued, they debated, they disagreed, they vote against each other. I mean, jefferson and Adams for decades didn't even speak to each other though. They did make up. Uh and and and had a fascinating, fascinating relationship. It's like the founding fathers uh you know, there's there's there's massive debate and discussion, but I don't I don't agree with the characterization of Paine and Jefferson. I don't think it's just to call them rationalists because I don't think the rationalists, people have looked at history at the problems in history and and remember this is the 18th century and the uh, we're coming out of 100 years earlier, Some of the bloodiest wars in all of human history were happening in europe, many of them over religion. Um, you know, they had seen what was going on in France and other countries where people where people were starving and where, where kings were frolicking in palaces in spite of that. Uh, they were very aware of the relative freedom that the british tradition had had had given englishman. I think they knew that they understood that. Um, and I think they were building on that they were taking the observation of the past and trying to come up with a more perfect system. And I think they did. And in that sense, I'm a huge fan of Jefferson. You know, there are two things that I'm I think the unfortunate about jefferson one is that he continued to hold slaves, which is, which is, which is very unfortunate. The second is is early support for the french revolution, which I think is a massive mistake and I wouldn't be surprised if you regretted it later in life, given the consequences, but you know, they were trying to divide principles by which they could establish a new state. And yes, there was some, there was pushback by by some and there was disagreements in the, in the constitution in the end is to some extent, a form of compromise. It's still one of the great documents of all of human history, political documents, the constitution, although I think it's inferior to the declaration. I I'm I'm a huge fan of the declaration and I think one of the mistakes the conservatives makes, one of the mistakes the Supreme Court makes and american judiciary makes is assuming the two documents are separate. I think Lincoln is actually right. You can understand the constitution without understanding the declaration, the declaration. What set the context and what sets everything up for the constitution. Individual rights are the key concept there. And and and one of the challenges was that some of the compromises and and and compromise is not necessarily between groups, but compromises that even jefferson made and others made regarding individual rights set America on a path that we're suffering from today. And and uh, I mentioned three last night, one was slavery. Obviously there was a horrific compromise, one that american not just paid for with the civil war, 600,000 young men died because of it, but the suffering of black slaves for all those years. But then the whole issue of racial tensions in this country uh, for for for a century and to this day, really, uh, is a consequence of that initial compromise, who knows what would have what the counterfactual is in America if if there's a civil war, right at the founding right, because it would have been a war, no matter what. But if it had happened in the late 18th century, early 19th century, rather than waiting till till till 18 sixties. But then second was, um, Jefferson's embrace of, of public education. His founding of the University of Virginia, which, which I think is a great tragedy, and um, which nobody agrees with me on. So, so that that's one of the areas where I'm pretty radical. And then they embrace both by jefferson and by Hamilton's for different reasons, but embraced by both of them of government role in the economy. And, you know, I'm, I do finance. So, I know a little bit about finance. And the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton about banking is, is fascinating. But at the end of the day, both wanted a role for government in banking. They both didn't trust Jefferson, didn't trust, uh, big financial interests. Hamilton's wanted to capture some of those financial issues for the state. And there's a consequence, we set America on a path where, You know, in my view, regulation always leads to more regulation. There's never never a case where regulation decreases. And we we started out with a certain regulatory body around banks and a recognition that was okay to regulate the economy. So, once we get into the late 19th century, it's fine to regulate the railroads. It's fine to pass antitrust laws? It's fine to then continue on the path of where we are today, which is heavy, heavy, heavy, massive involvement of government in every aspect of the economy and really in every aspect of our life because of education. So I think the country was found in a certain mistakes and we haven't been willing to question those mistakes and in a sense that we've only moved in the opposite direction and now America has become, whereas I think it was founded on the idea of the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of the individual. At least there's an idea even if not fully implemented. I think now that's completely lost. I don't think anybody, uh, it really is an advocate out there for individualism in politics or for true freedom in politics. </s><s>[INST] We'll get to individuals and but let me ask the Beatles and the Rolling Stones question about the Declaration of Independence and the constitution. What? Well, because it's like which document beetles are all in? Which document is more important questions? Is there even a question? But let me then even zoom in further and ask you to pick your favorite song. So what ideas in the constitution or the Declaration of Independence do you think are the most important to the success of the United States of America. [/INST] I'll answer the question, but before answering the question I want to dissent from registered dissent from neurons. Is that the </s><s>[INST] public education is it? Which [/INST] No, no, no, actually we're not. So look, we're not so far apart on on on on public education, I'm actually kind of, I'm actually kind of surprised that you're so anti bismarck because his public school system was his national public school system was created in order to stick it to the church. It was the church that ran the schools before then. And Okay, but so that's a different. I'm all for sticking it to the church any opportunity, but not when the alternative is the nation basically free educational system, you know what freedom is in education. Okay, so, so, um, I want to register a descent about Lincoln look, Lincoln is an important figure and a great man and he was presiding over a country which at that point was pretty jeffersonian in terms of its self perception. He said what he needed to say. I'm not going to criticize him, but I don't accept the idea that the, that the declaration of independence, Which starts one revolution is is of a piece with the constitute the second constitution, the constitution of 17 87 the Nationalist Constitution, which is effectively a counter revolution. What happens is there is a revolution, it's based on certain principles, There are a lot. Not exactly, but in many ways resemble the later ideas of the french revolution and what the Federalist Party does. The national Nationalist Conservative Party does is a counterrevolution to reinstate the old english constitution. So, these documents are if you're willing to accept the evidence of history, they are in many respects, contrary to one another. And so if if I'm asked what's the most important values that are handed down by these documents? I don't have an objection to uh you know, to life, liberty and property, all of which are really important things. I do have an objection to the to the pomp the pompous overreach of these are self evident, Which is absurd, that they can't be self evident. If they were self evident, then somebody would have come up with them, you know, like like 2000 years before it's not it's not self evident. And and so, so that's damaging. I I like the conservative preamble of the Constitution which describes the purposes of the of the national government that's being established. There there are are 77 purposes, uh, a more perfect union, which is the principle, the principle of cohesion justice, uh domestic peace, uh common defense, the general welfare, which is is the welfare of the public as a as a thing. That's not only individuals, but there is such a thing as a general welfare liberty, which we agree is absolutely crucial and posterity. The idea that the purpose of the government is to be able to sustain and grow of this independent nation and not only to guarantee rights no matter what happens, </s><s>[INST] but you don't like the way we hold these truths to be self evident. So you're definitely beetles guy. You don't want the you don't want the pompous. You don't need [/INST] that. Look, I look, I I just I think that that expression self evident truth, it does tremendous damage because it instead of a moderate skepticism, which says, look, we may not know everything it says, Look, we know everything here it is. Here's what we know. We know. We don't know. We know. We think so. So, you know, I'll agree with you. Um I don't like self evident. I don't like self evident because he's absolutely right. It's not self evident. These are massive achievements. These are massive achievements of enlightened thinking of studying history, of understanding human nature, of deriving a truth from 3000 years of history of historical knowledge and a better understanding of human nature and and and and the capacity it's using reason in some ways better than any human beings have. And I mean, the funny father's giants historically, in my view, because they came up with these truths. I do think the truth, but they're certainly not self evident. I mean, if they were your arm is right, they would have discovered them thousands of years earlier, or everybody would accept them. Right. I mean, how many people today? I think that those what they state in the document is true. Pretty much, you know, five people. I don't know. It's it's very it's very </s><s>[INST] it's [/INST] very, very few people recognize that if there was self evident bam, everybody would have become uh you know, would have accepted the american revolution as as truth and and that was it. A lot of work has to go into understanding and describing and convincing people about those truths, but but I completely disagree with your home about this idea or I'll voice my dissent as we said </s><s>[INST] about [/INST] about about a just being two different revolutions and and be that the american revolution was at any similarity to the french revolutionary, you know, that jefferson and Paine were they were in France and running and running a different but they were writing constantly, I mean they were in communication with Madison, there was no input going on. I know, and and jefferson sitting there in paris pulling his hair out because Madison Madison has come under the influence of these nationalists and he can't believe it. But the reality is that the difference between the french revolution and and the and the american revolution is is vast and it is a deep philosophical difference and it's a difference that expressed, I think between the difference is that, you know, your um in his writings lumps so with lock and with Voltaire and with others and I think I think that's wrong, I think also is very different than the others. I think again, russo is an anti enlightenment figure was so is in many respects, harkening back to a past, an ancient past, and I think, and I think a completely distorted view of human nature of human mind. He rejects reason. I mean Russo is on the premise that reason is the end of humanity. Reason is the destruction of humanity. Reason is is how we get civilization and civilization is awful because I don't disagree, we're only talking about different texts when I say, I'm just talking about the social contract, but the social contract is similarity between others, but he takes in a completely different direction and we agree with social contract is a bad idea, but it can have a contract that you don't actually voluntarily accept. But Russo is the french revolution. Rousseau is about destruction and mayhem and chaos and anarchy. He is the spirit behind the french revolution. I I think the american revolution is a complete rejection of Rousseau. I think jefferson is a complete rejection of you. So I don't think Jefferson is a fan of us, so he is of Voltaire, and he certainly is a Mon. Ask you if you look at it, and if you look at the federalist papers, the the intellectual most cited in the Federalist papers, I think in terms of this, the number of times decided is minuscule, you know, so I think that the american revolution is an individualistic revolution. It is a revolution about the rights of the individual. The french revolution is the negation of the rights of the individual. It's a collectivist IQ revolution. It's it's not quite the Marxist revolution of the proletarian, but it it's defining people in classes and it's a rebellion against a certain class and yeah, kill them all right off with their heads. And it it is a negation. It's about egalitarianism in the sense of equality of outcome, not in a sense of equality before the law or equality of rights, which is the jeffersonian sense. So I think it's it's it's it's wrong to lump jefferson in to the fraternity, you know, egalitarian notion of of the french, which is far more similar to to what ultimately became socialism and Marxism or and and uh and and kind of that tradition, it's anti individualistic. The french revolution is whereas the american revolution, the first one is is individualistic. It's all about individual rights. And while there's certain phrases in the Declaration of Independence that I don't, I agree with, you know, it's it's beautifully written and it's a magnificent document. So it's hard for me to say, I don't agree who am I right. These were these were giants uh self evident as one of them. You know, I'm not particularly crazy about endowed by the creator. Um but I like the fact that its creator and not God or not a specific creator, but just it's kind of a more general thing. But putting those two ashes aside, it's the greatest political document in all of human history, in my view, by far, nothing comes close. It it it is it is a document that that identifies the core principles of political tourism of of truth, that is the role of government is to preserve and protect these rights, these inalienable rights. And and that is so crucial that these rights are inalienable. That is a majority can vote them out. Uh, you know, revelation can vote them out. This is this is what is required for human liberty and human freedom. The rights that is the sanction the freedom to act on your own behalf, to act based on your own judgment. As and as long as you're not, you know, interfering with other peoples rights, you are free to do so, that is such a profound truth. And that to me is the is the is the essence of political philosophy. That's the beginning. You know, and and it's it's based on just just not fall into your arms gonna say, uh, it's a rationalist. It's based on a whole history of what happens when when you get that, it's based on looking at England and seeing to the extent that they practiced respect for individual liberty of property of of of freedom. Good things happened. So, let's take that all the way, let's not compromise on that. Actually, let's let's be consistent with the good and reject the bad and when England goes away distance itself from the rights of man from the idea of of of of a right to property and so on. Bad things happen. And when they go through, let's go all in. And I'm I'm all in on on the right to life liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. And I think the idea of pursuit of happiness is profound because it's a moral statement. It's a statement that says that sanctions and and and says that ultimately, people should be allowed to make their own judgments and and live their lives as they see fit, based on how they view happiness. They might be right, they might be wrong. But we're not gonna dictate what happiness in entails, and dictate to people how they should live their lives. We're gonna let them let them figure that out. So it has this self interested moral code kind of embedded in it. So, I think it's a it's a beautiful statement. So, I think the declaration is key. And I I think there was an experiment and the experiment was post uh in that period of of before the constitution where the experiment was, let's let the States let's have a kind of a loose confederation. Let's get the States experiment with with setting up their own constitutions and role of government, and we won't have any kind of unity. And I think what they realized, and I think even jefferson realized is that that was not workable because many of the States were starting to significantly violate rights. There was nothing to unify. There was nothing to really protect the vision of the Declaration. You needed to establish a nation, which is what the constitution does. It establishes a nation. But the purpose of that was to put everybody under one set Of laws that protected rights. The the focus was still on the protection of rights. And I agree with six of the seven of the principles, right? I and I, and which which the common welfare, which which the general worry about, right? I think in the way the founders understood it, I think I probably agreed with it, but it's such an ambiguous maybe, maybe I just </s><s>[INST] can you stay at the general welfare principle? [/INST] Well, the idea that part of the world of government is to secure the general welfare. It's something, it's something like this is something we we we didn't get to it in the debate. We really should have is the question of whether there is such a thing as a common good or a public interest or a national interest or a general welfare. Do these words, do these terms mean anything other than the good of all of the individuals in the country? That that's an so so that's right. So that's why. So I object to it because I think it's too easy to interpret it as, so I interpret it as well. What's good for the, you know, a general, a group of common uh, people are just collection of individuals. So what's good for the individual is good for the common welfare. But I understand that that is a that's something that is hard for people to grasp and and not the common understanding. So I would I would have skipped the general welfare in order to avoid the fact that now the general welfare includes the government telling you what gender you should be assigned. So, so I would have I would have wanted to have skipped that completely. Um so I think the the the Constitution, because really consistent with the Declaration, with a few exceptions, the General Welfare, but, you know, perfection is is a difficult thing to find, particularly for me right politically. But it's it's a magnificent document that the Constitution, it doesn't quite rise to the level I think of the Declaration, but it's a magnificent document, because, you know, and this is the difference. I think between the english constitution, here's here's what I see as the difference. The difference is that the Constitution is written in the context of why do we have a separation of powers? For example, we have a separation of powers in order to make sure that the government only does what the government is supposed to do. And what is the government's supposed to do? Well, fundamentally, it's supposed to protect rights. I mean, all of those seven or at least six of the seven about protecting rights. They're about protecting us from foreign invaders, about protecting, you know, peace within the country there about preserving this protection of rights. And why do we have this separation too? So so that we make sure that no one of those entities, the executive or the legislature judicial can violate rights because there's always somebody looking over their shoulder, there's always somebody who can veto their power, but there's a purpose to it. And that purpose is clearly signified and characterized. And that's why I think the Bill of Rights was written in order to add to the clarification of what exactly we mean, what is the purpose? The purpose is to preserve rights. Um and that's why we need to to elaborate what those rights and and Madison's objection to the Bill of Rights was, say not that he objected to having uh protection of rights, but to listing them, because he was worried that other rights that were not listed would not be. And that's why he was completely justified because that's exactly what's happened. It's like the only reason we have free speech in America, we've got it in writing as the First Amendment. If we didn't have any writing, it would have been gone a long time ago. And the reason we don't have, for example, the freedom to negotiate a contract uh you know, independent government regulation is that was that was not listed as a right uh in the bill, even though I think it's clearly covered under the Constitution and certainly under the Declaration. So there was a massive mistake down in the Bill of Rights. They tried to cover it with the Ninth Amendment, but it never really stuck on this idea that the non enumerated rights that, that, that is still in place. So I don't see it as a second revolution. I think it's it's a, it's a, it's a fix to a flaw that happened. It's a fix that allowed the expansion of the protection of rights to all states by creating a national entity to protect those rights. And that's what ultimately led to the, to slavery going away. Uh, you know, under the under the initial, uh, initial agreement, slavery would have been there in perpetuity because states were sovereign in a way that under the new constitution, they were not. And in a sense, the constitution sets in motion the declaration and then the Constitution said, emotion, the, the civil war, the civil war has to happen because at the end of the day, you cannot have some states with a massive violation of rights. What, what's more of a violation of rights and slavery and some states that recognize it's not. It it inevitably leads to the civil war urine was just saying that other than the general welfare, These principles are about individual liberties. I, I think, I just don't think you can read it that way. The first stated purpose of the constitution of 1787 is in order to form a more perfect union, a more perfect union. What it's describing a characteristic of the whole, it is not a characteristic of any individual. If you look at how the individuals are doing, you don't know whether whether their union is more or less perfect. So what they're doing is they're looking they're looking at the condition in which in order to be able to fight the battle of Yorktown, they have to somebody has to write a personal check in order to be able to move armies. A more perfect union is a more cohesive union. It's the ability to get all of these different individuals to do one focused thing when it's needed necessary to do it. Well, it's it's more than that, right? So I agree with that. But for what purpose that is? And this is why, you know, this is why it's so hard with these historical documents because there's a there's a context and it's a thinking that they can't write everything down right. Which is sad because I wish they had what's the purpose of a more perfect union. The purpose of the more perfect union is to preserve the liberty of the individuals within that union. And and because because if you look what's the rest. So what is the common defense? The common defenses is to protect us from foreign invaders. Who would now disrupt what the rest of the constitution is all about, all of the constitution is written in a way is to preserve find ways to limit the ability of government to violate the rights of individuals. That is the beauty of this constitution. And again, its connection to the declaration and and and tradition, right? What came before it? What came before it was was a document which they all respected, which was the declaration which set the context for this. And now the Union is there in order to provide for the common defense. Great because we know that foreign invaders can violate our rights, that that's what was about to protect us from piece to establish peace and justice within the country. That's based on law, the rule of law. And and again, uh individual liberty. So, to me, when you read the founders, when you read the Federalist papers, when you read what they wrote, what they're trying to do is figure out the right kind of political system, the right kind of structure to be able to preserve these liberties. And and not all of them had from my perspective, perfect understanding what those liberties entailed. But they were all, even the conservatives that you call conservatives were all in generally in agreement about the importance of individual liberty and imports of individuals. Because almost all of these rights are traditional english rights. They exist in the english bill of rights and the english petition of right in the existence of what you're trying to do is perfect, that they're trying to take the british system and perfect it and what but you you keep leaving out that that they want to be like England and that they want to have an independent nation. An independent nation is not a collection of individual liberties. An independent nation. The first sentence of the Declaration of Independence is the declaration that there is a collective right that we as a people are breaking the bonds with another people and we're going to take our place are equal station among the nations of the earth, that for what purpose the purpose is to protect individual rights. And there's no collective rights. Know, your your your argument is completely circular, you're not allowing the possibility that there could be that there could be great and decent men that you and I both admire who wanted the independence of their nation, not not because that would give individuals liberty, but because the independence of their nation was itself a great good. So we clearly disagree on this because I don't think the independence of the nation is a good in of itself, because it's and and this is what I think it was, I don't think they did. And this is why they tried so hard not to break from England and why many of them when many of them uh struggled really, really struggled with with having a revolution because England was pretty good, right? English was the England was the best and this is where you know, we should get to the universality of these things because I, I do think England was the best and universally and, and, and, and absolutely was the best system out there. And what they were, they struggled to break from England because they didn't view the value of having a nation as the primary, but what they identified in England is certain flaws in the system that created situations in which their rights were being violated. So they figured that our only option in order to secure these rights is to break away from England insecure nation. Now, I am not an anarchist as Michael malice because we've discussed it. I believe you need nations, you need nations to secure those rights. That is the rights or not. You can't secure those rights without having a nation, but the nation is just a means to an end. The end is the rights. And I think that's how the founders understood it and that's why they created this kind of country. </s><s>[INST] I think this is a good place to ask about common welfare and cohesion. Let me uh, say what john Donne wrote that quote, No, man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, he went on any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee. So, let's talk about individualism and cohesion, not just at the political level, but at a philosophical level for the human condition? What is central? What is the role of other humans in our lives? What's the importance of cohesion? This is something you've talked about. So, Iran said that the the beauty of the founding documents is that they create a cohesive union that protects the individual freedoms. But you have spoken about the value of the union, the common welfare, the cohesion in itself. So, can you maybe elaborate and what is the role of cohesion and the collective not to use that term, but multiple humans together connected in the human condition? [/INST] Sure, I keep getting the feeling that you're on and I are actually having an a disagreement about empirical reality because I think that enlightenment, rationalist political thought features the individual, It features the state. There isn't really a nation other than the nation. The people is as a collective, is created by the state and when the state disappears, then the collective disappears. Now, I think that when conservatives of all stripes look at this kind of thinking that there's the individuals and then there's the state and there really isn't anything else. When they look at that, they say even before you get to consequences, it's a terrible theory because when we try to understand any field of inquiry any domain, any subject area. When you try to understand it, we try to come up with a a small number of of concepts and of relations among the concepts, which is supposed to be able to explain to illuminate, um, as much as possible. The, the important things that are taking place in the domain and conservatives look at this individuals and the state and they say you're missing most of what's going on in politics, also in in in in personal human relations as well. But it just doesn't look like a description of human beings. It looks like a completely artificial thing. And then conservatives say, well, look, if one wants to adopt this artificial thing, then the consequences are horrific because you're not describing reality. So a conservative reality begins with, um, with an empirical view of what you know, what are human beings like. And the first thing you notice about human beings or at least the first thing I think conservatives notice is that they're sticky is that they clump. They turn into groups and you take any arbitrary collection of human beings and set them to a task or even just leave them alone and they quickly form into groups. And those groups are always structured as hierarchies. Is that this competition within the hierarchy, who's, you know, who's going to be the leader, who's gonna be number two. But there are everywhere you look in human societies universally. Um, there are groups, the groups compete and they're higher and they're structured internally as hierarchies and then their internal competitions for who leads to different groups. And when we think about scientific explanation, we allow that there are there are different levels of explanation that, you know, a macroscopic object, like a table. It doesn't have properties that are that, you know, that can be directly derived from the properties of, you know, the atoms and the molecules of the micro fibers that make up the table. And and and that's understood that there's what, you know, academic philosophers call emergent properties that when you get up to the level of the table, it has properties like, you know, that you can't put your fist through it, which you can't necessarily know just by looking at the atoms alone. And I think conservatives say the same thing is true for political theory, for social theory that looking at an individual human being and thinking about what does that individual human being need, which you're on does very eloquently in his writings, but that doesn't tell you what the characteristics are of this hierarchically structured group as soon as you have that it has its own qualities. So, an example, the question of what holds these groups together. And and we need to answer that question. I try to answer it by by saying there's such a thing as mutual loyalty, Mutual loyalty is shorthand for human beings. Individuals have the capacity to include another individual within their self, within within their conception of their self. When two people do it, it it creates a bond like a like a bond between two to Adam's creates a molecule. That doesn't mean that they lose their individuality. They within the group. They may still continue competing with one another. But that doesn't mean that there isn't in reality a bond and that real bond is the stuff of which political events and political history are made. Is that the coming together, the cohesion and the dissolution of of of these bonded loyalty groups. That's the reality of of politics. And so when I hear these discussions about individuals in the state, I feel like we're missing most of the reality. And in order to understand the political reality, we need to understand what makes human beings coherent two groups, what makes them dissolve, what makes the groups come apart and and end up creating civil wars and that kind of thing. I think we also need to know um uh what in practice um rival groups do come together and and bond. I mean basically when we think about uh democratic society, we're talking about different different groups. We can call them tribes or you can come up with a different name but but different different tribal groupings with different views. They come together to form a nation and they're able to do that even though you know often they hate each other. You know like like we were talking about the american revolution and often they hate each other and nevertheless they're able to come together. Why how and that leads us into questions like how does honor the giving of honor by one group to another? How does that increase the uh the mutual loyalty between groups that that are still competing with one another? All of these questions. I think we have to answer them in in order to be able to talk about politics. And uh and and I think the reason, the first reason why why why one should approach politics as a conservative rather than as an individual. Just because it gives gives gives us these these theoretical tools to be able to talk about reality which we don't have as long as we keep within the individualist frameworks as </s><s>[INST] you're talking the metaphor that's popping up in my mind. And this is also something that bothers me with theoretical physics. The metaphor is there's some sense in which there's things called theories of everything. When you try to describe the basic laws of physics, how they interact together and once you do, you have a sense that you understand all of reality in a sense you do and that to me when you do that to me, is understanding the individual, like how the individual behaves in this world. But then you're saying that there, hey hey you're also forgetting chemistry biology, how all of that actually comes together. The stickiness, the stick stickiness of molecules and how they build different systems and they some systems can kill each other, Some systems can flourish, Some can make pancakes and bananas and some can make poison and all those kinds of things that we need to be able to, we need to consider the the full stack of things that are constructed from the fundamental basics. Um and uh I guess you're on, you're saying that no, you you're just like the theoretical physicists, it all starts at the bottom like if you need to preserve the fundamentals of reality, which is the individual, like the basic atom of human society is the individual to you. [/INST] So yes, so the basic unit, the basic model unit, the basic ethical unit in society is the individual. And of course we form groups and and you can't understand history unless you understand group formation and group motivation. And and I have a view about what kind of groups should be formed uh and and politically from a political perspective, voluntary ones, ones in which we we join when we want to join and we can leave when we want to leave and uh 1/2 that help us and clearly groups help us pursue whatever it is, a goal is ultimately So so in the pursuit of happiness, there are lots of groups that one wants to form, whether it's marriage, whether it's businesses, whether it's sports teams, whether it's lots of there are lots of different groups want to form. But the but the question is, what is the standard of well being? Is it the standard well being, some algorithm that maximizes the well being of a group, you know, some utilitarian function, you know, is it is it something that's inherent in the group that we can measure as goodness and to help with the individuals within as long as we can get that, that the group to function well, we don't really care about where the individuals are. So to me, the the the the goal of creating groups is the well being of the individual. And that's why it needs to be voluntary. And that's why there has to be a way out of of those, sometimes it's costly. It's not a cheap out. That's why you should really think about what groups you you you and this, you know, on an issue that's very controversial. Maybe we can discuss maybe not. This is why, to me, immigration is so important, right? Open immigration or free immigration is because that's another group that I would like people to be able to voluntarily choose both in and out. And and I'd like to see people be able to go and join that group that, you know, that they believe will will will allow for the pursuit of happiness. But let me say that, you know, that's a description of an idea what I'm just saying. I recognize that that's not the reality in which we live? I recognize that that's not the reality in which history, history, you know, recognizing that such as that the individual exists in a sense, philosophically is a massive achievement, right? You know, human beings however they evolved clearly. We started out in in a, in a tribal context, in which individual didn't matter. We followed the leader. The competition was for power, power over the group and and and and dictates how the group should work. Um You know, the history of human beings is a history of gaining knowledge and part of the knowledge is the value of an individual. And you can see that in in in religion, you can see that in philosophy, you can see that through the evolution and then, you know, we we evolved from tribes into nations and then empires and conflicts between nations and conflicts, empires. And we tried a lot of different things if you will. I don't think we always did it on purpose, but we kind of different philosophies, different sets of ideas drove us towards different collectives, different groupings and and different ways in which the structure And after, I don't know, 3000 years of kind of known history, uh history before that, but we don't know much about it. 3000 years of known history. You can sit back and evaluate and I think that's what that's what is done in the enlightenment and and you sit back and suddenly we can do it today. We can sit back and evaluate what promotes human flourishing and what doesn't and what do we mean by human flourishing? Human whose whose flourishing? Well, individual human beings. Now, since I don't believe in a zero sum world and the world is not zero sum, like we can see that it's it's empirically possible to show that the world is not a zero sum game. My fellow human flourishing doesn't come into your expanse. So I I you know, I can show that a system that promotes my flourishing will probably promote your flourishing as well and promotes the general welfare in that sense, because it promotes individuals flourishing. And we can we can look at all these examples of how we evolved and what leads to bloodshed and what doesn't and what promotes this ability to flourish as an individual. Again, an achievement, the idea of individual flourishing, and then we can think about how to create a political system around that a political system that recognizes and allows for the formation of groups, but just under the principle of voluntary. So you can't be forced to join a group, you you can't be caused into forming a group um other than the fact that you're born in a particular place in a particular, you know that in a sense, but that's not force that's there's a difference between metaphysics and between choices. </s><s>[INST] So this is something that came up in the debate that your arm said that not all human relations are voluntary and you kind of emphasized that a lot of where we are is not voluntary were grounded. We're connected in so much so how how can a human be free in the way you're describing individual be free If uh, some part of who we are is not voluntary. Some part of who we are is other people. [/INST] Well, because what do we mean by freedom? Freedom doesn't mean and the negation of the laws of physics, right? Freedom doesn't mean ignoring, um, uh, feta means the the ability within the scope of what's available for you to choose. Being able to choose those things. Um, so in in in in in a political context, feta means, uh, you know, the negates the absence of coercion. So once you're an adult, you know, your mom says you're born with a particular into a particular religious context. Absolutely. But once you're an adult, I think it's incumbent on you to evaluate that religious context. And and and and look at different religions or non religion or whatever. And choose your philosophy of life, choose your values, choose how you want to live your life. That's the freedom. The freedom is 1. 1 system says you're either caused by the state of course by the group of, caused by society around you to follow a particular path or you're you're the expectation is the demand is the pressure is to conform to a particular powers. And my view is no, you you should be in a position to be able to choose your path. And and that choice means you look around you, you you you evaluate you evaluate the history based on knowledge based on all of these things and you choose what that path would be. That's fundamentally what what freedom means. Yes. You cannot choose your parents. But of course not. No, nobody would claim that that's within the scope of what is possible. I think that I think the coercion freedom dichotomy, these are too few concepts, coercion and freedoms. It's too simplistic to be able to describe what we're actually dealing with. The traditional anglo conservative view is that society has to be, it has to be ordered. It has to be disciplined. And there are two choices for how it can be ordered. One is that a people is by its own traditions, you would say voluntarily, but these are mostly inherited traditions by its own traditions. It is uh it is ordered. For example, people just in general will not go into somebody else's yard because that's the custom here is we don't go into somebody else's yard without their permission. And so fortescue, we're talking about, you know, 500 years ago already. So Ford excuse says that the genius of the English people is that our government can be mild and apply very little coercion because the people are so disciplined and when when he says the people are so disciplined. What he's saying is is that that our our our nation, our tribes, we have strong traditions which channel people, you know, through, through tools of being honored and dishonored. Now that's a reality that exists in every society and it's, it's not captured by your distinction between coercion and lack of coercion. When, when, when, when I'm going to be dishonored if, if I don't, if I don't care for for for for for my aging mother, I'm not being coerced like the state comes and puts a gun to my head, but I am being pressured and given guidelines. But I'm saying that's wrong and I'm saying that's dangerous because because that could easily be used for bad traditions, but but that's what, what's the standard by which we evaluate what a good tradition is about your english, you're getting to the standard to wait, wait, you're getting to the standard too fast first. I want to know factually is it true that all societies work like this? Because if it's true that all societies work like this, then saying saying we should be free from it is just a fantasy. So I don't think all societies work like this. I think much of what happened in America post founding in the 19th century didn't work like that. I think that's the genius of America and I think what happened during the 19th century, the industrial revolution, what happened in the in the 19th century some extent globally, but certainly in the United States didn't work that way. It broke tradition. I think, I think all innovation breaks tradition, and I think that's what the genius of of this country is, and and and the post enlightenment the world is. Uh I think pre that tradition they work that way. And then the question is that people understand why they do what they do. That is I don't want people doing what I think is right, just because I think it's right, and I've, you know, and I've created a society in which they gotta Yeah, Yeah, okay. You know, somebody found in this country in a particular way, so we're just gonna follow, I want people to understand what they're doing. So I want people to have a respect for property, not because it's a tradition, but because they understand the value of a respect for property. Um I want people not to murder one another, not because it's a commandment thou shall not murder, but because they have an understanding of why motoring is bad and wrong and bad for them, and bad for the kind of world that they want to live in. That's and I think that's what we achieved through enlightenment through education through through and where we don't treat people just as a blob, the tribe that just follows orders, but we now treat individuals as capable of thinking for themselves, capable for discovering truth, capable of of of of figuring out their own values and and that's the big break between and this is why, you know, this is the break. I think that the declaration represents the break between society that is based on tradition following commandments following rules because they are the rules because they are the commandments. And a society where individuals understand those rules understand. Yes, it's now become a tradition, let's say to respect the individual right to respect property rights. But it's they're not following it because it's a tradition. They were following it because they understand what it is about it. That that that makes it good. So that's the world. I think that that we were on the process of evolving towards And that is what got destroyed in the 20th century and has certainly disappeared today. And I think that's a great tragedy is that we're evolving to a place where people understood the values, the representative course. The danger with tradition is, I mean, we'll agree, right? It's it's it's yeah, it's it's okay to kill the jew, right? Or it's okay to steal people's property if there are a certain color of it, okay to enslave those are all traditions. And yet, once you stop and say. But what are they based on what is this? Right? Is this just based on </s><s>[INST] some moral law? [/INST] No, it's not. There's something wrong here. We can't achieve happiness and success if we follow these. </s><s>[INST] You're talking about reason and tradition. But I think I would love to sort of linger on the on the stickiness of humans they described. Uh so you kind of said this primary the individuals is primary knows a great invention. But to me it's not at all obvious that somehow that uh the invention that humans have been practicing for very long time of the stickiness of of community, of family of love, it's that's that's not obvious to me that that's not also fundamental to human flourishing and should be celebrated and protected. Now, the I suppose the argument you're making is when you start to let the state define what the stickiness, how the stickiness looks between humans. So you're really like the voluntary aspect. But I just want to sort of the the the observation is, humans seem to be pretty happy when they form communities. However you define that [/INST] it's a romantic partnership, </s><s>[INST] Family, [/INST] some communities, people, people, people are miserable in other communities. So the nature of the community matters, right? We we know this, we know that that some bonding czar not healthy and not good for the individuals involved and they and they don't thrive. Um, so I absolutely, I mean I'm a lover, not a fighter. Right? So I'm a huge believer in love. The whole philosophy I think is a is a love based philosophy I fight in order to love, Right? So it's it's love is love is at the core of all of this. And it's it's it's it's a love of of of life. It's a love of of the world out there. And it's a love of other people because they represent a value to you. So the stickiness is there, it's it's, you know, my point is a should be chosen, it should be consciously chosen and and this is put aside the state, forget the state for a minute, forget forget cocksure and forget all that. What I would encourage individuals to do. And this is where, you know, I'm I'm not primarily a political for, you know, interested in politics, although I sent to talk most about that, I'm primarily interested in human beings and how they live in in a sense of morality. And what I would urge individuals to do is to think about their relationships to choose the best relationships possible, but to seek out great relationships because other human beings are an immense value to us and and you know, when I write, you know, maybe you unquoted this or not, but alright, that that, you know about the trade of principle and trading, you know, it's easy and and and obvious to think of it as a materialistic kind of thing, you know, I get, you know, I do the chose this day and my wife doesn't choose the other day and we're trading, but trading is much more subtle than that and much more can be much more spiritual than that. It's about the the the the the, the trading in in emotions. It's about, it's about the way one sees each other as one, what one gets from one another. I think friendship is a form of trade now. I know that that seems to make it material, but I don't, I don't think it's of trade as a material thing. But friendship is incredibly important in life. Love is incredibly important in life. You know, having having a group of friends is incredibly important. All of these are sticky and </s><s>[INST] important. How can I try to be eloquent on this? So if you give people freedom, if you give people politics, well not politics relations relations, uh, relationships. So this is interesting because we have an interesting dynamic going on here in terms of beliefs, their differing. And so there was interesting overlaps but there's a worry if you look at human history and you study the lessons of history and you look at modern society if you give people freedom in terms of stickiness and human relations and so on. Full like if you not give people freedom, emphasize freedom as the highest ideal. You start getting more tender online dating the stickiness dissolves just like in chemistry you start to have a gas versus a liquid right? That that's the word. So you have to do what you have to study what actually happens if you emphasize that um, the stickiness, the bonds of humans is holding you back. The exercise of voluntary choice is the highest ideal. The danger of that is for that to be implemented or interpreted in certain kinds of ways by us flawed humans that are not. I mean, you could say we're perfectly reasonable and rational. You can think that all of our decisions, but really, I mean especially your young, you get horny, you make decisions that are suboptimal perhaps. So the point is you have to look at reality of when you emphasize different things. So when you, when you, when you talk about what is the ideal life, what is the ideal relations? You have to also think like what are you emphasizing? I think you both agree on what's important, that community can be important, that freedom is important. But what are you emphasizing and you're really emphasizing the individual and you're emphasizing um your arm, you're emphasizing more of the community of the family, of the stickiness of the nation. [/INST] Well look, I don't want to deny the place of the individual. I think that that there really is a very great change in civilization when the books of moses announced that the individual is created in the image of God, that that's a step that's as far as we know without precedent before that in history and to a very large degree, I mean, one of the kind of unspoken things going on is that that uh you're on and I really do agree on all sorts of things. I I think in part because because we're both jewish and you </s><s>[INST] did say you're on is basically moses [/INST] yesterday. No, I said he was channeling moses, but but that's still in my book. You know, that's that's still pretty good compliment. That's pretty that's for me. That's a compliment. </s><s>[INST] We'll talk about this a little bit just for the listener, just so they know your arm amongst many things. We'll talk about the virtue of nationalism, but you're also a religious scholar source released leverage the bible for much. Not much, but some of the wisdom in your life [/INST] look, the way that you're on looks at enlightenment or maybe at Ayn rand. That that that's that's the way that I see the Hebrew scripture and and the tradition that comes from it, uh it has the same kind of place in my life. And I just I don't know how much we want to want to explore it. But I think that uh that the agreement that we do have about the positive value of the creative individual, the positive value of the individuals, um desire to improve the world. And and and and in my book that it means including his or her desire to improve his family, his tribe, his congregation, his nation. But but it still comes from this kind of for you know what your own calls selfishness. The desire to make things better for yourself in hebrew bible and in Judaism, that just is a positive thing. Of course it can be taken too far, but it just is positive and it doesn't carry these kinds of, you know, you should turn the other cheek, You should give away your cloak, you should love your enemy. These kinds of christian troops do not exist in Judaism. And so it just I like listening to your neurons. I do feel like he goes too far on various things. But but I also hear, you know underneath that I can sort of you know, here, here, here's the jewish current and the resistance to you know, to uh to things that about Christianity that jews often find. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask you a question there? Um can you make an argument for turning the other cheek? No, I I tend to, I guess you would equate that with altruism. Mm hmm. I tend to um [/INST] it's unjust it to another chief. Mm hmm. It's okay. You don't see yourself if you're turning the other cheek. It's it's a lack of love, </s><s>[INST] lack of self respect. Well, let me push back on that because I'm I I like turn the other cheek. Um especially on twitter. Uh so [/INST] I like I like block the offender on twitter. Know what? </s><s>[INST] Uh So twitter aside is more like you're you you're investing in the long term version of yourself versus the short term. So that that's the way I think about it. It's like the energy you put onto the world. The turning of the cheek philosophy allows you to walk through the fire gracefully. Um, it's some sense, I mean, perhaps you would reframe that is not a uh, then that that's not being altruistic or whatever, but there's something pragmatic about that kind of approach to life, [/INST] disciplining yourself so that you become a better version of yourself. I mean, I not not only do we agree, but, you know, I think, I think every religious and philosophical tradition probably has a version of that, even even Conto, we join together in finding to be terrible. Even Kant makes that distinction between the short term interest and long term interest. So I I think that's a universal, I don't know of anybody who's really disagreeing about that. The thing that we were talking about a couple of minutes ago before we got onto this tangent is the relationship between the the individual who is in the image of God and is of uh value as an individual. Nevertheless, there is this question about what, what is, what is good for that person and and and also what makes them happy. I'm not sure that those are exactly the same things, but they're both certainly relevant and important. And um, I feel like, I mean, I think we're beginning to uncover this empirical disagreement about what it is that's good for the individual and what it is that makes them happy and I'll go back to something I raised, I raised in the debate, which is uh this uh this theory of dark time that now has been uh popularized by, by Jordan Peterson. But um dirk. I'm argues that um that the he's writing a book on suicide, he's trying to understand what what brings individuals to suicide and he coins this term anomie lack of law. And the argument is that uh that individuals basically are healthy and happy when they find their place in the hierarchy within a loyalty group. In a certain place in the hierarchy. They compete and struggle in order to rise in the hierarchy, but they know where they are, they know who they are. The kids today, like to say they know what their identity is because they associate themselves, their self expands to take on, you know, the leadership, the different layers, the past and the future of this, this particular hierarchy. And I completely agree with the Iran that some of these hierarchies are are pernicious and oppressive and and and terrible. And some of them are better. What we might disagree about is that you can find human beings who are capable of becoming healthy and happy off by themselves without participating in in this kind of structure. The minute that you accept, if you accept that this is empirical reality about human beings, it's an it's an iron law. You can't you can't do anything, you can tell you human beings that they can be free of all constraints, all you want. And you can get them to do things that that, as you say, dissolve, dissolve their place, that they can have contempt for hierarchies. They can say, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna serve the man, I'm going to, you know, I'm just gonna burn them all down. You can you can get them to say all get kids to say all these things. You can get them either to be marxists who are who are actively trying to overthrow and destroy the existing hierarchies or you can make them some kind of liberal where they basically pretend the hierarchies don't exist. They just act like that. They're not there in both cases. And it's not a coincidence that that's what universities teaches your choices. Either Marxist revolution or liberal ignoring of the hierarchies in both cases, what you've done is you've eliminated the possibility that the young person will be able to find his or her place in a way that allows them to grow and exercise their their their their love, their drive, their their creativity in order to to advance something constructive. You've eliminated it and you've put the burden on them, you know, kind of a neat Sheehan burden to uh to just be the fountain of all values yourself, which, you know, maybe some people can do it, but almost no one can do it. And I think that's empirically true. And so I think by telling them about their freedom rather than telling them about how about the need to join into some, some traditionalist hierarchy that can be good and healthy for them. I think we're destroying them. I think we're destroying this generation and the last one and the next </s><s>[INST] neuron is the burden of freedom destroying mankind. [/INST] What freedom, I mean, how many people are indeed free? The look, the problem is that we were caught up on political concepts and we we've we're moving into ethical issues and I don't think it's right to tell people you're free, go do whatever the hell you want. Just just use your emotions, you know, just just go where you want to go. You know, in the spur of the moment, think short term, don't think long term, I don't think what I think one has to provide moral guidance and and and morality here is crucial and crucially important. And part of taking responsibility for your own life is establishing a moral framework for your life. And and what does it mean to live a good life? I mean, that's much more important in a sense of of a question. And it is it is my belief that people can do that. They can find and choose the values necessary to achieve a good life, but they need guidance. They need guidance. This is why religion evolved in my view, because people need guidance. So so so that says, you know, I had called religion a primitive form of philosophy. It was the original philosophy that provided people with some guidance about what to do and what not to do. And secular philosophy is supposed to do the same. And the problem is that I think religion and 99% of secular philosophy give people bad advice about what to do and therefore they do bad stuff. And and some of that sometimes, uh you know, because uh when they do good stuff, it gets reinforced that we survive in spite of that. But ideas like content, Hagel and marks and so on, give young people awful advice about how to live and what to do and as a consequence, really bad stuff happens and the world in which we exist today, which we agree a lot of pathologies to it. There's a lot of bad stuff going on in my view is going the wrong way, in my view, are products of of of a set of ideas. Uh you know, on the one hand, I think, I think christian ideas on the other hand, I think secular philosophical ideas that have driven this country and the world more generally in a really, really bad direction. And this is why the, this is why what I do what I do, because I think at the, at the core of it, the only way to change it is not to impose a new set of ideas from the top because I, I worry about who's going to be doing, doing the imposition, plus I don't believe you can you can force people to be good. It's to challenge the ideas. It's the question, the ideas, it's to present an alternative view of morality, an alternative set of moral principles and alternative, ultimately, an alternative view of political principles. But it has to start with morality if you don't. And and my morality centered on the individual and what individuals should do with his life in order to attain a good life. I believe that leads to happiness, but but but the good life, that's why it's good, right? The goal is survival and thriving and flourishing and and and happiness, ultimately. But politics is a servant of that in the end. It's it's not an end in itself. So, the real issue is, you know, you asked before, what is the value of relationship, that there's an almost value in relationship? Because we get values from other people. We don't produce all our values. We don't produce all our spiritual values and we don't produce all the material values, other people on a massive benefit to us because they produce values. We can't there's a massive division of labor in terms of values, not just in economics, but also in philosophy and elsewhere. It's why we have teachers. That's why we have moral teachers. More teachers. Important to help guide us towards a good life. Not all of us are philosophers, but what I do demand if you all of individuals. So this is where I put a burden on people, right, understand what you're doing right. You know, don't embrace a mall teaching because it was tradition. Don't embrace them all teaching because your parents embraced it. Don't embrace them all. Teaching just because your teachers are teaching it, challenge it. Think about it, embrace it because you embrace it, you might be wrong, you might embrace the wrong one, but take more responsibility, take responsibility over your life by evaluating testing, challenging what you have received and choosing what you're what, what you're going to pursue. And I acknowledge empirically that most people don't do that. And uh, and and and this is why intellectual leadership is so important. Uh, this is why you want to get you want the voices and the culture to be good voices. So that those people who don't think for themselves land up being followers, but they end up being followers of somebody good versus followers of somebody bad. But for the thinkers in the world out there, who I think are the people who count who the people who shape society. Boy, wait a minute. Not not count in the sense that you can dismiss the lives of others. And you know, because, you know, obviously I'm anti corrosion and anti violence. Yes, I don't want to sound like plato, but in a sense that that they're the ones who shaped who'll end up shaping the world. They're the ones who'll end up shaping how, how there will be, I want those people to make choices about their values and not to just accept them based on traditional based the commandment are based on where they happen to grow up and and in that sense, again, you know, I do and this is this is an interesting point where we disagree, but I'm not exactly sure what your position is. I do believe in universal values. That is, there are things that are good and there are things that are evil and I think we agree on that and, and there are systems, we agree that, that communism and fascism are evil. Well, I think we should be able to agree that something, some political systems are good and maybe there's this middle ground where we both think that there not particularly bad, but not particularly good and y'all might think that better than I think they are, but if we can agree and this is good and this is evil right? Then the systems that tend towards the good are good and the system that tends towards evil, evil and, and but that's universal, right? You know, I I look at places like uh south Korea, Japan asia, you know, cultures that are very, very different in many respects in the west and yet when they adopt sudden uh western ideas right about freedom about liberty about individualism, I mean, the Japanese constitution because McArthur forced it in there has the pursuit of happiness in the constitution, not because they chose it because you put it in there, but they to some extent adopted that. And and they're they're successful. They're successful. Places today. Those societies in Asia that didn't adopt these values are not successful societies today, Japan has has as a birth rate of what is it? One point no, 1.11 point two Children per woman. I mean, look, there there there are some things, there's some places where you give people freedom. This is also biblical, right? The idea that everyone did what's right in his own eyes. Okay, right. This is a refrain, refrain in the book of judges. And and and and the bible is not an anti freedom book. I mean, there's many many. Look, I don't know, we're not fine, we're OK. Ok. Look, just as an asterisk, I'm not asking you because, you know, because the bible is such a great authoritarian, but it it's not that at all. My in my in my view if if you want to know where you know where, where, where, where this the what you call the the sanctity of property, where does the sanctity of property comes from? It comes from the 10 commandments, that comes from moses saying I haven't taken anything from anyone who comes from Samuel saying I haven't taken anything from anyone. It's the condemnation of have of the unjust kings who steal the property of their, of their subjects. So, so I'm not so I'm property and freedom. I think there's great basis for for in in in in the bible. But right now I'm focusing on on on this other question, which is what happens when everyone does what's right in his own eyes? That's the book of judges. And that's that's this civil war, moral corruption, theft, idolatry, murder, rape. I mean, that's what happens when everyone, everyone does whatever is right is or not. Well, no, it's what that, that that's what it says in the text. I'm not. Okay, So when I look at your right, there are things that I think are objectively true. I think it's really hard to get people to agree, agree to them. Almost impossible. But when I look at a country which is, uh, is approaching one birth per woman, in other words, half of the minimum necessary for for for replacement. You can say whatever you want, whatever you want about immigration, we can have that discussion. But the point is that when when, when your values are such that you're not even capable of, of doing the most basic techniques that human beings need in order to be able to propagate themselves and their values and the way they see things, then I look, you're finished. You can't say that. You can't if I implied that Japan is an ideal society. I take that back. But I I just just think about it. I just think we're in trouble and we're in trouble. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Give me a second hold that hold [/INST] that it's his show man, we enter into his hierarchy. That's it. We we should talk about hierarchy. But </s><s>[INST] um, just just to clarify, do you, how do you explain the situation in Japan? Is it the decrease in value and family? Like some of the um, just to expand on that, Like how do you explain that situation? You're saying that that society is in trouble in a certain way? Can you kind of describe the nature of that trouble? [/INST] I'm saying that when the individual is part of a social group, this can be a family, a congregation, a community, a tribal nation. When the individual feels that the things that are happening to the society are things that are happening to him or to her. And I want to emphasize this is not the standard view of collectivism, that, you know, that Mussolini Mussolini will say, you know, the glory of the individuals and totally immersing himself in, you know, in the organic whole. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that human beings have and are both. They enter into a society to which they are loyal and they compete with one another with uh in the terms that that society allows competition, but also sometimes by bending the rules and by shaping them and by by by changing them, what you see in many societies, certainly throughout the liberal West, but also in countries that have been affected by the Liberal West by industrialization and ideas of individualism. What you see is a collapse of a willingness of the individual to look at what the what is what is needed by the whole and to uh, to make choices that are um, that are as the urine would call them selfish because it's because the purpose of them is is self expression, competition, self assertion. Moving up in the hierarchy, achieving, achieving um, honor or wealth in order to do those things. But but when you stop being able to look at the framework of a particular society and identify with it, you lose that you cease to understand what it is that you need to do not. Not every single person, But I'm talking about society wide. So there are a few individuals who are just going to have a fantastic time and live the kind of life that you're on is describing. And the great majority, they stopping, we're willing to take risks. They stop being willing to get married. They stop being willing to have Children. They stop being willing to start companies. They stopped being willing to put themselves out to do great things because the guide rails that told them what what kinds of things and the social feedback that honored them when they did things like getting married and having Children. They've been crushed and what have they have been crushed by they've been crushed by the false view that if you tell the individual be free, make all your own decisions, that they will then be free and make all their own decisions. They don't they just stop they stop being human. </s><s>[INST] That's powerful. So, do you want to respond to [/INST] that? So, I don't think anybody should have Children. If the goal it's a goal, there's there's a good there's a good tweet tweet clip that you can make. Um, I don't think anybody should have Children for the goal of um perpetuating their nation or expanding their society or for some people, I think they'd make horrible parents if that was the goal, the purpose of doing it. I think people should have Children because they want to embrace that challenge that that that beauty that experience that amazing. Very, very hard, very, very difficult experience in life. It's it's it's about being able to project a long term, but also being able to enjoy and love the creation of another human being, that process of creation. It is a beautiful self interested thing. And by the way, not everybody should have Children. I think way too many people have Children. You know, there's some awful parents out there that I wish I would stop. I mean, you know, life is precious and life of suffering is sad. It's sad to see people suffering. A lot of people are born into situations and aboard born into parents that, that destroyed the capacity to ever live a good life and that's, that's a tragic and sad thing. And uh, so, so I don't measure um, the health of a society, uh, and how many Children they're having a health of a couple of whether they have Children or not, those are individual choices. Some people uh, make a choice not to have Children, which is completely rational and consistent with their values. And now when you look at a society overall, I do think having Children or not having Children is a reflection of something. I think it's a reflection of a certain optimism about the future. I think it's a reflection of thinking long term versus short term. I think a short term society doesn't have Children. People don't have Children there because Children are long term investment, they require real planning and real effort and really thinking about the long term. But those are moral issues And again, we're confusing or mixing. When I say Japan look how well Japan has done. I, I don't mean the specific Japanese people and how many kids they're having and what kind of life they're having. You know, in terms of these kind of particulars, but think about the alternatives Japan faces. If you look around the options right that they face, they tried empire. Uh, they tried nationalistic empire, didn't turn out too well for them or anybody who they interacted with, they could have become north Korea. We we know how that turned out, we know what that is. They could have been cambodia if you've ever been to cambodia and seeing the kind of poverty and yes, maybe cambodians have lots of Children. But God, I'd rather be in Japan any day than than have Children in a kind of poverty and horrific circumstances they have. But in the context of the available um regimes that there were possible post World War Two for the, for the Japanese team based game based one that generally lead to prosperity, to freedom to individuals pursuing values, not perfectly because they didn't implement the philosophical foundation, the mall foundation that I would like to to have. There's still being impacted by content. Hagel Ian whatever philosophy that's out there in the west that's destroying the better parts. So you give people freedom now, what do they do with it? And if they have a bad philosophy, they're going to do bad things with that freedom right? You tell people to do whatever they choose to do. But if they have bad ideas, they will choose to do bad things. So it is true that the primacy of morality and the primacy of philosophy has to be recognized. It's it's not the primacy of politics and indeed you don't get free societies unless you have some elements of decent philosophy, but you can get free societies with a rotten philosophy, but they don't they don't stay free for very long. I don't understand how can it be a decent philosophy? If it doesn't care about posterity? If it does. If you're willing to say I'm offering guidance, I think you should live as a trader. All relationships should be voluntary. But those are those are interesting things. But the moment that it comes to posterity to the future to there being a future, let's say that there were a society that lived the way you know in general. According to your view, let's say there was such a society, How can you not care whether that society is capable of passing it on to the next generation or not? But the way to pass it on to the next generations through ideas and not through through having Children. Having Children is an individual choice that some people are going to make and some people are not. But the fundamental that preserve what the good life. What does that? Even if there is a sense if if if if every generation from now on your your your society that was good at a certain point has half as many people in it. It's going to be very quickly it's just going to be overrun overrun by whom? What do you mean overrun by whom are we just totally a historical. If you're the Spartans and you have all of these you know like like warrior values but you stop having Children, you get overrun, you get defeated. That's a good thing. Not a bad thing. But you get my point, You have to have the ability to have enough Children to create enough wealth and enough power, enough strength. Who makes these kind of conclusions and decisions about how many you make it as an individual and you decide that, you know, we're not talking about, we're talking about what kind of intellectual, cultural, religious inheritance you give your Children. And those are the ideas that those ideas are going to perpetuate because they're good ideas. If they're bad, they're not going to perpetually, they could be they can't be good ideas if they don't produce future generations. What are you talking about? What they not produce future generations. As I look at every liberal, every liberal society on earth visiting democratic collapse is not a single liberal society on earth today that I'm willing to defend because they're not living by not acceptable. So they have a semblance I have a semblance of a political system that is a little bit like what I would like far from what I would, you know, but they certainly don't have a moral foundation. I believe that people who have the right moral foundation. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them will have Children. Most of them will continue into the future, will most of them will fight for the future, but not because they care what happens in 200 years, but because they care about their lifetime and part of having fun and enjoying one's lifetime is having kids is projecting into the future. Are you really going to tell me that people have Children because it's fun. They're fun when they're four years old. They're not fun when they're when they're 15, when they know they're just not funny. Look, you don't you don't you don't do this for fun. You know, marriage also you don't do for fun. There are times that are fun and there are times they're not fun. Look, fun is not exactly, but you certainly do it for you do it for happiness, you do it for fulfillment, You do it as a challenge. You do it for making for making your life better for making your life interesting for making your life challenging for embracing. You know, part of it is fun. Part of it is hard work, but you do it because it's, it's it makes your life a better </s><s>[INST] life. That's very interesting, sort of empirically speaking, if you dissolve the cultural backbone where everybody comes up like the background, the moral ideas that everybody is raised with. If you dissolve that if you truly emphasized the individual, uh I think your arm is saying it's going to naturally lead to the dissolution of marriage and all of these concepts. So you're not So like everything? Well, basically saying, you're not going to choose some of these things. You're not, you're going to more and more, choose the short term optimization versus the long term optimization beyond your own life, like posterity. So, [/INST] so I don't think about posterity, I don't know what posterity means, right? I can project into my Children's life Maybe when I have grandchildren, the grandchildren, but it ends there. I I can't project 300 years in the future. It's ridiculous to try to think about 300 years into the future. Things changed so much. And and and and the founding fathers, that's the conservative founding fathers. Well, no, I don't think, I think they set up a system. I think the whole idea was to set up a system. It was self perpetuating that would it would if people lived up to it, right? No, no. Would perpetuate the self no systems are self perpetuating things rise and fall and it's that they don't have, I don't believe in that. Let me speak to your heart for a second. The great, the great individuals in societies are the people who have seen the decline, understood it and provided resources in order to redirect and bring it back up. You can't agree to that. I don't see it that way at all. Yes, I want people out there to rebel against conventional morality. I think conventional morality is destructive to their own lives and broadly to posterity because I think it's unsustainable. It's not good. And this goes to I think conventional morality is christian morality is the morality that's been secularized through a christian lens and I think it's destructive but I don't want them to dump that and not replace it with something I want and I think it's necessary and essential for people to have a mall code and to have a mall code code of morality is a set of guidelines to live your life. It is a set of values that to guide you to help you identify what is good for you. But </s><s>[INST] let me hold on a second you're saying essential to this morality that people should have is reason. Yes. Okay you're not saying other things. You're basically saying reason will arrive a lot of things. Why are you so sure that reason is so important. [/INST] There's nothing else. </s><s>[INST] No. Hold on a second but like it seems like obvious to you. So first of all humans have limited cognitive capacity. So even to assume the reason can actually function that well from an artificial intelligence uh researcher perspective. Uh it [/INST] seems the whole discussion about whether there is such a thing as artificial intelligence, whether whether whether that is what it is but </s><s>[INST] but see here's the thing I mean you're very confident about this particular thing but not about other aspects of human nature that seems to be obviously present. So yes. Uh huh uh human relations love connection between us. So it's very possible to argue that all of the accomplishments of reason would not exist without the connection of other humans. That it's very it's not obvious though. It's possible that reason is a property of the collective of multiple people interacting with each other. When you look at the greatest inventions of human history, some people tell that story by individual inventors. You could argue that's true. Some people say that it's it's a bunch of people in the room together. The ideas bubbling. And if you're saying individual is primary and they have the full power and the capacity to make choices. I don't know if that's necessarily [/INST] So there's a straw manning going on here. Of my position, right? </s><s>[INST] Of course [/INST] You don't do it and you do it more politely than anybody else. I know when you do it of course. We all stand on the shoulders of Giants. Of course invention and uh and sciences collaborative. Uh not always, not, not not 100% Newton stood on the on the shoulders of giants. I don't know how collaborative he was. He wasn't exactly known as a, as a bubbling up and and testing ideas out with other people. But this is a metaphysical fact. You can't eat for me. There's no collective stomach. You can't eat for me. You know, you can provide me with food, but I need to do the eating. You can't think for me, you can help stimulate my thoughts. You can challenge my thinking. You can add to it. But in the end of the day only I can either do my thinking or not do my thinking, but I need to </s><s>[INST] think. But you can think all by yourself alone. [/INST] What does that mean? All by yourself? Right. Can can I think on a desert island? Yes, I can think on a desert island. Can I can I think as big and as broad and as deep as I can in in uh Aristotle's lyceum, of course not. I'm a much better thinking in Aristotle's lyceum or in or in or in any kind of situation like this where you're going to challenge me and I have to come back and have to think deeply about what it is you said and why I'm not communicating very effectively and why why you're not understanding me? Of course, now you're causing me to think much more deeply and to and to challenge me. But it's still true that I have to think, and if I don't think for myself, who's gonna think for me, right? So, so this is why, um, I'm not a philosopher, I'm certainly not an original thinker in that sense. I, you know, I recognize the fact that they're geniuses that are that are much smarter than me. Whether it's Aristotle Ayn rand or people that inspire me, I study their work. I try to understand it to the best of my ability, but I don't take it as gospel. I take it as you know, this is something I need to figure out. I need to learn it. I need to understand it because it's good for my life. It's important to me. But I have to do the thinking. It won't be mine. It'll behind vantage, but it won't be mine unless I've done the thinking to integrate it into my soul, into my consciousness into my mind. But it's still true that I have to think for myself, not on a desert island. I, you know, and and I I now regret ever using a desert island. And in the book as an example because because uh, uh, because clearly clearly it was misunderstood. Uh, I I didn't make myself clear enough in in the book in terms of what I meant. But um, you know, I do not advocate for thinking alone in a dark room, not engaging with reality, not studying history, not knowing about the world or on a desert island. Not interactively or collectivist. No, I'm a trader. So I I enjoy what we're doing right now because you're challenging me. You make me a better thinker. It's interesting. You know, the fact that a lot of people are gonna watch this plays into it as well. But I would probably enjoy engaging with you in conversation. Yeah, I would enjoy engaging with you with your in conversation even if it wasn't being recorded. And even if it was because, uh, you know, that kind of conversation makes me better. There's some people who I wouldn't, there's some people who make it worse, right? That that you want to walk, that you walk away from the conversation because because they're harmful to you. And this is where choice comes in. It's I want to be able to choose who I engage with. I don't always have that choice because as a public intellectual, you go in front of audiences, you don't always choose who it is. But you want to choose who you engage with and who you don't. You want to choose the forum in which you engage and how you engage. And the standard for me is reason. There is no other stand. So you asked a deep question to start off why reason, right? Because that's where the values come from. That's the only tool we have to discover truth. Yes. You know, reason is something that it doesn't guarantee truth. It doesn't guarantee there will always right. It's fallible. But it's all we have. It's the tool in which we evaluate the world around us and we come to conclusions about it. There is there just isn't other two emotions, emotions are not tools </s><s>[INST] of cognition. Consciousness is a tool. Emotion like love. All of these things are ways to experience the world to say that reason is the best tool, [/INST] but there's a difference in experiencing the world and and evaluating the world in terms of what is truth and what is not </s><s>[INST] an emotion [/INST] and emotions and love are consequences. They're not primary emotions are consequences of conclusions you've come to your emotions will change very quickly, relatively speaking, when your evaluations of the situation will change, Different people can see exactly the same scene and have completely different emotions because they're bringing different value systems and they're bringing different thoughts to the process. Maybe </s><s>[INST] love is primary. But let me ask, uh love [/INST] is the same thing. You can fall out of love with somebody. Why? Because you learn something new? Because you've discovered something new about the person. Now, you don't love </s><s>[INST] them the wrong podcast to bring up love. [/INST] We'll talk forever about </s><s>[INST] it. So, your arm you wrote the book, the virtue of nationalism, contrasting nation states with empires and with global governance like United Nations and so on. So, uh you argue that nationalism uniquely provides the quote, the collective right of a free people to rule themselves. So, continuing our conversation, why is this particular collection of humans we call a nation a uniquely powerful way to preserve the freedom of the people to have people who call themselves [/INST] before I say anything on the subject, I should emphasize that I'm not a rationalist. I'm an empiricist and I'm I'm I'm offering what uh what I think is a valid observation of, of human history. I don't have some kind of deductive framework for proving that, you know, that the nation is the best and empirically, we know something about the way Systems of national states work and about the way empires work and the way tribal societies work. What we don't know is uh you know, is it possible to invent something else? Or I mean, there's a lot of things we don't know here. So with the caveat that I'm I'm making an empirical observation, the basic argument is human beings form collectives naturally loyalty groups. And for most of human history and prehistory, as far as we know, human beings lived in tribal societies, tribal societies or societies in in which there's uh constant friction and constant warfare among very small groups among among families and clans. And we reached a turning point in human history with the invention of large scale agriculture, which allows the creation of vast wealth. It allows the establishment of standing armies instead of militias. You know, Sargon of Akkad Cod says, I can pay 5000 men to do nothing other than to drill in the Arts of War. And then I'm going to send them out to conquer the neighboring city states and there you have empire. The bible, which is the source of our our image, our conception of a world of independent nations that are not constantly trying to conquer one another. The source, the source of that is the bible and the the biblical world is one in which uh Israel and and and and various other small nations are, are trying to crew to, to to to to fight for their independence against world. Empires against empires, Babylonian, Assyrian Persian Egyptian, which aspired to rule the world. My my claim is fundamentally to fold, its its moral that whenever you conquer a foreign nation, you're murdering and you're stealing, You're you're destroying you as your own would say, you're you're using force to to to to to cause people to submit. So, so there is something in in the profits that rebels against this ongoing atrocity and carnage of trying to take over the whole world. And um, and and there's a prudential practical argument which is that the world is governed best when there are multiple nations, when when they're free to experiment and chart their own courses, that means they have their their own route to God. They have their own morality is they have their own forms of economy and government. And what tends to happen in history is that when something is successful, when something looks like when people, different nation looks at and say why those people are, they're flourishing, they're succeeding, then it's it's imitated and, you know, in in the way that, you know, the dutch invented the stock market and and the english said, look, that makes them them them powerful, so so will will adopt it so that there's endless examples of that. So that's the argument for the argument is um since since we don't know, a priori deductive lee from self evident principles, what is best, it's best to have a world in which people are trying different things </s><s>[INST] so quick question because the word nationalism sometimes has presented a negative light in connection to the nationalism of Nazi Germany, for example. So, so you're looking empirically at a world of nations that respect each other. [/INST] I used the word nationalism the way that I inherited it in my tradition, which is it's a principled stand point that says that the world is governed best when many nations are able to be independent and chart their own course. That's the nationals as far as the Nazis Hitler is an imperialist. He hated nation states. His whole theory. If you pick up, I don't recommend doing this. But if you if you do, you're reading it right now in conference, right? If you do read mine confident, you'll see that. He says explicitly that the goal is for Germany to be the lord of the earth and mistress of the globe. And he detests the idea of the independent nation state because he sees it as weak and defeat. He might as well have said, it's jewish. </s><s>[INST] So let me ask from the individual perspective for nationalism, what do you make of the value of the love of country? The reason I connect that. So, I I personally, uh, what what would you say? Patriot? I I love the love of country or I am susceptible or how how in a random way I enjoy i in a self [/INST] interest, but well </s><s>[INST] I love a lot of things, but I'm saying this particular love is a little bit contentious, which is loving your country. That's an interesting love that some people are a little uncomfortable with even when, especially when that love, you know, I grew up in the soviet union to say, you know, you, you just love the country, it represents a certain thing to you and it's not, you don't think like philosophically, like I was marching around with with like marks under my arm or something like that. It's just loving uh community at the level of nation. It's very interesting. I don't know if that's an artifact of the past that we're going to have to strip away. Um I don't know if I was just raised in that kind of community, but I appreciate that my, I guess the thing I'm torn about is that love of country that I have in my heart that I now love America and I consider myself an american that would have easily if I was born earlier, been used by Stalin and I would have proudly died on the battlefield. I would have probably died if I was in nazi Germany as a german and I would proudly die as an american. [/INST] Yes, that's interesting. </s><s>[INST] I think about this a [/INST] lot. It's interesting to run a radical counterfactual and be sure of the answer. I mean I'm not sure, I mean, </s><s>[INST] but I think about this a lot because obviously I'm really interested in history and I put my, this is the way I think about most situations, as I empathize, I really tried to do hard work of placing myself in that moment and thinking through it. I'm just okay. I just know myself psychologically what, what I'm susceptible to, uh, that's a negative way to phrase it. But what I would love doing. And so I'm just saying my question is, um, is the love of nation a useful or a powerful moral sort of for a moral philosophy, perspective, a good thing. [/INST] I think it is a good thing. But before we ask whether it's a good thing, I think it's worth asking whether there's any way to live without it. The idea of national independence of a world or a continent which politically is governed by multiple independent national states. That is a political theory. Somebody came up with that, you know, in the bible or elsewhere, some someone came up with this idea and sold it and a lot of people like it, but the nation is not an invention. It every place in human history that we have any record of. There are nations. And so the, the, the fact of people creating families, families, creating an alliance of, of, of, of, of clans, clans, creating alliances of tribes, tribes, creating alliances of and an alliance that becomes the nation. We see that everywhere in human history, everywhere we look and the love of a group of tribes that have come together in order to fight opponents that are trying to destroy your way of life and you know, and steal your land and, and and and and harm your women and Children. The love of of the leadership that brings it together here. This is, you know, a George Washington type figure or an Alfred, the great type figure or, or or solve the biblical saw somebody who has the wisdom, the daring to unite the tribes, overcome their, their, you know, their, their, their internal, uh, mutual hatreds and grievances and rally them around a set of ideas, a language, a tradition, a an identity, as people say today, that love is a radical from human beings. Maybe we'll have brave new world people take drugs in order to get rid of it. The </s><s>[INST] problem is that could be leveraged by authoritarian. [/INST] Yes, but that's true of everything. It's like saying, you know, you can have Children and you can teach them to be evil. You can, you can make a lot of money, you can use it for evil. You you can have a gun for self defense, but you can use it for evil. Come on, we just that's that's that's human, that's being human. But you guys are making love. This primary, which I don't think it is that there's lots of people, I know there are lots of people in the world that they who don't love their nation because the nation is not worth loving. That is love is conditional. It's not unconditional love is conditional on the value that's presented to you. You know, so I I lived through this experience in my own life, right? I was I grew up in a in a in in Israel at a time of everything was geared towards patriotism and the state. I would say I was trained to to when I saw a grenade to jump on it because that was, you know, every song and every story and everything was about the state is everything and you should sacrifice. And you know when the when the flag went up, I got teary eyed, I mean I bought into it completely. Um and at some point I rejected that and I changed, I changed my alliance and I rejected my love of Israel. It's not that I don't love it anymore, but it's certainly not my top love. And it's certainly I'm certainly not looking for the grenade to jump on and I'm not volunteering to go fight the war there and and I fell in love from a distance with with with the idea of America. I love the idea of America more than I love America right? And and I could see myself falling in love out of love with America given where it's heading right? It's it's not automatic. It's it's it's conditioned on what it is that it represents and what it is what value it represents. Uh for me, you know, and and and I think that's that's always the case with love. You know, it's not true that Children have to love their parents. It that's the ideal. And and hopefully most Children love their parents because their parents, but some Children fall out of love with their parents because their parents don't deserve their love. Uh and and the same with this is the same with the other way around. I think I think parents are capable of not loving their Children. So it's it's love is is a conditional thing. It's not automatic. But but let me let me point out an agreement with, let me say something of an agreement agreement. I blow right? Mostly I like to talk to your own about his ideas and I don't want to talk about 10 grand, but I want to say something just just 11 thing about Ayn rand and all my kids, all my kids read Ayn rand's books. My father read the Fountainhead. I don't know like, you know, like what we know in rand and I'll tell you it is incredibly difficult reading for me, it's it's it's painful. It's painful to read why is it painful not because I disagree with the with with the view of of trading and business and the creativity of it and and you know, and and reardon metal, I mean, you know, that stuff that stuff moves me and and and and and and I do admire it. But to read, you know, a book that's 1000 pages long in which nobody, nobody is having Children, nobody is having a stable marriage. No one is running a an admirable government that's fighting for a just cause anywhere, anywhere you're on. I I feel I just I feel like like it's focusing on one aspect of what it is to be human and to flourish and that everything else is just erased and thrown out as though it's just not part of reality. And I'm scared, I'm scared of what happens to to two teenagers who hormonally are, in any case. No, that that's the program two to pull away from their parents and experiment with things. They're they're biologically programmed to do that. And you give them a book which says, look, you you don't you don't have to have a family. You don't have to raise Children. You don't have to have a country. You don't have to fight for anything. All you have to do is assert yourself in trade. I think it's destructive because it's not realistic. It's just not real. But I got none of that for mine. I got none of that from Ayn rand. You know, the the books went out about a family. Uh, you could write a book in nine grand style about where people have a family, but the goal, the purpose. It's a novel. It's not it's a novel which is delimited with with the particular study. There's one family in Gold Coach. And there's a little Passage about raising Children and the value of that because it's not court to what she is writing about. But that doesn't excluded. I know when I read I read I read atlas shrugged when I was 16 and I read it over over the years, several times more. It never occurred to me. Oh, I know. And my entire family, I shouldn't have a family. It that that thought never came into my mind. I always want to have Children. I continue to want to have Children. I thought of it a little differently. I thought of how I would find a partner a little bit differently. I thought about what I would look for in a partner differently. But not that I wouldn't want to get married. </s><s>[INST] The question I have is what effect it has on society. So, outside of you. So, for example, you mentioned, love should be conditional. I think, well, [/INST] it is whether you like it or not. It is you might pretend that it isn't, but it's </s><s>[INST] always conditional. Well, let me try to say something and see if it makes any sense. So, could there be things that are true? Like, love is conditional is always conditional that if you say it often it has a negative effect on society. So, for example, I mean, uh, so maybe I'm just a romantic but good luck saying love is conditional to a romantic partner. I mean, you could I would argue on mass that would deteriorate the quality of relationships. Uh, if you remind the partner of that truth, that is universal. Like you have to the the I mean, okay, maybe it's just me. I'll just speak to myself. It's like there is a certain romantic notion of unconditional love. [/INST] It's part of why you have so many destructive marriages. It's it's part of why. Yes, it's it's a real problem because because yes, there is a um talked about honoring your spouse and and there's real truth there and I I respect that. Yes, you have to do certain things. Love is not you marry somebody. And there's a real attitude out there in the culture, you marry somebody. And okay, now we're gonna we're just gonna cruise. It's just that, you know, marriage is work. It's like all values. It's work. It's something you have to reignite every day. You have to you have to the challenges, the real disagreements that the things you you fight about, you disagree about. And and there's real, if it's a value, you work it out, you you you you you struggle through it. You you you and and sometimes you struggle through and you come to a conclusion that this is not gonna work and you dissolve a marriage and I'm all for dissolving after really, really fighting for it. Because if it's an important value. And if you fell in love with this person for a reason, then that's something worth fighting for. I have a feeling that Hollywood goes the other way, but it's not this cruising along and everything everything is easy. No, human relationship is like that in our friendship, not love, not not not not raising Children, not being a child. Um, you know, they require work. And and they were quite thinking and they require creating the conditions to thrive. And that's the sense in which it's it's conditional you you have to look at it. And it's an it's very easy not to do the work. And it's very easy to drift away. And I think most people don't do the work. Most people take it. And and generally in life they the only place people seem to work is at work and then they take the rest of their life as I'm going to cruise. And yet every aspect of your life, the art, you choose the friends, you choose the lovers. You choose all require real thinking and real work to be successful at them. None of them are just just there because there is no such thing as just the intrinsic right? I agree with all of that. I was going to say before The rabbis have this sort of shocking expression, uh the pain of raising of raising Children. And I find when I speak to audiences about relationships, I find that that in general, and this is a this is cross cultural, different countries, different religious backgrounds that in general, young people do not know that the only way to make a marriage work is through a lot of pain and overcoming. They don't know that raising Children involves a great deal of pain, they don't know that caring for and helping your parents approach the end of their lives, causes a great deal of pain and and everything is kind of this sketchy, you know, very sketchy glimpse see, kind of, and I mentioned Hollywood just because it it's everything is made to look easy, except, you know, there's kind of a funny breakdown of something, but then it, you know, maybe there's a divorce. They, you know, they shoot one another. So that's so then they should get divorced. But but the the reality of of how hard it is to do and how heroic it is to to do it and then overcome and then actually in the end achieve something, create something that there was really it's almost it's almost not, it's almost not discussed. And so it looked to me it's just not surprising that if if there's no parallel to Ayn rand about, you know, the heroic saving of a marriage that was on the rocks. How does it actually happen? So, it's a good point you're making and but it's something just came to me that I've never thought of before. So that's always good. This is where the conversation is good. Look, take the Talmud and and and and I I can't remember how many years after the bible. And Talmud has written how many over how, how long of a period it's written how many people participating in writing it. Ireland was one individual. She wrote a series of books and philosophy, which I think are true and and but at the beginning there was a lot of work to be done, it's time to apply this. So hopefully there will be one of her students who writes a book on relationships and there'll be uh somebody who writes a book on on developing a political theory in greater detail and and develop her ethics. She's got like, she's got she's got a few writings on ethics and it's in the novels, but but there's a lot of work to be done fleshing it out. What does it mean? How do you, so, to say, Iran didn't do everything is a truism, she didn't do everything. Okay, So what but she laid this amazing philosophical foundation that always allows us to take those principles and to apply them to all these realms of human life, and she does it on a scope that few philosophers in human history have done, because she does goes from metaphysics all the way to aesthetics, hitting the key and she's an original thinker on each one of those things and she might be right, She might be wrong on certain aspects of it? Always happy to have a debate about where, where where she's wrong or where she's not, but there's a lot of work to be done right, it's not like and and if if their objective is out there, who presented as okay, human knowledge is over, because I'm a man, wrote these books, That's absurd, this huge amount of work to be done in applying these particular ideas. Just like there was for any philosophy, take these ideas and now apply them to all these realms and human experience that flesh it out and make it. And one of the reasons I don't think objectivism has taken off is because there's all this work still to be done that allows it to be relatable to people </s><s>[INST] in every aspect of them. Let me ask a hard question here. We've we've got we can actually [/INST] what I agreed with. Um </s><s>[INST] are you sure this is good. This would be a good transition [/INST] here. This is this is this is I mean, I agree about nations. So, I I don't like the term nationalism because I I fear of what happens when you put in is um at the end of anything. Anything. But but the nation is is a good thing. And and and having a diversity of nations in a sense, it's a good thing and in this sense, in this sense, I don't think one can come up. So, look, I I said, I hold that the, the ideal nation is a nation that protects individual rights. How do you do that? What are the details? How do we define property rights Exactly? In the internet world, there's gonna be disagreement, rational, reasonable disagreement. They're gonna be in my The future in the 300 years from now, in my ideas of one finally, right, there will be multiple nations trying to apply the principle of applying individual rights and they'll do it differently. One of the, one of the benefits of federalism is that while you have a national government, there are certain issues that you relegate to states and they can try different things and learn because there is a huge value and the empirical knowledge comes that you can't just do sit all and figure it all out. You have to experiment. So I do. I hate the idea of a one world, one world government because experimentation is gone and if you make a mistake, everybody suffers. I like the idea and then I like the idea of people being able to to choose where they live. But but this notion of experimentation, I think is crucial, but you need a principal, this is you need a principal. So I don't like the idea of nations, if all the nations are going to be bad right? If all the nations are going to be horrible, then I don't like it. What I like is a variety of nations, all practicing basically good ideas and then we try to figure out, okay, what works better than other things and and and what is sustainable and what is not </s><s>[INST] given how many difficult aspects of history and society we talked about. Let me ask a hard question of both of you [/INST] breeze up until </s><s>[INST] now, what gives you hope about the future? So we've been describing, um reasons to maybe not have hope, What gives you hope when you look at the world? What gives you hope that in 200 years and 300 years and 500 years, like the founders look into the future, that human civilization will be all right and more than that it would flourish. [/INST] two Things for Me. One is history. So in a very long run good ideas. We know, I think in a very long run you can go through a dark ages, but you come out of the dark ages. Um you know, the the the the the the good and the just does win in the end, even if it is bloody and difficult and hard to get there. So while I'm quite pessimistic, unfortunately, about the short run, I'm ultimately optimistic that in the long run good ideas win. And and they're justified. And and and I think the fundamental behind that is I I think is is that I'm fundamentally positive about human nature. I think human beings um can think they're capable of reasoning, They're capable of figuring out the truth. They're capable of learning from experience. They don't always do it. It's an achievement to do it. But over time they do, uh and and if you create the right circumstances, they will, and when things get bad enough, they look for way out. They look at maybe at history, if the history is available to them, maybe at just learning from the from from what's around them to find better ways of doing things and that reinforces itself. But human beings are an amazing creature, right? We were just amazing in our capacity to be creative, in our capacity to think in our capacity to love and our capacity to change our environment, to fit our needs and to fit our requirements for survival and to learn and to grow and to progress. And uh, you know, so, so again, long term, I think all that wins out short term in any point in history, short term. Um it doesn't right now, it doesn't look too good. </s><s>[INST] What about you? [/INST] Well, as usual, I moved by by what your own says and I and uh and I hear scripture and uh, the source for your ons hope um is the book of exodus, which is the first place in human history where we were presented with the possibility that and enslaved people that's being persecuted and murdered and living under the worst possible regime can free itself and have a shot at a life of independence and worth. And it's another inherited jewish idea in the tradition. Um the way that we express this is by saying um that that there is a god who judges the Israelites in Egypt were were enslaved for hundreds of years according to the exodus story, hundreds of years before God wakes up and and and and hears them and he doesn't do anything until until, you know, moses uh, kills the oppressor and and and goes out into the desert. So, um, so I think it's pretty realistic that, you know, there's a God that God judges and acts, but probably, you know, often not for a very, very long time. And not until there's there's a human being who gets up and says enough. I know that today people don't want to read the bible, They don't like reading the bible, but I always hear in my ear this cry of the prophet Jeremiah who saw his, his nation destroyed and these people exiled and he says um in God's name, he says he's not my word like fire. Like the hammer that shatters rock a petition and a pet cela hammer, that my word is like fire, like the hammer that shatters rock. And this is actually, this is the traditional way of saying something like what your honor saying that it may take a long, long time, but that that there there is a truth and it has its own strength and it will in the end shatter the things that are opposing it. That's that's our traditional hope. We we we we grew up like that and um you know, so so I do have hope, I see the trends, the trends are terrible right now and uh and and and and and it's frightening and it's hard but we are terrible at seeing the future and it is very possible that an unexpected turn of events is going to appear, you know, maybe soon, maybe much later. And the possibility of of a redemption is there, </s><s>[INST] let me ask, given that long arc of history, given that you do study the bible, what is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? [/INST] Wow, that's beautiful. I think that the meaning of life is is in part um what your own touches on when when he says that that the productive work, labor creativity is, is at the heart of what it is to be human. I just think that there there are some more arenas and maybe we even agree with a lot of them and I on a lot of them to be human, is to inherit a world which is imperfect, terribly imperfect, imperfect in many ways. And uh and and God created it that way. He created a world which is terribly lacking and he created us with the ability to stand up and to say, I can change the direction of this, I can do something to change the direction of this. I can take the time and the abilities that are given to me to be a partner with God in creating the world. It's not going to stay the way it was before me. It will be something different maybe a little bit, maybe a lot. But that's that is that is the heart, that is the key, that is the meaningful life is to be a partner with God in creating the world so that it is moving that much more in the right direction </s><s>[INST] the way we found. So nudge even if a little bit the direction of the world, well, uh you're you're on um you've actually been talking and your program about life quite a bit. Uh so let me ask the same question. I never tire you asking this question. What [/INST] do </s><s>[INST] you think is the is the meaning of this [/INST] whole? I mean, I don't believe in God. So God doesn't play a role in, in in my view of of the meaning of life. I think the meaning of life is to live, I like to say, to live with a capital l it's to embrace it and and I agree with your arm, in a sense you were born into a world and as human beings, one of the things that makes us very different than other animals is our capacity to change that world. We can actually go out there and change the world around us. We can change it materially through production and through that, we can change it spiritually through changing the ideas of, of people. We can we can change the direction to which humanity works. We can um, we can create a little universe. Part of that. I think part of the joy of creating a family is to create a little universe, right? We're creating a little world around us. That's part of the joy. And there is joy and family and make it all about difficulty and hard work. You know, part of the part of the idea of getting married is is to create a little world in which you and your spouse are are creating something that didn't exist before and and and and building something building a universe. But it's really to live. I mean, one of the things that I see and and it saddens me is wasted lives. There's people who just just cruise through life. They just, they just, they get bored and they get born in a particular place. They never challenge it. They never questioned, they just, you know, they live die and nothing really happened, Nothing really changed. They didn't produce, they didn't make anything of their life and produce here again, in the, in the largest sense, so to me, it's it's an every aspect of life, you know, as you know, because you've listened to my show, I love art, I love, I love aesthetics, I love the experience of great art, you know, I love relationships. I, you know, I I love producing them, you know, I like business, I like that, that aspect of it. Um and I think I think people, people are shallow in so many parts of their lives, which saddens me. I mean if if we if you had eight billion people on this planet, even if it never grew, even if we just stayed at eight billion, but the eight billion all lived fully, wow, I mean, what an amazing place. This would be, what an amazing experience we would have. So, so to me that is the meaning is just make the most that you have a short period of time on earth. And and that's it, this is it and and live it, experience it fully and and challenge yourself and push yourself. And and let me just say something about optimism, you know, one source of hope for me in the world in which we live right now is that there are people who do that, at least in certain realms of their lives, right? And and I'm inspired and I know a lot of people don't like me for this, but I'm inspired for example, by Silicon Valley, in spite of all the political disagreements I have with them and all of that. I'm inspired by people inventing new technologies and building I'm inspired by by the people you talk to about artificial intelligence and about about new ideas and about pushing the boundaries of science. Those things are exciting and it's it's terrific to see a world that I think generally is in decline yet. That these pockets in which people are still creating new new ventures and new ideas and new things that that inspires me and gives me hope that that is not dead. That in spite of the decay that's in our culture, there's still pockets where that spirit of being human is still is still alive and </s><s>[INST] well. Yeah, they inspired me as well. Yeah. And they truly live with a capital L. And maybe I can do in a star. Maybe we can also put a little bit of love with a capital L. Out there as well. Uh you're on, you knew I would end it that way, wouldn't you? Uh you're on, you're on. Thank you so much. This is a huge honor. I really enjoyed the debate yesterday. I really enjoyed the conversation today that you spend your valuable time with me. It just means a lot. Thank you so much. This is amazing. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Yaron brook and your um whose oni to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Edmund Burke. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] So I've uh, this is, this is an app called clubhouse. Um, I've gone back on it recently to practice Russian unrelated for for a few big Russian conversations coming up anyway it's a great way to talk to regular people in Russian. But also there was a I was I was nervous, I was preparing for a fighter ceo conversation and there was a vaccine room and so I joined it. Uh and there's a there's a pro science room as they, these are like scientists that were calling each other pro science. The whole thing was like theater to me. I mean I haven't thoroughly researched but looking at the resume they were like pretty solid researchers and doctors and they were mocking everybody who was at all. I mean it doesn't matter what they stood for but they were just mocking people and the arrogance was overwhelming. I had to shut off because I couldn't handle that human beings can be like this to each other. And then I I went back to just to double check. Is this really happened, How many people are here? Is this theater? And then I asked to come on stage on clubhouse to to make a couple of comments and then as I opened my mouth and say thank you so much you know this this is is a great room sort of the usual civil politeness, all that kind of stuff. And I said I'm worried that the kind of arrogance with which things are being discussed here will further divide us, not unite us. And and before I said even the unite us further divide us. I was thrown off stage. Now this isn't why I mentioned platform but like I am like lex Friedman, m I. T. Also which is something those people seem to sometimes care about the followers and stuff like that. Like did you just do that? And then they said enough of that nonsense enough of that nonsense, they said to me enough of that nonsense. Somebody who is obviously interviewed Francis Collins is uh the fighter ceo uh [/INST] epidemiologists also. So just </s><s>[INST] Yeah, exactly. But this broke my heart. The arrogance and this is the echoes of that arrogance is something you see in this email and I really would love to have a million things to talk about, to try to figure out how can we find a path forward. [/INST] I think a lot of a lot of the problems we've seen in the discussion over Covid, especially in the scientific community, You know, there's there's two ways to look at science. I think that that have been competing with each other for a while now. Uh, one way and this is the way that I view science and I've always found it so attractive is an invitation to a structured discussion where the discussion is tempered by by evidence, by data, by by reasoning and logic. Right? So it's a dialectical process where if I believe A and you believe B. Well, uh, we talked about it, we come up with an experiment that distinguishes between the two and while, you know, be turns out to be right, I'm all frustrated by buy you dinner and I said no, no, no, no. See. And then we go on from there, Right? That's that's what science is at its best. It's this process of using data in discussion. It's a human activity right To to to learn to have the truth unfold itself before us. On the other hand, there are there's another way that people have used science or thought about science as a as truth in and of itself, Right? This like if it's if it's science, therefore it's true automatically and there, you know, what does the science say to do? Well, the science never says to do anything the science says, here's what's true and then we have to apply our human values to say, okay, well, if we do this, well, this is likely to happen. That's what the science says. If we do that, then that is likely to happen. Well, we'd rather have this than that, right? And but it doesn't, science doesn't tell us that we'd rather have this than that is the human values that tell us that we'd rather have this than that Science plays a role. But it's not the only thing, it's not the only role. It's it's like it helps understand the constraints we face, but it doesn't tell us what to do in face of those constraints. </s><s>[INST] But underneath it at the individual level, at the institutional level it seems like um arrogance. It is really destructive. So the flip side of that, the productive things humility. So sort of um always not being sure that you're right, this is actually kind of Stuart Russell talks about this for a I research how do you make sure that ai super intelligent ai doesn't destroy us. You built in um a sort of module within it that it always doubts it's actions like it's not sure. Like I know it says I'm supposed to destroy all humans, but maybe I'm wrong and that maybe I'm wrong is essential for progress for actually doing in the long arc of history. Better. Not the perfect thing, but better and better and better and better. I mean, the question I have here for you is this this email so clearly captures some maybe Echo, but maybe a core to the problem. Do you put responsibility of this email of the shortcomings and failures on individuals or institutions, Is this? [/INST] No this is an institutional failure. Right. So um the NIH, so I've had two decades of NIH funding, I've sat on NIH review panels. The purpose of the NIH is what you said earlier, lex the purpose of the NIH is to support the work of scientists to some extent. It's also help to help scientists to direct scientists to work on things that are very important for public health, for the health of the public. Um so and the way you do that is you say, Okay, we're going to put you know, $50 million $70 million dollars on HIV or whatever it is. Right? And uh that pot of money then uh scientists compete with each other for the best ideas to to use it to address that problem. So it's essentially an endeavor to support the work of scientists. It is not in and of itself a policy organ. It doesn't say what public health policy should be for that. You have the C. D. C. And what happened during the pandemic is that people in the NIH were called upon to contribute to public health policy making and that created the conflict of interest you see in that email. Right? So now you have the head of the NIH in effect saying to all scientists, you must agree with me in the policy that I've recommended or else you're french. That is a deep conflict of interest. It's deep because first he's conflicted, he has this dual role as as as the head of the NIH supporter of scientific funding and then also inappropriately called to set or help set pandemic policy that should never have happened. There should be a bright line between those two roles. </s>

<s>[INST] Okay, so that means engineering, programming, your engineering them in the future. And in some sense, the definition of a robot is something you in part engineer and versus evolved. I mean it's such a fuzzy definition anyway in some sense. Many of the organisms within our body are kinds of robots. And I think robots is a weird line because it's we tend to see robots as the other. I think there will be a time in the future when there's going to be something that came to the civil rights movements for robots. But we'll talk about that later perhaps anyway. Um So how do you, can we just linger on it? How do you build a robot? What are we talking about here from from whence does it start? And how does it become the glorious. [/INST] Yeah. So just take one step back. One of the things that a lot of people get stuck on is they say, well uh you know, engineering requires new D. N. A. Circuits or it requires new nano materials. You know what the thing is? We are now moving from old school engineering which use passive materials. Right. The things that you know, wood metal, things like this that basically the only thing you can depend on is that they were going to keep their shape. That's it. They don't do anything else. You it's on you as an engineer to make them do everything they're going to do. And then there were active materials and now computation materials, this is a whole new era. These are a gentle materials. This is your your now collaborating with your substrate because your material has an agenda. These cells have you know, billions of years of evolution. They have goals, they have preferences. They're not just going to sit where you put them. </s><s>[INST] That's hilarious that you have to talk your material and to keep [/INST] that is exactly right. That is exactly right </s><s>[INST] there. It's like getting a bunch of cats or something and trying to organize the shape out of them. [/INST] It's funny, we're on the same page here because in the paper this is this is currently um just been accepted in nature by engineering. One of the figures I have is building a tower out of legos versus dogs. Right? So think about the difference, right? If you build out of legos you have full control over where it's gonna go. But if somebody knocks it over, it's game over with the dogs, you cannot just come and stack them. They're not going to stay that way. But the good news is that if you train them, then somebody knocks it over, they get right back up. So it's all right. So as an engineer, what you really want to know is what can I depend on this thing to do, Right? That's really, you know, a lot of people have definitions of robots as far as what they're made over how they got here. You know, design versus evolved whatever. I don't think any of that is useful. I think I think as an engineer, what you want to know is how much can I depend on this thing to do when I'm not around to micromanage? At what level of uh what level of dependency can I can I give this thing, how much agency does it have, which then tells you, what techniques do you use? So do you use micromanagement? Like you put everything where it goes? Do you train it? Do you give it signals to try to convince it to do things, right? How much you know, how intelligent is your substrate? And so now we're moving into this into this area where you're you're you're working with a gentle materials. That's a collaboration. That's not that's not old old style agency. It comes from the word agency. So, so basically the material has agency meaning that it has some some level of obviously not human level, but some level of preferences, goals, memories, ability to remember things too compute into the future, meaning anticipate. Um, you know, when you're working with cells, they have all of that to some to to various degrees. </s><s>[INST] Is that empowering or limiting? Having material has a mind of its own, literally. [/INST] I think it's both. Right? So it raises difficulties because it means that if you if you're using the old mindset, which is a linear um kind of extrapolation of what's going to happen, you're going to be surprised and shocked all the time, because biology does not do what we linearly expect materials to do. On the other hand, it's massively liberating. And so in the following way, I've argued that advances in regenerative medicine require us to take advantage of this because what it means is that you can get the material to do things that you don't know how to micromanage. So, just as a simple example, right? If you if you you had a rat and uh you wanted this rat to do a circus trick, put a ball in a little, you can do it the micromanagement way, which is try to control every neuron and try to play the thing like a puppet, right? And maybe someday that will be possible. Maybe or you can train the rat and this is why humanity for thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience, we have no idea what's behind what's between the ears of any animal. We were able to train these animals because once you recognize the level of agency of a certain system, you can use appropriate techniques. If you know the currency of motivation, reward and punishment, you know how smart it is, you know what kinds of things it likes to do? You are searching a much more, much smoother, much nicer problem space than if you try to micromanage the thing and then regenerate medicine when you're trying to get, let's say, an arm to grow back or an eye to repair cell birth defect or something. Do you really want to be controlling tens of thousands of genes at each point to try to micromanage it? Or do you want to find the high level modular controls? Let's say, build an arm here, You already know how to build an army. You did it before. Do it again. So that's, I think it's it's both it's both difficult and it challenges us to develop new ways of engineering and it's it's hugely empowering. </s>

<s>[INST] Well, but you were sort of commenting, I see, to the, the financial aspect of it. Like, why does it even make sense? [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] I'm thinking about the transformative effects of AI and what starts to ask, what is the, what is even education? Right. What do you suppose, what is the purpose of education? So one is to give you kind of a background knowledge on a bunch of different topics, but the other is to discover the thing you're truly passionate about and the thing you're really good at, such that you can make money and you can contribute to society and have a fulfilling life. [/INST] Yeah. And also learning to interact with other people, relationships are built, socializing, and so many other things as well. </s><s>[INST] But is that, you know, that is the big value of university. And maybe it should be called something else. [/INST] Yeah. Can you get that for less than 200K a year? Exactly. Or else? Yeah, no, it's a fair question. </s><s>[INST] A kind of social club. [/INST] And you know, one of the things I think about also is people who are well connected. I mean, this has always been, this isn't new, right? But if you're well connected and you have a sort of drive towards entrepreneurship and doing your own thing, and you're not pursuing a field that is very licensing dependent, like medicine or law, getting started four years earlier with some internships can be a privilege in some cases. But again, that's that path is available to the people that would likely do well, regardless of whether they went to college. And so it's a very privileged, self-selected group anyway. </s><s>[INST] Another question from Reddit. Ask David to explain why American style libertarianism is an unserious philosophy. [/INST] I don't know what they mean by American style libertarianism. I've talked before about these kind of utopian libertarians where, you know, we have we don't have police. You just kind of like hire a for profit company if you want protection. And if there's a conflict between two of these private security companies, then I don't know. You figure it out somehow. </s><s>[INST] So it's almost like anarchism. [/INST] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. If by I don't know what the question means by that American style libertarianism, but in general, my problems with libertarianism, as it is often presented, come from the work of sociology as well as human psychology, which is the reality that once you get a group that's bigger than one hundred and fifty people, you really have to start centralizing some decisions unless you're going to subdivide the one fifty endlessly into two seventy fives that now no longer have contact. But then that's not really one society. Now it's two. I've not seen good evidence. And I've read a fair bit about this, that once you get beyond one fifty, you can keep all decisions decentralized. And once you say some things need to be centralized, then it's a matter of how you do it. And it's going to be some version of government that conflicts with aspects of libertarianism. </s><s>[INST] Well, it could be companies, right? It could be it could be more market driven, which is the idea of anarchism, that you're not you don't give any centralized entity of monopoly over violence. And then if you think that the markets are efficient at delivering, especially in this twenty first century and beyond where a market could have perfect information about people. So one of the issues is that you can manipulate markets because there's not perfect information. But now in the digital age, we can we can be higher bandwidth participants in the market. So if you're choosing between different security companies or you're choosing between different providers, different services, you can do so more efficiently and more effectively and in the digital space. So you can kind of imagine it. But we haven't successfully done it without governments. [/INST] Yeah. And I think there's a practical once you get beyond one fifty, you also start specializing. It just is a matter of fact, you don't have everybody isn't growing their own food. Some people grow the food and other people do other things. And you come across a lot of the problems that started at the agricultural revolution. And whether you say that it's a company that's solving it or a government, the problems are going to be very similar. And I've not read anything that to my satisfaction explains how you deal with that. </s><s>[INST] Well, there's underlying principles of libertarianism, which is putting priority at the freedom of the individual. Right. And that's a compelling notion. [/INST] Yeah. Whenever I do these various political compass things that put you on two axes on the authoritarian libertarian axis, I am way down on the libertarian side as a left libertarian. So my tendencies are always anti-authoritarian and towards that option when it makes sense. </s><s>[INST] So I sympathize with that a lot. Another question from Reddit. Ask David what issues he disagrees with you on. Is there something? I have no idea. Okay, that's great. There you go. There's no issues. Perfect agreement. What's your view on Tesla? That's a good opportunity to ask. What do you think is strengths and weaknesses of Elon Musk? [/INST] You mentioned Twitter. Have you paid your $8 idea? Okay, that's great. I have not paid my dollars. I don't see the point in paying for it. I have no problem paying for services. I use a ton of services. I'll try the free. I'll go to the paid right now. So the way I used to use the verified feed was I would post a tweet and then the next day when I, you know, review what's going on in my social media, I would look at the replies to the tweet, which give me a mix of replies from verified and unverified people. But then I also look at the verified and see who that are verified public folks have responded to me or maybe I want to engage with or whatever the case may be. There's, I don't even understand why I would look at the verified feed anymore. So I never do because it's random folks who I don't </s>

<s>[INST] as a small little quirk of history, it seems like you're related to Jordan Peterson, thank you mentioned he's going through some rough stuff. Now, is there some common you can make about the roughness of the human journey ups and downs? [/INST] Well, I became an expert in Benzo withdrawal. Mhm. Like which is you took benzodiazepines and at some point they interact with gabby circuits, you know, the reduced anxiety and do 100 other things. Like, there's actually no known list of everything they do because they interact with so many parts of your body and then once you're on um you habituate to them and you're you're you have a dependency. It's not like you're a drug dependency, we're trying to get high, it's a it's a metabolic dependency. And then if you discontinue them, there's a funny thing called kindling, which is if you stop them and then go, you know, you'll have a horrible for all symptoms if you go back on them at the same level, you won't be stable and that unfortunately happened to him </s><s>[INST] because it's so deeply integrated to all the kinds of systems [/INST] in the body literally changes the size and numbers of neurotransmitter sites in your brain. So there's a there's a process called the Ashton Protocol where you taper it down slowly over two years. Two people go through that goes through unbelievable hell. And what Jordan's went through seemed to be worse because on advice of doctors, you know, we'll stop taking these and take this. It was the disaster. And he got some, you know, it was pretty tough. Um It seems to be doing quite a bit better intellectually. You can see those brain clicking back together. I spent a lot of time with, I've never seen anybody suffered so much. </s><s>[INST] Well his brain is also like this powerhouse, right? So I wonder does the brain that's able to think deeply about the world suffer more to these kinds of drawings like [/INST] I don't know, I've I've watched videos of people going through withdrawal. They all seem to suffer unbelievably. And you know, my heart goes out to everybody and there's some funny math about this. Some doctor said as best you can tell, you know, there's the standard recommendation is don't take them for more than months and then taper over a couple of weeks. Many doctors prescribe them endlessly, which is against the protocol, but it's common, right? And then Something like 75% of people when they taper, its you know, half the people have difficulty but 75% get off, Okay, 20% have severe difficulty and 5% have life threatening difficulty and if you're one of those is really bad and the stories that people have on this is heartbreaking and and tough. </s><s>[INST] So you put some of the fault of the doctors that just not know what the hell they're doing. [/INST] It's hard to say, it's it's one of those commonly prescribed things, like one doctor said, what happens is if you're prescribed them for a reason and then you have a hard time getting off the protocol basically says you're either crazy or dependent and you get kind of pushed into a different treatment regime, your drug drug addict or a psychiatric patient. And so like one doctor said, you know, I prescribed me from 10 years thinking I was helping my patients and I realized I was really harming them and you know, the awareness of that is slowly coming up. Um the fact that they're casually prescribed to people is horrible and it's bloody scary and some people are stepping on them, but they're on them for life. Like once, you know, it's another one of those drugs that but Benzos long range have real impacts on your personality. People talk about the Benzo bubble where you get disassociated from reality and your friends a little bit, it's really </s><s>[INST] terrible. The mind is terrifying. What we're talking about how, how the infinite possibility of fun, but like it's the infinite possibility is suffering too, which is one of the dangers of like expansion of the human mind. It's like I wonder if all the possible experiences that intelligent computer can have, is it mostly fun or is it mostly suffering? So like if you if you brute force expand the set of possibilities, like are you going to run into some trouble in terms of like torture and suffering and so on? Maybe our human brain is just protecting us from much more possible pain and suffering. Maybe the space of pain, it's like much larger than we could possibly imagine [/INST] and that the world is in the balance. You know, all the all the literature on religion and stuff is, you know, the struggle between good and evil is this balance for very finely tuned for reasons that are complicated. That's all, that's the law and philosophical conversations. </s><s>[INST] Uh, speaking of balance, that's complicated. I wonder because we're living through one of the more important moments in human history with this particular virus, it seems like pandemics have at least the ability to kill off most of the human population at their worst. And they're, they're just fascinating because there's so many viruses in this world. There's so many, I mean viruses basically around the world in the sense that uh they'd been around very long time. They're everywhere. They seem to be extremely powerful and they're just in the distributed kind of way. But at the same time they're not intelligent and they're not even living, Do you have a high level thoughts about this virus that uh like in terms of you being fascinated terrified or someone between [/INST] So I believe in frameworks right? So like one of them is the evolution like we're evolved creatures, right? Yes. And one of the things about evolution is it's hyper competitive and it's not competitive out of a sense of evil. It's competitive sense of there's endless variations and variations that work better when and then over time there's so many levels of that competition. You know like multi cellular life partly exists because of you know the competition between you know different kinds of life forms and we know sex partly exists to scramble our genes so that we have you know genetic variation against uh the invasion of the bacteria and the viruses. And it's endless Like I've had some funny statistic like the density of viruses and bacteria in the ocean is really high and one third of the bacteria die every day because the virus has invaded them. Like 1/3 of </s>

<s>[INST] for hobby. I got it. [/INST] Uh, that's like, </s><s>[INST] like Ted Bundy. [/INST] Um, he was </s><s>[INST] actually very charming [/INST] and, and didn't have any trouble attracting women, but his killing spree </s><s>[INST] started [/INST] shortly after he was rejected </s><s>[INST] by a [/INST] very high status, attractive </s><s>[INST] woman. [/INST] Uh, and he felt a rage </s><s>[INST] about [/INST] being rejected </s><s>[INST] by [/INST] her. Now who knows? That's an end of one. And we don't know if, you know, </s><s>[INST] you know, being rejected, [/INST] um, causes </s><s>[INST] serial killing per [/INST] se, but </s><s>[INST] sex and violence [/INST] are related in different ways. Um, I, uh, argue </s><s>[INST] and I haven't [/INST] studied the insult community in in detail. I </s><s>[INST] actually have an incoming [/INST] graduate student who's </s><s>[INST] going to start in the fall who who has been [/INST] studying the insults. And so he'll have a </s><s>[INST] more informed [/INST] picture. But my attitude is um, there are ways to improve your mate value if you're having trouble attracting a mate. There are ways to improve your mate value because a lot of things </s><s>[INST] that [/INST] women want intimate are improve </s><s>[INST] a ble, you know, [/INST] they women want guys who are um compassionate, who are understanding, who are ambitious, who who acquire resources </s><s>[INST] etcetera. [/INST] There who are physically fit. There are things you can do to improve your mate value. </s><s>[INST] And so I would [/INST] say rather than I would encourage in cells or the </s><s>[INST] insular communities rather [/INST] than being hostile towards women or being angry at women. </s><s>[INST] Um just do things [/INST] to improve your mate value and then you will be more successful at attracting women. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] I mean, some of it [/INST] that's a fascinating. So, um </s><s>[INST] your student will be studying [/INST] that there's a um </s><s>[INST] listen, I love the internet, the internet always [/INST] wins. And there's a fascinating aspect to which is just </s><s>[INST] humor. [/INST] And I </s><s>[INST] um I'm fascinated by seeing [/INST] The humor, whether it's four chan or reddit and all that kind of stuff </s><s>[INST] or [/INST] where people maybe </s><s>[INST] will self [/INST] identify as in cells </s><s>[INST] as a joke as a kind of [/INST] basically representing </s><s>[INST] the fact that, you know, it's [/INST] hard to get women. This is the </s><s>[INST] struggle, [/INST] the struggle and for women, it's hard to get a mate that they, you know, they're basically jokingly </s><s>[INST] representing [/INST] the challenges, </s><s>[INST] the difficulty of the mate selection process, that the [/INST] desirable </s><s>[INST] group is smaller than the entire [/INST] group. That's it. And they're joking about it. But then it's interesting </s><s>[INST] how quickly humor [/INST] again the dynamical </s><s>[INST] system, it can [/INST] turn into </s><s>[INST] anger and that on the internet. So [/INST] interesting to watch, </s><s>[INST] like how trolling [/INST] light </s><s>[INST] trolling is humor, but it can [/INST] turn into aggression. </s><s>[INST] And [/INST] I have just </s><s>[INST] seen it's weird, it's [/INST] weird how </s><s>[INST] this is true [/INST] on the internet, but you </s><s>[INST] also just look at the [/INST] dark aspects of </s><s>[INST] the 20th century. [/INST] They've been reading a lot about </s><s>[INST] how kind of [/INST] lighthearted things </s><s>[INST] turn [/INST] dark quickly. </s><s>[INST] And it's interesting, I I [/INST] don't know what to make of it because it's </s><s>[INST] basically sexual [/INST] frustration </s><s>[INST] that all humans [/INST] feel. It's, you know, </s><s>[INST] dating in general [/INST] can turn into </s><s>[INST] anger can turn [/INST] into sophisticated philosophical </s><s>[INST] constructs, [/INST] like about how the world </s><s>[INST] works of [/INST] who really is pulling </s><s>[INST] the strings. [/INST] And </s><s>[INST] that turns [/INST] some of the worst </s><s>[INST] crimes committed [/INST] by the nazis, </s><s>[INST] for example, or [/INST] by extremely </s><s>[INST] intelligent people [/INST] that </s><s>[INST] constructed models [/INST] of how the world </s><s>[INST] works. [/INST] And </s><s>[INST] there's there's something [/INST] about sexual </s><s>[INST] frustration is one of the really [/INST] powerful forces that could be </s><s>[INST] a catalyst for construction such [/INST] models and once you've </s><s>[INST] done that. [/INST] Mhm. </s><s>[INST] She gets a lot more serious and [/INST] it's no longer joke, it's </s><s>[INST] serious, but at the same time when you just [/INST] look from the surface, it's kind of jokes. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] it's weird. That's interesting [/INST] points that you're making. I think that this is one way in which evolution has built into us um </s><s>[INST] a [/INST] a feature which is really bad for our </s><s>[INST] overall happiness. [/INST] Uh and and that is that it's created </s><s>[INST] desires [/INST] that can never be fully </s><s>[INST] met. You [/INST] know, and that includes in the mating domain. So even with people who are successful in attracting, you know, somewhat desirable mates, maybe </s><s>[INST] they want, [/INST] you know, Gisele Bundchen or </s><s>[INST] some, you know, they [/INST] desire </s><s>[INST] things [/INST] that are there are women that are higher in mate value or or </s><s>[INST] a larger number [/INST] of partners than they can successfully attract. </s><s>[INST] And and in a way, I [/INST] mean these services </s><s>[INST] evolution [/INST] is built into these because they're motivational devices, they motivate </s><s>[INST] us to try to get what [/INST] we want, but it also makes us miserable or at least unhappy or dissatisfied </s><s>[INST] because [/INST] there are desires </s><s>[INST] that can never be [/INST] fulfilled. And this is and </s><s>[INST] this is mentioned, one more sex [/INST] difference. This desire </s><s>[INST] for sexual [/INST] variety, meaning a variety of different partners is </s><s>[INST] much much greater in men than [/INST] in women. </s><s>[INST] Um And so [/INST] that's why even like in in pornography </s><s>[INST] consumption, men [/INST] will like, </s><s>[INST] you know, go through [/INST] multiple, multiple, multiple um images </s><s>[INST] and sex scenes and so forth [/INST] compared compared to what women </s><s>[INST] who consume pornography go through. [/INST] But this desire for sexual variety is is something that makes </s><s>[INST] me miserable because [/INST] it's something that they can't, most of them unless you're a king or a desperate or um </s><s>[INST] you know [/INST] have </s><s>[INST] have a harem, it's [/INST] something that can never be </s><s>[INST] fulfilled [/INST] in everyday life. And so I even think that you know, you talked to men who are walking </s><s>[INST] down a city [/INST] block in Austin or new york city or san Francisco </s><s>[INST] or wherever [/INST] And they passed by, they could pass by six women and feel a sexual attraction to six different women in one </s><s>[INST] city block. [/INST] You </s><s>[INST] know [/INST] now. And so this is again where evolution has created in this desires that can never be fully met and revolution. </s><s>[INST] Well it's useful, [/INST] right? And the hilarious thing that this is always about my own </s><s>[INST] mind. But just [/INST] observing people once </s><s>[INST] You get that 10 or [/INST] that beautiful woman </s><s>[INST] that you've been lost, you take it for granted [/INST] to the next thing. They're classic cases like um I don't </s>

<s>[INST] every [/INST] particle has a chance per second of having its way functions spontaneously collapse. The chance is very small. For a typical particle, it will take hundreds of millions of years before it happens even once, But in a table or some Macroscopic object, there are way more than 100 million particles and they're all entangled with each other. So when one of them collapses collapses, it brings everything else along with it. There's a slight variation of this, that's a spontaneous collapse theory. There are also induced collapse theories like Roger Penrose thinks that when the gravitational difference between two parts of the wave function becomes too large, the wave functions uh collapses automatically. So those are basically, in my mind the three big alternatives many worlds, which is just, there's a wave function and always a basic schrodinger equation, hidden variables. There's a wave function that always obey the schrodinger equation, but there are also new variables or collapse theories which the wave function sometimes obey the schrodinger equation and sometimes it collapses. So you can see that the alternatives are more complicated in their formalism than many worlds is, but they are closer to our experience. </s><s>[INST] So just this moment of collapse, do you think of it as uh so is it way function fundamentally sort of probabilistic description of the world and its collapse, sort of reducing that part of the world into something deterministic? Where again, you can now describe the position and the velocity in the simple classical model? [/INST] Well, there is </s><s>[INST] how you think about collapse, [/INST] There's 1/4 category is a 4th contender. There's a mayor pete of quantum mechanical interpretations which are called epistemological terp rotations and what they say is all the way function is a way of making predictions for experimental outcomes. It's not mapping onto an element of reality in any real sense. And in fact two different people might have two different way functions for the same physical system because they know different things about it. Right? The wave function is really just a prediction mechanism. And then the problem with those epidemic interpretations is if you say okay, but it's predicting about what like what is the thing that is being predicted and they say no, no, no, that's not what we're here for. We're just here to tell you what the observational outcomes are going to be. </s><s>[INST] But the other the other interpretations kind of think that the way function is real. Yes, [/INST] that's right. So that's an antic interpretation of the wave function, ontology being the study of what is real, what exists as opposed to an epistemological interpretation of the wave function. Epistemology being the study of what we know. </s><s>[INST] Actually just love to see that debate on stage. [/INST] There was a version of it on stage at the World Science Festival a few years ago that you can look up </s><s>[INST] online on Youtube. [/INST] Yeah, it's on </s><s>[INST] Youtube. Okay, awesome. [/INST] I wouldn't </s><s>[INST] get and watch it. [/INST] Many were won by one. I don't know, there was no vote, there was no vote, but those, there's brian Greene was the moderator and David Albert stood up for spontaneous collapse and Shelly Goldstein was there for hidden variables and Rudiger shock was there for epidemic approaches? </s><s>[INST] Why do you, I think you mentioned it but just elaborate. Why do you find many worlds so compelling? [/INST] Well there's two reasons actually. One is like I said it is the simplest right? It's like the most bare bones, austere pure version of quantum mechanics and I am someone who is very willing to put a lot of work into mapping the formalism onto reality. I'm less willing to complicate the formalism itself. But the other big reason is that there's something called modern physics with quantum fields and quantum gravity and holography and space time doing things like that. And when you take any of the other versions of quantum theory, they bring along classical baggage, all of the other versions of quantum mechanics, prejudice or privilege. Some version of classical reality like locations in space. Okay. And I think that that's a barrier to doing better at understanding the theory of everything and understanding quantum gravity in the emergence of spacetime. Whenever if you change your theory from, you know, here's a harmonic oscillator. Oh there's a spin, here's an electromagnetic field in hidden variable theories or dynamical collapse theories you have to start from scratch. You have to say like well what are the hidden variables for this theory or how does it collapse or whatever where as many worlds as plug and play, you tell me the theory and I can give you as many worlds version. So when we have a situation like we have with gravity and spacetime where the classical description seems to break down in a dramatic way, then I think you should start from the most quantum theory that you have, which is really many </s><s>[INST] worlds. So start with the quantum theory and try to build up a model of spacetime, the emergence of space time. Okay, so I thought spacetime was fundamental. [/INST] Yeah. So this </s><s>[INST] sort of dream that Einstein had that everybody had and everybody has of, you know, the theory of everything. So how do we build up from many worlds from quantum mechanics? Uh a model of space time model of gravity? [/INST] Well, yeah, I mean, let me first mention very quickly why we think it's necessary. You know, We've had gravity in the form that Einstein bequeathed it to us for over 100 years now, like 1915 and 1916, he put general relativity in the final form. So gravity is the curvature of space time and there's a field that pervades all the universe that tells us how curved spacetime is </s><s>[INST] and that's a fundamentally classical, [/INST] that's totally classical. Right. Exactly. But we also have a formalism, an algorithm for taking a classical theory and quantum izing it, this is how we get quantum electrodynamics for example and it could be tricky. I mean you think you're quantized something that that means taking a classical theory and promoting it to a quantum mechanical theory, um but you can run into problems. So they ran into problems and they did that with electromagnetism namely that certain quantities were infinity and you don't like infinity. Right? So uh Feinman and Tomonaga and Swinger won the Nobel prize for teaching us how to deal with the infinities. And then ken Wilson wanted another Nobel prize for saying you shouldn't have been worried about those infinities after all. But still, that was the it's always the thought that that's how you will make a good quantum theory. You'll start with a classical theory and quantized it. So, if we have a classical theory, general relativity, we can quantized it or we can try to but we run into even bigger problems with gravity than we ran into with electromagnetism. And so far those problems are insurmountable. We have not been able to get a successful theory of gravity quantum gravity by starting with classical general relativity and quantum izing it. Um and there's evidence that there's a good reason why this is true that the whatever the quantum theory of gravity is, it's not a field theory, it's something that has weird non local features built into it somehow that we don't understand, We get this idea from black holes and Hawking radiation and information conservation and a whole bunch of other ideas I talked about in the book. So if that's true, if the fundamental theory isn't even local in the sense that an ordinary quantum field theory would be that we just don't know where to start in terms of getting a classical precursor and quantized in it. So the only sensible thing, it's at least the next obvious sensible thing to me would be to say, okay, let's just start intrinsically quantum and work backwards, see if we can find a classical limit. </s>

<s>[INST] know when it, it sort of lost its utility to me. And then, yeah, sorry to interrupt, but the idea is if everybody who's human pays the eight dollars, it shows to you that it's not [/INST] bots. It's at least humans from the reports about the number of people that have bought the blue check Mark. I think we may be a thousand years from enough signups in order to make that sort </s><s>[INST] of like a reality. I don't know. That was the idea. It's an interesting idea. Honestly, I know [/INST] that was the idea. It's an. From my experience, the obviously, I was seeing all sorts of attack comments, some of which were, I'm sure, from bots. But I'm ignoring all of those comments anyway. So it really didn't affect my experience that much. I mean, here's the thing about Elon and I say this people sometimes like David, you obviously hate Elon or you obviously love Elon. I was an investor in Tesla starting in 2015. I've since sold all my shares. Great run. I'm on my second Tesla right now. I probably won't get a third one because I think that electric vehicle technology is now maturing such that when my lease is up, I'm going to have many more options with the range and charging network that's important to me. But I could be wrong. Maybe, you know, I don't know. I have no the cult of personality around people. They mean nothing to me. So for me, it's just like people are people. Nobody has only good ideas. Fine. I think that what Elon Musk did accelerating and pushing forward the battery and electric vehicle technology is unbelievable. It's it's a it's a one person wrecking ball in the best sense of saying we're not going to slow play this and do. OK, now Toyota has a Toyota hasn't actually entered, but now whoever we've got a 90 mile range car and next year it'll be 110. And it's just like we're doing this right now. You can compete or you can opt out and look at what's happened. Fantastic. On the Twitter side of things, I don't really get the whole plan. I don't know if it started maybe as kind of a goof of some kind. And it developed into I guess I have to buy it. And I think something about it ended up with there was a clause invoked where I think he did try to get out of buying it, but then was forced to to some degree. He was forced. The way Twitter used to work was you followed people. And when you looked at your feed, you either saw the posts from the people you were following in reverse chronological order or posts from the people you followed algorithmically tailored to what you're most likely to want to see. And if you didn't follow someone, you generally wouldn't see their posts unless it was like a sponsored tweet or someone you follow quoted or retweeted them. Fine. The for you feed TikTok, I believe, first had a so called for you feed. The idea is this is stuff you might like based on I don't know what either demographic data about you, your other habits, whatever. And so it's useless to me. It's just </s><s>[INST] it's just basically mostly right wing content that that is not an interesting thing. That is, I mean, so the the signals that are used to generate the for you page is looking at all your your likes, all your comments, all your blocks and mutes and all that is show that I mean, [/INST] I don't know why it's looking up. OK, so it's supposed to be very pleasant for you. So that I mean, I don't know why it's OK. I'm sure other people go, wow, this for you thing is awesome. And like, if you had insert some right wing or sitting here, they would go. Twitter used to suppress right wing voices, and now finally they're getting the fair shake that they deserve </s><s>[INST] in the for you feet. OK, I mean, I wonder if there's left wing folks setting their feelings of Elon aside that are enjoying the for you page. That's a really important question because it's supposed to be people on the left and people on the right should be enjoying the for you page. [/INST] Sure. Yeah, I mean, so for me, my thought on Elon is some incredible successes. I don't know about Twitter. I do think that I don't believe Elon is a right winger. And when you see interviews with him, certainly at least socially and in many ways culturally seems very moderate or even somewhat on the left in my experience. So I don't think it's Elon's a right winger. I don't that's not an interesting critique. It does seem, though, that throughout the Twitter escapade, he certainly ended up closer to some voices that may be influencing him in a particular way. That's giving some people that impression, you know, but as far as like the Elon hate or the Elon love, it's just it's just a person who's done some interesting things, some of which I like and some of which I could kind of leave aside. </s><s>[INST] I have seen folks drift towards the right more in response to just the viciousness of attacks from the left. [/INST] Like who? I'm all Elon. And so like who? So you do you do think he's drifted towards the right? </s>

<s>[INST] a planet and we think that with [/INST] as far as we can tell with enough </s><s>[INST] certainty that they would never [/INST] be able to leave their </s><s>[INST] planet and [/INST] then the sun eventually would </s><s>[INST] engulf that planet wherever that planet might be in some [/INST] solar system. </s><s>[INST] But if we had a way to help [/INST] them, their culture, </s><s>[INST] their science, their technology, everything about a different species [/INST] to </s><s>[INST] survive, would we not interfere, interfere? [/INST] I think that would actually </s><s>[INST] be wrong to say, well we can save [/INST] this this life here </s><s>[INST] and we decide not to. We decide [/INST] after </s><s>[INST] millions and billions of years past and we know [/INST] the sun will engulf that </s><s>[INST] planet, like what will happen with [/INST] our planet. And we don't interfere. </s><s>[INST] That's you know, watching a train hit someone on the tracks and not moving the train. [/INST] So </s><s>[INST] in terms of the effort of humans becoming a multi planetary species. Mhm. In terms [/INST] of priorities, how much would you </s><s>[INST] allocate to try to make contact with aliens and getting their help? And if we look at the next 500 beyond years and just [/INST] versus option number two. Really </s><s>[INST] just focusing on setting up the party on our own engineering [/INST] are on </s><s>[INST] our own. Um the [/INST] genome, the </s><s>[INST] biology of humanity. the ai [/INST] collaborating </s><s>[INST] with humans. Just that all the engineering [/INST] challenges and </s><s>[INST] opportunities that were um [/INST] we're exploring. I'm </s><s>[INST] focused in my lab of course a lot [/INST] on the engineering of genomes, </s><s>[INST] the monitoring of astronauts during long missions. You know, reaching out to other alien. We've been doing [/INST] reach out to aliens since the </s><s>[INST] first radio waves have been broadcast. We're doing some of it. But to do it really made it sound like your lab [/INST] is mostly focused on </s><s>[INST] biology, but you also reach out [/INST] occasionally aliens occasionally when they </s><s>[INST] visit they had they bring [/INST] their whiskey and I we </s><s>[INST] have a drink. But the uh [/INST] I think </s><s>[INST] we we can do, we've been broadcasting into space for, you know, at [/INST] this point almost a century getting close to </s><s>[INST] and [/INST] you know, so, but it's not </s><s>[INST] been structured. So I think [/INST] it's very cheap and easy to send out structured messages um, like what Carl Sagan wrote about </s><s>[INST] in contact during prime [/INST] numbers and sending those out </s><s>[INST] to indicate intelligence. Uh, so these things [/INST] we can do that I think are very cheap and very easy. So we should we should do some of that. </s><s>[INST] We can walk in [/INST] chew gum at the same time. This is one of the biggest critiques people </s><s>[INST] often say of space research and [/INST] even space flight in general is it's too expensive, shouldn't we solve </s><s>[INST] poverty, shouldn't [/INST] we cure diseases. And the answer is always </s><s>[INST] as it always has been, is [/INST] that you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You </s><s>[INST] can, you know passed the civil rights [/INST] act and go to the moon in the same </s><s>[INST] decade. You can improve. [/INST] Um, and and you get rid of structural </s><s>[INST] inequality while getting to the [/INST] moon and mars in this decade. So I think I think we can do both. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, they kind of help [/INST] each other. There's </s><s>[INST] sometimes criticism of [/INST] like ridiculous science like studying penguins </s><s>[INST] or something or studying the [/INST] patterns of birds or fish and so on. Some congressmen </s><s>[INST] stands up and says this is a waste of taxpayer [/INST] dollars and then, but someone for example CRISPR was pure </s><s>[INST] research for 20 [/INST] five years </s><s>[INST] now it's a household word and and students are editing genomes in [/INST] high school but it was just pure </s><s>[INST] research on weird bacteria living [/INST] actually in salt </s><s>[INST] hyper saline lakes [/INST] and rivers </s><s>[INST] for decades and, and then [/INST] eventually became a massive </s><s>[INST] therapeutic which is like the [/INST] curing of diseases in this past year. And there's stuff that you </s><s>[INST] discover as part of the [/INST] research that you didn't </s><s>[INST] anticipate that have [/INST] nothing to do with </s><s>[INST] the actual research [/INST] like oceanography </s><s>[INST] uh, [/INST] is </s><s>[INST] one of the interesting things about that [/INST] whole field is that it's a huge amount </s><s>[INST] of data in neuroscience to actually. So [/INST] you could discover computer science, </s><s>[INST] things [/INST] like machine learning </s><s>[INST] things or even data [/INST] storage manipulation, </s><s>[INST] distributed, [/INST] compute things </s><s>[INST] by having to forcing yourself [/INST] to get something done about on the </s><s>[INST] oceanography side. That's [/INST] how you invent the </s><s>[INST] internet and [/INST] and and all those kinds of things. So </s><s>[INST] to me, [/INST] aliens looking for </s><s>[INST] aliens out there [/INST] in the universe </s><s>[INST] is a [/INST] motivator that </s><s>[INST] just inspires, inspires [/INST] everybody, young people, old people, </s><s>[INST] scientists, artists, [/INST] um, engineers, entrepreneurs, everybody. </s><s>[INST] That somehow [/INST] the </s><s>[INST] that line between [/INST] fear and beauty </s><s>[INST] because [/INST] we're aliens are like </s><s>[INST] perfectly [/INST] merged basically because it's, we don't know. I mean for </s><s>[INST] you, let's start [/INST] talking about primitive alien life. Are you excited by it </s><s>[INST] or are you terrified? [/INST] I want to make a lotion out of it. I think it'd </s><s>[INST] be great if it's alien life assuming it's safe. But I'm very excited. [/INST] It doesn't have to be. You just said a half sentence presuming </s><s>[INST] it's safe. That's the fundamental [/INST] question. </s><s>[INST] So if you could [/INST] just presuming it's safe. So, </s><s>[INST] I think, you know, [/INST] we we have this, uh, this </s><s>[INST] beginning of [/INST] some planetary protection is </s><s>[INST] happening now is we're going to send [/INST] we're bringing rocks back from </s><s>[INST] Mars in 2033 of logos according to [/INST] plan. But </s><s>[INST] there's always a danger. [/INST] What if you bring this back and what if it's alive, what if it </s><s>[INST] will kill all of [/INST] humanity? Or Michael Crichton wrote a book, the Andromeda strain about this very </s><s>[INST] idea [/INST] and we </s><s>[INST] could, but it [/INST] hopefully won't. And the </s><s>[INST] only way you can, [/INST] you know, really engage that is the same way we do with any infectious agent here on earth. Right? If it's </s><s>[INST] a new pathogen a new [/INST] organism you do </s><s>[INST] it slowly carefully you often do it [/INST] with levels of containment. </s><s>[INST] So [/INST] you know and it's gonna </s><s>[INST] be probably have to be where [/INST] some pioneers go and would be for example on mars there might be other organisms there that only get activated once </s>

<s>[INST] I guess that's a that's a primal fear of almost almost kind of uh a kind of mortality. So around the time you said you work with it's stanford with Ed Feigenbaum. So let's look at that one person throughout his history. Clearly key person, one of the many in the history of I how has he changed in general, around him? How stanford changed in the last how many years are we talking about [/INST] here since </s><s>[INST] 65 6, 65. So maybe it doesn't have to be about him. It could be bigger. But because he was a key person in expert systems for example, how is that? How are these folks who you've interviewed In the 70s 79 changed through the decades? Mm [/INST] In Ed's case. I know him well. We are dear friends. We see each other every month or so. He told me that when machines who think first came out, he really thought all the front matter was kind of bologna? Mm And 10 years later he said, no, I see what you're getting at. Yes. This is an impulse that has been, this has been a human impulse for thousands of years to create something outside the human cranium that has intelligence. Uh I think it's very hard when you're down at the algorithmic level and you're just trying to make something work which is hard enough. Just step back and think of the big picture. It reminds me of when I was in santa fe, I knew a lot of archaeologists which was a hobby of mine. And I would say, yeah, yeah, well you can look at the shards and say, oh this came from this tribe and this came from this trade route and so on. But what about the big picture? And a very distinguished archaeologist said to me, they don't think that way, you know, they're trying to match the shard to the to where it came from. That's where did this corn remainder of this corn come from? Was it grown here? Was it grown elsewhere? And I think this is part of the ai any scientific field. Uh you're so busy doing the hard work and it is hard work that you don't step back and say, well now let's talk about the, you know </s><s>[INST] the picture meaning of all this. Yes. So none of the even Minsky and McCarthy, they [/INST] owe those guys did. Yeah, the founding fathers did </s><s>[INST] early on or [/INST] pretty early on that they had but in a different way from how I looked at it. The two cognitive psychologists, Newell and Simon, they wanted to imagine reforming cognitive psychology so that we would really, really understand the brain. Minsky was more speculative and john McCarthy saw it as I think I'm doing, doing him right by this. He really saw it as a great boon for human beings to have this technology. And that was reason enough to do it. And he had wonderful, wonderful fables about how if you do the mathematics, you will see that these things are really good for human beings. And if you had a technological objection, he had an answer, a technological answer, but here's how we could get over that and then blah blah blah blah. And one of his favorite things was what he called the literary problem, which of course he presented to me several times that is everything in literature. There are conventions in literature. One of the conventions is that you have uh a villain and a hero and the hero in most literature is human and the villain in most literature is a machine. And he said that's just not the way it's going to be, but that's the way we're used to it. So when we tell stories about ai it's always with this paradigm, I thought yeah, he's right. You know, looking back the classics are you are certainly the machines trying to overthrow the humans. Frankenstein is different Frankenstein is a creature, he never he never has a name. Frankenstein of course is the guy who created him, the human dr Frankenstein. This creature wants to be loved, wants to be accepted. And it is only when Frankenstein turns his head in fact runs the other way and the creature is without love that he becomes the monster that he later becomes. </s><s>[INST] So who's the villain in Frankenstein? It's unclear, [/INST] right? So it is unclear. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] It's really the people who drive him by driving him away, they bring out the worst. [/INST] That's right. They give him no human solace and uh he is driven away. You're right. Uh He becomes at one point the friend of a blind man and they he serves this blind man and they become very friendly. But when the sighted people of the blind man's family commit ah you got a monster here. So it's it's very didactic in its way. And what I didn't know is that mary Shelley and Percy Shelley were great readers of the literature surrounding abolition in the United States, the abolition of slavery and they picked that up wholesale um you know, you are making monsters of these people because you won't give them the respect and love that they deserve. </s><s>[INST] Do you have if we get philosophical for a second, do you worry that once we create machines that are a little bit more intelligent. Let's look at Roomba that vacuums cleaner, that that this darker part of human nature where we abuse uh the other the somebody who's different will come out [/INST] I don't worry about it. I could imagine it happening. Uh But I think that what ai has to offer the human race will be so attractive that yeah people will be won over. </s>

<s>[INST] Can I ask your opinion on something here? What in terms of the Times coming back in terms of twitter being the editorial board for prestigious journalistic organizations? Um what's the importance of the role of mr Elon musk in this? So um you know it's all fun and games but here's a human who tweets about the importance of freedom of speech and buys twitter. What are your thoughts on the influence, the positive and the negative possible consequences of this particular action? [/INST] So you know, if he is going to succeed in if he's going to be one of the major reasons why we de carbonized quickly and why we get to mars then I'm willing to cut him a lot of slack. Um so I have an overall positive view of him now where I'm concerned and where I'm critical is we're in the middle of a raging culture war and this culture war is making our institutions stupid, it's making them fail. This culture where I think could destroy our country and by destroying I mean we could descend into constant constitutional crises a lot more violence, you know? Not that we're gonna disappear now that we're going to kill each other. But I think there will be a lot more violence. So we're in the middle of this raging culture war, It's possibly turning to violence. You need to not add fuel to the fire. And the fact that he declared that he's going to be a republican and the democrats are the bad party. Um, and you know, as an individual citizen, he's entitled to his opinion of course, but as an influential citizen, he should at least be thoughtful and more importantly, companies need. Companies need and I think would benefit from a Geneva convention for the culture war in which because they're all being they're all being damaged by the culture. We're coming to the company's what we need to get to, I hope is a place where companies do they have they have strong ethical obligations about the effects that they cause, about how they treat their employees about their supply chain. They have strong ethical obligations, but they should not be weighing in on cultural issues. </s><s>[INST] Well, if I can read the exact tweet because part of the tweet, I like he said in the past, I voted democrat because they were mostly the kind the kindness party, but they have become the party of division and hate. So I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. And then he finishes with now watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold. Okay, uh [/INST] what do you make of that? Like what do you think he was thinking that he came out so blatantly as a partisan </s><s>[INST] because he's probably communicating with the board with the people inside twitter and he's clearly seeing the lean and he's responding to that lean, he's he's also opening the door to the to the potential bringing back um the former president onto the platform and also bringing back which is probably looking at the numbers of the people who are behind truth social saying that okay, it seems that there's a strong lean in twitter in terms of the left. Um and in fact, from what I see, it seems like um the current operation of twitter is the the extremes of the left get outraged by something and the extremes at the right point out how the left is ridiculous, like that seems to be the mechanism and and and it's it's um that's the source of the drama and then the left gets very mad at the right that points out the ridiculousness and there's this vicious kind of cycle, that's [/INST] the polarization cycle, that's what that's what we're in. </s><s>[INST] There's something that happened here that's there's a shift where there's a decline, I would say in both parties towards being shitty, [/INST] look what everything with the party is, that's not the issue. The issue is should the most important ceo in America the ceo of some of our biggest and most important companies. So let's yeah, let's imagine, let's imagine five years from now, two different worlds in one world. The ceo of every Fortune 500 company has said I'm a republican because I hate those douche bags or I'm a democrat because I hate those nazi Racists. That's one world where everybody declare everybody puts up a thing in their window. Everybody is its cultural everywhere. All the time. 24 hours a day. You pick a doctor based on whether he's red or blue. Everything is culture war. That's one possible future which we're headed towards the other is we say you know what political conflict should be confined to political spaces. There is a room for protest but you don't go protesting at people's private homes, you don't go threatening their Children, You don't go doxing them. We have to have channels that are not culture war all the time. When you go shopping, When you go to a restaurant, you shouldn't be yelled and screamed at um when you buy a product you should be able to buy products from an excellent company. You shouldn't have to always think what's the Ceo, what is that? I mean what an insane world. But that's where we're heading. So I think that Ellen did a really bad thing in in in in launching that tweet. That was I think really throwing fuel on the fire and setting a norm in which businesses are gonna get even more politicized than they are </s><s>[INST] and you're saying specifically the problem was that he picked a side [/INST] as the head of yes, as the Ceo, as a head of several major companies of, you know, of course we can find out what his views are. You know, it's not like it's just, I mean actually with him it may be hard to know, but you know, it's not that a Ceo can't be a partisan or have views but to publicly declare it in that way. In such an really insulting way. This is throwing fuel on the fire and it's setting a precedent that corporations are major players in the </s>

<s>[INST] But it also shows that there's the happy ending, that it does end on a good note that it does get infinitely infinitely better. Um and that I think there's a, I don't like you said there were responsibility, but there is um an opportunity for those of us who did dodge that bullet to give testimony to these people and more importantly to give testimony to the people who are going through this now. So you know, one of the reasons I, you know, talk about north Korea so much why I wrote Dear Reader is because it's very easy and this is human nature. I'm not condemning people. I don't think that's just how people are wired when you see an asian country with Asian people and things are you know, bad over there. You know, I think in the west it's like oh you know Asia, they're all crazy, they're they're wacky. They, you know, they eat dogs or so and so forth some weird stereotype and they think of them as kind of Martians. So it's important for people who aren't of that kind of ancestry to kind of speak on behalf of these people because it's very different how just people just natural react when you have a westerner talking about this instead of becoming their, you know them over there, it becomes, you know, this could have been uh us very easily. I have a friend Peter, they had ski great dude. And I was showing him photos when I was in Pyongyang and he goes, this looks like a Russian city with asian people, it was completely disturbed him. So you know that was one of the reasons I did go to north Korea because that was as close as I would get to see what your family went through to see what my family went through and they're still living under this regime. And one of the things I fought very hard to do with your reader, which I was successful and amazingly and it just, I said like I could die now like I feel like if you make it just moves need a little bit then you kind of uh pay your due for your time here on this earth to have it changed from being a laughing stock, you know, and I think team America did a good job, they made kim jong il into a clown and they made a joke of it, but you're going from nothing to joke. So at least now people are aware of it that it exists, right? And then I and many others took it from a joke to like guys, this is really, really, really bad and none of us can even appreciate how bad it is. And I think now there is an understanding other than a few people who are just looking at through a trump lens and wanting trump to fail because trump's and asshole, that's fine to be like these poor people. And it's really unfortunate because there's a segment of Western culture who thinks that correctly, often when you're complaining about or discussing the plight of another country, that's just your prelude to war and an excuse to invade. Like the kurds in Syria. You know, we're talking about if we're not in Syria tomorrow, it's gonna be another genocide, blah blah. I'm not saying let's invade North Korea and things like that. All I'm saying is, you know, thank God that this isn't your life. I bring this up all the time. The woman who was my guide when I was there, I'm aware of what she's up to now. She's still, she's extremely rich by North korean um standards, but she'll never be in a position to buy medicine. She'll never be in a position to go on a vacation, uh, things that you and I just, you know, whatever, she, she can't go on the internet. Uh, she can't get encyclopedia, uh she can't better herself as a person other than through what the state allows and meaning better yourself as a person in service to the state. So I mean there's it's also frustrating because there's only so much that I can do as an individual. [/INST] What's your takeaway about human nature, from looking at north Korea and looking at how the rest of the world is looking at north Korea. </s>

<s>[INST] It's all beautiful. Now you say... The underlying fabric is the model of that particular theory's fields, like you keep [/INST] saying fields. Those are quantum fields. Those are different from classical fields. A field is something like you say the temperature field in this room. It's like there is a value of temperature at every point around the room. Or you can say the wind field would be the vector direction of the wind at every point. It's continuous. Yes. And that's a classical field. The quantum field is a much more mathematically elaborate kind of thing, and I should explain that one of the pictures of quantum mechanics that's really important is, in classical physics, one believes that definite things happen in the world. You pick up a ball, you throw it. The ball goes in a definite trajectory that has certain equations of motion. It goes in a parabola, whatever else. In quantum mechanics, the picture is definite things don't happen. Instead, what happens is this whole structure of all many different paths being followed and we can calculate certain aspects of what happens, certain probabilities of different outcomes and so on. And you say, well, what really happened? What's really going on? What's the underlying story? How do we turn this mathematical theory that we can calculate things with into something that we can really understand and have a narrative about? And that's been really, really hard for quantum mechanics. My friend Dick Feynman always used to say nobody understands quantum mechanics, even though he'd made his whole career out of calculating things about quantum mechanics. </s><s>[INST] And so it's a little bit of a continuum, but nevertheless, it's what the quantum field theory is very, very accurate at predicting a lot of the physical phenomena. [/INST] So it works. Yeah. But there are things about it. It has certain, when we apply it, the standard model of particle physics, for example, which we apply to calculate all kinds of things, it works really well, and you say, well, it has certain parameters. It has a whole bunch of parameters, actually. You say, why does the muon particle exist? Why is it 206 times the mass of the electron? We don't know. </s><s>[INST] No idea. But so the standard model of physics is one of the models that's very accurate for describing three of the fundamental forces of physics. It's looking at the world of the very small. And then there's back to the neighbor of gravity, of general relativity, and in the context of a theory of everything, what's traditionally the task of the unification of these theories? [/INST] Well, I mean, the issue is you try to use the methods of quantum field theory to talk about gravity, and it doesn't work, just like there are photons of light. So there are gravitons, which are the particles of gravity. And when you try and compute the properties of the particles of gravity, the mathematical tricks that get used in working things out in quantum field theory don't work. So that's been a fundamental issue. And when you think about black holes, which are a place where the structure of space has sort of rapid variation and you get kind of quantum effects mixed in with effects from general relativity, things get very complicated and there are apparent paradoxes and things like that. And people have, you know, there have been a bunch of mathematical developments in physics over the last, I don't know, 30 years or so, which have kind of picked away at those kinds of issues and got hints about how things might work. But it hasn't been, you know, the other thing to realize is, as far as physics is concerned, it's just like his general relativity, his quantum field theory, you know, be happy. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so do you think there's a quantization of gravity, the quantum gravity, what do you think of efforts that people have tried to, yeah, what do you think in general of the [/INST] efforts of the physics community to try to unify these laws? So I think what's interesting, I mean, I would have said something very different before what's happened with our physics project. I mean, you know, the remarkable thing is what we've been able to do is to make from this very simple, structurally simple underlying set of ideas, we've been able to build this, you know, very elaborate structure that's both very abstract and very sort of mathematically rich. And the big surprise, as far as I'm concerned, is that it touches many of the ideas that people have had. So in other words, things like string theory and so on, Twister theory, it's like the, you know, we might have thought, I had thought we're out on a prong, we're building something that's computational, it's completely different from what other people have done. But actually, it seems like what we've done is to provide essentially the machine code that, you know, these things are various features of domain specific languages, so to speak, that talk about various aspects of this machine code. And I think this is something that to me is very exciting because it allows one both for us to provide sort of a new foundation for what's been thought about there, and for all the work that's been done in those areas to give us more momentum to be able to figure out what's going on. Now, you know, people have sort of hoped, oh, we're just going to be able to get string theory to just answer everything that hasn't worked out. And I think we now kind of can see a little bit about just sort of how far away certain kinds of things are from being able to explain things. Some things, one of the big surprises to me, actually, literally just got a message about one aspect of this is the, you know, it's turning out to be easier. I mean, this project has been so much easier than I could ever imagine it would be. That is, I thought we would be, you know, just about able to understand the first 10 to the minus 100 seconds of the universe. And you know, it would be 100 years before we get much further than that. It's just turned out, it actually wasn't that hard. </s>

<s>[INST] instructed us. Yeah, it does seem like in the research that uh the effectiveness of psychedelics always comes with the integration where you use it, just like you said as a catalyst for thinking through stuff. It's not it's not going to be, I don't even know if google maps, oh maybe maybe google maps is the right analogy, but it doesn't do the driving for you. You still you still have to do the driving. Uh it just kind of gives you the directions. Uh So after you come come down from the trip or whatever, he still has to drive. There's other tools that are kind of interesting, We've been talking about this um uh at the psychological level, but there's also a neuroscience perspective that if we kind of like go past the skull into the brain with neurons firing. There's ideas of brain computer interfaces. First of all, there's a whole field of neuroscience that's kind of zooming in and studying the firing of the brain, the firing of neurons in the brain, of how from those uh neurons emerges all the things that we think that make us human. That's a fascinating exploration of the human mind. That's of course where the psychedelics have the chemical, the biochemical effects on, on those neurons, there's ideas of brain computer interfaces, which, you know, if you look at, especially when your link is doing with this long term vision, with the mosque and your link, they they hope to expand, he calls it a wizard. Hat they uh this is back to the humor and the internet thing, the wizard hat that expands the capabilities, the capacity of the human mind. Do you think there's something there or is the human mind so infinitely complex that um we're quite a long way away from expanding the capabilities of the human mind uh through technology versus something like psychedelics. [/INST] I wonder how Terence McKenna would answer that question. Um you know, he looked to shamans as kind of the the scientists, the high magicians of the high archaic past and the far flung future. I'm not going to discount, you know, more about ai than I do, so I'm not going to discount it, but I do think that a I paired with um the sacred recovery, right? Um the archaeology of consciousness, um, and these and these states, these archaic techniques of ecstasy that were practiced across time. I think that's a winning combination. Um you know, part of what I do in the book is just I try and lay out the set and setting that's often talk about with psychedelics. I mean, so maybe psychedelics and the right ai environments going to work. I think it probably work a lot better with that myth and ritual incorporated. So the reason it looses worked for 2000 years. Um, and let's assume the psychedelic hypothesis has some merit to it. Um, but I think the reason it worked is because you were born into a mythology, you were born into a story about demeter and persephone and you waited your entire life to meet them in the flesh. So you weren't just preparing for a few months, It was a lifetime of expectation, anticipation, ritual preparation. Um, in fact, some of the early church fathers made fun of the Greeks for essentially just picking people's curiosity and revving up the anticipation, which has something to do with the outcome by the way. But in other words, I think we need to create a new mythology Around this. I don't think you, you pop into a laboratory, I don't think you pop into a retreat center um from one day to the next. I think that in my own case, I feel like I've been preparing 12 years for psychedelics and I'm still preparing, including in today's conversation, I'm learning new things and uh, I'm willing to explore it together with the computer interface. But I, but I do think ritual is a gigantic part of this. And even McKenna would say that I'll paraphrase him by saying that if you'd met someone who didn't know where they were Between the years 1995 and 2005, you would describe them as a fairly damaged person and yet who among us knows what was happening in Western civilization between 900 and 1300, let alone 2500 years ago. So this is in many ways the profit of the psychedelic renaissance saying that history has lessons and I don't think they're superficial lessons. I think it cuts to the very core of how and why Western civilization came to be born. </s>

<s>[INST] If we look at human nature, you're saying the fundamental big thing that we need to consider is our capacity capability to reason. [/INST] So to me, reason is this massive evolutionary achievement in quotes, right? Um if you think about any other sophisticated animal, everything has to be coded. Everything has to be written in in the hardware, it has to be there and they have to have a solution for every outcome. And if there's no solution animal dies, typically the animal suffers in some way, human beings have this capacity of self program, They have this capacity. There's not it's not a a couple of russell in the sense that there's nothing there. Obviously we have a nature, obviously our minds, our brains are structured in a particular way, but given that we have the ability to turn it on or turn it off, we have the ability to commit suicide to to reject our nature, to work against our interests, not to use the tool that evolution has provided us with, which is this mind, which is reason. So that choice, that fundamental choice, you know, uh Hamlet says it right to be or not to be, but to be or not to be, is to think or not to think, to engage or not to engage the focus are not the focus, you know, in in the morning when you get up, you kind of, you know, you're not, you're not really completely there. You're kind of out of focus and stuff. It requires an act of will to say, okay, I'm awake, I've got stuff to do. Some people never do that. Some people live in that haze and they never engage that mind. And when you, when you're sitting and try to solve a complex computer program problem or a math problem, you have to turn something on, you have to in a sense, it exerts certain energy to focus on the problem to do it. And that is not determined in a sense that you have to focus. You choose to focus and you could choose not to focus. </s><s>[INST] And that choice is more powerful than any other, like parts of our brain that we've borrowed from fish and from our evolutionary origins like this, whatever this crazy little leap in evolution is that allowed us to think so. Anything else? [/INST] So I think neuroscientists pretend they know a lot more about the brain than they really do. Yeah. Um and we know fired and and and we don't know that much yet about how the brain functions and what's efficient, you know, all this stuff. So I think what, what exists, there is a lot of potentialities, but the beauty of the human brain is its potentialities that we have to manifest through our choices. It's there, it's sitting there and yes, there's certain things they're going to evoke certain uh senses, certain feelings. I'm not even saying emotions because I think emotions are too complex to have been programmed into our mind, but I don't think so, you know, is this big issue of evolutionary psychology is huge right now, and it's a big issue, you know, I find it to a large extent as way too early and storytelling about expo storytelling about, about stuff we still don't, you know? So for example, I would like to see if evolutionary psychology differentiate between things like inclinations, feelings, emotions, sensations, thoughts, concepts, ideas, what of those? The program and one of those are developed and chosen and a product of reason. I think anything from emotion to abstract ideas is all chosen is all a product of reason and everything before that we might have been programmed for. But the fact is so clearly a sensation is not a product of, you know, it is something that we feel because that's how I biology works. So until we have these categories and until we can clearly specify what is what and where do they come from? The whole discussion. And evolutionary psychology seems to be rambling, it doesn't seem to be scientific. So we have to define our terms, you know, which is the basis of science. You have to have some some clear definitions about what we're talking about. It's when you ask them these questions, there's never really a coherent answer about what is it exactly. And everybody is afraid of the issue of free will. And I think, I think to some extent, I mean, Harris has this and I don't want to misrepresent anything houses because I, you know, I'm a fan and I like a lot of your stuff, like, but on the one hand, he is obviously intellectually active and wants to change our minds. So he believes that we have some capacity to choose. On the other hand, he's undermining the capacity to choose by saying it's just determined. You're gonna choose what you choose. You have no say in and there's actually no you he so it's you know, so and that's, to me completely unscientific. That's completely him. You know, uh pulling it out of nowhere, we all experience the fact that we have and I </s><s>[INST] that kind of certainty saying that we do not have that fundamental choice that reason provides is uh unfounded. Currently [/INST] look, there's a sense in which you can never be contradicted because it's a product of your experience. It's not a product of the experience, you can experience it directly. So, no science will ever prove that this table isn't here. I can see it. It's Yeah, right. I can I can feel it. I I know I have free will because I can introspect it in a sense, I can see it, I can see myself engaging it and that is as valid as the evidence of my senses now. I can't point at it so that you can see the same thing I'm seeing, but you can do the same thing in your own consciousness and you can identify the same thing and to deny that in the name of science is to get things upside down. You start with that. And that's the beginning of science, the beginning of sciences identification that I choose and that I can reason. And now I need to figure out the mechanism, the rules of reasoning, the rules of logic that, you know, how does this work? And that's where science comes from. </s>

<s>[INST] Well, I mean, we're having like several layers of conversation, but I think whether lab leak hypothesis is true or not, it does seem that the likelihood of a coverup, if it leaked from a lab is high, that's the more important conversation to be having. Well, you could argue a lot of things, but to me, arguably, that's the more important [/INST] conversation is about what is the likelihood of a coverup? That's the 100%. Like, in my mind, there is a legitimate debate about the origins of the pandemic. There are people who I respect, who I don't necessarily agree with. People like Stuart Neal, who's a virologist in the UK, who's been very open-minded, engaged in productive debate about the origin, and you know where I stand. There is and can be no debate about whether or not there has been a coverup. There has been a coverup. There is, in my mind, no credible argument that there hasn't been a coverup, and we can just see it in the regulations, in the lack of access. There's an incredible woman named Zhang Zhan, who is a Chinese... We have to call her a citizen journalist, because everything is controlled by the state, but in the early days of the pandemic, she went to Wuhan, started taking videos and posting them. She was imprisoned for picking quarrels, which is kind of a catch-all, and now she's engaged in a hunger strike, and she's near death. There's no question that there has been a coverup, and there's no question in my mind </s><s>[INST] that that coverup is responsible for a significant percentage of the total deaths due to COVID-19. [/INST] In a pivot, can I talk to you about sex? </s><s>[INST] Let's roll. Okay, so you're the author of a book, Hacking Darwin. Humans have used sex, allegedly, as I've read about, to make genetic information to produce [/INST] offspring through that kind of process, adapted their environment. Lex, you mentioned earlier about your asking tough questions and people pushing you to ask tough questions. </s><s>[INST] Is it okay if I just... So you said, have done this as I've read about. [/INST] This is, yeah, as I've read about on the internet, yeah. All I'm saying, as a person sitting with you to people who would be open-minded and experimenting of as I've read about to reality, what I would say is, Lex Friedman is handsome, charming ... I'm gonna open a Tinder account. Really a great guy. I'm sorry to interrupt. </s><s>[INST] He's really a great ha... I'm gonna open a Tinder account and publish this. Thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you. I was reading about this last night. I was going to tweet it, but then I'm like, this is going to be misinterpreted. This is why I like podcasts because I could say stuff like this. It's kind of incredible to me that the average human male produces like 500 billion plus sperm cells in their lifetime. Each one of those are genetically unique. They can produce unique humans. Each one, 500 billion, there's like 100 billion people who's ever lived, maybe like 110, whatever, whatever the number is. So it's like five times the number of people who ever lived is produced by each male of genetic information. So those are all possible trajectories of lives that could have lived. Like those are all little people that could have been, and like all the possible stories, all the Hitlers and Einsteins that could have been created and all that. I mean, I don't know, this kind of, you're painting this possible future and we get to see only one little string of that. I mean, I suppose the magic of that is also captured by the, in this piece of physics of having like multiple dimensions and the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics, the interpretation that we're basically just at every point, there's an infinite offspring of universes that are created. But I don't know, that's just like a magic of this game of genetics that we're playing. And the winning sperm is not the fastest. The winning sperm is basically the luckiest, has the right timing. So it's not, I've also got into this whole, I start reading papers about like, is there something to be said about who wins the race, right, genetically? So it's fascinating because there's studies in animals and so on to answer that question because it's interesting. It's because like, because I'm a winner, right? I won, I won a race. And so you want to know like, what does that say about me in this fascinating genetic race against I think, what is it, 200 million others, I think. So one pool of sperm cells is about something like 200 million, it could be, yes, some, but that millions, I thought it was much, much lower than that. So like that, those are all brothers and sisters of mine and I beat them all out, I won. And so it's interesting to know there's a temptation to say I'm somehow better than them, right? And now that goes into the next stage of something you're deeply thinking about, which is if we have more control now over the winning genetic code that becomes offspring, if we have first not even control, just information and then control, what do you think that world looks like from a biological perspective and from an ethical perspective when we start [/INST] getting more information and more control? Yeah, great question. So first on the sperm, there can be up to about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation. So as I mentioned in Hacking Darwin, male sperm, it's kind of a dime a dozen with all the guys in all the world just doing whatever they do with it. And it's an open question how competitive, I mean, there is an element of luck and there is an element of competition and it's an open question how much that competition impacts the outcome or whether it's just luck, but my guess is there's some combination of fitness and luck. But you're absolutely right that all of those other sperm cells in the ejaculation, if that's how the union of sperm and egg is happening, all of them represent a different future. And there's a wonderful book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and he even talks about a city as something like this where everybody, you have your life, but then you have all these alternate lives and every time you make any decision, but in this Invisible Cities, there's a little string that goes toward that alternate life. And then the city becomes this weaving of all the strings of people's real lives and the alternate lives that they could have taken had they made any other different steps. So that part, it's like a deep philosophical question. It's not just for us, it's for all of them. It's baked into evolutionary biology. It's just what are the different strategies for different species to achieve fitness? And there are some of the different corals or other fish where they just kind of release the eggs into the water and there's all different kinds of ways. And then you're right, in my book Hacking Darwin and into the full title is Hacking Darwin Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity, I kind of go deep into exploring the big picture implications of the future of human reproduction. We are already participating in a revolutionary transformation, not just because of the diagnostics that we have, things like ultrasound, but because now an increasing number of us are being born through in vitro fertilization, which means the eggs are extracted from the mother. They're fertilized by the father's sperm in vitro in a lab and then re-implanted in the mother. On top of that, there's a somewhat newer, but still now older technology called pre-implantation genetic testing. And so as everyone knows from high school biology, you have the fertilized egg and then it goes one cell to two cells to four to eight and whatever. And after around five days, in this PGT process, a few cells are extracted. So let's say you have 10 fertilized eggs, early stage embryos, a few cells are extracted from each and those cells, if they would, the ones that are extracted would end up becoming the placenta. But every one of our cells has other than a few, has our full genome. And so then you sequence those cells and with pre-implantation genetic testing now, what you can do is you can screen out deadly single gene mutation disorders, things that could be deadly or life ruining. And so people use it to determine which of those 10 early stage embryos to implant in a mother. Because we shift towards a much greater understanding of genetics and that is part of our just the broader genetics revolution. But within that, in our transition from personalized to precision healthcare, more and more of us are going to have our whole genome sequenced because it's going to be the foundation of getting personalized healthcare. We're going to have already millions, but very soon billions of people who've had their whole genome sequenced and then we'll have big databases of people's genetic genotypic information and life or phenotypic information and using, coming into your area, our tools of machine learning and data analytics. We're going to be able to increasingly understand patterns of genetic expression, even though we're all... </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] I see if she gets deep, real aggressive, like... Crack the door, for I am the light, the giver, the taker. I am warrior, I am life. I am air, I am water, I am fire, I am light. This will, this can, this will, this can, for I am warrior, for I am light. And there's a leaf here. [/INST] What's the story with the leaf? I don't know, I was walking, and every single time over those three days, any time I went for a walk by myself, I would just hear like, take this, just almost like as if a voice was standing there, I'd be like, you need this, take it with you and keep it in your book, keep it ground to you. And it just goes off. So this is from there. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it goes off. So this is from there. [/INST] It's cool to have sort of, it's almost like time travel. I have poppies from France too, when I did a 75th anniversary D-Day ride in France, where we rode 600 kilometers on our road bikes for charity, and we landed on the beaches of Juneau on the 75th, and we got to go buy the poppy fields. And I'm like covered in poppies. And I have some in a book. I don't know why I do that. </s><s>[INST] I just, I do that. That's cool, because like, these are your thoughts, and those are the physical items as it really helps transport to that place somehow. [/INST] Let the light in, let her in. And she would show me these visuals. </s><s>[INST] So my drawings are just like, ah. [/INST] Yeah, there's drawings here, and you're seeing this stuff. Oh yeah. I can't draw either. So that's why they're so, I wish I could draw, because if only I could translate </s><s>[INST] what I could see visually onto paper. And you're talking to her. Yeah, yeah. It's time. I'm here to listen. [/INST] Is this mama ayah? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, we call her mama ayah. Mama ayah. Mama ayah. So who are you seeing? [/INST] Is this a woman? So for me at first, it was just eyes floating in the sky, these unbelievably gorgeous, beautiful eyes that I, and I was like literally looking up at the top of the yurt, and I kept going to myself. Is anyone else seeing this? There's eyes in the sky. May. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah. [/INST] May. And so there's these eyes floating, and they just kept looking at me. And I remember when I kept telling myself like, oh, don't worry about it, there's nothing there. She would get angry. I'm right here. Pay attention to me, and I'd be like, okay. Like forceful, like very forceful. So at first, it was just the eyes. The second night, is I'm crazy when I say this. Greasy when I say this. Great, that's gonna be great. That's gonna be my clip. Ain't they all crazy? That's what I do when I get uncomfortable. I do weird hand gestures and movements. Voices, I like it. Yeah, I do, yeah. You would hate to be in my office because most of the day, it's just meh. This weird lunges and uncomfortable moments. </s><s>[INST] She turned me into a wolf. Voices, I like it. This. [/INST] I love it. I know I said it out loud, I hear it, I said it. Head to toe. And her takeaway for me was, I'm trying to be this pack leader. I'm trying to be this leader in my life. I'm trying to do these things, but I'm going about them the whole wrong way. So when the shamans call you up to do their special prayer over you, you go up, you don't touch them. They flash their little light. You see the little light spot. You walk to the light. You sit down on the light. And then my shaman, he's so funny because he's got this great tone in his voice. He goes, how you doing Kelsey? And I'm like, so hi, yeah, I have a problem. I'm a wolf and I need it to stop. And he'd be like, don't you worry girl, I got you. You ready? He's like, so I'm sitting there cross-legged. I've got my palms out like this. And I had a really traumatic shoulder injury. So I don't just sit slanted like this. My shoulders actually permanently detached and no one in the world will touch it or fix it. My collarbone comes out my back here, and I don't have any collarbone here. So nobody will fix it. No one will touch it even I've had specialists. I've had surgeries. No one will do anything with it. So I'm permanently down and forward. So I slouch, it's horrible. So before I- Horrible functionally too? Oh, there's nothing. I can't do a pull-up anymore. Oh. Oh wow. Oh, you should, I'll show you how to do a push-up after you'll fucking throw up an embarrassment. Yeah, it's bad. So before I though, chronic pain, like had to drink a bottle of CBD every day, just the pain is so bad because the trauma in it was so bad. The surgery went wrong. The collarbone dissipated and no longer exists. Like there's just, and they're not sure how I lift things with it and do stuff with it. It's like overcompensation everywhere. Like my back, like my scapula like flares outward. I'm all messed up from it. And so I was in chronic pain, so he's praying over me. And all of a sudden, all I feel is this arm just start just fucking vibrating and my hair's really long. And I feel somebody grab the back of my ponytail and snap my head back like this. And it felt like something was coming out of my throat, like being pulled out of me and the takeaway that I end up in the whole the rest of the night, there's a million other things, but the takeaway was you no longer need to bite. You may only show your teeth. You can be the leader that you want to be. You do not always have to be the traditional type of leader. You can be in the back of the pack. have to watch the rest around you, be mindful of those around you. Instead of just being upfront, be behind as well. Make sure that everything that you're doing is all being looked after. Because my thing was I will rip your fucking head off if you just say the wrong thing to me before. The whole thing was you can just show your teeth and that is more than enough. Stop trying to be, stop trying to overcompensate. You don't need to do that any longer. And then I had this weird astral projection thing happen, like where I was in my house and there were these flyers all over my husband and my son and like I went ham on them. I like shredded them to pieces. Like I was this protector and it's crazy because the guys told me after like someone would be like, there were flyers all over you the whole night. They were just all over you. And I'm like, I was snarling when I was sitting there like the shaman had to be like, I need you to try to calm your breathing after I could, but before like I was like attacking things beside me that people could see and I could see, but couldn't wrap my brain around that they were real. Like, it was weird. This is crazy, man. That's day two. That's day two. </s>

<s>[INST] with psychedelics about some of the big white questions about life? Like uh like what the heck is the value of love? Um why does it suck so much that we die? And uh and for some of us, maybe it's the Russian in me, but it's quite terrifying. The notion of it or the biggest white question of them all, which is what's the meaning of it all? [/INST] Well, um yeah, what I've discovered is that we don't need answers to those questions, you know that the fact that um we can feel happy, you know that that we can love, that we can have moments of happiness, that's enough, you know, figuring out these big questions. You can get lost in that and you we all can come up with our answers. What's what's the meaning of life? Why why is there life, why is their consciousness? But um I don't know that we need those answers. What we know is that were um social creatures that um we people, other people can make us happy by certain things. We can make other people happy that one life is enough. So this other part about why is it so um tragic that we die? I don't think it's tragic that we die. So first off if you believe in this collective unconscious, but but but you know, we have an impact that lasts. But I think that for me, at least I've been of the view that we should be grateful for death, that death makes life precious. That if we had an infinite amount of time, you know, I mean, I'm a bit of a procrastinator about stuff, particularly things that are really, you know hard to do and you just, you know, you just don't do it and then like we're the day go, I was going to do that. So, so if we had an infinite life, we never died. Um you know, would life be precious? Would we do anything? I don't think so. So my parents gave um you know every jewish New Year, they would, they would make their New Year's card and and one of the quotes was fantastic. It was just uh we have to make up for the brevity of life with the intensity of </s><s>[INST] life. Oh man, that is good. Well the end makes things precious. Death makes life precious. The end of this conversation makes it precious and uh which is a great way to end rick. It's, I wanted to talk to you for a long time I share you were very excited about the study. I can now understand exactly why this is really promising. This is really exciting, gives me hope about the future, even if it doesn't come fast enough. But like you said, had to be patient and stubborn. Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time with me today is truly an honor to meet you and not [/INST] to waste at all. I really appreciate it this time together. </s><s>[INST] Thank you for listening to this conversation with Rick Doblin and thank you to their gun express VPN blink kissed and a sleep check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from Terence McKenna, Nature loves courage, You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all the teachers and philosophers who really counted who really touched the chemical gold. This is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance and the waterfall. This is how magic is done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it's a feather bed. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] Bitcoin and ethereum seem to be dominating the space, But who knows what 10 2030, 50 100 years from now it looks like. Anyway, I hope to talk to a bunch of folks from the Cryptocurrency space on this podcast soon including once again the great, the powerful metallic Budarin. So again, if you get cash out from the app store, Google play and use collects podcast, you get $10 and cash out will also donate $10 to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young folks around the world. And now here's my conversation with Charles Isabel and Michael Littman? You'll probably disagree about this question, but what is your biggest would you say disagreement about either something profound and very important or something completely not important at all. [/INST] I don't think I have any disagreements at all. I'm </s><s>[INST] not sure that's [/INST] True. We walked into that one didn't. </s><s>[INST] So one thing that you sometimes mention is that and we did this one on air to as it were whether or not machine learning is computational statistics. [/INST] It's not but it is. Well, it's not and in particular and more importantly, it is not just computational statistics. </s><s>[INST] So what's missing in [/INST] the picture all the rest of </s><s>[INST] it, which is missing because you can't be wrong now. Well, [/INST] it's not just the statistics. He doesn't even believe this. We've had this conversation before. If it were just the statistics then we would be happy with where we are. </s><s>[INST] It's not just the stuff that's why it's computational [/INST] statistics. If it was just the computation </s><s>[INST] agree that machine learning is not just statistics, [/INST] it's not just that we can agree on that. Where is it? Just computational statistics, </s><s>[INST] computational [/INST] computational what is the computational </s><s>[INST] computational statistics? This is take us into the realm of computing. [/INST] It does. But I think perhaps the way I can get him to admit that he's wrong is that it's about rules. It's about rules. It's about symbols, it's about all these other things. It's not </s><s>[INST] about rules. Say statistics [/INST] about it's not just the statistics. It's not just a random variable that you choose and you have a probability? I think </s><s>[INST] you have a narrow view of statistics. [/INST] Okay, well then what would be the broad view of statistics that would still allow it to be statistics and not say history. That would make computational statistics. Okay. Well </s><s>[INST] okay. So I I had my first sort of research mentor, a guy named Tom Landauer taught me to do some statistics right? And I was annoyed all the time because the statistics would say that what I was doing was not statistically significant and I was like but but but and basically what he said to me is statistics is how you're going to keep from lying to yourself. Which I thought was really deep. [/INST] It is a way to keep yourself honest in a particular way. I agree with that. </s><s>[INST] And so you're trying to find rules. I'm just going to bring it back to rules. Wait, wait, wait. Could you possibly try to define rules? Even regular statisticians, non computational statisticians do spend some of their time evaluating rules. Right? Applying statistics to try to understand is this is this does this rule capture this, does this not captured like hypothesis testing or like confidence intervals? Like like like more like hypothesis. Like I feel like the word statistics literally means like a summary, like a number that summarizes other numbers. But I think the field of statistics actually applies that idea to things like rules to understand whether or not a rule is [/INST] valid. The software engineering. Statistics. No programming languages. Statistics. No. Because I think there's a very it's useful to think about a lot of what ai and machine learning is or certainly should be a software engineering as programming languages. Just if to put it in language that you might understand the hyper parameters beyond the problem is the </s><s>[INST] hyper parameters has too many syllables for me to understand [/INST] the hyper parameter. Uh, that goes around it, right. It's the decisions you choose to make. It's the metrics you choose to use. It's the </s><s>[INST] lost. You want to say the practice of machine learning is different than the practice of statistics. Like the things you have to worry about and how you worry about them are different. Therefore they're [/INST] different at a very little. I mean at the very least it's that that much is true. It doesn't mean statistics, computational otherwise aren't important. I think they are. I mean, I do a lot of that for example, but I think it goes beyond that. I think that we could think about game theory in terms of statistics, but I don't think it's very as useful to do. I mean the way I would think about it or a way I would think about it is this way chemistry is just physics. </s><s>[INST] But [/INST] I don't think it's as useful to think about chemistry as being just physics. It's useful to think about it is chemistry, the level of obstruction really matters here. </s><s>[INST] So, I think it is there are context in which it is useful that way right now, finding that connection is actually helpful. And I think that's when I when I emphasized the computational statistics thing, I think I think I want to befriend statistics and [/INST] not absorb them. Here's the here's the a way to think about it beyond what I just said. Right, So what would you say? And I want you to think back to a conversation had a very long time ago. What would you say is the difference between, Say the early 2000's I CML and what we used to call nips nerves. Their difference. A lot of, particularly on the machine learning that was done there. </s><s>[INST] I cmos around that [/INST] long. Oh yeah, </s>

<s>[INST] What advice would you give to those young people today? Maybe in high school and college at Stanford, maybe to your grandchildren? About how to, uh, have a career they can be proud of, Have a life they can [/INST] be proud of, pursue careers that are in the public interest, you know, in one fashion or another. And not just in their interest. Um, and and that would be I mean, it's not bad to pursue a career in your own interest. I mean, as long as you're it's something that's useful and positive for the, you know, for for their families or whatever, but yeah, so I mean, I I try to try to advise kids to find themselves somehow, you know, find out who they want to be and what they want to be and try to pursue it. And the NGO world is growing, as you know, and, uh, and a lot of young people are kind of throwing themselves into it and and, yeah, Human Rights Watch and that kind of stuff, and you know, they want to do that kind of work, and it's it's very admirable. </s><s>[INST] I tend to think that even if you're not working in human rights, there's a certain way in which, if you live with integrity, the I believe that all of us are. Many of us have a bunch of moments in our lives when we're posed with the decision. It's a quiet one. Maybe you'll never be written about or talked about when you get to choose whether you, uh, there's a choice, that it's difficult to make. It might require sacrifice, but it's the choice that the best version of that person would make. Um, that's the best way I can Sort of say how to act with integrity is the very thing that would resist the early days in Nazi Germany. It sounds dramatic to say, but those little actions, um, and I feel like the best you can do to avoid genocide on scale. It's for all of us to live in that way to within those moments, unrelated potentially to human rights to anything else is to take those actions like, I believe, that all of us know the right thing to do. [/INST] You know? That's right. I think that's right. You put it very well. I couldn't have done it better myself. No, no, I I agree. I agree completely that there are, you know, you know, to live, to live with truth, which is what possible hovel used to say, This famous Czech dissident, you know, talked about living in truth, but also to live with integrity. Um, and that's really super important. </s><s>[INST] Well, let me ask you about love. What role does love playing this whole thing in the in the human condition and all of the study of genocide, it does seem that hardship in moments brings out the best in human nature, and the best in human nature is expressed the love. [/INST] Well, as I already mentioned to you, I think hardship it can is not a good thing for, you know, it's not the best thing for love. I mean, it's better. It's better to not have to suffer and not have to. Yes, I think it is. I think it's, you know, as I mentioned to you, you know, studying concentration camps. You know, this is not a place for love. It happens. It happens. But it's not really a place for love. It's a place for rape. It's a place for torture. It's a place for killing in this place for in human action, one to another, you know, and also, as I said, among those who are suffering not just between those who are and and then their whole gradations. You know the same thing in the gulag. You know, there are gradations all the way from the criminal prisoners who beat the hell out of the political prisoners. You know who then have others below them? Who? They beat them, you know, So everybody is being the hell out of everybody else. So I would I would not idealize in any way suffering as a you know, uh, a source of source of beauty and love. I wouldn't do that. I think it's a whole lot better for people to be relatively prosperous. I'm not saying super prosperous, but to be able to feed themselves and to be able to feed their families and how's their families and take care of themselves, Um, you know, to foster loving relations between people. And, you know, I think it's no accident that, um, you know, poor families have much, you know, worse records when it comes to crime and things like that, you know, and and also to wife beating and to child abuse and stuff like that. I mean, you just you don't you don't want to be um, poor and indigent and not have a roof over your head be homeless. I mean, it doesn't mean again, you know, homeless people are mean people. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is that you know what we want to try to foster in this country and around the world and one of the reasons, you know? I mean, I'm very critical of the Chinese in a lot of ways, but, I mean, we have to remember they pull the country out of horrible poverty, right? And I mean, there's still poor people in the countryside. There's still problems, you know, with with want and need among the Chinese people. But, you know, there were millions and millions of Chinese who were living at the bare minimum of life, which is no way to live, you know, and no way again to foster love and compassion and getting along. So I want to be clear. I don't speak for history, right? I'm giving you. I mean, it used to be historians, you know, in the 19th century, who really thought they were speaking for history. You know, I don't think that way at all. I mean, I understand I'm a subjective human being with my own my own points of view in my own opinions. </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, that's interesting that people have told me that there's an art to listening to music as well and you can start to, if you listen to a song just carefully explicitly, just force yourself to really listen. You start to uh I did this when I was part of jazz band fusion band in college is there they you you start to hear the layers of the instruments, you start to hear the individual instruments and you start to you can listen to classical music orchestra this way, you can listen to jazz this way. Uh It's funny to imagine you now too walking that forward to listening to pop hits now it's like a scholar, it seems like Cardi B or something like that or Justin timberlake, no not temple like Bieber I get my job, they've [/INST] Both been in the top 10 since I've been listening. </s><s>[INST] They're still still still up there. Oh my God, I'm so cool. Is [/INST] If you haven't heard Justin Timberlake's top 10 in the last few years there was one song that he did where the music video was set at essentially Europe's. </s><s>[INST] Oh the one with the robotics. Yeah [/INST] yeah yeah it's like at an academic conference and he's doing it, he was presenting, it was sort of a cross between the apple like steve jobs kind of talk and europe's um so you know it's it's always fun when ai shows up in pop culture, </s><s>[INST] I wonder if he consulted somebody for that. That's that's really interesting. So maybe on that topic I've seen your your your celebrity multiple dimensions. But one of them is you've done cameos in different places. I've seen you in the turbo tax commercial as like I guess the brilliant Einstein character and the point is that TurboTax doesn't need somebody like you doesn't need a brilliant a few [/INST] things need someone like me. But yes, they were specifically emphasizing the idea that you don't need to be a computer expert to be able to use their software, </s><s>[INST] How'd you end up in that world? [/INST] I think it's an interesting story. So I was teaching my class, it was an intro computer science class for non concentrators, non majors. And uh sometimes when people would visit campus they would check in to say, hey, we want to see what a class is like, can we sit on your class? So a person came to my class who was the daughter of the brother of the house husband of the best friend of my wife. Anyway, basically a family friend came to campus to check out brown and asked to come to my class and and came with her dad. Her dad is who I've known from various kinds of family events and so forth. But he also does advertising and he said that he was recruiting scientists for this, this, this add this TurboTax set of ads and he said we wrote the ad with the idea that we get like the most brilliant researchers. Um but they all said no. So can you help us find like B level scientists, I'm like sure that's that's who I hang out with. So that should be fine. So I put together a list and I did what some people call the Dick Cheney. So I included myself on the list of possible candidates, uh you know, with a little blurb about each one and why I thought that would make sense for them to, to do it and they reached out to a handful of them, but then they ultimately, the Youtube stalked me a little bit and they thought, oh, I think he could do this. And they said, okay, we're going to offer you the commercial. Like what? So it was, it was such an interesting experience because it's, it's they have another world, the people who do like nationwide kind of ad campaigns and, and television shows and movies and so forth. It's quite a remarkable system that they have going because yeah, so I went to uh, it was just somebody's house that they rented in New Jersey. Um but in the commercial, it's just me and this other woman. In reality, there were 50 people in that room and another half a dozen kind of spread out around the house in various ways. There were people whose job it was to control the son. They were in the backyard on ladders, putting uh filters up to try to make sure that the sun didn't glare off the window in a way that would wreck the shot. So there was like six people out there doing that. There was three people out there giving snacks. The craft table, there was another three people giving healthy snacks because there was a separate craft table. There was one person whose job it was to keep me from getting lost. And I think the reason for all this is because so many people are in one place at one time, they have to be time efficient. They have to get it done this morning. They were going to do my commercial in the afternoon, they were going to do a commercial of a mathematics professor from Princeton. They had to get it done. No, you know, no wasted time or energy. And so there's just a fleet of people all working as an organism and it was fascinating. I was just the whole time just looking around like this is so neat, like one person whose job it was to take the camera off of the camera man, so that someone else whose job it was to remove the film canister because every couple's takes, they had to replace the film because film gets used up. It was just, I don't know, I was seeking out the whole time. It was </s>

<s>[INST] So what makes a great comic do you think in the history of comedy said [/INST] something at the moment, in a way I found a way to communicate with people in the funniest possible way at that moment and illustrate, you know, illustrated larger truths about life in what they did. And I think that guys like louis and chappelle and Pryor and Kinison and Hicks, people like joan rivers have done that. And even, you know, modern people, people like Maria bamford's an amazing comedian. It's just a different style of comedy per se, but she's an amazing community. Uh, you know, Katt Williams is an amazing comedian, you know, it really is. </s><s>[INST] Does he have any, we'll see the, one of the things you kind of mentioned the community, as you mentioned, there were kind of fearless and saying that different because there needs to be said, Katt Williams is more, I, I don't remember his comedy, but I think it's just more wild out there to [/INST] an extent that you can watch it. He's got stuff, he talks about stuff, he talks about race brilliantly, he talks about America brilliantly. No, I think there's a lot of stuff there, of course, chris rock </s><s>[INST] and chris rock, of course, [/INST] it's so hard, you can't really pick one, you just gotta, there's a class of people that, throughout the history of this business, which is not that long of a history. It's, you know, pretty much within the last century. Uh, you know, that are have been really influential. Sometimes it's style, the way they deliver things. Sometimes it's substance of how they, you know what they're saying or sometimes it's just a style of what they're saying. I mean, and we're only talking about stand up comedians, right? So there's a million great comedians. I mean if we're gonna talk about Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler and Chris Farley, I mean, these are brilliant and those guys are bigger influences on comedy, I think, than stand ups really, truly. So there's there's there's so many brilliant people in the business </s><s>[INST] who was for you, like influential. Just the early on, [/INST] this was influential because I watched Bill Hicks and I'd be like, this guy sang Crazy Ship on stage and this is the only way you can get away with it. Because it's so funny. And he was calling out like, you know, the military industrial complex. And and he was talking about the first gulf war. I remember he said a joke that I heard it made me sit up straight, he goes, he goes, he was in Canada and he said we had a war in the States. He was talking about the first gulf war and he said I was in the unenviable position of being for the war, but against the troops. And to me, I love that joke. It was so funny to me. and I was like, oh, you can't get away with that anywhere other than standing on a stage. You could never say that in an office really. And this was before, like it was like pC and the other thing I always knew that comedians had to say sh it and have it be funny enough that you couldn't get away with it in polite society. That was the whole point. That was why it was a dark theater or dark nightclub. That's when people had a few drinks. That's what the art form was and that's why uh, so a guy like that was influential as I started watching him and of course, like, you know, I loved SNL when I was a kid and I would watch Chris Farley and I would watch, um, you know, people like even john Belushi going back in the day, but I watch Adam Sandler and will Farrell and all these guys. I mean the, there's so many funny people, but Bill Hicks was kind of funny and then Patrice O'neal was like, probably my favorite comedian has made me laugh more than anybody else. Um, </s><s>[INST] I think it was you actually, that may be a new podcast. We're talking about Patrice Union that he was actually vicious. Well there's, [/INST] I think he was a little mean to other people, but he was very good to people he liked, I guess. I think he was like, no, I mean, he wasn't and I've never met him. I have no inside info. But from what I've heard, he was like no nonsense guy, right? He just said what he wanted to say. But I think in terms of comedians, I don't know of anyone funnier than Patrice O'neal who said in modern times that said more about our society than him. I mean, he was just a brilliantly funny guy on the radio. He was funny on his specials. He was funny everywhere. He was funny </s><s>[INST] and there's something else to be said about the whole medium of comedians doing podcasts because that's unlocks a weird special new thing that changed everything. I mean, Rogan started with that, you're doing that. It, I think that's a whole, another form of like stand ups, the ones that have a lot to say. Almost like uh, we get to witness the process of the creation of the jokes in a way or the mind, the sort of the evolution of the mind behind the jokes, which is, [/INST] comedians were laid to social media, comedians, comedies. Uh, it's a performance based medium. So it's about getting up and doing it, getting up in the club, getting up in the theater, getting up in a bar, getting up wherever you can get up and comedy for years was about performance and then on the higher end it was about movies and tv shows, but we were very slow to get on youtube were very slow to adapt to technology were very slow to monetize anything we did on the internet. So podcasting was away for comics and funny people to kind of get into that space, start earning money and now because of the pandemic has really become essential and it helps you. And even without the pandemic, it was where people was how you were building a fan base and that's like, you know, but comics were very reticent to embrace social media at all because they thought it was cheap and they didn't like it and they thought that people on it were idiots and we're unfunny and it was just a blatant, you know, whatever it was, whether it was a money grab, it was just to commercial and in a sense where they're like, hey look at me like it was just goofy, right? Um and then comics I think got displaced because all the Youtubers came in, you know, the social media stars came in and they really knocked comics off because now people are much more like if you ask anyone under 30 of their famous favorite comedians, they say David a brick and there's nothing wrong with that. David's a funny guy. But like what you, you know, I'm not especially to me a ton, but that's okay, I don't, you know, but he makes people laugh so he's funny. Um but he's what people, you know, that's a comedian now. So comics got beat by other people coming into a digital space before they did laying the groundwork and taking it over and now comics are just trying to stay alive. Like even my podcast, which is people really like it. Thank God and I love doing it, </s>

<s>[INST] You stand there and you just go, what is this? And also, I mean, there's a kind of magical aspect to the, this is the place where over the next few years we'll start as a human species reaching out there, traveling out [/INST] there. We'll for sure see the development of the rockets that I think will take us further </s><s>[INST] than ever before, be born right there. [/INST] What's it like to witness the actual testing of Starship? So far it's been high stakes, like it's been insane because it was the first I kind of mentioned earlier, there's been SN8, 9, 10, 11, and 15 that have all done these suborbital hops. The highest one went 12.5 kilometers and the rest of the four went 10 kilometers in altitude and then turned off the engines and just fell. Now the cool thing about that is the general public could be about five miles away. So again, like eight kilometers away. And the weird thing is this rocket's slowly accelerating. They didn't want to exceed a certain speed, so they didn't have to worry about the aerodynamics of it. They just slowly climbed and it probably also to appease the FAA. They're like, here, we'll just limit the thrust-to-weight ratio and just make it so it's slow and controlled, no big deal. So it's basically more or less like slightly above a hover, just climbing for minutes, for like four or five minutes, you just hear and feel the roar of this thing. And rockets, like after the first 30 seconds or minute, they're so far away that you're just diminishing. It's just fading, fading, fading, fading. You still get that rumble, that sense. But those first five flights, the suborbital hops were just, I'll cherish them forever because you're watching this thing that you've driven up next to. You've seen it with your own eyes. That's bigger than most buildings in a fairly dense urban area. It's this massive thing. You stand there, you stood there, you look at it, you're like, wow, that's crazy. You've seen people working on it, they're little ants compared to it. Then you drive away and you see it on the horizon and all of a sudden that thing leaves. It starts moving. Hovering. Hovering. Essentially. And the first time, I mean, for me at least, I put my hands on my head when I, I just, I can't help it. I'm not, it's not, I don't know what it is. It's surreal, like you said. I don't know what in human nature decides this is what to do when you can't believe something, but that's what happens. When that thing first took off, it was just like, my brain couldn't process seeing, because I had spent so much time driving around and seeing it and all of a sudden you're watching it just take off and you're like, it's moving. All these, the most complicated rocket engines ever made are all firing simultaneously and it didn't blow up on the launch pad and slowly increasing and it's just crazy and the sound, everything about it. At the time, the first one specifically, it was December 2020, was the first SN8. It went up and I actually, we all lost it in the sky. We couldn't quite see it, but our, we had telescopes and, you know, high telephoto lenses tracking it. And what's funny is there is a pretty strong wind up there at altitude. </s><s>[INST] Essentially. I don't know what it is. [/INST] It's surreal, like you said. It's moving, there's a lot of gaseous oxygen being vented out of the rocket and it's being blown by this air. So it looks like it's moving actually quite quickly, like away from us, like it was strafing to one side. So I'm watching the monitor. I'm going, oh my God, they're moving it like over Brownsville and we're all, all of us, everyone on this, this hotel balcony is looking out down, like way out over, you know, and we can't find it. And we're like, where do they lose it? Like we're thinking like, Oh my God, this is going to crash down in Brownsville. And, and finally they shut the engines off and we're watching it fall and again, we're tracking it. We know it's falling and it's falling, falling, falling, falling super controlled and we're like, oh my God, this is perfect. And all of a sudden I clicked and I see it with my, you know, my eyes. I finally like tracking it straight out like straight in front of us and it looks like, it looks like it was a blimp just barely moving because it is falling slowly, thanks to all drag. And again, that's one of those moments I'm, like, this is falling so slow, you know, because it's so big, it's so massive. It's falling sideways, you know? I've seen Falcon 9 boosters and Falcon Heavy boosters. And they scream. They come in so fast. And you can barely even see. We can just barely check them all. So they light their engines and they decelerate so quickly. This was, like, the opposite. It was, like, find it. We're like, Where do they lose it? Like, we're thinking, like, Oh my gosh, that thing ever coming down! It was director's just falling so slowly. And so right It just felt like it was so close. And so when it finally lit its engine and it flipped, I was losing my mind because I'm like, it's working. You know, this crazy plan, this huge, massive thing is doing this absurd feat. And the first one, well, the first four, again, didn't work out as planned, but getting to that point already, getting to that flip maneuver was a huge milestone. And it was so exciting just going through those firsts were amazing. And I think, you know, we're coming up now on them doing the full stacks of the booster and the upper stage. I think when we see that fly, when that leaves earth for the first time, it'll be, like I said, almost twice the amount of thrust as anything else. It'll be the biggest, heaviest, largest thing to ever fly. It's going to shake everything. </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] disagree. I like him very much. He works hard, I admire, I admire, you know, um I would like, he's incredible uh goal scorer, right? Um but I, so first of all, leo messi and there was some confusion because I've kept saying maradona is my favorite player, but I think I think leo has suppressed them, so uh um it's messy that maradona then pele for me, but the reason is, is um there's certain aesthetic definitions of beauty that I admire, whether it came by hard work or through God given talent or through anything. And it doesn't, it doesn't really matter to me, there's certain aesthetic like genius when I, when I see it to me and especially it doesn't have to be consistent. It isn't a case of messy case in the Ronaldo, but just even moments of genius, which is where maradona really shines, it's I [/INST] even if that doesn't translate into like results and goals being </s><s>[INST] scored, right? And that's the challenge, like they did that because that's where people that tell me that leah messes never even on strong teams have led the national team people as part of the World Cup, right? As really important And to me, no, it's the moment, like winning to me was never important. What's more important is the moments of genius and but you're, you're talking to the human story and um yeah, Christiano, Ronaldo definitely is a beautiful human story. [/INST] Yeah, and I think you can't uh for me, it's hard to decouple those two. I don't, I don't just look at, you know, the list of achievements, but I like how he got there and how he keeps pushing the boundaries. It's like almost 40 and how that sets up an example Maybe 10 years ago, I wouldn't have ever imagined that like, one of the top players in the world could be a top player like 30 </s><s>[INST] seven or, but so, and there's an interesting 10, the human story is really important, but like, if you look at Ronaldo, he's like, he's somebody like kids could aspire to be, but at the same time, I also like maradona who like, is a is a tragic figure in many ways. It's like the, you know, the drugs, the temper all of those things that's beautiful to, like, I don't necessarily think to me for the flaws are beautiful too in an athletes, I don't think you need to be perfect uh from a personality perspective those flaws are also beautiful, so, but yeah, there's something about hard work and uh there's also something about being an underdog and being able to carry a team, uh that's that's an argument for maradona, I don't know if you can make that argument for messi and Ronaldo either because they've all played on superstar teams for most of their lives. So I don't know how, you know, it's, it's difficult to know how they would do um when they had to work, like did what maradona had to do to carry team on his shoulders? [/INST] True, </s><s>[INST] and pele did as well, depending on the context. [/INST] Maybe you could argue that with the Portuguese national team, but we have a good team. Uh Yeah, but maybe what Madonna did with lap now apples and, and a couple other teams, it's, it seems incredible to the beauty of the game that, you know, we're talking about all these different players that have, or especially, you know, if you're comparing messi and Ronaldo that have such different, you know, styles of play and also, even their bodies are so different and, and, and but these two very different players can be at the top of the game and that's not, that's the, there's not a lot of other sports where you where you have that, you know, like you have kind of a mental image of a basketball player and like the top basketball players kind of fit that mental image and, and they look a certain way and, but for soccer, there's there's it's not so much like that and, and that's, I think that's that's beautiful, but that's, that really adds something to the sport. </s><s>[INST] Well, do you play soccer yourself? Have you played that in your, your life? What do you find beautiful ball two game? [/INST] Yeah, I mean it's one of the states the biggest support in Portugal is still growing up. We played a </s><s>[INST] lot. Did you see the paper from deep Mind? I didn't look at it. Were there like uh doing some analysis on soccer strategy? I [/INST] saved that paper. I haven't read it yet. Um It's actually I when I was in college, I actually did some research on on applying um machine learning and statistics in sports. And in our, in our case we're doing it for basketball. Um but uh what they're effectively trying to do was have you ever watched Moneyball? So they're trying to do something similar, taking that in this case basketball, taking a statistical approach to to to basketball. Um The interesting thing there is that baseball is much more about having these discrete events that happened kind of in similar conditions and so it's easier to take a statistical approach to it. Whereas basketball, it's much more dynamic game. Uh it started to measure um it's hard to to replicate these conditions and so you have to think about it in a slightly different way. And so we were doing work on that and working like with with the Celtics to analyze the data that they had, like they had these cameras in the, in the arena, they were tracking the players and so you, so they have, they had a ton of data but they didn't really know what to do with it. And so we we were doing work on that and and and soccer is maybe even a step further. It's it's right. It's a game where you don't have as many in basketball, you have a lot of field goals and so you can measure success, uh soccer. It's it's right. It's more of a post process almost where it's like you have a goal like or two. And </s>

<s>[INST] So you want to be more the en esa unless the end user. [/INST] Exactly, exactly that way, that way I'm listening to the day of combat, That's right, We're watching you pee, but basically, you know, it's, I guess what I would, what I would come back and say is uh if you understand how things interact on a fundamental level and what type of games exist and what type of interactions exist then you can transcend a lot of the uh the systems you it's almost like a cook versus if I can make certain things in the kitchen, I can but I am not a chef, you could give me a bunch of ingredients and I could probably cook not well but a couple of different things but a master chef, you know, would be aware of the implications of all of the things that they're doing, you know, extra time in the oven, less time in the oven putting this, you know flavoring or spice in, you know what you're doing with various things. And also they can make they can turn all of these ingredients into chinese food and they can turn all these ingredients into italian food and they can turn all these italian food ingredients into chicken parmesan or it could turn into a lasagna but they are not limited to a specific thing because they have knowledge of how food interacts, how what it does to create taste, but it does create texture. So to come back, let's take rock paper scissors, Rock paper scissors is built on the idea of a couple different things. Actually I'll tell you what can I may I ask you a question, what's your favorite dinosaur on the same on three, we'll go 12, three t rex T rex, I'll meet you know, a man, this is we're gonna be best friends. So uh it's okay. Uh so what's the first question when you say, hey, let's play rock paper scissors is like a rock paper scissors. Rock paper scissors shoot you like rock paper scissors shoot, you're like, okay because if we go rock paper scissors shoot and I'm like, oh man, I got lucky and I want imagine I want 100 times in a row. Yeah, the luck, The luck if I was honestly doing that. But now let's say for instance, I go on rock paper scissors and you go on shoot. Rock paper scissors shoot. Here comes the rock, right? If you lose, whose fault is it? It's yours. This is built on a parody thing where the we, I don't get to pick second if I get to pick second, it's like being able to investigate your background before going to meet you and then I'm like, oh hi, oh I too love the New Jersey, you know the New Jersey nets, which is a statement that no one in their right mind would ever make when I was growing up. So anyway, you'd have to have personal knowledge of somebody. So anyway, to come back, let's your, if you understand how games are structured, you can start to realize that there's huge gaps and huge holes in a lot of the thinking behind all of it and if you can create the illusion of choice, I'll play one more If you don't mind, that's one of my favorite ones. Do this in class all the time. Uh Have you seen this before? Okay. Um May I ask you some questions please? Okay. Fantastic. I'm scared there's everybody wins. Don't worry. All right, so, could you could you please uh when uh could you please pick three fingers and tell me what they are </s><s>[INST] your thumb okay? Your pinky and your middle think. [/INST] Okay. So could you please pick two fingers, </s><s>[INST] your middle finger and your pinky? [/INST] Okay, could you please pick one finger? </s><s>[INST] I'll go with the middle finger. [/INST] Okay, could you please pick one finger? Pinky, Okay, Let's play again. Can you pick one finger please? </s><s>[INST] Uh your middle [/INST] Finger. Okay? Can you pick one finger please? </s><s>[INST] Your thumb yeah, your pinky. [/INST] Okay, now pick two more fingers, please, </s><s>[INST] your middle finger and your ring finger. [/INST] Ok? Could you please pick one more finger? Dammit. So, </s><s>[INST] I thought that enhanced the illusion of choice. [/INST] It's the illusion of choice. If I'm asking the questions provided I asked the right questions there can be no correct answer, doesn't mean that ultimately if that's what you wanted. Let's say like I thought I was guiding you to something I wanted, It turns out that was the outcome. You want to listen. Now here's not gonna ask the wrong question. I might not get what I </s><s>[INST] want by the way, sergeant dropped for people that might be just listening to this that no matter what trajectory we took through that decision tree that Ryan was presenting. It was always ending up with the middle finger ironically enough. [/INST] I was surprised. So </s><s>[INST] and all of us were surprised and we're both winners. [/INST] Yeah, we all everyone I felt like a winner. All right, so now now I'm gonna I'll ask some different questions if you don't mind. Can you please pick two fingers to put down </s><s>[INST] uh your middle finger and your pinky? All right, [/INST] That's so awkward. This is the worst finger positions. Okay, can you please wait a minute? That's hold on. Well what if you pick two other fingers to put down </s><s>[INST] ah your thumb your pinkie. [/INST] Okay my thumb on my pinky, can you please pick two fingers to put down? Well whatever you like. </s><s>[INST] Okay, your middle finger and your pointy finger. [/INST] Okay, can you pick two fingers to put down? What's </s><s>[INST] the name? Is index [/INST] Index finger at the point the .1 that's the one we usually points were to point the finger. </s><s>[INST] Uh Sorry [/INST] What to put two more to put down please? </s>

<s>[INST] Why? Let's talk about it. First of all, I'm with you, but let me ask you this interesting question because we talked about properties and securities, let's talk about conflict of interest. You said you have a popular Twitter account, it's hilarious and insightful. You do promote Bitcoin in a sense. I don't know if you would say that, but do you think there's a conflict of interest in anyone who owns Bitcoin promoting Bitcoin? [/INST] Is it the same as you promoting the farming? I would say no, there's an interest. I think that you can promote a property or an idea to the extent that you don't control it. I think that the point at which you start to have a conflict of interest is when you're promoting a proprietary product or a security in general as a proprietary asset. For example, if you look at my Twitter, you will find that I make lots of statements about Bitcoin. You won't ever see me making a statement that say micro strategy stock will go out forever. I'm not promoting a security MSTR because at the end of the day, MSTR is a security, it is proprietary. I have proprietary interest in it. I have a disproportionate amount of control and influence on the direction. </s><s>[INST] The control is the problem. The control is the problem because you have interest in both. If Bitcoin is as successful as we're talking about, you are very possibly can become the richest human on earth given how much you own in Bitcoin, the wealthiest, not the richest. [/INST] I don't know what those words mean. </s><s>[INST] I would benefit economically. You would benefit economically. That's true. So the reason that's not conflict of interest is because the word property that Bitcoin [/INST] is an idea and Bitcoin is open. That's true. It's because I don't own it. I don't control it. In essence, the ethical line here is, could I print myself 10 million more Bitcoin or </s><s>[INST] not? Or can anyone? It's not just you, it's can anyone. Because can you promote somebody else's? Yes, I guess you can. [/INST] Can you promote Apple when you have no stake? You could have a Twitter account where you promote oil, or you promote camping, or you promote family values, or promote a carnivore diet, or promote the Iron Man. </s><s>[INST] You're not going to get wealthier if you promote camping because you can't own a stake. You own a lot of Bitcoin. What is that? [/INST] Don't you own a stake in the idea of Bitcoin? </s><s>[INST] I would grant you that. But the lack of control is the fundamental ethical line that you don't have. All you are is you're a fan of the idea. You believe in the idea and the power of the idea. [/INST] You can't take that idea away from others. Let's come back to, let me give you some maybe easier examples. If you were the head of the Marine Corps, and someone came to you and said, I created a Marine coin, and the twist on marine coin is I want you to tell every marine that they'll get an extra marine coin when they get their next stripe. Then I'm going to give you, and I'm going to let you buy marine coin now, and then after you buy marine coin, I want you to promote it to them. At some point, if you start to have a disproportional influence on it, or if you're in a conversation where people with disproportionate influence becomes conflict of interest. It would make you profoundly uncomfortable, I think, if the head of the Marine Corps started promoting anything that looked like a security. Now, if the head of the Marine Corps started promoting canoeing, you might think he's kind of wacky, like maybe that's kind of a waste of time and a distraction, but to the extent that canoeing is not a security, not a problem unless, you know, ultimately, the issue of decentralization is really a critical one. </s><s>[INST] So not having a head. So not having a head. One. So is it something, can Bitcoin be replicated? So all the things that you're saying that make it a property, can that be replicated? Have any other... I think it's possible to create other crypto properties. Does the having a head, like of a project, a thing that limits its ability to be a property if you try to replicate a project? Is that the fundamental flaw? [/INST] Look, I think the real fundamental issue is you just never want it to change. Like, if you really want something decentralized, you want a genetic template that substantially is not going to change for a thousand years. So I think Satoshi said it at one point, he said the nature of the software is such that by version 0.1, its genetic code was set. If there was any development team that's continually changing it, you know, on a routine basis, it becomes harder and harder to maintain its decentralization because now there's the issue of who's influencing the changes. So what you really want is a very, very simple idea, right? The simplest idea. I'm just going to keep track of who owns 21 million parts of energy. And when someone proposes big functional upgrades, you almost don't really want that development to go on the base layer. You want that development to go on the layer threes because now Cash App has a proprietary set of functionality and it's a security. And if you're going to promote the use of this thing, you're not going to promote the layer three security because that's an edge to a given entity and you're trusting the counterparty. You're going to promote the layer one or most the layer two. </s>

<s>[INST] Now the kinds of abstractions just zoom out. We're talking about. There's the hands abstractions and then there is betting strategies, [/INST] meeting actions baiting actions. So there's information abstraction to talk about general games information abstraction which is the abstraction of what chance does And this would be the cards in the case of poker. And then there's action abstraction which is abstracting the actions of the actual players. Which would be fits in the case of poker, </s><s>[INST] yourself and the other [/INST] players. Yes, yourself and other players. And for information abstraction, we were completely automated. So this was these are algorithms but they do what we call potential aware abstraction where we don't just look at the value of the hand, but also how it might materialize in the good or bad hands over time. And it's a certain kind of bottom up process with vintage programming there and clustering and various aspects. How are you build this abstraction? And then in the action abstraction there, it's largely based on how humans other and and other ai s have played this game in the past. But in the beginning we actually use an automated action obstruction technology which is provably convergent that it finds the optimal combination of bed sizes, but it's not very scalable. So we couldn't use it for the whole game, but we use it for the first couple of betting actions. </s><s>[INST] So what's more important, the strength of the hands. So the information distraction or the how you play them. Uh The actions does it? You know, the romanticized notion again, is that it doesn't matter what hands you have, that the actions the betting uh maybe the way you win no matter what hands you [/INST] have. So that's why you have to play a lot of hands. So that the role of luck gets smaller? So you you could otherwise get lucky and get some good hands and then you're going to win the match even with thousands of hands, you can get lucky Because there's so much variance in no limit Texas hold them because if we both go all in, it's a huge stack of variants. So there are these massive swings in uh no limit Texas hold'em. So that's why you have to play, not just thousands, but uh over 100,000 hands to get statistical significance. </s><s>[INST] So let me, let me ask another way this question, if you didn't even look at your hands, but they didn't know that the your opponents didn't know that. How well would you be able to do? [/INST] That's a good question. There's actually, I heard the story that there's this Norwegian female poker player cool and at Oberstar who's actually won a tournament by doing exactly that, but that would be extremely rare. So, so I I you can't, you cannot really play well that way. </s><s>[INST] Okay, the hands do have some role to play. So Lebron James does not use as far as I understand they used learning methods of deep learning, is there room for learning? And uh you know, there's no reason why Lebron doesn't, you know, combined with now for go type approach for estimating the quality uh for function estimator, What are your thoughts on this maybe as compared to another algorithm which I'm not that familiar with deep stack the the engine that does use deep learning that it's unclear how well it does, but nevertheless uses deep learning. So what are your thoughts about learning methods to aid in the way that calibrates plays the [/INST] game of poker? Yeah, So as you said, liberators did not use learning methods and played very well without them. Since then we have actually actually here we have a couple of papers on things that do use learning techniques. Uh So um and and deep learning in particular and uh sort of the way you're talking about where it's learning an evaluation function. Mhm. But in imperfect information games, unlike let's say in go or now, now also in chess and Shaggy, it's not some sufficient to learn an evaluation for a state because the value of an information set depends not only on the exact state, but it also depends on both players, beliefs like if I have a bad hand, I'm much better off if the opponent thinks I have a good hand and vice versa, if I have a good hand, I'm much better off if the opponent believes I have a bad hand. Uh So the value of a state is not just a function of the cards, it depends on if you will the path of play, but only to the extent that is captured in the belief distributions. So, so that's why it's not as simple as uh as it is imperfect information games. And I don't want to say it's simple there either. It's of course, very complicated competition aly there too. But at least conceptually it's very straightforward. There's a state, there's an evaluation function. You can try to learn it here. You have to do something more. Uh What we do is in one of these papers, we're looking at allowing where we allow the opponent to actually take different strategies at the leaf of the search tree as if you will and and that uh is a different way of doing it. And it doesn't assume therefore a particular way that the opponent place. But it allows the opponent to choose from a set of different continuation strategies. And that forces us to not be too optimistic in a look ahead search. And that's that's one way you can do sound look ahead search in imperfect information games, which is very different, difficult. And in us you were asking about deep stack, What they did is very different than what we do either in liberators or in this new work. They were randomly generating various situations in the game, then they were doing the look ahead from there to the end of the game as if that was the start of a different game. And then they were using deep learning to learn those values of those states, but the states were not just the physical states, they include the belief distributions. </s>

<s>[INST] so the boost you get from performance enhancing drugs could be tiny relative to the stuff we have in the future. You might be the last generation of like natural unmodified humans that were running. [/INST] Who knows, maybe that's already over, who knows who's, who's modified that. That's true. </s><s>[INST] You might, we might be living through that transition to the new Nike shoe, but broadly defined. Yeah. So you'll be, uh, in some sense, in, in the history books as, uh, humans used to run without any modifications, [/INST] used to destroy their body and let it recover and then do it again. And they used </s><s>[INST] to be impressed with with an 11 hour, 100 mile time when we can do it in under an hour now. So, but nevertheless, it isn't, the four mile, The four minute mile was incredibly impressive. Uh, I really love the 11 hour mark for the 100 miler and the two hour marathon by most people for the longest time will start to be impossible? You know, there's still people that think it's impossible under certain constraints. So, Elliot Kipchoge of Kenya, as you mentioned, ran a one hour, 59 minutes, 42 marathon, but he had, like you said, the prototype shoes and he had the pacesetters? I don't know how essential that is, but it seems quite essential. Do you think it's possible? First of all, what do you think about that accomplishment? Uh, and he is one of the greatest, if not the greatest marathon runners of all time. What do you think about that accomplishment? And do you think it's possible to run a two hour marathon without any assistance. [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I think there's no question about it regardless of technology. He's world class, if not the best. Um, the, I think he, I think he could go under two hours, Someone equivalent to him could go under two hours with, with the shoe technology. Probably what it will take is it'll take a fast course. Of course. That has like very few tangents because like, you know, turning on, of course they have to make ads about a percent to the, to the distance. So, you know, when we're talking about a marathon, you're getting up to like a quarter mile extra running. You know, that alone could potentially put you down near near to flat based on what you know, we're seeing because I mean, he's got a, was it to a 140, I believe this is actual world record where it's actually like certified. So, I mean, he's right on the door, knocking, knocking on the door there. Um, Yeah, the prototype you had since then they put on a regulation where you can't stack a shoe for the roads more than 40. So you can only have so much of that energy returning foam and you can only have, I think one carbon played in there now. Uh, so that puts a little bit of a ceiling on that technological thing. Uh, but, but who knows what else will come out and that and to be honest, who comes out with it? Because the fact that Nike came out with this technology is the reason why it's being allowed to be be used if it would have been like, you know, another running company that came out with it. I'm sure the regulations would've been slapped down on it immediately and they would have probably just throwing it out altogether. Would have </s><s>[INST] been in politics. [/INST] Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, and I mean you can go, you can go super like, you know, negative with that and say like, hey, like this is like this is terrible or this is like super nefarious when in reality it's like, you know, you have a company that has, you know, billions of dollars and is interested enough in the sport that otherwise doesn't generate a ton of revenue to pick up a big tab and support like track and field and things like that. But you know, with that, you know, if you want to be the guy who says, yeah, thanks for the millions and millions of dollars, but we're gonna all those years and money you spent on that phone, you wasted it. We're not gonna let you use it. But you know, if you're another company who uh, you know revolutionized the sport and potentially a negative way, uh, you know, maybe maybe you say no to them. So it gets interesting. That's the way that's how it always happens. Yeah, There's really no way around </s><s>[INST] film effort tone. I think it's him that he wrote a book about a two hour marathon. What are the limits? How fast can we run? And I think he puts it like an hour and 42 minutes, something like that or 40 something minutes. It's kind of interesting question of what are the limits. Uh, do you think, do you think we'll just keep pushing the limits of what humans are capable of in the ultras in the marathon? Is this just like the way, uh, the way of [/INST] sport and I think ultra for sure because that is a fastly growing sport and it's, there's, there's a lot of potential for much bigger pot or much pool bigger pool of talent to pull from. Uh, that could really push the needle down on some of these performances and things like that, especially as it becomes more popular. If people start realizing or I shouldn't say realizing, but if a scenario happens where like, oh, I'm one of the best endurance athletes in the world. I make more money running ultra marathons than I do running the marathon. Then, you know, all of a sudden we see every record get broken in a matter of a couple of years. But the, for the marathon, I mean it's going to get faster I think, but like to what degree is so hard to know, it's very hard to know and it's the one hour </s>

<s>[INST] We'll always have Paris. Well, Harvey, like I said, I hope you're very successful in your run for the Harvard Board of Overseers. I think what you stand for in the realm of freedom of speech is I think the thing that makes these universities great institutions in American culture. And I'll do everything I can to help you succeed. And I'm really grateful for all the work you've done, and I'm grateful that you would talk with me today. This was amazing. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Harvey Silverglate. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Harry S. Truman. Once the government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of the opposition, it is only one way to go. And that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes the source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] don't you think that law becomes ethics? So we um well that like idea of justice starts to like we start to internalize it, that we just the way we behave the way we think about the world. [/INST] No, I I think it's a complete red herring because no one is no, </s><s>[INST] you're a red herring. Okay. [/INST] Um because someone is people are still going to always prefer their family to strangers or their in group to our group. So in terms of you're gonna have equality, that means it's gonna not matter to you whether someone is your mom or someone is, you know, someone down the street and I don't see how that will ever become the case. </s><s>[INST] Do you think it would be possible if you were an intellectual, Like you are at the beginning of the 20th century, would you be able to predict the rest of the 20th century? [/INST] No, I don't think at all. I think there was so many um out of no returns that no one would have seen their them coming for and as an example, um Lenin seizing power and making the bolshevik revolution a reality was regarded as utopian and insane. The fact that he pulled it off is close to miraculous and it was quite literally unprecedented. Um the fact that so that's a very big one, </s><s>[INST] which aspect of it, sorry to interrupt, which aspect was hard to predict that a singular figure with just some ideas would be able to take so much power [/INST] and and and maintain that power and remake that society so drastically so quickly despite such opposition </s><s>[INST] also not just a set of temporary protests by Hooligans that lead to um turmoil in the short term, but then stabilizes but literally changes the entirety of the [/INST] society. Yeah Lewton Dorf, who is the german general? He's like, all right, we got to get the Russians out of World War One. He's the one who's like, alright, let's get this lunatic Lenin who already tried and failed to have a revolution in Russia, let's send him back there and he's just going to cause problems for everybody and it's gonna be great because it's going to weaken Russia and then our eastern front isn't going to have to be a problem. And then to his surprise and everyone else's including, you know, anarchists and communists worldwide, they pulled off this, you know, october revolution. And then for a while it's like all right, I mean, I mean, I think my understanding is even people at the time in ST Petersburg and Moscow were like, what does this even mean? Right? Like no one took it seriously. And then very quickly you had the Cheka and and the secret police and all these other kind of implementations of the, you know, the communist state and people like oh they're not messing around, but they're like, all right, this is this is not gonna last for for long and you know, the U. S. A. The U. S. And day, we didn't even recognize the soviet union's legitimacy for a very long time. There were no diplomatic relations after a certain point. It's like who's the if you don't recognize Lenin and Stalin's government, who is the government of this of Russia or the soviet union? Is that these are like you have to recognize that it's just that they're not going anywhere. So that was something that was not I think very um predictable. The great depression in retrospect there were certain things that were predictable but it was not at all the case that it needed to last as long as it did in the States as FDR made it do. So there's all sorts of things. I mean if they um uh fought Germany's remilitarization near World World World War Two could have been prevented. If you didn't have the treaty of Versailles, would you have the hyperinflation? Would you have Hitler, These are all I think choose your own adventure moments where things could have gone in other directions. I don't believe I don't believe this kind of idea this very Marxist idea that like history is inevitable and once you start with certain premises, the contradictions kind of unfold. I think that's ridiculous. </s><s>[INST] I feel that there's power in the santa claus outfit. [/INST] Yeah. I </s><s>[INST] mean it's a fundamentally Communist idea [/INST] right. Santa </s><s>[INST] claus arbitrary redistribution of [/INST] wealth. It's not redistribution. </s><s>[INST] Well at least I decide who's good and bad only I only I know this and I mean I am somehow getting funding from somewhere right, okay, listen, there's, I have so much to teach [/INST] you a little </s><s>[INST] Michael workshop Yeah, and how many people do you think are employed in this workshop? Yes, I [/INST] don't know how many are in the workshop, </s><s>[INST] I think the rest of you are going to have to look into it anyway and the red colors and everything. Is that the biggest holiday of all time christmas like just in terms of the intensity of the festivities? [/INST] No, I think christmas is a very recent phenomenon, I think historically it was not a big deal </s><s>[INST] now, I know historically has not been, but in terms of how much it captivates how intense it is, I guess from a capitalist perspective like how much is going on, how visual it is, how intense it is, I think how grabs a whole population [/INST] think it's because the idea of christmas is probably one of the most powerful holiday ideas, easter is probably up there, Easter is obviously up there because you have christ resurrected christ dying his resurrection, so that's kind of a big one but but christmas is this symbol of brotherhood and kindness and magnanimity, you know, one of the things I despise about our culture is this glory and something of fighting very heavily with this book or at least attempting to, is this glorification of cynicism, this kind of like, oh you like this song, that's cute, stupid um whereas christmas is the one time of year where you could be happy and joyous and kind and people don't get to roll their eyes at you, they get to stop being too cool for school and they get to be like, you know, I, I enjoy your friendship, your, your my sister, my brother, my dad, my mom, whatever, and it's, you know, I was in rand's favorite holiday, I adore it, especially christmas in new york, and it's just this idea of like, even though we're cold and it's dark outside, you know, it's still, it's kind of like, it's still cozy and you and the next let's hope the next year is because with, with Russians santa comes on New Year's. So it's kind of like let's make this next year an even better one. So it's very much the holiday of hope and joy </s>

<s>[INST] And uh to one side note, first of all, it's an exceptionally popular video game. The side effect is that there's a lot of incredible human experts at that video game. So the benchmark that you're trying to reach is very high and the other, can you talk about the approach that was used initially and throughout training these agents to play this [/INST] game? And so they personally used is self play. And so you have two agents, they don't know anything, They battle each other, they discover something a little bit good and now they both know it and they just get better and better and better without bound. And that's a really powerful idea, right? Uh that we then went from the one versus one version of the game and scaled up to five versus five, right? So you think about kind of like with basketball where you have this like team sport, you need to do all this coordination. Um and we were able to push the same idea, the same self play too, To really get to the professional level at the full five versus 5 version of the game. And uh and and the things I think are really interesting here is that these agents in some ways they're almost like an insect like intelligence right? Where, you know, they have a lot in common with how an insect is trained, right? Insect kind of lives in this environment for a very long time or you know that the ancestors of this insect has been around for a long time and had a lot of experience that gets baked into into into this agent. And you know it's not really smart in the sense of a human rights not able to go and learn calculus but is able to navigate its environment extremely well. It's able to handle unexpected things in the environment that's never seen before pretty well. Um And we see the same sort of thing with our Dota bots right? They're able to within this game they're able to play against humans which is something that never existed in its evolutionary environment totally different play styles from humans versus robots. And yet it's able to handle extremely well. And that's something I think was very surprising to us. Was something that doesn't really emerge from what we've seen with P. P. O. At smaller scale. Right? The kind of scale we're running this stuff out was uh you know I could take 100,000 CPU cores running with like 100 GPU s. It's probably about you know like you know something like hundreds of years of experience going into this body every single real day. And so that scale is massive and we start to see very different kinds of behaviors out of the algorithms that we all know and love </s><s>[INST] Daughter. You mentioned beat the world expert one v. 1 and then uh you didn't weren't able to win five U. Five this year at [/INST] the best players in the </s><s>[INST] world. So what's what's the comeback story? What's first of all talk through that exceptionally exciting event and what's what's the following months and this year looks like? [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. So well one thing that's interesting is that you know, we lose all the time because we so the Dota team at open ai we played the boat against better players than our system all the time. Or at least we used to write like you know, the first time we lost publicly was we went up on stage at the international and we played against some of the best teams in the world. Um And we ended up losing both games but We gave them a run for their money, right? That both games were kind of 30 minutes, 25 minutes and they went back and forth, back and forth back and forth. And so I think that really shows that were at the professional level. Um and kind of looking at those games, we think that the coin could have gone a different direction and we could have could have had some wins. And that was actually very encouraging for us. Um and you know, it's interesting because the international was at a fixed time, right? So we we knew exactly what day we were going to be playing and we pushed as far as we could as fast as we could. Two weeks later we had a boat that had an 80% win rate versus the one that played at T. I. Um so the March of progress, you know, you should think of as a snapshot rather than as an end state. Um and so in fact we'll we'll be announcing our our finals pretty soon. I actually think that will announce our final match prior to this podcast being released. So there should be uh we'll be playing, we'll be playing against the World champions. And you know, for us, it's really less about like the way we think about what's upcoming is the final milestone, the file competitive milestone for the project, right. That our goal in all of this isn't really about beating humans at Dota. Our goal is to push the state of the art in reinforcement learning and we've done that right? And we've actually learned a lot from our system and that we have uh you know, I think a lot of exciting next steps that we want to take. And so, you know, kind of the final showcase of what we built, we're going to do this match, but for us it's not really the success or failure um to see, you know, do do do do we have the coin flip, go in our direction are against. </s><s>[INST] Where do you see the field of deep learning heading in the next few years. What do you see the work and reinforcement learning perhaps heading and uh [/INST] more specifically </s>

<s>[INST] So you have looked deep into these people have deep conversations and it's interesting to get a sense of stories of the way they were thinking and the way it was changed the way your own thinking about Ai has changed. So you mentioned McCarthy is um what about the years of cmu Carnegie Mellon with joe And was sure [/INST] joe was not in a I he was in algorithmic complexity. </s><s>[INST] Was there always a line between ai and computer science for example is a i it's own place of outcasts. It was that the feeling there [/INST] was a kind of outcast period for AI for instance in 1970 for the new field was hardly 10 years old. The new field of computer science was asked by the National Science Foundation I believe. But it may have been the National academies. I can't remember uh to you know tell us tell our your fellow scientists where computer science is and what it means and they wanted to leave out a I Uh huh and they only agreed to put it in because Don Knuth said hey this is important. You can't just leave that out. </s><s>[INST] Really. Don. Don [/INST] Kennedy. Yes </s><s>[INST] I talked to mrs e joseph out of all the people. [/INST] Yes. But you see an Ai person couldn't have made that argument. He wouldn't have been believed but can youth was believed. Yes. </s><s>[INST] So joe crow worked on the real [/INST] stuff, joe was working on algorithmic complexity but he would say in plain english again and again the smartest people I know are in a I really? Oh yes, no question. Anyway joe I love these guys. What happened was that I guess it was as I started to write machines who think Herb Simon and I became very close friends. He would walk past our house on Northumberland Street every day after work and I would just be putting my cover on my typewriter and I would lean out the door and say her, would you like a sherry? And her almost always would like a sherry. So he'd stop in and we talked for an hour, two hours. My journal says we talked this afternoon for three hours. </s><s>[INST] What was in his mind at the time? If in terms of the ai side of things. [/INST] Uh we didn't talk too much about ai we talked about other things in life. We we both love literature and Herb had read Proust in the original french twice all the way through. I can't read it in english and translation. So we talked about literature. We talked about languages, we talked about music because he loved music. We talked about art because he was he was actually enough of a painter that he had to give it up because he was afraid it was interfering with his research and so on. So no, it was really just chat chat, but it was very warm. So one summer I said to her, you know my students have all the really interesting conversations. I was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh then in the english department. You know, they get to talk about the meaning of life and that kind of thing. And what do I have? I have university meetings where we talk about the photocopying budget and you know, whether the course on romantic poetry should be one semester or two. So her laughed. He said, yes, I know what you mean, he said, but you know you could do something about that Dot was his wife Dot and I used to have a salon at the university of Chicago every sunday night. And we would have essentially an open house and people knew it wasn't for sure. A small talk. It was really for some the topic of uh depth, he said, but my advice would be that you choose the topic ahead of time. Fine. I said so the following we we exchanged mail over the summer that was us post in those days because you didn't have personal email and um we I decided I would organize it and there would be eight of us Allen Newell and his wife, Herb Simon and his wife Dorothy. Um there was a novelist in town a man named Mark Harris. He had just just arrived and his wife, josephine Mark was most famous then for a novel called Bang the Drum Slowly, which was about baseball And Joe and Me So eight people. And we met monthly and we we just sank our teeth into really hard topics and it was great fun. </s><s>[INST] How have your own views around artificial intelligence changed and through the process of writing machines who think and afterwards the ripple effects. [/INST] I was a little skeptical that this whole thing would work out. It didn't matter to me, it was so audacious, </s><s>[INST] the whole thing being a I [/INST] a I generally and in some ways uh yeah, it hasn't worked out the way I expected so far. That is to say there is this wonderful lot of apps, thanks to deep learning and so on. But those are algorithmic and in the part of symbolic processing there is very little yet, yes. And that's the field that lies waiting for industrial industrious graduate students. </s><s>[INST] Maybe you can tell me some figures that popped up in your life in the 80s with expert systems or there was the symbolic ai possibilities of what's you know that what most people think of as a i if you dream of the possibilities ai is really expert system and those hit a few walls and those challenges there. And I think yes, they will re emerge again with some new breakthroughs and so on. But what did that feel like? Both the possibility and the winter that followed the slow down. [/INST] You know, this whole thing about ai winter is to me a crock, </s><s>[INST] it's no winters [/INST] Because I look at the basic research that was being done in the 80s, which is supposed to be my God, it was really important. It was laying down things that nobody had thought about before. But it was basic research, you couldn't monetize it. Hence the winter. That's the winter. You know, research scientific research goes and fits and starts. It isn't this nice smooth. Oh, this follows, this follows this. No, it just doesn't work that </s>

<s>[INST] You said, I think to Sean Carroll, by the way, everyone should go check out Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast. It's incredible. And Sean Carroll is an incredible person. I think you said there, maybe in a paper, I have a quote. You said that a soft particle is a particle that has zero energy, just like you said now. And when the energy goes to zero because the energy is proportional to the wavelength, it's also spread over an infinitely large distance. If you like, it's spread over the whole universe. It somehow runs off to the boundary. What we learned from that is that if you add a zero energy particle to the vacuum, you get a new state. And so there are infinitely many, plural for vacuum, which can be thought of as being different from one another by the addition of soft photons or soft gravitons. Can you elaborate on this wild idea? If you like, it spreads over the whole universe. When the energy goes to zero because the energy is proportional to the wavelength, it also spreads over an infinitely large distance. If you like, it's spread over the whole universe. Can you explain [/INST] these soft gravitons and photons? Right. Yeah. So the soft gravitons and photons have been known about since the 60s, but exactly what we're supposed to do with them or how we're supposed to think about them, I think has been well understood only recently. And in quantum mechanics, the energy of a particle is proportional to Planck's constant times its wavelength. So when the energy goes to zero, the wavelength goes to infinity. Now, if something has zero energy and it's spread all over the universe, in what sense is it actually there? Yeah. That's been the confusing thing to make a precise statement about when something is and isn't there. Now, the simplest way of seeing... So people might have taken the point of view that if it has zero energy and it's spread all over the universe, it's not there. We can ignore it. But if you do this, you'll get into trouble. And one of the ways that you'll get into trouble is that even though it has zero energy, it doesn't have zero angular momentum. If it's a photon, it always has angular momentum one. If it's a graviton, it's angular momentum two. So you can't say that the state of the system with the zero energy photon should be identified with the one without the zero energy photon, that we can just ignore them, because then you will conclude that angular momentum is not conserved. And if angular momentum is not conserved, things won't be consistent. And of course, you can have a lot of these things. And typically, you do get a lot of them, and you can actually do a calculation that shows that every time you </s><s>[INST] scatter two particles, you create an infinite number of them. Infinite number of the soft photons and gravity. [/INST] Of the zero energy ones. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And so these are somehow everywhere. They're everywhere. But they also contain information or they're able to store information. [/INST] They're everywhere. And they're able to store information. They're able to store an arbitrary large amount of information. So what we pointed out is… So what these things really do, one way of thinking of them is they rush off to the edges of the universe, spreading all over the space. It's like saying they rush off to the edge of the universe. And that includes, if the interior of the black hole is not considered part of the universe, that includes the edge of the black hole. So we need to set up our description of physics so that all the things that are conserved are still conserved in the way that we're describing them, and that will not be true if we ignore these things. We have to keep careful track of these things. And people had been sloppy about that, and we learned how to be very precise and careful about it. </s><s>[INST] And once you're being precise, you can actually answer this kind of very problematic thing that Hawking suggested that black holes destroy information. [/INST] Well, what we showed is that there's an error in the argument that all black holes are the same because they hadn't kept track of these very subtle things. And whether or not this is the key error in the argument remains to be seen, or whether this is a technical point. </s><s>[INST] Yes. But it is an error. It is an error. [/INST] And Hawking obviously agreed with it. Hawking agreed with it, and he was sure that this was the critical error, and that understanding </s><s>[INST] this would get us the whole story, and that could well be. What was it like working with Stephen Hawking and this particular problem because it's kind [/INST] of a whole journey, right? Well, you know, I love the guy. He's so passionate about physics. </s><s>[INST] He just, yeah, his oneness with the problem and the, I mean it's- So his mind is all occupied by the world that's- Yeah. [/INST] And let me tell you, there's a lot of other things with his illness and with his celebrity </s><s>[INST] and a lot of other things. A lot of distractions pulling at his mind. He's still there. [/INST] He's still there. That's right. </s><s>[INST] I remember him turning down tea with Lady Gaga so we could spend another hour on paper. That my friend's dedication. What did you learn about physics? [/INST] What did you learn about life from having worked with Stephen Hawking? Well, he was one of my great teachers. Of course, he's older than me, and I was reading his textbooks in graduate school. And I learned a lot about relativity from him. I learned about passion for a problem. I learned about not caring what other people think. Physics is an interesting culture, even if you make a great discovery like Hawking did. People don't believe everything you say. In fact, people love to disagree. It's a culture that cherishes disagreement. And so he kept ahead with what he believed in and sometimes he was right and sometimes </s>

<s>[INST] you know, try to let those flow through us. What is the OpenAI moderation tooling for GPT look like? What's the process of moderation? So there's several things, maybe it's the same thing, you can educate me. So RLHF is the ranking, but is there a wall you're up against, like where this is an unsafe thing to answer? What does that tooling look like? [/INST] We do have systems that try to figure out, you know, try to learn when a question is something that we're supposed to, we call refusals refuse to answer. It is early and imperfect, we're, again, the spirit of building in public and bring society along gradually. We put something out, it's got flaws, we'll make better versions. But yes, we are trying, the system is trying to learn questions that it shouldn't answer. One small thing that really bothers me about our current thing and we'll get this better is I don't like the feeling of being scolded by a computer. I really don't, you know. I, a story that has always stuck with me, I don't know if it's true, I hope it is, is that the reason Steve Jobs put that handle on the back of the first iMac, remember that big plastic bright colored thing? Was that you should never trust a computer you shouldn't throw out, you couldn't throw out a window. Nice. And of course, not that many people actually throw their computer out a window, but sort of nice to know that you can. And it's nice to know that like, this is a tool very much in my control. And this is a tool that like does things to help me. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that with GPT-4. But I noticed that I have like a visceral response to being scolded by a computer. And I think, you know, that's a good learning from deploying or from creating the system </s><s>[INST] and we can improve it. Nice. Yeah, it's tricky. [/INST] And also for the system not to treat you like a child. Treating our users like adults is a thing I say </s><s>[INST] very frequently inside the office. But it's tricky, it has to do with language. Like if there's like certain conspiracy theories you don't want the system to be speaking to, it's a very tricky language you should use. Because what if I want to understand the earth, if the earth is, the idea that the earth is flat and I want to fully explore that, [/INST] I want the, I want GPT to help me explore. GPT-4 has enough nuance to be able to help you explore that without entry you like an adult in the process. GPT-3 I think just wasn't capable of getting that right. But GPT-4 I think we can get to do this. </s><s>[INST] By the way, if you could just speak to the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-4 from 3.5 from three, is there some technical leaps [/INST] or is it really focused on the alignment? No, it's a lot of technical leaps in the base model. One of the things we are good at at OpenAI is finding a lot of small wins and multiplying them together. And each of them maybe is like a pretty big secret in some sense, but it really is the multiplicative impact of all of them. And the detail and care we put into it that gets us these big leaps. And then, you know, it looks like to the outside, like, oh, they just probably like did one thing to get from three to 3.5 to four. </s><s>[INST] It's like hundreds of complicated things. It's a tiny little thing with the training, [/INST] with everything with the data organization. Yeah, how we like collect data, how we clean the data, how we do the training, how we do the optimizer, how we do the architecture, </s><s>[INST] Like, so many things. Let me ask you the all-important question about size. So, does size matter in terms of neural networks, with how good the system performs? So, GPT-3, 3.5 had 175 billion... [/INST] I heard GPT-4 had 100 trillion. </s><s>[INST] 100 trillion. Can I speak to this? Do you know that meme? Yeah, the big purple circle. Do you know where it originated? I don't, do you? I'd be curious to hear it. It's the presentation I gave. No way! Yeah. A journalist just took a snapshot. Now I learned from this. [/INST] I don't, do you? </s><s>[INST] It's right when GPT-3 was released. I gave a... it's on YouTube. I gave a description of what it is. And I spoke to the limitation of the parameters, like where it's going, and I talked about the human brain and how many parameters it has, synapses and so on. And perhaps like an idiot, perhaps not. I said like GPT-4, like the next. As it progresses. What I should have said is GPT-N or something. [/INST] I can't believe that this came from you, that is... </s><s>[INST] But people should go to it. It's totally taken out of context. They didn't reference anything. They took it. This is what GPT-4 is going to be. And I feel horrible about it. [/INST] You know, it doesn't, I don't think it matters in any serious way. </s><s>[INST] I mean, it's not good because, again, size is not everything, but also people just take a lot of these kinds of discussions out of context. But it is interesting to... I mean, that's what I was trying to do to compare in different ways the difference between the human brain and the neural network, and this thing is getting so impressive. [/INST] This is like in some sense... Someone said to me this morning, actually, and I was like, oh, this might be right. This is the most complex software object humanity has yet produced. And I was like, and it will be trivial in a couple of decades, right? It'll be like kind of, anyone can do it, whatever. But yeah, the amount of complexity relative to anything we've done so far </s>

<s>[INST] and you also don't want to romanticize it because it is true that some, some, some of the greats in history, especially writers suffer from all the same stuff like they weren't quite able, I mean, you might only right for two or three hours a day, but the rest of the day is often spent, you know, kind of tortured. [/INST] But all right, this is the irrational thing is if I if if this goes for a lot of people's jobs, people especially who work for themselves, You'd be shocked how much you could wake up at nine Or eight or 7 or whatever. Get to work and stop at one. But you're really focused in those hours One or two and do 25 really focused hours of of stuff productive of a week and then there's 100 12 waking hours in the week, right? So we're talking about 80 something hours of free time. You can live. You know, if you're just really focused in your, you know, yin and yang of your time and that's what, that's my goal is black and white time. I've really focused time and then totally like clean conscience free time right now. Neither is a lot of great, it's a lot of I should be working, but I'm not, I'm wasting this time, this is bad and that's just this massive. So if you can just get really good at uh the black and the white. So you just wake up and it's just like full work and then I think a lot of people could have like all this free time, but instead I'll do those same three hours. It's like you said, I'll do them really late at night or whatever after having tortured myself the whole day and not having any fun. It's not like I'm having fun. Um I call it the dark playground by the way, which is where you are when you know, you should be working, but you're doing something else, you're doing something fun on paper, but it's it's never, it feels awful and </s><s>[INST] so yeah, I spent a lot of time in the dark and you know, you shouldn't be doing it and you still do it and yeah, [/INST] it's it's not clean conscience fun. It's bad, it's it's it's toxic. Um and I think that it's, there's something about, you know, you're draining yourself all the time and if you just did your focused hours and then if you actually have good clean fun fun can be anything, you're reading a book, can be hanging out with someone can be really fun, you can go and do something cool in the city, you know, that is critical, it's your recharging some part of your psyche there and I think it makes it easier to actually work the next day and I say this from the experiences when I have had, you know, good stretches, it's like, it's your, you know what it is? It's like, you feel like your fist pounding one part of your brain just pounding the other part, like you're like, you're like we got like, like we we treated we treat ourselves well, like that's how you're internally feel like I treat myself and it's like, you know, of course it's work time and then later you're like, now it's playtime and it's like okay, back to work and you're in this very healthy like parent child relationship in your head versus like this constant conflict and like the kid doesn't respect the parent, the parent hates the kid and like, yeah, </s><s>[INST] and you're right, it always feels like it's like one fix away so that there's hope. I mean, I I guess, I mean so much of what you said just rings so true. I guess I have the same kind of hope. [/INST] Very regular. I mean I'm I'm impressed like and I think partially what, what there is a bit of a duct tape solution here, which is you just the because it's always easy to schedule stuff for the future for myself, right? Because that's future tim and future tim is not my problem. So I'll schedule all kinds of ship for future tim and I will um and I will uh not then not do it, but in this case you can schedule podcasts and you have to show up. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] right? It seems like a good medium </s><s>[INST] for progress, but this is not my this is what I do for, [/INST] you know, but at least this is the kind of thing, especially if it's not your main thing, especially not your main thing, it's the kind of thing that you would dream of doing and want to do and never do and I feel like your, your, your regular, you know, production here is a, is a sign that something is working at least </s><s>[INST] in this regard in this regard, but this, I'm sure you have this same kind of thing with the podcast. In fact, because you're gonna be doing the podcast as possible, the podcast becomes what the podcast is for me, [/INST] This is your procrastinating, if you think about being 80 and if you can get into that person's head and look back and be like just deep regret, you just, you know, yearning, you could do anything to just go back and have done this differently. That is desperation, it's just you don't feel it yet, it's not in you yet. The other thing you can do is if you have a partner, if you want to partner with someone now, you could say we meet These 15 hours every week and that point you're going to get it done. So working with someone can help. Um </s>

<s>[INST] in dyke nor mr. con had any involvement in any misconduct by mr. Epstein of any kind at any time the executives the executors lawyer said in a statement it is enormously regrettable that the Attorney General chose to level false allegations and to unfairly malign the co-executors reputation without any proof or factual basis um what no proof has been provided um and what reputation by the way these two dudes have the same reputation as insert any scumbag here and that's the sort of reputational power that these people have if we were doing a social credit score they would have a negative 100 so what do you mean their reputation why is his name all over the Epstein stuff can you answer that for me wise con signature everywhere wise in dike signature everywhere why were they facilitating sham marriages and the real question is why have they not been charged yet if you'd like to contact me you can do that at Bobby kapuchi at protonmail.com that's B-O-B-B-Y-C-A-P-U-C-C-I at protonmail.com you can also find me on Twitter at B-O-B-B-Y underscore C-A-P-U-C-C-I all of the links that go with this episode can be found in the description box [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] I mean, there is a compelling hope that you don't have to do fine tuning, which is one of the cool things about GPT three seems to do well without any fine tuning, [/INST] I guess for specific applications, we still want to train in a certain, like, add a little fine tune on, like a specific use case, but uh it's an incredibly impressive I think from my standpoint and again, I'm not an expert. I wanted to say that it will be people then </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I have access to the ap, I've been, I'm gonna probably do a bunch of fun things with it. Um already did some fun things, some videos coming up just for the hell of it. I mean, I could be a troll at this point that I haven't used it for a serious applications, so it's really cool to see. You're right, you are, you're able to actually use it with real people and see how well it works. That's really exciting. Yeah, let me ask you another question, but there's a feeling when you interact with replica with an AI system, there's an entity there? Do you think that entity has to be self aware. Do you do you think it has to have consciousness to create um a rich experience and uh and a corollary? What's what is consciousness? [/INST] Mhm. I don't know if it does need to have any of those things, but again, because right now, you know, it doesn't have anything, but can again, a bunch of assimilate. Well, I'm not sure. Let's just put it this way, but I think as long as you can assimilate it, if you can feel like you're talking to to an um to to robot to machine, that seems to be self aware? That seems to reason well, and feels like a person. And I think that's enough. And again, what's the goal? Um in order to make people people feel better, We might not even need that. Um in the end of the day, </s><s>[INST] What about this one goal? What about like, ethical things about suffering? You know, the moment there's a display of consciousness, we associate consciousness was suffering. Um you know, there's a temptation to say, well, shouldn't this thing have rights, shouldn't this, shouldn't we not? You know, should we be careful about how we interact with a replica? Like should it be illegal to torture a replica? Right? All those kinds of things, Is that uh See I personally believe that that's going to be a thing uh like that's a serious thing to think about, but I'm not sure when, but by your smile, I can tell that's not a that's not a current concern. But do you think about that kind of stuff about like suffering and torture and ethical questions about ai systems? [/INST] I think if we're talking about long game, I wouldn't torture your ai, Who knows what happens in 5 to 10 years. </s><s>[INST] They'll get you off from that, [/INST] they'll get you back. I'm trying to be as nice as possible and create this Ally. I think there should be regulation, but both way in a way, like I don't think it's okay to torture and I have to be honest, I'm not I don't even think it's okay to yell Alexa, turn on the lights. I think there should be some or just saying kind of nasty, you know how kids learn to interact with Alexa and this kind of mean way because you just yell at it all the time. I think that's great. I think there should be some feedback loops so that these systems don't train us that it's okay to do that in general. Uh so that if you try to do that, you really get some feedback from the system that it's not okay with that. Um And that's the most important right now </s><s>[INST] let me ask a question. I think people are curious about when they look at a world class uh leader and thinkers such as yourself as what uh what books, technical fiction philosophical had a big impact on your life and maybe from another perspective. Would books would you recommend others read? [/INST] Yeah. So my choice, the three books write three books. My choice is um So the one book that really influenced me a lot when I was building, starting out this company 10 years ago was G. B. Godel Escher bach. And um I like everything about it. First of all, it's just beautifully written and it's so old school and so um someone outdated a little bit. But I think the idea is in it um about the fact that a few meaningless components can come together and create meaning. We can't even understand </s><s>[INST] everything. I mean complexity, the whole science of complexity and uh that beauty intelligence, all interesting things about this world emerge. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. The the Godel theorems theorems and just thinking about like what even this form, you know, you know, these formal systems, something can be created that would can't quite yet understand. And that, from my romantic standpoint, it was always just that is why it's important to maybe I should try to work on these systems and try to build an ai yes, I'm not an engineer. Yes, I don't really know how it works, but I think that's something comes out of it, that's you know, pure poetry and I know a little bit about that. Um something magical comes out of it um that we can't quite put a finger on, that's why that book was really fundamental for me just for, I don't even know why it was just all about this little magic that that happens. So that's one that, um, probably the most important book for applicant was carl Rogers on becoming a person. Um, and that's really, and so I think when I think about our company, it's all about, there's so many, there's so many little magical things that happened over the course of working on it. Um, for instance, I mean the most famous chad bought that we learned about when we started working on the company was Eliza, which was wise and bomb, you know, the professor that built, um, build a child, father would listen to you and be a therapist, therapist. Um, and I got really inspired to be a replica. When I read carl Rogers don't become a person and then I realized that Eliza was mocking carl Rogers. It was carl Rogers back in the day. But I thought that carl Rogers ideas are, they're simple and they're not, you know, they're very, very simple. But there may be the most profound thing I've ever learned about human beings. And that's the fact that before carl Rogers, most therapy was about seeing what's wrong with people and trying to fix it or show them what's wrong with you. Um, it was all built on the fact that most people are old people are fundamentally flawed. We have this. Uh, you know, broken psyche and this is just a therapy, just an instrument to shed some light on that. And carl Rogers was different in a way that he finally said that well. Um it's very important for therapy to work is to create this therapeutic relationship where you believe fundamentally and inclination to positive growth that everyone deep inside wants to grow positively and change. And it's super important to create this space and this therapeutic relationship where you give unconditional positive regard, deep understanding along someone else to be a separate person, full acceptance. And you also try to be as generous as possible in it as possible in it. And then and he's and then for him that was his own journey of personal growth and that was back in the 60s and even that book, that is, you know, it's coming from years ago. Um there's a mention that even machines can potentially do that. Um, and I always felt that you know, creating the space is probably the most, the biggest gift we can give to each other. And that's why the book was fundamental for me personally, because I felt I want to be learning how to do that in my life and maybe I can scale it with disease systems and other people can get access to that. So I think carl Rogers, it's a pretty dry and boring book. I think they just try to read it. I do, I think for just for yourself, for </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] don't know, I'm gonna push back on that. So I think the parallels are very much closer than you're making them seem. I think it's compare Stalin Stalin as an example of somebody who held power considered by many to be one of the most powerful men ever. He held power for 30 years. So that's what I'm referring to longevity and then there's a few people have to wish my knowledge of history was better, but people who fought a few great battles and they did not maintain power, but [/INST] This contract say for example, Alexander the great who died at 33, um, from probably unnatural causes, um, had around 4-5 truly defining battles in his life, which uh, responsible for the, for the lion's share of, of of his achievements and burned very bright but didn't burn along. Um, Stalin, on the other hand, started from nothing and quietly methodically worked his way through the revolutionary phase and uh green increasing amounts of power and as he said, um went all the way to the end of uh, of his career. Um, yeah, there's there's definitely something to be said for for longevity. Um, but as to which one is greater than the other, You can't give it a definition or a set of criteria which will definitively say this is better than that. But when you look ultimately, we look at alexander is great, but in a different way and we look at Stalin, I don't think many people say son was a great person, but from the Machiavellian point of view, uh, I would say he was great author. </s><s>[INST] But when you think about beautiful creations done by human beings in the space of, say, martial arts, in the space of sport, what inspires you, the peak of performance, [/INST] I I see where you're coming from, like it's a great question. Um, for me it always comes down to a degree of difficulty, but things are difficult in different ways. Okay, a single flawless performance in youth is still, that wins a gold medal, let's say for example, uh Nadia comaneci won the olympic gold medal in gymnastics, the first person ever to get a perfect score. Um If she had disappeared after that, we would still remember that is an incredible moment and the degree of difficulty to to get a perfect score. An olympic gymnastics is just of the charts. Um, and contrast that with someone who went to four olympics and got four silver medals. I mean they're both incredible achievements. That is different. Uh the attributes that lead to longevity, um typically tend to conflict with the attributes that bring a powerful single performance. One is all about focus on, on a particular event, the other is on spreading your resources over time. Both present tremendous difficulties. Um, there's nobody to say one is better than the other. </s><s>[INST] There's also just for me personally, the stories of the, of somebody who truly struggled are are the most powerful. I know a bunch of people don't necessarily agree because you said perfection, perfection is kind of the antithesis of struggle. But I look at somebody, okay, my own life, somebody I'm a fan, I'm a fan of, I'm a huge fan of yours. I'm trying not to be nervous here, but uh somebody I'm a fan of in the judo world is Travis stevens. [/INST] He's a remarkable family by the way, </s><s>[INST] remarkable human being insane in the best kinds of ways. I think I started due to us, I really started martial arts. I have wrestled. If you consider those marshals, that's my, that's been in my blood, I'm rushing. So, but beyond that, you know, the whole Pajama thing. We were at the GI started by watching Travis in 2008. Olympics. [/INST] Was that accidental? Did you know Travis </s><s>[INST] prior to watching? I don't know, I just tuned in [/INST] that it's an unusual choice. It was just random. You just tuned in and you saw Travis stevens. </s><s>[INST] I tuned into the olympics and I was wondering what judo is and then I started watch, we're all proud of our countries and so on. So I started watching, he was, I think the only american In the Olympics for Judo, uh, maybe the, so the scale of Harrison was 2012. Uh, Rhonda was there too. So I watched Rhonda and Travis, But obviously sort of uh, I was, I was focused on somebody who also weighed the same as I did. So there was a kind of uh, I think 81 kg. So there's a connection, but also there's an intensity to him. Like he would get like angry at his own failures and he would just refuse to quit. It's that kind of dan gable mentality. I just, that was inspiring to me that he's the underdog and the way people talk about him, the commentators that it was an unlikely person to do well, right? And I the F you attitude behind that saying no, I'm gonna still win gold. Obviously he didn't do well in 2000 and eight, but that was that, that was somehow inspiring. And I just remember he pulled me in, but then I started to see this sport, I guess you can call it of effortlessly dominating your opponent and like throwing because to me, wrestling was like a grind, you kind of control, you slowly just break your opponent. The idea that you could with like a foot sweep was fascinating to me that just because of timing, you can take these like monsters, giant people, like incredible athletes and just smash them with, it just doesn't, there was no struggle to it. It was always like a look of surprise, judo dominance in judo has a look like the other person is like, what just happened, This is very different from rest. It's built into [/INST] the rule structure to the whole idea of an emp on of of a match being over in an instant and um, that creates a thrilling spectator sport because you can, as you say, with the wives of the foot sweeps, um you can take someone out who's heavily favored and if you're not Judah was the most unforgiving of all the grappling sports, you can, if you have a lapse of concentration for half a second, it's done, it's over. Um if those guys get a grip on each other, uh any one of them can throw the other, The idea, you know, uh when you see someone like um Nomura who won three Olympic gold medals to to win across three Olympics and that's an incredible achievement given how many ways there are to lose in the standing position in judo and how unforgiving it is as a sport that shows an incredible level of dominance. And </s>

<s>[INST] We think as humans that the hardware is the fundamental thing I human is a hardware entity. But it could be the software. [/INST] Right? Yeah. Yeah. I would say like there needs to be some grounding at some point to like a physical reality. The </s><s>[INST] software is the thing. Like is this thing that makes that thing special? Right. [/INST] Yeah. I guess you're right. </s><s>[INST] But then cloning might be exceptionally difficult. Like there might be a deep integration between the software and the hardware in ways we don't quite understand [/INST] from the ocean point of view. Like what makes me special is more like the gang of genes that are writing in my chromosomes I suppose. Right. Like they're the replicating unit, I suppose. And </s><s>[INST] no, but that's just the thing that makes you special. Sure. Well, the reality is what makes you special is your ability to survive based on the software that runs on the hardware that was built by the genes. [/INST] Um, so </s><s>[INST] the software is the thing that makes you survive, not the hardware. It's a [/INST] little bit of both. You know, it's just like a second layer. It's a new second layer that hasn't been there before the brain. They both, they both co exist. </s><s>[INST] But there's also layers of the software. I mean it's, it's not, it's a so abstraction and uh, on top of abstractions, [/INST] but so selfish gene um Nick Lane, I would say sometimes books are like not sufficient. I like to reach for textbooks sometimes. Um, I kind of feel like books are for too much of a general consumption sometime and they just kind of like they're too high up in the level of abstraction and it's not good enough. So I like textbooks. I like the cell. I think the cell was pretty cool. That's why also I like the writing of nick Lane is because he's pretty willing to step one level down and he doesn't, </s><s>[INST] uh, yeah, he's [/INST] sort of he's willing to go there, but he's also willing to sort of be throughout the stack, so he'll go down to a lot of detail. But then he will come back up and I think he has a basically I really appreciate that. That's </s><s>[INST] why I love college, early college, even high school, just textbooks on the basics of computer science and mathematics, of biology and chemistry. Those are they condensed down like uh it's sufficiently general that you can understand both the philosophy and the details, but also like you get homework problems and you get to play with it as much as you would if you weren't Yeah, programming stuff. And [/INST] then I'm also suspicious of textbooks honestly, because as an example in deep learning, there's no like amazing textbooks and the field is changing very quickly. I imagine the same is true. And say uh synthetic biology and so on. These books, like the cell are kind of outdated, there's still high level like what is the actual real source of truth is people in wet labs working with cells, you know, sequencing genomes and yeah, actually working with working with it and uh I don't have that much exposure to that or what that looks like. So I still don't fully, I'm reading through the cell and it's kind of interesting and I'm learning but it's still not sufficient, I would say in terms of understanding what </s><s>[INST] it's a clean summarization of the mainstream narrative. Yeah. But you have to learn that before you break [/INST] out </s><s>[INST] towards the cutting edge. [/INST] Yeah. What is the actual process of working with these cells and growing them and incubating them And you know, it's kind of like a massive cooking recipes of making sure yourself slaves and proliferate and then you're sequencing them running experiments and just how that works. I think it's kind of like the source of truth of at the end of the day what's really useful in terms of creating therapies and so on. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. I wonder what in the future ai textbooks will be because you know, there's an artificial intelligence, a modern approach actually haven't read if it's come out the recent version. The recent there's been a recent addition. I also saw there's a science of deep learning book. I'm waiting for textbooks that worth recommending worth reading. [/INST] It's </s><s>[INST] tricky because it's like papers and code. Code code. [/INST] Honestly I find papers are quite good especially like the appendix appendix of any paper as well. It's like it's like the most detail you can </s><s>[INST] have. It doesn't have to be cohesive connected to anything else. You just described a very specific way you saw the particular thing. Yeah. [/INST] Many times papers can be actually quite readable. Not always but sometimes the introduction in the abstract is readable even for someone outside of the field not this is not always true. And sometimes I think unfortunately scientists use complex terms, even when it's not necessary. I think that's harmful? I think there's no reason for </s><s>[INST] that. And papers sometimes are longer than they need to be in the in the parts that don't matter. Yeah, appendix would be long. But then the paper itself, you know, look at Einstein, make it simple. Yeah, [/INST] but certainly I've come across papers I would say and say like synthetic biology or something that I thought were quite readable for the abstract and introduction and then you're reading the rest of it and you don't fully understand, but you kind of are getting a gist and I think it's cool </s><s>[INST] what advice you give advice to folks interested in machine learning and research, but in general life, advice to a young person, high school, early college about how to have a career they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of. [/INST] Yeah, I think I'm very hesitant to give general advice. I think it's really hard. I've mentioned, like some of the stuff I've mentioned is fairly general. I think like, focus on just the amount of work you're spending on like a thing, compare yourself only to yourself not </s>

<s>[INST] I do think that that's one of the most powerful things is the grocery, the grocery store is like in terms of drawing a distinction between the two systems because um you know, you could have like technology, you can show off technology and so on, but you can kind of sign up right off. Technology is like okay that's the mechanism [/INST] of </s><s>[INST] the devil. But when you look at just uh fruit and veggies and like very big fruit and veggies and like Yeah and fruit in particular like certain kinds of fruit, they're just not available in Russia. I mean yeah, that really shows wait a minute. It's interesting like when you're older and you have to face the reality that what you believe to be true. Like your whole life has been based on a set of lies [/INST] and stuff. Not mistakes, not like a little bit like blatant lies from top to bottom start to finish that I don't know what that's like </s><s>[INST] how much you've you start the book, I think you start the book with Iran and yes, yes as one does. So before the revolution she was born in in in in Russia and she witnessed the revolution Um and moved to United States in the 20 [/INST] 26, </s><s>[INST] 1926. I remember like it was yesterday anyway, uh she you write that she spent a lot of her life trying to convince Americans in the world that um the negative effects of totalitarian government just, you know, maybe using her as an example. But also this question, can we draw a distinction between authoritarian regimes and communism? Is it possible to steal man the case that not all implementations of socialism and communism would lead to the atrocities we've seen in the soviet union and in china under mao like when you in studying all of this, how much blame do you put on the ideologies, on Marxist ideologies versus the particular leaders and dictators? [/INST] Well, you have to blame the leaders a lot because they had different leaders in different countries where Uh different from each other. Do check who took over Czechoslovakia and he tried to introduce socialism with a human face in the Prague Spring of 1968. He was like, all right, we got to do away with authoritarianism, we gotta have more free speech. He was thinking of introducing elements of democracy. Now, then the Russians sent in the tanks, but the point is, he certainly was someone who was like, all right, this this has got to stop this is just absolutely crazy. Um Khrushchev and Stalin were not the same animal at all. Um So I I think the problem with uh communism in the Marxist sense is that you're going to have an introduce an element of authoritarianism simply because you can't have um economic planning. If I don't have a price mechanism, I don't know how prices, what is me knowing as a consumer or a producer, what should be produced or what there's a shortage of as prices increase. That's a signal that we have a shortage years, prices decreased. That means that there's a surplus here. But if I'm setting the price, I don't really have no how much weed I need to produce if I'm compared to corn as compared to shoes as compared to standard costumes. So, that is a big problem. The other issue is if you have one agency, the government having a monopoly on, let's suppose the news like you were talking about earlier with twitter, it's gonna be really hard to have any kind of objective discourse because everyone is going to be working for the same organization that is going to cause a problem in terms of having a feedback mechanism, even in the best scenario, in terms of this is a problem. This isn't a problem. And when you have a monopoly, which is what a government is, I think people are very familiar with what the problems happen with monopoly, this lack of accountability. Bureaucracies are faceless and then no one's to blame, but you know, and yet everyone kind of suffers as a consequence. So it doesn't necessarily have to be as authoritarian as stalinism, but you can't have it government which is authority by its nature be this pervasive </s><s>[INST] without [/INST] a strong amount of of oppression. And same thing with even if you just have like let's go socialize healthcare, you're gonna have to make it illegal for doctors to practice privately, you're gonna have to have rationing so on and so forth. Now that might be a price that people are willing to pay because you can't have infinite spending on health care, right? So something's gonna have to give somewhere. So there is an element of authoritarianism there and people are comfortable with that and I can wrap my head around it. But if you're going to have one organization running literally everything in society, I don't see how you do that and have any measure of liberalism, </s><s>[INST] why do you think Iran had so much trouble telling people the danger of soviet stalinism? [/INST] Well I I think uh more pertinent question is why did Emma Goldman and alexander Berkman have so much problems. So they were hardcore. </s><s>[INST] Yeah [/INST] they're Emma Goldman's on the cover, they were deported um from the U. S. J. Edgar Hoover saw them off at Ellis Island, they were sent to Russia, they were bloodthirsty revolutionaries, they had no shortage advocating violence when necessary. And when they went there they were just like this is a complete nightmare. They both individually had meetings with Lenin complaining about political prisoners complaining about lack of free speech, she told them, you know, this is a revolutionary time, You could do that later. And when they both left, they she wrote her memoir was split into two books, My Disillusionment in Russia and my further dissolution in Russia, he wrote the bolshevik myth and she was in England and she gave a speech and she's just like, if you guys think this is for the workers, this is the biggest lie I've ever heard, like they're oppressing the workers, like no capitalist has ever imagined. And you know, as she described it, like people just shifting their sheet seats, they were interrupting her. And she, when she opened her talk, she had a standing ovation and when she was done, you could hear a pin drop so they didn't want to hear it because this was this kind of and Eugene Lyons talks about it later, this was like the guinea pig theory of the Russian people, like we're gonna experiment on them over there, if it works great, we're right, if it's wrong, it's their problem. And sure these animals squeal, but they're beneath us and of course they're gonna make some noise, but you know, this is a noble experiment, but they're experimenting on a country, several countries. Um so I think an ideology like this which appeals to intellectuals because, you know, if it works or if it's implemented, they're the ones who are gods in effect in a society like their status cannot be higher. They really want this to work like they want a society where they are the new aristocracy, that the most important people uh and their crew criticisms of America. They had a binary worldview if America is bad and this is the opposite of America there by definition, it's good. And the other binary that they bought into is, you know, the nazis and the fascists hate the communists and the communists. It's true. Uh, up to a point, hated the fascists and the nazis. Okay, well Hitler is evil. So this guy's against Hitler were with him. So that's an argument that still made in in you know, schools growing up when you talk about World War Two, where they're like, we've seen it with Stalin and they don't really talk about Stalin being a bad guy, but it's like, you know, we worked with him to fight Hitler because Hitler was a unique evil. Now that is certainly true, that Hitler's unique evil, but that doesn't mean or even imply that Stalin is somehow an angel or a saint. </s>

<s>[INST] In my imagination, I have a girlfriend in Canada. Yeah, that I have imagined exactly. Imagined conversation. Someone mentioned that. But also, I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see this, I'd love to also mention this Twitter feud between two other interesting people, which is Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris or Sam Harris and others in general. And it kind of breaks my heart that these two people I listened to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues, let's put COVID aside because people are very emotional about this topic. I mean, I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent. I have imagined exactly whether you agree with them or not. And I always learn something from their conversations and they are legitimately or have been for a long time friends. And it's a little bit heartbreaking to me to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore. And there's occasional jabs on Twitter. And I hope that changes. I hope that changes in general for COVID, that COVID brought out the, I would say, the most emotional sides of people, the worst in people. And I think there hasn't been enough love and empathy and compassion. And to see two people from whom I've learned a lot, whether it's Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Sam Harris, you can criticize them as much as you want, their ideas as much as you want. But if you're not sufficiently open-minded to admit that you have a lot to learn from their conversations, I think you're not being honest. And so I do hope they have those conversations. And I hope we can kind of, I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post COVID of relationships, of conversations. And I think empathy and love can help a lot there. And this is also just a, I talked to Sam privately, but this is also a public call out to put a little bit more love in the world. And for these difficult conversations to happen. Because Brett Weinstein could be very wrong about a bunch of topics here around COVID, but he could also be right. And the only way to find out is to have those conversations. Because there's a lot of people listening to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein. And if you go into these silos, where you just keep telling each other that you're the possessors of truth and nobody else is the possessor of truth, what starts happening is you both lose track or the capability of arriving at the truth. Because nobody's in the possession of the truth. So anyway, it's just a call out that we should have a little bit more conversation, a little bit more love. [/INST] I totally agree. And both of those guys are guys who I respect. And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned, they're just a handful of us, who were the early people raising questions </s><s>[INST] about the origins of this pandemic. Origins of this pandemic. He was there also talking. So people have heard him speak quite a bit about antiviral drugs and all that kind of stuff. [/INST] But he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on. Yeah, exactly. And so, but I completely agree with you that we don't have to agree with everybody, but it's great to have healthy conversations. That's how we grow. And absolutely, we live in a world where we're kind of, if we're not careful, pushed into these little information pockets. And certainly on social media, I have different parts of my life. One is focusing on issues of COVID origins, and then I have genetics and biotechnology. And then I have, which maybe we'll talk about later, one shared world, which is about how do we build a safer future? And when I say critical things like the Chinese government, we'd have to demand a full investigation into pandemic origins. This is an outrage. Then it's really popular. When I say, let's build a better future for everyone in peace and love, it's like, wow, three people liked it. And one was my mother. And so I just feel like we need to build, we used to have that connectivity just built in because we had these town squares and you couldn't get away from them. Now we can get away from them. So engaging with people who have a different background is really essential. I mean, I'm on Fox News, sometimes three, four times a week. And I wouldn't, in my normal life, I'm not watching that much of Fox News or even television more generally, but I just feel like if I just speak to people who were very similar to me, it'll be comfortable. But what have I contributed? And so I think we really have to have those kinds of conversations and recognize that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy. They want to live in a better world. They maybe have different paths to get there, but if we just break into camps that don't even connect with each other, </s>

<s>[INST] So can you reason about this stuff that's given how little we know about the universe? Is that um reasonable to uh to reason about these probabilities? So like how little, well maybe you can disagree, but to me it's not trivial to figure out how difficult it is to build a simulation? We kind of talked about it a little bit. We also don't know like as we try to start building it, like start creating virtual worlds and so on. How that changes the fabric of society. Like there's all these things along the way, they can fundamentally change just so many aspects of our society about our existence that we don't know anything about. Like the kind of things we might discover when we understand to a greater degree the fundamental the physics, like the theory. If we have a breakthrough, I have a theory and everything how that changes stuff, how that changes deep space exploration and so on. So like is it still possible to reason about probabilities, given how little we know. [/INST] Yes, I think that there will be a large residual of uncertainty um that will just have to acknowledge. And I think that's true for most of these big picture questions that we might wonder about. Um It's just we are small, short lived, small brained uh cognitively very limited humans with little evidence and it's amazing we can figure out as much as we can really about the cosmos. </s><s>[INST] But okay, so there's this cognitive trick that seems to happen when I look at the simulation argument, which for me it seems like case one and to feel unlikely, I want to say feel unlikely supposed to sort of like it's not like I have too much scientific evidence to say that either wanted to or not true. It just seems unlikely that every single civilization destroys itself and it seems like feels unlikely that the civilizations lose interest. So naturally the without necessarily explicitly doing it. But this elimination, the simulation argument basically says is very likely we're living in a simulation. Like to me, my mind naturally goes there. I think the mind goes there for a lot of people. Is that the incorrect place for it to go? [/INST] Well not not not necessarily. I think the second alternative um which has to do with the motivations and interests of technological immature civilizations. Um I think there is much we don't understand about that. </s><s>[INST] Can you can you talk about that a little bit. What do you think? I mean this question that pops up when you have, when you build an A. G. I. System or build a general intelligence or um how does that change our motivations? Do you think it will fundamentally transform our motivations? [/INST] Well it doesn't seem that implausible that once you take this leap to to technological maturity, I mean I think it involves creating machine super intelligence, possibly that would be sort of on the path for basically all civilizations. Maybe before they are able to create large numbers of ancestor simulations they would that that possibly could be one of these things that quite radically changes the orientation of what civilization is. In fact optimizing for. Um there are other things as well. So um at the moment we have not perfect control over our own being, our own mental states, our own experiences are not under our direct control. Um So for example, if you want to experience a pleasure and happiness, you might have to do a whole host of things in the external world to try to get into the stage into the mental state where you experience pleasure. Like like some people get some pleasure from eating great food. Well, they can just turn that on, they have to kind of actually got to a nice restaurant and then they have to make money too. So there's like all this kind of activity that may be arises from the fact that we are trying to ultimately produce mental states, but the only way to do that is by a whole host of complicated activities in the external world Now at some level of technological development I think will become outer potent in the sense of gaining direct ability to choose our own internal configuration and enough knowledge and insight to be able to actually do that in a meaningful way. So then it could turn out that there are a lot of instrumental goals that would drop out of the picture and be replaced by other instrumental goals. Because we could now serve some of these final goals in more direct ways and who knows how all of that shakes out. Um after civilizations reflect on that and converge and different detractors and so on and so forth. Um and and that that could be new, new instrumental um considerations that come into view as well that that we are just oblivious to that would maybe have a strong shaping effect on actions like very strong reasons to do something or not to do something and we just don't realize they're there because we are so dumb </s><s>[INST] bumbling through [/INST] the universe. But if If almost inevitably on on route two attaining the ability to create many ancestor simulations, you do have this cognitive enhancement or advice from super intelligences or yourself and then maybe there's like this additional set of considerations coming into view and yesterday i it's obvious that the thing that makes sense is to the X whereas right now it seems that you could x wires, that and different people will do different things and we are kind of random in that sense. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Because at this time with our limited technology, the impact of our decisions is minor. I mean that's starting to change in some, in some ways, but [/INST] uh well, I'm not sure it follows that the impact of our decisions is minor. </s>

<s>[INST] The following is a conversation with got weighed an entrepreneur who is passionate about creating positive change in africa through economic empowerment and now a quick few second mention of each sponsor, check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got missing domain for style, audible for audiobooks Inside tracker for longevity and honored for supplements, choose wisely my friends and now onto the full ad reads as always no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting even though my voice is incredibly monotone, especially in this ad read. It makes no sense whatsoever. I try to be exciting and emotional, but the voice just does not know how to do that. It is a version one of this particular voice speech generation box. Anyway, if you skip these very monotone but hopefully interesting ads, please still check out the sponsors in the description. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. [/INST] This </s><s>[INST] show is brought to you by missing the main, the makers of comfortable stylish dress shirts and other men's wear. I wear their black dress shirt and I love it. I have more of those than I can actually count. Have a ton of them. They're incredibly comfortable. They are in terms of form that just like perfect in terms of the human body. I guess there's like an athletic fit to it but without being too constraining. So I feel I can do any kind of stuff in hot weather and cold weather allows me to move comfortably while the sort of the material is still has has like a strong form to it, which is nice for a dress shirt. I just like the minimal classiness of a good dress shirt. This is definitely my favorite black dress shirt is the one that mr remain makes right now. You can get a special discount by going to mizzen and main dot com and use the promo code lex. This episode is also brought to you by audible and audiobook service. That has given me hundreds if not thousands. I'm actually pretty sure it's thousands at this point of hours of education through listening to audiobooks. Many of the audio books I mentioned this podcast I once listened to with audible. I listen to audible when I run. So those two hour runs that are like 12 13 14, 15 mile runs that I do in the austin heat. I'm listening to an audio book. I just can't tell you the power of some of these books carry when they're done well in terms of the voice that does the reading, I mean they really pull you in into that world in the way that sometimes even reading can't do a great audio book. A well read audiobook is unlike any other experience. Anyway, there's thousands of titles to choose from and new members can try it free for 30 days at audible dot com slash lex or text lex to 505 100. 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 of which have blood tests that obviously use your blood data and machine learning algorithms to analyze. It also have DNA data, fitness tracker data. All of that is combined together to give you a picture of what's going on inside your body. It's obvious to me that the measures of the human body, of the specific body that you are in are essential to making the proper decisions for what you should do with your health, your life, all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of medicine relies on population data and very shallow diagnosis of the patient as they come in. I think it's obvious that the future of medicine will be leveraging algorithms with only minimal sort of deep insight from the human doctors but grounded in the time series data across a long period of time that comes from your own body and Inside Tracker is at the forefront of that kind of idea. So you should definitely support them. You should definitely check them out and see if it works for you get special savings for a limited time When you go to Inside Tracker dot com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by on it, a nutrition supplement, a fitness company. They make Alpha Brain and you try to help support memory. Metal speed and focus. I remember when I first started listening to joe Rogan, one of the early legitimate sponsors I remember is uh for Alpha Brain for on it, it feels surreal and and really an honor to be able to say that on. It supports this podcast. So just like uh one of the podcasts that really inspired me to get into the long form discussion format, I mean joe has been an inspiration for many years and now is a good friend and it's just all of it is surreal and just like a gigantic honor. But yeah, I do take Alpha Brain on occasion when I have a difficult deep work session coming up. So when I really have to think for a long period of time, you can get a special discount on Alpha Brain. If you go to lex Friedman dot com slash on it, this is Alex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends, Here's my God, wait, you were born in Senegal. You have lived and traveled across the world. So let me ask you what is the soul of Senegal, like its people, its culture, its history. Can you, can you try to sneak up on telling us what is the spirit of its [/INST] people, Tauranga, tauranga, it's a wall of word is the main indigenous language of Senegal and it means hospitality, that is what us, the people of Senegal are known for. Um and it transpires in everything that we do, um everything that we say, it's a place where I guess with hospitality goes this concept of warmth. So we are very we are a very warm people uh us, that's that's us the place where you come and everybody will just embrace you um make you feel very comfortable, make you look like feel like you're the only person in the world and that we've been waiting for your whole life, right? So so that's my country. </s>

<s>[INST] I think, to the people. You think so. So Iraq, Afghanistan, [/INST] the government didn't manipulate public opinion. There's an argument to be made that they did in terms of like WMD and everything, but after 9-11, were you in the United States after 9-11? After 9-11, I legit. </s><s>[INST] That seems accusatory. [/INST] Like what were you in 9-11? Well, just checking, okay. </s><s>[INST] All right, cool. Okay, all right, cool. I have evidence and witnesses. No, okay, all right. I'm very defensive right now. It's very strange. [/INST] Look into it, Alex Jones. Oh, sure. Witnesses. No, okay, all right. It's very strange. Look into it, Alex Jones. I think after 9-11, we could have gone to war with any country in the world. We were ready because all of America was like, oh my God, and they pointed to Iraq, and the reasons for the WMDs was kind of dumb, but I don't think we even needed WMDs to go to Iraq. We could have just said, you know, Saddam Hussein was giving medical aid to Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Iraq, let's go, and we would've gone for it, but post Iraq, Iraq was, for a while, popular, and then became obviously deeply unpopular, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think you could see that influence other foreign policy that the United States had. For instance, we opted more towards drone warfare than troops on the ground for places like Yemen. We opted more towards kind of like sending money and help instead of boots on the ground for places like Syria, and I think that a lot of that was kind of in response to how unpopular the Iraq stuff had became, and when you looked at a lot of elections afterwards, even for Obama, like one of the defining characteristics of a lot of campaigns were like, I'm gonna close Guantanamo Bay, I'm gonna get us out of foreign wars, even up to Trump, I'm going into, I'm not gonna stop doing all this weird stuff in the Middle East. But they didn't still withdraw from Afghanistan. They didn't withdraw, but they definitely tapered off and weren't as aggressively pushing those types of conflicts, because they knew it was unpopular. </s><s>[INST] But I think Afghanistan, if you also consider perfect information or good information, if you ask a lot of people, are you okay spending this amount of money for this purpose? So military conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, [/INST] I think almost from the very beginning, they would say no. </s><s>[INST] After 9-11, I feel like maybe like a few days after 9-11, like, what was the nature of the public support for the war? Well, there's some memes and so on, yes, [/INST] but the nature of the public support for the war. </s><s>[INST] I remember freedom rise, we were so mad at it. Was there public support in 2003, [/INST] which is when the invasion happened? I feel like initially there was a lot, I remember seeing it on, but then I also lived in a Republican household and I was not very like media savvy at that, </s><s>[INST] so my parents were my parents. And I don't know if the nature of that public support had to do with WMDs or with 9-11, because the weird- It came about WMDs. But I wonder what is the, if you were to poll people and let's say, hypothetically, there was above 50% support for the war, what would be the nature of that support? And to what degree is the government actually representing the will of the people versus some complex mechanism, like the military industrial complex, is manipulating the narrative that's controlling public opinion. And then there's the media that gets a lot of attention by being divided and how they're shaping the narrative through the mechanism of division. [/INST] So what- There's a lot of complicated things out there. It's not just like the people and then the government and that that's, yeah, for sure, I agree that there are gonna be different elements at play. </s><s>[INST] And how much of those elements that lead us astray can be attributed to the largeness of the different systems and the different institutions, like the media institutions and government, the institutions that have a monopoly on violence, let's put it this way, which is one way to define government. [/INST] Sure, it's complicated. There's definitely gonna be different institutions at play, but I think that all I would say is, in reference to my original point, it becomes like broad consensus around a thing. I think the government will usually follow. It's not gonna fight. It's gonna follow more often than not. But I think that a lot of times, I think Americans think that there's more consensus around certain issues and there actually are. So like a really good example, we're on that war point too. What caused like the lowest dip in Biden's approval rating? I'm pretty sure it was right after we pulled out of Afghanistan, which I think if I would have asked people like a year before, like, let's assume that we could pull out of Afghanistan, the government's probably gonna collapse after we leave because they just don't have the will to fight. They don't have the support, they don't, whatever. There's just not gonna work, but like, no Americans are gonna die. There might be a couple other people, but like, no Americans gonna die. We're gonna get off Afghanistan. Would you support that? I think broadly speaking, I think like more than 60% or 70% of Americans are like, yeah, that would be fine. But then when it actually plays them on TV, when we see the people hanging out in the planes, when we see like helicopter embassies, some of the course and politicians. Well, now it's like, oh my God, this was horrible and it was so botched and it was so, like, it could've gone so much better. Like, well, could it have gone better? Like maybe, maybe not. But I mean, it seems like you can have consensus around a certain opinion, but the way that things play out and the way that people actually feel, it's actually way, way, way more complicated. And there's not usually this broad consensus opinion. </s>

<s>[INST] And then, I love it. A lot of us experienced this in a, even when sober, but drunk too. Sort of, you pick up a thing and expect it to be, what is it? Heavy. And it turns out to be light. Yeah, and then you woo. Oh yeah. And then, so the same, and I'm sure if your depth perception for whatever reason is screwed up, if you're drunk or some other reason, and then you think you're putting your hand on the table and you miss it. [/INST] I mean, it's the same kind of situation, but. And then you woo. There's a. Which is why you need to be able to predict forward just a little bit. And so that's where this model of predictive control stuff comes in. Predict forward what you think's gonna happen. And then if that does happen, you're in good shape. If something else happens, you better start predicting again. </s><s>[INST] So like, regenerate a plan. Yeah. When you don't. I mean, that also requires a very fast feedback loop of updating what your prediction, how it matches to the actual real world. Yeah, those things have to run pretty quickly. What's the challenge of running things pretty quickly? A thousand Hertz of acting and sensing quickly. [/INST] You know, there's a few different layers of that. You want at the lowest level, you like to run things typically at around a thousand Hertz, which means that, you know, at each joint of the robot, you're measuring position or force and then trying to control your actuator, whether it's a hydraulic or electric motor, trying to control the force coming out of that actuator. And you want to do that really fast. Something like a thousand Hertz. And that means you can't have too much calculation going on at that joint. But that's pretty manageable these days and it's fairly common. And then there's another layer that you're probably calculating, you know, maybe at a hundred Hertz, maybe 10 times slower, which is now starting to look at the overall body motion and thinking about the larger physics of the robot. And that means you can't have the, and then there's yet another loop that's probably happening a little bit slower, which is where you start to bring, you know, your perception and your vision and things like that. And so you need to run all of these loops sort of simultaneously. You do have to manage your computer time so that you can squeeze in all the calculations you need in real time in a very consistent way. And the amount of calculation we can do is increasing as computers get better, which means we can start to do more sophisticated calculations. I can have a more complex model doing my forward prediction. And that might allow me to do even better predictions as I get better and better. And it used to be, again, we had, you know, 10 years ago, we had to have pretty simple models that we were running, you know, at those fast rates because the computers weren't as capable about calculating forward with a sophisticated model. </s><s>[INST] But as computation gets better, we can do more of that. What about the actual pipeline of software engineering? How easy it is to keep updating Atlas, to do continuous development on it. So how many computers are on there? [/INST] Is there a nice pipeline? It's an important part of building a team around it, which means, you know, you need to also have software tools, simulation tools, you know, so we have always made strong use of physics-based simulation tools to do some of this calculation, basically test it in simulation before you put it on the robot, but you also want the same code that you're running in simulation to be the same code you're running on the hardware. And so even getting to the point where it was the same code going from one to the other, we probably didn't really get that working until, you know, a few years, several years ago. But that was, you know, that was a bit of a milestone. And so you want to work, certainly, work these pipelines so that you can make it as easy as possible and have a bunch of people working in parallel, especially when, you know, we only have, you know, four of the Atlas robots, the modern Atlas robots at the company. And, you know, we probably have, you know, 40 developers. They're all trying to gain access to it. And so you need to share resources </s><s>[INST] and use some of these, some of the software pipeline. Well, that's a really exciting step to be able to run the exact same code in simulation as on the actual robot. How hard is it to do realistic simulation, physics-based simulation of Atlas, such that, I mean, the dream is like, if it works in simulation, it works perfectly in reality. [/INST] How hard is it to sort of keep working on closing that gap? The root of some of our physics-based simulation tools really started at MIT. And we built some good physics-based modeling tools there. The early days of the company, we were trying to develop those tools as a commercial product. So we continued to develop them. It wasn't a particularly successful commercial product, but we ended up with some nice physics-based simulation tools so that when we started doing Legged Robotics again, we had a really nice tool to work with. And the things we paid attention to were things that weren't necessarily handled very well in the commercial tools you could buy off the shelf, like interaction with the world, like foot-ground contact. So trying to model those contact events well in a way that captured the important parts of the interaction was a really important element to get right and to also do in a way that was computationally feasible and could run fast. Because if your simulation runs too slow, then your developers are sitting around waiting for stuff to run and compile. So it's always about efficient fast operation as well. So that's been a big part of it. I think developing those tools in parallel to the development of the platform and trying to scale them has really been essential, I'd say, to us being able to assemble a team </s>

<s>[INST] sex interesting. [/INST] The 6th scenario which was the up skilling labor, good for good for workers scenario wasn't wasn't </s><s>[INST] discussed to clarify that the integral piece of technology that is platooning. [/INST] Yeah, I mean in a sense it's it's platooning but and and I and in fairness right? The as I pitched that idea or so ran that idea by the computer scientists and engineers that I would and product managers that I would talk to, they would say, you know, you know, we thought about that but that following truck, it's not that simple. You know that thing basically we had to engineer that to be capable of independent self driving because what if there was a cut in or you know, any number of scenarios in which it lost that connection to the lead truck for whatever reason. Now, I mean I don't know who platooning is hard, </s><s>[INST] there's edge cases I guarantee the number of edge cases and platooning is orders of magnitude lower than the number of edge cases in the general solo full self drive, you do not need to solve the full self driving problem. I mean if you're talking about uh probability of dangerous events, it just seems with platooning, then the like you can deal with curtains. [/INST] So this is, you know, this is beyond, this is one of the challenges obviously of being a researcher, you know, doesn't, doesn't really have any background in in the technology. Right. Um, so I can, I can dream this up. You know, I have no idea if it's feasible. Um </s><s>[INST] well let me speak, you spoke to the phds in economics, let me speak to the phds in computer science if you think platooning is as hard as the full self driving problem um we need to talk because I think that's ridiculous. I think platooning and in fact I think platoon is an interesting idea for ride sharing as well for the general autonomous driving problem, not just trucking, but obviously trucking is the big, big benefit because the number of eight to be points in trucking is much much lower than the general ridesharing problem. But anyway, I think that's a great idea but you're saying it was removed. [/INST] Yeah. And so you can go, you know, and you know, listeners could go to these reports, their their their publicly available and they explain why in the, in the footnote and you know, they note that there was this other scenario um, suggested by at least me. And I remember they said someone else did too. But they said, you know, we didn't include it because no developers, we're working on it interesting full disclosure. That was the approach that I took in my research, right? Which was to go to the developers and say, what's your vision? Right? What are you trying to develop? That's what I was trying to do. And maybe, you know, and then I tried to think outside the box at the end by adding that one, right? Like here's one that I have, you know, people aren't talking about. That could be cool. Now again, it had been proposed in 2014 for like fuel convoys. Um, so you could just have like one super armored lead fuel truck, right? In a bringing fuel to forward operating bases in Afghanistan. And then you wouldn't need, you know, the super having, you know, you don't have to protect the human life in the </s><s>[INST] following. So that's interesting. You're saying like when you talk to weigh more, when you talk to these kinds of companies, they weren't at least openly saying they're working on this so that it doesn't make sense to uh, to include in the list. [/INST] Yeah. And so, but here's the thing, right. This is the Department of Transportation, right? And the Department of Labor, maybe they could consider some scenarios like maybe we could say, you know this, we, this technology has got a lot of potential. Here's what we'd like it to do. You know, we'd like it to reduce highway deaths, help us fight climate change, reduce congestion, you know, all these other other things. But that's not how our policy conversation around technology is happening. We're not and people don't think that we should. And I think that's the fundamental shift that we need to have. Right? </s><s>[INST] I've been involved this a little bit like Nitze and D. O. T. The approach they took is saying, we don't know what the heck we're doing. So we're going to just let the innovators do their thing and not regulate it for a while. Just to see you don't you think that's um, you think bot should provide ideas themselves? [/INST] Well, So this is the, this is the great trick in policy of um, of private actors is you, you get narrow mandates for government agencies, right? So, you know, this, the safety case will be handled by organization whose mandate is safety. So the federal motor carrier Safety administration, who is, you know, going to be a key player. I I argue in in an article that I wrote, you know, they're going to be a key player in actually determining which scenario is most profitable by setting the rules for truck drivers. Their mandate is safety right now. They have lots of good people there who want, you know, who care about truck drivers and who wish truck drivers jobs were better, but they don't have the authority to say, hey, we're gonna write this rule because it's good for truck drivers, right? And so when you, you know, we need to say, you know, as a society, we need to not restrict technology, not stand in the way of things. We need to harness it towards the goals that matter, right? Not whatever comes out the end of the pipeline, because it's the easiest thing to develop or whatever is most profitable for the first actor or whatever. But, you know, and we do that. The thing is we do that, right? I mean, like when we, when we sent people to the moon, you know, we did that, you know, and there were tremendous benefits that that followed from it, right? And we do this all the time and you know, trying to cure cancer or whatever it is, right? I mean, we can do this right now. The interesting sort of uh, epilogue to that story is, you know, uh six months or so. I don't know how long it was after those, those meetings in which that six scenario was not considered, um, a company called local nation, uh you know, ends up using that essentially that basic scenario with a slight variation. So they leave the human driver in both trucks and then that following driver goes off duty and then, um uh, you know, I, I've been trying to think of what the terms that kind of I think of as like sling shotting, they sort of when one runs out of ours, you know the one who is off duty goes in front and you know um and so you know, if only they had been uh you know around 66 months earlier that it might have been considered by the O. T. But it just says you know, who has the authority to propose what </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. Give me a second hold that hold [/INST] that it's his show man, we enter into his hierarchy. That's it. We we should talk about hierarchy. But </s><s>[INST] um, just just to clarify, do you, how do you explain the situation in Japan? Is it the decrease in value and family? Like some of the um, just to expand on that, Like how do you explain that situation? You're saying that that society is in trouble in a certain way? Can you kind of describe the nature of that trouble? [/INST] I'm saying that when the individual is part of a social group, this can be a family, a congregation, a community, a tribal nation. When the individual feels that the things that are happening to the society are things that are happening to him or to her. And I want to emphasize this is not the standard view of collectivism, that, you know, that Mussolini Mussolini will say, you know, the glory of the individuals and totally immersing himself in, you know, in the organic whole. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that human beings have and are both. They enter into a society to which they are loyal and they compete with one another with uh in the terms that that society allows competition, but also sometimes by bending the rules and by shaping them and by by by changing them, what you see in many societies, certainly throughout the liberal West, but also in countries that have been affected by the Liberal West by industrialization and ideas of individualism. What you see is a collapse of a willingness of the individual to look at what the what is what is needed by the whole and to uh, to make choices that are um, that are as the urine would call them selfish because it's because the purpose of them is is self expression, competition, self assertion. Moving up in the hierarchy, achieving, achieving um, honor or wealth in order to do those things. But but when you stop being able to look at the framework of a particular society and identify with it, you lose that you cease to understand what it is that you need to do not. Not every single person, But I'm talking about society wide. So there are a few individuals who are just going to have a fantastic time and live the kind of life that you're on is describing. And the great majority, they stopping, we're willing to take risks. They stop being willing to get married. They stop being willing to have Children. They stop being willing to start companies. They stopped being willing to put themselves out to do great things because the guide rails that told them what what kinds of things and the social feedback that honored them when they did things like getting married and having Children. They've been crushed and what have they have been crushed by they've been crushed by the false view that if you tell the individual be free, make all your own decisions, that they will then be free and make all their own decisions. They don't they just stop they stop being human. </s><s>[INST] That's powerful. So, do you want to respond to [/INST] that? So, I don't think anybody should have Children. If the goal it's a goal, there's there's a good there's a good tweet tweet clip that you can make. Um, I don't think anybody should have Children for the goal of um perpetuating their nation or expanding their society or for some people, I think they'd make horrible parents if that was the goal, the purpose of doing it. I think people should have Children because they want to embrace that challenge that that that beauty that experience that amazing. Very, very hard, very, very difficult experience in life. It's it's it's about being able to project a long term, but also being able to enjoy and love the creation of another human being, that process of creation. It is a beautiful self interested thing. And by the way, not everybody should have Children. I think way too many people have Children. You know, there's some awful parents out there that I wish I would stop. I mean, you know, life is precious and life of suffering is sad. It's sad to see people suffering. A lot of people are born into situations and aboard born into parents that, that destroyed the capacity to ever live a good life and that's, that's a tragic and sad thing. And uh, so, so I don't measure um, the health of a society, uh, and how many Children they're having a health of a couple of whether they have Children or not, those are individual choices. Some people uh, make a choice not to have Children, which is completely rational and consistent with their values. And now when you look at a society overall, I do think having Children or not having Children is a reflection of something. I think it's a reflection of a certain optimism about the future. I think it's a reflection of thinking long term versus short term. I think a short term society doesn't have Children. People don't have Children there because Children are long term investment, they require real planning and real effort and really thinking about the long term. But those are moral issues And again, we're confusing or mixing. When I say Japan look how well Japan has done. I, I don't mean the specific Japanese people and how many kids they're having and what kind of life they're having. You know, in terms of these kind of particulars, but think about the alternatives Japan faces. If you look around the options right that they face, they tried empire. Uh, they tried nationalistic empire, didn't turn out too well for them or anybody who they interacted with, they could have become north Korea. We we know how that turned out, we know what that is. They could have been cambodia if you've ever been to cambodia and seeing the kind of poverty and yes, maybe cambodians have lots of Children. But God, I'd rather be in Japan any day than than have Children in a kind of poverty and horrific circumstances they have. But in the context of the available um regimes that there were possible post World War Two for the, for the Japanese team based game based one that generally lead to prosperity, to freedom to individuals pursuing values, not perfectly because they didn't implement the philosophical foundation, the mall foundation that I would like to to have. There's still being impacted by content. Hagel Ian whatever philosophy that's out there in the west that's destroying the better parts. So you give people freedom now, what do they do with it? And if they have a bad philosophy, they're going to do bad things with that freedom right? You tell people to do whatever they choose to do. But if they have bad ideas, they will choose to do bad things. So it is true that the primacy of morality and the primacy of philosophy has to be recognized. It's it's not the primacy of politics and indeed you don't get free societies unless you have some elements of decent philosophy, but you can get free societies with a rotten philosophy, but they don't they don't stay free for very long. I don't understand how can it be a decent philosophy? If it doesn't care about posterity? If it does. If you're willing to say I'm offering guidance, I think you should live as a trader. All relationships should be voluntary. But those are those are interesting things. But the moment that it comes to posterity to the future to there being a future, let's say that there were a society that lived the way you know in general. According to your view, let's say there was such a society, How can you not care whether that society is capable of passing it on to the next generation or not? But the way to pass it on to the next generations through ideas and not through through having Children. Having Children is an individual choice that some people are going to make and some people are not. But the fundamental that preserve what the good life. What does that? Even if there is a sense if if if if every generation from now on your your your society that was good at a certain point has half as many people in it. It's going to be very quickly it's just going to be overrun overrun by whom? What do you mean overrun by whom are we just totally a historical. If you're the Spartans and you have all of these you know like like warrior values but you stop having Children, you get overrun, you get defeated. That's a good thing. Not a bad thing. But you get my point, You have to have the ability to have enough Children to create enough wealth and enough power, enough strength. Who makes these kind of conclusions and decisions about how many you make it as an individual and you decide that, you know, we're not talking about, we're talking about what kind of intellectual, cultural, religious inheritance you give your Children. And those are the ideas that those ideas are going to perpetuate because they're good ideas. If they're bad, they're not going to perpetually, they could be they can't be good ideas if they don't produce future generations. What are you talking about? What they not produce future generations. As I look at every liberal, every liberal society on earth visiting democratic collapse is not a single liberal society on earth today that I'm willing to defend because they're not living by not acceptable. So they have a semblance I have a semblance of a political system that is a little bit like what I would like far from what I would, you know, but they certainly don't have a moral foundation. I believe that people who have the right moral foundation. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them will have Children. Most of them will continue into the future, will most of them will fight for the future, but not because they care what happens in 200 years, but because they care about their lifetime and part of having fun and enjoying one's lifetime is having kids is projecting into the future. Are you really going to tell me that people have Children because it's fun. They're fun when they're four years old. They're not fun when they're when they're 15, when they know they're just not funny. Look, you don't you don't you don't do this for fun. You know, marriage also you don't do for fun. There are times that are fun and there are times they're not fun. Look, fun is not exactly, but you certainly do it for you do it for happiness, you do it for fulfillment, You do it as a challenge. You do it for making for making your life better for making your life interesting for making your life challenging for embracing. You know, part of it is fun. Part of it is hard work, but you do it because it's, it's it makes your life a better </s>

<s>[INST] and economic freedom is the thing that unlocks that human potential of young people just [/INST] yes for them to run, to run with their ideas to start businesses or to start initiative. It doesn't have to be for profit all the time. Right. But it is it is it is this this this thing that gets you to get up and go and do something criticized by creating. Young people are naturally wired to want to criticize by creating they're not sitting around waiting or complaining usually unless you put them in a tiny box and they have no other way to go. And in this situation where they do, you know, let's talk about pre colonial africa of forefathers before slavery ever happened. There were black people in the car on the continent. You see when we talk about the story of black people and Africans Africans, you know, black people in africa. For most of us, even me, I noticed that unconsciously it starts with slavery, but you're like, no, we were there before before white men ever set foot. Who were we? What were we doing in our diversity? Um what economic systems where we running on. Um and then you realize that for most of them they were free marketeers and they were very much on the free trade on the free enterprise side. So even that is a reinforcement, this is the place where we do not understand our history. So, proper diagnosis africa is the poorest region in the world because it happens to be the most over regulated region in the world lacks economic freedom. Number two, what do we do about that? We got to become serious about reforms economic reforms so that we can become beacons of uh free markets, just like the asian tigers. That's what the asian tigers did. They had to become serious Singapore Taiwan, you know South Korea, those guys had to become serious about the free markets lee kwang woo, you know when, you know, he's just like we got to do something and he looked around and he realized at some point we got to make these reforms and he went on to that journey of reforms making his country one of the most free market, you know, countries in the world and voila, the magic happened back in the, you know, in the thirties of the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything the world and with all the lies that were told to the world coming from the soviet union Stalin while they were starving and dying over there, but oh no, you know, I mean Durante was telling the world that oh no, no, everything is going well, nobody's dying when we know now and getting producer prices based on this stuff, but then the world went on believing that, oh no, um capitalism failed, this is this, this, this you know, um crash that you had in the, in the, in the stock market is proof, this is what the stage capitalism produces, You guys always have your big ups and downs and at that time it was so hard on people that they're like, we're done with this. And at the same time we're told the lies coming out of the soviet union, but supposedly the communism was doing just fine and you're at the point where the free market concept almost died and it's um you know the asian tigers who kind of helped you know bring that idea back to life right there success having used the free markets and so for me we gotta have we got to make a new commitment to the free market on this continent if we want to go anywhere, if we want to go anywhere. </s><s>[INST] And the timing is perfect because the young people, there's a there is a kind of freedom for the revolutionary free markets in this whole space. [/INST] Exactly. And you said something oh say that again, because I want to tell you what I'm hearing in that because something is really cool. Say it again, come on, lex, </s><s>[INST] I don't know which [/INST] Part English is my 2nd language. No, you said you said there's something revolutionary in in that because you know how young people are attached to the revolution and how you know, I understand, look, look like I understand and I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to some of these socialists who who came to it because they had to witness some of the horrors of, you know, of their times. You know, there's </s><s>[INST] a revolution behind that. It's ultimately uh criticized by [/INST] Exactly, exactly, but violent revolution is never the answer, but that's what they went for in 1789 in France and the French Revolution. Um and then they and you know Marx and Engels, you know, they're promoting these ideas that usually for them justifies violent revolution learning all of these people. The I am with them when they say that they want um to see equal rights for people of course I don't agree with their therefore we need to push for equal outcomes. Equal rights is right but equal outcomes is not right. So but I am with them for all the way to equal rights. But this is where the two paths go this way and also they're they're they're none the fact that they have no issue with violent revolution. People get killed. You know, people get put in gulags and people get that's not right. So what you just said here just give me Gustan because there is a revolution in the free markets but that's the type of revolution we want the revolution that comes from people creating, criticizing by creating. It's one of the best forms of revolution. If you ask me, that's the most sexy way of revolution criticized by creating but what you're gonna go shoot people or be like what's his name? Um Navarra who tells you I love it's in writing, I love nothing more than to fry the brain of a man with his gun really </s>

<s>[INST] And so you flew like close sometimes put the wheels, you put the wheels down without [/INST] landing and just so I'm making where down, you know? So, </s><s>[INST] okay, so you're you're you're being tracked by jet. He's trying to shut before that. I'm just like retelling the story how insane it is. Uh he's trying to shoot you down and there's a thunderstorm that you're escaping into and then you do a spin down to what? 2000 ft, whatever you said, uh like somehow escaping all of this and then you try to land on a pasture when the giant heavy plane that carries three tons uh by uh touching down five or six times to make a to make a landing strip for [/INST] yourself. Yeah, the grass is three or four ft so it's really good after about after a few times. So then just before it stopped, I said, I'll take your feet off the brakes. He said, I don't have my feet on the brakes. Well, I knew I had broken through the crust And I put full power on but it didn't that old big plane just come on down and it just did a head is it came to stop. It did a headstand 90° to the ground and the engines held it up and the nose and I'll just crushed in right on it. We fell between the two seats to keep from getting killed when it comes to stop, all that fuel was pouring out on those hot engines and there's a escape hatch at the top. I just stepped out, took my suitcase with me. </s><s>[INST] Mhm. That it was [/INST] a fire, no fire. The plane left the plane there and the two guys that was in the back when I broke his thumb and it was with the barrels and they had to put the hoses tiga so was together to shimmy down to get out. so that's </s><s>[INST] an incredible story. [/INST] Well let me just tell you they had a little bit more to it. I learned to fly with the idea of being a missionary aviation fellowship pilot fly the missionaries in and out of the jungle. Well I went 11 days through that jungle. The rest of them went on down the road and got went to prison. I said I'll crawl on my bill is six months and year year eating snakes for I'm going down the road. So I went in there and uh. I was 11 days in the jungle and I finally came to his place and uh it had airplanes. I kept asking the indian done just aviones I want to steal an airplane and get out of there And when I came to the place I asked what is this place, lovely place. It looked like Honolulu widow in World War two with runway there said you don't know this is Loma linda headquarters for Missionary Aviation fellowship for the amazon and they flew me out, </s><s>[INST] you escaped from prison five times. So what what stands out to you is the most difficult or miraculous escape in the bunch. [/INST] The most black miraculous was what was in the courtroom in spain I think I was, I was on the third floor of real high and I ran across the courtroom handcuffed kicked the window out and I looked down and it was above the palm trees. I thought there might be a power line or something I could grab on as I went down, there was nothing and there was a car parked a station wagon on the uh </s><s>[INST] jumped out, [/INST] I jumped out from 31 ft on top of that car and it exploded in the street. The windshield went over three or four cars. He looked like snow going up and I looked like donald duck with handcuffs and I got out. He kept running. Yeah they ran me down and hit me in the back. I still got a dead spot. My backwards policeman hit me with a shotgun and they brought me back Murray was there, he was saying your husband is crazy. That was spectacular. But I escaped from Lubeck maximum security prison and I cut out of there and got a, that was a miraculous and Lubeck Germany </s><s>[INST] what was, what was that escaped like [/INST] I was there and I was going to extradite me back to the United States where I still had all these charges in 25 years special parole. And uh I was cleaning the lawyers visiting room and on it was bars that looked like a piano notes or this way to make it pretty. But there was a little bit So I got a route from a guy where they made boots in there and I uh I had 20 minutes so I went in there and I wrapped it around and I put a broom handle in it that was cut off and wrapped it around until they pull the bars together on that side and then I pulled them together on the other side. But that only put me in inside the prison yard where the soccer equipment was kept. But they were um putting new windows on one side of the prison and they had a scaffold up to the fourth floor. So there was a little recess there and there's guard towers every 100 ft or so. I mean they would shoot and kill you. So I got behind that uh and climbed up holding to the bricks on one end and the scaffolding on the other and went to the roof. I lost my shirt and most of my clothes going through the window, I got older skin off of me, I thought I was gonna die and I was trying to go sideways like this and finally I got a grip and the bars let me through and took all the skin off of me. So I got up on that roof and I have asked me and I just lay there trying to catch my breath, I didn't bring my inhaler so with blood everywhere. Oh I would bloody yes and so I got down to the end and on the end, the reason I did it, they would put it, he was putting a new wall again around the prison to make it larger and they had taken all the uh wire off above the sally ports where they could join the two walls together. And I saw that when I came up and there was a guard half of uh like a dome sticking out of that brick building where there's a guard there with a gun and kill you. And I mean he was made, it was surely trained to kill you. And we had some bad people in that place. So I lay up, 11 flew above it and I saw a guard and his wife come with a double umbrella, it was just pouring down rain um without a shirt on bloody in. He had a little boy, she had a little boy with him under that double umbrella and I knew him when he comes and she started back from the sally port. I hit the top of that guard tower bam with both feet. And I jumped, I guess it's three more floors. I jumped, there was a pile of sand like a cone where they were digging it there and I hit that in my feet, buried up to the knees. But I didn't fall and I ran straight towards her so he couldn't shoot me. And then I went around some bushes and went downhill and then I heard bam bam bam bam bam behind me and I looked in that food woman was in a big old car and she was knocking down the parking meters behind me, she was trying to run over me and I ran behind </s>

<s>[INST] your life is difficult because you can potentially hurt the company. That doesn't deserve it if you're wrong or you if you're right and you warned the company you might hurt the who um well, I'm glad your wife is a supporter and keeps you strong. That's a tough, tough decision, um ultimately, I guess you want to err on the side of the of the of the individual people, of the investors and so on. But it's tough. It's always a really, really tricky decision to make. [/INST] Very tricky </s><s>[INST] boy. That's so interesting. And then um the thing I've seen in your interviews uh that I don't remember because I [/INST] think when </s><s>[INST] you I watched you earlier in your career, you were a little bit harsher, You were having your electric troll Lier, you're having a little more fun. And when I've seen you recently, you do have the fun, but whenever you interview, you seem respectful, like, like you attack in good faith, which is really important for an interviewer. So then people can go on and actually try to defend themselves. That's really important signal to send to people, because then you're not just about tearing down your after, like, you know, it's a cliche to say, but the truth, like, you're you're really trying to actually investigate in good faith, which is great. So that signals out there. So like, people like SPF could like he should, he should go on your platform, I think, I mean now it's like in full, not just like a half asked conversation on twitter spaces, but in full, so that's that's great that that signals out there, but of course the downside of sort of as you as you become more famous people might be scared to sort of go on. Um but your, you do put that signal being respectful out there, which is really, really important, [/INST] you know, it's interesting, it surprises me, I know it surprises other people because other people have commented, but it consistently surprises me how many people still talk to me uh and maybe it's because they, and I really do give a good attempt to try to argue in good faith, I try not to just like load up ad hominem or anything like that, I just try to present the evidence and let the audience make up their mind. Um but it surprises me sometimes that people will just be like yeah, they wanna talk, they want to talk, they want to talk, I think it's very human in a way and I think it's like almost, it's almost like good, like one of the things that is always told to everyone who's going to talk to the cops, like you should never talk to the cops, whatever um which is true, you shouldn't talk to the cops because because even if you're innocent, they can use your words, they can twist your words with that, but there's something that, that gets lost in that like almost robotic, like, you know self interest that I think having open conversations, even if you've done something wrong, I think there's something really compelling about that that continues to make people talk in interrogation rooms in twitter spaces wherever you are, regardless of whether you totally shouldn't be talking. And I don't want to downplay that that's actually really important. I mean, it's like a lot of cases get solved a lot of investigations go farther because people sort of make the miscalculation to talk, but I think it's like almost important in a way that we have that human bias to like connect in spite of self interest. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but also they're judging the integrity and the good faith of the other person. So I think when people consume your content, especially your latest content, they know that you're a good person. I found myself like, there's a lot of journalists that reached out to me and I find myself like not wanting to talk to them because I don't know if the other person on the side is coming in, good faith, even on silly stuff, I'm not the [/INST] same way. Like, </s><s>[INST] I'm not uh I don't have anything to hide. Like you don't really have anything to hide, but you you don't know what they're like, spin is, can [/INST] can I tell you an example I'm dying because I I believe so strongly that journalists have done themselves such a disservice. Okay, one of the truest things is that like, everyone loves journalism in theory, and almost everyone dislikes journalists as a whole. Like, there's a deep distrust of journalists and there's a deep love for journalism is this weird disconnect. I think a lot of it can be summarized in there's this book called the uh God what it's called. I think it's called the journalist and the murderer. It's written by Janet Malcolm. The first line of this book is that like every journalist who knows what they're doing, who isn't too like is smart enough to know what they're doing, knows what they're doing is deeply unethical or something like that. And what they're talking about is that there's a tradition in journalism to betray the subject to lie to them in the hopes of getting a story and play to their ego and to their sense of self to make it seem like you're going to write one article and you stab them in the back at the end when you press publish and you write the totally different article. This is what actually everyone hates about journalists and it's happened to me before. So I did a story like way back in the day I got interviewed about something that was like data with Youtube. I made a few comments about data in Youtube and somehow by the time the article got published, it's about me endorsing their opinion that pewdiepie is an anti semite and I'm like, I reached out to this process, I never said that. Like what do you, how did you even twist my words to say that and I felt so disgusted and betrayed to have, like, I'm like this mouthpiece for an ideology or like I thought that I do not actually agree with so, and when journalists do this, they think, well, I'm never gonna interview this person again. So it's okay. So it's like, it's almost like the ends justify the means, I get the story, but the ends don't justify the means because you've now undermined the entire field's credibility with that person. And when that happens enough time times you end up sitting across from lex Friedman and it's like, well, I don't know if they're gonna represent me fairly because the base assumption is that regardless of what the journalist says, they could betray you and they might betray you at the end of the day and be saying you're great while they're secretly writing like a hit piece about like, you know, how much, you know, you're a bad force for the world where whereas there's an alternate universe where if the journalist was somewhat upfront about their approach or at least didn't mislead and didn't say like, I love you, I think you're great, um you would end up with less access, but you would end up with more trusted journalism, which I think in the long run would be better. </s>

<s>[INST] interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of, in the in the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful and so maybe it's possible for social media to do that, a presentation uh sort of a slither a slice, a look into a person's life that reveals something real about [/INST] them. But </s><s>[INST] in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed graphically or through words some way, I mean in some way twitter can do that kind of thing, a very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person. Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking the thing out of context. Not people often don't retweet in the context of the human being that wrote them the full the full history of the tweets, they've written the education level, the humor level, the the worldview, they're playing around with all that context is forgotten and people just see the different words so that can lead to trouble, but in a certain sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person. So in that sense, twitter can be more successful if we talk about molluscs is driving a better kind of incentive. [/INST] Yeah, I mean how they can, like if we were to rewrite it, is there a way to rewrite the twitter twitter algorithm so that it stops being the like the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars because that's really what it is, it's um I mean maybe I'm giving it you know twitter too much power, you know power but just the more I looked into it and I had conversations with tristan Harris from the center of humane technology and he explained it as like twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture and then this terribly designed algorithm that amplifies the craziest people um and the the angriest the angriest most divisive takes and amplifies them and then the media the mainstream media because all the journalists are also on twitter, they then are informed by that and so they draw out the stories they can from this already like very boiling lava of of of of rage and then spread that you know to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on twitter. And so I honestly I think if I could press a button, turn them off probably would at this point because I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness but that's not gonna happen. Um and so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less monarchy would be to um change at least like it was on a subscription model then it's now not optimizing for you know uh impressions because basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible, that's how they get paid right um every time an ad gets shown to someone and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone um if they moved on to at least a subscription model then They're getting the money. Either way, whether someone comes back to the site once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes away that incentive you know to use technology you know to build to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive. Um that would be one way for example. Yeah </s><s>[INST] but you still want people to yeah I just feel like that just slows down, creates friction in the chirality of things but [/INST] that's good. We need to slow down good. </s><s>[INST] It's one way [/INST] variety is monarch to be clear. </s><s>[INST] So Mullick is always negative then. [/INST] Yes by definition </s><s>[INST] yes but then I disagree with [/INST] negative, competition is neutral, </s><s>[INST] I disagree with you that all vitality is negative then uh Malik then because i it's a good intuition because we have a lot of data and chirality being negative but I happen to believe that the core of human beings so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible it might be just harder to engineer systems that enable vitality but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable viral ITty and the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive and positive, not like La la paz, it's more like win win, meaning a lot of people need to be challenged [/INST] wise things </s><s>[INST] you grow from it that might challenge you, you might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it [/INST] and ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart. I deeply want that to be true and I very much agree with you that people at their core are on average, good as opposed to care for each other as opposed to not like, you know, I think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly like wanting to do just like destructive malicious things. Most people are just trying to win their own little game and they don't mean to be, you know, they're just stuck in this badly designed system um that said the current structure, yes, is the current structure means that virility is optimized towards malek, that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. You know, sometimes positive stories do go viral and I think we should study them. I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, you know, identifying memes that, you know, above a certain threshold of the population, agree as a positive, happy, bringing people together meme, the kind of thing that you know brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the table. The dinner table um identify those memes and figure out what it was, what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. Um </s>

<s>[INST] the requirement to understand that is to be almost to a radical degree, be empathetic and to listen to the world. And I mean, you brought up sort of gender roles. It's not so simple. All of this is messy. For example, this is me talking. It's clear to me that, for example, the wolf culture has bullying built into it has some elements of the same kind of evil built into it. And when you're part of the wave of wokeness standing out for social rights? You also have to listen and think, are we going too far? Are we hurting people? Are we doing the same things that others that we're fighting against, that others were doing in the past. It's not simple. Uh, once you see that there's evil being done uh that it's easy to fix. No. And uh in our society it's there's something about our human nature that just to easily stops listening to the world to empathizing with the world. And we label things as evil, This is through human history, this is evil. You mentioned tribes, this religious belief is evil and so we have to fight it and we become certain and dogmatic about it. And then in so doing commit evil onto the world, it seems like a life that accepts and responsibility for the norms or in has to constantly be sort of questioning yourself and questioning like listening to the world fully and richly without being um weighed down by anyone sort of uh realization, you just always constantly have to be thinking about the world, am I wrong? Am I wrong? And seeing in the world this way, [/INST] I mean the very last thing you said, you've constantly got to be thinking about the world. You've constantly got to be listening, you've constantly got to be attending. And it's not simple. All that sounds exactly right to me. And the phrase that rings through my head is another one from the brothers Karamazov Dmitry is passionate sort of sometimes violent brother who um who is also sort of deep deeply cares. I mean he's because he's passionate, he's sort of got care through and through, but it's breaking him apart. He says at one point, um, God and the devil are fighting in the battlefield is the heart of man. And I just think, yeah, it's not simple and the idea that there might be a purely good way of doing things, it's just not our condition that we are, everything we do is going to be sort of undermined by some aspect of it. There's not going to be a kind of pure good in in human existence. And so it's sort of required that we're going to have to be um empathetic that we're gonna have to recognize that others are dealing with that just as we are. </s><s>[INST] So I apologize for distracting us. We were talking about Heidegger that uh, and the reason we were distracted is he happened to also be a Nazi, but he nevertheless has a lot of powerful ideas. What are the ideas he's brought to the world? [/INST] Okay, so that's a big, huge question. So let me see how much of it I can get on the tape. I mean the big picture is that Heidegger thinks and he's not really wrong to think this that the whole history of philosophy from plato forward, maybe even from the pre Socratic forward from like the sixth century BC to now has been motivated by a certain kind or has been grounded on a certain kind of assumption that it didn't have the right to make and that its lead us astray and that until we understand the way in which it's led us astray, we're not going to be able to get to grips with the condition we now find ourselves in. So let me start with what he thinks. The condition we now find ourselves in is lots of periods to hide occurs views. I'm not, I'm just going to sort of mush it all together for the purposes of today. Heidegger thinks that one of the crucial things that we need to contend with when we think about what it is to be us now, is that the right name for our age is a technological age. And what does it mean for our age to be a technological age? Well, it means that we have an understanding of what it is for anything at all to be at all. That we never really chose that sort of animating the way we live our lives. That's animating our understanding of ourselves and everything else that is quite limited. And it's organized around the idea that to be something is to be what sitting there as an infinitely flexible reserve to be optimized and made efficient. And Heidegger thinks that, uh, that's, that's not just the way we think of silicon circuits or you know, the river when we put a hydro electric power plant on it were optimizing the flow of the river so that it makes energy, which is infinitely flexible and we can use in any way at all. It's the way we understand ourselves. Two, we think of ourselves as this reserve of potential that needs to be made efficient and optimized. And when I when I talk with my students about it, I asked them, you know, like, what's your calendar look like? What's the goal of your day? Is it to get as many things into it as possible? Is it to feel like I've I've failed unless I've I've made my life so efficient that I'm doing this and this and this and this and this, that I can't let things go by the feeling that I think we all have, that there's some pressure to do that, to relate to ourselves that way is a clue to what Heidegger thinks, um, the technological age is about. And he thinks that's different from every other age in history. We used to think of ourselves in the 17th century, at the beginning of the of the enlightenment as subjects who represent objects. Take heart thought that a subject is something some mental sort of realm that represents the world in a certain way, and we are closed in on ourselves in the sense that um, we have a special relation to our representations. Uh, that's that's what the realm of the subject. But others, you know, in the Middle Ages we were created in the image and likeness of God and in the pre Socratic Age to be, was to be what washes up and lingers for a while and fades away. The paradigm of of what is we're thunderstorms and the anger of the gods, achilles, battle fury. And it overtakes everything and stays for a while and then leaves the flowers blooming in spring. And that's very different from the way we experience ourselves. And so the so the question is, um, what are we supposed to do in the face of that? And Heidegger thinks that the the priest opposition that's motivated everything from the pre Socratic forward is that there is some entity that's the ground of the way we understand everything to be for the Middle Ages. It was God that was the entity that made things be the things that they are for the enlightenment, it was us, maybe for start it's us and Heidegger thinks, um, whatever it is that stands at the ground of what we are, it's not another thing, it's not another entity and we're relating to it in the wrong way. If we think of it like that, there's some way and this is partly why I was interested in Meister Eckhart, he says what there is is there's giving going on in the world and we're the grateful recipient of it. And the giving is like, whatever it is, it's the social norms that were thrown into, we didn't choose them. They were given to us </s>

<s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ben Shapiro to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Ben Shapiro himself, freedom of speech and thought matters especially when it is speech and thought with which we disagree. The moment the majority decides to destroy people for engaging his thought. It dislikes thought. Crime becomes a reality. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] had like a headpiece like here, but you have to wear your helmet when you're firing. Yeah, right. So you can't have both on. Okay. So how much are you aware of the logistics of the whole thing? That's always fascinating with warfare. Like in terms of setting up, you mentioned gravel and the fobs, like setting all those bases up. Were you seeing any of this or again, it's a 19 year old [/INST] kind of just. Well, it's not that I was oblivious. That's the one thing I would say I wasn't. I was, I'm very aware of my surroundings. That's something that's always been taught to me from a very early age because I traveled a lot with my dad in the truck. And so my dad would be like, you're going to go into that bathroom and I'm going to watch you come out and you're going to watch everyone around you because people get kidnapped. Like this is just the reality. I was always very paranoid. So you were paying attention to surroundings. But the fob was </s><s>[INST] already built up when we got there. This is already like well-established bases already. Established enough. All right. And that is one of the first times you've heard [/INST] actual fire. Established enough. Yeah, that was like the, I mean, I'd heard it on the, when we shoot and when we, you know, zero in weapons and we do all that stuff. But I had never heard it like that before and then you would see the guys, the Americans, would roll out every day and go on patrol and come back, roll up, come back, come back. And so you would see them and you would hear them and they would tell the stories, those types of things. But I never experienced it because we never got attacked. Like our base never got hit. We're really lucky that way. There were other ones around us that were getting hit, but we weren't getting hit. We were We were very fortunate. At least we didn't get hit when I was there. I believe the entry got, there was an attempt. There was an attempt at some point in a past, but I wasn't privy to that. But we were in the OP towers, so we had to do our own security. But because we were such a small subset of Canadians and we always had to have people running the guns and ready to run the guns at all times, we only had to man one tower. So you would do four-hour shifts with a fire team partner in the tower, depending on whatever, but you would do it every day. So I would look out into the rest of Afghanistan at that opportunity, otherwise it was just </s><s>[INST] like your walls. What did it look like? Is it beautiful? Just a full landscape? [/INST] Or is it... Where I was, there was mountains in the distance, it was just very sandy, very flat, and there was a couple small compounds on the outside. It wasn't a lot to look at. There was a long road that you knew that got hit all the time. </s><s>[INST] There wasn't a lot to look at. [/INST] It's just a strange place to be the center of superpowers over the decades. </s><s>[INST] It really is. And the fact that the populace, the civilians, are almost completely clueless to the full [/INST] history of things in terms of globally, the geopolitics of it all. Yeah. Well, if you look at the location of it, right, on a map, it makes more sense. Right. You can wrap your brain around it. Right. But I met plenty of people who had never even seen a picture of themselves when I was in that country. </s><s>[INST] I mean, how much more are they going to understand if they don't know what even exists outside? You tell a small story of taking a picture of a girl and showing it to her, an Afghani [/INST] girl. Yeah. We were... I was with the British at that time. And we were on that operation that gets highlighted quite a bit. And we had stopped and we... The ICOM radios were pinging. And ICOM radios are a radio that we have an interpreter on that the Taliban... Basically, we can hear what they're saying. It's there comms, it's us tapped in. When it's really clear, they're close. When it's scatty and they're far enough away. Normally they're not planning an attack, although you never know, really. And we were going door-to-door, kind of like what they're doing now. And we were pulling people out of their houses. And we knew there was people in there that were active Taliban, and we knew the ICOMs were pinging. When we got in there, they had hidden all the women and kids and locked them inside the house. Because often nowadays women, the women, they would hide things on them that they shouldn't have because no one would be ever there to search them because there isn't a lot of women on the front lines. But I got borrowed to go specifically search women and children. So they had me. And one of the little girls kind of snuck out and was kind of sitting near me and I was eating something and I had like these little candies that are called Little Sweeties. The British have them in the ration packs. I don't know. They're good, though. eating them and so I gave them to her and then her brother came over and slapped her upside the head and took him from her. So then I just went over and slapped him upside the head and just pointed my gun at her while she ate them all yeah because I was like no yeah like you can have these I mean I'm gonna stand here and make sure you do. And I remember asking can I take a picture with her I asked a trip can you ask her can I take a picture with her um and a she was very confused and you when you look at the photo you see her face very stunned Very stunned. And it wasn't my camera, it was my officer's camera. It was a hot pink like fluorescent pink camera. So I pulled this like huge pink thing out of my lip. Let's take a picture. And so she stood there and took a picture, but then she grabbed the camera, because I flipped it and showed it to her and her eyes got huge. And she grabbed it and she ran inside. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, oh, that's gone forever. Like that's over for you. And then she came out and she kind of snuck out. I went in and grabbed it and the mom lifted up her burger and was showing me that she like shaved her legs to be more Western and I was just At that moment. I don't know that I could have realized how much that moment affected me How much how much that moment would affect me later on in my life until it's been later on in my life </s>

<s>[INST] So one of the ways I think about, I think people think about consciousness is in connection to suffering. So let me just ask about suffering because that's how people think about animals cruelty to animals or cruelty to living things. They connect that to suffering into consciousness. I think there's a sense in which those are two are deeply connected when people are are are thinking about just um public policy, they're thinking about this like philosophy, engineering, psychology, sociology, uh political science, all of those things have to do with human suffering and animal suffering. Life suffering. And that's connected to consciousness in a lot of people's minds. Is it connected like that for you? So the the capacity to suffer, is it also, is it also somehow like strongly correlated with the capacity to experience? [/INST] Yeah, I would say I would say suffering is a kind of experience and so you have to be conscious to suffer. Um actually there's so there as well as people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously. Now, panpsychism is one radical approach. Another one is what's become known as illusionism. The view that consciousness at least in the sense that philosophers think about it doesn't really exist at all. So yeah, my podcast mind chat. I I host with a I committed illusionist. So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere. He thinks it's nowhere. And so, so that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right? Consciousness doesn't exist. We don't need to explain it job done. Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious why it's so hard to get out of the idea that we're conscious. But the the reason I connect this to what you're saying is actually my co host keith Frankish is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain. He says oh in some you know in some sense I believe in pain and in some sense I don't. But another illusionist francois camera has a paper discussing um how we think about morality given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just does not exist. He thinks it's an illusion. The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain but we don't and how we should think about morality in the light of that. Um it's it's become a big topic actually. Thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality. David Chalmers, the philosopher is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie. So a philosophical zombies very different from a Hollywood zombie, Hollywood zombies. You know? You know what they're like. But philosophical zombies are sort of really good korean zombie movie on Halloween this year. It's called them anyway. Uh Philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings of their body and brain are the same as ours but they have no conscious experience, there's nothing that's like to be a zombie. So you stick a knife in it, it screams and run away but runs away but it doesn't actually feel pain. It's just a complicated um mechanism set up to behave just like us. Now there's lots of, no one believes in these. I think there's one philosopher who believes in everyone is a zombie, accept him. But anyway, </s><s>[INST] but isn't that what illusionism? [/INST] I suppose so in a sense solution is because of you, we're all zombies and you know, 1 1 reason to think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness. So if there were a zombie, here's a question, suppose suppose we could I mean suppose we could make zombies by, let's say for sake of discussion, things made of Silicon aren't conscious. I don't know if that's true, It could turn out to be true. And suppose you built commander data out of Silicon, you know, it's a bit of an old school reference to star trek the next generation. So you know, behaves just like a human being. But you know, it can you can have a sophisticated conversation, it will talk about its hopes and fears but it has no consciousness. Does it have moral rights? Um is it murder to turn off such a being? You know, I'm inclined to say no it's not, you know, if if it doesn't have experience, it doesn't really suffer, it doesn't really have moral rights at all. So I'm inclined to think, you know, consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern and conversely as as as a as a pan sickest for this reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature. If you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind, then a tree is a locus of moral concern in its own right, chopping down a tree is an active, immediate moral concern. If you see these, you know, horrible forest fires, we're all horrified. But if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms that does add a whole new dimension, although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a parent slickest, I'm going to be vegan. But it's tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you've got to eat something. If you if you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got a nice moral dividing line, you can say, I'm not going to eat things that are unconscious, I'm not gonna kill things that are unconscious. But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then you don't have that nice moral dividing line. I mean, so that the principal I'm kind of working my way towards, I haven't kept it up and it's in my trip to the U. S. But is just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed, you know, my vegan friends, they were still suffering there and I think there is even in the even in the the nicest farms cows will suffer when their cows when when their calves are taken off them they go for a few days of quite serious morning so they're still suffering. But it seems to me my my thought is the principal of just not having factory farm stuff is something more people could get on board with and you might have greater harm minimization. So if people went into restaurants and said are your animal products factory farmed, if not I want the vegan option or if people looked out for the label that said no Factory farmed ingredients, you know I think maybe that that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization anyway so that's </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. You know what's fascinating. I mean, one of my favorite aspects of the paper and the work you do with the arc challenge is um the process of making Prior is explicit. Just even that act alone As a really powerful one of like what are it's uh it's a really powerful question ask of us humans, what are the prices that we bring to the table? Mm The next step is like once you have those prayers, how do you use them to uh solve a novel task? But like just even making the prior explicit is a really difficult and really powerful step. And and that that's like visually beautiful and conceptually philosophically beautiful part of the work you did with uh and I guess continue to do probably with the paper and the arc challenge. Can you talk about some of the prior that we're talking about here? [/INST] Yes. So a researcher has done a lot of work on what exactly uh on the knowledge bias that innate to humans. Is Elizabeth speaking from Harvard. Uh so she developed the core knowledge theory Which outlines four different core knowledge systems uh systems of knowledge that we are basically either born with or that we are hard wired to acquire very early on in our development. And there's no uh there's no strong distinction between the two. Like if you are and primed to acquire a certain type of knowledge in just a few weeks you might as well just be born with it. It's just it's just part of who you are. And so there are four different core knowledge systems. Like the first one is the notion of object Nous and a basic physics like to recognize that um something that moves uh currently for instance is an object. So we intuitively naturally in Italy divide the world into objects based on this notion of coherence, physical currents. And in terms of elementary physics, there's the fact that uh you know, objects can bump against each other and the fact that they can occlude each other. So these are things that we are essentially born with or at least that well going to be quite extremely early because we already hardwired to acquire them. So </s><s>[INST] a bunch of points, pixels that move together [/INST] on objects are partly the same object. Yes, </s><s>[INST] I mean I mean that like I don't I don't smoke weed but if I did that's something I could sit like all night and just like think about remember when I first in your paper just object Nous, I wasn't self aware I guess of how that particular prior that that's such a fascinating [/INST] prior that like That's that's the most basic one. But the objection is just </s><s>[INST] identity. I just object. Yes, it's very basic I suppose, but is so fundamental. [/INST] It is fundamental to human cognition. Yeah. And the second prior, that's also fundamentalist Agent Nous which is not the real world, real world, but so Agent Nous, the fact that some of these objects that you that you segment your environment into some of these objects are agents, what's an agent is uh basically it's an object that has goals. Um so far that has goals, this is capable of person goals. So for instance, if you see two dots moving in a roughly synchronized fashion, you will intuitively infer that one of the dots is pursuing the other so that one of the dots is and one of the dots an agent and its goal is to avoid the other dot and one of the dots. The other dot is also an agent and its goal is to catch the first start. Pelkey has shown that babies as young as three months, identify agent Nous and goal directed nous in the environment. Another Prior is basic uh you know, geometry and topology, like the notion of distance, the ability to navigate uh in your environment and so on. This is something that is phenomenally hard wired uh into our brain. It's in fact backed by very specific neural mechanisms like for instance uh grid cells and place cells. So it's it's something that's uh literally hard coded at a new level uh in a hyper campus. And the last Prior would be the notion of numbers like numbers are not actually a cultural construct where intuitively in italy able to do some basic counting and to compare quantities. So it doesn't mean we can do arbitrary at arithmetic, uh accounting, the accounting, that's coming like counting 123 H then maybe more than three. You can also compare quantities. If I give you uh three dots and five dots, you can tell the side with five dots as more dots. So this is actually an innate Prior. Um So that said the list may not be exhaustive. Uh Oh spelling is still uh you know, passing uh the potential existence of new knowledge systems for instance. Uh Knowledge systems that that we deal with social relationships. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean [/INST] which is much, much less for event uh to something like our or our contestants, right? </s><s>[INST] There could be stuff like, like you said, rotation symmetry is really interesting. [/INST] It's very likely that there is uh speaking about rotation, that there is uh in the brain hard coded system that is capable of performing rotations. Uh 11 famous experiment that people did in the uh I don't remember which was exactly, but in the in the seventies uh was that people found that if you asked people, if you give them two different shapes and one of the shapes is rotated version of the first shape. And you ask them, Is that shape for the division of 1st ship or not? What you see, is that the time it takes people to answer is linearly proportional right to the angle of rotation. So it's almost like you have in somewhere in your brain like a turntable um with the fixed speed. And if you want to know if 22 objects, our stated version of each other, you put the object on the table, you let it move around a little bit and then you and then you stop when you have a match and and that that's really interesting. </s>

<s>[INST] What do you think is the best movie sequel of all time? Speaking of Part 2? Because like because most of them suck [/INST] movie </s><s>[INST] Sequels and you tweet about movies. So just a tiny tangent is there? What's your, what's like a favorite movie sequel? Godfather? Part two. Um Are you a fan of Godfather cause you didn't even tweet or mention the Godfather. [/INST] Yeah, I don't love that movie. I know it hasn't </s><s>[INST] edit that out. We're going to edit out the hate towards The Godfather? How dare you [/INST] Think will make a strong statement? I don't know why. I don't know why, but I basically don't like any movie before 1995. Something like that. </s><s>[INST] Didn't you mention Terminator [/INST] 2? Okay, Okay. That's like a terminator two was a little bit later, 1990. </s><s>[INST] No, I think terminator two was in there [/INST] And I like terminator one as well. So okay, so like a few exceptions, but by and large, for some reason I don't like movies before 1995 or something, they feel very slow. The camera is like zoomed out, it's boring, it's kind of naive. It's kind of weird. </s><s>[INST] And also Terminator was very much ahead of its time. [/INST] Yes. And The Godfather, there's like no, A G. I joe </s><s>[INST] I mean, but you have Good Will Hunting was one of the movies you mentioned and that doesn't have any A G. I either. I guess that's mathematics. I [/INST] guess occasionally I do in the movies that don't feature or </s><s>[INST] like anchorman that has no, that's that [/INST] is so good. </s><s>[INST] I don't understand. Um Speaking of A G. I because I don't understand why Will Ferrell is so funny. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute there's just something about him and he's a singular human because you don't get that many comedies these days and I wonder if it has to do about the culture or the like The Machine of Hollywood or does it have to do it just we got lucky with certain people in comedy came together because he is a singular human. That was a ridiculous tangent, I apologize, but you mentioned humanoid robots. So what do you think about optimus? About Tesla body? Do you think we'll have robots in the factory in in in the home in 10 2030, 40, 50 years? [/INST] Yeah, I think it's very hard project, I think it's going to take awhile but who else is going to build human robots at scale? And I think it is a very good form factor to go after because like I mentioned that the world is designed for human in form factor. These things will be able to operate our machines, they will be able to sit down in chairs, potentially even drive cars. Uh basically the world is designed for humans, that's the form factor you want to invest into and make work over time. Uh I think you know, there's another school of thought which is okay, take a problem and design a robot to it. But actually designing a robot and getting a whole data engine and everything behind it to work is actually incredibly hard problem. So it makes sense to go after general interfaces that okay, they are not perfect for any one given task but they actually have the generality of just with a prompt with english able to do something across and so I think it makes a lot of sense to go after a general uh interface um, in the physical world. And I think it's a very difficult project. It's going to take time. Um, but I see no other, no other company that can execute on that vision. I think it's going to be amazing. Like uh basically physical labor, like if you think transportation is a large market, try physical labor insane, </s><s>[INST] but it's not just physical labor. To me, the thing that's also exciting is the social robotics. So the relationship will have on different levels with those robots. That's why I was really excited to see optimists like um people have criticized me for the excitement, but I've I've worked with uh a lot of research labs that do humanoid legged robots, boston dynamics, unitary. A lot there's a lot of companies that do legged robots, but that's the the elegance of the movement is a tiny tiny part of the big picture. So integrating the two big exciting things to me about Tesla doing humanoid or any legged robots is clearly integrating into the data engine. So the data engine aspect, so the actual intelligence for the perception and the and the control and the planning and all that kind of stuff integrating into this huge the fleet that you mentioned, right. Um and then speaking of fleet, the second thing is the mass manufacturers just knowing uh culturally uh driving towards a simple robot that's cheap to produce at scale and doing that well, having experience to do that. Well, that changes everything. That's why that's a very different culture and style than boston dynamics who by the way, those those robots are just the way they move. It's like, it'll be a very long time before Tessa can achieve the smoothness of movement. But that's not what it's about. It's, it's about, it's about the entirety of the system. Like we talked about the data engine and the fleet. That's super exciting. Even the initial sort of models but that too was really surprising that in a few months you can get a prototype [/INST] and the reason that happened very quickly is as you alluded to, there's a ton of copy paste from what's happening in the autopilot a lot. The amount of expertise that like came out of the woodworks at Tesla for building the human robot was incredible to see like basically Ellen said at one point, we're doing this. And then next day, basically like all these cad models started to appear and people talking about like the supply chain and manufacturing and people showed up with like screwdrivers and everything like the other day and started to like put together the body and I was like, whoa! Like all these people exist at Tesla and fundamentally building a car is actually not that different from building a robot the same. And that is true, not just for the hardware pieces and also, let's not forget hardware, not just for a demo, but um, manufacturing of that hardware at scale. It's like a whole different thing, but for software as well, basically this robot currently thinks it's a car. Uh, it's gonna </s>

<s>[INST] so Lockheed Martin's partner with uh a few years ago with Boeing to work with the D. O. D. A nasty bill launch systems and rockets with the U. L. A. What's beyond that? What's Lockheed's mission timeline and long term dream in terms of space, you mentioned the moon. I've heard you talk about asteroids as mars. What's the timeline? What's the engineering challenges and what's the dream? Long term? [/INST] Yeah I think the dream long term is to have a permanent presence in space beyond low earth orbit ultimately with a long term presence on the moon and then to the planets to mars and trying to interrupt. And </s><s>[INST] that's a long term presence means [/INST] sustained and sustainable presence. And an economy a space economy that really goes alongside with human </s><s>[INST] beings being and being able to launch perhaps from those. So like hop [/INST] but you know there's a lot of energy that goes in those hops. Right? So uh I think the first step is being able to get there and to be able to establish sustained basis right and uh and build from there. And a lot of that means getting as you know things like the cost of launch down. And you mentioned United Launch alliance and uh so I don't want to speak for you L. A. But obviously they're they're working really hard to uh on their next generation of space of launch vehicles uh you know maintain that incredible mission success record that you Ella has but ultimately continue to drive down the cost and make the flexibility the speed and the access ever greater. </s><s>[INST] So what's the missions that are in the horizon that you could talk to hope to get to the [/INST] moon? Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, and I think, you know, this uh you may know this, you know, there's a lot of ways to accomplish some of these goals. And so that's a lot of what's in discussion today. But ultimately the goal is to be able to establish a base um essentially insist lunar space that would allow for ready uh transfer from orbit to the lunar surface and back again. And so that's sort of that near term I say near term in the next decade or so. Vision Yeah. Starting off with, you know, a stated objective by this administration to get back to the moon in the 19 or 2024, time frame, which is uh, is right around the corner here. So big of an </s><s>[INST] engineering challenges that [/INST] uh huh I think the big challenge is not so much to go, but to stay. Right. And so we demonstrated in the 60s that you could send somebody up to a couple of days of mission and bring them home again successfully. Uh Now we're talking about doing that, I'd say more to, don't say an industrial scale, but a sustained scale. Right? So permanent habitation. Uh you know, regular re use of vehicles, the infrastructure to get things like fuel, air, um uh, consumables, replacement parts, all the things that you need to sustain that kind of infrastructure. So those are certainly engineering challenges. There are budgetary challenges uh and uh those are all things that we're going to have to work through, you know, the other thing and I shouldn't I don't want to minimize this. I mean, I'm excited about human exploration, but the reality is our technology and where we've come over the last, you know, 40 years essentially has changed what we can do with robotic exploration as well. And uh you know, to me it's incredibly thrilling. This seems like old news now, but the fact that we have rovers driving around the surface of MArs and sending back data is just incredible. The fact that we have satellites in orbit around mars that are collecting whether, you know, they're looking at the terrain, they're mapping all of these kinds of things on a continuous basis. That's incredible. And the fact that, you know, it's, you got the time lag of course going to the, going to the planets, but you can effectively have virtual human presence there uh in a way that we have never been able to do before. And now with the advent of even greater processing power, better ai systems, better cognitive systems and decision systems. Um you know, you put that together with the human peace and we really opened up the solar system in a whole different way. And I'll give you an example, we've got, oh, Cyrus rex, which is a mission to the asteroid, Bennu. So the spacecraft is out there right now and basically a year mapping activity to map the entire surface of that asteroid in great detail. You know, all autonomously piloted. Right with the idea then that this is not too far away, it's going to go in. It's got a sort of a fancy vacuum cleaner with a bucket, it's going to collect the sample off the asteroid and then send it back here to Earth. And so, you know, We have gone from sort of those tentative steps in the 70s, you know, early landings, video of the solar system. So now we've sent spacecraft to Pluto. We have gone to comets and brought and and intercepted comments. We've brought Stardust, uh, you know, uh, material back. Uh, so that's uh, we've gone uh, far and there's incredible opportunity to go even farther. </s><s>[INST] So it seems quite crazy that this is even possible. That can you talk a little bit about what it means to orbit an asteroid and with a bucket to try to pick up some soil samples. [/INST] Yeah. So part of it is just kind of the, uh, you know, these are the same kinds of techniques we use here on Earth for um, high speed, high speed, high accuracy imagery stitching these scenes together and creating essentially high accuracy world maps. Right. And so that's what we're doing obviously on a much smaller scale with an asteroid. But the other thing that's really interesting, you put together sort of that neat control and data and imagery problem. But the stories around how we design the collection, I mean essentially, you know, this is the sort of the human ingenuity element. Right? That essentially uh you know, had an engineer who had a one day is like well starts messing around with parts, vacuum cleaner bucket. You know, maybe we could do something like this. And that was what led to what we call the pogo stick collection. Right. We're basically, I think comes down, it's only there for seconds. Does that collection grabs the essentially blows the regular material into the collection hopper and off it goes, it doesn't really land </s>