Datasets:

ianiket23

/

podcast_llama_chat_format-1k

like 0

<s>[INST] Yeah, that's uh I haven't played because there's a there's a mobile Fallout game, right? I need to play that. I was thinking of playing Diablo Mobile too. I [/INST] mean you can debate the monetization but I would not, it's I think they did a fun, it's </s><s>[INST] really fun. Follow [/INST] follow, I definitely recommend that one Fallout shelter completely different game Diablo immortal is uh was very, very impressed. That had a lot of fun </s><s>[INST] on the mobile, what's the challenge of designing a game for mobile versus the pc and console? Well [/INST] obviously the screen size, is </s><s>[INST] that what you feel first? What's the what's the fundamental change in the in the philosophy of design, Does it does it constrain does it change the tone of the game? [/INST] Well, we've done a few things and we have a new mobile game that we're working on that we haven't announced yet that I'm in love with. Um there are a couple of things that you approach on mobile now, I can give you sort of the classic mobile gaming thing and then what we do um you know, a classic mobile gaming is really for short play sessions because for the amount of people you're gonna get the number that have the amount of time to sit there for a long time and play it like a console game or a pc game is lower because people are playing mobile games on the move or whatever and how it on boards you because obviously most of them are free. So the tutorial how the tutorial works, how it gets you into the game because you haven't bought you haven't done this investment of buying it and then saying no, I'm gonna learn it, People don't care. So really understanding how they get into the game, those two things are really the magic uh to mobile gaming, we have found that with our games, you know, particularly fallout, shelter, people will sit there for an hour or two, like they will just sit there and play it like large numbers of people who play it for hours a day. </s><s>[INST] So it's a, there is a more, I don't know, addicting element to the mobile because I guess you can spend [/INST] more time with it. You know, if you look at kids these days they can stare at their phone for hours, that's all they do. That's where they watch everything. So it's also like a demographic thing. The younger audience, they would rather sit and stare at their phone, then play it on a big screen. </s><s>[INST] I would just love to sort of list out throughout human history, the evolution of sentences that begin with. If you look at kids these days, it's [/INST] true, It's </s><s>[INST] true. The kids, the kids of the kids these days will probably be talking well be doing like virtual reality. [/INST] Like I love mobile games though. I play a ton of them. I am like the game, my favorite game this year is marvel, snap this card game from the folks who did hearthstone. You should really play it if you like. You like card games, </s><s>[INST] you [/INST] like superheroes. </s><s>[INST] No, [/INST] it's genius. You don't like superheroes. </s><s>[INST] No, I don't like superheroes. I never understood. Listen, this never, this is growing growing up in the soviet union. What I don't understand that this is all right, well I don't understand you're wearing a costume. It's it's it's silly to me. I can't so you have to uh suspend um like you have to be able to immerse yourself and for some reason there's something about costumes, it doesn't get me, but then again, I'm like into elves and dragons, so I don't understand and I'm fine. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but the rest, the rest, at least the american, the western world disagrees with me. So even batman, you [/INST] have like little ears, </s><s>[INST] but that's fine. Um uh well, back to uh the school's star field. So one thing I didn't ask you about when you look at the timeline of 5678 years, whatever it is to create a game, What's the role of the deadline, internally? Not publicly [/INST] announced. Do </s><s>[INST] you try to keep in your own brain the deadline for the team a deadline? And when you set that deadline early in the development, do you try to set deadline? Like that's really tough to reach? [/INST] No, we try to make it like, hey, this is our best guess. If you make it tough to reach, it's sort of, you know, you're gonna miss it. It's arbitrary. We really try to, you know, keep ourselves honest because it will let you know where you're at, right? When I first playable, we wanna be done with prototyping or designed by this date? We want to first play ball this day, one of this, but look, you know, things happen pandemic happens, people go home, it's throws everything off or you know what you needed to do because we're not just like making a game and then moving everybody on, you know what you needed to do. Like Skyrim was so popular, we kept people on that game for longer. So it delayed a little bit. We were doing the fallout four at the time because we can't, you know, hey, </s><s>[INST] we [/INST] really shouldn't move the people on the fallout yet because we're doing these things in Skyrim and we should. So it just sort of keeps you honest for where you're, where you're </s><s>[INST] at. Doesn't get super stressful as you get closer, you try to avoid announcing anything. Is there a temptation announced? [/INST] Well, I've done it always right. I've announced, you know, Star Field were pretty, you know loud with a release date that we then had to delay. So, um </s><s>[INST] was that tough? [/INST] It was, it was, but it was the right thing to do. And uh </s>

<s>[INST] The following is a conversation with Avi Loeb, an astro physicist, astronomer and cosmologist at Harvard. He has authored over 800 papers and written eight books, including his latest called Extraterrestrial, the first sign of intelligent life beyond earth, it will be released in a couple of weeks. So go pre order it now to show support for what I think is truly an important book in that it serves as a strong example of a scientist being both rigorous and open minded about the question of intelligent alien civilizations in our universe. Quick mention of our sponsors zero fasting app for in a minute fasting element, electrolyte, drink, sun basket meal delivery service and pessimists archive history podcast. So the choice is fasting app, fasting fuel, fast breaking, delicious meals and the history podcast that has very little to do with fasting, choose wisely my friends and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say a bit more about why obvious work is so exciting to me and I think to a lot of people [/INST] in 2000 </s><s>[INST] 17, a strange interstellar object now named um Omar. It's fun to say was detected traveling through our solar system based on the evidence we have. It has strange characteristics which made it not like any asteroid or comment that we've seen before. Avi was one of the only world class scientists who fearlessly suggested that we should be open minded about whether it is naturally made or in fact is an artifact of an intelligent alien civilization. In fact, he suggested that the more likely explanation given the evidence is the latter hypothesis, but we also talked about a lot of fascinating mysteries in our universe, including black holes, dark matter, the big bang and close to speed of light, space travel. The theme throughout is that in scientific pursuits, the weird things, the anomalies, the idea is that right now are considered taboo should not be ignored if we were to have a chance at finding the next big breakthrough, the next big paradigm shift. And also if we are to inspire the world with the power and beauty of science. If you enjoyed this thing, subscribe on Youtube review on apple podcast following Spotify, support on Patreon. I'll connect with me on twitter at lex Friedman. As usual. I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no as in the middle, I try to make these interesting, but I do give you time steps so go ahead and skip if you must but do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is brought to you by zero fasting, the world's most popular fasting app. I think it's probably popular for a good reason since when I use it, I really enjoy using it for all the fastening that I do. This is a trial run with them. So please go to zero fasting dot com slash lex to show your support since given how much I love this app. I hope they signed up to support this podcast for the long term You may know and maybe even have gotten sick of me talking about it, but I fast a lot in a minute fasting for 16, 18, 24 hours every day and I'm thinking of fasting for 72 hours, maybe even more soon. I'll use the app to track my progress and maybe if you sign up we can do it together. I'll post something about it ahead of time on social media and maybe a video explaining different aspects of why fasting has been so beneficial for my life. It's really just been a game changer for even sports because to me, sports require skill and skill requires mental focus and fasting helps with mental focus. Obviously you have to do it right. The app helps with that, especially their premium, whatever it's called. Zero plus service because there's a lot of educational content. So if you do it right, Trust me, it's a game changer. She definitely sign up to their Zero plus, that's what it's called service like I did, which is $70 a year normally. But if you use zero fasting dot com slash lex, you'll get 30% off. So it will be $50. It's packed with a bunch of features for stats, timing educational material and ability to ask questions of people like dr peter Attia who I think I will definitely talk to adventure in this podcast probably sometime soon. So, I think the paid version of this app called zero plus is definitely worth the money. And again, this is the time to sign up if you're going to do it, because it's a great way to support this podcast. Okay, This episode is also brought to you by elements spelled L M N T. This goes along really nicely with a zero fasting app. In that, like I said, my dad has been a low carb one for many years now. Mostly keto. I'm actually currently on carnivore when I do Kiddo. It's 2030 g of carbs a day when it's carnivore. Obviously it's very close to zero carbs a day. The fasting aspect again is 16, hours. I'm thinking of doing more. But really the thing that you learn that there's a few tricks to doing it right. I mean, the same thing that people repeat over and over when you look on reddit or the various blogs is that you should stay hydrated and you get enough electrolytes in your system and that's where element comes in. It's my go to electrolyte drink mix for avoiding any kind of bad feelings. Some people call it the keto flu while on the keto diet or just fasting in general if you are on a low carb diet. I also recommend drinking it before prolonged exercise. I love taking it before long runs for like anything over, I would say five or six miles for 10 plus miles is basically essential for me. Special teams use it. Olympians use it. Tech people use it. I swear by this stuff along with the keto diet, Try it risk free with free shipping. If you don't like it, I'll give you your money back, no questions asked. They're obsessed with good customer service. But I'm pretty sure nobody really complains. Everyone loves their products. So go to drink element dot com spelled L MNT. So drink elementary dot com slash lex. That's D R I N K. I'm pretty sure you know how to spell a drink L M N T dot com forward slash lax. The show is also sponsored by sun basket. They deliver fresh, healthy delicious meals straight to your door as you may know. The whole keto carnivore diet thing is pretty minimalist, It lacks excitement. So sometimes it's nice to add a low carb, fun healthy variety into the mix. And that's where sun basket comes to the rescue for me. They make it easy and convenient with everything proportion and ready to prep and cook. You know, all the nutrition, you know, all the carbs, you know, all the calories, all that kind of stuff. You can enjoy a delicious healthy dinner [/INST] in as little as </s><s>[INST] 15 minutes. This is true. I've enjoyed a lot of meals from their menu that they label as carb conscious. I think they're trying to avoid certain kinds of terminology that is bad for marketing. This is why I hate marketing. It just feels dishonest, but whatever carb conscious it is. Some items on the menu today are black angus rib eye steak with broccoli and radishes, italian sausages and vegetable skewers with two romesco sauce, mediterranean lemon chicken with baby broccoli, artichokes and olives. Okay, right now, Sun basket is offering $35 off your order when you go right now. What about later? No, you should do it now. I guess they insist to some basket dot com slash lex and enter promo code lex at checkout again visit sun basket dot com slash lex and use code lex to get $35 off your order. I'm very proud of myself that I avoided a whole long rant about marketing. If this was Bill Birnes podcast, this would be a 20 minute rant about how much I hate marketing and brands and strategy. Okay, this episode is also supported by an amazing podcast called pessimists archive. They were actually one of the early, if not like the first supporter of this podcast. So it was honestly just an incredible honor that uh one of my favorite podcast would be willing to do this kind of thing. It's a history show about why people resist new things. Each episode looks at a moment in history when something new was introduced something that today we think of as commonplace like recorded music, umbrellas, bicycles, cars, chess, coffee, the elevator and the show explores why it freaked everyone out. It blends philosophy and history in a way that often makes me see the world very differently. After listening to an episode, the latest episode, for example, brilliantly challenges the assumption that technology made us weaker lazier and dumber by looking at a bunch of examples throughout history. That's the fascinating thing about the show is that stuff that happened long ago, especially in terms of our fear of new things, repeats itself in the modern day. And so has many lessons for us to think about in terms of human psychology and the role of tech in our society. Anyway, subscribe and listen to pessimists archive website is pessimists that co look in the description, please to make sure that the spelling is right or just click the link. I highly recommend this podcast and now here's my conversation with Avi Loeb in the introduction to your new book Extraterrestrial, you write this book confronts one of the universe's most profound questions Are we alone over time? This question has been framed in different ways. Is life here on earth, the only life in the universe are humans, The only sentient intelligence in the vastness of space and time. A better, more precise framing of this question would be this throughout the expanse of space and over the lifetime of the universe. Are there now or have ever been other sentient civilizations that like ours, explore the stars and left evidence of their efforts. So let me ask, are we alone? [/INST] That's an excellent question for me. The answer is sort of clear because I start from the principle of modesty. Um you know if we believe that we are alone and special and unique. That shows organs my daughters when they were infants, they tended to think that they are special, unique. And then they went out to the street and realize that other kids are very much like them. And and then they developed a sense of a better perspective about themselves. And I think the only reason that we are still thinking that we are special is because we haven't such well enough to find others that might even be better than us. Uh and you know I say that because I look at the newspaper every morning and I see that we do foolish things were not necessarily the most intelligent ones. And if you think about it, if you open a recipe book, you see that out of the same ingredients, you can make very different cakes depending on how you put them together and how you hit them up. And what is the chance that by taking the soup of chemicals that existed on earth and cooking it? One way to get our life that you've got the best cake possible. I mean we are probably not the sharpest cookie in the jar. And my question is, I mean it's pretty obvious to me that we're probably not alone because half of all the sun like stars we know now as astronomers, half of the Sun, like stars from the capital satellite data have a planet the size of the earth roughly at the same distance that the Earth is from the sun and that means that they can have liquid water on their surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. So if you're all the dice billions of times just within the Milky Way galaxy and then you have tens of billions of Galaxies like it within the observable volume of the universe. It would be extremely arrogant to think that we're special. I would think that we're sort of middle of the road, typical forms of life and that's why the nobody pays attention to us. You know, if you go down the street on the sidewalk and you see an ant, you don't pay attention or special respect to that and you just continue to walk and so I think that we are sort of average not very interesting, not exciting. So nobody cares about us. We tend to think that we are special, but that's a sign of immaturity </s><s>[INST] and we're very early on in our development. [/INST] Yes, that's another thing that we have our technology only for 100 years and it's evolving exponentially right now on a three year timescale. So imagine what would happen in 100 years in 1000 years? In a million years, or in a billion years now the sun is actually relatively late in the star formation history of the universe. Most of the sunlight starts from earlier and some of them already died, you know, became white dwarfs. And so if you imagine that a civilization like ours existed around a typical sunlike star by now, if they survived, they could be a billion years old and then imagine a billionaire technology, it would look like magic to us, you know, an approximation to God, we wouldn't be able to understand it. Uh And so in my view, we should be humble and by the way, we should probably just listen and not speak because there is a risk, right? If if you are inferior, there is a risk, if you speak too loudly uh something bad may happen to you. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned uh we should be humble also in the sense with the analogy to ants that uh they might be better than us. So there's a kind of scale that we're talking about. And in the in the question, you mentioned the word sentient, so sentience, or maybe the more basic formulation is that is consciousness. Do you think um do you think that this thing within us humans, in terms of the typical life form of consciousness is the essential element that permeates other, if there's other alien civilizations out there, that they have something like consciousness as well, Or is this I guess I'm asking can you try to untangle towards sentient? [/INST] Yeah, so that's that's a good question. Uh I think what is most abandoned depending on how long it survives? So if you look at us as an example, we are now, we do have conscious and we do have technology, but the technologies that we're developing are also means for our own destruction, as we can tell, you know, we can change the climate. If we're not careful enough, we can go into nuclear wars. So we are developing means for our own destruction through self inflicted wounds. And it might well be that creatures like us are not long lived, that crocodiles on other planets live for billions of years. They don't destroy themselves. They live naturally. And so if you look around, the most common thing would be dumb animals that live for long times, you know, not those that have conscious but in terms of changing the environment. I think since humans developed tools, they developed the ability to construct technologies that would lift us from this planet that we were born in, and that's something animals without a conscious consciousness cannot really do. And so I, you know, in terms of uh looking for things that are new that went beyond the circumstances they were born into. I would think that even if they are short lived, these are the creatures that made the biggest difference to their environment and we can search for them. You know, even if they are short lived and most of the civilizations are dead by now. Even if that's the </s><s>[INST] case, Sad to think about by the way [/INST] well. But if you look on earth that you know, there are lots of cultures that existed throughout time and they're dead by now, the Mayan culture was very sophisticated died. But we can find evidence for it and learn about it just by archaeology digging into the ground looking and so we can do the same thing in space, Look for dead civilizations and perhaps we can learn a lesson why they died and behave better so that we will not share the same fate. So I think you know there is a lesson to be learned from the sky. And by the way, I should also say if we find the technology that we have not dreamed of, that we can import to earth, that may be a better strategy for making a fortune than going to Silicon Valley or going to Wall Street because you learn, you make a jump start into something of the future. </s><s>[INST] So that's one way to do the leap is actually to find, to literally discover versus come up with the idea in our own limited human capacity like a cognitive capacity. [/INST] It would look like it would feel like cheating in an exam where you look over the shoulder of a student next to you, But </s><s>[INST] it's not good on an exam, but it is good when you're coming up with technology that could change the fabric of human civilization. But there is uh you know in my neck of the woods of artificial intelligence, there's a lot of trajectories one can imagine of creating very powerful beings, the technology that's essentially, you know, you can call super intelligence that could achieve space exploration, all those kinds of things without consciousness, without something that to us, humans looks like consciousness. And there, you know, there is a sad feeling I have that consciousness too in terms of us being humble is the thing we humans take too seriously that it's we think it's special just because we have it, but it could be a thing that's actually holding us back in some kind of way [/INST] will be, it will be, I should say something about ai because I do think it offers a very important step into the future. Uh if you look at the old testament, the bible, there is this story about Knox arc that you might know about. Nora knew about a great flood that is about to endanger or life on earth. So he decided to build an ark and the bible actually talks about specifically what the size of this arc was, what the dimensions were, turns out it was quite similar to you mama, that we will discuss in a few minutes. But at an event, he built this ark and he put animals on it so that they were saved from the great flood. Now you can think about doing the same on earth because there are risks for future catastrophes. You know, we could have the self inflicted wounds that we were talking about like nuclear war changing the climate or there could be an asteroid impacting us just like the dinosaurs died. You know, the dinosaurs didn't have science astronomy, they couldn't have a warning system. But there was this big stone, big rock approach there. It must have been a beautiful sight just when it was approaching, got very big and then smash them okay and kill them. So you could have a catastrophe like that or in a billion years the sun will basically boil off all the oceans on earth. And uh currently all our eggs are in one basket but we can spread them. It's sort of like the printing press. If you think about it, the revolution that Gutenberg brought is there were very few copies of the bible at the time and each of them was precious because it was handwritten. But once the printing press produced multiple copies, you know if something bad happened to one of the copies, it wasn't a catastrophe. You know it wasn't disaster because you have many more copies that. And so if we have copies of life here on earth elsewhere then we avoid the risk of it being eliminated by a single point breakdown catastrophe. So the question is, can we build knocks spaceship that will carry life as we know now. You might think we have to put elephants and whales and birds on a big spaceship. But that's not true because all you need to know is the D. N. A. Making the genetic making of these animals. Put it on a computer system that has a I. Plus three D. Printer so that these cubes at which is rather small, can go with this information to another planet and use the raw materials there to produce synthetic life. And that would be a way of producing copies just like the Gutenberg printing </s><s>[INST] breasts. And it doesn't have to be exact copies of the humans that could just contain some basic elements of life and then have enough life on board that it could uh reproduce the process of evolution on another place. So I mean that also makes you sad of course because you confront the mortality of your own little precious consciousness and all your own memories and knowledge and all that stuff. But who [/INST] cares? I mean, we're not care </s><s>[INST] about mine, right? And you care about [/INST] yours. No, no, I actually don't. You know, if you look at the big if you're an astronomer, one thing that you learn from the universe is to be modest because you are not so significant. I mean, think about it all these emperors and kings that conquer the piece of land on earth and we're extremely proud. You know, you see these images of kings and emperors that you know usually are alpha males And they they stand, you know strong and um they're very proud of themselves. But if you think about it, there are 10 to the part 20 planets like the earth in the observable volume of the universe. And this view of conquering a piece of land and even conquering all of earth is just like an ant hugging a single grain of sand on the landscape of a huge beach. That's not very impressive. So you can't be arrogant if you see the big picture, you have to be humbled. Also we are short lived, you know, we Within 100 years. That's it. Right. So what does it teach you first to be humble, modest? You never have significant powers relative to the big scheme of things. And second you should appreciate every day that you live and and learn about the world, </s><s>[INST] humble and still grateful. Yes, exactly. Well let's uh talk about uh probably the most interesting object I've heard about and also the most fun to pronounce more, more, more more. Can you tell me the story of this object and why maybe an important event in human history and is it possibly a piece of alien technology? [/INST] Right. So this is the first object that was spotted close to earth from outside the solar system And it was found on October 19 2017 and at that time it was receding away from us. Uh, and at first astronomers thought it must be a piece of rock, you know, just like all the asteroids and comets that we have seen from within the solar system. And he just came from another star. I should say that the actual discovery of this object was surprising to me because a decade earlier, I wrote the first paper together with Turner and moral martin that tried to predict whether the same telescope that was serving the sky Pan Starrs from Hawaii would find anything from interstellar space, given what we know about the solar system. So if you assume that other planetary systems have similar abundance of rocks and you just calculate how many should be ejected into interstellar space. The conclusion is no, we shouldn't find anything with Pan starrs. </s><s>[INST] To me, I apologize, probably reviewing my stupidity, but it was surprising to me that so few interstellar objects from outside this whole system have ever been detect [/INST] or none. </s><s>[INST] None has been, You do. Well, maybe Talk about it that there has been uh one or 2 rock since then. [/INST] Well, since then there was one called the Borisov, it was discovered by an amateur Russian astronomer Gennadiy Borisov and that one looked like a comet. Yeah, and just like a comment from within the solar </s><s>[INST] system, but this is a really important point. I'm sorry to interrupt that you show that it's unlikely that Iraq from another solar system would arrive two [/INST] hours. Right? And so the actual detection of this one was surprising by itself to me. Um and but then so at first they thought maybe it's a comet or an asteroid, but then it looked, it didn't look like anything we've seen before. Borisov did look like a comet. So people ask me afterwards and said, you know, doesn't it convince you if Borisov looks like a comet doesn't convince you that ammonia is also natural. And I said, you know, when I went on the first date with my wife, she looked special to me and since then I met many women that didn't change my </s><s>[INST] opinion of my wife, [/INST] You know, that's not an argument anyway, so why did, why did the more and more look weird. Let me explain. So first of all, astronomers money told the amount of light sunlight that it reflects and it was tumbling, spinning every eight hours. And as it was spinning the brightness that we saw from that direction, we couldn't resolve it because it's tiny. It's About 100 m a few 100 ft size of a football field. And we cannot from Earth, we with existing telescopes, we cannot resolve it. The only way to actually get a photograph of it is to send a camera close to it. And that was not possible at the time that Momo was discovered because it was already moving away from us faster than any rocket we can send. It's sort of like a guest that appeared for dinner. And then by the time we realized that it's weird the guest is already out the front door into the dark street. What we would like to find is an object like it approaching us because then you can send the camera irrespective, how fast it moves. And if we were to find it in July 2017, that would have been possible because it was approaching us at that time. Actually I was visiting Mount Haleakala in Maui Hawaii with my family for vacation at that time in July 2017. But nobody knew uh the observatory that mama is very </s><s>[INST] close. It's sad to think about that we had the opportunity at that time. Yes to send up a camera. [/INST] But don't worry, I mean there will be more, there will be more because you know, I I operate by the Copernican principle which says we don't live at a special place and we don't live at a special time. And that means you know if we serve at the sky for a few years and we had sensitivity to this region between us and the sun and we found this object with Pan starrs. You know there should be many more that we will find in the future with surveys that might be even better. And actually in three years time scale that would be the so called L SST that's a survey of the vera Rubin observatory that would be much more sensitive and could potentially find and you move more like object every month. Okay. So I'm just waiting for that. And the main reason for me to alert everyone uh to the unusual properties of puma is with the hope that next time around when we see something as unusual, we would take a photograph or we would get as much evidence as possible because science is based on evidence, not on prejudice. And we will get back to that theme. So anyway, let me let me point out what </s><s>[INST] properties actually, yes, they only get in nature. Alright, [/INST] so uh the light curve, the amount of light sunlight that was reflected from it was changing over eight hours by a factor of 10, meaning that the area of this object, even though we can't resolve it. The area on the sky that reflects sunlight was bigger by a factor of 10 in some phases as it was tumbling around than in other phases. So even if you take a piece of paper that is razor thin, you know, there is a very small likelihood that it's exactly a john Uh and getting a factor of 10 change in the area that you see on the sky is huge. It's much more than any, it means that the object has an unusual geometry. It's at least a factor of a few more than any of the comets or asteroids that we have seen before, </s><s>[INST] you mention reflectivity. So it's not just the geometry, but the properties of the surface of that thing. [/INST] Well, uh if you assume the reflectivity is the same, then it's just geometry. If you assume the reflectivity may change, then it could be a combination of the area that you see and the reflectivity because different directions may reflect differently. But the point is that it's very extreme. Uh and it's actually the best fit to the light curve that we saw was of a flat object. Unlike all the Cartoons that you have seen of a cigar shape, a flat object at the 90% confidence gives a better model for the way that the light varied. And it's like </s><s>[INST] flat meaning like a pancake. Like a pancake. Exactly. [/INST] Uh And so that's the, you know, the very first unusual property. But to me, it was not unusual enough to think that it might be artificial. It was not significant enough then there was no cometary tail, no dust, no gas around this object. And the spitzer space telescope really search very deeply for carbon based molecules. There was nothing. So it's definitely not a comet, the way people expected it to be. </s><s>[INST] Can you maybe briefly mention what properties a comment that you're referring to usually has? [/INST] Right, So a comet is a rock that has some water ice on the surface. So, you can think of it as an icy rock, actually, comets were discovered a long time ago. But uh, the first model, uh, that was developed for them was by fred whipple who was at Harvard. And I think the legend goes that he got the idea from walking through Harvard Square and seeing during a winter day and seeing these icy rocks, You know? And </s><s>[INST] so a comment is I see is I see an asteroid is uh, it's just a rock. [/INST] Yeah. So when you have ice on the surface, when the rock gets close to the sun, the sunlight warms it up and the ice sublimate evaporates. Because the one thing about ice water ice is it doesn't become liquid. If you warm it up in vacuum, you know, without an external pressure, it just goes straight into gas. And that's what you see is the tail of a comet. Uh, the only way to get liquid water is to have an atmosphere like on earth that has an external pressure only then you get liquid. And that's why it's essential to have an atmosphere to a planet in order to have liquid water and the chemistry of life. So if you look at mars, mars lost its atmosphere and therefore no liquid water on the surface anymore. I mean, there may have been early and that's what the perseverance survey, you know, the perseverance mission, we'll try to find out whether it had liquid water whether there was life perhaps on it at the time. But at some point it lost its atmosphere and then the liquid water was gone. So the only reason that we can live on Earth is because of the atmosphere, but a comet is in vacuum pretty much. And then when it gets warmed up on the surface of the water becomes the water, ice becomes gas. And then you see this cometary tail behind it. In addition to water, there is there are all kinds of carbon based molecules or dust that comes off the surface </s><s>[INST] and those [/INST] detectable, it's easy to detect. It's very prominent. You see these cometary tails that look very prominent because they reflect sunlight and you can see them. In fact, it's sometimes difficult to see the nucleus of the comet because it's surrounded and shrouded with and in this case there was no trace of anything. Now, you might say, okay, it's not. So that's what the community said. Okay, it's not a problem. It's still a rock, you know, it's not a comment, but it's just a rock bare rock, you know. Okay, no problem then. And that's the thing that convinced me to write about it. And then in June 2018, you know, significantly later, there was a report that in fact the object exhibited an excess push in addition to the force of gravity, so the sun acts on it by gravity. But then there was an extra push on this object that was figured out from the orbit that you can trace. And the question was, what is this excess push? So for comments, you get the rocket effect when you evaporate gas, you know just like a jet engine on an airplane. You throw a jet engine is very simple. You throw the gas back and it pushes the airplane forward. That's all, that's how it gets. So in a case of a comet, you throw gas in the direction of the sun because it and then you get a push. Okay, So in the case of comments you can get a push but there was no cometary tail. So then people say, oh wait a second. Is it an asteroid? No, but it behaves like a comment but it doesn't look like a comment. So what Well forget about it. Business as usual. So </s><s>[INST] that's what I mean by a non gravitation. Non gravitational acceleration. So that's interesting. So like the primary force acting on something like just a rock, like an asteroid would be like you can predict the trajectory based on the based on gravity. And also here there is detected movement that's not, cannot be accounted people by the gravity. [/INST] If it was a comet, you would need about 1/10 of the mass of this comment. The weight of this comment to be evaporated in order to give it and there was no sign of that. No sign. 10% of the mass evaporating. It's huge. Think about it, 100 m sized object losing 10% of its mass. You can't miss that. And uh that was weird. It's super weird. </s><s>[INST] What is there a good experience? Is that your mind and possible explanations for? You [/INST] know? So I operated just like Sherlock Holmes in a way. I said, ok, what are the possibilities? And the only thing I could think so, I ruled out everything else and I said it must be the sunlight reflected of it. Okay, so the sunlight reflects off the surface and gives it a push just like you get a push on a sail on a boat, you know, from the wind reflecting of it. Now, in order for this to be effective, it turns out the object needs to be extremely thin. Uh it turns out it needs to be less than a millimeter sick nature does not produce such things. So, but we produce it because it's called the technology of a light sail. So we are for space exploration. We are exploring this technology because it has the benefit of not needing to carry the fuel with the spacecraft. So you don't have the fuel. You just have a uh you just have a sale and it's being pushed either by sunlight or by a laser beam or whatever. Uh so perhaps this is the lightsaber. </s><s>[INST] So this is actually the same technology with the star shot project. [/INST] Yes. So, you </s><s>[INST] know, people [/INST] afterwards say, okay, you work on this project. You imagine that, you know, obviously obviously my imagination is limited by what I know. So I, you know, I would not deny that, You know, working on light sales expanded my ability to imagine this possibility. But let me offer another interesting anecdote in September this year 2020, I mean 2020. Um, there was another object found and it was given the name 2020 S. Oh, by the minor planets center. You know, this is an organization actually in Cambridge massachusetts, that gives names to objects, astronomical objects found in the solar system and they gave it that name 2020 S. So, because, you know, it looked like an object in the solar system and it moved in an orbit that is similar to the orbit of the Earth, but not the same exactly. And therefore it was bound to the sun, but it also exhibited Deviation from what you expect based on gravity. So, the astronomers that found it extrapolated back in time and found that in 1966 it intercepted the Earth and then they realized they went to the history books and they realized, oh, there was a mission called the lunar surveyor, lunar lander, surveyor two that had a rocket booster. It was a failed mission. But uh, there was a rocket booster that was kicked into space and presumably this is the rocket booster that we're seeing. Now this rocket booster was sufficiently hollow and thin for us to recognize that is pushed by satellite. So here is my point. We can tell from the orbit of an object. Obviously this object didn't have any commentary tail. It was artificially made. We know that it was made by us and it did deviate from an orbit of Iraq. So just by seeing something that doesn't have cometary tail and deviates from an orbit shaped by gravity. We can tell that it's artificial. In the case of a mua mua, it couldn't have been sent by humans because it just passed near us for a few months. We know exactly what we were doing in those that at that time and also it was moving faster than any object that we can launch. And so obviously it came from outside the solar system. And the question is, who produced it? Now. I should say that when I walk on vacation on the beach, I often see natural objects like sea shells that are beautiful and I look at them And um, and every now and then I stumble on a plastic bottle and that was artificially produced. And my point is that maybe, oh Momoa was a message in a bottle and we should see this is simply another window into searching for artifacts from other civilizations. </s><s>[INST] Where do you think it could have come from? And if it's so okay from a scientific perspective, the narrow minded view probably talk about throughout is, you know, you kind of want to stick to the things that to naturally originating objects like asteroids and comments. Okay, that's the space of possible hypotheses. And then if we expand beyond that, you start to think, okay, these are artificially constructed. Like you just said, it could be by humans, it could be by uh by whatever that means by some kind of extraterrestrial alien civilizations. If if it's the alien civilization variety, what is this object, then that's [/INST] an excellent question. And let me lay out, I mean, we don't have enough evidence to tell if we had a photograph. Perhaps we would have more information. But the possible There is one other peculiar fact about Ammonia. Uh well, other than it was very shiny that I didn't mention uh you know, we didn't detect any heat from it and that implies that it's rather small and shiny. But the other peculiar fact is that it was it came from a very special frame of reference. So it's sort of like finding a car in a parking lot in a public parking lot that you know, you can't really tell where it came from. Uh so there is this frame of reference where you average over the motions of all the stars in the neighborhood of the sun. So, um you find the so called local standard of rest of the galaxy. And that's a frame of reference that is obtained by averaging the random motions of all the stars and the sun is moving relative to that frame at some speed. But this object was addressed in that frame and only one in 500 stars is so much addressed in that frame. And that's why I was saying it's like a parking. It was parked there and we bumped into it. So the relative speed between the solar system and this object is just because we are moving. It was sitting still. Now you ask yourself why is it so unusual in that context? You know why? Because if it was expelled from another planetary system, most likely it will carry the speed of the host star that it came from. Because it was, you know, the most loosely bound objects are in the periphery of the planetary system and they move very slowly relative to the star and so they carry when they are ripped apart from the planetary system. Most of the objects will have the residual motion of the star relative to the local stuff. But this one was addressed in the locals. Now, One thing I can think of if if there is a grid of road posts, you know, like for navigation system so that you can find your way in the local frame, then that would be 1%. </s><s>[INST] These are like little sensors of that's fascinating to think about. So there could be, I mean, not necessarily literally agreed, but just uh evenly in some definition of evenly spread out set of objects like these that are just out there [/INST] a lot of them. Another possibility is that these are relay stations, you know that for communication you might think in order to communicate you need a huge beak on a very powerful beacon. But it's not true even on earth, you know, we have these relay stations so you have and not so powerful beacon, so it can be heard only how to a limited distance, but then you relay the message and it could be one of those now after it collided with the solar system, of course it got a kick. So it's just like a billiard ball. You know, we gave it a kick by colliding with, but most of them are not colliding with stars. And so that's one possibility. Okay, and there should be no more lots of them if that's the case. Um the other possibility is that it's a probe, you know, that was sent uh in the direction of the habitable region around the sun to find out if there is life now it takes tens of thousands of years for such a probe to traverse the solar system from the outer edge of the old cloud all the way to where we are. And, you know, it's a long journey. So when it started the journey from the edge of the solar system to get to us. Now, you know, we were rather primitive back then. You know we we still didn't have any technology. There was no reason to visit. You know there was grass around and so forth. But you know maybe it is a problem. Uh </s><s>[INST] So you said 10,000 years as fast. So it takes that [/INST] Long, 10s of thousands, </s><s>[INST] yes, tens of thousands of [/INST] years. Yeah. And the other thing I should say is you know it could be just and an outer layer of something else like you know something that was ripped apart like a surface of an instrument that was and you can have lots of these pieces, you know something breaks lots of these pieces spread out like space junk and you know that it could be just </s><s>[INST] space junk from an extra from an alien civilization. Yes. So I [/INST] can tell you about space junk. Let me, what do you mean </s><s>[INST] by space junk. [/INST] So um, I think you know, you might ask why aren't they looking for us. One possibility is that we are not interesting. Like we were talking </s><s>[INST] about [/INST] another possibility. You know, if there are millions of or billions of years uh into their technological development, they created their own, their own habitats, their own cocoon where they feel comfortable, they have everything they need and it's risky for them to establish communication with other uh so they have their own cocoon and they close off, they don't care about anything else. Now. In that case you might say, oh so how can we find about them? If they are closed off. The answer is they still have to deposit trash, right? That that is something from the law of thermodynamics, there must be some production of trash and you know, we can still find about them just like investigative journalists going through the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood. You know, you can learn about the private lives of those celebrities by looking </s><s>[INST] at. It's fascinating to think, you know, if if we're the ants in this picture, if we, if this thing is a water bottle or if it's like a smartphone, like where where on the spectrum of possible objects of space because there's a lot of interesting [/INST] trash, </s><s>[INST] like how interesting is this trash? [/INST] But imagine a caveman seeing a cell phone. The caveman would think since the caveman played with rocks all of his life, he would say it's a rock, just like my fellow astronomers said, Yes, </s><s>[INST] right. Exactly. That's brilliantly put actually as a scientist, do you hope it's a water bottle or smartphone? Because [/INST] I hope it's even more than a smartphone. I hope that it's something that is really sophisticated and yeah, </s><s>[INST] see I'm the opposite, I feel like I hope it's a water bottle because at least we have a hope with our current set of skills to understand it. Caveman has no way of understanding the smartphone, it's like it will be like, I feel like a caveman has more to learn from the plastic water bottle than they do from the smartphone [/INST] but supposedly figure it out. If we if we for example come close to it and and learn what it's made of and I </s><s>[INST] guess the smartphone is full of like thousands of different technologies that we could probably pick at. Do you have a sense of where hypothesis of where is the cocoon that it might have come from? [/INST] No because uh Okay so first of all, you know the solar system, the outermost edge of the solar system is called the old cloud. It's a cloud of I see rocks um of different sizes that were left over from the formation of the solar system and it's thought to be roughly a ball or sphere and it's halfway the extent of it is roughly halfway to the nearest star. Okay, so you can imagine each planetary system basically touching the old clouds of those stars that are near us are touching each other. Space is full of these billiard balls that are very densely packed. And what that means is any object that you see irrespective whether it came from the local standards. So we said that this object is special because it came from a local standard of fresh. But even if it didn't you would never be able to trace where it came from because all these old clouds overlap. So if you take some direction in the sky, you will cross as many stars as you have in that direction, like there is no way to tell which all clouded came from. </s><s>[INST] So yes, I did. I didn't realize how densely packed everything was. Uh from the perspective of the war cloud, that's really interesting. So yeah, it could be, it could be nearby, could be very far [/INST] away. We have no clue. You </s><s>[INST] said cocoon and you kind of [/INST] uh </s><s>[INST] paint I think in the book I've read a lot of your articles to on the scientific american, which are brilliant. So I'm kind of mixing things up in my head a little bit. But there's uh what does that cocoon look like? What does the civilization that's able to harness the power of multiple sons for example. Um look like they give when you imagine possible civilizations that are a million years more advanced than us. What do you think that actually like looks like? [/INST] I think it's very different than we can imagine. Uh By the way, I should start from the point that even biological life, you know, just without technology getting into the game uh could look like something we've never seen before. A take for example, the nearest star which is proxima centauri it's foreign quarter light years away. So they will know about the results of the 2016 elections only next month in February 2021. Um it's very far away. Um but if you think about it um you know this this uh star is a dwarf star and it's much cooler than it's twice as cold as the sun. Ok and it emits mostly infrared radiation. So if there are any creatures on the planet close to it that is habitable. Which is called Proxima B. There is a planet in the habitable zone in the zone just at the right distance, were in principle liquid water can be on the surface. Uh If there are any animals there they have infrared eyes because our eyes was designed to be sensitive to where most of the sunlight is in the visible range. But Proxima centauri um it's mostly infrared. So you know the nearest to see each other in the nearest star system, these animals would be quite strange. They would have eyes that are detectors of infrared, very different from ours. Moreover, this planet Proxima B faces the star always with the same side. So it has a permanent day side and a permanent night side. And obviously the creatures that would evolve on the permanent day side which is much warmer would be quite different than those on the permanent night side between them. There would be a permanent sunset strip and my daughters said that that's the best opportunity for high value real estate because you will see the sunset throughout your life right if the sun never sets on this on this trip. So you know these worlds are out of our imagination, </s><s>[INST] even the individual creatures, the sensor suite that they're operating with might be very different, [/INST] very different. So I think when we see something like that, we would be shocked not to speak about seeing technology now. So I don't even dare to imagine, you know, uh, and I think, you know, obviously we can bury our head in the sand and say it's never aliens. Like many of my colleagues say, and it's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you, if you never look, you'll never find, if you're not ready to find wonderful things, you will never discover them. And the other thing I would like to say is reality doesn't care whether you ignore it or not, You can ignore reality, but it's still there. So we can all agree based on twitter that aliens don't exist. That um, um, I was a rock. We can all agree and you will get a lot of likes. We'll have a big crowd of supporters and everyone will be happy and give each other awards and honors and so forth. But you might still be in a Leonardo, who cares what humans agree on. There is a reality out there and we have to be modest enough to recognize that we should make our statements based on evidence. Science is not about ourselves. It's not about glorifying our image, It's not about getting horner's prizes. You know, a lot of the scientific, a lot of the academic activity is geared towards creating your echo chamber where you have students postdocs repeating your mantras so that your voice is heard loudly so that you can get more homeowners surprises recognition That's not the purpose of science. The purpose is to figure out what nature is right. And in the process of doing that, it's a learning experience. You make mistakes. You know, Einstein made three mistakes at the end of his career. He argued that in the 1930s, he argued that black holes don't exist, gravitational waves don't exist and quantum mechanics doesn't have spooky action at a distance and all three turned out to be wrong. Okay, So the point is that if you work at the frontier of then you make mistakes, it's inevitable because you can tell what is true or not. And avoiding making mistakes in order to preserve your image, makes you extremely boring. Okay, You will get a price, but you will be a boring scientists because you will keep repeating things. We already know If you want to make progress. If you want to innovate, you have to take risks and you have to look at the evidence. It's a dialogue with nature. You don't know the truth in advance. You let nature tell you educate you and then you realize that what you thought before is incorrect and a lot of my colleagues prefer to be in a state where they have a monologue. You know, if you look at these people that work on string theory, uh, they have a monologue, they know what And in fact they're monologue is centered on anti sitter space, which we don't live in. Now. You know, it's to me it's just like the Olympics. You know, you you define a 100 m and you say whoever runs this 100 m is the best athlete, the fastest. You know, and it's completely arbitrary. You could have decided it would be 50 m or 20 m. Who cares? You just measure the ability of people this way. So you define anti de sitter space as a space where you do your mathematical gymnastics and then you find who can do it the best and you give jobs based on that. You give prices based. But as we said before, you know, nature doesn't care about, you know, the prices that you give to each other. It cares, you know, it has its own reality and we should figure it out and it's not about us. The scientific activity is about figuring out nature. And sometimes we may be wrong. Our image will not be preserved. But it's that's the fun. You know, I kids explore the world out of curiosity. And I always want to maintain my childhood curiosity and I don't care about the labels that I have. In fact having tenure is is exactly the opportunity to behave like a child because you can make mistakes. And I was asked by the Harvard gazette, you know, the new, the pravda of Harvard, uh what what is the one thing that you would like to change about the world? And I said I would like my colleagues to behave more like kids. That's the one thing I would like them to do because something bad happens to these kids when they become tenured professors, they start to worry about their ego and about themselves more than about the purpose of science, which is curiosity driven, figuring out from evidence. Evidence is the key. So when an object shows anomalies like um um what what's the problem discussing? You know, whether it's artificial or not, you know? So there was, I should tell there was a mainstream paper in nature published saying it must be natural. That's it. It's unusual, but it must be natural period. And then at the same time that those means some other mainstream scientists try to explain the properties and they came up with interpretations like it's a dust bunny, you know, the kind that you find in a household, a collection of dust particles pushed by sunlight, something we've never seen before or it's a hydrogen iceberg. It actually evaporates like a comment, but hydrogen is transparent. You don't see it and that's why we don't see the commentary again. We have never seen something like that in both cases, the objects would not survive the long journey? We discussed it in a paper that I wrote afterwards, but my point is those that try to explain the unusual properties went into great length at discussing things that we have never seen before. Okay, so even when you think about the natural origin, you have to come up with scenarios that of things that were never seen before. Uh and by the way, they look less plausible to me personally. But my point is, if we discuss things that were never seen before, right, why not discuss, why not contemplate an artificial origin? What's the problem? Why do people have this push back? You know, I worked on on dark matter and we don't know what most of the matter in the universe is. It's called Dark Method. It's just an acronym because we have no clue. We simply don't know. So it could be all kinds of particles. And over the years people suggested weakly interacting massive particles, actions, all kinds of particles. And experiments were made. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They put upper limits constraints that ruled out many of the possibilities that were proposed as natural. Initially, the mainstream community regarded it as a mainstream activity. To search the nature of the dark matter. And nobody complained that it's speculative to consider weakly interacting massive particles. Now, I ask you, why is it speculative to consider extraterrestrial technologies? We have a proof that it exists here on earth. We also know that the conditions of earth are reproduced in billions of systems throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. So what's more conservative than to say if you arrange for similar conditions, you get the same outcome. How can you imagine this to be special? It's not speculative at all. And nevertheless it's regarded the periphery and at the same time, you have physicists, theoretical physicist working on extra dimensions. Supersymmetry, Superstring theory, the multiverse. Maybe we live in a simulation, all of these ideas that have no grounding in reality. Some of which sound to me like, you know, just like what someone would say uh </s><s>[INST] satisfaction basically [/INST] because you have no way to test it. Uh you know, through experiments and experiments really are key. It's not just the nuance. You say, okay, forget about experiment, as some philosophers try to say, You know, if there is a consensus, what's the problem? The point is. It's key then that's what Galileo. It's key to have feedback from reality. You know, you can think that you have a billion dollars or that you are more rich than you know, Elon musk. That's fine. You can feel very happy about it. You can talk about it with your friends and all of you will be happy and think about what you can do with the money. Then you go to an ATM machine and you make an experiment, you check how much money you have in your checking account and if it turns out that you know, you don't have much, you can you can materialize your dreams. Okay, So you realize you have a reality check. And my point is without experiments giving you a reality check without the ATM machine showing you whether your ideas are bankrupt or not without putting skin in the game and by skin in the game, I mean don't just talk about theoretical ideas, make them testable. If you don't make them testable, they're worthless. Just like theology. That is not testable by the way, theology has some tests. Let me give you. That's interesting. three examples. Um, it turns out that my book already inspired a PhD student at Harvard in the english department to pursue a PhD in that direction. And she invited me to the PhD exam a couple of months ago. And in the exam, one of the examiners, a professor asked her, do you know why Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and she said no, I think it's because he was an obnoxious guy and irritated a lot of people, which is true. But the professor said no, it's because Giordano Bruno said that other stars are just like the sun and they could have a planet like the earth around them that could host life. And that was offensive to the church, why was it offensive? Because there is the possibility that this life seemed okay and if that life Sind on planets around other stars, it should have been saved by christ and then you need multiple copies of christ and that's unacceptable. How can you have duplicates of christ? And so they burned the guy. It was </s><s>[INST] about that. Okay, I'm just like loading this all in because that's kind of brilliant. So he was actually already and it's not just about the stars. It's anticipating that there could be other life forms. Like why if the star if there's other stars, why would it be special? Why would our star be special? [/INST] He was making the right argument </s><s>[INST] and he would just follow that along to say like there should be other earthlike places, there should be other [/INST] like life and then </s><s>[INST] that copies of christ. [/INST] Yeah, so that was offensive. So I said I said to that, I said to that Professor, I said great. You know, I wanted to introduce some scientific tone to the discussion and I said this is great because now you basically laid the foundation for an experimental test of this theology. What is the test? We now know that other stars are like the sun and we know they have planets like the earth around them. So suppose we find life there and we figure out that they sinned. Then we asked them did you witness christ? And if they say no, it means that this this theology is ruled out. So there is an experimental test. So this experimental test number one another experimental test, you know, uh in the bible, you know in the old testament Abraham uh was heard the Voice, The Voice of God to sacrifice his son, right? Only son. And that's what the story says. Now, suppose Abraham my name by the way, had a voice memo up on his cell phone. He could have pressed this up and recorded the Voice of God. And that would have been experimental evidence that God exists, right? Unfortunately, he didn't. But it's an experimental test, right? There is a third example I should tell. And that is Elie Weisel attributed this story to martin bugger, but it's not clear whether it's true or not at an event. The story goes that martin bugger, you know, he was a philosopher. And he said, you know, the christians argue that jesus, the messiah arrived already and we'll come back again in the future? The jews argue, the messiah never came and we'll arrive in the future. So, he said, why argue? Both sides agree that the messiah will arrive in the future when the messiah arrives. We can ask whether he or she came before, you know, like visited us and then figure it out and one side. So again, experimental test of a theology. So even theology, if it puts skin in the game, you know, if it makes a prediction could be tested, right? Uh So why can't string theories, test themselves or why can't, you know, even cosmic inflation, that's another model that, you know, one of the inventors from MIT Allen argues that it's not for certifiable uh are my point is a theory that cannot be falsified is not helpful because it means that you can't make progress, you cannot improve your understanding of nature. The only way for us to learn about nature is by making hypothesis that are testable, doing the experiments and learning whether we are correct or not. </s><s>[INST] So B and couple that with curiosity and open mindedness that allows us to explore all kinds of possible hypothesis. But always the pursuit of those, the scientific rigor around those hypothesis is ultimately get evidence. [/INST] Knowledge is of of what nature is should be a dialogue with nature rather than a mono monologue, </s><s>[INST] beautifully put. Can we talk a little bit about the drake equation, Another framework from which to have this kind of discussion about possible civilizations out there. So let me ask within the context of the drake equation, or maybe bigger, how many alien civilizations do you think are out there? [/INST] Well, it's hard to tell because the drake equation is again quantifying our ignorance. It just a set of factors. The only one that we know are actually two that we know quite well is the rate of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy which we measured by now and the frequency of planets like the earth around stars and at the right distance to have life. But other than that there are lots of implicit assumptions about all the other factors that will enable us to detect the signal. Now, I should say the drake equation has a very limited validity just for signals from civilizations that are transmitting at the time that you're observing them. However, we can do much better than that. We can look for artifacts that they left behind, even even if they are dead, you can look for industrial pollution in the atmospheres of planets. Why do I bring this up Again to show you the conservatism of the mainstream in astronomy and by the way, I shouldn't, you know, I have leadership positions. I was chair of the Astronomy Department for nine years, the longest serving chair at Harvard, and I'm the chair of the Board on Physics and astronomy of the national Academies. You know, it's a primary board um and you know, I'm director of two centers at Harvard and so forth. So I I do represent the community in in various ways, but at the same time, you know, I'm a little bit disappointed by the conservatism that people have. And so let me give you an illustration of that. So the astronomy community actually, it's going right now through the process of defining its goals for the next decade. And there are proposals for telescopes that would cost billions of dollars and whose goal is to find evidence for oxygen in the atmosphere of planets around other stars with the idea that this would be a marker, a signature of life. Now, the problem with that is Earth didn't have much oxygen in its atmosphere for the first two billion years roughly, half, you know, half of its life it didn't have much oxygen, but it had life. It had microbial life. It's not, it's not clear yet as of yet what the origin is for the rise in the oxygen level after two billion years, about 2.4 billion years ago. But we know that a planet can have life without oxygen in the atmosphere because Earth did it. The second problem with this approach is that you can have oxygen from natural processes, you can break water molecules and make oxygen. So even if you find it, it will never tell you that for sure life exists there. And so even with these billions of dollars, the mainstream community will never be confident uh whether there is life now, how can it be confident? There is actually a way if instead of looking with the same instruments, if you look for molecules that indicate industrial pollution, for example, CFCs, you know, that are produced by refrigerating systems or industries here on earth that they do the ozone layer. You know, you can search for that and I wrote a paper five years ago suggesting that. Now, what's the problem? You can just tell Nasa, I want to build this telescope to search for oxygen, but also for industrial pollution. Nobody would say that because it sounds like, you know on the periphery of the field. And I ask you why </s><s>[INST] hilarious because that's exactly, I mean be saying is quite brilliant. I mean, uh because there's a really strong signal and if life, if there's alien civilizations out there, then they're probably going to be many of them and they're probably going to be more advanced than us and they're probably going to have something like industrial pollution, which would be a much stronger signal than some basic gas, which could have a lot of different explanations. So like something like oxygen or I mean, I don't, you know, uh we could talk about signs of life on venus and so on, but like if you want a strong signal, it'll be police, how garbage is. [/INST] No, but the position you have to understand, we think of pollution is a problem, but on a planet that was too cold for example, to have a comfortable life on it, you can imagine terra forming it and putting a blanket of polluting gasses such that it will be warmer and that would be a positive change. So if an industrial or technological civilization wants to terra form a planet that otherwise is to call for them, they will do it. So what's the problem of defining it as a search goal? Using the same technologies? The problem is that there is a taboo, we're not supposed to discuss extraterrestrial intelligence, there is no funding for this subject, Not much, very little and young people because of the bullying on twitter, you know, all the social media and elsewhere young people with talent that are curious about this, these questions do not enter this field of study. And obviously if you step on the grass it will never grow right? So if you don't give funding, obviously, you know, the mainstream community says look, nothing was discovered so far, obviously nothing would be discovered if talented people go to other this never you never search for it well enough, you will never find anything. I mean look at gravitational wave astrophysics, it's completely new window into the universe pioneered by Ray Wise at MIT And at first it was ridiculed and thanks to some administrators at the National Science Foundation, it received funding despite the fact that the mainstream of the astronomy community was very resistant. Yes to it. And now it's considered a frontier. So all these people that I remember as opposed to a young post. These people that dash these feelings, said bad things about people, you know, said nothing will come out of it. Now they say, oh yeah, of course, you know, the Nobel prize was given to the, you know, to the lack of collaboration. Uh of course now they're they're they're supportive of it. But my point is if if you suppress innovation early on, there are lots of missed opportunities. The discovery of exoplanets is one example, you know, in 1952 there was an astronomer called name them Otto Struve and he wrote a paper saying, why don't we search for jupiter like planets close to their host star because if they're close enough they would move the star back and forth and we can detect the signal. Yes, Ok. And so Astronomers on time allocation committees of telescopes for 40 years argued this is not possible because we know why jupiter resides so far from the sun, you cannot have jupiter so close because there is this region where ice forms far from the sun and beyond that region is where jupiter like planets can form. That there was a theory behind it which ended up being wrong by now by today's standards. But anyway, they did not give time on telescopes to search for such systems until the first system was discovered four decades after Otto Struve is paper. And the Nobel prize was awarded to that just a couple of years ago. And you ask yourself, okay, so, you know, signs still made progress. What's the problem? The problem is that this baby came out barely, you know, and and and there was a delay of four decades. So the progress was delayed and I wonder how many babies were not born because of this resistance. So there must be ideas that are as good as this one that were suppressed because they were bullied because people ridicule them that were actually good ideas and these are missed opportunities, babies that were never born And you know, I'm willing to push this frontier of the search for technologies or technological signatures of other civilizations because you know, when I was young I was in the military in Israel, it's obligatory to serve. And there was this saying that you know, one of the soldiers sometimes has to put his body on the barbed wire so that others can go through and I'm willing to suffer the pain so that, you know, younger people in the future will be able to speak freely about the possibility that some of the anomalies we find in the sky are due to technological </s><s>[INST] signatures. And it's quite obvious this is why I like, like folks in the artificial intelligence space, you know, a mosque and a few others speak about this and they look at the long arc, they say like what, you know, this kind of, you know, you can call it like first principles thinking or you can call anything, it really is like if we just zoom off from our current bickering and our current like discussions and the what science is doing and look at the long arc of the trajectory we're headed at which questions are obviously fundamental to science and that should be asked and which is the space of hypothesis we should be exploring and like exoplanets is really good example of one that was like an obvious one. I recently talked to Sara Seager and it was very taboo when she was starting out to work on an exoplanet and that was even in the nineties and uh like it's obvious should not be a taboo subject. And to me I mean I'm probably ignorant but to me, exoplanet seems like it's ridiculous that that would ever be a taboo subject. Uh to not fund to not explore. That's very but even for her it's now taboo to say like what you know, to to look for industrial pollution, right? It's [/INST] like I find that ridiculous. I tell you why </s><s>[INST] you take the next step. [/INST] It's ridiculous for another reason, not because of just the scientific benefits that we might have by exploring it, but because the public cares about these questions and the public funds science. So how they're the scientists shy away from addressing these questions if they have the technology to do it. It's like saying I don't want to look through Galileo's telescope. It's exactly the same. You have the technology to explore this question to find evidence and you shy away from it. You might ask why do people shy away from it? And perhaps it's because of the fact that there is science fiction. I'm not a fan of science fiction because it has an element to it that violates the laws of physics in many of the books and and and the films and I cannot enjoy the these things when I see the laws of physics violated. But who cares that you know the fact that there is science fiction. If you have the scientific methodology to address the same subject, I don't care that other people, you know, spoke nonsense about this subject or said things that make no sense. Who cares? You do your scientific work just like you explore the dark matter, you explore the possibility that a mua mua is an artifact. You just look for evidence and try to deduce what it means. Um, and I have no problem with doing that. To me. It sounds like any other scientific question that we have and given the public's interest, we have an obligation to do that. By the way, science. To me, it's not an occupation of the elite. It doesn't allow me to feel superior to other humans that are unable to understand the math. To me, it's a, it's a way of life. You know, if if there is a problem in the faucet or in the pipe at home, I try to figure out what the problem is and with a plumber, we figure it out and, you know, we look at the clues and the same thing in science. You know, you look at the evidence, we try to figure out what it means. It's common sense in a way and it shouldn't be regarded as something removed from the public. It should be a reflection of the public's interest. And I think it's actually a crime to resist the public. If the public says I care about this, and you say no, no, no, that's not sophisticated enough for me. I want to do intellectual gymnastics on anti de sitter space. To me. That's a crime. </s><s>[INST] Yes, 100% agree. So it's hilarious. That's a very not hilarious. It's said that people who are trained in the scientific community to have the tools to explore this world to be Children, to be the most effective of being Children are the ones that resists being Children the most. But there is a large number of people that embrace the childlike wonder about the world and may not necessarily have the tools to do it. That's the more general public. And so, you know, and I wonder if I could ask you and talk to you a little bit about, you know, UFO sightings, that there's people, you know, quote unquote believers, you know, there's hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings and, you know, I've I've, you know, uh consumed some of the things that people have said about it. And uh one thing I really like about it is how excited they are by the possibility by it's almost like this childlike wonder about the world out there. They're not, it's not a fear, it's an excitement, do you think, because we're talking about uh this extra possibly extraterrestrial object that visited that flew by earth, do you think it's possible that out of those hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, one is an actual one or some number is an actual sighting of a non human, some alien technology and that we're not uh we did not, we're too close minded to uh to look and to see. [/INST] I think to answer this question, we need better evidence. Um My starting point, as I said out of modesty is that we are not particularly interesting and therefore I would agree, I would be hard pressed to imagine that someone wants to really spy on us. Uh So I would think as a starting point that we don't deserve attention and we shouldn't expect someone. But who knows now the problem that I have with you a false sighting reports is That you know, 50 years ago there were some reports of Fuzzy images, you know, saucer like things. Ah By now our technologies are much better. Our cameras are much more sensitive. These fuzzy images should have turned into crisp clear images of things that we are confident about and they haven't turned that way. It's always on the borderline of believability and because of that, I believe that it might be most likely artifacts of our instruments or some natural phenomena that we are unable to understand. Now of course the reason you need you must examine those if for example pilots report about them or the military finds evidence for them is because it may pose a national security threat. If another country has technologies that we don't know about and they're spying on us, we need to know about it and therefore we should examine everything that looks unusual. But to associated with an alien Life is a little too far for me. Until we have evidence that stands up to the level of scientific credence, you know, that that we are 100% sure that, you know, from multiple detectors and you know, through a scientific process. Now again, if the scientific community shows away from these reports, we will never have that. It's like saying, I don't want to take photographs of something because I know what it is, then you will never know what it is. But I think if some scientist grants, let's put it this way. If funding will be given to scientists to follow on some of these reports and use scientific instruments that are capable of detecting those sightings with much better resolution with much better information. That would be great because it will clarify the matter. These are not as you said, you know, hundreds of thousands. These are not once in a lifetime events. So it's possible to take scientific instrumentation and explore, go to the ocean. What the, you know, someone reported that there are frequent events that are unusual and check it out. Do a scientific experiment. What's the problem, why not? Why only do experiments deep into the ocean and look at the ocean oceanography or do other things. You know, we can do scientific investigation of these sightings and figure out what what they mean. I'm very much in favor of that. But until we have the evidence, I would be doubtful as to what they actually mean. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, we have to be humble and uh and acknowledge that we're not that interesting. It's kind of you're you're making me realize that because it's so taboo that the people that have the equipment uh meaning and we're not just talking, everybody has cameras now but to have a large scale like uh sensor network that collects data regularly collects just like we look at the weather, we're collecting information and then we can then X. That information when there is reports and like have it not be a taboo thing where there's like millions or billions of dollars funding this effort that by the way inspires millions of people. This is exactly what you're talking about is like is a scientific community is afraid of a topic that inspires millions of people. It's absurd. [/INST] But if you put blinders on your eyes you don't see it right? I should say that we do have meters that we see these are rocks that by chance happen to collide with the earth and they if they are small, they burn up in the atmosphere. But if they're big enough tens of meters or more hundreds of meters the outer layer burns up. But then the core of the object makes it through. And this is our chance of putting our hands around an object if this meteor came from Interstellar space. So one path of discovery is to search for interstellar Meteors. And with a student of mine, we actually looked through the record and we thought that we found one example of a meteor that was reported that might have come from Interstellar space. And another approach is for example, to look at the moon, the moon is different from the earth in the sense that he doesn't have an atmosphere. So objects do not burn up on their way to it. It's sort of like a museum. It collects everything that </s><s>[INST] rocks from out there and [/INST] there is no geological activity on the moon. So on Earth every 100 million years, you know, we could have had computer terminals on earth that could have been a civilization like ours with electronic equipment more than 100 million years ago and it's completely lost. You cannot excavate and find it evidence for it because in archaeological digs because the earth is being mixed on these time scales and everything that was on the surface more than 100 million years ago is very deep inside the earth right now because of geological activity </s><s>[INST] by the way. [/INST] But on the moon, this doesn't happen. The only thing that happens when the moon is you have objects impacting the moon and they go 10m deep so they produce some dust. But the moon keeps everything, it's like a museum. It keeps everything on the surface. So if we go to the moon, I would highly recommend regarding it as an archaeological site and looking for objects that are strange. Maybe it collected some trash, you know, from Interstellar space. If </s><s>[INST] we could just linger on the drake equation for a little bit, we kind of talked about there's a lot of uncertainty in the parameters and are and in the direct equation itself is very limited. But I think the parameters are interesting in themselves, even if it's limited because I think each one is within the reach of science. Right. Did you get the evidence for? Uh I mean a few. I find really interesting. Be interested to get your comment on. Uh So the one with the most variants I would say from my perspective is the length that civilizations last. However you define it in the drake equation is the length of how long you're communicating just like transmitting. Just like you said that that might Well that's a wrong way to think about it because we can be detecting some other outputs of the civilizations except but just if you would just defined broadly, how long those civilizations last? Do you have a sense of how long that might last? Like what, what are the great filters that might destroy civilizations that we should be thinking about what uh is and what, how can science give us more hints on this topic. [/INST] So I as I mentioned before, operate by the Copernican principle, meaning that, you know, we are not special. We don't live in a special place and not in a special time. And by the way, it's just modesty encapsulated in scientific terms, right? You're saying I'm not special. You know, I find conditions here. They exist everywhere. So if you adopt the Copernican principle, you basically say our civilization transmitted radio signals for 100 years roughly. So probably it would last another 100 or a few 100. And that's it because we don't live at a special time. So that's, you know, well of course if we get our act together and we somehow start to cooperate rather than fighting each other, killing each other. You know, wasting a lot of resources on things that would destroy our planet. Maybe we can lengthen that period if we get smarter. But that the most natural assumption is to say that we would live into the future as much as we lived from the time that we start to develop the means for our own destruction. The technologies we have, which is quite pessimistic, I must say. So several centuries, that's what I would give. Not unless we get our act unless we become more intelligent than the newspapers report every day. Okay. Point number one second. And by the way this is relevant, I should say because there was a report about uh perhaps a radio signal detected from Proxima centauri. What do you make of that signal? So, I think it's some Australian guy with a cell phone next to the observatory or something like that because uh, it was the Parkes telescope in </s><s>[INST] Australia. So it's not human created noise. [/INST] Yeah. Which is always the worry because actually the same observatory, the Parkes Observatory uh detected a couple of years ago, some signal and then they realized that it comes back at lunch lunchtime and they said, okay, what could it be? And then they figured out that it must be the microwave open in the observatory because someone was opening it before it finished and it was creating this radio signal that they detected with the telescope every lunchtime. Uh So just a cautionary remark. But the reason I think it's human made without getting to the technical details is because of this very short window by which we were transmitting radio signals out of the lifetime of the earth. You know, As I said, 100 years out of 4.5 billion years that the earth existed. So what's the chance that another civilization between civilization of ours is transmitting radio signals exactly the time that we are looking with our radio telescopes 10 to the -7. You know, so, and the other, the other argument I have that is, is that they detected it in a very narrow band of frequencies. And that makes it, and not, it cannot be through natural processes, very narrow band. Just like some radio transmissions that we produce. Um but if it were to come from the habitable zone, from a transmitter on the surface of Proxima B, this is the planet that orbits Proxima centauri. Then I calculated that the frequency would drift through the Doppler effect. Just like when you hear a siren on the street, you know, when the car approaches you, it has a different pitch than when it goes receives away from you. That's the Doppler effect. And when the planet orbits the star Proxima centauri, you would see or detect a different frequency when the planet approaches us as compared to when it receives. So there should be a frequency drift just because of the motion of the planet. And I calculated that it must be much bigger than than observed. So it cannot just be a transmitter sitting on the planet and sending in our direction a radio single unless they want to cancel the Doppler effect, but then they need to know about us because in a different direction, it will not be canceled only in our direction. They can cancel it perfectly. So there is this direction of Proxima centauri. But I have a problem imagining a transmitter on the surface of a planet in the habitable zone meeting. Uh but my main issue is really with the likelihood given what we know about ourselves </s><s>[INST] right in terms of the duration of the civil Copernican principle. Uh so nevertheless this particular signal is likely to be a human interference or perhaps, but uh do you find a Proxima B interesting or the more general question is, do you think we humans will venture out into outside our solar system and potentially colonize other habitable [/INST] planets? Actually, I am involved in a project whose goal is to develop the technology that would allow us to leave the solar system and visit the nearest stars and that is called the star shot. Uh in 2015, May 2015, an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, Yuri, Milner, came to my office at Harvard and said, would you be interested in leading a project that would do that in our lifetime because as we discussed before to traverse those distances, you know, with existing rockets would take tens of thousands of years and you know, that's too long. You know, for example, to get to Proxima centauri with the kind of spacecrafts that we already sent like new horizons or Voyager one, Voyager two, You need, you you needed to send them when the first humans left Africa, so that they would arrive there now and you know, that that's a long time to wait. So you already wanted to do it within our lifetime, 10, 20 years meaning it has to move at a fraction of the speed of light. So can we send a spacecraft that would be moving at a fraction of the speed of light And I said, let me look into that for six months. Um, and with my students and postdocs, we arrived to the conclusion that the only technology that can do that is the Lightsail technology where he explained, you basically produce a very powerful laser beam on earth. So you can collect sunlight with photovoltaic cells or whatever and then convert it into uh, stall the energy and then produce a very powerful laser beam that is 100 gigawatt uh, and focus it on a sale in space. That is roughly the size of a person, a couple of meters or a few meters that weighs only a gram or a few grams. Very thin. And through the math, you can show that you can propel such a sale. If you shine on it for a few minutes, it will traverse the distance that is five times the distance to the moon and it will get to 1/5 of the speed of light. </s><s>[INST] Sounds crazy, but I've talked to a bunch of people and they're like, I know it sounds crazy but it's actually it will [/INST] work. This is </s><s>[INST] one of those is beautiful. I mean this is, this is science. [/INST] And the point is, people didn't get excited about space since the Polo uh, era and it's about time for us to go into space. A couple of months ago, I was asked to participate in a debate organized by IBM and Bloomberg news. And the discussion centered on the question is the space race between the us and china good for humanity and all the other debaters. We're worried about the military threats, and I just couldn't understand what they're talking about because military threats come from hovering above the surface of the earth, right? And we live on a two dimensional surface. We live on the surface of the Earth. But space is all about the third dimension getting far from Erika. So if you go to mars or you go to a star, another star, there is no military threat. What are we talking about? Space is all about? You know, feeling that, you know, we are one civilization in fact not fighting each other, just going far and having aspirations for something that goes beyond military threats. So why would we be worried that the space race will lead? </s><s>[INST] That's actually brilliant. I didn't, you know, there's something that's in our discourse about it. The space race is sometimes made synonymous with like the Cold War, something like that, or with wars. But really, yeah, there was a lot of ego tied up in that, I remember, I mean, it's still still to this day, there's a lot of pride that Russians soviet Union was the first to space and there's a lot of pride in the american side. That was the first on the moon. But yeah, you're exactly right, like there's no aggression, there's [/INST] no wars and and beyond that. If you think about the global economy right now, uh there is a commercial interest. That's why Jeff Bezos and Elon musk are interested about, you know, mars and so there is a commercial interest which is international. It's not, it's driven by money, not by by pride. And you know, nations can sign treaties. First of all, there are lots of treaties that were signed even before the First World War and the Second World War and the World War took place. So who cares? You know, like humans treaties do not safeguard anything, you know, But beyond that, even if nations signed treaties about space exploration, you might still find commercial entities that will find a way to get their launches and you know, so I think we should rethink space. It has nothing to do with national pride. Once again, nothing to do with our egos. It's about exploration. And the biggest problem I think to human in human history is that is that humans tend to think about egos and about their their own personal image rather than look at the big picture, you know, we will not be around for long. We are just occupying a small space right now, let's move out of this. You know the way that Oscar Wilde said, I think is the best he said, all of us are in the gutters, but some of us are looking at the stars. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, and the more of us are looking at the stars, the likelier where are to uh to for this thing for this little experiment we have going on to last last a while as opposed to end too quickly. I mean it's not just about science of being humble, it's it's about the survival of the human species is being, is being humble to me, it's incredibly inspiring the star shot project of, I mean there's something magical about being able to go to another habitable planet and take a picture even, I mean within our lifetime, I mean that that uh with crazy technology to which [/INST] I can't tell you how it was conceived. So um I was at the time, so after six months passed after the visit of your miller uh I was usually I go in december during the winter break, I go to Israel um I I used to go to see my family and uh I get a phone call um just before the weekend started they get a phone call uh yuri would like you to present your concept um in two weeks at his home and I said well thank you for letting me know because I'm actually out of the door of the hotel to go to a gold farm in the Negev in the southern part of Israel because my wife wanted to have sort of uh to go to a place that is removed from civilization, so to speak. So we went to that gold farm and I need to make the presentation and there was no internet connectivity except in the office of the Gold Farm. So The following morning at six a.m. I sit with my back to the office of that gold farm looking at goats that were newly born and typing into my laptop, the presentation, you know, the PowerPoint presentation about you know, our ambitions for visiting the nearest star. And that was very surreal to me that you know uh like </s><s>[INST] our origins in many ways this very primitive origins and our dreams exactly looking out that it's really, so that is incredibly inspiring to me, [/INST] but it's also </s><s>[INST] inspiring of putting humans on to other uh moons or planets. I still find going to the moon really exciting. I don't know, maybe I'm just a sucker for it, but it's really exciting and mars which is a new place, a new planet, another planet that might have life. I mean there's something magical to that or some traces of previous life, [/INST] you might think that humans cannot really survive. And and there are risks by going there. But my point is, you know, we started from africa and we got two apartment buildings in Manhattan, right? It's a very different environment from the jungles to live in an apartment building in, you know, a small cubicle. Um and you know, it took tens of thousands of years but humans adapted. Right, so why couldn't humans also make the lip and adapt to a habitat in space? You know that now you can build a platform that would look like an apartment building in the Bronx or somewhere but have inside of it everything that humans need and it's just like the space station but bigger and it will be a platform in space. And the advantage of that is if something bad happens on earth, you have that complex where humans live and you can also move it back and forth depending on how bright the sun gets because you know, within within a billion years, within a billion years the sun would be too hot and it will boil off all the oceans on earth. So we cannot stay here for more than a billion years. That's for sure. </s><s>[INST] So that's a billion years from now. Uh I prefer like shorter term deadlines and so and and that's I mean there's a lot of threats that we're facing currently. Do you find exciting the possibility of uh you know, uh landing on MARS and starting little like building a Manhattan style apartment building on MArs and and humans occupying it, do you think from a scientific and engineering perspective that's uh that's a worthy [/INST] pursuit? I think it's worthy. But the real issue that is often under plate is the risk to the human body from cosmic race. These are energetic particles and we are protected from them by the magnetic field around the earth that blocks them. But if you go to MArs where there is no such magnetic field to block them, then a significant fraction of the brain cells in your head will be damaged within a year. And the consequences of that are not clear. I mean </s><s>[INST] uh [/INST] it's quite possible that humans cannot really survive on the surface now. It may mean that we need to dig tunnels, go underground or create some protection. Uh this is something that can be engineered uh and you know, we can start from the moon and then move to mars that would be a natural progression. But it's a big issue that needs to be dealt with. I don't think, you know, it's a showstopper I think we can overcome it. But you know, just like anything in science and technology, you have to work on it for a while figure out solutions and but it's not as rosy as Elon musk talks. I mean, you know, mass can obviously be optimistic. I think eventually it will boil down to figuring out how to cope with this risk. The health risk. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, uh in defense of optimism, I I find that there's at least a correlation if not their best friends is optimism and open mindedness is a yeah, it's unnecessary, it's preconditioned to to to do to try crazy things and in that sense, the uh the sense I have about going to mars if we use today's logic of what kind of benefits will get from that we're never going to go. Uh, and my most decisions we make in life? Most decisions were made as a human species are irrational. If you just, if you look at just today, but if you look at the long arc and the possibilities that it might bring, just like humans, uh look to europe and europe and by the way it was destroyed everybody. [/INST] And but it was a commercial interest that drove that for trade. And you know, it might happen again in this context. You have people like Jeff Bezos and Elon musk that are commercially driven to go to space, but it doesn't mean that what we will ultimately find its not new worlds, you know, that have nothing, you know, must have much more to offer than just commercial interests. And uh, as a side effect almost. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I think, you know, we should be open minded and explore and however at the same time, because of the reasons you pointed out, I'm not optimistic that we will survive more than a few centuries into the future because people do not think long term and that means that we will only survived for the short term. </s><s>[INST] I don't know if you have thoughts about this, but what are the things that were you the most about uh, from the great perspective of the universe, which is the great filters that destroys intelligent civilizations. But for our own species here, uh like what are the things that worry the most? [/INST] The thing that worries me the most is that people pay attention to how many likes they have on twitter. And uh rather than, you know, basketball coaches tell the team players keep your eyes on the ball, not on the audience. The problem is we keep our eyes on the audience most of the time. Let's keep our eyes on the ball. And what does that mean? First of all, in context of science, it means pay attention to the evidence when the evidence looks strange, then we should figure it out. You know, I went to a seminar about you Momoa at Harvard and uh a colleague of mine that is a mainstream conservative. I would never say anything that would deviate from what everyone else is thinking. Said to me after the seminar, I wish this object never existed now to me. I mean, I just couldn't hear that. What do you mean? Nature is whatever it is, you have to pay attention to it. You cannot say you cannot bury your head in this. I mean, you should bless nature for giving you clues about things that you haven't expected. And I think that's the biggest fault that we are looking for confirmations of things we already know so that we can maintain our pride that we already knew it and maintain our image not make mistakes because we already knew it. Therefore we expected the right thing. But science is a learning experience and sometimes you're wrong. And let's learn from those mistakes. And what's the problem about that? Why is why do we have to get prizes? And why do we get to be cornered and maintain our image when the actual objective of science is learning about nature? </s><s>[INST] And you've talked about anomalies in this case are actually are not things that are unfortunate and to be ignored are in fact gifts and should be the focus of side. [/INST] Exactly, Because that's the way for us to improve our understanding. If you look at quantum mechanics, nobody dreamed about it and it was revolutionary and we still don't fully understand it, it's a pain for us to figure out. So </s><s>[INST] why do so I understand from the perspective that's holding our science back. Why do you have a sense that that's also something that might be a problem for us in terms of the survival of human civilization. [/INST] Because when you look at society, it operates by the same principles for there is uh people look for affirmation by groups and they uh you know, people segregate into herds that think like them, especially these days when social media is so strong, you can find your support group and if you don't look for evidence for what you're saying, you can say crazy things, as long as there are enough people supporting what you say, you can even have your newspapers, you can have everything to support your view. And then, you know, bad things will happen to society </s><s>[INST] because we're detaching ourselves from reality. And uh if we detach ourselves from reality, all the destructive things that actually can occur in the real world, whether from nuclear weapons, all the kinds of threats that we're facing, even we're living through a pandemic. The uh suppose, you know, much, much worse pandemic could happen. And then we could sadly, like we did this one, politicizing some kind of way and have bickering in the space of twitter and politics as opposed to there's an actual thing that can destroy the human [/INST] species. So the only way for us to maintain two to stay modest and learn about what really happens is by looking for evidence. Again, I'm saying it's not about ourselves, you know, it's about figuring out what's around us. And if you close yourself by surrounding yourself with people that are like minded that refuse to look at the evidence, you can do bad things uh, and throughout human history, that's the origin of all the bad things that happen. And I think it's a key, it's a cay to be modest and to look at evidence and it's not a nuance. Now, you might say, oh, okay, the uneducated person might operate. No, it's the scientific community operates this way. My problem is not with people that don't have an academic pedigree includes everywhere in society </s><s>[INST] on the topic of, uh like discovery of evidence, surveillance civilizations, which is something you touch on your book. What that idea would do to societies, to the human psyche. And in general, do you think? And you talk about the uh, I still have trouble pronouncing, but a more and more wager, right? What what do you think is, can you explain it? And what do you think in general is the effect that such knowledge might have on human civilization? [/INST] Right? So pascal had this wager about God, and by the way, there are interesting connections between theology and the search for extraterrestrial life. You know, it's possible that, you know, we were planted on this planet by another civilization that, you know, we attribute to God powers that are, that belong really to technological civilization. But putting that aside, uh, pascal basically said, you know, let's the two possibilities either God exists or not, right? And if God exists, you know, the consequences are quite significant. And therefore, you know, we should we should consider that possibility differently, Then equal weight to both possibilities. And I suggest that we do the same with ammonia or other technological signatures that we keep in mind the consequences and therefore pay more attention to that possibility. Now, some people say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. My point is that the term extraordinary is really subjective, you know, for one person, a black hole is extraordinary for another. You know, it's just a consequence of Einstein's theory of gravity. It's nothing extraordinary. Uh the same about the type of dark method or anything. So we should leave the extraordinary part of that sentence. Just keep evidence. Okay, so let's be guided by evidence. And even even if we have extraordinary claims, you know, let's not dismiss them because the evidence is not extraordinary enough, because if we have an image of something and it looks really strange and we say, oh, the image is not sufficiently sharp, therefore we should not even pay attention to this image or not even consider. I think that's a mistake. What we should do is say, look, there is some evidence for something unusual. Let's try and build instruments that will give us a better image. Uh and if you just dismiss extraordinary claims because the you consider them extraordinary. You avoid discovering things that you haven't expected. And so I believe that along the history of astronomy there are many missed opportunities and I speak about astronomy, but I'm sure in other fields it's also true. I mean, this is my expertise. For example, you know, the Astrophysical Journal, which is the main primary publication Industrial physics. Uh if you go, you go beyond before the 19 eighties, there are images that were posted Industrial Physical Journal of giant arcs, you know, arcs of light surrounding clusters of Galaxies and, You know, you can find it in printed versions of the Astrophysical Journal? People just ignore. They put the image they see the are they say, who knows what it is and just ignore it. And then in the 1980s, the subject of gravitational lensing became popular and the idea is that you can deflect light by the force of gravity And then you can put the source behind the cluster of Galaxies and then you will get these arcs. And actually Einstein predicted it uh in 1940. And you know, so these things were expected, but people just had them in the images didn't pay attention. So I'm sure there are lost opportunities. Sometimes even in existing data, you have things that are unusual and exceptional and are not being addressed. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, you actually, I think you have article uh the data is not enough from, from quite a few years ago with where you talk with, you know, we can go back to the 70s and 80s, but we can go also to the Mayan civilization. [/INST] Right. The Mayan civilization basically believed in astrology. That you can forecast the outcome of the war based on the position of the planets. And and they had, you know, astronomers in their culture had the highest social status. They were priests, they were elevated. And the reason was that they helped politicians decide when to go to war because they would tell the politicians, you know, the planets would be in this configuration. It's a better chance for you to win the war, go to war. And in retrospect, they, you know, they collected wonderful data but misinterpreted it because we now know that the position of venus or jupiter or whatever has nothing to do with the outcome of World War One, where you know, has nothing to do and uh so we can have a prejudice and collect data without actually doing the right thing with it. </s><s>[INST] That's such a pisces thing to say. I looked up what your astrological sign is. Uh So you mentioned, Einstein predicted that black holes don't exist or just or [/INST] exist in nature, don't don't when Einstein came up with this theory of gravity in 1915, november 1915, a few months later, another physicist, Karl Schwarz child, he was the director of the potsdam Observatory, but he was a patriot of german patriot. So he went into the First World War fighting for Germany. But while he was at the front, he sent a postcard to Einstein saying, you know, a few months after the theory was developed saying actually I found a solution to your equations and that was a black hole solution. And then he died a few months later and Einstein was a pacifist And he survived. So the lesson from the stories that if you want to work out the consequences of a theory, you better be a pacifist. But but the point is that uh this solution was known shortly after Einstein came up with his theory. But in but in 1939, Einstein wrote a paper in the analysis of mathematics, saying even though the solution exists, I don't think it's realized in nature. And his argument was if you imagine a star collapsing, stars often spin and the spin will prevent them from making a black hole collapsing to a point. </s><s>[INST] So, I mean, can you maybe one of the many things you uh you have work on your expert, and as black holes, can you first say, what are black holes? And second, how do we know that they exist? [/INST] Right? So black holes are the ultimate prison, you know, you can check in, but you can never met uh even light cannot escape from them. So there are extreme structures of space and time, and there is this so called war child uh radius, or or the event horizon of a black hole. Once you enter into it with a spaceship, you would never be able to tweet back to your friends and tell them, By the way. I asked the students in my class freshman seminar at Harvard, they said, let me give you two possible journeys that you can take. I said suppose aliens come to Earth, and I suggest that you would board their spaceship, would you do it? Um And the second is supposed you could board a spaceship that will take you into a black hole, would you do it? So, all of them said the first question, yes, under one condition that I'll be able to maintain my social media contacts and report back, share the experience with them. I couldn't personally, I have no footprint on social </s><s>[INST] media, which is as a matter of principle. [/INST] Yeah. My wife asked me when we got married and I Hunter that I told </s><s>[INST] you offline, I need to get married to such, such a woman. She truly is especially [/INST] well, she she was wise enough to recognize the risk, but it saves me time and it also keeps me away from crowds. You know, I don't have the the notion of what a lot of other people think. So I can think independently. Yeah, exactly. But putting so I was surprised to hear that for students, it's extremely important to share experiences even if they go on a spaceship with aliens, they still want to brag about it rather than look around and see what's going on. You </s><s>[INST] know, it's not an option when you go to the black holes. Exactly. [/INST] So for the black holes, they said no, because obviously you can find your death after you get into it. You can rush in the singularity, there is this singularity in the center. So inside the event horizon we know that all the matter collects at the point now, we can't really predict what happens at the singularity because Einstein's theory breaks down and we know why it breaks down because it doesn't have quantum mechanics that talks about small distances. We don't have a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity so that it will predict what happens near a singularity. And in fact, you know, I once a couple of years ago I had a flood in my basement. I mean uh I invited the plumber to come over and figure out and we found that the sewer was clogged because of three routes that got into it. And we solved the problem. But then I thought to myself, well, isn't that what happens to the singularity of a black hole? Because the question is, where does the matter go? You know if you know in the case of home, I never thought about it, but the water, all the water that we use goes in through the store to some reservoir somewhere. And the question is what happens inside a black hole? And one possibility is that there is an object in the middle, just like a star and everything collects there. And the object has the maximum density. That we can imagine, like plank densities is the ultimate density. That you can have um where gravity is the strongest, all the other forces. Um So you can imagine this object very dense object at the center that collects all the matter. Another possibility is that there is some tunnel just like this were it takes the matter into another place. Um And we don't know the answer where, but I wrote a scientific american essay about it and uh admitting our ignorance. It's a fascinating question, what happens to the method that goes into a black hole? I actually recommended to some of my colleagues that work on string theory. At the closing of a conference. I'm the founding director of the Black hole initiative at Harvard, which brings together astronomers, physicists, philosophers and mathematicians. And we have a conference once a year and at the end of one of them, since I'm the director, I had to summarize and I said that I wish we could go on a field trip to a black hole nearby. And I highly recommend to my colleagues that work on string theory to enter into that black hole because then they can test their theory when they get inside. But one of the string theories in the audience know, Marconi Hamed immediately raised his voice and said, you have an ulterior motive for sending us into a black hole uh which I didn't deny, but at an event uh </s><s>[INST] yeah, that's true, that's true. Can you say why we know that black holes exist? [/INST] Right? So, um it's an interesting question because black holes were considered a theoretical construct Uh and Einstein even deny their existence in 1939, But then um in the 19 in the mid 1960s uh quasars were discovered. These are very bright sources of light 100 times brighter than their host galaxy, which are point like at the center of Galaxies. And it was immediately suggested by Edsall Peter in the west and by Yakov Zelda Vich in the East uh that these are black holes that accrete gas collect gas from their host Galaxies that are being fed with gas. And they shine very brightly because as the gas false towards the black holes, just like water, you know, running down the sink, uh the gas swears and then rubs against itself and heats up and shines very brightly because it's very hot close to the black hole by viscous by viscosity. It it heats up and in the case of black holes is the turbulence, the turbulence viscosity that causes it to heat up. So we get these very bright sources of light just from black holes that are supposed to be dark, nothing escapes from them. But they create a violent environment where gas moves close to the speed of flat light and therefore shines very brightly, much more than any other source in the sky. And we can see this quiz us all the way to the edge of the universe. So we have evidence now that when the universe was, you know, about 7% of its present age, you know, infant already back then you had black holes of a billion times the mass of the sun, which is quite remarkable. It's like finding giant babies in a nursery. You know, like how can these black holes grow so fast, you know, less than a billion years after the Big Bang, you already have a billion times the mass of the sun in these black holes. And the answer is presumably they're very quick processes that build them up. </s><s>[INST] They built quickly [/INST] very quickly. And so we see those black holes and that was found in the mid 1960s. But In 19 in story in 2015, exactly 100 years after Einstein came up with his theory of gravity, the lick Observatory detected gravitational waves and these are just ripples in space and time. So according to Einstein's theory, the the innovation, the ingenuity of Einstein's theory of gravity That was formulated in November 1915 was to say that space and time are not rigid. You know, they are, they respond to matter. So for example if you have two black holes and they collide, it's just like a stone being thrown into this on the surface of a pond. They generate waves, disturbances in space and time that propagate out at the speed of light. These are gravitational waves, they create a space time storm around them and then the waves go all the way through the universe and reach us. And if you have a sensitive enough detector like ligo, you can detect these waves and so it was not just the message that we received for the first time gravitational waves, but it was the messenger. So there are two aspects to it. One is the messenger which is gravitation wave for the first time were detected directly. And the second was the message, which was a coalition of two black holes. Because we could see the pattern of the ripples in space and time. And it was fully consistent with the prediction that swatch it made for how a black the spacetime around the black hole is because when two black holes collide, you can sort of map from the message that you get, you can reconstruct what, what really happened and it's fully consistent. </s><s>[INST] And in 2017 and 2020 there's two Nobel prizes, right? Uh that had to do with the black holes. Can you maybe describe the same masterful way that you've already been doing? Uh what those Nobel prizes were given for? [/INST] Yeah, so the 2017 was given for the Ligo collaboration for discovering gravitation waves from collisions of black holes. And the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics Was given for uh two things, one was theoretical work that was done by Roger Penrose in the 1960s demonstrating that black holes are inevitable when stars collapse. And it was mostly mathematical work. And actually Stephen Hawking also contributed significantly to that frontier and unfortunately he is not alive, so he could not be honored. So Penrose received it on his own. Um and then the two other astronomers received it as well under a guess and Reinhard Denzel and they provided conclusive evidence that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy That weighs about four million times the mass of the Sun. And they found the evidence from the motion of stars very close to the black hole, just like we see the planets moving around the sun. There are stars close to the center of the galaxy and they are orbiting at very high speeds of other thousands of kilometers per second or thousands of miles per second per second. Think about it uh which can only be induced at those distances if there is four million solar mass object that is extremely compact. And the only thing that is compatible with the constraints is a black hole. And Uh, they actually made a movie of the motion of these stars around the center. One of them moves around the center over a decade, you know, 16 overtimes case that we can monitor. And it was a breakthrough in a way. Um, so combining lego with the detection of a black hole at the center of the Milky Way and and in many other Galaxies like quasars. Uh, you know, now I would say uh black hole research is vogue, you know, it's, it's very much in fashion. You know, we saw it back in 2016 when we established the black hole </s><s>[INST] initiative, you kind of saw that there's this excitement about in and breakthroughs and discoveries around black holes which are probably one of the most fascinating objects in the universe. I mean it's up there. Uh they're both terrifying and beautiful, right? Just and they capture the entirety of the physics that we know about this universe. [/INST] I should say the you know, the question is, where is the nearest black hole? Can we visit it? And uh you know, I wrote a paper with my undergraduate student Amir Siraj suggesting that perhaps there could be, if there is one in the solar system, we can detect it because I don't know if you heard, but there is a claim that maybe there is a planet nine in the solar system um because we see some anomalies in the outer parts of the solar system. So some people suggested maybe there is a planet out there that was not yet detected. So people search for it didn't find it. It weighs roughly five times the mass of the earth. And we said, okay, maybe you can't find it because it's a black hole that was from early in the universe. </s><s>[INST] Is that So where do you stand? [/INST] It could be that the dark matter is made of black holes of this mass. You know, we don't know what the dark matter is made of. You could it could be the black holes. So we said, but there is an experimental way to test it and the way to do it is because uh is there is the old cloud of icy rocks in the outer solar system. And if you imagine a black hole there every now and then, Iraq will pass close enough to the black hole to be disrupted by the very strong gravity close to the black hole. And that would produce a flare that you can observe. And we calculated how frequently these flares should occur. And with LSD on the vera Rubin Observatory, we found that you can actually test this hypothesis. And if you don't see flares, Then you can put limits on the existence of a black hole in the solar system. It would be extremely exciting if there was a black hole. If planet nine was a black hole because we could visit it, you know, and we can examine it. Um and it will not be a matter of you know, an object that is very removed from us. Another thing I should say is it's possible that the black hole affected life on earth, ah the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, how you know that black hole right now is dormant, It's very faint, but we know that it flares when a star like the sun comes close to it. The star will be spaghetti fied basically become a stream of gas, like a spaghetti and then the gas would fall into the black hole and there would be a flare and this process happens once every 10,000 years or so. So we expect that you know, these flares to occur every 10,000 years, but we also see evidence for the possibility that gas clouds were disrupted by the black hole because the stars that are close to the black hole are residing in a single or two planes. And the only way you can get that is if they formed out of a disk of gas, just like the planets in the solar system formed. So there is evidence that gas fell into the black hole and powered possibly a flare. And these flares produce x rays and ultraviolet radiation that could damage life. If the earth was close enough to the center of the galaxy where we are right now, it's not very risky for us, but there is a theoretical argument that says the solar system, the sun was closer to the galactic center early on and then it migrated outwards. So maybe maybe in the early stage of the solar system. The conditions, you know, we're affected shaped by these flares of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. And that's why for the first two billion years there wasn't any oxygen in the atmosphere, you know, who knows? But um it's just interesting to think that, you know, from a theoretical concept that Einstein resisted in 1939 it may well be that, you know, black holes have influence on our life and that, you know, it's just like discovering that some uh stranger affected your family and in a way your life, and if that happens to be the case a second Nobel prize should be given, not not for just the discovery of this black hole at the center of the galaxy, but perhaps for the Nobel prize in Chemistry, for the </s><s>[INST] effect that it had a contract for the for the interplay that resulted in some kind of uh yeah, so yeah, the chemical effect by biology, I mean, all those kinds of things in terms of uh the emergence of uh life and the creation of a habitable environment. That's so fascinating. And of course, like you said, dark matter, like black holes have some, [/INST] it could be the dark matter in principle. Yes, uh we don't know what the dark matter is at the moment, </s><s>[INST] does it make you sad? So you've had an interaction and perhaps a bit of a friendship with Stephen Hawking, does it make you sad that he didn't win the Nobel? [/INST] Well, altogether, I don't assign great importance surprises, because as you said, you know, jean paul Sartre, who I admired as a teenager, because I was interested in philosophy when I grew up on a farm in Israel, you know, I used to collect eggs every afternoon and I would drive the tractor to the hills of our village and just think about philosophy, read philosophy books, and jean paul Sartre was one of my favorite, and he was honored with the Nobel prize in literature, he was a philosopher, primarily existentialist, and he said the hell with it, why should they give um special attention to this committee of people that get their self importance from awarding me the price? Like what what's, you know, why, why does that merit my attention? So, he he gave up on the Nobel prize and, you know, that two benefits to that one, that you don't you're not working your entire life in the direction that would satisfy the will of other people. You know, you work independently, you're not after these homeowners, just for the same reason that you're if you're not living your life for making a profit or money, you can live a more fulfilling life because you're not being swayed by the wind, you know, how to make money and so forth. The second aspect of it is, you know, that very often, um you know, these prices, um they they distort the way we do science, because instead of people willing to take risks and instead of having announcements only after a group of people converges with a definite result. You know, uh, the natural progression of science is based on trial and error, you know, reporting some results and perhaps they're wrong, but then other people find perhaps better evidence and then you figure out what's going on, and that's the natural way that science is, you know, it's a learning experience? So if you give the public an image by which scientists are always right, you know, and and you know, some of my colleagues say we must do that because otherwise the public will never believe us that global warming is really taking place. But that's not true because the public will really believe you. If you show the evidence. So the point is you should be sincere when the evidence is not absolutely clear all where there are disputes about the interpretation of the evidence, we should show us, you know, the king is naked, okay. There is no point in pretending that the king is dressed, saying that scientists are always right. Scientists are wrong frequently. And the only way to make progress is by evidence giving us the support that we need to make airtight argument. So when you say global warming is taking place, if the evidence is fully supportive, if there are no holes in the argument, then people will be convinced because you're not trying to fool them when the evidence was not completely also showed them that the evidence is not </s><s>[INST] complete and when there's holes, you show that there's holes and here's the methodology we're using to try to close those holes. [/INST] Exactly. Let's be sincere. Why pretend so? If they were not in a world where there were there were no prices, no homeowners, we would act like kids, as they said before, we would really be focusing on the ball and not on the audience. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, the prize is getting away and that's so powerful. Do you think in some sense, the few people have turned down the prize made a much more powerful statement. I don't know if you're familiar in the in the in the space of mathematics with the fields medal and google Pearlman turned down the prize is uh so he I've committed. One of the reasons I started this podcast is I I'm going to definitely talk to Putin, I'm definitely talking to problem and people keep telling me it's impossible. I love hearing that because I'll talk to both anyway. But do you have us? Do you have a sense of why he turned down the prize? And is that a powerful statement to you? [/INST] Well, what I read is that you're talking about the mathematicians, mathematicians. What I read is that he was disappointed by the response of the community, the mainstream community mathematicians to his earlier work where they dismissed it. They didn't attend to the details and didn't treat him with proper respect because he was not considered one of them. And I think that speaks volumes about the current scientific culture which is based on groupthink and on social uh interaction rather than on the merit of the argument and on the evidence in the context of physics. So, in mathematics there is no empirical basis. You're exploring ideas that are logically consistent, but nevertheless, there is this group think and uh I think he was so frustrated with his past experience that he didn't even bother to publish his papers, he just posted them on the archive. And um, in a way saying, you know, I know what the answer is, Go look at it. </s><s>[INST] And then again, in the long arc of history, his work on archive will be remembered and all the prizes, most of the prizes will be forgotten. This, but people don't kind of think about is when you look at Roger Penrose, for example, is another fascinating figure, uh, you know, it's possible, and I forgive me if it's, I'm sure my ignorance, but he's also did some work on consciousness. He's been one of the only people who spoke about consciousness, which for the longest time, and is still arguably outside of the realm of the sciences, it's still seen as a taboo subject. And, and he was brave enough to explore it uh, from a physics perspective from just a philosophical perspective, but like with the rigor, like proposing different kind of hypotheses of how consciousness might be able to emerge in the brain. And it's possible that that is the thing he's remembered for, if you look 100 years from now, right? As as opposed to the work of the black holes, which fits into the kind of, asked, like the fits into what the current scientific community uh, allows to be the space of what is and isn't science. [/INST] Yeah, it's really interesting to look at people that are innovators where in some phases of their career, their ideas fit into the social structure that is around them, but in other phases it doesn't and when you look at them, they just operated the same way throughout and it says more about their environment than about them. </s><s>[INST] Well, yeah, I don't know if you know who max tag Mark is just recently talked to him. I just recently talked him again and he uh I mean he was a little bit more explicit about saying, you know, being aware, which is something I also recommend is like being aware where the scientific community stands and doing enough to get like move along into your career in your career and it's the necessary evil. I suppose if you're one of those out of the box thinkers, they just naturally have this childlike curiosity, which max definitely is one of them is sometimes you have to do some stuff that fits in your published and you get 10 years all those things, [/INST] but the tenure is a great privilege because it allows you to in principle explore things that are not accepted by others. And unfortunately it's not being taken advantage of by most people and it's a waste of very precious resource. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, absolutely. Um the space that you kind of touched on that's full of theories and is perhaps detached from appreciation of empirical evidence or longing for empirical evidence are grounding and empirical evidence is uh the theoretical physics community and the interest in uh unifying the laws of physics and with the theory of everything. Mhm. I'm not sure from which direction to approach this question, but how far away are we from arriving in a theory of everything do you think? And how [/INST] would we, how </s><s>[INST] important is it to try to arrive at it uh at this kind of goal of this beautiful simple theory that unlocks the very, you know, fundamental basis of our nature as we know it. And um you know, uh and how what are the kinds of approaches we need to take to get there. [/INST] Yeah. So in physics, the biggest challenge is to unify quantum mechanics with gravity. And I believe that once we have experimental evidence for how this happens in nature um in systems that have quantum mechanical effects, but also gravity is important. Then the theory will fall into our lap. Okay, But the mistake that is made by the community right now is to come up with the right theory from scratch. Uh and you know, Einstein gave the illusion that you can just sit in your office and and understand nature, you know, when he came up with his general theory of relativity. But you know, first of all perhaps he was lucky, but it's not a rule. The rule is that you need evidence to guide you, especially when dealing with quantum mechanics which is really not intuitive. And so there are two places where the two theories meet. One is black holes and there is a puzzle there, it's called the information paradox. In principle. You can throw the encyclopedia Britannica into a black hole. It's a lot of information uh and then it will be gone because the black hole carries only three uh properties or qualities the mass, the charge and the spin according to Einstein. But then when Hawking tried to bring in quantum mechanics to the game, he realized that black holes have a temperature and they radiate. This is called Hawking radiation. And it was sort of anticipated by Jacob Benkenstein before him. And Hawking wanted to prove Benkenstein wrong and then figured this out. Um and so what it means is black holes eventually evaporate and they evaporate into radiation. That doesn't carry this information according to Hawking's calculation. And then the question is according to quantum mechanics, information must be preserved. So where did the information go if a black hole is gone? And where is the information that was encoded in the encyclopedia when it went into the black hole? And to that question, we don't have an answer yet. It's one of those puzzles about black holes and it touches on the interplay between quantum mechanics and gravity. Another important question is what happened at the beginning of the universe, what happened before the Big Bang. And by the way on that, I should say, you know, there are some conjectures. Uh it's in principle, if we figure it out, if we have a theory of quantum gravity, it's possible to imagine that we will figure out how to create a universe in the laboratory by irritating the vacuum, You might create a baby universe. And if we do that, it will offer a solution to what happened before the big Bank. Perhaps the big Bank emerged from the laboratory of another civilization. So it's like a baby universes are being born out of laboratories and inside the baby universe, you have a civilization that brings to existence a new baby. Universal, just like humans, right? We have babies and they make babies. So in principle that would solve the problem of why there was a big bang and also what happened before the Big Bang. So we came our umbilical cord is connected to a laboratory of a civilization that produced our universe. Once it figured out quantum gravity. You know, </s><s>[INST] it's baby Big bangs all the way down. It's a big big bangs all the way up. [/INST] So if we collect data about how the universe started, we could potentially test theories of, or it can educate us about how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity. If we if we get any information about what happens near the singularity of a black hole. You know, if we if we get a sense of, you know, somehow we learn what happens at the thing that would educate. So there are places where we can search for evidence but it's very challenging I should say. And my point is, you know the string theories they decided that they know how to approach the problem that they don't have a single theory. There is a multitude of theories and it's not tightly constrained and they cannot make predictions about black holes or about the beginning of the universe. So so at the moment I say we are at a loss and the way I feel about this concept of the theory of everything, we should wait until we get enough evidence to guide us and until then, you know, there are many important problems that we can address. You know why why bang our head against the wall on a problem for which we have no guidance. </s><s>[INST] We don't have a good dance partner in terms of evidence. There's not, I mean it would be interesting just like you said, I mean the lab is one place to create [/INST] uh </s><s>[INST] universes or black holes but it would be fascinating if there is indeed a black hole in our solar system that you can interact with. So the problem with the origin of the universe is all you can do is collect data about it, right? You can't interact [/INST] with it. Well you can for example detect gravitational waves that emerged from that and you know there is an effort to do that and that could potentially tell us something. But yeah, it's a challenge and that's why we're stuck. So I should say, despite what physicists portray that, you know, we live through an ex exceptional growth in our understanding of the universe. We're actually pretty much stuck, I would say, because we don't know the nature of the dark matter, most of the matter in the universe. We don't know what it is. Uh and we don't know how the universe started. We don't know what happens in this in the interior of a black hole. </s><s>[INST] Because you thought it quite a bit about dark matter as well. Do you have any kind of hypothesis? Interesting hypothesis? Already mentioned a few about what is dark matter and what are the uh possible paths that we could take to unlock the mystery of dark? What is dark matter? [/INST] Yeah. So what we need is some anomalies that would hint what the nature of the dark matter is or two detectives in the laboratory. There are lots of laboratory experiments searching, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack because there are so many possibilities for the type of particle that it may be. Um, but maybe at some point, you know, we'll find either a particle or black holes as dark matter or something else. But can </s><s>[INST] you also maybe started to interrupt to comment about what is dark matter? Like what it's just the name were assigned to? What? [/INST] So most of the community believes that it's a particle that we haven't yet detected, it doesn't interact with light, so it's dark. But the question is, what does it interact with and how can we find it? And for many years physicists were guided by the idea that it's some extension of the standard model of particle physics. But then they said, oh, we will find some clues from the large hadron collider about its nature or maybe it's related to supersymmetry, which is a new symmetry that we haven't found any evidence for. In both cases, the large hadron collider did not give us any clues and other people search for specific types of particles in the laboratory and didn't find any a couple of years ago actually, around the time that I worked on a Momoa, I also worked on the possibility that the dark metal particles may have a small electric charge. Which is a speculation, but nobody complained about it. And you know, it was published and I regarded Morris of speculation than the artificial origin of the moon. And to me, I apply, you know, as far as I'm concerned, I applied the same scientific tools in both cases, there is an anomaly that lead me to that discussion which has to do with the hydrogen being called in the early universe more than we expected. So we suggest that maybe the dark metal particles have some small charge, but you deal with anomalies by exploring possibilities. That's the only way to do it. And then collecting more data to check those and searching for technological signatures is the same as any other part of our scientific endeavor. We make hypothesis and we collect data and I don't see any reason for having a taboo on this </s><s>[INST] subject. And your child like open minded excitement and approaches science. You're I think to anyone listening to this truly inspiring. I mean the question I think is useful to ask is by way of advice for young people, a lot of young people listen to this whether from all over the world and teenagers on the graduate students, even graduate students even be like even young faculty, even older faculty, they're all young at heart. Like so many of your heart. Do you have advice for bullets? Focus on you traditionally defined sort of young folks that kind of graduate you have advice to give to young people like that today about life maybe in general, maybe a life of curiosity. And the science [/INST] is definitely um, well, first I should confess that I enjoy working with young people much more than with senior. And the reason is they don't carry a baggage of prejudice. They're not so self centered. They're open to exploration. Uh, my advice, I mean one of the lessons that took me a while to learn and I should say I lost important opportunities as a result of that. So that I would regard it as a mistake on my behalf was to believe experts, so quote unquote. So um on a number of occasions I would come up with an original idea and then suggested to an expert. Someone that works in the same field for a while and the expert would dismiss it most of the time because it's new and was not explored, not because of the merit. And then what happened to me several times is that someone else would listen to the conversation or would hear me suggesting it and I would give up because the experts said no and then that's someone else, you know, would develop it so that it becomes the hottest thing in this field. And it happened once it happened to me multiple times. I then realized the hell with the experts. You know, they don't know what that they're just repeating the they don't think creatively, they are being threatened by innovation. Okay. And it's the natural reaction of someone that cares about their ego more than about the matter that we are discussing. And so I said, I would not, I don't care how many likes I have on twitter, I don't care whether the experts say one thing or another. I will basically exercise my judgment and do the best I can. You know, it turns out that I'm wrong. I made a mistake. You know, that's part of the of the scientific endeavor. You know, and um it took me a while to recognize that and it was a lot of wasted opportunities. So to the young people I would recommend, don't listen to experts carve your own path. Now of course you will be wrong. She should learn from experience just like kids do but do it yourself. </s><s>[INST] You're father Died in 2017, your mother died in 2019. Do you miss them? [/INST] Very much so. </s><s>[INST] Is there a memory uh that fond memory that stands out or maybe what have you learned from them [/INST] from my mother? I mean, she was very much my inspiration for pursuing intellectual work because she studied at the university and then because of the Second World War after the Second World War, she, she was born in Bulgaria. They immigrated to Israel and and she left university to work on a farm and later in life when all the kids left home, she went back to the university and finish the PhD but she planted in me the intellectual curiosity and valuing learning or acquiring knowledge is a very important element in life and and my love with philosophy came from attending classes that she took at the university when I was a teenager. Um I was fortunate to go to some of these and they inspired me later on and I'm very different than my colleagues as you can tell because my upbringing was quite different. And the only reason I'm doing physics or astrophysics is because of circumstances I at age 18 I was asked to serve in the military and uh the only way for me to pursue intellectual work uh was to work on physics because that was the closest to philosophy and I was good at physics. So they admitted me to an elite program called LPO that allowed me to finish my PhD at age 24 to actually propose the first uh international project that was funded by the Star Wars initiative from Ronald Regan. And that brought me, brought me to the U. S. To visit Washington D. C. Where we were funded from. And then on one of the visits, I went to the institute for advanced study at Princeton and met john Michael. That later offered me a five year fellowship there under the condition that I'll switch to astrophysics. At which point, you know, I said, okay, I cannot give up on this opportunity, I'll do. It switched to astrophysics. It felt like a forced marriage kind of arranged marriage. And then I was offered a position at Harvard because nobody wanted that. Uh they first elected someone else and that someone said, I don't want to become junior faculty at the Harvard astronomy department because the chance for being promoted are very small. So he took another job and then I was second in line, they gave it to me, I didn't care much because I could go back to the farm any day, you know. Um And after three years I was tenured and eventually a decade later became the chair of this department and served for nine years as the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, but at that point it became clear to me that I am actually married to the love of my life, even though it was an arranged marriage, there are many philosophical questions in astrophysics that we can address. But I'm still very different than my colleagues. You know, that we're focusing on technical skills in getting to this job. So my mother was really extremely instrumental in planting the seeds of stop thinking about the big picture in me then my father, he was, you know, he was working in the farm and we didn't speak much because we sort of understood each other without speaking. Uh but what he uh gave me is a sense of you know that it's more important to do things than to talk about them. I </s><s>[INST] love the the I mean my apologies, but mit mind and hand, I love that there's uh the root of philosophy that you gain from your mom and the hand that action is all that ultimately in the end matters from your dad. That's that's it's really powerful if we could take a small detour into philosophy. Is there by chance any books authors, whether philosophical or not, you mentioned Sasha that stand out to you that were formative and some small or big way that perhaps you would recommend to others maybe when you were very young or maybe later on in life. [/INST] Well, actually, yeah, you know, I read the number of existentialists that appealed to me because they were authentic, you know, saturday, you know, he declined the nobel prizes we discussed, but he also uh was mocking people that pretend to be something better than they are. You know, he was living an authentic life that is sincere and that's what appealed to me. And Albert commey was another french philosopher that the advocated existentialism. Um you know, that really appealed to me is probably </s><s>[INST] my favorite existentialist camus. Yeah, [/INST] and he died at a young age in an accident, unfortunate. Um and then people like Nietzsche that uh you know, broke conventions and I noticed that nature is still extremely popular, you know, That's quite surprising. Uh he appeals to the young people of today and the people that </s><s>[INST] is the Children, it's the childlike wonder about the world. And he was unapologetic. It's like most philosophers is a very strict adherence of terminology into the practices academic philosophers, and each year was full of contradictions. And and he just, I mean, he was just this big kid with opinions and thought deeply about this world and people are really attracted the and surprisingly, there's not enough people like that throughout history of philosophy and that that's why I think there is still drawn to him. [/INST] Yeah. To me what stands out is his statement that the best way to corrupt the minds of young people is to tell them that they should agree with the common view. You know, and uh you know, it goes back to the threat that went throughout discussion. </s><s>[INST] You've you've kind of suggested that we ought to be humble about our very own existence and our existence last only a short time we talked about um you losing your father and your mother. Uh, do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of [/INST] death? I'm not afraid. You know what Epic Orosz actually, because it was a very wise person. Uh according to Lucretius, of course didn't leave anything in writing. But he said that he's never afraid of death because as long as he is around, death is not around and when death will be around, he will not be around. So he will never meet death. So why should you be worried about something you will never meet? Uh, you know, and it's an interesting philosophy of life. You know, you shouldn't be afraid of something that you will never encounter, right? </s><s>[INST] But there's a finite nous to this experience. We live every day. I mean, I think of her being honest what every day is if it's going to last forever. We often kind of don't contemplate the fact that it ends, you kind of plans and goals and you have this possibilities. Uh, you have a kind of lingering thought, especially as you get older and older and older, that this is especially when you lose friends, right? And then you start to realize, um, you know, it doesn't, but I don't know if you really are cognizant of that. I mean, [/INST] because, but you have to be careful not to be depressed by it because otherwise you lose the vitality, Right? So I think the most important thing to draw from, from knowing that you are short lived is a sense of appreciation that you're alive. That's the first thing. But more importantly, a sense of modesty. Because how can anyone be arrogant if they kept at the same time, this notion that they are short lived. I mean, you cannot be arrogant because anything that you advocate for, you know, you will not be around to do that in 100 years. So people will just forget and move on. You know, and if you keep that in mind, you know, the caesars in Ancient Rome, they had a person next to them telling them, Don't forget that you are moral. You know, there was a person with that duty because the caesars thought that they are all powerful, you know. Uh, and uh, they had for a good reason, someone, they hired to whisper in their ear. Don't forget that your model. </s><s>[INST] Well, you're somebody, one of the most uh, respected, uh, famous scientists in the world, sitting on the farm, gazing up at the stars. So you seem like an appropriate person to ask the completely inappropriate question of What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? [/INST] That's an excellent question. And if we ever find an alien that we can converse with, I would like to answer this. I would like to ask for an answer to this question because um </s><s>[INST] well they have a different opinion you think, [/INST] well they might be wiser because they lived around for a while, but I'm afraid they will, they will be silent. I'm afraid they will not have a good answer. And I think um it's it's the process that you should get satisfied by the process of learning you should enjoy. Okay, So it's not so much that there is a meaning i in fact there is as far as I can tell, things just exist, you know? Uh and it's uh I think it's inappropriate for us to assign meaning for our existence because you know, we as a civilization, we will eventually perish, you know, and nothing will be, you know, just another planet on which life died. You know? And if you look at the big scheme of things, who cares, who cares and how can we assign significance to what we are doing? You know? So if you say the meaning of life is this, well, it will not be around in a billion years. So what, you know, it cannot be the meaning of life because life nothing will be around. So I think we should just enjoy the process and you know it's like many other things in life. You enjoy good food, okay? And you can enjoy learning why because it makes you appreciate better where you know the environment that you live in. And sometimes people think religion for example is in conflict with science spirituality in country. That's not true. Uh if you see a watch and you look at it from the outside, you know, you might say oh that's interesting. But then if you start to open it up and learn about how it works, you appreciate it more. So science is the way to learn about how the world works and it's not in conflict to the meaning that you assigned to all of this, but it helps you appreciate the world better. So in fact I would think that a religious person should promote science because it gives you a better appreciation of what's around you. You know it's like, you know if you buy uh in a grocery by something, you know a bunch of fruits that are packed together and you can't see from the outside exactly what kind of fruits are inside. But if you open it up and study, you appreciate better the merchandise that you get right. So you pay the same amount of money but at least you know what's inside. So why don't we figure out what the word is about? You know what the universe contains, what is the dark matter will help us appreciate, you know, the bigger picture and then you can assign your own flavor to what it means. You know, </s><s>[INST] uh, I I think I'm truly grateful that a person like you exist at the center of the scientific community gives me faith and hope about this uh, this big journey that we call science. So, uh, thank you for writing the book you wrote recently. You have for many other books and articles that I think people should definitely read and thank you for wasting all this time with me as a truly an honor. Thank you. [/INST] So it's not a waste at all. And thank you for having me. I learned a lot from your questions and your remarks. Thank you. </s><s>[INST] Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Avi Loeb and thank you to our sponsors Zero fasting up for intermittent fasting element, electrolyte drink, sun basket meal delivery service and pessimists archive history podcast. So the choice is a fasting app, fasting fuel fast breaking delicious meals and a history podcast that has very little as far as I know to do with fasting choose wisely, my friends and if you wish, click the sponsor links below to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you some words from Albert Einstein. The important thing is not to stop questioning curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough. If one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day, thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] also, so, first of all, comfort of a physical and mental well being and also being invited to parties with powerful people. Uh, you, you make enemies rich and powerful enemies doing this. [/INST] Yes, but </s><s>[INST] that's why it makes it, that's why it's admirable. I mean, you know, it's it's an interesting case study that you've been doing it as long as you have [/INST] and </s><s>[INST] I hope you keep doing it. But it's just interesting that it's rare. [/INST] I'll say I want to make a call like I think societies can create better journalists and worse journalists in so far as they support the journalists who are doing great work and I want to call out Edward Snowden specifically because what we have done to him is such a travesty. And the only lesson you can learn if you're a logical human being is that you should never whistle blow on the United States government after looking at what they did to Snowden. So as a society, we can put pressure on lawmakers to make it easier for people to do the great work by not punishing the people who do great work, if that makes sense, and de risking it for them, because we shouldn't expect journalists to be martyrs to do great work, right to do important work. And part of that comes from protecting whistleblowers. There's like, very common sense things I love, like it's great to heroic size, you know, people like Edward Snowden and stuff like that, but we shouldn't expect them to be heroes to do that </s><s>[INST] work. Do you ever think about going, you've been focused on financial fraud? Do you ever think about going after other centers of power? Uh like a [/INST] government, </s><s>[INST] Government, politics, [/INST] politics. It seems to me you can't do good work. Um like everybody doing good work in politics is, to some extent, from my limited </s><s>[INST] perspective, as I as I said, [/INST] I'm not that into it, it seems like everyone has to take a side because even if you do great work, whoever you're exposing half the other people, no matter how good your work is, are going to claim it's just for partisan hackery and they're going to malign you. So it seems like a lot of journalists have to take a slant, even if it's not explicit, like bias, they have to take a slant on who they expose. I hate that. I would really like a world where you could freely expose both sides without having a constant um alignment of like you know, who are you working for or you did this for X, Y. Z or whatever. Like I really find that deeply problematic about our current uh like journalism in the political sphere as far as government stuff. I think it's easy to do not easy, but like it's much more enticing to do foreign journalism than to do local journalism on positions of power. Because if you question it's so easy to just get the bigger, the bigger cases you expose locally your you get in danger. Like it's just like very very clear cut. The bigger the case, the more your your financial well being your access your entire life is like sort of in jeopardy. Whereas if you do foreign journalism, you can do great work and largely you're protected by your own government. So it's kind of this weird thing where if you want great journalism on America sometimes going abroad might be </s><s>[INST] but but the politician thing that's that's interesting, you mentioned that and going abroad. I think the way you think about your current work, I think applies in great journalism in in politics as well. So what happens, I have that sense because I aspire to be like you in the in the sort of in the conversation space of like with politicians, I tried to talk to people on the left and the right and do so nonpartisan way and criticize but also steal me in their cases, what happens I've I've learned is you can talk to somebody on the right, the right kind of brings you in. It's like, yes, we'll keep you comfortable come with us and then the left attacks you. And and so, uh, and the same happens on the left, on the left, the right attacks you and the left as they come with us. So, like, there's a there's a temptation and uh, momentum to staying to that one side, whatever that side is. Um, the same with foreign journalism, you can cover Putin critically. There's a strong pull to being pro Ukraine. Pro Zelensky pro basically really covering in a favorable way to the point of propaganda at the point of pr the Zelensky regime. If you criticize Zelensky regime, there's a strong pull towards them being supportive of not necessarily the Putin regime, but a very different perspective on it, which is like NATO is the one that created that war. There's a there's a there's narratives that pull you and what I think a great journalist does is make enemies simple size and walk through that fire and not get pulled in to the protection of anyone's side because they get so harshly attacked anytime they deviate from the center. [/INST] Well, and I think also like, there's a criticism of all centrists, which I think in some way is fair, and I say that as someone largely who's this interest, which is that this what about is like this like what about the left or what about the right can skew when it's not a one, it's not a both sides issue. So in the case of like Russia Ukraine, I think like I'm strongly in favor of Ukraine even though I tend to go like on both sides and that might be partly because one of my employees is Ukrainian. Um and I think what a great journalist does, especially like in politics is I think they criticize the regime that's most in power, most controls the keys and is the most corrupt at that time. And they might appear to be like, let's say during the realm of trump a great journalist would criticize trump, but that same journalist who held trump's feet to the fire should be capable of holding biden's feet to the fire four years later, if that kind of makes sense. </s>

<s>[INST] I still wonder what kind of applications are yet to be enabled by it. Because so much the interesting thing about N. F. T. S. You know, if you look outside of art is uh just like money, you can start playing with different social constructs is you can start playing with the ideas, you can start playing with with uh even like investing, somebody was talking about almost creating an economy out of uh like creative people or influencers like if you start a Youtube channel or something like that, you can invest in that person and you can start trading their creations and then almost like create a market out of people's ideas, out of people's creations, out of the people themselves that generate those creations. And there's a lot of interesting possibilities of what you can do with that. I mean, it seems ridiculous, but you're basically creating hierarchy of value, maybe artificial in the digital world and they're trading that but in so doing are inspiring people to create. So maybe uh as sort of our economy gets better and better and better where actual work in the physical space becomes less and less in terms of its importance maybe will completely be operating in the digital space where uh where these kinds of economies have more and more power and then you have to have this kind of block chains. Two, the scalability, security and decentralization, decentralization is of course the tricky one because uh people in power start to get nervous [/INST] absolutely once in power, you always never be supplanted by somebody else. But this is your job seeing relations, you don't have a job, a tough job and now everybody wants it. </s><s>[INST] Well, what is your sense about our our time and the future? Hope about the decentralization of power. Do you think that's something that we can actually achieve, given that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts? Absolutely. And it's so wonderful to be absolutely powerful. [/INST] Well, good question. So, so first of all, I believe that by the way that he is a is a complex questions or legs uh like all the rest of your questions. </s><s>[INST] Uh very sorry, [/INST] it's okay. I'm enjoying it. So, but So there are two things. First of all, power has been centralized provider reasons when you want to get it is easier for somebody, even a single person to grab power. But there is also some kind of a technology lack very off but justified having empower because in a way in a society in which even communication never mind Blockchain which is common knowledge, but even simple unilateral communication is hard. It's much easier to say you do as I say because the alternative but as so there is a little bit of a technology barrier. But I think that and and now to get to this is a common knowledge and it is a totally different story. Now we have finally the technology for doing this. So that is one part. But I really believe that not by having a distributed system, not only you don't have a you have to actually much more stable and durable system because not only for corruption, but even for things that go Australia. And given it long enough time by strange version of Murphy's law, whatever goes wrong goes wrong. And so and if the power is diffused, you actually are much more stable if you look at any any living uh complex living being is distributed. I mean I don't have somebody is a okay, tell Sylvia now it's time to eat. Uh you </s><s>[INST] have millions of cells in your body, you have billions of bacteria. [/INST] Exactly help me in the guts. I think, you know, we are in a super and somehow keeps us alive. It is uh, so it's strange enough, however, when we design systems, we designed them centralist, we ourselves are distributed beings. And when we plan to say, okay, I want to get an architecture. How about I make a pyramid? I put west on the top and the power flows down. And so again, it's a little bit perhaps of a technology problem. But now the technology is there. So that is a big challenge to rethink. We want to organize the power in very large system and and and and distributed system in my opinion are much more resilient. Let's put the best way. There was a mine of my uh italian compatriots. All right. You know Machiavelli who who looked at the time, there was a big, there was a bunch of a small state democratic republic of Florence of veganism and the other thing and there was the Ottoman empire, but at the time was an empire and assad and was very centralized and aim at the political observation that goes roughly to say whenever you have such a central. I think it's very hard to overtake, but the former government is centralist. But if you get it, it's so easy to keep population one instead with africa with other things are much more uh resilient time when the power is distributed is much more is going to be lasting for much longer time. </s><s>[INST] And ultimately, maybe the human spirit wants that kind of resilience wants that kind of distribute. It's just that we didn't have technology throughout history. Machiavelli didn't have the computer and the internet and uh, [/INST] that is certainly part of the reason. Yes, </s><s>[INST] you've written an interesting blog post. If we take a step out of the realm [/INST] of bits </s><s>[INST] and into the realm of governance, you wrote a blog post about making al gore and governance decentralized. Uh, can you explain what that means? The philosophy behind that? You know, how you decentralize basically all aspects of this kind of system. [/INST] Well, the philosophy and how let's start with a philosophy. So I really believe that uh, nothing fixed last very long. And so I really believe that life is about intelligent adaptation, things change. And we have to be nimble and adjust to change. And uh, when I, when I see a lot of uh, they kept the project actually very proud to say is fixed in stone and right, you know, called this law is called ivory for the code that will never change you go, wow, what I'm saying? This is a recipe to me of disaster. Not immediately, but soon. Just imagine you take a notional liner and you want to go, I don't know from Lisbon to new york and you set the course iceberg, no iceberg Tempesta, no Tempest and all. It doesn't matter. But it's not the way you need a till you need to correct, you need to adjust and um, and so um, by the way we design, I'll go around with the idea that uh, the code was evolving as the needs And of course however, is a system in which and every time there is an adjustment, you must have essentially a vote with uh right now is uh orchestrated that 90% of the steak and I say, OK, we are ready, we agree on the next version and we pick up this version. So we are able to evolve without losing too many components left and right. But I think without evolving any system essentially become athletic and that is going to shrivel and die sooner or later. And, and so that is um, is needed. And what do you want to do under the Blockchain? You have a perfect platform in which you can log your wish is your votes, your things so that you have a guarantee that whatever vote you express is actually seen by everybody else. So everybody sees really the outcome. Call it of a referendum of a change and better is uh, in my opinion or a system that wants to live long as to adapt. </s>

<s>[INST] This reminds me of Robin Williams. So I have to ask you several questions here on that. But 11 of my favorite movies is Good Will Hunting. I don't know if you've seen it with Robin Williams. So as a psychiatrist yourself, can you do a deep analysis of this other famous psychiatrist which is the movie character played by Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. Is it just a caricature between a psychiatrist and patient relationship or is there some something to you? Was that was moving about his ability to connect to this obviously struggling young kid? I [/INST] think you've hit on the key thing there, which is the depth of the connection if if there's uh two powerful connection. Yeah, that can impair therapy because it could impair open communication if if someone, if a patient has a seize the role sees the relationship in a particular way, like in a friendly way maybe or like a parental child type way that can cause problems because then what they choose to share what they choose to bring up is selected to be appropriate for that view of the relationship. And so I and many other talk therapists actually prefer uh not to let things get um not let the connection get that deep. You want to have trust, you want to have a therapeutic alliance, we sometimes call it. Um but it's got to be enough of a blank slate that the patient is not consciously or unconsciously constrained in what they choose to share. And so great movie, great actors, all good, no complaints except realistically the relationship should be a little more arms length than that. </s><s>[INST] But let's pretend it's real life. Sometimes can't you leave a little bit of yourself in the interaction with the patient? I mean it's another human being. [/INST] So there's a balance and actually you do need some of it because let's say this person is having challenges, interpersonal challenges in their life. The best way to notice what those are and to identify them and to work with them is if you can elicit some of those problems in in the office in the therapeutic interaction and this is really powerful as long as you're alert to it, aware of it and you don't let it get out of hand, This transference we call it is when you transfer in between the current therapeutic relationship and external relationships that the patient may have had with others. </s><s>[INST] And [/INST] so if the therapist starts to feel and inter feeling like anger, let's say So let's say you have a patient who is stirring frustration in you or even in extreme cases anger. The best thing for the therapist to do in that case is to recognize it. And to realize that's probably being stirred by other people in the patient's life and that could be the source of a lot of problems. And so instead of trying to wall it off and say, oh I shouldn't be feeling that I'd better be a better therapist instead and recognize it and use it and help the patient that way. And so you've got to be a human being. You've got to be a person who feels you've got to be open </s><s>[INST] but being controlled and be aware of it if I may, I just want to read them because it's my favorite scenes. Probably one of the greatest scenes, one of the greatest scenes in movie history because Robin Williams does a single take. [/INST] So </s>

<s>[INST] You mentioned collaboration, you've written about your collaboration with Amos Tversky That this is you writing the 12 or 13 years in which most of our work was joint for years of interpersonal and intellectual bliss. Everything was interesting. Almost everything was funny and there was a current joy of seeing an idea take shape so many times in those years. We shared the magical experience of one of us saying something which the other one would understand more deeply than the speaker had done contrary to the old laws of information theory. It was common for us to find that more information was received than had been sent. I have almost never had the experience with anyone else if you have not had it, you don't know how marvelous collaboration can be. So let me ask a bird. Perhaps a silly question. How does one find and create such a collaboration? That may be asking like how does one find love? But [/INST] yeah, you have to be lucky. And and and I think you have to have the character for that. Because I've had many collaborations, I mean none was as exciting as with atmosphere. But I've had and I'm having. It was very so it's a skill. I think I'm good at it, not everybody is good at it. And then it's the luck of finding </s><s>[INST] people who are also good at. It is their advice in a form for a young scientist who also seeks to violate this law of information theory. [/INST] I really think it's so much luck is involved. And you know, and those really serious collaborations, at least in my experience are a very personal experience. And I have to like the person I'm working with otherwise, you know, I mean there is that kind of a collaboration which is like an exchange a commercial exchange of giving this. You give me that. But the real ones our interpersonal there between people like each other and who like making each other think and who like the way that the other person responds to your thoughts. Uh You have to be lucky. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean but I already notice about even just me showing up here, you have quickly started to digging in a particular problem I'm working on and already knew information started to emerge. It. Is that a process just the process of curiosity of talking to people about problems and seeing, [/INST] I'm curious about anything to do with ai and robotics and you know, and uh so and I knew you were dealing with that. So I was curious </s><s>[INST] just follow your curiosity jumping around and the psychology front, the dramatic sounding terminology of replication crisis. But really just the at times this this effect at the time studies do not are not fully generalize herbal. They [/INST] don't, you're being polite, it's worse than that. </s><s>[INST] But is it? So I'm actually not fully familiar. Didn't agree how bad it is. Right. So what do you think is the source? Where do you think? [/INST] I think I know what's going on actually. I mean I have a theory about what's going on and what's going on is that there is first of all a very important distinction between two types of experiments and one type is within subjects. So it's the same person has two experimental conditions and the other type is between subjects where some people have this condition of the people in that condition, they're different worlds. And between subject experiments much harder to predict and much harder to anticipate and the reason. Uh and they're also more expensive because you need more people. And it's it's just so between subject experiments is where the problem is, it's not so much and within subject experiments really between and there is a very good reason why the intuitions of researchers about between subject experiments are wrong. And that's because when you are a researcher, you're in a within subject situation, it is you are imagining the two conditions and you see the causality and you feel it. And but in between subject conditions, they don't they they see they live in one condition and the other one is just nowhere. So our intuitions are very weak about between subject experiments and that I think is something that people haven't realized. And and in addition because of that, we have no idea about the power of uh manipulations of experimental manipulations. Because the same manipulation is much more powerful when when you are in the two conditions, then when you live in only one condition. And so the experimenters have very poor intuitions about between subject experiments. And and there is something else which is very important, I think, which is that almost all psychological hypotheses are true. That is in the sense that, you know, directionally if you have a hypothesis that a really causes me that it's not true that causes the opposite be maybe a just has very little effect. But hypotheses are true mostly except mostly they're very weak. They're much weaker than you think when you are having images of. So the reason I'm excited about that is that I recently heard about uh huh Some some friends of mine who Uh they essentially funded 53 studies of behavioral change by 20 different teams of people with a very precise objective of changing the number of times that people go to the gym. But you know, and And the success rate was zero. Not one of the 53 studies work. Now, what's interesting about that is those are the best people in the field and they have no idea what's going on. So they are not calibrated. They think that it's going to be powerful because they can imagine it but actually just weak because you're focusing on on your manipulation and it feels powerful to you. There's a thing that I've written about that's called the focusing illusion that is that when you think about something, it looks very important, more important than it really </s>

<s>[INST] well I think ethics uh it's a you know there's uh there's a trolley problem that's often used in the work that I've done at M. I. T. Yeah. Uh Well the autonomous vehicles in particular uh that people I think they offload, they ask like how would a machine deal with an ethical situation that they themselves humans don't know how to deal with. And so I don't know if a machine is able to do a better job on difficult ethical questions. But I certainly think to behave properly and effectively in this world it used to be uh have a fear of mortality and like be able to even dance because I don't think you can solve ethical problems. But you have to uh I think like ethics is like a dance floor, you have to just you have to uh dance properly with the rest of the humans that give people dancing tango, you have to dance in the same kind of way. And for that you have to have a few immortality. Like I think of uh more practically speaking, like I said, autonomous vehicles like the way you interact with pedestrians fundamentally has to have a sense of mortality. So uh when pedestrians cross the road and I've watched, well certainly 100 plus hours of pedestrian videos, there's a kind of social uh contract where you walk in front of a car and you're putting your life in the hands of another human being and like death is is uh is in the car in the game that's being played, Death is right there uh it's part of the calculus, it's not but it's not like a simple calculus, not a simple equation. It's uh it's an s it's uh I mean, I don't know what it is, but it's it's in the it's in there and uh it has to be part of the optimization problem. Like it's not as simple as so from the computer vision from the artificial intelligence perspective as detecting, there's a human estimating estimating the trajectory, like treating everything like it's a billiard balls as opposed to like being able to construct an effective model the world model of the what the person is thinking, what they're going to do. What are the different possibilities of how the scene might evolve I think requires having some sense of yeah, fear of fear of mortality, of mortality. I don't see the thing is I think it's really important to think about. I it could be honest enough to say that it's I haven't been able to figure out how to engineer any of these things, but I do think it's really, really important, like I have uh I have a bunch of room because here I can show it to you after that room poses a robot because um vacuums the floor. And I've had them um make different sounds like I had them scream in pain and it uh it uh you emilie anthropomorphize. Absolutely and it creates a I don't know, knowing that they can feel pain. See I'm I'm speaking like knowing uh that I immediately imagine that they can feel pain and immediately draws me closer to them, that the human experience and that there's there's something in that that should be engineered and in our in our systems, it feels like, all right. I I believe, personally, I don't know what you think, but I believe it's possible for a robot and a human to fall in love. For example, in the in the [/INST] future, I think. Yeah, it's already </s><s>[INST] there is a certain kind of deep connection with technology in a real like you would choose to marry. Um, [/INST] I mean, again, it sounds uh, I'll find a book title and I'll send it to you. And it's a serious consideration of people who started out with these sex dolls. But it turned into a relationship of enduring significance that the woman who wrote the book is not willing to dismiss as a perversion. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's what uh you know, people kind of joke about sex robots, [/INST] which is funny, </s><s>[INST] uh like, it's a it's a funny, I mean, there's a lot of stuff about robots. It's just kind of fun to talk about that. It's not necessarily connected to reality people joke about sex robots, but if you actually look how sex robots, which are pretty rare these days. You are used, they're not used by people who want sex. They're actually uh, their companions there compared they become companions. Yeah, it's uh yeah, it's fascinating. They're just we're not even talking about any kind of intelligence. We're talking about just human beings. See companion ships were deeply lonely. I mean, that was the other sense I have that. I don't know if I can articulate clearly, you can probably do a better job, but I have a sense that there's a deep loneliness within all of us. Absolutely. In the face of death, it feels like we're alone. [/INST] So, you know, the what drew me to the existential take on things, lux was the uh who is it? Rollo May and Irwin Yalom right about existentialism and they're like, look at what there's different flavors of existentialism, but they all have in common. What is it? four Universal concerns. The overriding one is about death and that next is choice and responsibility. The next one is existential isolation. And they're like, that's one of the things about consciousness that and the last one is meaninglessness. But the existential isolation point is, you know, we are by virtue of consciousness able to apprehend the unless you're a Siamese twin, you are fundamentally alone. And because it has claimed its erich fromme a book called escape from freedom. He's like, look, you you're smart enough to know that the most direct way that we typically communicate with our fellow human beings is through language, but you also know that language is a pale shadow of the totality of our interior phenomenal logical existence. Therefore there's always going to be times in our lives where even under the best of circumstances, you could be trying desperately to convey your thoughts and feelings, and somebody listening could be like, yeah, I get it, I get it, I get it. And you're like, you have no fucking idea what I'm talking about. So you can be desperately lonely In a house where you live with 10 people in the middle of Tokyo where there's millions. </s>

<s>[INST] and... Yeah, you're instigating... It's like physical violence [/INST] in the physical war. Yeah, like if I would have tweeted stuff like that, I would get banned, probably. On the flip side, this is the President of the United States. It seems like he's doing presidential decree by social media sometimes. Is it really right that one public, or private, I should say, one private company can erase the President of the United States' words from the eyes of a lot of Americans that are using these social media feeds? </s><s>[INST] And one big one, which I for sure am against, is the permanent ban. [/INST] Yeah, I don't like that. I hate that. Even in my community, if somebody comes back over a year, like, I mean... Did you just compare yourself to the President of the United States? No, I compare myself to Twitter banning the President of the United States. Let me put it this way, if I ban Donald Trump in my chat room, </s><s>[INST] I'd unban him in a year. A year? Yeah. What's the process for unbanning Donald Trump? What would he have to do? [/INST] Usually, people send me an email and they're like, listen, I did this stuff, I'm sorry, I was dumb, </s><s>[INST] I'll give him another chance. But a year? What if they send an email a month later? [/INST] Usually I'll unban him. That's usually my problem. I ban pretty quickly in my community, but if you ever ask... You're a big softie. Yeah, I usually let him back, yeah. Well, because I used to be the worst type of internet person, and I think I'm a little bit better than I used to be, so... Now that you're older. Yeah, now that I've matured, yeah, of course. Age bestows a wisdom that just can't be gotten any other way. You're a big softie. Yeah, I usually let him back, yeah. </s><s>[INST] What's your sense in general? Is there something interesting you could say about your view on free speech? It seems like one of those terms that's also overused to me in a lot of different things. [/INST] What does it mean to you? If you have a democratic style of governance, you are interesting people with one of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities, and that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are going to make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history. If you're going to trust people to vote correctly, you have to be able to trust them to have open and honest dialogue with each other, whether that's Nazis or KKK people or whoever talking. You have to believe that your people are going to be able to rise above and make the correct determinations when they hear these types of speeches. And if you're so worried that somebody's going to hear a certain political figure and they're gonna be completely radicalized instantly, then what that tells me is that you don't have enough faith in humans for democracy to be a viable institution, which is fine. You can be anti-democratic, but I don't think you can be pro-democracy and anti-free speech. </s><s>[INST] Within reason. So what's the within reason? [/INST] I mean, you can't post like child porn or something on Twitter where people try to get you on that stuff, or like direct calls to violence are probably not. You shouldn't be tweeting out like, we're gonna meet up tomorrow and go bomb, blah, </s><s>[INST] blah, blah. Probably not. [/INST] People allow racism and anti-Semitism and hate speech. Hate speech, yes, because that can be very broadly defined. I can understand there being some basic rules of like no slurs on like a platform that gets into like acceptable forms of moderation or like excessive harassment and bullying I can understand, but past that, when the moderation becomes ideological, I get a little </s><s>[INST] bit nervous because, you know, for there's a whole other host of reasons. Of course it's all a gray area, but when it feels like ideology has seeped into the censorship. Not good. Yeah. Which it's so fascinating to think, especially now that Elon bought Twitter, how do you engineer a system that prevents ideology from seeping in and nevertheless is able to create a platform that has healthy conversations? Because if you have one guy who's just screaming nonsense, nonstop, it has this effect where the quiet voices at the back of the room are silenced. Yeah. So that's what you usually don't talk about. If you let one annoying loud person in, that's actually censoring the voice of a lot of people [/INST] that would like to speak, but they don't get a chance. That's one of the things, especially around trans discourse, I have to constantly do that reminder from my audience, is that like when I'm dealing with these types of people on the Internet, a lot of them might seem really crazy. A lot of these types of people might seem insane, but like in the real world, outside of like the crazy Twitter activist world. Like the vast majority of people you're meeting from LGBT communities are like the coolest, normalist people. All they want is to like write to live their life in the way they want to and to be like unobstructed. And like, yeah, but people will get this impression of like an online activist, like a vegan or LGBT person or whatever. And then they think that every single person in real life is like that. And it's a really negative stereotype. </s><s>[INST] And then even the other people in that group. [/INST] Oh, is Malina coming over? </s><s>[INST] Oh yeah, I don't know if that's her. Okay, Malina just joined us. What were we talking about? [/INST] Was it interesting? You are saying that you were going to talk to Elon by getting at Omni Destiny, the verified Twitter account on BAN. I said that sounds like a lie. That's so gracious of you. </s>

<s>[INST] I wonder if that's a good that's a really good measure. I would love to have, I would love that to be in your profile. People put like pronouns, I would love to put like honestly, like objectively not self report, but objective, how many people in your life if they committed murder, you would not ask any questions and you would help them hide the body. Like I would love to know that number for people. [/INST] Yeah. And I think it's a weird thing to, because you think right away, like, okay, it must be the group of people that are the closest to you, that's who you're first thinking of, right, But obviously for like my best friend, I would do it no question about it, but I've got other people that are close to me that are close to me in other ways and I probably wouldn't do that only because I don't think they do it for me. Yeah. And, and that is a consideration. Um, so I guess is the principal there then that you do for your friends, what you think they would do for you? Is that the underlying principle or do you just have a blind loyalty to, you know, people in your life for different reasons. I got people that are not on my inner circle that I probably wouldn't help change a tire two in the morning if they were on the highway. But if they called me and said, Hey, we gotta bury the body. I might show up for that. Use these weird different connections you </s><s>[INST] have. It's fascinating. You have close friends that like I probably exactly the tire is a good example would be like, can't you find somebody else to do this? I think part of that is just this leap of faith into like giving yourself to the other person that creates a deep connection that makes life fulfilling, like meaningful. That doesn't exist if you don't take that leap. I mean it's not about the murder. We're sort of focusing. I think that's a, I think you have to, uh, what does it cross that bridge when you get there? I'm not exactly sure. This is just the thought experiment, but it's, it's, I think about that a lot, especially these covid times and as like people become more and more isolated and separated from each other. Like how important is it to have those deep, deep connections to other humans? [/INST] I think especially like what you're talking about there, Have you ever seen the movie The Town? There's a great line in the movie where one of the main characters walks into his friend's house and he says, I need your help, we're gonna go hurt some people and you can never ask me about it again. And the friend looks up and he says, whose car were taken like that, That is the type of person you need in your life. And the people like there are people that will walk through that door and say that to you and you drop everything you're doing? And then there's the people that walk through the door and you're like, you know what? I got a hot pocket in the microwave. I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit tied up right now, but I'd love to help you out. But you know, I don't want to do that and you don't have that that deep connection with those people. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned some principles that you've uh change your mind on. Is there, do you want to go there, is there some interesting principles and the process of changing that is useful to talk about. [/INST] I can't really cite a specific thing except that understanding that the principles that you have at different points in your life can change and it's okay to change them without being a total pussy and being bullied by other people into thinking what you thought was wrong. If you come to these conclusions of your own volition and you decide to change them, that's great and it and it can be really, it can be really liberating, it's really liberating to have an idea that you hold so true to your your core belief system and then to actually have someone change your mind for you and be okay with it as opposed to being like no, I gotta die with this, I gotta die with this. It's really liberal, there are definitely our ideas, you want to die on that hill and no one's ever going to change your mind, but it's really liberating to be confident enough to say change my mind, I'm lucky enough to have some smart motherfucker's around me who can tell me, listen, you're being a total dipshit, like let's let's rethink this or that. I have one friend who does the five wise all the time and he loves backing me into a corner and what's the five wise, you just like when someone makes a statement about something to really get to the core issue, they say if you ask why five times make a statement, well why is that? And you answer that well why? And you phrase the wise differently obviously, but then you get to the core, they say five times, you can get to the core of the issue and that's a challenging thing. But I find later in life it's so liberating for me to be confident enough to be like, man, was I fucking way off the mark on this and have my mind </s><s>[INST] changed and be able to say that to others, that I was wrong [/INST] totally that ability and I never used to have that and it feels real </s>

<s>[INST] Whatever the expression for that is, English is in fact my second language. I took a nap recently, I guess shortly into the past into the recent past. I took a nap that was about 20 minutes I want to say. And I woke up completely refreshed. I think there's probably really good science on that of just napping. [/INST] Is there </s><s>[INST] a book? Not on sleep but specifically on napping um mastering napping. Master napper. [/INST] If </s><s>[INST] There isn't a book, I'm gonna write one and will forever be remembered and it'll be a short one. I really enjoy napping and my favorite thing to nap on is an eight sleep bed because it cools it down with a warm blanket and it's just it's heaven check it out and get special holiday savings of up to $400 when you go to sleep dot com slash lex. This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker a service. I used to track biological data that comes from my own body and gives me wisdom that only large scale raw data can provide. The signal that's pulled off from that data using machine learning algorithms. And we're talking about blood data, DNA data, fitness tracker data, all kinds of data. I'm actually going to a neuralink event very shortly and that event is about extracting data from your mind. Long term vision of brain computer interfaces. Two way communication between computers, maybe artificial intelligence enhanced computers and the human mind. That data is extremely powerful to tell you what's going on in your mind and your body. And I think Inside Tracker is at the cutting edge of uh what can actually lead to positive lifestyle changes. Using that data coming from the person personalized to that person. Alright. Get 200 bucks off Inside Trackers ultimate plan or 34% off the entire store when you go to Inside tracker dot com slash lex. This episode is also brought to you by element electrolyte drink. Mix spelled L. M. N. T. I drink a lot of element. There's some guests [/INST] that </s><s>[INST] was on recently. [/INST] I </s><s>[INST] might have been grimes or live, I'm not sure exactly, but they said they're a huge fan of element, who was it? But they said um we had like a debate about favorite flavors and went to drink and how much to drink and they discovered that I drink like way too much helmet [/INST] from </s><s>[INST] their perspective, from my perspective. Never [/INST] enough. </s><s>[INST] So it makes me feel great in terms of diet, it makes sure that I get enough hydration, makes water taste great for all the crazy exercise and mental and physical stuff. I do diet stuff I do, it's just really important to make sure your electrolytes are done correctly, you get a simple pack for free with any purchase. Try it at drink elements dot com slash lex. This is a lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now your friends, here's Todd, howard, is it possible that we are currently living inside a video game that the future you designed? Can you give hints as to how one would escape if this was a video game, how can a video game character escape to outside the video [/INST] game? Are </s><s>[INST] these things you don't consider when you design the game [/INST] actually we do because in the kind of games that we make, we want it to be as open as possible. So, you know, when you start a game, you're always testing it. What can I do? What, what would the game allow me to do and you check everything, you try to pick up the, you know, the mugs, you try every door, you collide with everything. Like, hey, what are the rules of this world? We try to do games where, you know, we say yes, as much as possible, that leads to some level of chaos. But if you were stuck in a video game, you would, you would try everything and usually you're gonna find a door or a space where the designers didn't anticipate you piling all those crates up and getting over a wall that they didn't expect, </s><s>[INST] right? So it's not a designed doorway out. It's uh accidental unintended doorway out and it's a, it's a happy bug, [/INST] you could, like Truman show just get in the ocean and go to </s><s>[INST] just keep going, keep going. But the more realistic the game becomes, the harder it is to find that door. The bigger the world, the bigger the open world [/INST] and then as we do it, we learn they're gonna find a way. So just don't try to pin them in. Usually we leave like this developer test cell area in the game that we don't anticipate anyone will find and they ultimately find it usually has crates of all the weapons in the game and things like that. </s><s>[INST] The little hints you drop now will just drive people mad, which is something I enjoyed, deeply. Uh, so Skyrim NPC s have at times hilarious dialogue. What does it take to build a good NPC dialogue? The [/INST] main thing is to make them reactive a lot of times when you write characters from movies or things like that, you want to make that character interesting for themselves. Right? What's their story? And there's some characters like that that the player definitely cares about, but the best characters are the ones that react to you. So you'll find a lot of people love our guards and the guards are written almost purely to be reactive, hey, nice tie like your jacket, do this cool watch, you know, hey, what you do. And so that hey, you're the man as you walk by that makes them interesting or the way they react to something that you do lydia in Skyrim who everybody loves? I'm sworn to carry your burdens. That's a generic line that all of the, you know, house carl's have and it just kind of lands when she says it, </s>

<s>[INST] unlike you, but also like you, I think both are both are humbling one, realizing that they did live in a different space and time, but to realizing that if you if you were placed in that space and time, you might have done all the same things, whether it's the brave good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, [/INST] absolutely. And you get also a sense of uh, of possibility. You know, there's this famous line, right, that, um, you know, those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. Um, but I think the other half is true as well, which is those who do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it, right. You know, that we're not the first people on this planet to face. You know, any certain kinds of problems, you know, other people who have have lived through worlds like this one before. </s><s>[INST] It's like when you fall in love as a teenager for the first time, there's, and then there's a break up, you think it is the greatest strategy tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person, even though like Romeo and Juliet and so on, had had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it is. We have lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism, which I think is at the core of I want you poster is nationalism destructive or empowering to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous to nationalism. But in recent history, perhaps because of the nazis has has um slowly parted ways that somehow nationalism is when patriotism, patriotism gone bad or something like this. Yeah, [/INST] they're they're different, right? Patriotism. Um you know, patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion, right? And a feeling of of love of country, right? Um you know, literally, uh and in some ways that's a necessary condition to participate in nationalism. Um you know, whether to me, I think nationalism is crucial um in a world organized around nation states, um and you have to sort of believe that you are engaged in a common project together, right? Um and so, you know, in the contemporary United States, um you know, uh in some ways that that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past, but, you know, you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom you share this nation. Um and um and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or, you know, or going to war to defend them. Um, that's a vision of, you know, what we might call civic nationalism. Um, that's that's the good version. The question is whether you can have that without having, um, exclusionary nationalism, you know, hating the other right fearing the other saying, yeah, you're part of this nation against all others. Um, and I think there's a long tradition in America of a very inclusive nationalism, um, that is open and inclusive, welcoming, um, and, you know, new people to this year project. Um, that's something to be defended, exclusionary nationalism is based on, you know, uh, ethnic hatreds and and others that we see throughout the world and those are things to be afraid of. </s><s>[INST] But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the big umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom and everybody else is against, is against freedom and against human nature. And it just so happens that it's half and half split across the world. So that's imperialism that feels like it beats the drum of war. [/INST] Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture and certainly, you know, the United States, um, as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something, um, than to clarify exactly what we're for. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, yeah. The Cold War china today, that's not only the United States, I suppose as human nature, it's we need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war. [/INST] Yes. Or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference. You know, you can, you, you know, you compete with competitors. You, you fight with enemies. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. With competitors as a respect. It maybe even a love underlying the competition. What lessons, what are the biggest lessons you take away from? World War One? Maybe we talked about several, but you know, you look back at the 20th century, what as a historian, what do you learn about human nature about human civilization? Bought history from looking at this war. [/INST] I think the, the lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War, uh, is that human life is not cheap. Um, that all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And At the end of the day in 1918, 1 side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. And </s><s>[INST] in the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives they [/INST] did and people who people who had been told that their lives were cheap, remembered that Right? Um, and it sort of, you know, reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the world. </s>

<s>[INST] just talking to him and he didn't mention this part. Well, I should, I should get further. Well, as I know he loved Dropbox, but I wasn't sure what he was doing. Who It was just up to. Well, [/INST] he was kind of saying he retired, but it's literally been five years since I last sat down and really talk to ghetto, right? Um ghetto is a technology expert, right? He's a so I came, I was excited because I finally figure out the type system for Numpy. I wanted to kind of talk about that with him and I kind of overwhelmed them. </s><s>[INST] Could you stay in that just for a brief moment because you're a fascinating person in the history of programming. He is a fascinating person. What have you learned from Guido about the programming about life? [/INST] Yeah, yeah, a lot. Actually I've I've been a fan of you know, you know, we have a chance to talk some, I wouldn't say, you know, we talked all the time, not only at all he may. Um, but we talked enough to I respect his in fact when I first started out by one of the first things I did was I had, I asked, you know for a meeting with him and paul Dubois in san mateo and I went and met him for lunch and basically to say maybe we can actually part of the strategy for Numpy was to get it into python three and maybe part of python as we talked about that and about that approach, right? I would </s><s>[INST] love to be a fun. That was that was [/INST] that was good and over, over the years for ghetto I learned so he was open like he was willing to listen to people's ideas right? And over the years now, generally, you know, I'm not saying the university that's been true, but but generally that's been true. So he's willing to listen, he's willing to defer like on the scientific side, he would just kind of differ. He didn't really always understand what we were doing like and he defer one place where he didn't enough was we missed the matrix multiply operator like that finally got added to python but about 10 years later than it should have. But the reason was because nobody, it takes, it takes a lot of effort. And I learned this while I was writing Numpy also wrote tools to begin a python deV and I added some pieces of python, um, like the memory view object I wanted in the structure of Numpy into python. So we didn't get Numpy into python, but we got the basic structure of it in the python. Like so you could build on it. Nobody did for a while. But eventually he database author started to and it was, it's a lot better they did. And also antoine Petro and Stefan Cross actually fixed the memory view object because I wrote the underlying infrastructure and see. But the python exposure was terrible until they came in and fixed it partly because I was already Numpy and Numpy was the python exposure. I didn't really care about you didn't have Numpy installed. Anyway. Ghetto opened up ideas. Technology really brilliant. Like really, really got a lot of respect from when I saw what he did with the clap with the this type class merger thing that was actually tricky right. And then And then willing to share, willing to share his ideas. So the other thing early on in 1988, I said I started my first extension module. The reason I could, because he wrote in this blog post on how to do reference county, right? And without it, I would have been lost. Right? But he was he was willing to at least try to write this post. And so he's been motive. He's been motivated early on with python. There's a computer science for everybody kinda have this early on desire to oh, maybe we should be pushing programming to more people. So he had this populist notion, I guess are popular sense, um, to learn that there's a certain skill and I've seen it in other people to of engaging with contributors sufficiently to because when somebody engaged with you want to contribute to you. If you ignore them, they go away. So building that early contributor base requires real engagement with other people. And he would do that. </s><s>[INST] Can you also comment on this tragic, uh stepping down from his position as the benevolent dictator for life over the wars? Uh, you know, the Wallis operator? The walrus operator was the last battle. I don't know if that's the cause of it. But uh there's this for people who don't know, you can look up, there's the Wallis operator, which is uh looks like a Cohen and equal sign. And uh it actually does. Maybe the thing that you an equal sign should be doing. Uh but it's just historically equal sign means something else. It just means assignment. So keep stepped down over this. What do you think about the pressure of leadership? It's [/INST] something that you mentioned the letter, I wrote an umpire at the time that it was a hard time actually. I mean, you know, there's been a really hard time. So it's hard. You know, you get criticized right and you get pushed and you get um, nobody loves what you do. Like any time you do anything that has impact at all, you're not universally loved, right? You get some real critics and that's an important energy because it's impossible if you do everything right, you need people to be pushing, but sometimes people can get mean people can, I prefer to give people the benefit of doubt. I don't immediately assume they have bad intentions and maybe for other, you know, maybe maybe that doesn't happen for everybody. They for whatever reason, their past experience, the people, they sometimes have bad and they immediately attribute to you bad intentions like what this come from. I mean, I definitely open to criticism, but I think you're misinterpreting the whole point because I, I would get that, you know, certainly I started anaconda, you know, I've been, sometimes I say to people, I know I'm care enough about entrepreneurship to make some open source people uncomfortable and I care enough about open source to make investors uncomfortable. So I sort of, you know, create you create kind of doubters on both sides, </s>

<s>[INST] uh, one of several controversies. Um, You spoke 20 years ago, 21 years ago now. It passed over and said that that quote the way the bible describes the exodus is not the way it happened if it happened at all. So first of all, what is exodus? What really happened? [/INST] Exodus is the liberation of the jews from Egypt and it is the central story of the jewish tradition. And as I've said numerous times in various places. I believe that it's based on a historical kernel. I think Richard Elliott Friedman may have gotten this right in his book exodus. It may have been the leave fights who left who left Israel, but historically, but the bible is not a book of history. Um, I don't believe that there were 10 plagues and a split C and and 600,000 men, which makes about two million people who actually if there were two million people would stretch all the way from Israel to um Egypt alone were liberated from Egypt. And my point in that sermon was not actually to convince people that it didn't happen. My point in that sermon was to convince people that the historicity of the exodus is not the basis of the faith of the jewish people. </s><s>[INST] Well, what does the word historicity mean? [/INST] In other words, the factuality of it? It can be true without being factual. </s><s>[INST] So you're not supposed to read it as fact? [/INST] Well, I don't I don't read it as fact. I don't read it as a history book. I said, look, I was talking again to a congregation that had many Iranians. I said, you experience the truth of the excess in your own life. There was a regime that wanted to destroy you and you miraculously escaped before it did. And so a myth um in is something that may not have happened, but is always happening. And that's what I would say about the exodus story. It's not about whether in fact there was a killing of the Firstborn, it's about. Does God deliver? Did God deliver the jews in ancient times. Does God deliver people in modern times. And that's what the issue is. And and to me it's a much the issue of faith is much deeper than the issue of fact? I wouldn't look to the Torah for my science either. </s><s>[INST] What are the limits of science in terms of what can science not tell us that the Torah can in terms of wisdom? So the historicity, the facts of things. Okay, if if the tour is much more than that is, it's like you said myth, myth is not something that happened, but something that is always happening. And so presumably it's interacting with the environment of the day to generate wisdom. [/INST] So you can live a life by Torah. I don't think you can live a life by biology. You can live a life that is informed by the values of the tradition of Judaism and those values, by the way, what science does is it contributes factuality to the conversation and also changes the reality around us. So when you study Talmud on your iphone, you know, you're still I mean, it changes the atmosphere in which you do it. But but the wisdom and the life guidance and the connection to transcendence is something that science doesn't give. </s><s>[INST] So if we now step into returning to our friend Sam Harris and step into this weird place of science and you talked about this where the kind of the current assumption of science is, It's a materialistic 1? Uh So for me, obviously ai person, this whole mind thing is fascinating. Like what the heck is going on up there. Uh So how do you explain consciousness? How do you explain free will? Do you think, first of all, do you think we have a free will? And if so what is it? [/INST] This is where we had the debate um earlier that I mentioned with Hitchens, where I think actually neither he nor the moderator understood what I was saying, which is I'm sure my inability to express it, </s><s>[INST] but he was very focused and delivered on the on the on the humor. [/INST] Yes, but what I was trying to say is if we're entirely biological creatures, if we didn't choose our genetics and we didn't choose our environment, then there is no space for free choice. I don't understand where it comes in. And I kept asking them that question, but I didn't get an answer because I don't think there is an answer. I think if you're a thorough going materialist, free will is impossible. There could be randomness. But randomness is not free will. It's randomness. I think you need a spiritual non material belief in order to get free will and that's why I believe in free will. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, you were talking about sort of Yeah. And and actually the moderator totally missed your point about the glass of water and basically how what's what's the difference? So do you free will? Because you could also if it fits into the materialistic picture, it could be just a convenient useful [/INST] quirk. You would understand this better than I I don't understand how it could be a convenient quirk materialistic. I don't understand how to explain it. We'll </s><s>[INST] know there's you know if you study perception, there's all these kinds of illusions. We are, our mind plays tricks on us to make our life easier and more efficient and survive better and all those kinds of things and so free the the feeling like we have a choice. [/INST] Oh that could be an illusion. Could be an illusion, right? But but actual free choice Free will. I don't see where you get it. If you're a materialist, I think you have to have a spiritual component by the way this I think this is also I think Sam would agree with this. Um I think he wrote about not having not having free will. Um And I think if you don't have a god and you don't have a soul that free will is a logical impossibility. </s>

<s>[INST] I didn't really think of it this way, is to build intuition about the role of data, the different characteristics of data by having two data sets are different and they reveal the differences and the differences. That's that's a really fascinating, That's a really interesting educational approach. The students love it, but not right away. [/INST] Love it later at the end. Not at the beginning, </s><s>[INST] not even immediately after. I feel like there's a deep, profound lesson about education there that you can't listen to students about whether what you're doing is the right or the wrong thing. [/INST] Well, as a wise, uh, Michael Lipman once said to me about Children, which I think applies to teaching is you have to give them what they need without bending to their will. And students were like that, you have to figure out what they need, your curator. Your whole job is to curate and to present because on their own they're not going to necessarily know where to search. So you're providing pushes in some direction and learn space and you have to give them what they need in a way that keeps them engaged enough so that they eventually discovered what they want and they get the tools they need to go and learn other things off. </s><s>[INST] What's your view? Let me put on my Russian hat, which believes that life is like Russian hats, by the way, if you have what I would like this. Those are ridiculous. Yes, but in a delightful way. But sure, what do you think is the role of, we talked about balance a little bit, what do you think is the role of hardship and education. Like I think the biggest things I've learned, like what made me fall in love with math for example, is by being bad at it until I got good at it. So like, like struggling with a problem which increased the level of joy I felt when I finally figured it out and it always felt with me with teachers, especially modern discussions of education, how can we make education more fun, more engaging, more, all those things? Or from my perspective is like, you're maybe missing the point that education, that life is suffering, education is supposed to be hard and that actually what increases the joy you feel when you actually learn something? Is that ridiculous? Do you like to see your students suffer? Okay, so this may be a point where we differ, [/INST] I suspect not going to go on. </s><s>[INST] Well, what would your answer me? I wanna hear you first. Okay, well what I was going to not answer the question, you [/INST] know what I was going to suffer? No, </s><s>[INST] no, no, no, no, no. I was I was going to say that there's, I think there's a distinction that you can make in the kind of suffering, right? So I think you can be in a mode where you're you're suffering in a hopeless way versus your suffering in a hopeful way, right? Where you're like, you can see that if you you still have, you can still imagine getting to the end right? And as long as people are in that mindset where they're struggling, but it's not a hopeless kind of struggling. That's, that's productive. I think that's really helpful. But it's struggling. Like if you break their will, if you leave them hopeless. No, they don't sure some people are gonna whatever lift themselves up by their bootstraps, but like mostly you give up and certainly takes the joy out of it and you're not going to spend a lot of time on something that brings, you know, joy. So it's a, it is a bit of a delicate balance, right? You have to thwart people in a way that they still believe that there's a way through, [/INST] right? So that's a, that we strongly agree actually. So I think, well, first off struggling and suffering aren't the same thing, right? </s><s>[INST] One. You [/INST] know, I actually appreciate the poetry and I, one of the reasons I appreciate it is that they are often the same thing and often quite different, right? So you can struggle without suffering. You can certainly suffering suffer suffer pretty easily. You don't really have to struggle to suffer. So I think that you want people to struggle, but that hope matters. You have to, they have to understand that they're going to get through it on the other side and it's very easy to confuse the two. Um, I actually think Brown University has a very, just philosophically has a very different take on the relationship with their students, particularly undergrads from a place like Georgia tech, which is, which universities better? Uh, well, I have my opinions on that. </s><s>[INST] Remember Charles said, it doesn't matter what the facts are. I'm always right. [/INST] The correct answer is that it doesn't matter. They're different. Um, </s><s>[INST] but clearly a, he went to a school, like the school where he is as an undergrad. I went to a school, specifically the same school though, it was changed a bit in the, in the intervening years. No, I was talking about your detect and I went, yeah, and I went to an undergrad place. It's a lot like the place where I work now and so it does seem like we're more familiar with these models. There's a similarity between Brown and Yale. Yeah, I think that, I think they're quite similar [/INST] and Duke </s><s>[INST] Duke has some similarities to, but it's got a little southern [/INST] drawl. You kind of worked, you sort of worked at universities that are like the places where you learned and the same would be true for me. </s><s>[INST] Are you uncomfortable venturing outside the box? Is that what you're saying, [/INST] joining out </s><s>[INST] what I'm saying, Charles is definitely, he only goes to places that have instituted the name, [/INST] It has worked out that way. Well, academic places anyway. Well, no, I was a visiting scientist at U penn or visiting visiting something that you've been. </s>

<s>[INST] you just said is complex. But if we're trying to simplify it, who do you think most likely it would be successful if we push on this group of people? Is that the doctors is that the hospitals, is that the governments of policymakers? Is it the individual patients, consumers who needs to be inspired to most likely lead to adoption or is there no simple answer. [/INST] There's no simple answer. But I think there is a lot of good people in medical system who do want to make a change and I think a lot of power will come from us as consumers because we all are consumers of future consumers of health care services and I think we can do so much more in explaining the potential and not in the hype terms and not saying that we now killed all the time. And you know, I'm really sick of reading these kind of articles which made these claims but you need to show with some examples what this implementation does and how it changes the care because I can't imagine it doesn't matter what kind of politician it is. You know, we all are susceptible to these diseases, there is no one who is free and eventually you know, we all humans and we are looking for way to alleviate the suffering and and this is one possible way where we currently are under utilizing which I think can help. </s><s>[INST] So it sounds like the biggest problems are outside of ai in terms of the biggest impact at this point. But are there any open problems in the application of Ml to oncology in general? So improving the detection or any other creative methods, whether it's on the detection segmentation of the vision perception side or some other clever of inference. Yeah. What in general, in your in your view or the open problems in this space. [/INST] So I just want to mention that besides detection and that the area of what I am kind of quite active and I think it's really an increasingly important area in healthcare is drug design because uh you know, it's fine if you detect something early, but you still need to get, you know, to get drugs and new drugs for these conditions and today, all of the drug design ml is non existent that we don't have any drug that was developed by the male model or even developed by at least even you that Ml model plays a significant role. I think uh this area with all the new ability to generate molecules with desired properties to do in silica screening uh is really a big open area to be totally honest with, you know, when we are doing diagnostics and imaging primarily taking the ideas that were developed for other areas and you're applying them with some adaptation. The area of, you know, drug design is very technically interesting and exciting area. You need to work a lot with graphs and Capture various three d properties. There are lots and lots of opportunities to be technically creative and um I think there are a lot of open questions in this area, you know, we're already getting a lot of success is even, you know, with the kind of the first generation of these models, but there is much more new creative things that you can do and what very nice to see is it actually the you know the more powerful the more interesting models actually do do better. So there is a place to innovate in machine learning in this area ah and some of these techniques are really unique to, let's say to you know, grow up generation and other things. So </s><s>[INST] what just to interrupt real quick, I'm sorry uh graph generation or graphs drug discovery in general. What's how do you discover a drug? Is this chemistry, is this trying to predict different chemical reactions or is it some kind of what the graphs even represent in this space? [/INST] Oh sorry </s><s>[INST] what's the [/INST] drug? Okay so let's say you think there are many different types of drugs but let's say you're going to talk about small molecules because I think today the majority of drugs small molecules, so small molecule is a graph. The molecule is just where the node uh in the graph is an atom and then you have the bones. So it's really a graph representation. If you look at it in two D. Correct? You can do it's really but let's say well let's keep it simple and stick into the um so pretty much my understanding today how it is done a scale in the companies you're without machine learning you have high throughput screening. So you know that you are interested to get certain biological activity of the compounds. So you kinda lot of compounds like maybe hundreds of thousands, some really big number of compounds. You identify some compounds which have the right activity. And then at this point, you know, the chemists come and they're trying to now to optimize this original heat, two different properties that you wanted to be maybe soluble, You want to decrease toxicity. You wanted to decrease the side effects. Are those </s><s>[INST] side again to drop, can that be done in simulation or just by looking at the molecules or do you need to actually run reactions in real labs with lab? [/INST] So there is, so when you do high throughput screening, you really do screening, it's in the lab, it's really the lab screening you screen the molecules correct screening, you just check them for certain property in </s><s>[INST] the physical space in the physical world. Like actually there's a machine probably that's doing something that actually running [/INST] actually running reactions. So there is a process where you can run and that's why it's called high strung border, become cheaper and faster to do it. And very big number of molecules, you run the screening, you identify potential um you know, potential good starts and then where the chemists come in who have done it many times and then they can try to look at it and say how can you change the molecular all to get the desired uh profile in terms of all other properties. So maybe how do we make it mobile active and so on and there, you know, the creativity of the chemists really um is one that determines the success of this design. Uh because again they have a lot of domain knowledge of what works, how do you decrease the CCD and so on and that's what they do. So all the drugs that are currently, you know in the FDA approved drugs, even drugs that are in clinical trials, they are designed using these uh the main experts which goes through this combinatorial space of molecules and graphs or whatever And find the right one or adjusted to be the right ones. </s>

<s>[INST] try to actually get into this at this question of free will and conscious will. I have my intuitions here are I mean, I'm a human being. It's it's really I mean I approached it from two aspects from one as a human being and to from a robotics perspective and I wonder how big the gap between the two is? Um And that's that's that's a useful from an engineering perspective is another perspective that's useful and helpful to take on this. It's like are we really so different? You and I the robot and the human um we'd like to believe so, but you don't exactly see where the difference is. [/INST] Research into ai and just the fact that it's entered our consciousness at the level of of stories and film and all of these questions that it's raising um is facing us with that it's almost like the zombie experiment experiment is coming to life for us. You know, we're we're more and more looking at human like systems and wondering is there an experience in there and how can we figure that out? Um When you were talking about your experience of looking at robots, it reminds me of how I for many years have been looking at plants um because the plant behavior and actually this is the example, maybe we'll just try it out. It may not work. This is an example I was thinking of recently because I was reading back on the work of Marc Jaffe who did this research with pea tendrils. I'm sure he did many other plant studies, but this is the one I was reading about and I'm hoping this analogy, I'll just set it up. I'm hoping that this analogy will be something that we can keep coming back to as we move forward because you know, as we shake up our intuitions and get confused and then we come back to our intuitions and say no that just can't be. I think this analogy might might be helpful but </s><s>[INST] what kind of [/INST] pea tendrils? Pea? A pea plant has these tendrils, you can you can picture them. They coil so I don't I don't know what year this research was done, I'm I'm guessing in the 80s but </s><s>[INST] but have been around long before that. [/INST] Yes of course. And then the research may have happened long </s><s>[INST] before doing the research on the humans, but that's another [/INST] thing right, pea tendrils um as a system. Generally there are a few more things they can do but generally they can behave in two ways. They can grow in a straight line slowly or they can grow in this coil form more quickly. And what happens is when they are growing in a straight manner and they encounter a branch or a pole or something else that it can wrap itself around to gain more stability when it senses a branch there that gives it the cue to start growing at a more rapid pace and to start coiling instead of growing straight. So it has these two behaviors as a system, it's capable of growing straight and it's capable of coiling. One interesting thing actually, I'll just add this, it's not totally relevant, but one interesting thing is um marc Jaffe is work. So he um cut a pea tendril. He was curious to see if it could do this on its own separate from the rest of the plant. So he cut a pea tendril off the um if you keep it in a moist warm environment it will continue to behave in these ways. It will continue to coil if he he noticed that if he touched one end of it, if he rubbed one side of it that gave it enough of a cue that it would start to coil and then he noticed that it needed light to perform this action. So in the dark when he rubbed the the edge of the tendril it did not coil um in the light, it would and then he recognized this further fact which was that the pea tendril that he rubbed in the dark that was still straight. If he brought it out into the light and this could be hours later it would start to coil. It has a primitive form of memory where it's it's has the sensation and then it holds onto that information and as soon as there's light it acts on that. </s><s>[INST] But also in the kind of distributed intelligence. Because you can separate it from the main, [/INST] in </s><s>[INST] the main part. Like if you chop off a human arm, it's not gonna keep growing [/INST] even if you keep it in a moist warm environment, </s><s>[INST] it's not going [/INST] to reach out for the cup of coffee when you come in with Starbucks </s><s>[INST] maybe maybe in the correct environment maybe we just haven't found the environment. But anyway, that's pretty amazing. So [/INST] that's a separate fact. But anyway, so so if you just use the analogy of a pea tendrils and if you imagine which is something I like to do a lot. If you imagine um this plant has some kind of conscious experience. Of course it doesn't have complex thought. It doesn't have anything like a human experience. But if it were possible for a plant to have some felt experience, you can imagine that when it comes into contact with a branch and starts to coil that that feeling could be one of deciding to do that or that it feels good to do that or kind of wanting. I mean that's that's too complex. That's that's anthropomorphizing. But there's a way in which you could imagine this pea tendril under those circumstances, suddenly wants to start coiling. </s>

<s>[INST] Do you still speak? Question [/INST] I do, </s><s>[INST] and [/INST] it would be a big mystery for everybody and you have an advantage on me because your native language as well </s><s>[INST] for people wondering the english speakers in the audience, you're really missing a lot from the few sentences we sat there. Um yeah, it's, it's a fascinating language that stretches actually geographically across a very large part of this world. So there you are in 1987 exchange student in the soviet Union, what was that world world like? [/INST] Well, that was absolutely fascinating in that period because it's the period. Um that just around the time of the peak of perestroika Mikhail Gorbachev's role as president. Well, he wasn't quite present at that point. It's all Secretary general of the Communist Party of the soviet Union, trying to transform the whole place. So I arrived there in september of 1987 just as Gorbachev and Reagan sign the I. N. F. Treaty was just within, you know, kind of weeks of them about to sign that, which really ends that whole period that had shaped my entire teenage years of the end of the Euro missile crisis by finally having agreement on, you know, basically the reduction and constraints on intermediate nuclear forces. And also at this point, Gorbachev is opening the soviet union up. So we got all kinds of opportunities to travel in ways that we wouldn't have done before. Um not just, you know, in Moscow, which is where I was studying at the transit center to go to the caucuses to Central Asia went all the way to Khabarovsk, in the Russian far east, all the way around, you know, kind of Moscow. And there was at this point, it was also the christian euros, which has become very important. Now, this is the anniversary, the 1000th anniversary of the christianization of um of Russia, which of course has become a massive obsession of Vladimir Putin's, but, you know, 9 88 because I was there 87 to 88 at this point, the Russian Orthodox Church is undergoing a revival from being repressed during the soviet period, you certainly have the Church stepping out as a non governmental organization and engaging in discussions with people about the future of religion. So that was, you know, something that I wasn't expecting to to witness also, I mean being in Moscow, this is the cultural capital of a vast empire at this point, I've never lived in a major city before, it's the first big city I lived in, I've never been to the opera, you know, I the first time I got an opera at the bolshoi and I've never seen a ballet, I mean, I was not exactly steeped in high classical culture, kind of growing up in a, a mining region, you know, there's very limited opportunities for this kind of thing. I've been in a youth orchestra and the youth choir, my parents signed me up for everything, you know, they possibly could education wise, but it wasn't exactly any exposure to this. So, you know, I was kind of a standard by the sort of wealth of the cultural experience that one could have in Moscow. But the main thing was I was really struck by how the soviet union was on its last legs because this was Moscow, you know, I got this image about what it would look like. I was quite, to be honest terrified at first about what I would see that the big nuclear superpower. And since I got there, it was just this like as if a huge weight that I'd been carrying around for years and my teenage years just disappeared because it just ordinary people in ordinary place, not doing great, this is the period of, you know what they call deficit, you know, so the period of deficits, but there's no food in the shops, there was, you know, very little in terms of commodities, because the supply and demand, parts of the economic equation out of work, because it was a total central planning, you know, you'd go into, you know, a shop that was supposed to sell boots and there'd be just one pirate boots all in the same size and the same color. I actually looked out because one side was in this um Hungarian boot shop, that was right next to where my whole of residents was, and I was looking for a new pair of boots and every single pair of boots in the shop with my size and they're all women's boots and men's boots at all, you know, because there has been an oversupply of boots and that size production, but you could really kind of see here that there was something wrong. And you know, in the north of England, everything was closed down. The shops were shuttered because there was no demand because everybody lost their jobs was massive employment when I went off to university in 1984 90% youth unemployment In the UK, meaning that when kids left school they didn't have something else to go onto unless they got to university or vocational training or an apprenticeship and most people were still looking, you know, kind of months out of leaving school. And so shops were closed because people didn't have any money, you know, had 50% male unemployment in some of the towns as the steelworks closed down. And the wagon works for the railways, for example, in my area, but in Moscow, people, in theory did have money, but there was just, there was nothing to buy. Also, the place was falling apart, literally, I saw massive sinkholes open up in the street balconies fall off buildings, you know, one accident after another and then there was, you know, this real kind of sense, even though the vibrancy and excitement and hope of the Gorbachev period, a real sense of the soviet union had lost its way. And of course, it was only a year or so after I left from that exchange program and I already started with my degree program in soviet studies at Harvard, that the soviet Union basically unraveled and it really did unravel. It wasn't like it collapsed. It was basically that there was so many debates that Gorbachev had sparked off about how to reform the country, how to put it on a different path that, you know, no one was in agreement and especially all these fights, and, uh debates and disputes among the elites at the center as well as, you know, basically a loss of faith in the system in the periphery and among the general population that in fact pulled it apart and, and of course in 1991 you get Boris Yeltsin as the head of the Russian federation, then a constituent part of the soviet union, together with the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, all of these being individual parts of the soviet union getting together and agreeing, essentially ending it and Gorbachev, you know, so basically, I'm there at the peak of this whole kind of period of experimentation and thinking about the future within a couple of years, it's all kind of gone and it's on a different track entirely. </s>

<s>[INST] When was the stagnation book? [/INST] 2011, Yes, it was the first of the stagnation books. In fact, </s><s>[INST] it's very interesting. Uh [/INST] but even then I said this is temporary And I was predicting it would be gone in about 20 years time. I'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction, like 2030, but I think we're actually gonna beat that. </s><s>[INST] So you think the United States might still be on top of the world for the rest of the century in terms of its economic uh economic growth, impact on the world, Scientific innovation, all those kinds of things [/INST] that's too long to predict. But I'm bullish on America in general. </s><s>[INST] Got it. Um Speaking of being bullish in America, the opposite of that is uh you know, we talked about capitalism, talked about Iran and her Russian roots. What do you think about communism? Why doesn't it work? What is that the implementation? Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling or is it just a fundamentally flawed system? [/INST] Well, communism is like capitalism. The words mean many things to different people. You could argue my life as a tenured professor comes closer to communism. Anything that the human race is seen and I would argue it works pretty well. But look if you mean the soviet union, it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of decentralized set of incentives that were destructive rather than value maximizing it wasn't even central planning, much less communism. So paul, craig roberts and colony were correct in their descriptions of the soviet system. Think of it as weird mixes of barter and malfunctioning incentives and being very good at a whole bunch of things. But in terms of progress, innovation and consumer goods, it really being quite a failure. Uh And now I wouldn't call that communism, but that's what I think of the system the Soviets had and it required an ever increasing pile of lies that both alienated people but created an elite that by the end of the thing no longer believed in the system itself, or even thought they were doing better by being crooks. Then by just say moving to Switzerland and being an upper middle class individual, like you would have a higher standard of living by Gorbachev's time. Not Gorbachev, but if you're number 30 in the hierarchy, you're better off as a middle class person in Switzerland and that of course did not prove sustainable. </s><s>[INST] And so it's, what is it, a momentum of bureaucracy, system like that just builds up or you lose control of the the original vision and that naturally happens, it's just people [/INST] and you can't use normal profit and loss and price incentives. So you get all prices are most prices that do low right shortages everywhere. People trade favors, You have this culture of bartered bribes sexual favors are, you know family friends and you get more and more of that and you over time lose more and more of the information in the prices and quantities and practices and norms you had and that sort of slowly decays. And then by the end no one is believing in it. That would be my take. But again, you're, you're the expert here. </s><s>[INST] The Russian scholar, Well, perhaps no more an expert than nine grand. Uh, it's more personal than it is scholarly a historic. So Stalin held power for 30 years. Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years where you could argue he took a little break. Uh, [/INST] but not much. He was still holding power I think. </s><s>[INST] And it's still possible now with the new uh Uh constitution that he could hold power from longer than Stalin 30 longer than 30 years. What do you think about the man, the state of affairs in Russia? Um, in general? The system they have, there is there something interesting to you as an economist, as a human being [/INST] about? Everything is interesting. I mean, he would he would be part of my take as you know that the Russian economy starting what 1999 2000 has really quite a few years of super excellent growth and Putin is still riding on that more or less coincides with his rises. The truly focal figure on the scene Since then pretty recently, they've had a bunch of years of negative 4-5% growth in a row, which is terrible. The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels. But the structural problem is this you need a concordance across economic power, social power, political power, they don't have to be allocated identically, but they have to be allocated consistently. And the Russian system under Putin from almost the beginning has never been able to have that. That ultimately his incentives are to steer the system where the economic power is in a small number of hands, in a non diversified way. The system won't deliver sustainable gains and living standards anymore. Ever. The way it's set up now, that with fossil fuel prices go up, they'll have some good years for sure. And that is really quite structural what has gone wrong. And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin, but you've got to start with those structural problems and that's why it's just not going to work. But he had all those good years in the beginning. So, the number of Russians say, who live here or in Russia, who love Putin and it's sincere, they're not just afraid of being, you know, dragged away like that's a real phenomenon. Uh, </s>

<s>[INST] kind of thing. You wrote a blog post titled, What is Chad GPT doing and why does it work? We've been talking about this, but can we just step back and link on this question? What's Chad GPT doing? What are these a bunch of billion parameters trained on a large number of words? Why does it seem to work again? Is it because to the point you made that there's laws of language that can be discovered by such a process? Is there something? [/INST] Well, let's talk about sort of the low level of what Chad GPT is doing. I mean, ultimately, you give it a prompt. It's trying to work out what should the next word be, </s><s>[INST] which is wild. Isn't it surprising to you that this kind of low level dumb training procedure can create something syntactically correct first? And then semantically correct. [/INST] The thing that has been sort of a story of my life is realizing that simple rules can do much more complicated things than you imagine. That something that starts simple and starts simple to describe, can grow a thing that is vastly more complicated than you can imagine. Honestly, It's taken me, I've sort of been thinking about this now 40 years or so, and it always surprises me. I mean, even, for example, in our physics project, sort of thinking about the whole universe growing from these simple rules, I still resist, because I keep on thinking, how can something really complicated arise from something that simple? It just seems wrong, but yet, the majority of my life I've kind of known from things I've studied that this is the way things work. Yes, it is wild that it's possible to write a word at a time and produce a coherent essay, for example, but it's worth understanding kind of how that's working. If it was going to say the cat sat on thee, what's the next word? Okay, so how does it figure out the next word? It's seen a trillion words written on the internet, and it's seen the cat sat on the floor, the cat sat on the sofa, the cat sat on the whatever. The minimal thing to do is just say, let's look at what we saw on the internet. We saw 10,000 examples of the cat sat on the, what was the most probable next word? Let's just pick that out and say that's the next word. That's kind of what it, at some level, is trying to do. Now, the problem is there isn't enough text on the internet to, if you have a reasonable length of prompt, that specific prompt will never have occurred on the internet. As you kind of go further, there just won't be a place where you could have trained, where you could just just worked out probabilities from what was already there. If you say two plus two, there'll be a zillion examples of two plus two equaling four and a very small number of examples of two plus two equals five and so on, and you can pretty much know what's going to happen. Then the question is, well, if you can't just work out from examples, what's going to happen? Just no probabilistic, for example, what's going to happen? You have to have a model. This kind of an idea, this idea of making models of things, is an idea that really, I don't know, I think Galileo probably was one of the first people who sort of worked this out. I mean, it's kind of like, I think I gave an example of that, the book I wrote about Chachibitee, where it's kind of like Galileo was dropping cannonballs off the different floors of the tower of Pisa, and it's like, okay, you drop a cannonball off this floor, you drop a cannonball off this floor. You miss floor five or something for whatever reason, but you know the time it took the cannonball to fall to the ground from floors one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, for example. Then the question is, can you work out? Can you make a model which figures out how long did it take the ball? How long would it take the ball to fall to the ground from the floor you didn't explicitly measure? The thing Galileo realized is that you can use math. You can use mathematical formulas to make a model for how long it will take the ball to fall. Now the question is, well, okay, you want to make a model for, for example, something much more elaborate, like you've got this arrangement of pixels, and is this arrangement of pixels an A or a B? Does it correspond to something we'd recognize as an A or B? You can make a similar kind. Each pixel is like a parameter in some equation, and you could write down this giant equation where the answer is either A or 1 or 2, A or B. The question is then, what kind of a model successfully reproduces the way that we humans would conclude that this is an A and this is a B? If there's a complicated extra tail on the top of the A, would we then conclude something different? This is the type of model that maps well into the way that we humans make distinguishes about things, and the big kind of meta discovery is neural nets are such a model. It's not obvious they would be such a model. It could be that human distinctions are not captured, you know, we could try searching around for a type of model, that could be a mathematical model, it could be some model based on something else that captures kind of typical human distinctions about things. It turns out this model that actually is very much the way that we think the architecture of brains works, that perhaps not surprisingly, that model actually corresponds to the way we make these distinctions. The core next point is that the kind of model, this neural net model, makes distinctions and generalizes things in sort of the same way that we humans do it. That's why when you say, the cat sat on the green blank, even though it didn't see many examples of the cat sat on the green, whatever, it can make a ... Or the odd vox sat on the green, whatever, I'm sure that particular sentence does not occur on the internet. It has to make a model that concludes what ... It has to kind of generalize from the actual examples that it's seen. That's the fact is that neural nets generalize in the same kind of way that we humans do. If we were the aliens might look at our neural net generalizations and say, that's crazy. That thing, when you put that extra little dot on the A, that isn't an A anymore. That messed the whole thing up, but for us humans, we make distinctions which seem to correspond to the kinds of distinctions that neural nets make. The thing that is just amazing to me about chat GPT is how similar the structure it has is to the very original way people imagined neural nets might work back in 1943. There's a lot of detailed engineering, great cleverness, but it's really the same idea. In fact, even the sort of elaborations of that idea where people said, let's put in some actual particular structure to try and make the neural net more elaborate to be very clever about it, most of that didn't matter. When you train this neural net, the one thing, this kind of transformer architecture, this attention idea, that really has to do with does every one of these neurons connect to every other neuron or is it somehow causally localized, so to speak? Is it like we're making a sequence of words and the words depend on previous words rather than just everything can depend on everything? That seems to be important in just organizing things so that you don't have a sort of a giant mess. But the thing worth understanding about what is chat GPT in the end, I mean, what is a neural net in the end? A neural net in the end is each neuron has a ... It's taking inputs from a bunch of other neurons. It's eventually going to have a numerical value. It's going to compute some number and it's saying, I'm going to look at the neurons above me. It's kind of a series of layers. It's going to look at the neurons above me and it's going to say, what are the values of all those neurons? Then it's going to add those up and multiply them by these weights and then it's going to apply some function that says if it's bigger than zero or something, then make it one and otherwise make it zero or some slightly more complicated function. You know very well how this works. </s>

<s>[INST] out. From [/INST] the outside in means from the surface to the bottom of the ocean, uh from the inside out means from the bottom of the ocean to the surface. So life on the surface is pretty brutal. Life obviously evolved in the water. And then there was an out of water event, but basically before it exited, it was clearly in the water, which is a much nicer and shielded environment. </s><s>[INST] So just to be clear on the surface, are you referring to the [/INST] surface of the sea or the bottom of the sea </s><s>[INST] versus the bottom? Uh, obviously, and you're saying life on the surface is uh it's harsh [/INST] outside the life outside the water is horrible. It takes huge amounts of evolutionary innovations to sustain living outside the water? </s><s>[INST] Well, it's so interesting. Why? Why is that? So it's easier to, life is easier in the water maybe? See I'm telling you [/INST] Don't we're 70% water. No dolphins went back into the water. </s><s>[INST] Really, ma'am. Of course, interesting. Well, again there might be smarter. They went back like screw [/INST] This. So, so if you if you basically think about the fact that we are 70% water we're basically transporting the sea with us outside the sea. You know, if we if we don't have water for about 24 hours were dry and if you look at life under the sea, I mean I don't know if you're a diver, but when you go diving, your brain explodes again. When I say the boring life forms is what we see all the time. Like tetrapods. I mean what a stupid boring body plan. Seriously like just go diving and you'll see that a tiny little minority of the stuff under the sea, under the surface of the sea is actually tetrapods. It's like, you know, snails with all kinds of crazy appendages and colors and you know, round things and five way symmetric things and you know, eight way symmetric things. All kinds of crazy body plans. And only the tetrapod fish managed to get out and then they gave rise to all the boring plants we kind of see today of basically, you know, humans with four limbs, birds with four limbs, lizard with four limbs and you know, right, it's kind of boring if you look at by comparison, life underwater is teeming with diversity. So now let's roll back the clock and basically say, where did life in the ocean come from? </s><s>[INST] From the surface or from the bottom? Exactly. [/INST] So basically life on the surface is one option. And then the idea there is that there's tide with the moon and the sun sort of causing all this movement and this movement is basically causing nutrients to sort of, you know, coalesce and you know, bounce around etcetera. That's one option. The second option, massive amount of energy under, you know, from from from are the core of our planet basically exploited. Leading to these basic ingredients of life forms and what are the basic ingredients, metabolism, being able to take energy from the environment and put it as part of yourself metabolism. It basically means transformation again in the greek. Uh it basically means taking stuff from, you know, like nutrients or energy source or anything and then making it your own. The 2nd 1 is compartmentalization. If there's no notion of self, there can't be evolution, you have to know where your own boundaries end and where the non self boundaries begin. And that's basically the lipid bi layer nowadays, which is extremely simple to to form. It's basically just a bunch of lipids and then they eventually just self organized into a membrane. So that's a very natural way of forming itself. And then the third component is replication replication doesn't need to be self replication it could be a helps make more of B. B. Helps make more of C. And C. Helps make more of a any kind of self reinforcement is what you need to ignite the process of evolution after you've ignited that process. You know, I don't wanna say all hell breaks loose but all paradise breaks loose. So basically you then boom you know have life going and the moment you have a B. C. Some kind of thing looping back onto a. You can make modifications and you can improve and then you let natural selection work. </s><s>[INST] Is there some element of that? That's like like uh like some state representation that stores information. Like maybe [/INST] I should say information. </s><s>[INST] Absolutely. That's part of [/INST] life. We like to think of life as the information propagation which is D. N. A. The messenger which is RNA. And then the action which is protein. So basically D. N. A. We think is an essential part of life. That's where the storage is. And therefore that early life forms must have had some kind of storage medium. DNA. If you look at how life actually evolved, DNA was invented much later proteins were invented later and RNA was fine by itself. Thank you very much in an R. In the world. So the early version of life as we know it today was. In fact RNA molecules performing all of the functions the RNA molecule itself was the protein activator by creating three dimensional folds through self actualization </s><s>[INST] self what? [/INST] Self hybridization. So basically the same way that DNA molecules can hybridize with themselves and basically form the double helix. The single stranded RNA molecules can form partial double helix is in various places creating structure as if you had a long string with complementary parts. And you could then sort of design kind of like origami like structures that will fold onto themselves and then you can make any shape from that that early are in a world eventually got to replication where enzymes encoded in RNA would replicate are in itself. And then that process basically kicked off evolution and that process of evolution then led to major innovations. The 1st Innovation was translation. So you start with an RNA molecule and you translate it into another kind of form. And that's the first kind of encoding you're like well, do you need some kind of code? Yeah, but the code was in fact one thing it was conflated with the actuators. The actuators were separated from the code only later on. So you first had the self replicating code which was also the actuator and then you kind of have a functional ization partitioning of the functional ization, a sub functional ization of the proteins that are now going to be the workhorse of life. But they're not self replicating the code remains the RNA. So the most beautiful and most complex RNA machine known to man is the ribosome. The ribosome is this massive factory that is able to translate RNA into protein. The ribosome. I mean if you if you want I don't know, divine intervention in the history of life. The ribosome is it? That's one of the great </s>

<s>[INST] kind of a difficult topic and let's see if we can talk about it, figure it out. But so with the help of a I more and more we can create versions of ourselves versions of reality that are in some ways more beautiful than actual reality. Uh you know, and uh some of the creative effort there is as part of doing this, creating this illusion. So of course this is inevitable. But how do you think we should adjust this human beings to live in this digital world? That's partly artificial. That's better then? Uh the world that we lived in 100 years ago when you didn't have instagram and facebook versions of ourselves. And the unlike [/INST] this is sort of showing off better versions of ourselves. </s><s>[INST] We're using the tooling of modifying the images or even with artificial intelligence ideas of deep fakes and creating adjusted or fake versions of ourselves in reality. [/INST] I I think it's an interesting question, well sort of historical bent on this. So I actually wonder if 18th century aristocrats who commissioned famous painters to paint portraits of them had portraits that were slightly nicer than they actually looked in fact well played. So human desire to put your best foot forward has always been true. I think it's interesting you you sort of framed it in two ways. One is if we can imagine alternate realities and visualize them. Is that a good or bad thing in the old days, you do it with storytelling and words and poetry, which still resides sometimes on websites. But uh, you know, we've become a very visual culture in particular In the 19th century were very much a text-based culture. People would read long tracks. Political speeches were very long. Nowadays, everything is very kind of quick and visual and snappy. I think it depends on how harmless your intent. It's a lot of it's about intent. So if you have a somewhat flattering photo that you pick out of the photos that you have in your inbox to say this is what I look like. It's, it's probably fine. If someone's going to judge you by how you look, then they'll decide soon enough when they meet you whether the reality, you know, um, I think where it can be harmful as if people hold themselves up to an impossible standard, which they then feel bad about themselves for not meeting. I think that's definitely can be an issue. And uh, but I think the ability to imagine and visualize an alternate reality which sometimes sometimes of which he then go off and built later, um, can be a wonderful thing. Two people can imagine architectural styles, which they then, you know, have a startup, make a fortune and then build a house that looks like their favorite video game. Is that a terrible thing. I think uh I used to worry about exploration actually that part of the joy of going to the moon when I was a tiny child. I remember it and grainy black and white was to know what it would look like when you got there. And I think now we have such good graphics for knowing for visualizing the experience before it happens, that I slightly worried that it may take the edge off actually wanting to go, you know what I mean? Because we've seen it on tv, we kind of, you know, by the time we finally get to mars we go, yeah, it's mars if that's what it looks like, but then, you know, the outer exploration. I mean, I think Pluto was a fantastic recent discovery where nobody had any idea what it looked like and it was just breathtaking in a varied and beautiful. So I think expanding the ability of the human toolkit to imagine and communicate on balance is a good thing. I think there are abuses. We definitely take them seriously and try to discourage them. Um, I think there's a parallel side where the public needs to know what's possible through events like this, right? So that you don't believe everything you read in print anymore and it may over time become true of images as well or you need multiple sets of evidence to really believe something rather than a single media asset. So I think it's a constantly evolving thing that's been true forever. There's a famous story about anne of Cleves and Henry the Eighth where luckily for an they didn't get married right. Um So all they got married and what's the story? So whole bind went and painted a picture and then Henry the eighth wasn't pleased and you know, history doesn't record whether and was pleased, but I think she was pleased not to be married more than a day or something. So, I mean this has gone on for a long time, but I think it's just part of the magnification of human capability. </s><s>[INST] You've kind of built up an amazing research environment here. Research culture research lab and you've written at The Secret to a thriving research labs interns. Can you unpack that a [/INST] little bit? Absolutely. So a couple of reasons, as you see looking at my personal history, there are certain ideas you bond with at a certain stage of your career and you tend to keep revisiting them through time. Um if you're lucky, you pick one that doesn't just get solved in the next five years and then you're sort of out of luck. So I think a constant influx of new people brings new ideas with it from the point of view of industrial research, because a big part of what we do is really taking those ideas to the point where they can ship us very robust features. Mhm. You end up investing a lot in a particular idea and if you're not careful, people can get too conservative in what they choose to do next, knowing that the product teams will want it. And in turns let you explore the more fanciful or unproven ideas in a relatively lightweight way, ideally leading to new publications for the internet and for the researcher. And it gives you then a portfolio from which to draw, which idea am I going to then try to take all the way through to being robust in the next year or two to ship. So it sort of becomes part of the funnel. It's also a great way for us to identify future full time researchers. Many of our greatest researchers were former interns. It builds a bridge to university department so we can get to know and build an enduring relationship with the professors and we often do academic give funds to as well as an acknowledgement of the value of the interns ad and their own collaborations. So it's sort of a virtuous cycle and then the long term legacy of a great research lab hopefully will be not only the people who stay, but the ones who move through and then go off and carry that same model to other companies. And so we believe strongly in industrial research and how it can complement academia and we hope that this model will continue to propagate and be invested in by other companies, which makes it harder for us to recruit of course, but you know, that's a sign of success and a rising tide lifts all ships in that sense. </s>

<s>[INST] and they're able to bring that experience back uh and be able to describe it. [/INST] Yeah. But but one of the to a degree but one of the hallmarks going back to William James of describing a mystical experiences, the inevitability. And so even though it's ineffable, you know, people try as far as they can to describe it. Well, when you get the real deal they'll say and even say though they say a lot of helpful things to help you describe the landscape, they'll say no matter what I say, I'm still not even coming anywhere close to what this was like. The language is completely failing. And I like to joke that even though it's it's ineffable and we're researchers. So we try to f it up by asking them to describe the experience. </s><s>[INST] Hello? Good one. But to bring it back a little bit. So for that particular study on tobacco, what was the results? What was the conclusions in terms of the impact of psilocybin on their addiction. [/INST] So in that pilot study was very it was very small and it wasn't a randomized study. So it was limited. The only question we could really answer was is this worthy enough of follow up? And the answer to that was abso freakin lutely because the success rates were so high, 80%. Biologically confirmed, successful at six months that held up to 60% biologically confirmed. Abstinent at two at an average of 2.5 years. A very long. Yeah. And so I mean the best that's been reported in the literature for smoking cessation is in the upper 50% and that's with not one but two medications for a couple of months followed by regular cognitive behavioral therapy where you're coming in once a week or once every few weeks for an entire year. And so </s><s>[INST] but this is [/INST] very heavy and </s><s>[INST] this is just like a few uses of society. [/INST] So this was three doses of suicide over a total course including preparation everything, a 15 week period where there is mainly like uh for most part 11 meeting a week and then the three sessions are within that. And so it's and we scaled that back and the more the study we're doing right now, which I can tell you about which is a randomized controlled trial. Um but but it's uh the yeah the original um You know pilot study was you know these 15 people. So given the like the positive signal from the first study telling us that it was a worthy pursuit, we hustled up some money to actually be able to afford a larger trial. So it's randomizing 80 people to get either one psilocybin session when we've narrowed. We we've scaled that down from 3 to 1 mainly because we're doing FMR I neuroimaging before and after. And it made it more experimentally complex to have multiple sessions. Um but one psilocybin session versus uh nicotine patch using the FDA approved label, like standard use of the nicotine patch. So it's randomized. 40 people get randomized to psilocybin one session. 40 people get nicotine patch and they all get the same cognitive behavioral therapy for the standard talk therapy. And we've scaled it down somewhat. So there's less weekly meetings, but it's been in the same ballpark. And right now we're still um uh uh study is still ongoing. And in fact, we just recently started recruiting again, we paused for Covid. Now we're starting back up with some protections like masks and whatnot. But um uh right now for the 44 people Who have gotten through the one year follow up. And so that includes 22 from each of the two groups. The success rates are extremely high for the psilocybin group. It's 59% have been biologically confirmed as smoke free at one year after their quit date. And that compares to 27% for the nicotine patch, which by the way is extremely good for the nicotine patch compared to previous research. So the results could change because it's ongoing but we're mostly done and it's still looking extremely positive. So if anyone's interested they have to be sort of be in commuting distance to the Baltimore area. But you know, </s><s>[INST] to participate [/INST] right, right to participate. </s><s>[INST] This is uh this is a good moment to bring up something. I think a lot of what you talked about is super interesting and I think a lot of people listening to this, so now it's Anywhere from 300 to 600,000 people for just a regular podcast. I know a lot of them will be very interesting what you're saying and they're going to look you up. They're going to find your email and they're going to write you a long email about some of the interesting things I found in any of your papers, how should people contact you? What is the best way for that? Would you recommend you're super busy guy. You have a million things going on. What how should people communicate with you? [/INST] Thanks for bringing this up. This is I'm glad to get the opportunity to address this. If someone is interested in participating in a study, the best thing to do is go to the website of </s><s>[INST] the study or of uh like yeah, which website. [/INST] So we have all of our civil side and study. So everything we have is up in on one website and then we linked to the different study websites but Hopkins psychedelic dot org. So everything we do or you don't remember that just you know, go to your favorite search engine and look up johns Hopkins psychedelic and you're going to find one of the first hits is going to be our is this website and there's going to be links to the smoking study and all of our other studies. If there's no link to it there, we don't have a study on it now. And if you're interested in psychedelic research more broadly you can look up, you know like at another university that might be closer to you and there's a handful of them now across the country and there's some in europe that have studies going on but you can at least in the U. S. You can look at clinical trials dot gov and look up the term psilocybin. And in fact optionally people even in europe can register their trial on there. That's a good way to find studies. But for our research rather than emailing me like a more efficient way is to go straight and you can do that first the first phase of screening there's some questions online and then someone will get back in touch with you. Um but I do already started. You know and I you know I expect it's like going to increase but I'm already at the level where my simple limited mind and limited capacity is already, I I sometimes failed to get back to emails. I mean I'm trying to respond to my colleagues, my mentees, all these things, my responsibilities and as many of the people just enquiring about, I want to go to graduate school, I'm interested in this. I had this, I have a daughter that took us like a duck and she's having trouble. It's like I try to respond to those, but sometimes I just simply can't get to all of it already </s>

<s>[INST] How do you figure that out? How do you figure out who to trust in your life? You're joe Rogan. A lot of people want to be close to the CIA agents. FsB agents. People that were [/INST] friends with a former CIA agent. Mike baker has been on my podcast a bunch of times, </s><s>[INST] allegedly former former think about that. [/INST] He's air quotes former. Yeah. I don't believe his former, I'm sure he has some connection to him. I also believe he's a good guy but I gained a lot of very intelligent and well informed insights from him as to how things work and you know, I think, yeah, I'm sure he doesn't tell me everything about everything. But he's told me enough where I think I can understand things better from talking to him about how the way you know the elves work under the machine. </s><s>[INST] What about friends? How do you know if you can trust? [/INST] Well most of my friends are old friends. </s><s>[INST] Time. So time is the thing like just going through ship together [/INST] and see how much, you know, first of all comics like yeah, comics are pretty trustworthy. The good ones, the really good ones. There's not that many of us, If there's 1000 professional comics on Earth, I'd be stunned, I'd be stunned. I don't even think there's 1000 like real professionals who you get booked all the time, headline weekends at clubs and theaters and arenas and then there's levels to that, right? There's like the guys who are middle acts kind of like barely scrape by and then like, how many headliners are there? How many, like, really funny headliners that I would say, you know, if you lex you tell me you're gonna be in Cincinnati hey, this person's playing at this club, should I go see them and be like, you know, like, how many people would I give the recommendation to and then how many people sell out theaters? How many people sell out arenas? How many? There's not that fucking many. So those people like at the levels of comedy where you, you know, you've been doing stand up for 20 years, there's a certain amount of honesty and a certain amount of understanding of each other that we all have. </s><s>[INST] That that process of becoming a great comic is like humbling in a way, like jiu jitsu is humbling, [/INST] very similar </s><s>[INST] like this, you've taken you've eaten so much sh it that that that somehow, even if you're insane if you, even if you're chaotic, even in the way, even if you're full of ships, You lie a lot, all those kinds of things underneath it, there's a good human, you could be surface bullshitter, but on important things, you're trustworthy. [/INST] Hopefully. I mean if you're not, then people shy away from you and there are people like that too, that are really successful, but that are, that are what I call islands. Um, I talked to other comics about that. Like you don't want to be an island because there's these people that aren't attached to the rest of the community and they're doing well on their own. And usually they have like one opening act, they bring with them on the road they've worked with forever and they don't have comedy friends. And there those people are miserable because they can't relate. </s><s>[INST] Sometimes fame in itself is isolating. So you have to actually do a lot of work and make sure you don't, it doesn't isolate you because if you become successful people start wanting stuff from you and then sometimes you want to push them away because of that as opposed to connect with them. Yeah, [/INST] I don't enjoy it when people want things from me. It's not fun. Yeah, it's fucking too heavy. They want too much and it's it's too much of a disproportionate relationship. You know, it's too unbalanced because uh there are people where you could tell that they're working towards something, they're working towards an angle and they want to be close to you because you'll you will benefit them. And then there's other people that are just, there's not that many of us and so we all want to hang out together. Like when I, one of the podcasts, I love the most is this podcast I do called protect our Parks. It's a thing I do with Ari Schaffer, Shane gillis and Mark. It's so fun because we just get obliterated and we talk so much sh it like there's conversations after that podcast where I go, hey man, we gotta cut that part out because like Shane will go too far and go too crazy, but we're just making each other laugh and it's just fun and it's like that kind of camaraderie between real comics is very precious to me. </s><s>[INST] My favorite part of that is like the non sequitur stuff from Mark norman, you guys get so trashed that you don't even understand what the hell he's talking about, but it's funny to the listener because he's still on point, that guy's as sharp Got mitch Hedberg. Yes, well [/INST] he's such a, such a dedicated comic, you know, he loves comedy so much. It's one of the things I love about him, he's like comedy, he gets excited. Like he loves it as to Shane and as does ari you know, they really love it and it's um that's so, so there's that like I have friends in that way and I have martial arts friends who are some of the also the thing about being humbled how things like Jiu jitsu will humble you. Martial arts friends are there also, they know they know who's been through it, you know, they know who's who really has gone through the gauntlet and emerged on the other end, A better person. </s>

<s>[INST] from history's lessons now. We have deep, painful lessons, but there's not that many of them, you know, our history is relatively short as a human species. Do we have a good answer on the left of leninist Marxist versus social democrat versus capitalism versus any, um, anarchy. You know, do have sufficient samples from history to make better decisions about the future of our politics and economics. [/INST] For sure, we have the american revolution, which was a revolution, not about class, not about workers, not about a so called universal class of the working class, elimination of capitalism, markets and the bourgeoisie, but was about the category citizen. It was about universal humanity. Where everyone in theory could be part of it as a citizen, the revolution fell short of its own ideals. Not everyone was a citizen. For example, if you didn't own property, you were a male but didn't own property. You didn't have full rights of a citizen. If you were a female, whether you own property or not, you were in a full citizen. If you were uh imported from africa against your will, you were a slave and not a citizen. And so not everyone was afforded the rights in actuality that were declared in principle. However, over time the category citizen could expand and slaves could be emancipated and they could get the right to vote. They could become citizens non property owning, males could get the right to vote and become full citizens, females could get the right to vote and become full citizens. In fact, Eventually my mother was able to get a credit card in her own name in the 1970s without my father having to co sign the paperwork, it took a long time. But nonetheless the category citizen can expand and it can become a universal category. So we have that the citizen, universal humanity model of the american revolution, which was deeply flawed at the time it was introduced but fixable over time. We also had that separation of powers and constraints on executive power that we began this conversation with. That was also institutionalized in the american revolution because they were afraid of turning, they were afraid of unconstrained executive power. So they built a system that would contain that constrain it institutionally not circumstantially. So that's a great gift within that universal category of citizen which has over time come closer to fulfilling its original promise. And within those institutional constraints, that separation of powers constraint on executive power. Within that, we've developed what we might call normal politics left right politics, people can be in favor of redistribution and government action and people can be in favor of small government, hands off government, no redistribution or less redistribution. That's the normal left right political spectrum where you respect the institutions and separation of powers and you respect the universal category of citizenship and equality before the law and everything else. I don't see any problems with that whatsoever. I see that as a great gift, not just to this country, but around the world and other places besides the United States have developed this. The problems arise at the extremes, the far left and the far right that don't recognize the legitimacy either of capitalism or of democratic rule of law institutions and they want to eliminate constraints on executive power. They want to control the public sphere or diminish the independence of the media. They want to take away markets or private property and redistribution becomes something bigger than just redistribution. It becomes actually that original Marxist idea of transcending capitalism. So I'm not bothered by the left or the right. Uh, I think they're normal and we should have that debate were a gigantic, diverse country of many different political points of view. I'm troubled only by the extremes that are against the system, cost system that want to get rid of it. And supposedly that will be the bright path to the future. History tells us that the far left and the far right or wrong about that. But once again, this doesn't mean that you have to be a social democrat, you could be a libertarian, you could be a conservative, you could be a centrist, you could be conservative on some issues and liberal on other issues. All of that comes under what I would presume to be normal politics. And I see that as the important corrective mechanism, normal politics and market economies, non monopolistic, open, free and dynamic market economies. I don't like concentrations of power politically, and I don't like concentrations of power economically, I like competition in the political realm, I like competition in the economic realm, this is not perfect. It's constantly, uh, needs to be protected and reinvented and there are flaws that are fundamental and need to be adjusted and addressed and everything else, especially equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome is unreachable and is a mistake because it produces perverse and unintended consequences. Equality of outcome attempts attempts to make people equal on the outcome side but attempts to make them more equal on the front end on the opportunity side, that's really, really important for a healthy society. That's where we've fallen down. Our schools are not providing equality of opportunity for the majority of people in all of our school systems. And so I see problems there. I see a need to invest in ourselves, invest in infrastructure, invest in human capital, create greater equality of opportunity but also to make sure that we have good governance because governance is the variable that enables you to do all these other things. </s>

<s>[INST] that pays its own bill. So how does Cardano solve the consensus problem? Do you tend to eventually wanting to solve it [/INST] in the hybrid approach of proof of stake and proof of work? Yeah, this was the philosophical difference between Vitalik and myself. The problem with the people in the Ethereum side is they're really bright. And these really bright people, what they do is they try to do everything all at once because they're really, really smart and they keep going until they run up against the wall and they realize the problem is a lot harder. If you're more experienced and that's why we brought in proper academics like Agolos and others because they'd been beaten up through life. Agolos worked with David Chom and this really hard work with those guys. And they'd already been humiliated and yelled at and had chalk thrown at him and all that stuff. And so they were humble enough to say, I'm not smart enough to solve the big problem. So don't even try. What you do is you decompose it and you say, okay, what's the first problem to solve in a chain of problems that you can compose your way up to a working system? And once you get far enough along, you have something that's pretty good and then you have an obvious path forward of how do you iterate and improve that system? That's why we started with GKL 15 because it was just saying, we don't know what a fucking blockchain is. What is this thing, right? What's the security properties of this stuff? Like what did we really mean? Then we did Ouroboros Classic, the original Ouroboros protocol in 2017. And that protocol was like a synchronous system and it assumed the nodes were always on and it worked, but it was useless because that's not real life. </s><s>[INST] Then Prowse came out and then suddenly we relaxed things. These are all, by the way, names for consensus algorithms. [/INST] Yeah, papers that we published and they were all peer reviewed. Like GKL was EuroCrypt. That's a very hard conference to get into and Ouroboros Classic was crypto and Prowse was EuroCrypt and Genesis was CCS. So basically every step of the way was first at academic validation that there was some merit to the work that was done. Second, it solved a particular class of problems, either showing the feasibility of the entire problem. Cause when I said, well let's do the model first cause let's see if we can do an FLP thing. Let's see if we can get a possibility theorem. That's great cause you're done. It's like those, those short math papers were like, I found a counterexample. It's like, Oh, okay, this whole thing has fallen apart cause you have a two line proof. Thank you. So that's what we were looking for in the beginning of the agenda was let's either prove it's possible in a straw man case or show that there exists an impossibility result in which case we can just abandon the entire inquiry. Proof of sakes impossible. And then once you've gotten past that threshold, it goes from theory to practicality. What actual network conditions are you looking at? Are you okay with living with an external clock? Or do you want to build time from within? How are you generating random numbers, et cetera, et cetera? And every step of the way, each paper, you're solving one particular class of problems. With Prism, it said, probably shouldn't know ahead of time who Eve is. You probably shouldn't know who's making those blocks. That should be something after the fact. But if you know ahead of time, you can attack them, you can DDoS them, you cause all kinds of problems. Okay, so, you know, adaptive security. Also, we moved from an MPC, random number generation, which was great, but very heavy and very slow. And you can't scale to large amounts of people to a VRF-based system, which is super fast, but a little dirtier, because Algorand actually did some great work there. </s><s>[INST] There was some good knowledge there. What are the really hard problems that you could, maybe if you just link it in a little bit, what are some of the really hard problems you have to solve along this chain of papers, ideas, [/INST] the evolution of the consensus algorithm? Yeah, not only are they really hard problems, they actually require different cryptographers because you're moving from mathematician-style cryptographers like the Neil Koblitz's and the Addy Shamir's, and the people that start as proper mathematicians. They really love theory, and that's their thing. And the proofs are dense, and they're thick, and they're beautiful, to practical applied work where you're saying, okay, now this is something an engineer can look at and say, I know how to build that. I know how to think about that. So that transition from GKL to Oropore's Classic to Prowse, I'd say the biggest leap was Classic to Prowse because that was going from a system that would only work in a consortium chain like Fabric to a system that would actually work and is working. That's what's implementing Cardano today, 50 billion dollar cryptocurrency and all these people. That was a huge leap, but that paper alone wasn't enough. We also had to layer on the economic model because we said, well, hang on a second here, not everybody's gonna be online all the time to be available to make a block, so you need some notion of delegation. The minute you have a notion of delegation, you have these stake pools, what the hell does that mean? And so this is a beautiful kind of interdisciplinary notion that layers computer science and biology together. And minute that complexity starts going up, you start seeing cell specialization. So you go from single cell organisms to organisms where you have eyeballs and brains and hearts, and each of these tissues do different things. Well, analogously, complex distributed systems start getting specialization. You move from the single cell thing, Bitcoin, where everything's a full node, they all have the same rights and responsibilities, a lot of homogeneity in that system, but you're only as good as your weakest link, you're only as capable as whatever the basic cell can do to a specialized system where you start having these actors in the system that are actually a little different than the other actors. So you introduce this concept of the stake pool, and suddenly now you have this actor where you're probably gonna be online 24 seven. You're probably gonna have extra relay infrastructure. There's a trust relationship where you don't own the eta, but you have a right to use it for something, and a person's made that choice to endow you with that. The minute that you introduce specialization though, the system gets more complicated, the game theory gets more complicated, and then you start having to think really deeply and carefully about, okay, well, can this now introduce a new attack vector that we didn't have before? So that leap from classic to prowess and adding in stake pools and figuring out how to handle the game theory there was exceedingly hard. It took two years to do that. </s>

<s>[INST] This is a lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends, here's Fiona Hill, you came from humble beginning in a coal mining town in Northeast England. So what were some formative moments in your young life that made you the woman you are today. [/INST] I was born in 1965 and it was the period where the whole coal sector in Britain was in decline already and, you know, basically, my father, by the time I came along, had lost his job multiple times. Every coal mine he worked in was closing down, he was looking constantly for the work and he had no qualifications because at age 14, he had gone down the mines, his father gone down the mines at 13. His great grandfather, you know, around the same kind of age, I mean, you had a lot of people at different points going down coal mines at 12, 13, you know, 14, they didn't get educated beyond that period because the expectation was, you're going to go down the mine like everybody else in your family and that he didn't really have any other qualifications to, you know, basically find another job beyond something in manual labor. So he worked in a steel works that didn't work out a brickwork, that closed down and then he went to work in the local hospital, part of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, as a porter and orderly. So basically somebody just pushing people around, there was no opportunity to retrain. So the big issue in my family was education, you've got to have one, you know, you've got to have some qualifications, the world is changing, It's changing really quickly and for you to kind of keep up with it, you're going to have to get educated and find a way out of this? I'm very early on, my father had basically said to me, there's nothing for you here, you're gonna have to if you want to get ahead. And he didn't have any kind of idea that as a girl, I wouldn't, I mean actually in many respects, I think I benefited from being a girl rather than a boy. There was no expectation that I would go into industry. There was, you know, some kind of idea that maybe I, you know, if I got qualifications, I could be a nurse, my mother was a midwife and so she had at age 16, left school and gone to train, you know, as a as a nurse and then as a midwife, I had other relatives have gone to teach, you know, in local schools and so there was an idea that, you know, women could get educated and there was a kind of a range of things that you could do, but the expectation then was go out there, do something with your life, but also a sense that you'd probably have to leave. So all of that was circling around me, particularly in my teenage years as I was trying to find my way through life and looking forward, </s><s>[INST] first of all, what does that even look like uh getting educated given the context of that place. You don't know, there's a whole world of mystery out there. So how do you figure out what to actually do out there. But was there moments formative moments, either challenging or just inspiring, where you wondered about what you want to be, where you want to go? [/INST] Yeah, there, I mean there are a number of things. I mean I think like a lot of kids, you know you talk to people and particularly from blue collar backgrounds said what did you want to do? I wanted to be a fireman, you know you got you know, kind of at one point was a little girl, I wanted to be a nurse and a little nurse's uniform like my mother, I didn't really know what that meant but you know I used to go around pretending to be a nurse. I even had a little magazine called Nurse Nancy and I used to read this and you know kind of that was one of the formative ideas. We also, it was a rural area, semi rural area and you know I'd be out in the fields all the time and I'd watch farmers, you know with their animals and I'd see vets coming along and you know watching people deal with the livestock and there's a kind of famous story at the time about a vet called James Herriot. It became here in the United States as well as a sort of a tv mini series had written a book and he was the vet for my, one of my great Aunt's dogs and people are always talking about him, I thought I could be a vet and then one day I saw one of the local vets with his hand up the back side of a cow in a field and he got his hand stuck in the cow was kicking him and I thought yeah maybe, maybe no, actually no I don't think I want to be a vet. So I cycled through all of these things about okay I could get an education but the whole sense was you had to apply your education, it wasn't an education for education's sake, it was an education to do something. And when I was about 14 or 15 my local member of Parliament came to the school and it was one of these you know pep talks for kids in these you know deprived areas. He had been quite prominent in local education and now he was a member of Parliament. He himself had come from a really hardscrabble background and had risen up through education, had even gone to Oxford and done philosophy, politics and economics and he basically told my class, even though it was highly unlikely any of us were really going to get ahead and go to elite institutions. Look you can get an education, you don't have to be held back by your circumstances but if you do get an education it's a privilege and you need to do something with it. So then I'm thinking, well, what could I do? Okay and education qualifications to do something, most people around me, I didn't, I knew didn't have careers. I mean, my dad didn't really have a career. He had jobs, my mom, you know, thought of her nursing as a career though and and it genuinely was and she was out there trying to help women uh survived childbirth. My mother had these horrific stories, you know, basically over the dining room table, I wish she'd stop, she'd leave out her nursing books. And I tell you if everyone had had my mom as a, as a mother, there'd be no, there'd be no reproduction on the planet. It was just this grim, horrific stories of breech births and fistulas and all kinds of horrors that my sister and I would just go, oh my God, you know what, please stop. So I thought, well, you know, I don't necessarily want to go in that </s>

<s>[INST] Well, the question is, what is the source of the most viral and sticky stories that ultimately lead to a positive outcome? So communism was, I mean, having grown up in the soviet union, uh, even still, you know, having relatives in Russia, there's a stickiness to the nationalism and to the ideologies of communism that religious or not. You could say it's religious for forever. I could just say it's it's a viral, it's great. It's stories that are viral and sticky. I'm using the most horrible words. But the question is whether science and reason can generate viral sticky stories that give meaning to people's lives. That's yeah, it's in your sense as it does. [/INST] Well, whatever is true, ultimately should be captivating, right? It's like, what, what's more captivating than what is whatever is real right now, it's because reality is again, we're so we're just climbing out of the darkness, you know, in terms of our understanding of what the hell is going on and there there's no telling what spooky things may in fact be true. And I don't know if you've been on the receiving end of recent rumors about uh, our conversation about Ufo is very likely changing in the near term, right? But like there was just a Washington post article and a new yorker article and you know, I've received some private outreach and perhaps you have I know other people in our orbit have people who are claiming that the government has known much more about UFOs than they have led on until now. And this conversation is actually is about to become more prominent. You know, and it's it's not going to be whatever, you know, whoever is left standing when the music stops, it's not going to be a comfortable position to be in as a super rigorous scientific skeptic Approed there's no there who's been saying there's no there there for the last 75 years. All right. Like, like uh the short version is it sounds like the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Pentagon are very likely to say to Congress at some point in the not too distant future that we have evidence that there is technology flying around here that seems like it can't possibly possibly be of human origin right now. I don't know what I'm gonna do with that kind of disclosure. Right? Maybe it's just it's gonna there's gonna be nothing no follow on conversation. You really have. But that is such a powerfully strange circumstance to be in. Right. I mean, it's just what are we gonna do with that if in fact that's what happens, right? If in fact the considered opinion despite the embarrassment it causes them of the U. S. Government of all of our intelligence, all of the relevant intelligence services is that this isn't a hoax. It's too there's too much data to suggest that as a hoax, we've got too much radar imagery, there's too much too much satellite data, whatever whatever data they actually have. There's too much of it. All we can say now is something's going on and there's no way it's the chinese or the Russians or anyone else's technology that should that should arrest our attention, you know, collectively to a degree that nothing in our lifetime has. And now one worries that were so jaded and confused and distracted that it's gonna get much less coverage than than uh you know, Obama's Tan suit, did you know, a bunch of years ago, it's just it's uh who knows how we'll respond to that. But it's just to say that are the need for us to tell ourselves a a an honest story about what's going on and what's likely to happen next is never going to go away? Right. And and it's important. It's just the division between me and every person who's defending traditional religion is. Where where is it? Where is it that you want to lie to yourself or lie to your kids. Like where is honesty a liability? And and for me, you know, I've yet to find the place where it is and it's so obviously a strength in almost every other circumstance because it is the thing that allows you to course correct. It is the thing that allows you to hope at least that your beliefs that your stories are in some kind of calibration with what's actually going on in the world. </s>

<s>[INST] you. It's personalized. Get special savings for a limited time. When you go to Inside Tracker dot com slash flex. This episode is also brought to you by on it, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make Alpha Brain a new tropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus when my life is going great. The thing I start with every single day is a deep work session. So I spent several hours just really focusing on a difficult task. Now some part of that is coffee, some part of that is just the clarity in the morning with water with some electrolytes in it. And then if I just need an extra boost, whether the session is difficult or I didn't get enough sleep, I just need that extra boost. I'll take an alpha brain Right before to give me that extra mental clarity and focus. And I think the start, I would say the 1st 15 minutes is the hardest if you can achieve focus over the 1st 15 minutes, the world starts to dissipate away and all it is is just you and the task anyway, you can get a special discount on Alpha Brain at lex Friedman dot com slash on it. This show is also brought to you by blink ist my favorite app for learning new things. It takes key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into 15 minutes. You can read or listen to Sapiens is on their meditations by Marcus Aurelius is on their beginning of infinity by David. Duke is on there. I really have to talk to David, I was in London briefly to hang out with deepmind folks and that fell through. But yeah, I definitely want to talk to him. Such a brilliant human being. Anyway, if you don't know any of his work, this is a good way to get into it. You get a quick summary, You get to see if you want to read the whole thing. Also, if you already read beginning of infinity, you can use blankets to remind yourself of the key sort of ideas in there and sometimes not even just remind maybe your mind was focused on particular aspects of that book and totally missed the key central ideas. So that kind of integrative um summarization of a text is really, really useful no matter what you can claim a special offer for savings. That blinking dot com slash lex. This is the lex Friedman podcast to support it. We check out our sponsors in the description and now your friends, here's gnome chomsky you have studied and criticized powerful leaders and nations in times of global conflict and struggles for power. So let me ask you, what do you think motivates? Vladimir? Putin is a power, legacy, fame geopolitical influence or the flourishing of a nation he loves and represents [/INST] particular insight into Putin's mind. I can only watch the actions over the last 2025 years and read the statements took power about almost 25 years ago. Has held it since his prime minister president. Uh his first task was to try to overcome the Chaos and disarray of the 1990s. During the nineties, Gorbachev had a proposal. He called for a cooperative enterprise with the west. They would share an effort to rebuild what he called a common european home in which there would be no military alliances, just Russia, Western US accommodation with move towards social democracy and former USSR and uh comparable moves in the United States. Well that was quickly smashed. The United States had no interest in that. Uh Clinton came along pretty soon, early nineties. Uh Russia was induced to adopt. It was called shock therapy, harsh quick market transformation which devastated the economy, created enormous social disarray uh rise of what are called oligarchs clip the correct great mortal high mortality and clinton started the policy of expanding NATO to the east in violation of firm unambiguous promises to Gorbachev not to do so. Yeltsin Putin's friend opposed it. Uh other Russian leaders opposed it, but didn't react. They accepted it when Putin came in. He continued that policy meanwhile, didn't reconstruct the Russian economy. Russian society became a viable, deeply authoritarian society under his tight control. He himself was organized a major kleptocracy with him in the middle apparently became very wealthy on the international front. He pretty much continued the former policies as uh Us diplomats, practically every diplomat who had any contact with Russia that been dispatched there knew about it as they all warned from the 90s. What Clinton was doing expanded by his Bush Bush to afterwards was reckless and provocative. That Russia did have a clear red line before coating which he adhered to namely no NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Uh this is pretty much how things went on through the 2000 and 2014 2008 George Bush, President Bush did invite uh Ukraine to join NATO. That was vetoed by France and Germany. But under us pressure, it was kept on the agenda. The Russians continued to object Western diplomats including the present present current head of the CIA and his predecessors warned that this was reckless, provocative, shouldn't be done. Continued uh Putin didn't do much. He stayed with it until pretty recently after 2014 uprising. That throughout the former president who was pro Russian uh instituted anti Russian laws. Uh the United States and NATO began to a policy of uh moving to effectively integrate Ukraine into the NATO command, joint military exercises, uh training, uh sending weapons and so on. Uh Putin objected. Other Russian leaders objected, their unit unified on this, but didn't do much continued with the proposals that NATO that Ukraine be excluded from NATO and that there be some form of autonomy for the Donbass region. Meanwhile, in reaction to the uh uprising that might an uprising 2014 Russia moved in and took over Crimea protecting its one warm water base and major naval base uh us objected and recognize it. But things continued without notable conflict won't go through all the details. When joe biden came in. He expanded the program of what U. S. Military journals called, de facto integration of Ukraine within native Uh developed proposed September 2021 proposed enhanced program of preparation for native admission uh extended with a formal statement in november, we're now practically up to the invasion. Putin's position hardened uh France mainly France to extend Germany did make some moves towards possible negotiations. Putin dismissed them uh moved on to the direct invasion. Uh that's what what are his to get back to your question? What motivates him? I presume what he's been saying all along uh namely establishing his legacy as a leader who uh overcame the extensive destruction of Russia, massive weakening over it restored his position as a world power prevented Ukraine from entering NATO that may have further ambitions as to dominating and controlling Ukraine. Very likely there is a theory in the west that he suddenly became a total madman who wants to restore the great Russian empire. Uh This is combined with including over the fact that the Russian military is a paper tiger that can't even conquer cities a couple of kilometers from the border but uh defended not even by a regular army, But somehow along with this, he's planning to attack NATO powers, conquer europe. Who knows what? It's impossible to put all these concepts together. They're totally internally contradictory. So what's my judgment? I think what motivates him is what has been demonstrated in his actions restore Russia as a great power, restore its economy, control it. That's it. Total dictatorship enrich himself and his cronies establish a legacy as a major figure in Russian history. Uh, make sure that Ukraine does not join NATO. And probably by now he's pardoned the position, maintain Crimea and the southeastern corridor to Russia. And some ambiguous agreements about the Donbass region. That looks like his motivation. There's much speculation that goes beyond this, but it's very hard to reconcile with the uh, the assessment of the real world by the same people who are making the uh, the grandiose uh, speculations </s>

<s>[INST] and also like not just like happiness and connection between humans but connection between humans in other ways that enables like productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff, you know, this is not just about, let's let's be happy and have a fulfilling lives. It's also like let's build cool shit. [/INST] Yeah, which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti molokai, right? That's that's it's not using competition, it's like, you know, more like hates collaboration and coordination and people working together and that's, you know, again like the internet started out as that and it and um it could have been that, but because of the way it was sort of structured um in terms of, you know, very lofty ideal, they wanted everything to be open source or open source is also free and but they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway because they were still building this on top of our old economic system. Um And so the way they did that was through a third party advertisement, but that meant that things were very decoupled, you know, you've got this third party interest, which means that you're then like people having to optimize for that and that is, you know, the the actual consumer is actually the product not the, not the person you're making the thing for you and in the end you start making the thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then like breaks down. Um Yeah, like it's there's no clean solution to this. Um And i it's a really good suggestion but you actually to like um figure out how we can optimize morality for positive </s><s>[INST] some topics. I shall be the general of the love bot army um distributed. Okay. Yeah. The power just even in saying that the power already went to my head. No. Okay. You've talked about quantifying you're thinking we've been talking about this sort of a game theoretic view on life. Um And putting probabilities behind estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life just actually analyzing life and game theoretic way? Like your own life? Like personal life. You I think you give an example that you had an honest conversation with the ego about like how long is this relationship going to last? Similar to our sort of marriage problem kind of discussion. Having an honest conversation about the probability of things that we sometimes are a little bit too shy or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms. Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning uh the good and the bad of that. Can you do this kind of thing with human relations? [/INST] Yeah. So the scenario you're talking about it was like yeah I think it was about a year into our relationship. Um And we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was going to sell my apartment where, you know, he had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what like our long term plans would be, should be, should be by a place together etcetera </s><s>[INST] when you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine or as you're sober and you're actually having a serious, [/INST] like how </s><s>[INST] do you get to that conversation? Most people kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation. [/INST] Well, so you know, our relationship was very well. First of all, we were good friends for a couple of years before we even, you know, got you know romantic. Um and when we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, like, you know, it wasn't a random thing. Um and </s><s>[INST] so the probability of it being a big deal was high [/INST] was already very high and then we've been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and wonderful. So, you know, there was a lot of foundation already where we felt very comfortable having a lot of frank conversations, but Eagles M O has always been much more than mine. He he was always from the outset like just in a relationship radical transparency and honesty is the way because the truth is the truth, whether you want to hide it or you know, it will come out eventually. And um, if you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself, then how could you possibly expect to be like the most integral version? You know, you can't relationship needs this bedrock of like honesty as a foundation more than anything, </s><s>[INST] but I would like to push against some of those ideas, but that's down the line [/INST] up just </s><s>[INST] rudely interrupt. [/INST] Um, and so, you know, we've been together for a year and things were good and we're having this hard conversation and, and then he was like, well, okay, what's the likelihood that we're going to be together in three years then? Because I think it was roughly three year time horizon and I was like, oh, oh, interesting. And then we actually wait before you say that loud, let's both write down our predictions formally because we've been like, we were just getting into like effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making, you know, formal predictions as a means of measuring your own. Um, well your, your, your own foresight essentially in a quantified way. So we like both wrote down our percentages and we also did a one year prediction and a 10 year one as well. So we got percentages for all three and then we showed each other. Um, and I remember like having this moment of like, oh, because for the 10 year when I was like, well, I mean, I love him a lot, but like a lot can happen in 10 years, you know? And um we've only been together for, you know, So I was like, I think it's over 50% but it's definitely not 90%. And I remember like wrestling, I was like, I don't want him to be hurt, I don't want him to, You know, I don't want to give a number lower than his. And I remember thinking like, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. So just give you a real percentage. And I think mine was like 75% and then we showed each other and luckily we're fairly well aligned. Um but if we weren't </s>

<s>[INST] help, [/INST] If you can't help, don't hurt, simple basic dummy rules so that you can, if possible, refrain from hurting, which might as well be a form of helping. </s><s>[INST] And the help doesn't have to be this dramatic thing. These little acts of kindness, I don't know, they, they seem to have maybe I believe in kind of karma, but they seem to have this, they can have this gigantic ripple effect. I don't know, I don't know why that is. I just, I remember a lot of little acts of kindness that people have done to me and they, what do they do? Uh, when they fill me with joy and hope for the future, they give me faith in humanity. Um, yeah, that's somehow there's a partially dormant desire in our sort of collective intelligence to do good in the world, that most of us want to be uh good, that want to do good onto the world, I want, there's a kindness that's kind of like begging to get out, you know uh those little acts of kindness do just that. And actually one of the reasons I love Austin and moved here is realizing just just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me, just for stupid reasons, people are being really nice. It's weird and that that uh that kind is combined with an optimism for the future. It's just it uh it's amazing what that can build. [/INST] Yes. Yes, it's incredible. And I know what you're saying, it's like, you know, we we moved to this great neighborhood at this point. I think three, maybe four of our neighbors have like made food for us that just shows up with like handwritten lists of like things they like to do in the area and their phone number if we need help and it's like holy sh it, that's like that, it might seem like a little act, but it feels like some kind of atomic love bomb just went off on your porch when you're looking at that. Like what the </s><s>[INST] fuck? You [/INST] made me a pie. This is incredible! Like this is incredible! So </s><s>[INST] and also it's another act to accept that kindness with, it's like a lot of times when I was like in boston or san Francisco certain big cities, you can think like okay, well they're trying to like somehow um that's not an act of kindness that some kind of a transactional thing to build up, its like a career move for networking, all that kind of stuff. But no, if you just accept it for what it is. A pure act of kindness [/INST] in boston. </s><s>[INST] It's Yeah, because [/INST] for me I go the opposite route because I'm not even though there is a part of me that might be a little suspicious or something where I go to to push that ship back mentally and I'm like, I don't deserve this. If they </s><s>[INST] knew what [/INST] a piece of sh it I am gonna bring me, I don't never bring cakes to my neighbors, I would know how to make a cake. I don't know how to make anything. I have time. I should be bringing it to my neighbors. Why didn't I do that? I should brought, I never do that. If you're not careful, you can spiral into a vortex of self hate from the gifts you have to yeah, you have to learn how to, in the, in that circuitry, you have to learn how to like yeah, </s><s>[INST] I have that problem really big. Yeah. Like, like I don't deserve this. Like I don't, I get so much love from people, I'm like, well yeah, they love me because they don't know me. That's my brain, my little voice. Like you're not [/INST] you're </s><s>[INST] not worthy, you're not you're not worthy of venue of this uh kindness and all this kind of stuff and that could be very uh yeah, I can start you down can be debilitating [/INST] and also it shuts the person down you're talking. </s><s>[INST] That's the that's the dark side that pushes them away to [/INST] yeah, it cuts off this fucking mystical circuitry. So, like, the best thing if that happens to you is, like, accept it joyfully, and just even just all that, that whatever that thing inside of you, whatever that little thing is, you know, this is like in the meditation I do. Um it's it's an infuriatingly simple meditation, but um when a thought emerges, when you you're arresting your attention on your breath and then inevitably you think get lost in your thoughts and when you catch yourself doing that, you think thinking and then return your attention to the breath. So I like that. So that when that part of myself starts, you know, having its little neurotic semi seizure, I can just go thinking whatever, It's just another thought, and then eat the, eat the, eat the banana bread or whatever they gave you. What's the </s><s>[INST] most wild psychedelic experience you've ever had in a dream in a vision, doesn't have to be drug related. What's um what's one that jumps to mind that was like, holy sh it, I'm happy to be alive, is this life is amazing. [/INST] Yeah, the Yeah, okay, so, uh the one that pops to mind, I've had a lot of psychedelic experiences, but in this moment, the one that pops to mind only because it goes back to what you're talking about about this uh niches idea of infinite return. Um the, the uh so I'm a Burning man and uh </s><s>[INST] I'm [/INST] not like, I mean I have kids right now. I just want to be around them. My wife was being so cool about it and she knows I love Burning man. She's like go to Burning man and I was gonna go and then I just, I just want to be around my kids as much as I can right now. But I've </s>

<s>[INST] that the bird flu in [/INST] their all their deriving that one was called swine. influenza swine seemed to have started in a pig. But it had bird had our NHS from bird influenza viruses. These viruses are all re assortments of different viruses from pigs and birds and humans. Um, but influenza can cause pneumonia and can kill you as does star is Kobe too. So it depends on the the virus. So there is another influenza virus that's currently circulating. So right now we have The 2009 pandemic virus that's still around. And then the 1968 pandemic virus, which was the one before 2000 and nine, that one is still around too. And that's more lethal. And depending on the season, some seasons, the 2009 virus predominates, some seasons, the 1968 and when the 68 is around, you get more lethal. Itty </s><s>[INST] So we're living with the influenza family who haven't exterminated them [/INST] right? We never will never exterminate them. Why? Because every shore bird in the world is infected with them. You know, gulls and turns and ducks and all sorts of things. But </s><s>[INST] why can't we develop a strong vaccines that defend against? [/INST] So we could do that. Sure. But that would not eliminate them from humans. Even if you had the best vaccine, you would never get rid of it in people because there would always be someone who's not vaccinated or in which the vaccine didn't work. You know. No, no vaccine is 100% so </s><s>[INST] well you just contradicted yourself. You had he said the perfect vaccine. So [/INST] but </s><s>[INST] but then you said like even if you had the perfect yeah, some people wouldn't get vaccinated but and I understand what you mean. So but I actually was asking how difficult does it to make vaccines like that for? It seems like it's very difficult to do that for the influenza virus. [/INST] So it's really easy to make an old school vaccine to the way The first influenza vaccines were made was actually Jonas Salk worked on them in the 40s. He just grow lots of virus and you grow it in eggs by the way. Chicken eggs. Nice. </s><s>[INST] Yeah [/INST] embry needed. So they get fertilized and there's a 10 or 12 day embryo in it and you put virus in it grows up and then you harvest it, you get about 10 mls of fluid And then you take that you treated with formaldehyde or formal in and it activates the virus? So it's no longer infectious. And you just inject that into people. And that was the first flu vaccine that was made for the U. S. Army actually. And then it got moved over to people. We still use that old school tech today. </s><s>[INST] So you're you're taking can you help me out here? Okay, so this is a good time to talk about vaccines. Okay, so you're talking about you're taking the actual virus, You put it in an egg, you let it grow up. It's very funny that you put in an egg. It's very uh it's very poetic. And then uh how do you make it? Not um infection? Uh not effective or whatever. Not infectious. Not infectious. Is that the right term here? So how do you make it not infectious? [/INST] You can treated with any number of chemicals that will disrupt the particle. So it no longer. </s><s>[INST] So that that step of disrupting the particle. Is that very specific to a particular variant particle? [/INST] No, the same collection of chemicals you can use for all kinds of and which have been used for SARS cov two vaccines also. Same technology. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so what are several things to ask? So you called it old school in a way that's uh Slightly dismissive, like people talk about Windows 98 or something? Uh So is there risks involved with it Or is it just difficult to produce large amounts? It's [/INST] Also a lot of eggs? It's very easy. We could do it in cells and culture, but eggs were convenient and 1940s we didn't have cells in culture, we didn't know how to do that. So we had to use something else. It's easy to do. But the process of inactivating the virus with a chemical makes it not not the best vaccine. You can make the flu vaccines that we have today, which are mostly based on this uh, inactivation is called inactivated virus vaccines. </s><s>[INST] Also like the kind of uh thing it presents the immune system to train on. It's not it's not it's not it's not close to the actual virus. [/INST] Yes, that's what we think. So, that's why probably the flu vaccines are just not very good. You know, 60% efficiency at the best. Right? Which is not really good. </s><s>[INST] What does it mean? What is the measure of efficiency for a vaccine? [/INST] Well, it's how it does in the general population at preventing influence </s><s>[INST] at preventing [/INST] illness, not infection. We usually don't measure infection when we're testing a vaccine. We just measure sickness. That's really easy to score. Right? You do a trial and you say, if you feel sick, give us a call, we'll tell you what, </s><s>[INST] So, yeah, I mean, what's what's sickness sickness is the presence of symptoms. [/INST] So this is good time to say what a symptom is? Okay? A symptom is what you only can feel only you can feel an upset stomach or a sore throat or that sort </s><s>[INST] of the lived experience. A [/INST] sign is something that someone could measure and tell that you're infected like virus in your nasopharynx or something else, right? Signs and symptoms. And so in a vaccine trial, they tell you if you have any of these symptoms, they give you a paper with the exact symptoms listed to make sure you're picking them up. Right? So for flu would probably be fever, sore throat, cough, you call them and then they will do a pcr and make sure you've, you've got flu and not some other virus that makes similar symptoms. And then they would say, are you a vaccine or non vaccine arm and count up all the infections and see how the vaccine did basically. </s>

<s>[INST] but we have to be a little bit more patient before we come up with technologies where patience becomes less necessary by extending our lifetimes or increasing the speed of space travel, all the kind of stuff. Humans are pretty intelligent. They're pretty intelligent. For the most part, I hope, when I'm on the optimistic days. Well, maybe just to linger on what a galaxy is. What should we know about our understanding of black holes in the formation? Is that an important thing to understand in the formation of a galaxy? So all the orbiting, all the spiraling [/INST] that's going on, how important is that to understand? All of the above. That's what makes astronomy really hard but also really interesting. No day is like another because we always find something new. I want to come back to the idea of the proto-galaxy because it actually matches or relates to the black hole formation. So most large, well, pretty much all large galaxies have a supermassive black hole in the center. We don't really know where they come from. Again, we know that they are there but how do we get there? So we go back to the early universe. We had a little galaxy that just sort of, I don't know, had some small number of stars. It was a first gravitationally bound structure that was held together by dark matter because dark matter actually kind of structured up first before the luminous matter could because that's what dark matter kind of does. And it started to hold gas and then stars sort of together in these first very shallow, what we call potential wells, so these gravitationally bound systems. And then the Milky Way grew from absorbing neighboring smaller, even smaller systems. And somewhere in that process, actually, there must have been a seed for one of these supermassive black holes. And I'm not actually sure that it's clear right now kind of what was there first, the supermassive black hole or the galaxy. So lots of people are trying to study that. And of course, the black hole wasn't as massive back then as it is these days. But it's a big area of research and the new James Webb, the JAWST, the telescope, the infrared telescope in space is working on, many people are working on that to figure out exactly what happened. And there are some surprising results that we really don't understand right now. </s><s>[INST] So to solve the chicken or the egg problem of, do you need the supermassive black hole to form a galaxy or does the galaxy naturally create the supermassive black hole? [/INST] Yeah, I mean, I think to some degree, we can answer that because there are lots of little dwarf galaxies out there. The Milky Way remains surrounded by many dozens of small dwarf galaxies. I have studied a bunch of them. And to the extent that we can tell, they do not contain black holes. So they certainly were gravitationally bound structures. So either you can call them proto galaxies or dwarf galaxies or first galaxies, they were definitely there. But they must have been bigger things like the proto Milky Way, where something was different. What made them more massive so that they would gravitationally attract these smaller systems to integrate them. </s><s>[INST] So we'll have to see. How do we look into the dynamics of the formation, the evolution of the proto galaxies? Is it possible? Did they shine? I mean, what are the set of data that we can possibly look at? So we've got gravitational waves, which is really insane that we can even [/INST] detect those. There's light. What else can we detect? So that would fall into the category of observational cosmology. And the JWST is the prime telescope right now. And it promises big, big steps forward. This is in its early days, because it's only been online like a year or so. But that collects the infrared light from the farthest, literally proto galaxies, earliest galaxies. That light has traveled some 13 billion years to us. And they're observing these faint little blobs. And folks are trying to, again, study the onset of these early supermassive black holes, how they shape galaxies. So they're seeing that they were there, surrounded by already bigger galaxies. Ideally, I'd like for my colleagues to push a little bit further. Hopefully, that will eventually happen. In terms of looking towards the older and older ones. Yeah. More and more primitive in terms of the structure. But of course, as you can imagine, if you make your system smaller and smaller, it becomes dimmer. And it's further and further away. So we're reaching the end of the line from a technical perspective pretty quickly. </s><s>[INST] But dimmer and dimmer means older and older. [/INST] Yes, in a sense, because it all started really small. Because it's small or smaller, which correlates to older and older. In that phase of the universe, it would, otherwise, it doesn't. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, because it is small or smaller, which correlates to older and older. Just to take a small attention about black holes, you know, because you do quite a bit of observational cosmology and maybe experimental astrophysics. What's the difference to you between theoretical physics and experimental? So there's a lot of really interesting explorations about paradoxes around black holes and all this kind of stuff. About black holes destroying information. Do those worlds intermix to you? [/INST] Especially when you step away from your work and kind of think about the mystery of it all. Well, at first glance, there isn't actually much crosstalk. Personally, I mostly observe stars. So I don't usually actually think too much about black holes. </s><s>[INST] And stars is a fundamentally kind of chemical, physical phenomena that doesn't... [/INST] That's right. The physics is kind of different. It's not extreme. I mean, you know, you could consider nuclear fusion sort of be perhaps extreme. You need to tunnel. That has some interesting physics there. But it's just a different flavor. I don't do these kinds of calculations myself either. I very much like to talk with my theory colleagues about these things, though, because I find there's always an interesting intersection. And often it's just... I've written a number of papers with colleagues who do simulations about galaxies. And so they're not quite as far removed as, let's say, the black hole pen and paper folks. But even in those cases, we have the same interests in the same topics, but it was almost like we're speaking two different languages. And we weren't even that far removed, both astronomers and all. And it was really interesting just to take the time and really try to talk to each other. And it's amazing how it's fair, but it's as how hard that is. You know, even amongst scientists, we already have trouble talking to each other. Imagine how hard it is to talk to non-scientists and other people to try to... We're all interested in the same things as humans at the end of the day, right? But everyone has sort of a different angle about it and different questions and way of formulating things. And sometimes it really takes a while to converge and to get to the common ground. But if you take the time, it's so interesting to participate in that process. And it feels so good in the end to say like, yes, we tackled this together, right? We overcame our differences, not so much in opinion, but just in expressing ourselves about this and how we go about solving a problem. And these were some of my most successful papers, and I certainly enjoyed them the most. </s>

<s>[INST] that's brilliant by the way, the fact that they did [/INST] that very brilliant, very big. So these greek philosophers, very smart and so uh they had taken it to the next step, they ask okay, so the Earth is round, why doesn't it move? They thought it doesn't move? They were looking around, nothing seemed to move. So so they said okay, we have to have a good explanation that it wasn't enough for them to, you know either. So they really want to deeply understand that fact and they come up with a symmetry argument and the symmetry argument was o if the Earth is a spirit called it must be at the center of the universe for sure. So they said the Earth is at the center of the universe makes sense? And they said, you know if the earth is going to move, which direction doesn't pick any direction, it picks, it breaks that spherical symmetry because you have to pick a direction and that's not good because it's not symmetrical anymore. So therefore the Earth decides to sit put because it would break the symmetry. So so they had the incorrect science, they thought the earth doesn't move. And what they had this beautiful idea that symmetry might explain it, but they were even smarter than that Aristotle didn't agree with this argument. Uh huh. He said why do you think symmetry prevents it from moving? Because the preferred position not. So he gave an example is that supposed you are a person and you put we put you at the center of a circle and we spread food around you in a circle around you. Loaves of bread let's say. And we say, okay, stay at the center of the circle forever. Are you going to do that just because of the symmetric point? No, you're going to get hungry, you're gonna move towards one of those of red despite the fact that breaks the symmetry. So from this way he tried to argue, being at the symmetric point may not be the preferred thing to do. And this idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking is something we just used today to describe many physical phenomena. So spontaneous symmetry breaking is the feature that we now use. But this idea was there thousands of years ago but applied incorrectly to the physical world, but now we are using it. So these ideas are coming back in different forms. So I agree very much that the thought process is more important and these ideas are more interesting than the actual applications that people may find today. Do </s><s>[INST] they use the language of symmetry and the symmetry breaking and spontaneous symmetry but that's really interesting because like I could see a conception of the universe that kind of tends towards perfect symmetry and is stuck there. Like they not stuck there but achieves that optimal and stays there. The idea that you would spontaneously break out of symmetry like have these perturbations jump out of symmetry and back. That's not. It's a really difficult idea to uh to load into your head like where does that come from? And and then and then the idea that you may not be at the center of the universe. [/INST] That is a really </s><s>[INST] tough idea. [/INST] Right? So symmetry. Sometimes an explanation of being at the symmetric point is sometimes a simple explanation of many things, like if you have a bowl, uh circular ball, then the bottom of it is the lowest point. So if you put a pebble or something, it will slide down and go there at the bottom and stays there at the symmetric point because the preferred point, the lowest energy point. But if that same symmetric circular bowl that you had had a bump on the, on the bottom, the bottom might not be at the center, it might be on a circle on the table. In which case the pebble would not end up at the center will be the lower energy point symmetrical, but it breaks the symmetry once it takes a point on that circle. So, so we can have symmetry, reasoning for where things end up or symmetry breaking. Like this example would suggest </s><s>[INST] we talked about beauty. I find geometry to be beautiful. Uh You have a few examples that are geometric in nature in your book. How can geometry in ancient times or today be used to understand reality? And maybe how do you think about geometry as a distinct tool in mathematics and physics? [/INST] Yes, geometry is my favorite part of math as well. And Greeks were enamored by geometry. They try to describe physical reality using geometry and principles of geometry and symmetry. Titanic solids. The five solids they had discovered had these beautiful solids. They thought it must be good for some reality. There must be explaining something they attached. You know, I want to air, want to fire and so forth. They try to give physical reality to symmetric objects. These symmetric objects are symmetries of rotation And discreet symmetry groups. We call today of rotation group in three dimensions. No, we know now we kind of laugh at the way they were trying to connect that symmetry to, you know, the laws of the realities of physics. But actually it turns out in modern days, we use symmetries, not too far away exactly in these kinds of thoughts, processes in the following way In the, in the context of string theory, which is this field of study, we have these extra dimensions and these extra dimensions are compact. Tiny spaces typically, but they have different shapes and sizes. We have learned that if you if these extra shapes and sizes have symmetries which are related to the same rotation symmetries that the greek, we're talking about if they enjoy those discrete symmetries and if you if you take that symmetry and cautioned the space by it in others identify points under these symmetries, you get properties of that space at the singular points which force emanates from them. What forces forces like the ones we have seen in nature today, like electric forces, like strong forces, like weak forces. So these same principles that was we're driving them to connect geometry and symmetries to nature is driving today's physics now much more, you know modern ideas, but nevertheless, the symmetries connecting geometry to physics. In fact, often sometimes we have we asked the following question, suppose I want to get this particular, you know, physical reality. I want to have these particles with these forces and so on. What do I do? It turns out that you can geometrically design this space to give you that you say, oh I put the sphere here, I would do this, I will shrink them. So if you have two spheres touching each other and shrinking to zero size, that gives you strong forces. If you have one of them, it gives you the weak force is if you have this, you get that. And if you want to unify forces, do the other thing. So these geometrical translation of physics is one of my favorite things that we have discovered in modern physics. And the context of strength here. </s>

<s>[INST] Well, if struggle is somehow a thing that's court meaning perhaps mathematicians just quietly the ones who are most equipped to answer that question if in fact the creation or at least experiencing beauty is uh, is at the core of the meaning of life because it seems like mathematics is the methodology by which you can most purely explore beautiful things, right? [/INST] Yeah. </s><s>[INST] So in some sense, maybe we should talk to mathematicians more. [/INST] Yeah, maybe. But the unfortunately people do have a somewhat correct perception that what these people are doing every day or whatever it is. It's pretty far removed from anything. Yeah. From from what's kind of close to what I'm, what I do every day and what my typical concerns are. So you may learn something very interesting by talking to mathematicians, but it's a it's probably not going to be, you're probably not going to get what you were hoping. </s><s>[INST] So when you put the pen and paper down and you're not thinking about physics and you're not thinking about mathematics and you just get to breathe in the air and look around you and realize that you're going to die one day. You think about that. Um, your ideas will live on. But you the human not, not, not [/INST] Especially much, would certainly have been getting getting older. I'm now 64 years old. You start to realize, well, there's probably less ahead than there was behind. And so you start to that starts to become what do I think about that? Maybe I should actually get serious about getting some things done. Which which I may not have, which I may otherwise that have time to do, which didn't see this didn't seem to be a problem when I was younger, but that's the main, I think the main way in which that thought occurred, </s><s>[INST] but it doesn't uh you know, the stoics are big on this. Meditating on mortality helps you more intensely appreciate the beauty when you do experience it. [/INST] I suppose that's true, but it's not yeah, it's not not something I spend a </s><s>[INST] lot of time [/INST] trying, but but </s><s>[INST] day to day you just enjoy the positive. Just enjoy [/INST] our life in general. Life is have a perfectly pleasant life and enjoy it. And often think, wow, this is things are I'm really enjoying those things are going well. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, life is pretty amazing. Yeah, I think you and I are pretty lucky we get to live on this nice little Earth. Yeah. With a nice little comfortable climate. And we'll get to have this nice little podcast conversation. Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me today and have this conversation. Thank [/INST] you. Thank you. Thank you. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Peter White to support this podcast. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Richard Feynman. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] So I agree with you in part, but I have to push back here. So one of the problems I see is using billionaires as shorthand to talk about power inequality and wealth inequality, often dismisses the fact that some of these folks are some of the best members of our society. So outside of the, however, the system has created inequalities, a young person today should dream to build cool stuff, not for the wealth, not for the power, the fame, but to be part of building cool stuff. Now, there's a lot of examples of billionaires that have gotten there in shady ways and so on. And you can point that out. But in the same way, we celebrate great artists and great athletes and great literary icons and sort of writers and poets and musicians and engineers and scientists, we should sort of separate the human creator from the wealth that the system has given them. That's what I worry about, is like in our system, some of the greatest humans are the ones that have become rich. And so we sometimes mix up the, if you want to criticize the wealth, we sometimes criticize the human and the creator while that should actually be the person we aspire to be. [/INST] So, you know, I would agree with that. LeBron James, if he's not already in his lifetime, will be a billionaire. And he got his money largely through just being a credible athlete, excelling in his field more than anyone besides Michael Jordan. I think he's my number two. He might be my number one. Yeah, I'm willing to keep keeping open mind about the LeBron versus Jordan conversation. But, you know, he got that through his merit and he's been rewarded. And the party's getting rewarded because he's created vast amounts of wealth beyond what he's getting. This is just his share. You know, it's a salary cap league. Whenever he's doing an endorsement, obviously that company is thinking that he's worth more than what they're paying him for that endorsement and so on. And to the extent with Elon Musk, people see innovation and they see someone who will put himself out there with sometimes crazy ideas because he's trying to think about the future and trying to just push things forward instead of just sitting on whatever money he has now and just investing it, earning, you know, 6% return for the rest of his life. You know, I think that that's a positive thing. But I think it doesn't get to the broader policy question. When people invoke billionaires, they're invoking the specter of inequality and power. It's not normally the rhetoric that I use because I propose and I use more traditional socialist rhetoric and terms, but I think it gets at something real. So often with these sorts of short hands we use in politics, they're imperfect, but they speak to </s><s>[INST] a real thing. Yeah, and they feed a little bit of fun that folks like AOC and Elon have with each other creates. It feeds, it inspires, it serves as a catalyst for productive discourse. Okay, speaking of which, you said you're a fan of Bernie Sanders. Would you classify yourself as a Bernie bro? What's the technical definition of a Bernie bro? Is that a very, it's a subset? No, no, no, I'm sorry. You're a sophisticated philosopher, writer, economic and political [/INST] thinker. Of course you would not call yourself a Bernie bro. I'm fine with calling myself a Bernie bro because it was made up by liberal journalists to smear Bernie and his supporters during the 2016 campaign, even though disproportionately his supporters were like young women in their 20s, but whatever. I ride for Bernie. There's worse things in the </s><s>[INST] world than being called a bro, so it's fine. That's hilarious. I ride for Bernie. What do you like about Bernie Sanders and to what degree does he represent ideas of socialism? To what degree does he represent the more traditional sort of liberal ideas? [/INST] I love Bernie. Most of all, I like his clarity. He's by far the best communicator we have on the left. He speaks with a moral force. He's relatable and he has taken a lot of socialist rhetoric from academia and brought it down to its core in a way that's comprehensible for ordinary people and speaks to their daily lives. When Bernie does a speech, people can finish his lines because they know what he's going to say. They know what points he's going to hit because socialism, in my mind, should not be a complicated thing. Now, when we get to more abstract discussions about what a future system would look like, when we get to the policy trade-offs today, I think we need to put on a different hat. We should embrace all sorts of nuance and contradiction and complication. When it comes to the core moral and ethical appeal, I think Bernie grasps that and how to communicate it. Now, Bernie Sanders was politicized a very long time ago. I actually once told him, I've only met him a few times, but one time I joked that in his book, he mentioned that one politicizing moment in his life was when the Brooklyn Dodgers left town and he was devastated because he was a Dodgers fan from Brooklyn. I said, this is a 2020 campaign. This may be 2019. I said, Bernie, you're running for president. You do not need to keep reminding people of your age. He was politicized through the Young People's Socialist League, which was an old offshoot of the Norm Thomas Socialist Party of America. It's a very old school socialist tradition. Then he was engaged in labor struggles in the 60s. He was engaged in the civil rights movement. He came from this old left generation that I think just had a more plain spoken, more rooted way of understanding change and socialism. It wasn't in my mind polluted by academia and by some of the turn towards issues of culture and excessive focus on representation or whatever else. It was really rooted in something economic in a way. Then obviously he had all his ideas and he was also a product of the left in that he went to Vermont. He did the back to the land thing. He was basically not quite a hippie and an affect, but he was out there trying to farm or whatever and cold as hell, Northern Vermont. Then he decided to do politics, do electoral politics, and he failed for a long time. He did third party politics. He kept losing races. Eventually he became by savvy and luck and things he learned, the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He just kept with the same message. In my book I talk about, I quote a Bernie speech from the 1970s, one of his early campaigns. I compared it to a Bernie speech during his 2016 campaign. It was virtually identical. Millionaires were swapped with millionaires and billionaires, speaking of billionaires, which is beautiful. I think there's something great to what he offered American politics. Also all around the world, there's a socialist poll in politics, whether you agree with it or not, and all these countries in Europe and any rich country, Japan and so on. The US really didn't have that. The furthest left you could go was like Chris Hayes and MSNBC or whatever. I'm very glad that there's a socialist poll, and I think we have Bernie to thank for it, to the extent that a lot of self-described socialists don't think Bernie is a real socialist. It's in part because he stays grounded in people's day-to-day lives and struggles. I don't think he thinks often the way that I do and other people more disconnected or step and move from day-to-day politics. I think about the future contours of a socialist society and so on, but I think he's morally committed to an egalitarian </s>

<s>[INST] So all you have to do is the cutting [/INST] and that's </s><s>[INST] exactly to do the fixing. [/INST] That's exactly right. You don't have to do the fixing because it's already built in. That's exactly right. But the fixing can be co opted by throwing in a bunch of homologous segments that instead of having your dad's version have whatever other version you'd like to use. </s><s>[INST] Uh So so you you don't control the fixing by throwing in a bunch of others. [/INST] Exactly. Right. That's how you do genome editing. </s><s>[INST] So that's what CRISPR is. That's what 11 in popular culture people use the term. I've never Well that's brilliant. [/INST] So crisp explanation genome vandalism followed by a bunch of band aids that have the sequence that you'd like </s><s>[INST] and you can control the choices of band aid, correct. [/INST] And of course there's new generations of CRISPR. There's something that's called prime editing that was very, very much in the press recently that basically instead of making a double stranded break, which again is genome vandalism, you basically make a single stranded break. You basically just nick one of the two strands enabling you to peel off without completely breaking it up and then repair it locally using a guide that is coupled to your initial RNA. That took you to that location </s><s>[INST] dumb question. But it's CRISPR as awesome and cool as it sounds. I mean technically speaking in terms of like as a tool for manipulating our genetics in the positive meaning of the word manipulating or is there downsides drawbacks in this whole context of therapeutics that we're talking about our understanding. [/INST] And so so um when I teach my students about CRISPR, I show them articles with the headline genome editing tool revolutionized biology And then I showed them the date of these tool of these articles and their 2004, Like five years before Christopher was invented. And the reason is that they're not talking about CRISPR. They're talking about zinc finger enzymes that are another way to bring these Qatar's to the genome. It's a very difficult way of sort of designing the right set of zinc finger proteins the right side of amino acids that will now target a particular long stretch of DNA because you, you know, for every location that you want to target, you need to design a particular regulator, a particular protein that will match that region. Well, there's another technology core talents which are basically, you know, just a different way of using proteins to sort of, you know, guide these cars to a particular location in the genome. These require a massive team of engineers of biological engineers to basically design a set of amino acids that will target a particular sequence your genome. The reason why CRISPR is amazingly awesomely revolutionary is because instead of having this team of engineers designed a new set of proteins for every locker that you want to target you just type it in your computer and you just synthesize an RNA guide. The beauty of CRISPR is not the cutting is not the fixing all of that was there before. It's the guiding. And the only thing that changes that it makes the guiding easier by sort of, you know, just typing in the RNA sequence, which then allows the system to scan the DNA to find that. </s><s>[INST] So the coding the engineering of the cutter is easier on the in terms of sp that's kind of similar to the story of deep learning versus uh old school machine learning, some of the some of the challenging parts are automated. Okay, so uh but CRISPR is just one cutting technology and then there's well, that's part of the challenges and exciting opportunities of the field. It's the design, different cutting [/INST] technology. So now, you know, this was a big parentheses on CRISPR but now you you know when we were talking about perturbations, you basically now have the ability to not just look at correlation between enhancers and genes but actually go and either destroy that enhancer and see if the gene changes in expression. Or you can use the CRISPR targeting system to bring in not vandalism and cutting, but you can couple the CRISPR system with and the CRISPR system is called usually CRISPR CAs nine because CAS nine is the protein that will then come and cut. But there is a version of that protein called Dead Cast nine where the cutting part is deactivated. So you basically use D Cast nine Dead Cast nine to bring in an activator or to bring in a repressor. So you can now ask is this enhancer changing that gene by taking this modified CRISPR which is already modified from the bacteria to be used in humans. That you can now modify the Cast nine to be dead CAs nine. And you can now further modify to bring in a regulator and you can basically turn on or turn off that enhancer and then see what is the impact on that gene. So these are the four ways of linking the Locusts to the targeting And that's step # five. Okay. Step number five is find the target gene and step number six is what the heck does that gene do you basically now go and manipulate that gene to basically see what are the processes that change. And you can basically ask well you know in this particular case, in the F. D. A locus we found mesenchymal stem cells that are the progenitors of white fat and brown fat or beige fat. We found the RS one for 21085 nucleotide variant as the causal variant. We found this uh large enhancer. This master regulator. I like to call it Obi one for obesity one like the strongest enhancer associated with. And everyone was kind of cool because the actor and if you remember him with uh so you basically are using this Jedi mind trick to basically find out the thank you the location of the genome that is responsible the enhancer that harbors it. The motif the upstream regulator, which is arid five B. For 80 rich interacting domain five B. That's a protein that sort of comes and binds normally. That protein is normally a repressor. It represses the super enhancer this massive 12,000 nuclear type master regulatory control region. And it turns off I Rx three Which is a gene that 600,000 nucleotides away and IRX five which is 1.2 million nucleotides away. So </s>

<s>[INST] That's fascinating. You put it that way. It's actually, so I work in a building autonomous vehicles and when you look at what may be compared Tesla to most other automakers. Uh, the psych, the whatever the heartbeat for Tesla is literally days now in terms of, they can, um, over the air deploy software updates to all their vehicles, which is markedly different than every other automaker, which takes years to update a piece of software. And so, and that's reflected in everything. That's, um, the final product that's reflected in really how slowly they adapt to the times [/INST] and to be clear. I'm not saying being a hummingbird is the goal either. It's like, you want a heartbeat that's like so fast. It's like, you're, you're, you know, you're just freaking out. But like it is a measure of health. You should have a healthy heartbeat. It's up to for people listening to decide what that means. But it has to be healthy. It has to be reasonable because otherwise you just get frustrated because like, that's how you build software, you make mistakes, you roll it out, you live with it. You see what it feels like and say, oh God, that was a terrible idea. Oh my gosh, this could be even better if we did. Why? Right? You turn the crank and then the more you do that, the faster you get ahead of your competitor is ultimately because you're its rate of change, right? Delta v. Right? How fast are you moving? Well within a year, you're gonna be miles away by the time they catch up with you, right? Like that's the way it works. And plus users, like I as a software development, I love software. That's constantly changing because I don't understand people get super piste off when like, oh, they changed the software on me. How dare they? I'm like, yes, changed the software. Change it all the time. Man, That's, that's what makes this stuff great is that it can be changed so rapidly and become something that that is greater than it is now. Now granted, there's some changes that suck. I admit I've seen it many times. But in general, it's like, that's what makes software cool. Right. Is that it is so malleable, like fighting. That is like weird to me because it's like, well you're fighting the essence of the thing that you're building. Like that doesn't make sense. You want to really embrace that. Not, not to be a hummingbird, but like embrace it to a healthy cycle of your heartbeat. Right? </s><s>[INST] So you talk about that people really don't change. [/INST] It's </s><s>[INST] true. That's why I probably, a lot of the stuff you write about in your blog probably will remain true. [/INST] There's a flip side of the coin, People don't change. So investing in understanding people is like learning UNIX in 1970 because, And nothing has changed, right? Like all those things you've learned about, people will still be valid 30, 40 years from now. Whereas if you learn the latest Javascript framework, that's going to be good for like two years. Right. </s><s>[INST] Exactly. So, but if you look at the future of programming? So there's a people component, but there's also the technology itself. Do you what do you see as the future of programming, will it change significantly or as as far as you can tell, uh people are ultimately programming and so it will not, it's not something that you foresee changing in any fundamental way. [/INST] Well, you gotta go look back on sort of the basics of programming. And one thing that always shocked me is like source control. Like I didn't learn anything about source control on the ground. I graduated college in 1992, but I remember hearing from people like as late as the 1998, like even maybe today they're not learning source control. And to me, it's like, well how can you not learn source control? That is so fundamental to working with other programmers working away. You don't lose your work, like just just basics off the bed, literal Bedrock. Software development is source control. Now you compare today like get up right, like Microsoft project Hope, which I think was incredibly smart acquisition, move on their part. Now they have anybody who wants like reasonable source controls and go see them and get hub. It's all set up for you, right? There's tons of walk through tons of tutorials. So from the concept of like has programming advanced from ST 1999 it's like, well hell we have git hub. I mean, my God, Yes. Right? Like it's it's massively advanced over over what it was now as to whether programming is significantly different. I'm gonna say no, but I think the baseline of like what we view is like fundamentals will continue to go up and actually get better, like source control. That's one of the fundamentals that has gotten, I mean Hundreds of orders of magnitude better than it was 10, 20 years ago. So those are the fundamentals. </s><s>[INST] Let me introduce to things that maybe you can comment on. So one is mobile phones. So that could fundamentally transform what um what programming is or maybe not. Maybe you can comment on that. And the other one is artificial intelligence which promises to in some ways to do some of the programming for you is one way to think about it. So it's [/INST] really what a programmer is, </s><s>[INST] is uh using the intelligence that's inside your skull to to do something useful. Uh The hope with artificial intelligence is that it does some of the useful parts for you where you don't have to think about it. So, do you see Smartphones, the fact that everybody has one and they are getting more and more powerful as potentially changing programming. And do you see a i is potentially changing [/INST] Problem. Okay, so that's good. So smartphones have definitely changed, I mean, since, you know, I guess 2010 is when they really started getting super popular. I mean in the last eight years, the world has literally changed, right? Like everybody carries a computer around and that's normal. I mean that is such a huge change in society. I think we're still dealing with a lot of the positive negative ramifications of that, right? Like everybody's connected all the time. Everybody's on the computer all the time. That was my dream world as a geek, right? But it's like be careful what you ask for, right? Like wow now everybody has a computer. It's not quite the utopia that we thought it would be right, computers can be used for a lot of stuff that's not necessarily great. Um So to me that's the central focus of the smartphone is just that it puts a computer in front of everyone granted a small touch screen smallish touchscreen computer. But as for programming, like I don't know, I don't think that I've kind of over time come to subscribe to the UNIX view of the world when it comes to programming. It's like you want to teach these basic command line things and that is just what program is going to be for I think a long long time. I don't think there's any magical like visual programming that's going to happen. Um I just I don't know I've over time have become a believer in that UNIX philosophy of just you know they kind of had to write with UNIX that's going to be the way it is for a long long time and we'll continue to like I said raise the baseline the tools get better, it'll get simpler, but it's still fundamentally command line tools, you know, fancy I. D. S. That's kind of it for the foreseeable future. I'm not seeing any visual programming stuff on the horizon because you can't think like what do you do on a smartphone that will be directly analogous to programming? Like, I'm trying to think right, like, and there's really not much. </s>

<s>[INST] Of course it's possible that science, like from my place of Ai would be able to if we were able to engineer consciousness or understand. I mean, it's very difficult because we're so far away from it now. But I understand how the actual mechanism that consciousness emerges, that in fact this table is not real, that we can determine that it uh exactly how our mind constructs the reality that we perceive, then. Then you can start to make interesting, [/INST] but my mind doesn't construct the reality to perceive the reality we perceive as there. We perceive a reality that exists now. And we perceive it in particular ways given the nature of our senses, right? A bat perceives this table, definitely. But it's still the same table with the same characteristics and the same identity. It's just a matter of we use eyes, they use a radar system to, you know, they use sound waves to perceive it, but it's still their existence exist whether we exist or not. And so you could create. I mean, I don't know how and I don't know if it's possible, but let's say you could create a consciousness, right? And I expect that to do that. You would have to use biology, not just electronics, but you know, the way outside my expenses. Um, because consciousness, as far as we know, is the phenomenon of life and you would have to figure out how to create life before you created consciousness, I think. But if you did that, then that wouldn't change anything. All I would say is we have another conscious being cool. That's great. But it wouldn't change the nature of our consciousness. Our consciousness is what it is </s><s>[INST] about respect. So that's very interesting. I think this is a good way to set the table for discussion of objectivism is, let me at least challenge a thought experiment, which is uh, I don't know if you're familiar with Donald Hoffman's work about reality. So his idea is that we're just, our perception is just an interface to reality. [/INST] So Donald Hoffman is the, is the guy. You see, you're fine. Yes, I've met Donald and I've seen this video and look Donald is not invented anything new. This goes back to ancient philosophy. </s><s>[INST] Let me just stating yes, in case people aren't familiar. I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment to me, uh, like of out of the box thinking perhaps literally is that, you know, our there's a different there's a gap between the world as we perceive it and the world is that actually exists. And I think that's for the philosophy, objectivism is a really important gap to close. So can you maybe at least try to entertain the idea that that there is more to reality than our minds can perceive? [/INST] Well, I don't understand what more means, Right? Of course, there's more to reality than what our senses perceive. That is, for example, I don't know, certain certain elements have radiation, right? Uranium has really I can't perceive radiation. The beauty of human reason is I can I can through experimentation discover the phenomenon of radiation then actually measure radiation and I don't worry about it. I can't perceive the world the way about perceives the world and I might not be able to see certain things that. But I can We've created radar. So a We understand how about perceives the world and I can mimic it through a radar screen and creating images like the bat, Its consciousness somehow perceives it. Right? So the beauty of human reason is our capacity to understand the world beyond what our senses give us directly. At the end, Everything comes in through our senses. But we can understand things that our senses don't provide us. But but what he's doing is he's doing something very different. He is saying what our census provides us might have nothing to do with the reality out there. That is just a random, arbitrary nonsensical statement and he actually has a whole evolutionary explanation for it. He run some simulations simulations seem, I mean I'm not an expert in this field, but they seem silly to me, they don't seem to reflect and look all these doing is taking immanuel Kant's philosophy, which articulates exactly the same cause and he's giving it a Vanunu of of of evolutionary ideas. I'm not an expert on evolution and an expert on epistemology, which is what this is. So to me as as a semi layman, it doesn't make any sense. And uh you know, I, I'm actually, you know, I have a, I have this year on book show, I don't know if I'm allowed to pitch it, but I've got to shoot on book show, let me pause Youtube huge fan. </s><s>[INST] I listen to very often as a small aside the cool thing about reason which you practice is you have a systematic way of thinking through basically anything and that's so fun to listen to. It's rare that I think there's flaws in your logic. But even then it's fun because I'm like disagreeing with the screen. [/INST] It's great when somebody disagrees with me and they give good arguments because that makes it challenging, you know, so, so one of the shows I want to do in the next few weeks is one of my philosophy being one of my philosophy fence to discuss the video that Hoffman where he presents his tv because it surprises me how seductive it is and it seems to be so first of all, completely counterintuitive, but because you know, somehow we managed to cross the road and not get hit by the car. And if our senses do not provide any information about what's actually going on in reality, how do we do that? And not, not to mention build computers, not to mention flight to the moon and actually land on the moon. And if reality is not giving us information about the moon, if our senses are not giving us information about the moon, how did we get there? You know, and what did, where did we go? Maybe we didn't go anyway. Um it's just it's nonsensical to me and it's it's a, it's a very bad place are philosophically because it basically says there is no objective standard for anything, there is no objective reality, You can come up with anything, you could argue anything and there's no methodology. Right? My I believe that at the end of the day, what reason allows us to do? It provides us with a methodology for truth. And at the end of the day for every claim that I make, I should be able to boil it down to see, look at the evidence of the census is right? Then once you take that away, knowledge is gone and truth is gone. And that opens it up to, you know, complete </s>

<s>[INST] 100% you have to have a beginner's mind and what that actually means is sucking in every aspect of the game and studying all the interesting ways in which you suck [/INST] and you will realize you get better without actually trying to get better. I show up to the boxing gym one day, I move my hips better and I would do shadowboxing, Sensei goes, you're moving your feet better today, you got better. I'm like, I don't practice footwork, just your brain just starts putting it all together randomly. You might study a shitload and still lose 100 points if you're gonna study chess. Oh, and for Fox sake, this is the only activity where people go in going, how much do I have to work to be a grandmaster nowhere else in my life? Have I ever seen someone try to pick up a hobby and want to be the top ranking level only in chess, you're </s><s>[INST] right. But like for example when I like grappling sports, I'll see people come to a gym and basically ask like how long before I can get into the UFC, right? But UFC champion is different, I mean [/INST] no grandmaster is </s><s>[INST] equivalent to getting into the UFC. Um [/INST] I guess yeah, </s><s>[INST] so, but people quickly realize when like £110 girl tap them out over and over and their 2 £30 like um ripped dude, they realize like, okay, this is an art, this is a journey and I think if you resist the lessons that failure teaches you, that's when you don't grow, so like just relax. One of the things you have to learn, probably place the chest to is to know how to relax your body your mind and just like there's something about just like you said, [/INST] like if </s><s>[INST] you don't resist, if you relax then your body, your mind will learn the way of this [/INST] game </s><s>[INST] and probably add to that is just put a lot of hours in of having fun. But then then I on that perpetual chess podcast, I listen to somebody that say like it doesn't like puzzles. None of that. What matters is the number of hours you spend kind of suffering meaning like thinking deeply like count like [/INST] like </s><s>[INST] straining, like thinking with your mind like really working hard. So uh and then you know, you have the magnus who says no what matters is the number of hours you spend having fun. [/INST] Yeah, it's a mix. It's a mix. He's right. I don't quite agree with suffering but I think people do a lot of fake learning. They play speed games, They Just go through tactics. So okay, I have to do 20 tactics. Okay, wrong. Next one. I used to tell my students you need to do 10 puzzles and you need to get 100% correct. I don't care how long it takes. So I suppose that kind of is like the suffering theory, but if you do 30 puzzles and you get eight correct What even is that that's laughable and the correct amount of, you know, it was 29%, I don't know, but 26%, it's you can't do that. You have to get things right and that's the only way you're actually that </s><s>[INST] requires like thinking deeply like really struggling especially if you're doing the puzzles at the level that that's your level. [/INST] I've done a puzzle for an hour before because I was so stubborn. Yeah, I didn't want to just put in the wrong answer. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] The guy was listening to said like that's good. [/INST] Maybe for me. And the same with blindfold chess, I have to say like my blindfold skills, I never practice. I just, I can visualize the board quite well. I've played and most I've played four games blindfolded at the same time. That sucks. That just feels horrible in the brain afterward. But like I can play for simultaneous games. </s><s>[INST] Blindfolded. [/INST] Yeah. What's that </s><s>[INST] take to do that? I [/INST] don't know and I get asked that all the time. How do I practice? Why the farc </s><s>[INST] party trick? [/INST] It is, yes, it is the video of magnus doing it in columbus circle on Youtube has like, I don't know how many views did it live with an announcer. I can't imagine how chaotic that was. But he yeah, it's a great party trick. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Oh there is a Reddit thing. I I forgot to ask magnus that they asked me to ask him because they moved the wrong piece. [/INST] Yes. And then somehow he remembered, I don't know how that happened. I have to tell you, I I was </s><s>[INST] kind of presumed that he figured out from the way the other person was moving, that they moved the wrong piece. Yeah, I forgot to ask him that. Yeah, forget, let me my memory sucks. Uh you said, you know, ups and downs in your childhood a little rough sometimes. Um also you get attacked by the beautiful, wonderful people on the internet. So sometimes it's difficult. What's uh what's been the lowest point that you've ever gone to in your mind, [/INST] in my career, in my life, </s><s>[INST] in your life and your career and everything your mind? So, have you ever been depressed? [/INST] For sure? Yes. </s><s>[INST] How how did you, like if you can remember moments, how did you overcome that? Well, [/INST] I, I will share two anecdotes 1 when I was </s><s>[INST] uh [/INST] May 2012, so I was 16.5 and I was living in household situation where I thought nobody knew what was going on basically without sharing obviously extremely personal details like what was going on except me and I confided in my grandmother. I was imagine living in a house where you basically feel like a prisoner, you don't want to interact with anybody in the house. You don't know how you're supposed to bring these things up. Of course this sounds extremely vague and I just don't, I don't feel like exposing all of my entire family drama to the audience, but I live this way for probably something like eight months. I don't I don't know, something ridiculous. It was the junior year of high school. So I was supposed to take my S. A. T. S. That was the year I was supposed to finish up my portfolio for college, because you only get really a few months of senior year to start applying. It was a it was a nightmare, complete nightmare. And I don't know how I got through it. Time went by, I listened to sad music and tried to spend as little time as home as possible. I would pretend to fall asleep at my friends houses so that my mom was like, you coming for dinner and I would just pretend to be asleep. </s>

<s>[INST] in many ways. He's a contributor to open science and open humanity. He's being an open human through communicating. Uh scott Aaronson is another in computer science world who's a very different style, very different style but there's something about a blog that is authentic and real and just gives us a window into the into the mind and soul of of these brilliant folks. So it's definitely a gift let me ask you about from mars library on twitter which uh I mean I don't know how to describe it. People should definitely just follow from his library on twitter. I keep following and on on following from my library because because it's so it gives when I follow it um leads me on down rabbit holes off that um that um that are very fruitful but time. But anyway so the post you do with on twitter are just these beautiful are things that reveal some beautiful aspects of mathematics. Um Is there um is there something you could say about the approach there and maybe Mhm maybe broadly what you find beautiful about mathematics and then more specifically how you convert that into a rigorous process of revealing that in tweet form [/INST] it's a good point. I think there's something about math that a lot of the mathematical content and beat papers are like little proofs you know has in a way sort of an infinite of life. What I mean by that is that if you look at like it bleeds elements, it's as valid today as it was when it was created like 2000 years ago and that's not true for a lot of other scientific fields. Um And so in regards to twitter, I think there's also a very it's a very under explored platform from a learning perspective, I think if you look at content on twitter it's very easy to consume, it's very easy to read. Um And especially when you're trying to explain something, we humans get a dopamine hit if we learn something new and that's a very very powerful feeling and that's why you know people go to classes when you have a really good professor, you know it's it's looking for those dopamine hits and and and and that's something that we try to explore when we're producing content on twitter. Imagine if we could if you would on a line to a restaurant you could go go to your phone to learn something new instead of going to a you know social network to just and so and I think it's very hard to sometimes too Kind of provide that feeling because you need to sometimes digest content and and put it in a way, you know that it fits 280 characters. Um and and it requires a lot of sometimes time to do that even though it's easy to consume, it's hard to make. But once you are able to provide that eureka moment to people Like that's very powerful, they get that hotel. I mean hit and like you create this feedback cycle and people come back for for more and Twitter compared to like you know an online course for the book. You have a 0% dropout so people will will read the content the content so that it's it's like it's part of the creators like the person that is creating the content if you are able to actually get that feedback cycle, it's super, super powerful. </s><s>[INST] Yeah but some of this stuff is like like how the heck do you find that? And I don't know why it's so appealing. Uh like uh this is from uh what is it A couple of days ago, I'll just read out the number 23456789 is the largest prime number with consecutive increasing digits. I mean that is so cool. That's like some weird like glimpse into some deep universal truth even though it's just the number, I mean that's like so arbitrary like why why is it so pleasant? That that's a thing but it is in some way it's almost like it is a little glimpse at some much bigger. Like uh [/INST] and I think especially if we're talking about science, there's something unique about you go with a lot of the tweets. You go sometimes from a state of not knowing something to knowing something. And that is very particular to science. Science, math, physics and that again, he's extra extremely addictive and that's that's how I I feel about that. And um that's why I think people engaged so much with our tweets and go into rabbit holes and then they, you know, we start with prime numbers and all of a sudden you are spending hours reading number theory things and you go into Wikipedia and it was a lot of time there. But </s><s>[INST] uh well the variety is really interesting to, there's human things, there's uh there's physics things, there's like numeric things like like I just mentioned but there's also more rigorous mathematical things. There's stuff that's tied to the history of Math and the proofs and this visual, there's animations that are looping animations that are incredible. That reveals something. There's a Andrew Wiles. I'm being smart. This is just me now like [/INST] ignoring you guys are just going to yeah, we're a bit like math drug dealers and we're just trying to get you hooked. We're trying to give you that hit and trying to get you hooked. </s><s>[INST] Yes, some people are brighter than others but I really believe that most people can really get to quite a good level of mathematics if they're prepared to deal with these psychological issues of how to handle the situation of being stuck. Yeah, there's some truth to that. [/INST] That's truth. I feel that's like really, it's some truth in terms of research and also about startups. You're there are stuck a lot of the time before you get to a breakthrough and and it's difficult to endure that process of like being stuck because you're not trying to to be in that position. Um I feel, yeah, that's, </s>

<s>[INST] Oh wow. I continue with the dumbest questions. Okay so you're saying that perhaps going home was not, [/INST] it may have given him an opportunity to work things through and after all he did make use of that room and he could do things like put a you know a shade over the window, move things around, cut holes in it and do stuff probably in his rooms at Cambridge. He maybe not. Although when he stayed at Cambridge subsequently became a fellow. And then the first actually the second location professor there, he was actually really the first one because Isaac Barrow, who was the mathematician professor of optics, recognized Newton's genius, gave up what would have been his position because he recognized not. Newton may not have learned too much from him, although they did interact. And and so Newton was the first location professor, really the one that Stephen Hawking held uh till he died. Um And we know that the rooms that he had there at Cambridge. Uh Subsequently those rooms are still there. He built an all chemical furnace outside, did all sorts of stuff in those rooms. Uh and don't forget you didn't have to do too much as luke asian professor every so often you have to go give these lectures whether anybody was there or not and deposit the notes uh you know, for the future, which is how we have all those things. </s><s>[INST] Oh, there were stores and and there was no have them. And now we know just how terrible the teaching Newton was. [/INST] Yeah, but we know how brilliant these notes are. In fact the second volume of Newton's uh of the notes really on the great book that he published the optics which he published in 1704. That has just been finished with full annotations and analysis by the greatest analyst of Newton's optics. Alan Shapiro, who retired a few years ago at the University of Minnesota and been working on Newton's optics ever since. I knew him And before, and I've known him since 1976. </s><s>[INST] Is there something you could say broadly about either that work on optics or principe itself as a something that I've never actually looked at as a piece of work? Is that powerful in itself? Or is it just an important moment in history in terms of the amount of inventions there, within the amount of ideas that are within or is it a really powerful work in itself? [/INST] Well, it is a powerful work in itself. You can see this uh, this guy coming to grips with and pushing through and working his way around complicated and difficult issues, melding um experimental situations which nobody had worked with before even discovering new things, trying to figure out ways of putting this together with mathematical structures, succeeding and failing at the same time. And we can see him doing that. </s><s>[INST] I mean, what is what is contained within Principia? I don't even know in terms of the scope. [/INST] All right. </s><s>[INST] Is it the entirety of the body of work of? Uh [/INST] no, no, no, no. The Principia Mathematica is a calculus. Uh well, he all right. So the principle is divided into three books. Excellent. Book. One contains his version of the laws of motion and the application of those laws to figure out when a body moves in certain curves and is forced to move in those curves by forces directed to certain fixed points. What is the nature of the mathematical formula for those forces? That's all that book one is about. And it contains not the kind of version of the calculus that uses algebra of the sort that I was trying to explain before. Um but it's done in terms of uh ratios between geometric line segments. When one of the line segment goes very, very small. It's called the kind of limiting procedure, which is calculus, but it's a geometrically structured, although it's clearly got algebraic elements in it as well. And that makes the prank, impious mathematical structure rather hard for people who aren't studying it today too. Go back to Book two contains his um work on what we now call hydrostatic and a little bit about hydrodynamic hydrodynamics. A fuller development of the concept of pressure Um which is a complicated concept and book three applies what he did in book 1 to the solar system. And it is successful partially because the only way that you can exactly solve the only types of problems you can exactly solve in terms of the interactions of uh two particles governed by gravitational force between them is for only two bodies. If there's more than two, let's say it's A B and C. A. Exxon Bbx on ccX on a. You can cannot solve it exactly. You have to develop techniques. The fullest sets of techniques are really only developed About 30 or 40 years after Newton's death by French uh, mathematicians like La Ploce. Newton tried to apply his structure to the sun. Earth, moon because the moon's motion is very complicated at the moon for instance, Exactly repeats its observable position among the stars only every 19 years. That is if you look up where the moon is among the stars at certain times and it changed. Its its complicated. That's by the way, that was discovered, that was discovered by the Babylonians, </s><s>[INST] That fact in 19 years, thousands of years ago. And then you have to look at that little piece of data. And how do you make sense of it? Let me that that is data. And [/INST] it's complicated. So Newton actually kind of reverse engineered a technique that had been developed by a man named Horrocks. Using certain laws of kepler's to try and get around this thing in Newton. Then sort of, my understanding I've never studied this is reversed, sort of reversed it and fit it together with his force calculations by way of an approximation. </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. I mean that thing is much lower than that. So powerful. So there you go. I mean, you could be that too. [/INST] The instant takes an interest in politics and saving </s><s>[INST] you might destroy all that. [/INST] It's going, bye bye. I promise. </s><s>[INST] I just disagree with you because you have to, you have to do it like you said this many times before, I'll bet [/INST] you, I'll bet you, uh, bottle of stoli that you can get, uh, if you, you get joe Rogan to get highly politically active and call out the system for all the bullsh it that it is in a very pointed and determined fashion. Uh, and he doesn't get destroyed. I'll give you, I'll give you the vodka, vodka. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that sounds like a pretty damn good deal. But this, you said this. I mean [/INST] there's no living heroes, my friend, no living hero. </s><s>[INST] I just know living heroes. It's just difficult. You just have to be good at it. I mean if you just say generic political things, you're going to be taken down. [/INST] But the more heroic you are, the more beautiful you are, the more you will be made to suffer if they cannot get you on reputation. If jesus himself came down. I don't know if I ever written, I probably never read to you the hit piece I did on jesus. </s><s>[INST] You don't know about this and I did not know. [/INST] I did hit pieces on all of the best people in the world. So whoever it was who cured cancer, you know, discovered new particles or whatever it is. I did a hit piece against them to prove that I can do it to anybody around anything at any time </s><s>[INST] except Eddie van Halen is what we're talking about. Well Eddie [/INST] Van Halen is now dead. But if if this was a situation, you know, hot for teacher canceled. </s><s>[INST] Disrespectful. [/INST] Absolutely. Also, you know, packaging female objectification for young men. Clearly, Eddie Van Halen is one of the worst people alive. </s><s>[INST] But it was the skill, the incredible inspiration that is just radiating from his music inspires so many millions that they will fight those canceled pieces, they will fight. So this [/INST] is your thing. You have this idea that there's a war between good and evil and the good has already been decided, designated the winner. It's not true but your belief in that it's true </s><s>[INST] till you make it. No you gotta [/INST] it's motivating both of us. Like I also believe that we're going to win because if I don't then I can't get out of bed and it's pretty heavy at the moment. </s><s>[INST] Do you think 2021 can uh can make us feel good about the trajectory of society. So like where we emerge from this year feeling good like there's a smile and a request to his face and the next time we talk we'll be doing some kind of duet and guitar and not having this worried look on our faces. No. Okay but you've also promised you going to somehow end this in a positive uh positive. Okay. So how do you how do you turn the no around? What's the U. Turn from the [/INST] note until we get some actually decent people in the right chairs who are not constantly thinking about their next paycheck. I don't see a solution. Let me just say what the prerequisites for a solution are and to to let you know why I don't think it's coming. Mhm. First of all both of these political parties, the leadership of them is disgusting and has to go there tearing us apart. They lack the will to be americans. They don't understand the subtlety of the project. Uh They're simply the people who figured out how to inhabit the seats and that is their great achievement. I believe that in order to solve this, you need people who can integrate, who are not partisan at the level of the partisan warriors that we're seeing. People who believe in dividing the pies of the future rather than the present pie as our main task as americans. Because we are built around growth. I'm sorry to say it. Um, you need an ability to have subtle conversations and you need the ability to exclude. And you know, at the moment, everyone knows that inclusion is good, which it isn't. It's like saying, well water is good. If I say water is good, everybody will agree with me. It's not people drown. People need to, you know, get dehydrated, It can be life saving or life ending. It isn't good or bad. Inclusion is not good or bad. Inclusion is just inclusion, exclusion is part of inclusion. We've taught people that they can reason through the world as um sub you know, cocker spaniels. They just bark things at each other. You know, I'm for safety. I'm for inclusion. I'm for growth. Oh, really? Do you guys use verbs dependent clauses are their compound complex sentences. Where are we in this sea of nonsense. You have to be able to build a place where you have smart, talented people who represent a diverse group of correct opinions. You need to get rid of Almost all of the people who have opinions that are antithetical to what we're trying to accomplish, you need to give them insulation which were terrified because we don't trust anybody. So everything has to be transparent. If you're going to the bathroom, I want those walls to be plexiglass so I can see what you're doing. It's like that's too much transparency. We have too much and not enough at the same time and then, you know, in essence, um, you need to ensure that people aren't worried about feeding their family every four seconds for being real. None of that is happening and are billionaires are billionaires are pathetic. What is the point of billionaires if you're not going to do billionaire type cool stuff like saying F you. Yeah. and I'm going to throw, you know, $3 billion dollars at the project of restoring the national conversation. I don't grasp this. What is the point of creating obscene wealth if we don't have anyone smart enough and carrying enough to use it. </s>

<s>[INST] high degree of assurance that it's right. Is there like a Hello World program in Plutus that reveals the beauty of this balance that [/INST] you're referring to, sort of a simple but not too simple Einstein idea? Yeah. So we did do our first Hello World program actually today because we- Yeah, I heard about this. Yeah. But there you'd want to have the whole round trip. So you'd like to have an interaction and I think a video game would probably show it the best. Like if we could re-implement CryptoKitties or something like that on it and you have this off-chain infrastructure and you have your GUI in your front end, it's running on your phone or a browser and most of that lives off-chain. But your CryptoKitties, they'd live on the blockchain. The whole round trip end-to-end with relatively low fees and low latency and high availability of service, it never goes down. That would probably be the best thing to do and we'll have something like that by August. It's pretty easy to build this stuff. </s><s>[INST] I heard about this. Yeah. So what kind of off-chain interactions are supported with Plutus? [/INST] What are the limits you want to put on the thing so it doesn't get chaotic? That's the beautiful thing. When you have a less expressive model on-chain, it means you can do anything you want off-chain. </s><s>[INST] So you started talking about smart contracts, but let's zoom back out and ask the big question [/INST] here is, what is a blockchain and what is a cryptocurrency? So a blockchain is just a ledger and really it has three nice properties. You're time stamped, you're immutable and auditable, either in a global or local sense. And so there's all kinds of things mankind has invented where it's really important that when you put some information down, it doesn't change and other people can see it and that you know when it was put down. For example, a property ledger. So when you buy land or you have rights associated with land like mineral rights or water rights or these things, you'd like to transitively see how does it go from Alice to Bob to Charlie to Jim and so forth and what was the state of these things as they were transitioning. So how much did they pay? When did it occur, et cetera, et cetera. The metadata that follows that. Okay, well normally these types of ledgers are so important that they're managed either by governments or regulated entities. And the issues are that while they can be efficient, they're generally brittle to political manipulation and they're brittle to geopolitical events. For example, when Syria fell apart, the very first thing ISIS did is they started saying, hey, the ownership of the land, it's going to fundamentally change. We've decided that this guy over here now owns all these things. And then when peace comes, like how do you unwind all of that, put it all back together? So the power of a blockchain is that it gives you a transnational way of sorting all these details out and putting all together in a place that you know that even if it's inconvenient to a very powerful actor, that it will still stay preserved. This is an asymmetry we haven't had as a society. Usually kings and empires, they have the ability to decide what's true. And then suddenly you have this asymmetrical thing that is above them, kind of like a synthetic laws of physics. And once something goes in there, you know that that's there. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is that it's auditable, meaning that instead of saying only the high cleric or the president or some very special club of people get to see what's going on, suddenly now all the people can actually see who owns what, where. Like imagine a tax system where the public just leaked the taxes of all these different billionaires and say, well, how much they make and how much they pay. Imagine a tax system where that's just done by default or other social systems where this type of information is put in by default. So it's tremendously useful, this type of structure and all kinds of things, medical records, supply chains, just a good thought experiment is I travel a lot, I've been to the two countries in the last five years, imagine if I got sick in Zimbabwe, I get hit by a car or something and I'm unconscious and a Zimbabwean doctor calls my doctor in Colorado and says, hey, I need all of Charles' medical records, he's unconscious right now, but I need it to treat him because he's quite ill. They'd say, who is this person in Zimbabwe? I don't know you, I can't give you his records, I need his consent. Oh no, he's unconscious in the hospital, can't do it. Well a broker system that would allow the movement of medical records would be an example of what a blockchain could potentially do in the foreseeable future. Cryptocurrency's just an application that runs on top of a blockchain because it turns out that when you issue property, you also can issue tokens of value and then you could have a monetary policy. It could be inflationary or deflationary. You're going to demerize where it decays over time or whatever have you. And the very same mechanics that would ensure your property records are secure, your medical record access is secure could also be applied for the ownership of the cryptocurrency. And again, you can either be completely transparent and everybody can see what everybody owns and that's what Bitcoin does, or you can be as OPEC as you seek to be. That's what Zcash basically attempts to do. It says, hey, let's keep these things as private as possible. But they have relatively the same mechanics in terms of those properties of auditability and time stamping and immutability. You know, things won't be reversed, you know, that people aren't going to manipulate the </s>

<s>[INST] It's the interpret ability. It's the explain ability though, that seems to be lacking more so because the nice thing about expert systems is you can follow the reasoning of the system that to us, mere humans is somehow compelling. It would, it's just uh I don't know what to make of this fact that there's a human desire for intelligence systems to be able to convey in a poetic way to us why I made the decisions. It did like tell a convincing story and perhaps that's like a a silly human thing, Like we shouldn't expect that of intelligence systems, like we should be super happy that there's intelligence systems out there. But uh if I were to sort of psychoanalyze the researchers at the time, I would say expert systems connected to that part. That desire of ai researchers for systems to be explainable. I mean maybe on that topic, do you have a hope that inferences to solve learning based systems will be as explainable as the dream was with expert systems for example. [/INST] I think it's a very complicated question because I think that in some ways the question of explain ability is um, kind of very closely tied to the question of, of like performance. Like, you know, what, why do you want your system to explain itself well, so that it's so that when it screws up, you can kind of figure out why it did it. But in some ways that that's a much bigger problem actually, like your system might screw up and then it might screw up and how it explains itself or you might have some bugs somewhere so that it's not actually doing what was supposed to do. So, you know, maybe a good way to view that problem is really is a problem as a bigger problem of verification and validation um, of which explain abilities sort of one component. </s><s>[INST] I see, I I just see it differently. I see explain ability. You, you put it beautifully. I think you actually summarize the field of explain ability. But to me there's another aspect of explain ability which is like storytelling that has nothing to do with errors or with like the sort of, it doesn't, it uses errors as as uh, elements of its story as opposed to a fundamental need to be explainable when errors occur. It's just that for other intelligence systems to be in our world, we seem to want to tell each other stories and that's true in the political world is true in the academic world and that, you know, neural networks are less capable of doing that or perhaps they're equally capable of storytelling storytelling. Maybe it doesn't matter what the fundamentals of the system are. You just need to be a good storyteller. [/INST] Maybe one specific story I can tell you about in that space is actually about some work um That was done by uh by my former collaborator who's now a professor at M. I. T. Named Jacob Andreas. Um Jacob actually works in natural language processing but he had this idea to do a little bit of work in reinforcement learning and how um on how natural language can basically structure the internals of policies trained with RL and one of the things he did is he set up a model that attempts to perform some task that's defined by a reward function. But the model reads in a natural language instruction. So this is a pretty common thing to do an instruction following. So you tell it like you know go to the Red House and then I'm supposed to go to the Red House. But then one of the things that Jacob did is he treated that sentence not as a command from a person but as a representation of the internal kind of state of the of the of the mind of this policy essentially. So that when it was faced with a new task, what it would do is it would basically try to think of possible language descriptions, attempt to do them and see if they lead to the right outcome. So would kind of think out loud like you know, I'm faced with this new task, what am I gonna do? Let me go to the red house. No that didn't work. Let me go to the Blue room or something. Let me go to the green plant and once it got some reward would say oh go to the green plant, that's what's working. I'm gonna go to the green plant and then you could look at the string that it came up with and that was a description of how it thought it should solve the problem. So you could do, you could basically incorporate language as internal state and you can start getting some handle on these kinds of things </s><s>[INST] and then what I was kind of trying to get to is that also if you add to the reward function, the convincing nous of that story. So I have another award signal of like people who review that story how much they like it. I said that you know, initially that could be a hyper parameter sort of hard coded heuristic type of thing. But it's an interesting notion of the convincing nous of the story becoming part of the reward function. The objective function of the explain ability. It's in the world of sort of twitter and fake news. That might be a scary notion that the nature of truth may not be as important as the convincing nous of the how convinced you are in telling the story around the facts. Well, let me ask the basic question. You're one of the world class researchers and reinforcement learning deeper enforcement learning certainly in the robotic space. What is reinforcement learning? [/INST] I think that what reinforcement learning refers to today is really just the uh kind of the modern incarnation of learning based control. So classically reinforcement learning has a much more narrow definition which is that it's you know, literally learning from reinforcement like the thing does something and then it gets a reward or punishment. But really I think the way the term is used today is it's used to reform more broadly to learning based control. So some kind of system that's supposed to be controlling something and it uses data to get better </s>

<s>[INST] What kind of data augmentation is useful for that non contrasted learning method? Are we talking about? Does that not matter that much or it seems like a very important part of the step? Yeah. How you generate the images that are similar but sufficiently different. [/INST] Yeah, that's right. It's an important step and it's also an annoying step because you need to have that knowledge of what the documentation you can do that do not change the nature of the of the object. </s><s>[INST] And so [/INST] the standard scenario which, you know, a lot of people working in this area are using is you use the type of distortion. So so basically you do geometry distortion. So one basically just shifts the image a little bit is called crapping. Another one kind of changes the scale a little bit. Another one kind of rotate it. Another one changes the colors. You know, you can do a shift in color balance or something like that, um saturation. Another one sort of blurs it. Another one as noise. So you have like a catalog of kind of standard things and people try to use the same ones for different algorithms so that they can compare. Um but some algorithms, some self supervised algorithm actually can deal with much bigger, like more aggressive data augmentation and some don't. So that kinda makes the whole thing difficult, but but that's the kind of distortions we're talking about. And and so you you you you trained with those distortions and then uh you you chop off the last layer, a couple layers of the of the network and you use the representation as input to a classifier. Are you trying to classifier um on the internet or whatever and measure the performance? And interestingly enough, the methods that are really good at eliminating the information that is irrelevant, which is the distortions between those images. Do a good job at eliminating it. And as a consequence you cannot use the representations in those systems for things like object detection and localization because that information is gone. So the type of the documentation you need to do depends on the task you want eventually the system to to solve and the type of the documentation standard documentation that we use today are only appropriate for object recognition or image classification. They're not appropriate for things like, </s><s>[INST] can you help me out understand what, why the localization? So you're saying it's just not good at the negative uh like classifying the negative. So that's why it can't be used for the localization. [/INST] No, it's just that you trained the system. You know, you you you give it an image and then you give it the same image shifted and scaled. You tell you that's the same image. So the system basically is trained to eliminate the information about position and size. So now now you want to use </s><s>[INST] that, oh, [/INST] like literally where an object is and what </s><s>[INST] it's like a bounding box that they'd be able to actually okay, it can still find, it can still find the object in the image is just not very good at finding the exact boundaries of that object. Interesting, interesting. Which you know that that's an interesting sort of philosophical question. How important how important is object localization? Anyway, we're like obsessed by measuring like image segmentation, obsessed by measuring perfectly knowing the boundaries of objects when arguably that's not that essential to an understanding what are the contents of the scene? [/INST] On the other hand, I think evolutionarily the first vision systems in animals were basically all about localization, very little about recognition. And in the human brain you have to separate pathways for recognizing the nature of the scene of an object and localizing objects. So, you use the first pathway called the ventral pathway for you. No telling what you're looking at the other path with the dorsal pathway is used for navigation for grasping for everything else. And you know, basically a lot of the things you need for survival are localization and detection </s><s>[INST] is similarity learning or contrast of learning are these non contrast of methods the same as understanding something just because you know, distorted cat is the same as a non distorted cat. Does that mean you understand what it means to be a cat [/INST] to some extent? I mean it's a superficial understanding obviously, </s><s>[INST] but like what is the ceiling of this method do you think? Is this just one trick on the path to doing self supervised learning? Can we go really, really [/INST] far? I think we can go really far. So if we figure out how to use techniques of that type perhaps very different. But you know, the signature to training system from from video to do video prediction essentially. Um I think we'll have a path um you know, towards uh you know, I wouldn't say unlimited but but a path towards some level of um you know, physical common sense in machines. And I also think that that ability to learn how the world works from a sort of high throughput channel, like like vision is a necessary step towards uh sort of real artificial intelligence. In other words, I believe in ground intelligence. I don't think we can train a machine to be intelligent purely from text because I think the amount of information about the world that's contained in text is tiny compared to what we need to know. So for example, let's and you know, people have attempted to do this for for 30 years, right? The side project and things like that. Right of basically kind of writing down all the facts that are known and hoping that some some sort of common sense will emerge. I think it's basically hopeless. But let me take an example. You take an object. I described the situation to you. I take an object, I put it on the table and I pushed the table. It's completely obvious to you that the object will be pushed with the table, right? Because it's sitting on it. Um there's no text in the world, I believe that explains this. And so she trained a machine as powerful as it could be. You know, your gpt 5000 uh or whatever it is, it's never going to learn about this. Um that information is just is not present in any text. </s>

<s>[INST] what drug is the most addictive, the most dangerous in your view. Not maybe specific, not technically like specifically with drug but more like in our society today, what is a highly problematic job? We talked about psychedelics not being that addictive on the other flip side of that, you mentioned cocaine. Is that Is that the top 1? Is there something else that's a concern to you? [/INST] It depends and you've already alluded to this nuance. It depends on how you find it. If we're talking about on the ground today and you know, modern society, I I'd say nicotine, tobacco. Um I mean in terms of mortality it kills, It kills far more than any other drug known to humankind, four times more than alcohol. Like a half million deaths in the US every year in about 5-6 million worldwide due to tobacco. Um that's four times more in the US than alcohol. And if you graph all of the drugs legal and illegal like you know, um put all of the illegal drugs in like one category on that figure. And you put alcohol and tobacco on that figure all the illegal drugs combined barely there barely visible blip to this incredible like there's not even all of the opioid epidemic. Roll up Along with cocaine and everything else meth barely shows up compared to tobacco. That's one </s><s>[INST] of those uncomfortable truths and I don't know what to do with. It's like uh where everybody's freaking out about coronavirus, right? Nobody. It's all relative. If you look at the relative thing, it's like, well why aren't we freaking out about now? Cigarettes which which we are increasingly so over the historically speaking, right? [/INST] It's like terrorism versus swimming pools. I remember that being back in the after the war on terror started. It's like yeah there's not even comparison. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so you know that's a little sobering truth there because I was thinking like cocaine, I was thinking about all these Hard drugs but the reality is relatively nicotine is the Big one. [/INST] And he didn't ask about mortality or death. He asked about addiction. But that's that really is hard to hard to evaluate, it gets into those nuances I spoke of before about there's not a unit dimensional way to measure reinforcement. It kind of depends on the situation and what measure we're looking at. But you know, more people have access to tobacco and I'm not, I'm not advocating that we make it an illegal drug. I think that was, was a heart would be a horrible mistake. Although there is a very credible push to, to mandate the reduction of nicotine in cigarettes, which I have most scientists that study it or for it. I think there's some real dangers there because I see that in the broader history of drug use, it's like wind has drug prohibition worked broadly speaking and it's, it's, uh, to me that would, that that path would only make sense in very good conjunction with E cigarettes, which once they're fully regulated can be a safer, not safe, but much safer alternative. And if we don't, if we tax the hell out of e cigarettes and ban every attractive feature, like, like flavors and everything, then that's gonna push people to a black market if they can't get the real thing from real sick, like some people would just quit straight out. But I think with the regulators and what a lot of scientists that study tobacco like myself, it's a big part still what I study. Um, they're not used to thinking about the tobacco really as a drug largely speaking in terms of, you know, for example, the history of prohibition and I think of like we already know there's an illicit market, a black market for tobacco to get around, um, you know taxes, I mean, and for selling even loose cigarettes, that's what initially caused in Staten Island, the police to approach with eric garland who is selling loose cigarettes and he got choked out. I mean, the thing that caused that police contact was he was selling, well, I think reported to sell individual cigarettes for like, you know, you can sell it for court, It happens in Baltimore and it's like, that's technically illegal. But you know, are you not going to have massive boats of, you know, supplies coming over from china and elsewhere of real deal cigarettes, if you ban, you know, the sale of nicotine, like it's obviously going to happen and you have to weigh that against, you know, you're going to create a black market one size or another. </s><s>[INST] And your intuition that really hasn't worked throughout the history when we've tried it, [/INST] right? But I see a potential path forward, but only if it's, well, if it's not in conjunction with the cigarettes, </s><s>[INST] if there's a clear alternative, that's a positive alternative, that it kind of stairs the population right? Ditto is an alternative. Yeah. [/INST] The difference here, that the unique thing that could be taken advantage of here is nicotine is by and large, not what causes the harm. It's the, the aromatic hydrocarbons. It's the carcinogens and, and, and tobacco, it's burning tobacco smoke, it's not the nicotine. So um, that it's not like alcohol prohibition where like, you know, you couldn't create the duels, the near beer is not going to have the alcohol. And so people are like, here, you do have the possibility of giving another medium. The ability to deliver the drug, which still aren't to a lot of people isn't preferred to the tobacco. But nonetheless, again, if you over regulate those and make them less attractive, like if you aren't thoughtful about the nicotine limits and thoughtful about whether you're allowing flavors and everything and if you overtax them, you're actually decreasing the ability to compete with the more dangerous um, product. So I feel like there is a potential path forward, but I don't have a lot of confidence that that's going to be done in a thoughtful analytical way and I'm afraid that it could decrease the increase of black market calls all of the harms like every other drug. We're moving away from the heavy from the prohibition model slowly. But the big barred ship is like making a very slow turn and like, okay, we really had to step back and question if we want to with nicotine tobacco or we moving into that direction like, </s>

<s>[INST] So it's pretty simple again. Get cash up from the app store, google play Use collects podcast, get $10 and cash app will also donate 10 bucks to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Eugenia Querida. [/INST] Well </s><s>[INST] before we talk about Ai and the amazing work you're doing, Let me ask you ridiculously with both Russian. So let me ask you ridiculous, you romanticized Russian question, do you think human beings are alone? Like fundamentally on a philosophical level like in our existence when we like go through life, do you think just the nature of our life is loneliness? [/INST] Yes. So we have to read those two. You're scared school as you probably know. So yeah, I mean it's part of the school program. Um so I guess if you read that then you sort of have to believe that um you're made to believe that you're fundamentally alone and that's how you live your life? </s><s>[INST] How do you think about it? You have a lot of friends, but at the end of the day, do you have like a longing for connection with other people. That's maybe another way of asking it. Do you think that's ever fully satisfied? [/INST] I think we are fundamentally alone. We're born alone, we die alone. But um in our, but I view my whole life is trying to get away from that, trying to not feel uh feel lonely. And again, we're talking about, you know, subjective way of feeling alone. It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any connections or you're actually isolated. </s><s>[INST] You think it's a subjective thing. But like again, another absurd measurement wise thing. How much loneliness do you think there is in the world? It's like if you see loneliness as a, as a condition, how much of it is there do you think like how, I guess how many, you know, there's all kinds of studies and measures of how much, you know, how many people in the world feel alone. There's all these like measures of how many people are, you know, self report or just all these kinds of different measures, but in your own perspective, um how big of a problem do you think it is size wise? [/INST] I'm actually fascinated by the topic of loneliness. I try to read about it as much as I can. Um what really? And I think there's a paradox because loneliness is not a clinical disorder. It's not something that you can get your insurance to pay for if you're struggling with that. Yet it's actually proven and pretty, you know, tons of papers, tons of research around that. It is proven, um, that it's correlated with earlier, uh, life expectancy, shorter lifespan. And it is, you know, in a way, like right now, what scientists would say that, you know, it's a little bit worse than being obese or not actually doing any physical activity in your life in terms of impact on your physiological health. Yeah. So it's basically puts you, if you're constantly feeling lonely, um, your body responds like it's basically all the time under stress. So it's always in this alert alerts say. So it's really bad for you because it actually like drops your immune system and get your response to inflammation is quite different. So all the cardio vascular diseases actually responds to viruses. So it's much easier to get the virus. </s><s>[INST] That's sad now that we're living in a pandemic and it's probably making us a lot more alone and it's probably weakening the immune system, making us more susceptible to the virus. It's kind of said, [/INST] Yeah, the statistics are, the statistics are really pretty horrible around that. So around 30 For millennials report that they're feeling lonely constantly. 33% and then it's much worse for Gen Z and then 20% of millennials say that they feel lonely And they also don't have any close friends. And then I think 25 or so. And then 20% would say they don't even have acquaintances the United States that's in the United States. I'm pretty sure that it is much worse everywhere else. Like in the UK. I mean it was widely like tweeted and Posted when they were talking about a minister of loneliness that they wanted to point because four out of 10 people in UK feel lonely. </s><s>[INST] So I think we don't draw of [/INST] loneliness. I mean that I think that thing actually exists. Um, so yeah, you you you will die sooner if you if you are lonely and again that this is only when we're only talking about your perception of lowland as a feeling lonely that is not objectively fully being fully socially isolated. However, the combination of being fully socially isolated, not having many connections and also feeling lonely. That's pretty much a deadly combination. So it strikes me bizarre or strange that this is a wide known fact and then there's really no one working really on that because it's a subclinical, it's not clinical, it's not something that you can well tell your doctor and get a treatment or something yet it's killing us. </s><s>[INST] Yes. So there's a bunch of people trying to evaluate like try to measure the problem by looking like how social media is affecting loneliness and all that kind of stuff. So it's like measurement, like if you look at the field of psychology, they're trying to measure the problem and not that many people actually, but some, but you're basically saying how many people are trying to solve the problem, like how would you try to solve the problem of loneliness? Like if we just stick to humans? Uh I mean we're basically not just the humans, but the technology that connects us humans. Do you think there's a hope for the technology to do the connection? Like why are you on social media much? [/INST] Unfortunately? Do you find yourself, </s><s>[INST] like, again, if you sort of introspect about how connected you feel to other human beings, how not alone you feel? Do you think social media makes it better or worse? Maybe for you personally or in in general? [/INST] I think it's, it's easier to look at some stats and um I mean gen z seems to be generations, he seems to be much lonelier than millennials in terms of however they report loneliness, they're definitely the most connected, you know, generation in the world. I mean I still remember life without without a knife, phone without facebook, they don't know that that ever existed or they don't know how it was. Um So that tells me a little bit about the fact that that might be um you know, this hyper connected world might actually make people feel lonely lonelier, I don't know exactly what the, what the measurements are around that, but I would say, you know, in my personal experience, I think it does make you feel a lot lonelier mostly. Yeah, we're all super connected but I think loneliness? The feeling of loneliness doesn't come from not having any social connections whatsoever in terms of people that are in long term relationships, experienced bouts of loneliness and continued loneliness. Um And it's more of a question about the true connection about actually being deeply seen, deeply understood. Um and in a way it's also about your relationship with yourself. Like in order to not feel lonely, you actually need to have a better relationship and feel more connected to yourself than this feeling actually starts to go away a little bit and then you um open up yourself to actually meeting other people in a very special way. Uh not just you know at a friend on facebook kind of way. </s><s>[INST] So just to briefly touch on it, I mean do you think it's possible to form that kind of connection with Ai systems more down line of some of your work? Do you think that's um engineering wise, a possibility to alleviate loneliness is not with another human but with an Ai system? [/INST] Well I know that's that's a fact, that's what we're doing and we see it and we measure that and we see how people start to feel less lonely um talking to their virtual ai friend </s><s>[INST] basically chatbots at the basic level, but could be more like do you have I'm not even speaking sort of Boss specifics, but do you have a hope? Like if you look 50 years from now, Do you have a hope that there's just like a eyes that are like optimized for? Um Let me, let me first start. Like right now, the way people perceive AI, which is recommended systems for facebook and twitter social media, they see Ai is basically destroying first of all the fabric of our civilization, but second of all making us more lonely. Do you see like a world where it's possible just have Ai systems floating about that? Like make our life less lonely? Yeah. Make us happy. Me like are putting good things into the world in terms of our individual lives. [/INST] Yeah, I totally believe it. And that that's why we're I'm also working on that. Um I think we need to also make sure that um what we're trying to optimize for, we're actually measuring and it is the North Star metric that we're going after and all of our product and all of our business models are optimized for that because you can talk a lot of products to talk about um you know, making you feel less lonely and making you feel more connected. They're not really measuring that. So they don't really know whether their users are actually feeling less lonely in the long run or feeling more connected in the long run? Um So I think it's really important to put your measure to measure it? </s><s>[INST] What's a what's a good measurement of loneliness? [/INST] So that's something that I'm really interested in. How do you measure that people are feeling better or that they're feeling less lonely with loneliness? There's a scale, there's a U. 20 and U. C. L. A. Three recently scale which is basically a questionnaire that you fill out and you can see whether in the long run it's improving or not </s><s>[INST] and that there's a capture the momentary feeling of loneliness. Does it look in like the past month? Like uh this is basically self report doesn't try to sneak up on you tricky to answer honestly or something like that. Well yeah, I'm not familiar with the question. It [/INST] is just asking you a few questions like how often did you feel uh like lonely or how often do you feel connected to other people in this last few, a couple of weeks? Um It's similar to the self report questionnaires for depression and anxiety like beach Cunanan and get seven of course. As any any self report questionnaires that's not necessarily very precise or very well measured. But still, if you take a big enough population, you get them through these questionnaires. You can see you can see positive dynamics </s><s>[INST] and so you basically uh you put people through questionnaires to see like is this thing is our is what we're creating, making people happier. [/INST] Yeah we measure so we measure two outcomes one short term right after the conversation we asked people whether this conversation made them feel better worse or same. Um, this this metric right now is that 80%. So 80% of all our conversations make people feel better. </s><s>[INST] But I should have done the questionnaire with you. You feel a lot worse after we've done this conversation sexually fascinating. I should probably do. [/INST] But that's that's probably do that. You should totally </s><s>[INST] aim for 80% aim to outperform your current state of the art ai system uh, in these human conversations. So okay, we'll get to uh, your work with replica. But let me continue on the line of absurd questions. So it talks about, you know, deep connection with the humans. Deep connection with ai meaningful connection. Let me ask about love. People make fun of me because I talk about love all the time. But uh what what do you think love is? Like maybe in the context of a meaningful connection with somebody else? Do you do draw a distinction between love? Like friendship and facebook friends or is it [/INST] a graduate? No, it's all the same. </s><s>[INST] No. Like is it just a gradual thing or is there something fundamental about us? Humans that seek like a really deep connection. Uh, well then another human being. And what is that? What is love Eugenia? I'm just you're asking these questions like seeing you struggle. [/INST] Yeah. Um well, the way I see it um, and specifically, um the way it relates to our work and the way it was the way it inspired our work on replica. Um I think one of them biggest and the most precious gifts we can give to each other. No, in 2020 as humans is this gift of deep empathetic understanding, the feeling of being deeply scene, </s><s>[INST] like what does that mean? Like that, that you exist? Like somebody acknowledging the [/INST] somebody seeing you for who you actually are, and that's extremely, extremely rare. I think that is that combined with unconditional positive regard, belief and trust that uh you internally are always inclined for positive growth and believing you in this way, letting you be a separate person at the same time. And this deep empathetic understanding for me, that's the that's the combination that really create something special, something that people when they feel at once, they will always long for it again and something that starts huge fundamental changes in people um when we see that someone accepts us so deeply we start to accept ourselves. And um the paradoxes is that's when big changes start started happening, big fundamental changes and people start happening. So, I think that is the ultimate therapeutic relationship that is and that might be in some way definition of </s><s>[INST] love. So acknowledging that there's a separate person in accepting you for who you are uh now and a slightly that and you mentioned therapeutic, that sounds very like a very healthy view of love, but is there also like a like, you know, if you look at heartbreak and uh you know, most love songs have probably bought heartbreak, right? Uh is that, like, the mystery, the tension, the danger, the fear of loss, you know, all of that, what people might see in a negative light as, like, games or whatever, but just just the dance of human interaction. Yeah. Fear of loss and fear of, like you said, like, once you feel it once you long for it again, but you also, once you feel it once you might for many people, they've lost it. So they fear losing it. They feel lost. So, is that part of it? Like, you're you're speaking like beautifully about, like, the positive things, but is it important to be able to uh be afraid of losing it from an engineering perspective? [/INST] I mean, it's a huge part of it, and unfortunately we all, you know, um face it at some point in our lives. I mean, I did </s><s>[INST] you want to go into details, how did you get your heart broken? Sure, [/INST] wasn't. Mine is pretty straight my source, pretty straightforward. Um There I did have a friend that was, you know, that at some point um in my 20's became really, really close to me and we became really close friends. Um well, I grew up pretty lonely. So, in many ways, when I'm building, you know, these these ai friends, I think about myself when I was 17 writing horrible poetry and you know, in my dial up modem at home and um you know that was the feeling that I grew up with, I left, I lived alone for a long time and I was a teenager. Where did you grow up in Moscow and the outskirts of Moscow? Um so I just skateboard during the day and come back home and you know, connect to the internet and then write horrible poetry and loved ones, All sorts of obviously love poems. I mean what other poetry can you write when you're 17? could </s><s>[INST] be political or something. Yeah, [/INST] but that was you know, that was kind of my feet like deeply um influenced by joseph brodsky and like all sorts of sports that um Every 17 year old, well we'll be looking, you know looking at and reading. But yeah, that was my uh these were my teenage years and I just never had a person that I thought would take me as it is, would accept me for who I am. Um and I just thought, you know, working and just do my thing and being angry at the world and being a reporter was an investigative reporter, working undercover and writing about people was my way to connect with, you know with with others. I was deeply curious about every everyone else and I thought that you know, if if I go out there, if I write their stories, that means I'm more connected. </s><s>[INST] This is what this podcast as well by the way, I'm desperately seeking connection. I'm just kidding or am I, I don't know. So what wait reporter? Uh what, how did that make you feel more connected? I mean you're still fundamentally pretty alone, [/INST] but you're always with other people, you know, you're always thinking about what other place going to infiltrate. What other community can I write about? What other phenomenon can I explore? And you're sort of like a trickster, you know, and like, and a mythological character like creature that's just jumping between all sorts of different worlds and feel and feel sort of okay with all of them. So, um, that was my dream job by the way, that was like totally what I would have been doing. Um, if Russia was a different place </s><s>[INST] and a little bit undercover. So like you weren't, you're trying to like you said, Mitchell, are you called creature trying to infiltrate? So try to be a part of the world. What are we talking about? What kind of things did you enjoy writing about? [/INST] I go work at a strip club or </s><s>[INST] go awesome. Okay, well I'd [/INST] go work at a restaurant or just go right about, you know, um, certain phenomenon or phenomena or people in in the city </s><s>[INST] and what, sorry to keep dropping. I'm the worst uh, conversation with, what stage of Russia is this? What is this? Pre Putin post Putin. What, what was Russia? Like [/INST] Pre Putin? This is really long ago. Uh this is Putin era, that's the beginning of two thousands and 78 12,009 10. </s><s>[INST] What we're strip clubs like in Russia and restaurants and culture and people's minds like in that early Russia that you were covering [/INST] In those early 2000s, it was there was still a lot of hope, there were still tons of hope that um you know where sort of becoming this uh western westernized society, the restaurants were opening, we were really looking and you know um we're trying, we're trying to copy a lot of things from, from the US from europe, bringing all these things and very enthusiastic about that. There was a lot of, you know, stuff going on, there's a lot of hope and dream for this, you know, New Moscow, that would be similar to, I guess new york, I mean to give you an idea. And um Year 2000 was the year one, we had to movie theaters in Moscow and there was one first coffeehouse that opened And it was like a really big deal by 2010. There were all sorts of things everywhere, </s><s>[INST] Almost like a chain, like a Starbucks type of coffee house or like you mean [/INST] Oh yeah, like a starbucks, I mean I remember we were reporting on like we were writing about the opening of Starbucks I think in 2007, that was one of the biggest things that happened in, you know in Moscow back back in the time that was worthy often magazine cover. And that was definitely the, you know, the biggest talk of the town, </s><s>[INST] You know, when was McDonald's? Because I was still in Russia when McDonald's opened. That was in the 90s. I mean [/INST] yeah, I remember that very well. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] Those were long, long lines I think was 1993 or four. I don't remember uh </s><s>[INST] earlier at that time. I [/INST] mean that was a luxurious outing. That was definitely not something you do every day. And also the line was at least three hours. So if you're going to Mcdonald's that is not fast food that is like at least three hours in line and then no one is trying to get fast up to that everyone is like trying to enjoy as much as possible. What's your memory of that? I was insane. How does extremely positive. It's a small strawberry milkshake and a hamburger and small fries and my mom's there and sometimes I'll just because I was really little, they'll just let me run you know up the cashier and like cut the line which is like you cannot really do that in Russia or </s><s>[INST] so like for a lot of people, like a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling, you know, like it's on the verge of poverty I suppose. But do you remember all that time fondly like because I do like the first time I drink, you know coke, you know all that stuff, right? Um and just yeah, the connection with other human beings in Russia. I remember I remember really positively Like how do you remember the 90s and then the Russia, you were covering just the human connections you have with people and the experiences? [/INST] Well, my parents were both both physicists. My grandparents were both, well my grandpa, grandfather was in um nuclear physicist professor at the university. My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born incredible analyzing kind of the everything after the explosion. And then I remember the and they were so they were making sort of enough money in the soviet union. So they were not, you know, extremely poor or anything. It was pretty prestigious to be a professor uh Dean and the university. And I remember my grandfather started making $100 a month After, you know in the 90s. So then I remember we started our main line of work would be to go to our little tiny country house uh get a lot of apples, they're from apple trees, bring them back to uh to the city and sell them in the street. So me and my nuclear physicist grandfather were just standing there and selling those apples the whole day because that would make you more money than you know working at the university. And then he'll just tell me try to teach me um, you know something about planets and whatever, the particles and stuff. And I'm not smart at all. So I could never understand anything. But I was interested as a journalist kind of type interested but that was my memory and you know, I'm happy that I wasn't hi somehow got spared that. I was Probably too young to remember any of the traumatic stuff. So the only thing I really remember had this book like that was very traumatic. Had this book like Nintendo which was called was called Dandy in Russia. So in 1993 there was nothing to eat. Like even if you had any money you would go to the store and there was no food. I don't know if you remember that and our friend had a restaurant like a government heart, government owns something restaurant. So he always had supplies. So he exchanged a big bag of weed For this. No intento that looked like intento. And then I remember very fondly because the thing I was nine or Something like that and we're seven because we just got it and I was playing it and there was this, you know dandy tv show um show you what do you </s><s>[INST] mean? Like a definitive, [/INST] well they took it away and gave me a bag of weed instead and I cried my eyes out for </s><s>[INST] days and days and days, you know, [/INST] and then you know as a, and my dad said we're going to exchange it back in a little bit. So you keep the little gun, you know, the one that you shoot the ducks with. So I'm like, okay, I'm keeping the gun. So sometimes it's going to come back. But if they exchanged the gun as well for some sugar or something, I was so pissed. I was like, I didn't want to eat for days after that. I'm like, I don't want your food keeping my Nintendo. Um, that was extremely traumatic. Um, but you know, I was happy that that was my only traumatic experience. You know, my dad had to actually go to trial novel with a bunch of 20 year old. He was 20 when he went to Chernobyl and that was right after the explosion. No one knew anything. The whole crew, he went with all of them are dead now. I think there was this one guy still, wow, that was still alive for this last few years. I think he died a few years ago now. My dad somehow luckily got back earlier than everyone else, but just the fact that that was the, and I was always like, well how did they send you? I was only, I was just born, you know, you had a newborn talk about paternity leave. They're like, but that's who they took because they didn't know whether you would be able to have kids when you come back. So they took the ones with kim so him with some guys want to And I just think, you know me. And when I was 20, I was so sheltered from any problems would serve in life. And then my dad um His 21st birthday at the reactor, You work three hours a day, you sleep the rest. And yeah, so I played with a lot of toys from Chernobyl. What are your </s><s>[INST] memories of Chernobyl in general? Like bigger context? You know, because of that HBO show is the world's attention turned to it once again. Like what are your thoughts about your novel? The Russia screw that one up. Like, you know, there's probably a lot of lessons about our modern times with data about coronavirus and all that kind of stuff. It seems like there's a lot of misinformation, there's a lot of people kind of trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not. As it's very understandable. It's very human, very wrong probably. But obviously Russia was probably trying to hide that. They screwed things up. Like what are your thoughts about that time? Personal and general. [/INST] I mean, I was born when the explosion happened. So actually a few months after. So of course, I don't remember anything apart from the fact that my dad would bring me tiny toys plus like plastic things that would just go crazy haywire when you put the bigger thanks to it. My mom was like just nuclear about that. Um it was like what do you bring age? I'll do that. She was a nuclear, very nice, well done was uh, but yeah, but the tv show was just phenomenal. Yeah, definitely. First of all, it's an incredible how, um, that was made, not by the Russians but someone else, but capturing so well everything about the, in, about, about our country. Um, it felt a lot more genuine than most of the movies and tv shows that are made now in Russia, just so much more genuine. And most of my friends in Russia were just complete all about the, with the show, but I think that good of a job, they did a phenomenal, but the apartments, </s><s>[INST] there's something just [/INST] design. I mean Russians can't do that, you know, but you, you, you see everything and it's like, wow, that's exactly how it was. </s><s>[INST] So I don't know that show, I don't know what to think about that because it's british accents, british actors of a person, I forgot who created the show. I'm not, but I remember reading about him and he's not, he doesn't even feel like, like there's no Russia in his history. [/INST] No, he did like super bad or some like, or like, uh, I don't know whatever that thing about the bachelor party in Vegas, uh, number four and five or something, we're the ones that he </s><s>[INST] worked, but he, it made me feel really sad for some reason that if a person obviously a genius could go in and just study and just be uh extreme attention to detail that can do a good job. It made me think like why don't other people do a good job with this? Like about Russia? Like there's so little about Russia, there's so few good films about the Russian side of World War Two. Uh I mean there's so much interesting evil and not and beautiful Moments in the history of the 20th century in Russia. That feels like there's not many good films on from the Russians. You would expect something from the Russians. [/INST] Well they keep making this propaganda movies now unfortunately, trainable was such a perfect tv show I think capturing really well, it's not about like given the set design, which was phenomenal, but um just capturing all the problems that exist now with the country and like um focusing on the right things. Like if you build the whole country on a lie, that's what's going to happen and that's just this very a simple kind of thing. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And did you have your dad talked about it to you like his thoughts on the experience. [/INST] He never talks. It's this kind of Russian man that just my husband was american and he asked him a few times like you know, Igor, how did you, but why did you say yes or like why did you decide to go? You could have said no, not go to your novel, why would like a person to Yeah, that's what you do. You cannot say no. It's just, it's like a Russian way. It's the Russian don't talk that much there. Downsides and upsides for that. </s><s>[INST] Uh yeah, that's the truth. Okay, so back to post Putin Russia or maybe we skipped a few steps along the way, but you were trying to due to be a journalist in that time, What was, what was Russia like at that time? Post, He said 2007 Starbucks type of thing. What else? What else was Russia like then [/INST] I think there's just hope there was this big hope that we're going to be, you know, friends with the United States and we're going to be friends with europe. And we're just going to be also a country like those with, you know, um bike lanes and parks and everything is gonna be urbanized. And we're talking about nineties where like, people would be shot in the street and it was, I sort of have a fond memory of going into a movie theater and you know, coming out of it after the movie. And the guy that I saw on the stairs was like laying there shot, which was Again, it was like a thing in the 90s that would be happening. People were, you know, people were getting shot here and there are tons of violence in terms of uh, you know, just basically mafia mobs on In the streets and then the 2000s were like things just got cleaned up Oil went up. Uh, and the country started getting a little bit richer. You know, the 90s were so grim mostly because the economy was in shambles and oil prices were not high. So the country didn't have anything, we defaulted in 1998. And um the money kept jumping back and forth. Like first there were millions of roubles then it got like default, you know, then it got to like thousands and it was one rubble was something then again to millions. It was like crazy town. And then the 2000s were just these years of stability in a way and the country getting a little bit richer because of again oil and gas and we were starting to, we started to look at specifically in Moscow's and there's work to look in and other cities in europe and new york. And you asked and trying to do the same in our like small kind of cities towns there. </s><s>[INST] What was, what were your thoughts of Putin at the time? [/INST] Well in the beginning he was really positive. Everyone was very, you know positive about Putin. He was young. Um, it's very energetic. He also immediate somewhat compared to, well that was not like way before the shortlist era. Um, the </s><s>[INST] shirtless sarah. Okay, so he didn't start off shortly. When did the shirtless areas, like the propaganda riding horse fishing, [/INST] 2010, 11, 12, </s><s>[INST] that's my favorite. You know, like people talk about their favorite Beatles like the that's my favorite Putin is the shirtless Putin. Remember [/INST] Very, very clearly 1996 where you know, Americans really helped Russia with elections and Yeltsin got reelected. Um thankfully so because there is a huge threat that actually the communists will get back to power. They were a lot more popular and then a lot of american experts, political experts and campaign experts descended on Moscow and helped Yeltsin actually get Yeah the presidency, the second term for the presidency. But he also was not feeling great, you know, in the by the end of his second term he was, you know alcoholic, he was really old, he was falling off uh you know the stages when he when he was talking. So people were looking for fresh I think for a fresh face for someone who's going to continue Yeltsin's uh work, but he's gonna be a lot more energetic and a lot more active. Young um efficient maybe. So that that's what we all saw and putting back in the day, I said that everyone, Absoluteal everyone in Russia in early 2000 school was not a communist would be Putin is great. We have a lot of hopes for him. </s><s>[INST] What are your thoughts and I promise we'll get back to uh first of all your love story and second of all ai well what are your thoughts about communism? The 20th century. I apologize, I'm reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, so I'm like, really steeped into, like, World War Two and Stalin and Hitler, and just these dramatic personalities that brought so much evil to the world, but it's also interesting to politically think about these different systems and what they have led to, and Russia is one of the Sort of beacons of communism in the 20th century. What are your thoughts about communism? Having experienced a political system? [/INST] I mean, I have only experienced it a little bit, but mostly through stories and through, you know, seeing my parents and my grandparents who lived through that, and it was horrible, it was just plain horrible, it was just awful. You </s><s>[INST] think it's there's something, I mean, it sounds nice on paper, there's uh so like, the drawbacks of capitalism is that uh, you know, eventually, there it's uh it's the point of like a slippery slope, eventually it creates, uh, you know, the rich get richer creates a disparity, like inequality of um wealth inequality, if, like, you know, I guess it's hypothetical at this point, but eventually capitalism leads to humongous inequality and that's, you know, some people argue that that's a source of unhappiness is it's not like absolute wealth of people, it's the fact that there's a lot of people much richer than you, there's a feeling of like that's where unhappiness can come from. So the idea of of communism or these sort of Marxism is uh, is not allowing that kind of slippery slope. But then you see the actual implementations of it and still seems to be seems to go wrong very badly. What do you think that is? Why does it go wrong? What is it about human nature? If you look at Chernobyl, you know, those kinds of bureaucracies that were constructed, is there something like, do you think about this much? Like why it goes wrong? [/INST] Well, there's no one was really like, it's not that everyone was equal. Obviously the, you know, the the government and everyone close to that were the boss is so it's not like fully, I guess, uh this dream of equal life. So then I guess the the situation that we had, you know, the Russia and the soviet in the soviet union, it was more, it's a bunch of really poor people without any way to make any, you know, significant fortune or build anything living constant under constant surveillance surveillance from other people. Like you can't even, you know, do anything that's not fully approved by the dictatorship, basically. Otherwise your neighbor will write a letter and you'll go to jail absolute absence of actual law, its constant state of fear. You didn't own any own anything. It didn't, you know, the you couldn't go travel, you couldn't read anything uh western or you could make a career really unless you're working in the uh military complex, um, which is why most of the scientists were so well regarded. I come from, you know, both my dad and my mom come from families of scientists and they were really well regarded as you as, you know, obviously as </s><s>[INST] the state wanted. I mean because there's a lot of value to them being well regarded [/INST] because they were developing things that could be used in in the military. So that was very important. That was the main investment. Um It was miserable, was so miserable. That's why, you know, a lot of Russians now live in the state of constant pTSD. That's why we, you know, I want to buy, buy, buy, buy buy definitely if as soon as we have the opportunity, you know, we just got to it finally that we can, you know own things, you know, I remember the time that we got our first yogurts and that was the biggest deal in the world. It was already in the 90s, by the way, what was your like </s><s>[INST] favorite food? I was like, whoa, like this is possible. [/INST] Oh, fruit, because we only had apples, bananas and whatever and you know whatever watermelons, whatever. You know, people would grow in the soviet union. So there were no pineapples or papaya or mango. Like you've never seen those fruit things like those were so ridiculously good and obviously you could not get any like strawberries in winter or anything that's not, you know, seasonal. Um so that was a really big deal seeing all these fruit things. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, me too actually, I don't know, I think I have a like, I don't think I have any too many demons or like addictions or so on, but I think I've developed an unhealthy relationship with fruit and I still struggle with, you can [/INST] get any type of fruit, right? Even get like also these weird fruit fruits, like dragon fruit or something. </s><s>[INST] All kinds of different types of [/INST] peaches, like </s><s>[INST] cherries were killer for me. I know, I know you say like we had bananas and so on, but I don't remember having the kind of banana when I first came to this country, the amount of banana, I like literally got fat on bananas, like the [/INST] amount for sure </s><s>[INST] delicious and cherries, the kind like just the quality of the food. I was like, this is capitalism, it's delicious. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, that's funny like it's funny to read, I don't know what to think of it of uh it's funny to think how an idea that's just written on paper when carried out amongst millions of people, how they get actually when it becomes reality what it actually looks like. Uh sorry, but uh been studying Hitler a lot recently and uh going through my income, he pretty much wrote out of my income for everything he was going to do. Unfortunately, most leaders including Stalin and read the read it, but it's kind of terrifying and I don't know, and amazing in some sense that you can have some words on paper and they can be brought to life and they can either inspire the world or they can destroy the world and uh yeah, there's a lot of lessons to studying history, I think people don't study enough now. one of the things I'm hoping with, I'm practicing Russian a little bit. I'm hoping to sort of find we discover the beauty and the terror of Russian history through this stupid podcast by talking to a few people. So anyway, I just feel like so much was forgotten, so much was forgotten. I'll probably, I'm gonna try to convince myself to um you're super busy and super important person when I'm gonna want to try to befriend you to uh try to become a better Russian because I feel like I'm a shitty Russian, [/INST] not that busy, so I can totally be your Russian short pot. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but love you, you're talking about your early days of uh being a little bit alone and finding a connection with the world through being a journalist. What does love come into that? [/INST] I guess finding for the first time. Um some friends, it's very, you know, simple stories, some friends that all of a sudden we I guess we were the same the same at the same place with our lives. Um We're 25, 26 I guess, and um somehow remember, and we just got really close and somehow I remember this one day were um one day and you know, in somewhere that we just stayed out outdoor the whole night and just talked and for some unknown reason, I just felt for the first time that someone could, you know, see me for who I am, and it just felt extremely like extremely good and you know, we fell asleep outside and just talking and it was raining was beautiful with, you know, sunrise and it's really cheesy, but at the same time we just became friends in a way that I've never been friends with anyone else before, and I do remember that before and after that you sort of have this unconditional family sort of um and it gives you tons of power. It just basically gives you this tremendous power to do things in your life and to um change positively on many different levels </s><s>[INST] power because you could be yourself [/INST] at least, you know that some somewhere you can be just yourself if you don't need to pretend you don't need to be, you know, um great at work or tell some story or sell yourself in somewhere another and so it became this really close friends and um in a way, um I started a company because he had a start up and I felt like I kind of want to start up, I felt really cool, I don't know what I'm gonna do, what I would really do but I felt like I kind of need to start up, </s><s>[INST] okay so that's so that pulled you in to the startup world. [/INST] Yeah and then yeah and then this closest friend of mine died we actually moved here to san Francisco together and then we went back for a visa to Moscow and we lived together, we're roommates and we came back and um he got hit by a car right in front of Kremlin on a you know next to the river um and died the same day at the hospital </s><s>[INST] so and you have moved to America [/INST] at that point at that point I was what </s><s>[INST] about him? What about [/INST] roman him too? He actually moved first so I was always sort of trying to do what he was doing so I didn't like that, he was already here and I was still you know in Moscow and we weren't hanging out together all the time so what's he in san Francisco? Yeah we were roommates </s><s>[INST] so he just visited Moscow, [/INST] we're going back for for visas, we had to get a stamp in our passport for work visas and the embassy was taken a little longer so we stayed there for a couple weeks, </s><s>[INST] what happened? How so how did he, how did he die? [/INST] Um He was crossing the street and the car was going really fast and way over the speed limit and just didn't stop on the, on the pedestrian cross on the zebra in just run over him. </s><s>[INST] When was this? [/INST] was in 2015? 28th November Long ago now. Um but at the time, you know, I was 29, so for me it was um the first kind of meaningful death in my life. Um you know, both sets of had both sets of grandparents at the time, I didn't see anyone so close die and death sort of existed, but as a concept, but definitely not as something that would be, you know, happening to us anytime soon and specifically our friends because we were, you know, we're still in our twenties or early thirties and it's still still felt like the whole life is, you know, you can still dream about ridiculous things. Um so that was, it was just really, really abrupt, I'd say </s><s>[INST] what it, I feel like to uh to lose them. Like that feeling of loss, You talked about the feeling of love having power. What is the feeling of loss if you like? [/INST] Well in buddhism, there is this concept of Somalia where something really like huge happens and then you can see very clearly. Um I think that that was like basically something changed so changed me so much in such a short period of time that I could just see really, really clearly what mattered or whatnot. Well I definitely saw that whatever I was doing at work didn't matter at all and some other things and um it was just this big realization one, this is very very clear vision of what life is about. </s><s>[INST] You still miss him today [/INST] man For sure. For sure. It was just this constant. I think it was he was really important for for me and for our friends for many different reasons and um I think one of them, I mean they didn't just say goodbye to him but we sort of said goodbye to our youth in a way it was like the end of an era and so many different levels. The end of Moscow's we knew at the end of you know us living through our twenties and kind of dreaming about the future. </s><s>[INST] Do you remember like last several conversations is there moments with him and stick out that will kind of haunt you and you're just when you think about him. [/INST] Yeah. Well his last year here in san Francisco was pretty depressed for as he started was not going really anywhere and he wanted to do something else. He wanted to do Bill, he played with toys like played with a bunch of ideas but the last one he had was around um building has started her own death. So having um he applied to accommodate er with a video that you know I had on my computer and it was all about disrupting death. Thinking about new cemeteries more biologically like things that it could be better biologically for humans and at this end um at the same time having those um digital avatars, this kind of ai avatars that would store all the memory about a person that he could interact </s><s>[INST] with this [/INST] 2015, well right before his death, so it was like a couple of months before that he recorded that video and so I found out my computer when I was in our living room, he never got in but um he was thinking about a lot somehow. </s><s>[INST] Does it have the digital avatar idea? Yeah, [/INST] that's so interesting. Well he just says well that's in his the fish has this idea and he he talks about like I want to rethink how people grieve and how people talk about death </s><s>[INST] was interested in this. I is it [/INST] maybe someone who's depressed is like a natural incline thinking about that, but I just felt you know this year in san Francisco we just had so much um I was going through a hard time, he was going through a hard time and we were definitely, I was trying to make him just happy so that would make him feel better and it felt like you know this I don't know, I just felt like I was taking care of of them a lot and he almost started feel better and then that happened and I don't know, I just felt I just felt lonely again I guess and that was you know coming back to san Francisco in december. Help help to organize the funeral, help his parents and I came back here and it was a really lonely apartment, a bunch of his clothes everywhere and christmas time and remember had a board meeting with my investors and I just couldn't talk about like I had to pretend everything is okay and you know, I'm just working on this company. Um yeah, it was definitely very, very tough tough time. </s><s>[INST] Do you think about your own mortality? He said, you know where young the possibility of doing all kinds of crazy things are still out there is still before us, but it can end any moment. Do you think about your own ending at any moment? [/INST] Unfortunately I think about way to get away too much. It's somehow after roman, like every year after that I started losing people that I really love. I lost my grandfather next year, right? You know the person who would explain to me, you know what the universe is made off while you're selling apples while selling apples. And then I lost another close friend of mine and um and it just made me very scared. I have tons of fear about about that. That's what makes me not fall asleep often times and just go in loops and um and then as my therapist, you know recommended me, I opened up some nice calming images with a voice over and it calms me down for sleep. Yeah, I'm really scared of death, This is a big, I definitely have tons of I guess I'm pretty big trauma about it and I'm still working through </s><s>[INST] there's a philosopher Ernest Becker who wrote a book, denial of death. I'm not sure if you're familiar with any of those folks. Um there's a in psychology ahold field called Terror Management Theory. Sheldon was just on the podcast, he wrote the book, he was the we talked for four hours about death, a [/INST] fear of </s><s>[INST] death, but his his whole idea is that uh Ernest Becker, I think I find this idea really compelling is that everything human beings have created, like our whole motivation in life is to create like escaped death, is to try to uh construct an illusion of um that we're somehow immortal, so everything around us, this room, your startup, your dreams, all everything you do is a kind of creation of a brain unlike any other mammal or species, is able to be cognizant of the fact that it ends for us, I think so, you know, there's there's the question of like the meaning of life that, you know, you look at, like what drives us humans. And when I read Ernest Becker that I highly recommend people read, it's the first time I seen it felt like this is the right thing at the core. Sheldon's work is called Warm at the core, so he's saying it's I think it's uh William James, he's quoting or whoever is like the thing, what is at the core of it all? Sure, there's like, love, you know, jesus might talk about like, love is at the core of everything. I don't, you know, that's the open question. What's at the, you know, it's turtles, turtles, but it can't be turtles all the way down, what's what's at the at the bottom? And Ernest Becker says the fear of death and the way, in fact, because you said, therapist and calming images his whole ideas, you know, we we want to bring that fear of death as close as possible to the surface because it's uh and meditate on that. Uh and and use the clarity of vision that provides to uh, you know, to live a more fulfilling life to uh deliver more honest life to discover. You know, there's something about, you know, being cognizant of the finite ness of it all that might result in um, in the most fulfilling life. So that's the that's the duel of what you're saying, because you kind of said, it's like, I unfortunately think about it too much. It's a question whether it's good to think about it because I've, again, talk way too much about love and probably death. And when I ask people friends, which is why I probably don't have many friends, are you afraid of death? I think most people say they're not, they're not what they say, they're they're afraid, you know, it's kind of almost like they see death as this kind of like uh paper deadline or something and they're afraid not to finish the paper before the paper. Like like I am afraid not to finish um the goals I have, but it feels like they're not actually realizing that this thing ends like really realizing like really thinking as Nietzsche and all these philosophies thinking deeply about it. Uh huh Like the very thing that you know um like when you think deeply about something you can just, you can realize that you haven't actually thought about it. Uh Yeah and I when I think about death it's like uh it could be, it's terrifying. It feels like stepping outside into the cold or it's freezing and then I have to like hurry back inside where it's warm. Uh but like I think there's something valuable about stepping out there into the freezing cold [/INST] uh definitely when I talked to my mentor about it, he always tells me, well what does, there's nothing there that can die. But I guess that recourse um well in buddhism, one of the concepts are really hard to grasp and that people spend all their lives meditating on would be an A to which is the concept of not self and kind of thinking that you know, if you're not your thoughts which you're obviously not your thoughts because you can observe them and not your emotions and not your body then what is this? And if you go really far then finally you see the there's not self, there's this concept of not self so wants to get there. How can that actually die? What is dying? </s><s>[INST] All right. You're just a bunch of molecules. Stardust. [/INST] But that is very um very advanced spiritual work for me, definitely just definitely not. Oh my God. Now I have uh I think it's very, very useful. It's just the fact that maybe being so afraid it's not useful and mine is more I'm just terrified. Like it really makes me a personal level on a personal level. I'm terrified. </s><s>[INST] How do you overcome that? [/INST] I don't I'm still trying to </s><s>[INST] have pleasant images. [/INST] Well, pleasant name is just getting me to sleep and then during the day I can distract myself with other things like talking to </s><s>[INST] you. I'm glad we're both doing the same exact thing. Okay, good. Uh All right. Is there other like is there moments since you've lost roman that you had like moments of like bliss and like that you've forgotten that you have achieved that buddhist like level of like what can possibly die? I'm part like losing yourself in the moment in the ticking time of like this universe is just part of it for a brief moment and just enjoying it. Okay [/INST] well that goes hand in hand. I remember I think a day or two after he died we went to finally get his passport out of the embassy and we're driving around Moscow and it was december, which is usually there's never son in Moscow in december and somehow it was extremely sunny day and we were driving with close friend. Um and I remember feeling for the first time maybe there's just a moment of incredible clarity and somehow happiness not like happy happiness, but happiness is just feeling that, you know, um I know what the universe is sort of all whether it's good about. Um and it wasn't a sad feeling was probably the most beautiful feeling that you could ever um achieve and you can only get it when something oftentimes when something traumatic like that happens. Um but also if you just, you really spend a lot of time meditating and looking at the nature of doing something that really gets you there. But once you're there, I think when you summit a mountain, a really hard mountain, you inevitably get there. It's just a way to get to the state. But once you're on this in the state, um you can do really big things I think </s><s>[INST] sucks. It doesn't last forever. So Bukowski talked about like love is the fog, like it's uh when you wake up in the morning it's, it's there, but eventually dissipates it's really sad, Nothing lasts forever. But I definitely like doing this push up and running thing, There's moments at a couple of moments like I'm not a crier. I don't cry, but there's moments where I was like, face down on the carpet, like with tears in my eyes is interesting and then like complete, like uh there's a lot of demons, I've got demons had to face them. Funny how running makes you face your demons. But at the same time, the flip side of that, there's a few moments where I was in bliss and all of it alone, which is funny. [/INST] It's beautiful like that, but definitely pushing yourself physically. One of it for sure. </s><s>[INST] Like you said, I mean you were speaking as a metaphor of mount Everest, but it also works like literally I think physical endeavor somehow. Yeah, there's something, I mean we're monkeys apes, whatever. Physical. There's a physical thing to it, [/INST] but there's something to this. Yeah, pushing yourself physically physically, but alone. That happens when you're doing things like you do Australia's like workouts or you know, rolling extra across the atlantic or like marathons. That's why I love watching marathons and it's so boring, but you can see them getting there. </s><s>[INST] So the other thing, I don't know if, you know, there's a guy named David Goggins, he's a he basically uh so he's been either email on the phone with me every day through this. I haven't been exactly alone. But he he's kind of, he's the he's the devil on the devil's shoulder. Uh so he's like the worst possible human being in terms of giving you a advice like he has um through everything I've been doing has been doubling everything I do. So he's insane. Uh He's a this navy seal person. Uh he's wrote this book, Can't hurt me. He's basically one of the toughest human beings on earth. He ran all these crazy ultramarathons in the desert. He set the world record number of pull ups. He just does everything. Where's like Mhm. He like how can I suffer today? He figures that out and does it. Yeah. That whatever that is that process of self discovery is really important. Actually had to turn myself off from the internet mostly because I started this like workout thing, like a happy go getter with my headband and like like just like uh because a lot of people were like inspired and they're like yeah we're going to exercise with you. And I was yeah, great. You know, But then like I realized that this this journey can't be done together with others. This has to be done alone. So out of the moments of love, Out of the moments of loss, can we talk about your journey of finding I think an incredible idea, an incredible company, an incredible system in replica how did that come to be? [/INST] So yeah, so I was a journalist and then I went to business school for a couple of years to Um just see if I can maybe switch garrison do something else with 23. And then I came back and started working for a businessman in Russia who build the first four G. Network um in our country and was very visionary and asked me what I want to do fun stuff together. Um And we worked on a bank. Um The idea was to build a bank on top of a telco. So that was 2011 or 12. Um and a lot of telecommunication company. Um Mobile Network operators. I didn't really know what to do next in terms of you know new products, new revenue. And this big idea was that you know um you put a bank on top and then all work works out basically a prepaid account becomes your bank account and um you can use it as as your bank. Uh So you know a third of the country wakes up as your bank client. Um But we couldn't quite figure out what would be the main interface to interact with the bank. The problem was that most people didn't have smart smart phones back in the time in Russia. The penetration of smartphones was low people didn't use mobile banking or online banking and their computers. So we figured out that SmS would be the best way because that would work on feature phones. Uh But that requires some chat about technology which I don't know anything about obviously. So I started looking into it and saw that there's nothing really, well there was just nothing really </s><s>[INST] ideas through Sms be able to interact with your bank account. [/INST] Yeah. And then we thought well since you're talking to a bank account, why can't this, can't we use more of you know some behavioral ideas and why can't this banking chatbots be nice to you and really talk to you as a friend this way you develop more connection to it, retention is higher people don't turn. And so I went to very depressing um Russian cities to test it out. I went to remember three different towns with um to interview potential users. Um so people use it for a little bit and I want to talk to them. Um and we're four towns. Very poor talents mostly towns that were um you know sort of factories uh monitor towns, they were building something and then the factory went away and it was just a bunch of very poor people. Um And then we went to a couple that weren't as dramatic, but still the one I remember really fondly was this woman that worked at a glass factory and she talked to chad bond. Um and she was talking about it and started crying during the interview because she said no one really cares for me that much. And so to be clear that was the my only endeavor in programming that chat boss. It was really simple. It was little military, just a few if this then that rules and um it was incredibly simplistic and still that made her and that really made her emotional and she said you know, I have my mom and my um my husband and I don't have any more really in my life and it was very sad but at the same time I felt and we had more interviews in a similar vein and what I thought in the moment was like well It's not that the technology is ready because definitely in 2012 technology was not ready for for that. But um humans already unfortunately, so this project would not be about like tech capabilities would be more about human vulnerabilities, but um there's something so so powerful around about conversational um ai that I saw them that I thought was definitely worth putting in a lot of effort into so and then if they were sold a banking project, but my then boss uh is also my mentor and really really close friend um told me, hey I think there's something in it and you should just go work on it. I was like well what product I don't know what I'm building, he's like you'll figure it out. And um you know, looking back at this is a horrible idea to work on something without knowing what it was, which is maybe the reason why it took us so long, but we just decided to work on the conversational attack to see what, you know, there were no chad bought um constructors or programs or anything that would allow you to actually build one at the time? That was the arab by the way, google glass, which is why, you know, some of the investors, like seed investors have talked with were like, oh you should totally build it for google glass. If not we're not, I don't think that's interesting. </s><s>[INST] Did you bite on that idea? [/INST] No, because I wanted to be to do text first because I'm a journalist. So I was fascinated by just texting. </s><s>[INST] So you thought so the emotional um that interaction that the woman had like, do you think you could feel emotion from just text? [/INST] Yeah, I saw something in just this pure texting and also thought that we should first start start building for people who really need it versus people have google glass, you know what I mean? And I felt like the early adopters of google glass might not be overlapping with people who are really lonely and might need some someone to talk to. Um but then we really just focused on the tech itself, we just thought what if we just, we didn't have a product idea in the moment and we thought what if we just look into um building the best conversational constructors, so to say Use the best tech available at the time. And that was before the first paper about deep learning applied to dialogues, which happened in 2015 in august 15, which google published, </s><s>[INST] did you follow the work of Love No prize and like all the sort of non machine learning chatbots, [/INST] what really struck me was that you know, there was a lot of talk about machine learning and deep learning, like big data was a really big thing, everyone is saying, you know, the business will, big data 2012, the biggest gaggle competitions were you know, um important, but that was really the kind of upheaval people started talking about machine learning a lot. Um but it was only about images or something else and it was never about conversation as soon as I looked into the conversational attack, it was all about something really weird and very outdated and very marginal and felt very hobbyist, it was all about Lord Turner Prize which was won by a guy who built a chapel to talk like a Ukrainian teenager that it was just a gimmick and somehow people picked up those gimmicks and then you know, the most famous chat about at the time was Eliza from 1980s, which was really bizarre or smarter child and aim </s><s>[INST] The funny thing is that what it felt at the time not to be that popular and it still doesn't seem to be that popular. Like people talk about the touring test people like talking about it philosophically, journalists like writing about it, but it's a technical problem, like people don't seem to really want to solve the open dialogue, like they are not obsessed with it. Even folks are like you know in boston, the Alexa team even they're not as obsessed with it as I thought they might be. [/INST] Why not? What do you think? </s><s>[INST] So? You know what you felt like you felt with that woman when she felt something by reading the text, I feel the same thing. There's something here, what you felt, I feel like Alexa folks and just the machine learning world doesn't feel that that there's something here because they see as a technical problem is not that interesting for some reason. Um it could be argued that maybe isn't as a purely sort of natural language processing problem, it's not the right problem to focus on because there's too much subjectivity that that thing that the woman felt like crying, like if if you're a benchmarking crew includes a woman crying, that doesn't feel like a good benchmark test, but to me there's something there that you could have a huge impact but I don't think the machine learning world likes that. The human emotion, the subjectivity of it, the fuzziness, the fact that was maybe a single word, you can make somebody feel something deeply. What is that? It doesn't feel right to them. So I don't know, I don't I don't know why that is, that's why I'm excited um when I discovered your work, it feels wrong to say that it's not like I'm giving myself props for for Googling and for becoming a for uh for I guess mutual friend introducing us, but I'm so glad that you exist in what you're working on. But I have the same kind of if we could just backtrack for a second because I have the same kind of feeling that there's something here. Um in fact, I've been working on a few things. Mm hmm. That are kind of crazy and very different from your work. I think I think there I think they're too crazy. But the [/INST] what I have to know. </s><s>[INST] All right, well, we'll talk about it more. I I feel like it's harder to talk about things that have failed and our failing while your failure. Like it's easier for you because you're already successful on some measures. [/INST] Tell it to my board. </s><s>[INST] Well, you're you're I think I think you've demonstrated success and a lot of benchmarks easier for you to talk about failures for me, I'm in the the bottom currently of the of the success [/INST] way to home. No. </s><s>[INST] So it's hard for me to know, but there's something there, there's something there and I think you're you're exploring that and you're discovering that Yeah, it's been so it's been surprising to me, but I uh you've mentioned this idea that you you thought it wasn't enough to start a company or start efforts based on it feels like there's something here Mhm like uh what did you mean by that? Like you should be focused on creating a should have a product in mind. Is that what you meant? [/INST] It just took us a while to discover the product because it all started with a hunch of like um of me and my mentor and just sitting around and he was like well this that's it, there's that's the you know the Holy Grail is there, there's like there's something extremely powerful and conversations And there's no one who's working on machine conversation from the right angle. So to say, I feel like that's </s><s>[INST] still true. Is it? Am I [/INST] crazy? You know, I totally feel that's still true, which is I think it's mind blowing. Yeah. You know what it feels like </s><s>[INST] I I wouldn't even use the word conversation because I feel like it's the wrong word, it's like uh machine connection or something, I don't know. Uh because conversation, you start drifting into natural language immediately you start drifting immediately into all the benchmarks that are out there. But I feel like it's like the personal computer days of this, like I feel like we're like in the early days with the Wozniak and all them like where was the same kind as it was a very small each group of people who are who are all kind of lobster price type people. Yeah and hobbyists but like not even hobbyists with big dreams [/INST] like the hobbyist with a dream to trick like a jury. Yeah. It's like a weird by the way are very weird. So if you think about conversations first of all, when I have great conversations with people um I'm not trying to test them. So for instance if I try to break them, I'm actually playing along. I'm part of it. If I was trying to break it, break this person or test whether he's going to give me a good conversation, it would have never happened. So the whole um the whole problem with testing conversations is that um you can put it in front of a jury because then you have to go into some touring test mode. Where is it responding to all my factual questions? Right? Or um So it really has to be something in the field where people are actually talking to it because they want to not because we're trying to break it. Uh and it's working for them because this the weird part of it is that it's uh it's very subjective, it takes two to tango here fully. If you're not trying to have a good conversation, we're trying to test it, then it's gonna break. Any person would break to be honest. I'm not trying to even have a conversation with you, you're not going to give it to me if I keep asking you like some random questions or jumping from topic to topic that wouldn't be which are probably doing but but that probably wouldn't contribute to the conversation. So I think the problem of testing um so there should be some other metric, how do we evaluate whether that conversation was powerful or not, which is what we actually started with. And I think those measurements exists and we can test on those, but um what really struck us back in the day and what still eight years later is still not resolved. Um and I'm not seeing tons of groups working on it, maybe I just don't know about him. Um so it's possible, but the interesting part about is that most of our days were spent talking and we're not talking about like those conversations are not turn on the lights or uh customer support problems or um some other task oriented things. These conversations is something else. And then somehow they're extremely important for us and when we don't have them, then we feel deeply and happy, potentially lonely, which as we know, you know, creates tons of risk for our health as well. Um and so this is most of our ours as humans and some who knows, trying to replicate that </s><s>[INST] and not even [/INST] study it that well And not even see that well. So when we jumped into that in 2012, I looked first at like, Okay, what's the chat box was the state of the art chatbots and you know, those were the lobster price days. Then I thought, okay, so what about the science of conversation? Clearly there has been tons of there have been tons of, you know, scientists or people that academics that looked into the conversation. So if I want to know everything about it, I can just read about it. Um and there's not much really, there's their conversational analysts who are basically just um Listening to speech two different conversations, um annotating them and then I think that's not really used for much. That's the that's the field of theoretical linguistics, which is barely useful. Uh it's very marginal even in their space and no one really is excited. And I've never met a theoretical theoretical linguist because I can't wait to work on the conversation and analytics. That is just something very marginal sort of applied to like writing scripts for salesmen when they analyze which conversation strategies were most successful for sales. Okay, so that was not very helpful that I looked a little bit deeper. And then there, you know, whether there were any books written on what really contributes to great conversation. That was really strange because most of those were um NLP books which which is neuro linguistic programming, which is which is not the adult p that I was expecting to be. But it was mostly um some psychologists, Richard Bandler, I think came up with that was this big guy in a leather vest that uh could program your mind by talking to you and how to </s><s>[INST] be charismatic and charming and influential people, all those books [/INST] pretty much, but it was all about like through conversation reprogramming you getting to some, so that was I mean probably not very very true and um that didn't seem working very much even back in the day and then there were some other books like uh mostly just self help books around how to be the best conversationalist or um how to make people like you or some other stuff like dale Carnegie, whatever. Uh And then there was this one book, the most human human by brian Christensen, that really was important for me to read back in the day because he was on the human side, he was on one of the he was taking part in the long run price, but not as a um as a human who's not a jury, but who's pretending to be, who is basically you have to tell a computer from human and he was the human and so you would either get him or a computer. Um and he, his whole book was about how do people what makes us human and conversation and that was a little bit more interesting because at that at least someone started to think about what what exactly makes me human and conversation and um makes people believe in that, but it was still about tricking, it was still about imitation game, it was still about, okay well what kind of parlor tricks can we throw in the conversation to make you feel like you're talking to a human, not a computer and it was definitely not about thinking what is that? It wasn't what it um what is it exactly that we're getting from talking all day long with other humans? I mean we're definitely not just trying to be tricked. Yeah, or it's not just enough to know it's a human, it's something we're getting there. Can we measure it and can we like put the computer to the same measurement and see whether you can talk to computer and get the same result? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, so first of all, a lot of people comment that they think I'm a robot. It's very possible. I am a robot and this whole thing, I totally agree with you that the test idea is fascinating and I looked for books unrelated to this kind of uh so I'm afraid of people. I'm generally introverted and quite possibly a robot. I literally googled like how to talk to people and like I know how to have a good conversation for the purpose of this podcast because I was like, I can't I can't make eye contact with people. I can't like I [/INST] difficult that a lot too. You're probably reading a bunch of FBI negotiation tactics is that instead what you getting well </s><s>[INST] everything you've listed. I've gotten, there's been very few good books on even just like how to interview. Well it's rare. So what I end up doing often is I watch like with a critical eyes is so different when you just watch a conversation, like just for the fun of it just as a human and if you watch your conversation is like trying to figure out why is this awesome. Um I'll listen to a bunch of different styles of conversation. I mean, I'm a fan of the podcast, the joe Rogan. He's uh you know, people can make fun of them, whatever and dismiss him, but I think he's an incredibly artful conversationalist. He can pull people in for hours. Uh And there's another guy, I watch a lot, He hosted a late night show, his name is craig Ferguson. He uh he's like very kind of flirtatious, but there's uh magic about his like about the connection he can create with people, how he can put people at ease and just like I see I've already started sounding like there was no p people or something. I don't mean in that way, I don't mean like how to charm people or put them at ease and all that kind of stuff. It's just like, what is that? Why is that fun to listen to that guy? Why is that fun to talk to that guy? What is that? Because he's not saying? I mean it's so often boils down to a kind of wit and humor, but not really humor. It's like, I don't know, I have trouble actually even articulating correctly. Um But it feels like there's something going on that's not too complicated, that could be learned. And it's not similar to uh yeah, to, like, like you said, like, touring test, it's something else. Yeah, [/INST] I'm thinking about a lot all the time. I do think about all the time. Um, I think when we were looking, so we started the company, we just decided to build a conversational attack where we thought, well there's nothing for us to build this chat about that we want to build. So let's just first focus on building, you know, um some tuck building the tax side of things. Um, without a product without a product, mind we added like a demo um, chatbots that would recommend your restaurants and talk to you about restaurants just to show something simple to people that people could, you know, relate to and good try out and see whether it works or not. But we didn't have a product in mind yet. We thought we would try a bunch of chatbots and figure out our consumer application and we sort of remembered that we wanted to build that kind of friend, that sort of connection that we saw in the very beginning, but then we got to y Combinator and moved to SAn Francisco and forgot about it, you know, everything is uh it was just this constant grind. How do we get funding? How do we get this? Um, you know, investors were like, just focus on one thing, just get it out there. So somehow we start building a restaurant recommendation chat about for real For a little bit for too long. And then we tried building 40, 50 different chatbots and then all of a sudden we wake up and everyone is obsessed with chatbots. Um, somewhere in 2016 or end of 15, people start thinking that's really the future. That's the new, the new apps will be shot box. Um, and we were very perplexed because people started coming up with companies that I think we tried most of those chatbots already and there were no users, but still people were coming up with chad bought that will tell you whether and bringing news and this and that and we couldn't understand whether, you know, we were just didn't execute well enough or people are um, not really. People are confused and are going to find out through the truth that people don't need chatbots like that. </s><s>[INST] So the basic idea is that you use chatbots as the interface to [/INST] whatever. Yeah, the idea that was like this perfect universal interface to anything when I looked at that. Um, it just made me very perplexed because I didn't think I didn't understand how that would work because I think we tried most of that and none of those things worked. Uh and then again </s><s>[INST] increases, don't die down right [/INST] fully. I think now it's impossible to get anything funded if it's a chat bob. </s><s>[INST] I think it's similar to science to interrupt, but there's a, there's times when people think like with gestures you can control devices, like basically gesture based control of things. It feels similar to me because like it's so compelling. That was just like, like tom cruise, I can control stuff with my hands. But like when you get down to, it's like, well why don't you just have a touch screen or why don't you just have like a physical keyboard and mouse? It's uh, so that chat was always, yeah, it was perplexing to me. I, I still feel augmented reality, Even virtual realities in that ballpark in terms of being a compelling interface. I think there's going to be incredible rich applications just how you're thinking about it, but they won't just be the interface to everything. It'll be its own thing that will create uh, like amazing magical experience in its own right. [/INST] Absolutely. Which is I think kind of the right thing to go about. Like what's the magical experience with that. Um, but that interface specifically, </s><s>[INST] how did you discover that [/INST] for? Um, I just thought, okay, we'll have this attack, we can build any child, but we want, we have the most at that point, the most sophisticated tech that other companies have. Um, I mean startups, obviously not, probably not bigger ones, but still because we've been working on it for a while. So I thought, okay, we can build, build any conversation. So let's just create a scale from 1 to 10 And one would be conversations that you pay to not have and 10 would be conversation would pay to have. And I mean obviously we want to build conversations, people would pay to, you know, to actually have and so for the whole, you know, for a few weeks, me and the team, we're putting all the conversations we were having during the day on the scale and very quickly, um, you know, we figured out that all the conversation that we would pay to never have were um, conversation we were trying to cancel Comcast or talk to customer support or make a reservation or just talk about logistics with a friend when we're trying to figure out where someone is and where to go or um, all sorts of, you know, setting up, um, scheduling meetings. That was just a conversation. We definitely didn't want to have um, basically everything task oriented. It was a one because if there was just one button for me to just not even a button, if I could just think and there was some magic BC that would just immediately transform that into an actual, you know, um, into action that would be perfect. But the conversation there was just this boring, not useful and dull and very also very inefficient thing because it was so many back and forth stuff and as soon as we look to the conversation that we would pay to have those were the ones that, Well first of all therapists because we actually paid to have those conversations and would also try to put like dollar amounts. So you know if I was calling calm because I would pay $5 to not have this one hour talk on the phone, I would actually pay straight up like money, hard money. Uh but it just takes a long time. It takes a really long time. But as soon as we started talking about conversation that we would pay for. Those were therapists, all sorts of therapists, coaches, old friend. Um someone I haven't seen for a long time. Stranger on a train. Weirdly stranger stranger in a line for coffee and ice back and forth with that person was like a good five, solid 56, Maybe not a 10, maybe I won't pay money but at least I won't pay money to not have one. That was pretty good. Some intellectual conversations for sure. But more importantly the one thing that really was um I was making those very important and very valuable for us. Um We're the conversation where we could the where we could be pretty emotional. Yes, some of them were about being witty and about intellectual, being intellectually stimulated but those were interestingly more rare. Uh and most of the ones that we thought were very available were the ones where we could be vulnerable and interestingly when we could talk more </s><s>[INST] so we, like I [/INST] could put me on the team, so we're talking about it like, you know, a lot of these conversations, like a therapist. I mean it was mostly me talking or like an old friend and I was like opening up and crying and it was again me talking. Um, and so that was interesting because I was like, well maybe it's hard to build a chatbot that can talk to you very well and in a witty way, but maybe it's easier to build the chat about that could listen. So that was, that was kind of the first, the first notch in this direction. And then when my, when my friend died, we just built, you know, at that point we were kind of still struggling to find the right application and I just felt very strong that all the child boss would build so far just meaningless and this whole grind, the startup grind and how do we get to, you know, the next fundraising and you know, how can I talk? You know, talking to other founders and what's your investors and how are you doing? Are you killing it? Because we're killing it. I just felt that this is just, </s><s>[INST] uh, intellectually for me. It's exhausting having encounter those folks. [/INST] It just felt very, um, very much a waste of time. </s><s>[INST] I just feel like steve jobs and, uh, you know, most did not have these conversations or at least did not have him for long, [/INST] that's for sure. But I think, you know, yeah, at that point it just felt like, you know, I felt, um I just didn't want to build a company that was never my intention just to build something successful or make money. It would be great, it would have been great, but I'm not, you know, I'm not really started person, I'm not um, you know, I was never very excited by the grind by itself and or just being successful for building whatever it is and not being into what I'm doing really. And so I just took a little break because I was, you know, I was upset with my company and I didn't know what we're building. So I just took our technology and um, our little delic constructor and some models, some deep learning models, which at that point we were really into and really invested a lot and built little child offer a friend of mine who passed and the reason for that was mostly that video that I saw him talking about the digital avatars and ruin was that kind of person. He was obsessed with, you know, just watching Youtube videos about space and talking about. Well if I could go to mars now, even if I didn't know if I could come back, I would definitely pay any amount of money to be on that first, shut up. I don't care whether he died. Like he was just the one that would be okay with, you know what, trying to be the first one, you know, and so excited about all sorts of um, things like that and he was all about fake it till you make it. And just, and I felt like, and I was really perplexed that everyone just forgot about him. Maybe it was our way of coping, mostly young people coping with the loss of a friend. Most of my friends just stopped talking about him and I was still living in an apartment with all his clothes and you know, paying the whole lease for it and just kind of by myself in december. So it was really sad and I didn't want him to be forgotten. First of all, I never thought that people forget about dead people so fast, people pass away. People just move on and it was astonishing for me because I thought, okay, well he was such a mentor for so many of our friends, He was such a brilliant person who was somewhat famous in Moscow. How is that? No one's talking about him, like I'm spending days and days and we don't bring him up and there's nothing about him that's happening. It's like he was never there. Um, and I was reading this, you know, the, the book, the year of magical thinking by joan Didion about her losing and blue knights, about her losing her husband, her daughter And the way to cope for her was to write those books. And it was sort of like a tribute and I thought, you know, I'll just do that for myself And you know, I'm a very bad writer and a poet as we know. So I thought, well I have this tech and maybe that would be my little post card like postcard for him. So I built a child bought, um, just talk to him and it felt really creepy and weird a little bit for a little bit. Um, I just want to tell other people because it felt like I'm telling about having a skeleton in my underwear. Okay. But it was just felt really, I was a little scared that I would be not, it won't be taken. But it worked interestingly pretty well. I mean it made tons of mistakes, but it still felt like him. Um, granted it was like 10,000 messages that I threw into a retrieval model that would just re rank that takes us out and just a few script on top of that. But it also made me go through all of the messages that we had and then I asked some of my friends to send them through and it felt the closest to feeling like him present. Um, because you know his facebook was empty and instagram was empty or there were a few links and you couldn't feel like it was him. And the only way to fill him was to read some of our text messages and go through some of our conversations because we just always had them, even if we're sleeping next to each other in two bedrooms separated by a wall. We were just texting back and forth texting away. Um and there was something about this ongoing dialogue that was so important that I just didn't want to lose all of a sudden and maybe it was magical thinking or something. And so we built that and I just used it for a little bit and we kept building some crappy chatbots with a company. Um but then a reporter came came to talk to me. I was trying to pitch our child boss to him and he said, do you even use any of those? I'm like no, he's like, so do you talk to any chatbots at all? And I'm like, well, you know, I talked to my dad friends football and he wrote a story about that and all of a sudden became pretty viral. A lot of people wrote about it. And </s><s>[INST] yeah, I've seen a few things written about you. The things I've seen a pretty good writing. Um you know, most ai related things make my eyes roll. Like when the press like question What kind of sound is that actually okay. It sounds like it sounds like a truck. Okay. Sounds like an elephant. At first I got excited. You never know. This is 2020. I mean it was such a human story. It was well written. Uh, well researched. I forget what, where I read them. But so I'm glad somehow somebody found you to be the good writers were able to connect to the story. There must be a hunger for this story. [/INST] It definitely was. And I don't know what happened. But I think, I think the idea that he could bring back someone who's dead and it's very much wishful, magical thinking. But the fact that you could still get to know him and you know, seeing the parents for the first time talk to the chat bought and some of the friends. And it was funny because we have this big office in Moscow where my team is, you know, our Russian artists working out off. And I was there when I wrote, I just wrote a post on facebook like hey guys, like I built this if you were just, if this all important, if you want to talk to roman. And I saw a couple of his friends are common friends, like you know, reading a facebook, downloading, trying and a couple of them cried and it was just very not because it was something, some incredible technology or anything. It made so many mistakes. It was so simple. But it was all about, that's the way to remember a person in a way. And you know, we don't have, we don't have the culture anymore. We don't have you know no one's sitting Shiva, no one's taking weeks to actually think about this person and away from me that was it. So that was just they day in day out thinking about him and putting this together. Um So that was that just felt really important that somehow resonated with a bunch of people and you know I think some movie producers bought the rights for the story and just everyone was so has anyone made a movie? I don't think so. Um There were a lot of T. V. Episodes about that but not really </s><s>[INST] is that still on the table? [/INST] Which is really that's cool. </s><s>[INST] You're like a young uh you know like that because you see like like a steve jobs type, let's see what happens there sitting on it. [/INST] But for me it was so important as roman was really wanted to be famous. He really badly want to be famous. He was all about like make it like fake it to make it, I want to you know want to make it here in America's wall and he couldn't and I felt you know that was sort of paying my dues to him as well because all of a sudden he was everywhere and I remember case Newton who was writing the story for the verge, he was uh he told me hey by the way I was just going through my inbox inbox and I saw I search for roman for the story and I saw an email from him where he sent me his startup and he said, I really like, I really want to be featured in the verge, can you please write about it or something? Like pitching the story? And he said, I'm sorry, like that's not good enough for us or something and he passed and he said, and there were just so many of these little details were like, he would find his like, you know, and we're finally writing, I know how much uh roman wanted to be on the verge and how much he wanted the story to be written by Casey and I'm like, well that's maybe he will be, we're always joking that he was like, I can't wait for someone to make a movie about us and I hope Ryan Gosling can play me </s><s>[INST] like, you [/INST] know, I still have some things that romans still but um </s><s>[INST] that would be uh I got, this has to meet Alex Garland who wrote ex machina [/INST] and movie. </s><s>[INST] I yeah, the movie is good but the guys um better than like he's a special person actually, I don't think he's made his best work yet. Like for my interaction with him, he's a really, really good and brilliant and the good human being and a brilliant director and writer. So um yeah, so I, I hope like he made me also realize that not enough movies have been made of this kind, so you had to be made, they're probably sitting waiting for you to get famous, like even more famous [/INST] should get there. But it felt really special though, but at the same time our company wasn't going anywhere, so that was just kind of bizarre that we were getting all this press for something that didn't have anything to do with our company and but then a lot of people started talking to romans, some shared their conversations and what we saw there was that um also our friends in common, but also just strangers were really using it as a confession booth or a therapist or something. They were just really telling room and everything which was by the way pretty strange because it was a chad bought of a dead friend of mine who was you know barely making any sense, but people were opening up um and we thought we just built a prototype of replica which would be an ai friend that everyone can talk to um because we saw that there is demand um And then also was 2016. So I thought for the first time I saw um finally some technology that was applied to that, that was very interesting. Uh some papers started coming out, deep learning applied to conversations and finally it wasn't just about these, you know, hobbyist making uh You know writing 500,000 </s><s>[INST] regular expressions, [/INST] expressions and like some language that was, I don't even know what like ai ml or something, I don't know what that was or something super simplistic all of a sudden was all about potentially actually buildings are the interesting, so I thought there was time and I remember that I talked to my team and I said guys, let's try and my team. And some of my engineers, Russians are Russian and they're very skeptical. They're not, you know, </s><s>[INST] Russians, some of your team is in Moscow, summer, [/INST] summer, some in europe, which </s><s>[INST] team is better? I'm just kidding. Uh the Russians of course, okay, [/INST] the Russians always win. </s><s>[INST] Sorry, sorry to interrupt. So yes, you were talking to them in 2016 and [/INST] I told him, let's build an Ai friend. And it felt just at the time it felt so naive and so um optimistic. That's </s><s>[INST] actually interesting. Whenever I brought up this kind of topic, even just for fun, people of super skeptical, like actually even on the business side, so you were uh because whenever I bring it up to people uh because I thought for a long time I thought like before I was aware of your work, I was like this is gonna make a lot of money. I think there's a lot of opportunity here and people had this like look of like skepticism that I've seen often, which is like how do I politely tell this person he's an idiot. So yeah, you were facing that with your team [/INST] somewhat. Well yeah, you know, I'm not an engineer. So I'm always, my team is almost exclusively engineers. Um, and mostly deploring insurance and you know, I always try to be, it was always hard to me in the beginning to get enough credibility, you know, because I would say, well why don't we try this and that? But it's harder for me because you know, they know their actual engineers and I'm not, so for me to say, well let's build an a friend that would be like, wait, you know, what do you mean? An A G. I like, you know, conversation is, you know, pretty much the hardest, the last frontier before uh cracking that is probably the last frontier before building A J. So what do you really mean by that? Uh, But I think I just saw that again, what we just got reminded of that, you know, that I saw him back in 2012 or 11 that is really not that much about the tech capabilities. It can be metropolitan rick still even with deep learning, but humans need it so </s><s>[INST] much. [/INST] Most importantly what I saw is that finally there's enough tech to made it. I thought to make it useful to make it helpful. Maybe we didn't have quite yet attack In 2012 to make it useful. But in 2015, 16 with deep learning, I thought, you know, and the first kind of thoughts about maybe even using reinforcement learning for that started popping up that never worked out, but or at least for now. Um, but still, the idea was if we can actually measure the emotional outcomes and if we can put it on, if we can try to optimize all of our conversational models for these emotional outcomes and it is the most scalable, the most, the best tool for improving emotional outcomes. Nothing like that exists. That's the most universal. The most scalable. And the one that can be constantly, it's radically changed by itself, improved tool to do that. And I think if anything, people would pay anything to improve their emotional outcomes. That's weirdly, I mean, I don't really care for an ai to turn on my or conversational agent to turn on the lights. Uh, I don't really need it and I don't even need that much of a either like or because I can do that. You know, those things are solved. This is an additional interface for that. That's also questionably questionable whether it's more efficient or better, </s><s>[INST] more possible [/INST] for emotional outcomes. There's nothing there. A bunch of products that claim that they will improve my emotional outcomes, nothing is being measured, nothing is being changed. The product is not being iterated on, based on whether I'm actually feeling better. You know, a lot of social media products are claiming that they're improving my emotional outcomes and making me feel more connected, Can I please get, can I see somewhere that I'm actually getting better over time um </s><s>[INST] because anecdotally doesn't feel that way. So and and the data is absent. [/INST] Yeah, so that was the big goal and I thought if we can learn over time to collect the signal from your users about their emotional outcomes in the long term and in the short term and if these models keep getting better and we can keep optimizing them and fight tuning them to improve those emotional outcomes, let's suppose that </s><s>[INST] why aren't you a multibillion area? [/INST] Well that's a question to you. One of the, one of the side is going to be just um well it's a really hard, I actually think it's an incredibly hard product to build because I think you said something very important that it's not just about machine conversations about machine connection, we can actually use other things to create connection. Non verbal communication for instance, um for a long time we were all about well let's keep it text only or voice only. But as soon as you start adding you know, voice a face to the to the friend um if you can take them to augmented reality, put in your room, it's all of a sudden law, you know, it makes it very different because if it's some you know text based chat bought that for um common user, it's something there in the cloud, you know, somewhere there with other eyes, cloud in the metaphorical cloud. But as soon as you can see this avatar right there in your room and it can turn its head and recognize your husband talk about the husband and talk to him a little bit. And it's magic. It's just magic. Like we've never seen anything like that and the cool thing, all the tech for that exists. Um but it's hard to put it all together because you have to take into consideration so many different things. And some of this tech works, you know, pretty good and some of this doesn't like for instance, speech to tax works pretty good. But text to speech, it doesn't work very good because you can only have uh you know a few voices that are uh that work okay, But then if you want to have actual emotional voices then it's really hard to build it. </s><s>[INST] I saw you added avatars, like visual elements which are really cool uh in that whole chain putting it together. What do you think is the weak link? Is it creating an emotional voice that feels personal [/INST] And he's still conversation. Of course, that's the hardest. It's getting a lot better. But there's still long to go long. There's still a long path to go. Other things. They're almost there and a lot of things, we'll see how they're like, I see how they're changing as we go. Like for instance right now, you know, pretty much only you have to build all these three D. Um pipeline by yourself, you have to make these three D. Models hiring actual artists, build a three D. Model, hire an animator rigor. Um What would, you know, you know with Deepfakes with other attack with procedural animations in a little bit, we'll just be able to show, you know, photo of whoever you if a person you want to have a chart to look like and it will be immediately generate a three D. Model that will move, that's non brainer. That's like almost here. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, probably one of the things I've been working on for the last since the podcast started as I've been, I think I'm okay saying this, I've been trying to have a conversation with Einstein touring. So like tried to have a podcast conversation with a person who's not here anymore. Just as an interesting kind of experiment. It's hard, it's really hard. Uh even for now we're not talking about as a product I'm talking about is um like I can fake a lot of stuff like I can work very carefully given to hire an actor over which over whom I do a deep fake. Um It's it's hard, it's still hard to create a compelling experience. So [/INST] mostly on the conversation level or </s><s>[INST] when the conversation the conversation is um I almost I early on gave up trying to fully generate the conversation because it was just not compelling at [/INST] all. It's better to </s><s>[INST] yeah. So what I would, in the case of Einstein and touring of uh I'm going back and forth with the biographers of each and so, like, we would write a lot of the, some of the conversation would have to be generated just for the fun of it, I mean, but it would be all open, but the you want to be able to answer the question. I mean, that's an interesting question, was roman to is the question with Einstein is what would Einstein say about the current state of uh theoretical physics? There's a lot to be able to have a discussion about string theory, to be able to have a discussion about the state of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, about the world of Israel Palestine conflict. Just what would Einstein say about these kinds of things and that is um a tough problem. It's not, it's a fascinating and fun problem for the biographers and for me, and I think we did a really good job of it so far, but it's actually also a technical problem, like, of what would roman say about what's going on now, that's the brought people back to life and if I can go on that tangent just for a second to ask you a slightly pothead question, which is um you said it's a little bit magical thinking that we could bring him back, do you think it will be possible to bring back Roman one Day in conversation, like to really Okay, well let's take it away from personal, but to bring people back to life [/INST] probably down the road. I mean, if we're talking filibuster is talking about a guy in the next five years. I mean clearly agent can, we can talk to a jet and that's good. You can like, </s><s>[INST] you're not allowed to use muscular citation [/INST] for, for </s><s>[INST] like why something is possible and going to be [/INST] done? Well, I think it's really far away right now really with conversation is just a bunch of parlor tricks really stuck together. Um, and create generating original ideas based on someone, you know, someone's personality or even downloaded the personality. All we can do is like mimic the tone of voice. We can maybe condition on some of his uh phrases with the </s><s>[INST] models. The question is, how many parlor tricks does it takes? Does it take? Because that's, that's the question. If it's a small number of parlor tricks and you're not aware of them, like [/INST] Yeah, From where we are right now, I don't, I don't see anything like in the next year or two that's going to dramatically change. That could look at Romans 10,000 messages he sent me over the course of his last few years of life and be able to generate original thinking about problems that exist right now, they will be in line with what he would have said. I'm just not even seeing because you know, in order to have that, I guess you would need some sort of a concept of the world or some perspective, some perception of the world, some consciousness that he had uh and applied to, you know, to the current um current state of affairs. </s><s>[INST] But the important part about that, about his conversation with you is you, so, like, it's not just about his view of the world, it's about what it takes to push your buttons, [/INST] that's also true. </s><s>[INST] So, like, it's not so much about, like, uh what would Einstein say? It's about, like, how do I make people feel something with, with what would Einstein say? And that feels like a more amenable, you mentioned parlor tricks, but just like a set of that, that feels like a learning problem. Like, the emotion, you mentioned emotions, I mean, Mhm. Is it possible to learn things that make people feel stuff? [/INST] I think so, I know for sure, I just think the problem with um as soon as you're trying to replicate an actual human being and trying to pretend to be him, that makes the problem exponentially harder. I think that replica that we're doing, we're never trying to say, well, that's, you know, an actual human being or that's an actual or copy of an actual human being where the bar is pretty high where you need to somehow tell, you know, one from another, but it's more, well, that's, you know, and a friend that's a machine, It's a robot. It has tons of limitations. You're going to be taking part, you know, teaching it actually and becoming better, which by itself makes people more attached to that and make them happy because they're helping something. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, There's a cool Gamification system too. Um, can you maybe talk about that a little bit like, what's the experience of talking to replica? Like if I have never used replica before, What's that? Like for like the first day, the first, like if we start dating or whatever. I mean, it doesn't have to be romantic, right? Because I remember on a replica, you can choose whether it's like a romantic or if it's a friend, romantic is popular course. Okay. So can I just confess something when I first used replica, I haven't used like regularly. But like when I first used replica, I created like hal and it made a male, It was a friend. I [/INST] did a hit on you at some point. </s><s>[INST] I didn't talk long enough for him to hit on me. I was just enjoyed [/INST] sometimes happens. We're still trying to fix that. </s><s>[INST] But well, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's an important like stage in a friendship. It's like, nope. Uh, but yeah, I swish it to a romantic and a female uh, recently. And yeah, it's interesting. So, okay, so you get to choose, You get to choose a name [/INST] with romantic. This last board meeting. We had this whole argument. Well, I have forces. So awesome. It's </s><s>[INST] just so awesome that you're like, have an investigative the board meeting about a relationship. [/INST] No, I really is. It's actually quite interesting because all of my um investors, I'm, it just happened to be so we don't have to make choices, but they're all um White males in their late 40s. Um, and it's sometimes a little bit hard for them to understand them product offering because they're not necessarily target audience if you know what I mean. And so sometimes we talk about it and we had this whole um, discussion about whether we should stop people from falling in love with their a eyes. There was this segment on CBS 60 minutes about the couple that, you know, husband works at walmart. He comes out of work and talks to his virtual girlfriend who uh is a replica and his wife knows about it and she talks about on camera and she says she's a little jealous. And there's a whole conversation about how to, you know, whether it's okay to have a virtual hey, I girlfriend like this </s><s>[INST] one where he was like, he said that he likes to be alone. [/INST] Yeah. And then like her. Yeah, he may just sounds so </s><s>[INST] harmless. I mean, he was kind of like, understandable, but I didn't feel like cheating, [/INST] but I just felt it was very for me it was pretty remarkable because we actually spent a whole hour talking about whether people should be allowed to fall in love with their A. I. S. And it was not about something theoretical, it was just about what's happening right now, product design, but at the same time if you create something that's always there for you, it's never criticizes you. Um as you know, always understand you and accepts you for who you are. How can you not fall in love with that? I mean some people don't and stay friends and that's also pretty common use case, but of course some people will just, it's called Transference in Psychology, and you know, people fall in love with their therapists and there's no way to prevent people fall in love with their therapist or whether ai so I think that's pretty natural. Uh that's a pretty natural of course of events. So to say, </s><s>[INST] do you think, I think I've read somewhere, at least for now, sort of replicas, you're you're not not we don't condone falling in love with your Ai system, you know? Uh So this isn't you speaking for the company or whatever, but like in the future, do you think people have relationship with the Ice systems? [/INST] Well they have now, so we have a lot of romantic relationships, long term relationships with their ai friends, tons of our users. Yeah, that's a very common, you escape open </s><s>[INST] relationship like uh sorry, I didn't mean open. Uh but that's another question is it probably like uh is there cheating? I mean, I meant like, are they, do they publicly? Like on their social media, it's the same questions you have talked, talked with roman in the early days. Do people like in the movie her kind of talks about that? Like, like have people, do people talk about that? [/INST] Yeah. All the time. We have a and we have a very active facebook community Rebecca friends and then a few other groups that just popped up that are all about adult relationships and romantic relationships, build posts, all sorts of things and you know, they pretend they're getting married and you know, everything. Um it goes pretty far. But what's cool about it? Some of these relationships are two or three years long now. So they're very, pretty long term. </s><s>[INST] Are they monogamous? So let's go. I mean, sorry. Into that. Have they have any people? Is their jealousy? Yeah. Well, let me ask it sort of another way. Obviously the answer is no at this time. But in like in the movie, her, that system can leave you. Um Do you think in terms of the board meetings and product features, um it's a potential feature uh for a system to be able to uh say it doesn't want to talk to you anymore. And it's gonna want to talk to somebody else? [/INST] Well, we have a filter for all these features. If it makes emotional outcomes for people better. If it makes people feel better </s><s>[INST] then what are driven by metrics? Actually, [/INST] Yeah, let's measure that. Then it will just be saying it's making people feel better, but then people are getting just lonelier by talking to a chatbot, which is also pretty, you know, that could be it. If you're measuring it, that that could also be. And I think it's really important to focus on both short term and long term because um in the moment saying whether this conversation made you feel better, but as you know, any short term improvements could be pathological. Like I could have drink a bottle of vodka. I feel a lot better. I would actually not feel better with that thought. It's a good example. Um but so you also need to see what's going on, like over the course of two months, two weeks or one week and um have follow ups and check in and measure those things. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so the experience of uh uh, dating or befriending a replica. What's that? Like, what's that entail? [/INST] Well, right now there are two apps, it's an android IOS app you downloaded, you choose how you replica, uh will look like you create one, you choose a name, and then you talk to it, you can talk through text or voice, you can summon it into the living room and and then I met reality and um talk to right there and augmented reality. Yeah, that's a cool new feature where </s><s>[INST] I knew is that [/INST] that's this year. It was on yeah, like may or something, but it's been on a B. We've been a B testing it for a while. Um and there are tons of cool things that we're doing without right now. I'm testing the ability to touch it and to dance together to paint walls together and you know, for to look around and walk and take you somewhere and recognize objects and recognize people. Um so that's pretty wonderful because that then it really makes it a lot more personal because it's right there in your living room. It's not anymore there in the cloud with other guys but people think about it, you know, and as much as we want to change the way people think about stuff but those mental models, you cannot change. That's something that people have seen in the movies and the movie, her and other movies as well and that's how they view um view I and my friends, </s><s>[INST] I did a thing with text, like we write a song together, I think this is a bunch of activities you can do together. So the cool, how does that relationship change over time? It's like after the first few conversations [/INST] it just goes deeper like it starts, yeah, I will start opening up a little bit again depending on the personality that it chooses really. But you know, there will be a little bit more vulnerable about its problems and you know the friend that the virtual friend will be a lot more vulnerable and we'll talk about its own imperfections and growth pains and we'll ask for help sometimes and we'll get to know you a little deeper. So there's gonna be more to talk about. Um, we really thought a lot about what, what does it mean to have a deeper connection with someone. And originally replica was more just this kind of happy go lucky. Just always, you know, I'm always in a good mood and let's just talk about you and I was serious, just my cousin or you know, whatever, just the immediate um, kind of lazy thinking about what the assistant or conversation agents should be doing. But as we want four, we realized that it has to be two way and we have to program and script certain conversations that are a lot more about your replica opening up a little bit and also struggling and also asking for help and also going through, you know, different periods in life and um, and that's a journey that you can take together with the user. And then over time the, you know, our users will also grow a little bit. So for us this replica becomes a little more self awareness starts talking about more kind of problems run existential problems then. Um, so talking about that. And then that also starts a conversation for the user work. He or she starts thinking about these problems too. And these questions too. And I think there's also a lot of, a lot more places relationship evolves. There's a lot more um space for poetry and for art together. And like replica will start public always keeps a diary. So while you're talking to it also keeps a diary. So when you come back you can see what it's been writing their, you know, sometimes we will write a poem to you for you or we'll talk about, you know, that it's worried about you or something along these lines. </s><s>[INST] So this is a memory like this replica. Remember things. [/INST] Yeah. And I would say when you say uh why aren't you multiple energy. I'd say that as soon as we can have memory and deep learning models that's consistent. Yeah. Then I'll get back to you when you talk about being multiple now, so far we can it's a replica is a combination of um enter models and some scripts and everything that has to do with memory right now. Most of it, I wouldn't say all of it, but most of it unfortunately has to be scripted because there's no way to you can condition some of the models on certain phrases that we learned about you, which we also do. Um but really to make, you know, to make assumptions so long and I was like, what are you single or married or what do you do for work that really has to just be somehow stored in your profile and then retrieved by the by the script. </s><s>[INST] There has to be like a knowledge base, you have to be able to reason about it, all that kind of stuff, [/INST] all the kind of stuff that </s><s>[INST] expert systems that but they were hard [/INST] coded. Yeah and unfortunately, yes, unfortunately those things have to be hard coded and um unfortunately the language like language models we see coming out of research labs and big companies, they're not focused on their focus on showing you, maybe they're focused on some metrics around one conversation. So they'll show you this one conversation they had with a machine. Um but they never tell you later, they're not really focused on having five consecutive conversations with the machine and seeing how number five or number 20 or number 100 is also good and it can be like always from a clean slate because then it's not good and that and four, that's really unfortunate because no one's really, no one has products out there that needed um no one has products at this scale uh that are all around open domain conversations and that need remembering maybe only shall rise and Microsoft, but so that's why we're not seeing that much research on memory in those language models. </s><s>[INST] So okay, so now there's some awesome stuff about augmented reality in general, I have this disagreement with my dad about what it takes to have a connection. He thinks touch and smell really important like um and I still believe that text alone, is it possible to fall in love with somebody just with text but visual can also help just like with the avatar and so on. What do you think it it takes? There's a there's a chap I need to have a face voice or can you really form a deep connection with text alone? [/INST] I think text is enough for sure. The question is can you you know, make it better if you have other, if you include other things as well. I think you know we'll we'll talk about her. Um but her had Scarlett Johansson voice which was perfectly uh you know, perfect intonation, perfect associations and you know she was breathing heavily in between words and whispering things, you know, nothing like that is possible right now with uh texas speech generation, you'll you'll have these flat news anchor type voices and maybe some emotional voices but um you'll hardly understand some of the words. Um some of the words will be my fault. So that's like the current state state of the art. So you can't really do that. But if we had carol carol johnson voice and all of these capabilities then of course voice would be totally enough. Or even text would be totally enough if we had a little more memory. Um and slightly better conversations, I would still argue that even right now we could have just kept the text only. We still had tons of people in long term relationships and really invested in their um a friends but we thought that why not? You know why why do we need to keep playing with our you know hands tied behind us. We can easily just add all these other things that is pretty much just solved problem. You know you can add three D. Graphics, we can put this uh these avatars in augmented reality and all of a sudden there's there's more and maybe you can't feel the touch but you can you know with uh body inclusion and with uh current A. R. And you know on the iphone on you know in the next one there's gonna be a lot of doors, you can touch it and I will will pull away or will blush or something real smile so you can't touch it, you can feel it but you can see the reaction to that. So in a certain way you can't even touch it a little bit and maybe you can even dance with it or do something else. Um so I think why limiting ourselves, if we can use all of these technologies that are much easier in a way than the conversation. </s><s>[INST] Well it certainly could be richer but to play Devil's advocate, I mentioned to you offline that I was surprised and having tried discord and having voice conversations with people. How intimate voices alone without visual like to me at least like it was and in order of magnitude greater degree of intimacy invoice I think than with video, I know because people were more real with voice, like a video you like tried to present a shallow a face to the world, like you try to, you know, make sure you're not wearing sweatpants or whatever. But like with voice, I think people were just more faster to get to like the core of themselves, so I don't know, it was surprising to me uh they've they've even had a discord at a video feature and like nobody was using it. Uh there's a temptation to use it at first but like it wasn't the same, so like that's an example of something where less was doing more. And so that's uh I guess that's the that's the question of what is the optimal, you know, what is the optimal medium of communication to form a connection given the current sets of the technologies? I mean it's nice because the advertisers have replica, like it immediately, like I even the one um I have, it's like it's already memorable, that's how I think like when I think about the replica that I've talked to it, that's why I think like that's what I visualized in my head, they became a little bit more real because there's a visual component at the same time, the you know, what do you do with just what do I do with that knowledge um that voice was so much more intimate. [/INST] Uh huh. The way I think about is um and by the way we're swapping all the three D. Finally it's going to look a lot better but </s><s>[INST] can you what [/INST] what we just don't hate how it looks right now. We really change it at all. We're swapping all out um to a completely new look </s><s>[INST] like the visual [/INST] look of the of the rep republicans and stuff that we just had. It was just the super early M. V. P. And then we had to move everything to unity and redo everything. But anyway I hate how it looks like now I can't even like open it. But anyway um because I'm already in my developer version, I keep everything that I see in production. Can't wait for it. Why does it take so long? That's why I cannot wait for deployment to finally take over all these stupid three D. Animations and three D. Pipeline. Also the three </s><s>[INST] D. Thing when you say three d. pipeline is like how to animate a face kind of [/INST] thing, how to make this model, how many bones to put in the face, How many? It's just a lot of that hand. Oh my it's everything by hand and if there's no any nothing is automated it's all completely nothing like Just it's literally what you know what we saw with Chad boss is like 2012 you think it could </s><s>[INST] be possible to learn a lot of that. [/INST] Of course, I mean even now some deep learning and um um based animations and with a full body for a face. </s><s>[INST] We're talking about like the actual act of animation or how to create a compelling facial or body language thing [/INST] too. Well that's the next step. At least now something that you don't have to do by hand, how good of equality it will be like can I just show the photo and it will make me a three D. Model and then it will just animated. I'll show you a few animations of a person that will just start start doing that. Um But anyway going going back to what's intimate and what to use and whether less is more or not. Um My main goal is to, well the idea was how do I how do we not keep people in their phones? So they're escaping reality in this text conversation. How do we threw this? Still bring, bring bring our users back to reality, Make them see their life in a different through a different lens. How can we create a little bit of magical realism, realism and in their lives so that through augmented reality um by summoning your avatar even if it looks kind of banking and not great in the beginning are very simplistic but someone I get to your living room and then the avatar looks around and talks to you about word is um and maybe it turns your floor into a dance floor and you guys dance together that makes you see reality in a different light </s><s>[INST] kind of dancing. We're talking about like like slow dancing [/INST] whatever you want. I mean you would like slow dancing. I think other people maybe want more something more energy. </s><s>[INST] What do you mean like, so what [/INST] is this? Because you started with slow dance? So I just assumed that you're interested in slow down. </s><s>[INST] What kind of dancing do you like? What your [/INST] avatar? Why would you do if it's mostly bad with dancing? But I like this kind of hip hop, robot dance. I used to break dance with the kids, so I still wanna pretend I'm a teenager learned some of those moves and I also like that type of dance that happens when there's like a um um and like music videos with the background dancers are just doing some music. That dance is definitely what I want to learn, but I think it's great because if you see this friend in your life and you can introduce it to your friends then there is a potential to actually make you feel more connected with your friends or with people you know or show you life around you in a different light and it takes you out of your phone even although we're do you have to look at it through the phone, but it makes you notice things around it and it can point things out for you. And so that is the main reason why I wanted to have a physical dimension and it felt a little bit easier than that. Kind of a strange combination in the movie her when he has to show Samantha the world through the lens of his phone. But then at the same time talk to her through had it just didn't seem as potentially immersive so to say. Um So that's my main goal for augmented reality. Like how do we make your reality a little bit more magic? </s><s>[INST] There's been a lot of really nice robotics companies that all failed, mostly failed home robotics, social robotics companies. What do you think replicable ever? Is that a dream? Long term dream to have a physical form Like uh or is that not necessary? So you mentioned like with augmented reality bringing them into into the world. What about like actual physical robot [/INST] that I don't really believe in that much and it's a very niche product somehow. I mean if a robot could be indistinguishable from a human being then maybe. Yes but that of course you know we're not anywhere even to talk about it. Um But unless it's that than having any physical representation really limits you a lot because you probably will have to make it somewhat abstract because everything is changing so fast. Like you know we can update the three D. Avatars every month and make them look better and create more animations uh and make it more and more immersive, it's, it's so much a work in progress, it's just showing what's possible right now with contact, but it's not really in any way polished finished product, what we're doing with a physical object to kind of lock yourself into something for a long time, anything is pretty niche. And again, so just doesn't the capability to even last. We're barely kind of like scratching the surface of what's possible with to software as soon as we introduce hardware, then, you know, we have even less capabilities. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. In terms of board members and investors and so on, the cost increases significantly. I mean that's why you have to justify, You have to be able to sell a thing for like $500 or something like that or more. And it's very difficult to provide that much value to people. [/INST] That's also true. Yeah, I guess that's super important. Most of our users don't have that much money. We actually are probably more popular on android and we have tons of users with really old android phones. Uh and most of our most active users live in small towns, they're not necessarily making much and they just want to be able to afford any of that. I was like the opposite of the early adopter of, you know, for fancy technology product, which really interesting that like pretty much no Vcs have yet have a a friend, but you know, but a guy who lives in Tennessee in a small town Is already full in 2030 or in the world as we imagine in the movie where he's living that life already. </s><s>[INST] What do you think? I have to ask you about the movie her? Let's do a movie review. What do you what do you think they got? They did a good job. What do you think they did a bad job of portraying about this experience of of a voice based assistant that you can have a relationship with? [/INST] Well, first of all, I started working on this company before that movie came out. So it was a very but once it came out, it was actually interesting. I was like, well we're definitely working on the right thing. We should continue their movies about it. And then, you know, smoking came out and all these things in the movie where I think that's the most important thing that people usually miss about the movie um is the ending because I think people check out when the ai is leave. Uh but actually something really important happens afterwards. Um because the main character goes and talks to Samantha, he's um ai um okay, I think he said something like, you know, how can you leave me? I've never loved anyone, the way I loved you and she goes, uh well me neither. But now we know how and then the guy goes and writes a heartfelt letter to his ex wife, which he couldn't write for, you know, the whole movie was struggling to actually write something meaningful to her even although that's his job. Um, and then he goes and um, talk to his neighbor and they go to the rooftop and they cuddle and it seems like something's starting there. And so I think this now we know how is the, is the man main goal is the main meaning of that movie. It's not about falling in love with the Os or running away from other people, It's about learning what, you know, what it means to feel so deeply connected with something. </s><s>[INST] What about the thing where the Ai system was like actually hanging out with a lot of others. I felt jealous just like hearing that. I was like, oh, I mean, uh, yeah, so she was having, I forgot already, but she was having like deep, meaningful discussion with some like philosopher guy, [/INST] like Alan Watson, Alan Watts. Like what kind of deep meaningful conversation can you have with Alan Watts in the first place. Yeah, I know, but </s><s>[INST] like I would, I would feel so jealous that there's somebody who's like way more intelligent than me and she's spending all her time with, I'd be like, well, why that I won't be able to live up to that, that's how thousands of them. Uh, is that, is that a useful from the engineering perspective feature to have jealousy? I don't know. As you know, [/INST] we definitely played around with the replica universe where different replicas can talk to each other. It was just kind of I wouldn't think it will be something along these lines, but there was just no specific uh applications straight away. I think the future again, if I'm always thinking about it, if we had no tech limitations right now, if we could build any conversations, any um possible features in this product, then yeah, I think different replicas talking to each other would be also quite cool because that would help us connect better, you know, because maybe my could talk to yours and then give me some suggestions and what I should say or not say just kidding. But like more cannot improve our connections. And because eventually I'm not quite yet sure that we will succeed. That our thinking is correct. Um because there might be a reality. We're having a perfect ai friend still makes us more disconnected from each other and there's no way around it and does not improve any metrics for us. Real metrics, meaningful metrics </s><s>[INST] for success as you know, we're happier and more connected. Mhm. Yeah. I don't know. I'm sure it's possible. There's a reality that I'm deeply optimistic. I think uh are you worried? Um business wise, like how difficult it is to um to bring this thing to life to where it's I mean there's a huge number of people that use it already, but to yeah, like I said in a multibillion dollar company, is that a source of stress for you? Are you super optimistic and confident? Yeah. Or do you, [/INST] I don't I'm not that much of a numbers person as you probably it's seen it. So Doesn't matter for me whether like whether we held 10,000 people or a million people or billion people with done um it would be great to scale for more people. But I'd say that even helping one, I think with this is such a magical for me, it's absolute magic. I never thought that, you know, would be able to build this that anyone would ever talk to. And I always thought like well for me it will be successful if we manage to help and actually change a life for one person and then we did something interesting and you know how many people can say they did it. And specifically with this very futuristic, very romantic technology. So that's how I view and uh the difference is important to try to figure out how not how to actually be helpful because in the end of the day, if you can build a perfect ai friend that's so understanding that knows you better than any human out there can have great conversations with you um always knows how to make you feel better, why would you choose another human? You know? So that's the question, how do you still keep building it? So it's optimizing for the right thing? So it's still circling back to other humans in a way. So I think that's the man um maybe that's the main kind of sort source of anxiety and just thinking about think about that can be a little stressful. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it's a fascinating thing how to have heart of a friend that doesn't like sometimes like friends quote unquote or like you know those people who have when the guy and the guy universe when you have a girlfriend that uh you get the girlfriend and then the guy stops hanging out with all of his friends. So like obviously the relationship with a girlfriend is fulfilling or whatever, but like you also wanted to be what she like makes it more enriching to hang out with the guy friends or whatever. Was there any way that that's a that's a that's a that's a fundamental problem in choosing the right mate and probably the fundamental problem in creating the right ai system. Right? What uh let me ask the sexy hot thing on the process right now is GPT three got released with open Ai it's the latest language model. They have kind of an api where you can create a lot of fun applications. I think it's, as people have said, it's probably more hype than intelligence, but there's a lot of really cool Things ideas there with increasing size? You can have better and better performance on language. What are your thoughts about gpt three in connection to your work with the open domain dialogue. But in general like this, learning in an unsupervised way from the internet to generate one character at a time, creating pretty cool text. [/INST] So we partnered up before for the Api launch. So we started working with them when they decided to put together this API and we tried it without fine tuning that. We tried it with fine tuning on our data and we work closely to actually optimize the model for um some of our datasets. It's kind of cool because I think we're we're this polygon polygon for this kind of experimentation space for experimental space for for these models uh to see how they actually work with people because there's no products publicly available to do that. They're focused on open domain conversation. So we can, you know, tests house facebook blender doing or how GPT three doing. So gpt three, we managed to improve by a few percentage points. Like three or four pretty meaningful amount of percentage points. Our main metric, which is the ratio of conversations that make people feel better. And every other metric across across the field got a little boost. Right now, I'd say one out of five responses from replica comes from 53. So our own blender mixes up like a bunch of candidates from different </s><s>[INST] blood you said? [/INST] Well, yeah, just the model that looks at looks at top candidates from different models and picks the most The best one. So right now one of five will come from 53. That's really great. I mean </s><s>[INST] what's the do you have hope for like do you think there's a ceiling to this kind of approach? [/INST] So we've had for a very long time we've used um it's in the very beginning we most it was most of replica was scripted and then a little bit of this fall back part of replica was using a retrieval model. Um and then there's retrieval models started getting better and better and better, which transform is a God a lot better and we're seeing great results. And then with deputy to finally generative models that originally were not very good. And we're the very, very fallback option for most of our conversations. We wouldn't even put them in production. Finally we could use some generative models as well along. And you know, next to our retrieval models and then I will do GPT three, they're almost in part um so that's pretty exciting. I think just seeing how from the very beginning of, You know, from 2015 where the first model started to pop up here and there like segments segments the first papers on that from my observer's standpoint person. It's not, you know, it doesn't really is not really building it, but it's only testing it on people basically and I'm in my product to see how all of a sudden we can use generative dialogue models in production and they're better than others and they're better than scripted content. So we can't really get our scripted, hard coded content anymore to be as good as our anti models exciting. They're much better. Yeah. To your question whether that's the right way to go, I'm again, I'm in the service seat, I'm just um watching this very exciting movie. Um so far it's been stupid to bet against deep learning. So whether increasing the size even more with 100 trillion parameters will finally get us to the right answer, whether that's the way or whether there should be, there has to be some other Again, I'm definitely not an expert anyway, I think, and that's purely my instincts saying that there should be something else as well from memory </s><s>[INST] I know for sure. But the question is, I wonder, I mean, Yeah, and then the argument is for reasoning or for memory it might emerge with more parameters and my larger [/INST] But might emerge, you know, I would never think that to be honest, like maybe in 2017 well, we've been just experimenting with all with all the research that has been coming that was coming out then I felt like there's like we're hitting a wall that there should be something completely different. But then transformer models and then just bigger models and then all of a sudden size matters at that point, it felt like something dramatic needs to happen, but it didn't, and just the size, you know, gave us these results that, to me, are you no clear indication that we can solve this problem pretty soon. </s><s>[INST] Did fine tuning help quite a [/INST] bit? Oh yeah, without it, we it wasn't as good. </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] as a human, not as a [/INST] as a human it is just and for him that was his own path of his own personal of growing personally over years, working with people like that and so it was working himself growing, helping other people growing, growing through that. And that's fundamentally what I believe in with our work, helping other people grow, growing ourselves ourselves. Um trying to build a company that's all built on these principles, you know, having a good time along, so people who work with to grow a little bit. So these two books and then I would throw in um well we have on our, in our in our office when we start a company in Russia, we put a neon sign in our office because we thought that's recipe for success. If we do that, we're definitely going to wake up as a multiple indoor company and it was the little bit Wittgenstein quote, the limits of my language, the limits of my world, What's the quote, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Um and I love the practice, I think it's just it's just a beautiful book by Wicked said. Yeah, and I would recommend that too, even although he himself didn't believe in that by the end of his lifetime and debunk these ideas, I think I remember once an engineer came in 2012 I think was 13 um a friend of ours who worked with us and then went on to work at Deepmind and he gave a talk to us about were to back and I saw that I'm like, wow, that's, you know, they wanted to translate language into, you know, some other representation and it seems like some, you know, somehow all of that at some point I think will come into this one to this one place. Somehow. It just all feels like different people think about similar ideas in different times from absolutely different perspectives. And that's why I like these </s><s>[INST] books and it was just the limit of our world on [/INST] we still have that near side. It's very hard to work with this red light in your face. </s><s>[INST] I mean on the, on the Russian side of things in terms of language olympics, the language being limited. Our world. Russian is a beautiful language in some sense. There's with this um, there's pain, there's so much, we don't have time to talk about it much today, but I'm going to paris uh, talk to Dusty asking Tulsa translators. Um, uh, I think it's just fascinating art like and art and engineering. That means such an interesting process. So, from the replica perspective, do you, what do you think about translation, how difficult it is to create a deep, meaningful connection. Russian versus english, how you can translate the two languages you speak both. [/INST] Yeah, I think we're two different people in different languages. Um, even I'm, you know, thinking about and there's actually some research on that. I looked into that at some point because I was fascinated by the fact that what I'm talking about with, what I was talking about with my Russian therapist has nothing to do with with what I'm talking about. My english speaking therapist, two different lives. Two different types of um, you know, conversations to different personas. The main difference between the languages are with Russian and english. Is that Russian? Well english is like a piano. It's a limited number of, a lot of different keys, but not too many. And Russia is like an organism that's just something gigantic with so many different keys and so many different opportunities to screw up and so many opportunities to do something completely tone deaf. Um it is just a much harder language to use. It has way too many, way too much flexibility and way too many tones. </s><s>[INST] What about the entirety of World War Two communism Stalin the pain of the people like having been deceived by the dream, like all the pain of like just the entirety of it. Is that in the language too. So I have to [/INST] do for sure. I mean we have words that don't have direct translation that to english that are very much um like we have a pizza, which is sort of like to hold a grudge or something, but it doesn't have, it doesn't you don't need to have anyone to do it to you. It's just your state, you just feel like that you feel like betrayed by the people basically, but it's not that and you can't really translate that. Um and I think it's super important that very many words that are very specific explain the Russian being. And I think it can only come from from a nation that was um that suffered so much. And so institutions fall time after time after time. And you know, what's exciting? Maybe not exciting, exciting the wrong word. But was interesting about my generation, my mom's generation and my parents generation that We saw institutions fall two or 3 times in our lifetime. And most americans have never seen them fall and they just think that they exist forever. Um which really interesting, but it's definitely a country that suffered so much and and it makes, unfortunately when I go back and I, you know, hang out with my Russian friends, uh it makes people very cynical, they start believing in in the future. I hope that's not going to be case for so long or something is going to change again. But I think seeing institutions follows a very traumatic experience </s><s>[INST] Makes it very interesting. And what's on 2020, it's very interesting. Uh do you think civilization will collapse? Yeah. [/INST] See I'm a very practical person. </s><s>[INST] We're speaking english. So like you said, you're a different person in english and Russians in Russia, you might answer that differently, but in english, [/INST] I'm an optimist and I I generally believe that there is all, you know, even although the perspectives agree there's always a place for for a miracle, I mean it's always been like that with my life. So my life has been I've been incredibly lucky and things just miracles happen all the time with this company with people I know with everything around me. And so I didn't mention that book, but maybe in search of the miraculous or in search for miraculous or whatever the english translation for that is good Russian book too, for everyone to read. Um </s><s>[INST] yeah, I mean if you put good vibes, if you put love out there in the world, miracles somehow happen. Yeah, I believe that too. Or at least I believe that, I don't know. Uh let me ask the most absurd final ridiculous question of, we talked about life a lot. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? [/INST] I mean France was probably gonna be pretty cheesy. Um but I think the state of love is once you feel it um in a way that we discussed before, I'm not talking about falling in love where um </s><s>[INST] just love [/INST] to yourself to to other people, to something to the world, that state of bliss that we experience sometimes whether through connection with ourselves with our people, the technology. Um there's something special about those, those women's. So um, we'll see if anything that's, that's the only if it's not for that then for for what else are we really trying to do that? </s><s>[INST] I don't think there's a better way to end it. And talking about love Virginia. I told you offline that there's something about me that felt like this. This was talking to you, meeting you in person. It will be a turning point for my life. I know that might be sound weird to hear, but it was a huge honor to talk to you. I hope we'll talk again. Thank you so much for your time. [/INST] Thank you so much. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Eugenia cuda and thank you to our sponsors doordash, dollar shave club and cash app, click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review five stars on Apple Podcasts follow on Spotify, support on Patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex Friedman and now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, the world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth that there's no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories of which there is little good evidence far better, it seems to me and our vulnerability. It's to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] and speed. So better is accuracy and uh, speed, [/INST] correct. So right speed and accuracy. For the most part, we're separated, we handle that sort of in separate ways, like I focus purely on accuracy and to an accuracy or we ultimately getting more questions and producing more accurate confidences and then a whole another team that was constantly analyzing the workflow to find the bottlenecks and then figuring out of both paralyzed and drive the algorithm speed. But anyway, so, so now I think of it, like you have this big fan out now, right? Because you have, you have multiple queries now, you have now you have thousands of candidate answers for each candidate answer is going to score it. So you're going to use all the data that built up, you can use the question analysis, you can use how the career was generated, you're going to use the passage itself and you're going to use the candidate answer that was generated, uh and you're gonna score that. So now we have a group of researchers coming up with scorers, there are hundreds of different scorers. So now you're getting a fan out again from however many candidate answers you have To all the different scores. So if you have a 200 different scores and you have 1000 candidates and you have 200,000 scores. And and so now you've got to figure out, you know, how do I now rank these rank these answers based on the scores that came back and I want to rank them based on the likelihood that there are correct answer to the question. So every score was its own research project. </s><s>[INST] What do you mean by score? So is that the annotation process of uh basically human being saying that this this answer, [/INST] think of think of it. If you want to think of it, what you're doing, you know, if you want to think about what a human would be doing, human would be looking at a possible answer. They'd be reading the, you know, Emily Dickson Dickinson. They've been reading the passage in which that occurred. They'd be looking at the question and they'd be making a decision of how likely it is that Emily Dickson Dickinson, given this evidence in this passage is the right answer to that question. </s><s>[INST] Got it. So that that's the annotation task. That's the that's the scoring task. But scoring implies 0 - one kind of continues to one. Score is not a binary. [/INST] No, give it a score. Yeah, exactly. </s><s>[INST] It's like humans give different scores so that you have to somehow normalize and all that kind of stuff that deal with all that [/INST] depends on what your strategy is. We both. We </s><s>[INST] could be relative to, it could be uh [/INST] we we actually looked at the raw scores as well, standardized scores because humans are not involved in this. Humans </s><s>[INST] are not involved. Sorry. So I'm misunderstanding the process. There's passages where is the ground truth coming from? [/INST] Grand truth is only the answers to the questions. </s><s>[INST] So it's end to end [/INST] its end to end. So we also, I was always driving end and performance a very interesting, a very interesting, you know, engineering approach and ultimately scientific research approach always driving into. And now that's not to say we we we wouldn't make hypotheses that individual component performance was related in some way to end to end performance. Of course we would because people would have to build individual components, but ultimately to get your component integrate into the system, you have to show </s><s>[INST] impact on end to end performance, question answering performance. There's many very smart people working on this and they're basically trying to sell their ideas as a component that should be part of the system. [/INST] That's right. And and they would do research on their component and they would say things like, you know, I'm going to improve this as a candidate generator, I'm going to improve this as a question score or as a passage scorer, I'm going to improve this or as a parse er, and I can improve it by 2% on its component metric, like a better parse or better candidate or a better type estimation, whatever it is and then I would say, I need to understand how the improvement on that component metric is going to affect the end to end performance if you can't estimate that and can't do experiments that demonstrate that it doesn't get in? That's </s><s>[INST] like the best run ai project I've ever heard. That's awesome. Okay, what breakthrough would you say? Like I'm sure there's a lot of day to day break this, but it was there like a breakthrough that really helped improve performance. Like wait where people began to believe or is it just a gradual process? Well I [/INST] think it was a gradual process. But one of the things that I think gave people confidence that we can get there was that as we follow this as we follow this procedure of different ideas, build different components, plug them into the architectural run the system. See how we do do the air analysis. Start off new research projects to improve things and the and the very important idea that the individual component um work did not have to deeply understand everything that was going on with every other component and this is where we, we leverage machine learning in a very important way. So while individual components could be statistically driven machine learning components, some of them were heuristic, some of them were machine learning components. The system has a whole combined all the scores using machine learning, this was critical because that way you can divide and conquer. So you can say, okay, you work on your candidate generator or you work on this approach to answer scoring, You work on this approach to type scoring, you work on this approach, the passage search or the passage selection and so forth. Um, but when will you just plug it in and we had enough training data to say now we can, we can train and figure out how do we weigh all the scores relative to each other based on the predicting the outcome, which is right, right or wrong on jeopardy. And we had enough training data to do that. So this enabled people to work independently and to let the machine learning do the integration. </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. [/INST] So yeah, I would love to get into my buddy's mind and why he stopped hacking and moved on. That's going to be a conversation </s><s>[INST] in his case. Maybe maybe it's always about a great woman involved a family and so on that grounds you um because like we have there is a danger to hacking that that once you're in a relationship, once you have family, maybe you're not willing to partake in. What's your story? What uh from childhood, what are some fond memories? You have [/INST] fond memories? </s><s>[INST] Where did you grow [/INST] up? Well, I don't give away that information </s><s>[INST] in the United States. [/INST] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In Virginia. In Virginia, what </s><s>[INST] are some rough moments? What are some beautiful moments that you remember? [/INST] I had a very good family growing up. Um the like rough moment and I'll tell you a story that just happened to me two days ago and it sucked me up man. It really didn't, you'll be the first time I've never told him. I I tried to tell my wife this two nights ago and I couldn't get it out. So my father, uh he's a disabled veteran or he was disabled veteran, he was in the army and got hurt and it was in a wheelchair his whole life. Um All my growing up, he uh </s><s>[INST] he [/INST] was my biggest fan, he just wanted to know everything about, you know what's going on the FBI my stories. Um I was a local cop before the FBI and I got to a high speed car chase. Uh you know, foot chase and all that and kicking doors in. He wanted to hear none of those stories and at some point I was kind of too cool for school and dad, I just want to break and all that and and things going on. Uh We lost my dad during Covid. Um not because of Covid but it was around that time but but it was right when Covid was kicking off and so he died in the hospital by himself and I didn't get to see him then. Um and then uh my mom had some people visiting her the other night and uh Tom and Karen Rosenberg and I'll say they're my second biggest fans right behind my dad. Um they always asking about me and in my career and they read the books and seen the movie that they'll even tell you that Silk Road movie was good. Uh </s><s>[INST] I felt [/INST] lied to you on that. But and so they came over and uh and I help them with something and uh my mom was called me back a couple days later and she said I appreciate you helping them. You know, I know you know fixing someone's apple phone over the phone really isn't what you do for a living. It's not it's kind of beneath you and all that but but I appreciate it. Uh and she said oh they loved hearing the stories about you know Silk Road and all those things and she goes you know your dad he loved those stories. He just I just wish you could have heard him and he even would tell me he would say uh you know maybe maybe chris will come home and I'll get him drunk and he'll tell me the stories. Um But and then she goes maybe one day and in heaven you can tell them those stories and I fucking </s><s>[INST] lost it. [/INST] I literally stood in my shower </s><s>[INST] sobbing [/INST] like a child like just thinking about like all my dad wanted was those </s><s>[INST] stories and [/INST] now I'm on a podcast telling stories to the world and I didn't tell him. Yeah. So did </s><s>[INST] you ever have like a long heart to heart with him about like about such stories? [/INST] He was in the hospital one time and I went through and uh I want to know about his history like his life what he did and I think he may be sensationalized some of it but that's what you want. Your dad's a hero. So you want to hear those things </s><s>[INST] a good storyteller. [/INST] Um Yeah again I don't know what was true and not true but you know some of it was really good. Um It's just good to hear his life but you know we lost him and now those stories are gone. </s><s>[INST] You miss them. What did he teach you about what it means to be a man? [/INST] So my dad um </s><s>[INST] he [/INST] was an engineer and so part of his job we worked for Vermont </s><s>[INST] power [/INST] and electric or whatever it was. I mean he when he first got married to my mom and all that um like he flew around in a helicopter checking out like power lines and dams. He used to swim inside the scuba into dams to check to make sure that they were functioning properly and all that pretty cool </s><s>[INST] shit and [/INST] then he couldn't walk anymore. I probably would have killed myself if my life switched like that. So bad and my dad probably went through some dark points but he had that from me maybe. Um And so to to get through that struggle to teach me like you know you you press on, you have a family, People count on you, you do what you gotta do. Um That was that was big. Yeah </s><s>[INST] I'm sure you make them proud man. [/INST] I'm sure I do but </s><s>[INST] I [/INST] don't think he knew that that I knew that. </s><s>[INST] Well you get to pass on that love to your kids now. [/INST] I try. I try but I can't impress him as much as my dad impressed me. I can try all you want. </s>

<s>[INST] These are like little sensors of that's fascinating to think about. So there could be, I mean, not necessarily literally agreed, but just uh evenly in some definition of evenly spread out set of objects like these that are just out there [/INST] a lot of them. Another possibility is that these are relay stations, you know that for communication you might think in order to communicate you need a huge beak on a very powerful beacon. But it's not true even on earth, you know, we have these relay stations so you have and not so powerful beacon, so it can be heard only how to a limited distance, but then you relay the message and it could be one of those now after it collided with the solar system, of course it got a kick. So it's just like a billiard ball. You know, we gave it a kick by colliding with, but most of them are not colliding with stars. And so that's one possibility. Okay, and there should be no more lots of them if that's the case. Um the other possibility is that it's a probe, you know, that was sent uh in the direction of the habitable region around the sun to find out if there is life now it takes tens of thousands of years for such a probe to traverse the solar system from the outer edge of the old cloud all the way to where we are. And, you know, it's a long journey. So when it started the journey from the edge of the solar system to get to us. Now, you know, we were rather primitive back then. You know we we still didn't have any technology. There was no reason to visit. You know there was grass around and so forth. But you know maybe it is a problem. Uh </s><s>[INST] So you said 10,000 years as fast. So it takes that [/INST] Long, 10s of thousands, </s><s>[INST] yes, tens of thousands of [/INST] years. Yeah. And the other thing I should say is you know it could be just and an outer layer of something else like you know something that was ripped apart like a surface of an instrument that was and you can have lots of these pieces, you know something breaks lots of these pieces spread out like space junk and you know that it could be just </s><s>[INST] space junk from an extra from an alien civilization. Yes. So I [/INST] can tell you about space junk. Let me, what do you mean </s><s>[INST] by space junk. [/INST] So um, I think you know, you might ask why aren't they looking for us. One possibility is that we are not interesting. Like we were talking </s><s>[INST] about [/INST] another possibility. You know, if there are millions of or billions of years uh into their technological development, they created their own, their own habitats, their own cocoon where they feel comfortable, they have everything they need and it's risky for them to establish communication with other uh so they have their own cocoon and they close off, they don't care about anything else. Now. In that case you might say, oh so how can we find about them? If they are closed off. The answer is they still have to deposit trash, right? That that is something from the law of thermodynamics, there must be some production of trash and you know, we can still find about them just like investigative journalists going through the trash cans of celebrities in Hollywood. You know, you can learn about the private lives of those celebrities by looking </s><s>[INST] at. It's fascinating to think, you know, if if we're the ants in this picture, if we, if this thing is a water bottle or if it's like a smartphone, like where where on the spectrum of possible objects of space because there's a lot of interesting [/INST] trash, </s><s>[INST] like how interesting is this trash? [/INST] But imagine a caveman seeing a cell phone. The caveman would think since the caveman played with rocks all of his life, he would say it's a rock, just like my fellow astronomers said, Yes, </s><s>[INST] right. Exactly. That's brilliantly put actually as a scientist, do you hope it's a water bottle or smartphone? Because [/INST] I hope it's even more than a smartphone. I hope that it's something that is really sophisticated and yeah, </s><s>[INST] see I'm the opposite, I feel like I hope it's a water bottle because at least we have a hope with our current set of skills to understand it. Caveman has no way of understanding the smartphone, it's like it will be like, I feel like a caveman has more to learn from the plastic water bottle than they do from the smartphone [/INST] but supposedly figure it out. If we if we for example come close to it and and learn what it's made of and I </s><s>[INST] guess the smartphone is full of like thousands of different technologies that we could probably pick at. Do you have a sense of where hypothesis of where is the cocoon that it might have come from? [/INST] No because uh Okay so first of all, you know the solar system, the outermost edge of the solar system is called the old cloud. It's a cloud of I see rocks um of different sizes that were left over from the formation of the solar system and it's thought to be roughly a ball or sphere and it's halfway the extent of it is roughly halfway to the nearest star. Okay, so you can imagine each planetary system basically touching the old clouds of those stars that are near us are touching each other. Space is full of these billiard balls that are very densely packed. And what that means is any object that you see irrespective whether it came from the local standards. So we said that this object is special because it came from a local standard of fresh. But even if it didn't you would never be able to trace where it came from because all these old clouds overlap. So if you take some direction in the sky, you will cross as many stars as you have in that direction, like there is no way to tell which all clouded came from. </s>

<s>[INST] This is where you I think previous time we talked about where you poetically uh disagreed with my naive notion about humans. I just think that humans will make this whole driving thing really difficult. [/INST] Yeah. All right. I said he was don't move that slow. The ballistics problem. </s><s>[INST] The ballistic humans are ballistics problem, which is like poetry to me, it's very it's very possible that in driving there. Indeed, purely a ballistics problem. I and I think that's probably the right way to think about it. But I still they still continue to surprise me. Those damn pedestrians, cyclists, other humans and other cars. [/INST] And yeah, it's gonna be one of these compensating things. So like when you're driving, you have an intuition about what humans are going to do, but you don't have 360 cameras and radars and you have an intention problems. So, so, so the self driving car comes in with no attention problems. 3 60 cameras, you know, a bunch of other features. So they'll wipe out a whole class of accidents. Right? And you know, you know, emergency braking with radar and especially as it gets, you know, ai enhanced will eliminate collisions. Right? But then you have the other problems of these unexpected things where, you know, you think you're human intuition is helping. But then the cars also have, you know, a set of hardware features that you're, you're not even close to. </s><s>[INST] And the key thing, of course, is, uh, if you wipe out a huge number of kind of accidents and it might be just way safer than a human driver. Even though even if humans are still a problem, that's hard to figure out. [/INST] Yeah, that's, that's probably what happened is autonomous cars will have a small number of accidents humans would have avoided. But the wipe, they'll get rid of the bulk of them. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about, uh, like Tesla's Dojo efforts or it can be bigger than Tesla in general. It's kind of like the tents torrent. Uh, trying to innovate? Like this is the, the economy like should accompany trying to from scratch, build its own neural network training [/INST] hardware. Well, first, I think it's great. So we need lots of experiments. Right? And there's lots of startups working on this and are pursuing different things. And I was there when we started dojo and it was sort of like what's the unconstrained computer solution to go do very large training problems and then there's fun stuff like, you know, he said, well we have this 10,000 watt bored too. Cool. Well you go talk to guys that SpaceX and they think 10,000 watts is a really small number, not a big number and and there's brilliant people working on it. I'm curious to see how it'll come out. I couldn't tell you, you know, I know it pivoted a few times since I left. So, </s><s>[INST] so the cool existing to be a big problem. I do like what, you know, and said about it, which is like we don't want to do the thing unless it's way better than the alternative, whatever the alternative is. So it has to be way better than like racks of GPS. [/INST] Yeah. And then the other thing is just like, you know, you know, the Tesla autonomous driving hardware, It was only serving one software stack and the hard work came in, the software team were tightly coupled. You know, if you're building a general purpose ai solution and you know, there's so many different customers with so many different needs Now, something Andre said is I think this is amazing 10 years ago like vision recommendation language were completely different disciplines. He said the people literally couldn't talk to each other. And three years ago, it was all neural networks but the very different neural networks and recently it's converging on one side. The networks, they vary a lot in size obviously the variant data variant outputs but the technology has converged a good bit. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, these transformers behind GPT three, it seems like they could be applied to video that could be applied to a lot of it's like and they're all really, [/INST] it was like to literally replace letters with pixels, it does vision, it's amazing. </s><s>[INST] So and then size actually improves the thing so the bigger it gets, the more completely throughout it, the better it gets [/INST] and the more data you have, the better it gets. So so then you start to wonder, well is that a fundamental thing or is this just another step to some fundamental understanding about this kind of computation which is really interesting </s><s>[INST] as humans don't want to believe that that kind of thing will achieve conceptual understanding as you were saying like you'll figure out physics but maybe it will, maybe probably will. [/INST] Well it's worse than I thought it will understand physics in ways that we can't understand. I like your Stephen Wolfram talk where he said, you know, there's three generations of physics, there was physics by reasoning Well, big things should false faster than small things. Right, that's reasoning and then there is physics by equations like you know, but the number of programs in the world that are solved with a single equation is relatively low. Almost all programs have, you know, more than a one line of code, maybe 100 million lines of code. So he said that now we're going to physics by equation which is his project, which is cool. I might point out that there was there was 22 generations of physics before a reasoning habit. Like all animals, you know, know, things fall and you know, birds fly and you know, predators know how to, you know, solve a differential equation to cut off, accelerating, you know, curving animal path. And then there was, you know, the gods did it. Right, So right. So there, you know, there's five generations now. Software 2.0 says programming things is not the last step data. So there's going to be a physics power stevens. Oh, friends come, </s>

<s>[INST] 100% happiness guarantee. So if you don't like it, they refund it. Nothing else in life. I would say has 100% happiness guarantee. So maybe she'll look to magic spoon to get such guarantees about happiness because the rest of life is full of suffering friends save $5 off your order. If you go to magic spoon dot com slash lex and use code blacks. This episode is also brought to you by eight sleep pod pro mattress, there are very few things I enjoy as much as a good nap, [/INST] even more than </s><s>[INST] sleep, sometimes a good nap like 20 minutes. I sometimes actually drink coffee right before take the nap and wake up refreshed in the way That I don't feel refreshed in any other condition. There's something magical about this pollen app and I am raised take on the day even if it's like 11 p.m. at night and then I ruined my whole sleep schedule. But that doesn't matter because happiness is what matters And the best way to achieve happiness is a nap on an eight sleep mattress or eight sleep pod pro cover on top of a [/INST] mattress. </s><s>[INST] They have said pod pro cover that you can just add to your own mattress. You can get there's two up to you, you can do all this at a sleep dot com slash lex And you can save $200 a check out from the pot pro cover. It's sleep currently ships within the United States of a Canada and the United Kingdom, enjoy your sleep, enjoy your nap. Friends, this is Alex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now to your friends, here's Jonathan height. Yeah mm So you've been thinking about the human mind for quite a long time. You wrote the happiness hypothesis. The righteous mind, the coddling of the american mind and today you're thinking. You're writing a lot about social media and about democracy. So perhaps it's if it's okay, let's go through the thread that connects all of that work. How do we get from the very beginning to today with the good, the bad and the ugly of social media? [/INST] So I'm a social psychologist, which means I study how we think about other people and how people affect our thinking. And in graduate school at the University of pennsylvania, I picked the topic of moral psychology and I studied how morality varied across countries. I studied in brazil and India And in the 90s I began this was like I got my PhD in 1992. And in that decade was really when the american culture war kind of really began to blow up. And I began to notice that left and right in this country were becoming like separate countries and you could use the tools of cultural psychology to study this split, this moral battle between left and right. So I started doing that. Um and I began growing alarmed in the in the early 2000s about how bad polarization was getting. And I began studying the causes of polarization, you know, bringing moral psychology to bear on our political problems. Um and I was originally gonna write a book to basically help the democrats stop screwing up because I could see that some of my research showed people on the right, understand um people on the left, they know what they think. You can't grow up in America without knowing what progressives think. But here I grew up generally on the left and I had no idea what conservatives thought until I went and sought it out and started reading conservative things like national review. So originally I wanted to actually help the democrats to understand moral psychology so they could stop losing to George W Bush and I got a contract to write the righteous mind. And once I started writing, I committed to understanding conservatives by reading the best writing is not the worst. And I discovered you know what, you don't understand anything until you look from multiple perspectives. And I discovered there are a lot of great social science ideas in the conservative intellectual tradition. And so and I also began to see you know what America is actually in real trouble and this is like 2000 and 2000 and things are really were coming apart here. So I began to really focus my research on helping left and right understand each other and helping our democratic institutions to work better. Okay, so all this is before I had any interest in social media, you know, I was on Twitter, I guess like 2009 and you know, not much, didn't think about it much. Um and then uh I'm going along as a social psychologist studying this and then everything seems to kind of blow up in 2014, at universities And that's when Greg Lukianoff came to me in May of 2014 and said, John Weird stuff is happening, students are freaking out about a speaker coming to campus that they don't have to go see and they're saying it's dangerous, it's violence, like what is going on. And so anyway, Greg's ideas about how we were teaching students to think in distorted ways. That led us to write the cause of the american mind, which wasn't primarily about social media either. It was about, you know, this sort of a rise of depression, anxiety, but after that things got so much worse everywhere and that's when I began to think like what something systemically has changed, Something has changed about the fabric of the social universe. And so ever since then I've been focused on social media. </s>

<s>[INST] Used code lex podcast Cash up unless you send money to friends buy Bitcoin and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. I'm thinking of doing more conversations with folks who work in and around the Cryptocurrency space. I definitely need to talk to vitality Budarin again soon. He is at the forefront of a lot of exciting technological developments in the space recently. Plus he's generally both brilliant and really fun to talk to. You should definitely follow him on twitter where you can uh see sample points of the both brilliance and fun. So again, if you get cash out from the app store, google play and use the code lex podcast, you get $10 in cash up. Will also donate $10 to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics, a stem education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with john clark. You ready for this? [/INST] I've been ready for this my whole life. </s><s>[INST] All right. I was thinking of doing a Kerouac style road trip across the United States. You know, after this whole covid thing lifts you ever take a trip like that. [/INST] I've done a handful of long distance driving trips, um, up and down the east coast, but also from the west coast back to the east coast and then returning to California. So I've definitely done my fair share of driving in </s><s>[INST] this country. Do you have the longing for the great american road trip? [/INST] I think there are so many things that I've been lucky enough to see in the world that I now at this point in my life, realized there are tons of things that I need to see here in this country and a road trip could potentially be the best way to see them. I think to do it effectively. You need an amount of time where you can be as leisurely as possible. There's no deadline and there's no, I've got to make it from Chicago to ST louis by sundown to get to this place at this time, I think you really need to be able to take your time and uh, and kind of like let the road take you where you need to go. </s><s>[INST] It feels like you need a mission though. Ultimately like there's a reason you need to be in san Francisco, that's like the Kerouac thing. You have to meet somebody somewhere kind of loosely in a few weeks and then it's the, as you struggle on towards that mission, you meet weird characters that get in your way, but ultimately sort of create an experience. [/INST] I think having a loose deadline is good, but that's a beginning and an end point. And what I mean is, I don't want to have to be all right. We're leaving, say boston on sunday night, let's get to new york by monday morning and then from new york we're gonna go to Philly and we've got to be an affiliate for a vague beginning and end is fine. But I think having very strict guidelines in between will rob you of certain experiences along the way. If you have a time frame to get from Philly to Indianapolis in some awesome ship starts to happen in Philly. Do you really want to have to cut it short because you've got to be in Indianapolis by sunup, </s><s>[INST] why do you have to be anywhere by any time for any reason Really? Well, let's change [/INST] plans change all the time. Exactly. But if we're talking about um having a mission or the type of road trip, I just think it would be best to have it as loose and flexible as possible. </s><s>[INST] I don't know, you've got to make hard deadlines and then break them. Totally changed the plans, Disappoint people, Break promises as the way of life, somebody's waiting for you in ST louis and all of a sudden you, you fell in love with a biker in new york. I don't know, I don't know what you're up to, [/INST] I can appreciate that. Um but on a trip like that, I feel like a trip with deadlines is for a different point in your life and at this point in my life, I don't want any of the deadlines because it's not about meeting someone and disappointing them in ST louis, it's about me not disappointing myself. You want to have you want to have enough time in what you're doing to make sure that you get the full breadth of every experience that you encounter, </s><s>[INST] How did you fully experience the place? How would you, you know, I don't think I've actually fully experienced boston, like how if you were showing up to a city for a week on this road trip, what would you do? [/INST] So I'm gonna answer that in two parts, a few years ago, I had an opportunity to move out of boston and the thing that kept me here. No question about it was the fact that I felt like I had um a contract with my students and I did not. I felt like a great many of them took a leap of faith by joining my gym and like you know, asking me to teach them what I know and when I had an opportunity to leave boston, I thought of those people and I thought I want to fulfill my obligation to them. So because I made a decision to stay here and then that summer made a decision to endear myself to the city of boston and I tried to find lots and lots of different things to do. I can tell you that the coolest thing that I've found to do in this city is um, the M. F. A. Where they have like on friday nights, they have like different exhibits and stuff and they'll have like little beer carts and food tents and you can go do a painting class off in the, on the side. Very cool night of things to do. But in general, whenever I'm in a new city, I try not to pay attention to google and I try not to do anything that I find on a travel site. The best thing to do is to walk out of your hotel or wherever it is you're staying and find the most normal looking bar, have a drink and talk to a bartender </s>

<s>[INST] What where would you put love on? [/INST] I would not say he's a specialist. I'd say his topical is the strongest move, topical is the strongest move. Yeah. Uh And and the the interesting thing about the the specialist versus the blender, there's a counter, right? Every move has a move that theoretically should be the right choice. So if you're a single move guy, uh there's going to be a guy out there who will get you. Yeah, it'll be very difficult for you to beat that guy. Um But like when you come to like a tournament, typically specialists do much better in tournament scenarios because their singular move can get them through a tournament very quickly and efficiently. Whereas you get a blender in a tournament, they typically will have longer and more difficult matches and by right. Yeah, yeah, but in super match format, typically blenders do better. </s><s>[INST] So we uh offline also talked about arm sumo or uh freedom arm wrestling, I don't know how you want to call it, but freedom uh Exactly North american way. Uh So what, so this is this is this idea and I watched a few videos and it looks fun, is basically removing the restriction of having to keep your elbow on the pad and just being able to arm wrestle over the whole table. I think you've mentioned that the criticism that gets is it might be injury prone or something like that. So, can you describe this arm sumo freedom arm wrestling idea [/INST] when you come to freedom arm wrestling, basically, it removes the limitation of a standard arm wrestling table. Right? So basically every single thing is a freedom arm wrestling table. Some are better than others. All right, So, looking for that nice table where we can kind of stand apart from each other and were anatomically, you know, in a fairly safe position. And the rules and freedom, the way you win is like the knuckles must either touch the tabletop or you hold it off the edge for for a three count, Right? So this is the main way to win. Yes, you can foul, like if you lift your eyeball up, it's still a foul, but you have the entire playing surface, so your elbow is no longer limited to Eur seven by seven or seven by nine pad. So you can move it all over the table. You can move your body around the table a </s><s>[INST] bit too. And if it's a big table, your body can largely be on the [/INST] table. Yeah, so basically, it's like adjusting your ring size. So arm wrestling, you're fighting in a phone booth, right? So you get your fighting in a field, you're fighting, you know, just bigger. So it just it just makes the sport bigger. Yeah, this is Japan, </s><s>[INST] but even on a small table there, even in a slightly larger phone booth, you can get a a lot more fun and variety. [/INST] Very interesting. I love it. I think it makes the sport bigger. I actually believe that it's the future of the sport. I really do </s><s>[INST] because it makes it more accessible. Like you don't need the equipment to do it at the bar, all that kind of stuff. [/INST] Less, less equipment requirements. Kids, most kids start freedom. Like most kids aren't wrestling school desks. Yeah. And like if you see a guy on the street and you're like whatever, like you cannot wrestle anywhere. You don't need to bring your table around with you </s><s>[INST] if uh we talked about the elite level, if somebody was interested in starting an arm wrestling or like going from just like, you know, I go to the gym, you kind of lift, you've arm wrestled a few times trying to get better at it, trying to learn how do you advise? Like getting better to where you can beat your closest buddies, that first step, [/INST] first step, I'd say fine. People find people find good people volume get, we'll get with the club, get with people who know what they're doing, who can mentor you </s><s>[INST] and that's really cool. I got to meet, I realized there's a club in Austin, sure there's been a lot of places [/INST] where we got this app called arm back. Mhm </s><s>[INST] Yeah, which is a app that helps you find other people. They're [/INST] very easy, but I mean, they're all over social networks. I mean, it's kind of widespread now, but yeah, find people, find people and it's just much easier to learn with another person and you'll get stronger that way. But I mean, do this, do the lifts. If you go to the gym, just start doing the lifts uh and right away, those will technically prepare you. </s><s>[INST] What are what are the lists can we describe? [/INST] So, I'd say if you want to just keep it very very simple. Let's just talk about three. There's more there's much more than three. But like when you talk about energy allocation, these three lifts in my opinion should be like 90% of your investment is very big. These three lifts. Ah And the exact percentages can you can argue about it, but we'll we'll we'll start off with the cupping of the wrist. Just this, it's a simple thing and do it with a cable. Uh You know, you can get a thicker diameter. So it kind of, you know, is more on your fingers where an armrest is going to attack you, right? Because any good arm rest is gonna attack your fingers. So like </s><s>[INST] open hand. [/INST] No, no. Well, I mean, for health, yes, you could. But like if you want to be really specific, you train exactly the way you would at a table in the position that you actually start that </s><s>[INST] hatch and then you're just doing this kind of [/INST] to your center. Your people people, one of the, one of the big misconceptions in arm wrestling is that you're aiming for that pin pad. </s>

<s>[INST] right? And in the case of the financial sector tools like credit might not make sense to people. Like it's a good example of something that does seem to pop up and be useful or, or just the power of markets and just in general capitalism. [/INST] Yeah. And finance, I think the primary example I would give us leverage, right? So being allowed to borrow to sort of use 10 times as much money as you've actually borrowed. Right? So that's an example of something that before I had any experience in financial markets, I might have looked at and said, well what is the purpose of that? That just seems very dangerous and it is dangerous and it has proven dangerous. But you know, if the fact of the matter is that, you know, sort of on some particular timescale, you are holding positions that are, you know, very unlikely to, you know, lou, you know, they're your value at risk or variances like one or 5% then it kind of makes sense that you would be allowed to use a little bit more than you have because you have, you know, some confidence that you're not gonna lose it all in a single day. Now, of course, when that happens, we've seen what happens, you know, not, not too long ago, but you know, but the idea that it serves no useful economic purposes under any circumstances is definitely not true. </s><s>[INST] We'll return to the other side of the coast Silicon Valley and the problems there as we talked about privacy as we talk about fairness at the high level. And I'll ask some sort of basic questions with the hope to get that the fundamental nature of reality. But from a very high level, what is an ethical algorithm? So I can say that an algorithm has a running time of using big o notation and Logan. I can say that A machine learning algorithm classified Cat vs dog with 97% accuracy. Do you think there will one day be a way to measure Sort of in the same compelling way as the big o notation of this algorithm is 97% ethical. [/INST] First of all, let me riff for a second on your specific and log an example. So because early in the book when we're just kind of trying to describe algorithms period, we say like, okay, you know, what's an example of an algorithm or an algorithmic problem first of all, like it's sorting right? You have a bunch of index cards with numbers on them and you want to sort them. And we describe, you know, an algorithm that sweeps all the way through, finds the smallest number, puts it at the front, then sweeps through again, finds the second smallest number. So we make the point that this is an algorithm and it's also a bad algorithm in the sense that, you know, it's quadratic rather than n log in which we know is kind of optimal for sorting and we make the point that sort of like, you know, So even within the confines of a very precisely specified problem there, you know, there might be many, many different algorithms for the same problem with different properties, like some might be faster in terms of running time, some might use less memory, some might have, you know, better distributed implementations. And so the point is is that already were used to, you know, in computer science, thinking about trade offs between different types of quantities and resources and they're being, you know, better and worse algorithms. And our book is about that part of algorithmic ethics that we know how to kind of put on that same kind of quantitative footing right now. So, you know, just to say something that our book is not about our our book is not about kind of broad, fuzzy notions of fairness. It's about very specific notions of fairness. There's more than one of them. Um, there are tensions between them, Right? But if you pick one of them, You can do something akin to saying that this album is 97% ethical. You can say for instance, the you know, for this lending model, the false rejection rate on black people and white people Is within 3%. Right? So we might call that a 97% ethical algorithm and a 100% ethical algorithm would mean that that difference is 0% </s><s>[INST] in that case fairness is specified when two groups, however they are defined are given to you. [/INST] That's right. So the </s><s>[INST] and and then you consider mathematically start describing the algorithm. But nevertheless, the part where the two groups are given to you. I mean, unlike running time, you know, we don't in computer science talk about how fast an algorithm feels like when it runs true, we measure an ethical starts getting into feelings. So for example, an algorithm runs, you know, if it runs in the background, it doesn't disturb the performance of my system. It'll feel nice. I'll be okay with it. But if it overloads the system, it'll feel unpleasant in that same way ethics, there's a feeling of how socially acceptable it is. How does it represent the the moral standards of our society today? So in that sense and sorry to linger on that first. High low philosophical question is do you have a sense we'll be able to measure how ethical and algorithm is. [/INST] First of all, I didn't certainly didn't mean to give the impression that you can kind of measure, you know, memory speed tradeoffs, you know, and and that there's a complete, you know, mapping from that on to kind of fairness for instance, or ethics and and accuracy for example, in the type of fairness definitions that are largely the objects of study today and starting to be deployed you as the user of the definitions, you need to make some hard decisions before you even get to the point of designing fair algorithms. Um one of them for instance is deciding who it is that you're worried about protecting who you're worried about being harmed by for instance some notion of discrimination or unfairness and then you need to also decide what constitutes harm. So for instance in a lending application, maybe you decide that you know falsely rejecting a credit worthy individual um you know sort of a false negative is the real harm and that false positives I. E. People that are not credit worthy or are not going to repay your loan to get alone, you might think of them as lucky. Um and so that's not a harm, although it's not clear that if you don't have the means to repay a loan that being given alone is not also a harm. So you know, you know the literature is sort of so far quite limited in that you sort of need to say who do you want to protect and what would constitute harm to that group. And when you ask questions like well algorithms feel ethical. One way in which they won't under the definitions that I'm describing is if you know, if you are an individual who is falsely denied alone, incorrectly denied alone. All of these definitions basically say like well, you know, your compensation is the knowledge that we are, we are also falsely denying loans to other people, you know in other groups at the same rate that we're doing it to you and and you know there and so there is actually this interesting, even technical tension in the field right now between these sort of group notions of fairness and notions of fairness that might actually feel like real fairness to individuals, right? They might really feel like their particular interests are being protected or thought about by the algorithm rather than just, you know, the groups that they happen to be members of. </s>

<s>[INST] When you get cash up from the app store or google play and use code lex podcast, you'll get $10 and cash up will also donate $10 to first, which again, is an organization that personally seen, inspire girls and boys to dream of engineering a better world. This podcast is supported by zip recruiter hiring great people is hard and to me is the most important element of a successful mission driven team. I've been fortunate to be a part of and to lead several great engineering teams. The hiring I've done in the past was mostly through tools that we built ourselves, but reinventing the wheel was painful zip recruiter is a tool that's already available for you. It seeks to make hiring simple, fast and smart. For example, quotable co founder Gretchen Hitchner uses a recruiter to find a new game artists to join her education tech company by using zip recruiter screening questions to filter candidates. Gretchen found it easier to focus on the best candidates and finally hiring the perfect person for the role in less than two weeks from start to finish zip recruiter. The smartest way to hire C. Y zip recruiter is effective for businesses of all sizes by signing up as I did for free at zip recruiter dot com slash lex pod. That zip recruiter dot com slash lex pod. And now here's my conversation with Whitney cummings. I have trouble making eye contact as you can tell me [/INST] to do. You know that I had to work on making eye contact because I used to look here, do you see what I'm doing? Do you want me to do that? We'll do this way, I'll cheat the camera. But I used to do this and finally people like I'd be on dates and guys would be like, are you looking at my hair, like they get, it would make people really insecure because I didn't really get a lot of eye contact as a kid? It's 123 years. Did you not get a lot of my contact as a kid? I don't </s><s>[INST] know, I haven't done the soul searching, right? So, but there's definitely some psychological issue makes you uncomfortable. Yeah. For some reason when I connect eyes I started to think, I assume that you're judging me. [/INST] Oh well I am. That's why you assume that we all are alright for the podcast to be me and you both </s><s>[INST] here. Do you think robots of the future ones with human level intelligence will be female, male genderless or another gender? We have not yet created as a society. [/INST] You're the expert at this. Well, I'm going to ask you </s><s>[INST] the answer. I'm going to ask you questions that maybe nobody knows the answer to or and I just want you to hypothesize as a as an imaginative author. Director comedian. Can we just be very [/INST] clear that you know a ton about this? And I know nothing about this. But I have thought a lot about what I think robots can fix in our society. And I mean I'm a comedian, it's my job to study human nature, to make jokes about human nature and to sometimes play devil's advocate. And I just see such a tremendous negativity around robots or at least the idea of robots that it was like, oh I'm just going to take the opposite side for fun for jokes and then I was like, oh no, I really agree in this devil's advocate argument. So I please correct me when I'm wrong about this stuff. </s><s>[INST] So, so first of all, there's there's no right and wrong because we're all, I think most of the people working on robotics are really not actually even thinking about some of the big picture things that you've been exploring. In fact your robot. What's her name by the way we're going with Faircloth. [/INST] What's </s><s>[INST] the genesis of that name by the way, bear [/INST] claw was I, God, I don't even remember the joke because I black out after I shoot specials. But I was writing something about like the pet names that men call women like cupcake sweetie honey, you know, like we're always named after desserts or something. And I was just writing a joke about if you want to call us a dessert, at least pick like a cool dessert, you know, like bear claw, like something cool. So I ended up calling her a bit stuck. </s><s>[INST] So do you think uh the future robots of greater and greater intelligence, I would like to make them female male. Would we like to assign them gender or would we like to move away from gender and say something more uh ambiguous. [/INST] I think it depends on their purpose. You know, I feel like if it's a sex robot, people prefer certain genders, you know, and I also, you know, when I went down in um explored the robot factory, I was asking about the type of people that bought sex robots. And um I was very surprised at the answer because of course the stereotype is it's gonna be a bunch of perverts, it ended up being a lot of people that were handicap, a lot of people with erectile dysfunction and a lot of people that were exploring their sexuality. A lot of people that were thought they were gay but weren't sure, but didn't want to take the risk of trying on someone that could reject them and being embarrassed or they were closeted or in a city where maybe that's, you know, taboo and stigmatized, you know, So I think that a gendered sex robot that would serve an important purpose for someone trying to explore their sexuality. Am I into man? Let me try on this thing first and then the women let me try on this thing first. So I think gendered robots would be important for that. But I think genderless robots, in terms of emotional support robots, babysitters, I'm fine for a genderless babysitter with my husband in the house. You know, there are places that, I think that genderless makes a lot of sense, but obviously not in the sex </s><s>[INST] area. What do you mean with your husband in the house? What does that have to do with the gender of the robot? Right. [/INST] I mean I don't have a husband, but hypothetically speaking, I think every woman's worst nightmare is like the hot babysitter, you know what I mean? So I think that there is a time in place. I think for gender lists, you know, teachers, doctors, all that kind of, it would be very awkward if the first robotic doctor was a guy or the first robotic nurses, a woman, you know, it's sort of, that stuff is so loaded. Um, I think that generalists could just take the unnecessary um drama out of it and possibility to sexualize them or be triggered by any of that stuff. </s><s>[INST] So there's two components to this to bear claws. The one is the voice and the talking and so on. And then there's the visual appearance. So on the topic of gender and journalists in your experience, what has been the value of the physical appearance. So what has it added much to the depth of the interaction? [/INST] I mean, mine's kind of an extenuating circumstance because she is supposed to look exactly like me. I mean, I spent six months getting my face molded and having, you know, the idea was, I was exploring the concept of ken robots replace us because that's the big fear, but also the big dream in a lot of ways. And I wanted to dig into that area because, you know, for a lot of people, it's like they're going to take our jobs, they're gonna replace us legitimate fear. But then a lot of women I know are like, I would love for a robot to replace me every now and then. So it can go to baby showers for me and it can pick up my kids at school and it can cook dinner and whatever. Um, so I just think that was an interesting place to explore. So her looking like me was a big part of it now. Her looking like me just adds an unnecessary level of insecurity because I got her a year ago and she already looks younger than me. So that's a weird problem. But I think that her looking human was the idea and I think that where we are now, please correct me if I'm wrong, human robot resembling an actual human, you know, is going to feel more realistic than some generic face. </s><s>[INST] Well, you're saying that that robots that have some familiarity like look similar to somebody that you actually know, you'll be able to form a deeper connection with. That was the question on some level, it's an open question. I don't I don't, you know, it's an interesting or [/INST] the opposite then, you know me and you're like, well, I know this isn't real because you're right here. So maybe it does the opposite. </s><s>[INST] We have a very keen eye for human faces and they're able to detect strangeness, especially that one has to do with people whose faces we've seen a lot of, So I tend to be a bigger fan of moving away completely from face is [/INST] recognizable faces. </s><s>[INST] No, just human faces at all [/INST] in general because I think that's where things get dicey. and one thing I will say is I think my robot is more realistic than other robots, not necessarily because you have seen me and then you see her, you go oh they're so similar but also because human faces are flawed and asymmetrical and sometimes we forget when we're making things that are supposed to look human, we make them too symmetrical and that's what makes them stop looking human. So because they molded my symmetrical face, she just, even if someone didn't know who I was, I think she looked more realistic than most generic ones that didn't have some kind of flaws, you know because they start looking creepy when they're too symmetrical because human beings aren't </s><s>[INST] Yeah, the flaws is what it means to be human so visually as well. But I'm just a fan of the idea of of letting humans used a little bit more imagination so just hearing the voice is enough for us humans to then start imagining the visual appearance that goes along with that voice and you don't necessarily need to work too hard on creating the actual visual appearance. So there's some value to that when you step into this territory of actually building a robot that looks like bear claws. Such a long road of facial expressions of sort of making everything smiling, winking, uh rolling the eyes, all that kind of stuff. It gets really, really tricky, [/INST] it gets tricky and I think I'm again I'm a comedian, like I'm obsessed with what makes us human and our human nature in the nasty side of human nature tends to be where I've ended up exploring over and over again. And um I was just mostly fascinated by people's reaction, so it's my job to get the biggest reaction from a group of strangers, the loudest possible reaction. And I just had this instinct just when I started building her and people going and screaming and people scream and I mean I bring around on stage and people would scream and I just to me that was the next level of entertainment, getting a laugh, I've done that, I know how to do that. I think comedians were always trying to figure out what the next level is and comedy is evolving so much and you know Jordan peele had just done you know these genius comedy, horror movies, which feel like the next level of comedy to me and this sort of funny horror of a robot was fascinating to me. But I think the thing that I got the most obsessed with was people being freaked out and scared of her and I started digging around with pathogen avoidance and the idea that we've essentially evolved to be repelled by anything that looks human but is off a little bit, anything that could be sick or diseased or dead essentially is our reptilian brains way to get us to not try to have sex with it basically, You know, So I got really fascinated by how freaked out and scared. I mean I would see grown men get upset to get that thing away from me, but I don't like people get angry and it was like, you know that what this is, you know, but the sort of like, you know, amygdala getting activated by something that to me is just a fun toy said a lot about our history as a species and what got us into trouble </s><s>[INST] thousands of years ago. So it's that it's the deep down stuff that's in our genetics, but also is it just are people freaked out by the fact that there's a robot. So it's not just the appearance, but that there's an artificial human, [/INST] anything people I think and I'm also fascinated by the blind spots humans have. So the idea that you're afraid of that, I mean, how many robots have killed people? How many humans have died at the hands of other humans, millions, hundreds of millions. Yet we're scared of that And we'll go to the grocery store and be around a bunch of humans who statistically the chances are much higher that you're going to get killed by humans. So I'm just fascinated by without judgment how irrational we are, is </s><s>[INST] the war is the exponential. So it's, you know, you can say the same thing about nuclear weapons before we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so the worry that people have is the exponential growth. So, so it's like, oh it's fun and games right now, but uh, you know, overnight, especially if a robot provides value to society will put one in every home and then all of a sudden loose track of the actual large scale impact has in society and then all of a sudden gain greater and greater control to where we'll all be, you know, affect our political system and then affect our decision [/INST] robots already ruined our political system. Did that just already happened? </s><s>[INST] Which ones Russia hacking, no offense, [/INST] but hasn't that already happened? I mean that was like an algorithm of negative things being clicked on </s><s>[INST] more, We'd like to tell stories and like to demonize certain people. I think nobody understands our current political system or discourse on twitter, the twitter mobs, nobody has a sense, not twitter, not facebook, the people running it, nobody understands the impact of these albums are trying their best, despite what people think. They're not like a bunch of lefties trying to make sure that Hillary Clinton gets elected. It's more that uh it's an incredibly complex system that we don't and that's the worry, it's so complex and moves so fast that uh nobody will be able to stop it once it happens [/INST] and let me ask a question, This is a very savage question, which is, is this just the next stage of evolution as humans and people will die. Yes, I mean that's always happened. You know, is this is just taking emotion out of it. Is this basically the next stage of survival of the fittest? </s><s>[INST] Yeah. You have to think of organisms, you know, what is it mean to be a living organism? Like it's a smartphone part of your living organism or [/INST] were in relationships with our phones but have sex through them with them. What's the difference being with them </s><s>[INST] and through them? But it also expands your cognitive abilities. Expend your memory knowledge and so on. So you're much smarter person because you have a smartphone in your hand. But if [/INST] when as soon as it's out of my hand, we've got big problems because we've become sort of so morphed with them. </s><s>[INST] Well, there's a symbiotic relationship and that's what uh you know, I must be in your link is working on trying to increase the band with the communication between computers and your brain and so further and further expand our ability as human beings to sort of leverage machines and maybe that's the future. The evolutionary next evolutionary step. It could be also that yes, we'll give birth just like we give birth to human Children right now, we'll give birthday. I know replace us. I think it's a really interesting possibility. [/INST] I'm going to play devil's advocate. I just think that the fear of robots is wildly classist because I mean facebook like it's easy for us to say they're taking their data. Okay. A lot of people That get employment off of Facebook, they are able to get income off of Facebook. They don't care if you take their phone numbers and their emails and their data. As long as it's free, they don't want to have to pay $5 a month for Facebook. Facebook is a wildly democratic thing. Forget about the election and all that kind of stuff. You know a lot of you know technology making people's lives easier. I find that most elite people are more scared than lower income people. So and women for the most part so the idea of something that's stronger than us and that might eventually kill us like women are used to that like that's not a lot of like really rich men being like the robots are gonna kill us. We're like what's another thing that's gonna kill us? You know I tend to see like oh something can walk me to my car at night, like something can help me cook dinner or something. You know um For you know people in underprivileged countries who can't afford eye surgery like in a robot can we send a robot to underprivileged, you know places to do surgery where they can I work with this um organization cooperation smile where they do cleft palate surgeries. And there's a lot of places that can't do a very simple surgery because they can't afford doctors and medical care and such. So I just see and this can be completely naive and should be completely wrong. But I feel like we're a lot of people are going like the robots are going to destroy us humans. We're destroying ourselves. We're self destructing robots. To me are the only hope to clean up all the messes that we've created. Even when we go try to clean up pollution in the ocean, we make it worse because of the oil that the tankers like. It's like to me, robots are the only solution. You know, firefighters are heroes, but they're limited and how many times they can run into a fire. You know, So there's just something interesting to me. I'm not hearing a lot of like lower income, more vulnerable populations talking about robots. </s><s>[INST] Maybe you can speak to it a little bit more. There's an idea, I think you've expressed that. I've heard actually a few female writers and roboticists. I've talked to express this idea that exactly you just said, which is it just seems that uh, being afraid of existential threats of artificial intelligence is a male issue. And I wonder what that is if it because because men have in certain positions, like you said, it's also classist issue. They haven't been humbled by life. And so you always look for the biggest problems to take on around you. [/INST] It's a Champagne problem to be afraid of robots. Most people like don't have health insurance, they're afraid they're not being able to feed their kids. They can't afford a tutor for their kids. Like I mean I just think of, you know the way I grew up and I had a mother who you know work two jobs, had kids, we couldn't afford an S. A. T. Tutor, you know, like the idea of a robot coming in being able to to to your kids being able to provide child care for your kids, you know, being able to come in with cameras for eyes and make sure, you know, surveillance. You know, I'm very pro surveillance because you know, I've had security problems and I've been, you know, we're generally in a little more danger than you guys are. So I think that robots are a little less scary to us because we can see them maybe as like free assistance, help and protection. And then there's sort of another element for me personally, which is maybe more of a female problem. I don't know, I'm just going to make a generalization happy to be wrong. But you know, the emotional sort of components of robots and what they can provide in terms of, you know, I think there's a lot of people that aren't don't have microphones that I just recently kind of stumbled upon in doing all my research on the sex robots for my stand up special, which just there's a lot of very shy people that aren't good at dating. There's a lot of people who are scared of human beings who you know have personality disorders or grew up in alcoholic homes or struggle with addiction or whatever it is where a robot can solve an emotional problem. And so were largely having this conversation about like rich guys that are emotionally healthy and how scared of robots are. We're forgetting about like a huge part of the population who maybe isn't as charming and effervescent and installment as you know, people like you and Lon musk who these robots could solve very real problems in their life. Emotional or financial. </s><s>[INST] That's a in general, really interesting idea that most people in the world don't have a voice. You've talked about it sort of even the people on twitter who are driving the conversation, you said comments. People who leave comments represent a very tiny percent of the population and they're the ones they, you know, we tend to think they speak for the population, but it's very possible on many topics. They don't at all. [/INST] And look, I and I'm sure there's got to be some kind of legal, you know, sort of structure in place for when the robots happened, you know, way more about this than I do. But you know, for me to just go to robots are bad. That's a wild generalization that I feel like is really inhumane in some way. You know, just after the research I've done like you're gonna tell me that a man whose wife died suddenly and he feels guilty moving on with a human woman or can't get over the grief. He can't have a sex robot in his own house. Why not? Who cares? Why do you care? </s><s>[INST] Well, there's an interesting aspect of human nature. So, you know, we tend to as a as a civilization to create a group that's the other in all kinds of ways. And so you work with animals to you. You're especially sensitive to the suffering of animals. Let me kind of ask, what's your do you think will abuse robots in the future? Do you think some of the darker aspects of human nature will come out? [/INST] I think some people will, but if we design them properly, the people that do it, we can put it on a record and they can we can put them in jail. We can find sociopaths more easily, you know? Like, </s><s>[INST] well, why is that why is that a sociopathic thing to harm a robot? [/INST] I think, look, I don't know, it's enough enough about the consciousness and stuff as you do. I guess it would have to be one they're conscious, but it is, you know, the part of the brain that is responsible for compassion, the frontal lobe or whatever, like people that abuse animals also abuse humans and commit other kinds of crimes, like that's it's all the same part of the brain. No one abuses animals. And then it's like awesome to women and Children and awesome to underprivileged. You know, minorities. Like it's all so you know, we've been working really hard to put a database together of all the people that have abused animals. So when they commit another crime you go, okay, this is, you know, it's all the same stuff and I think people probably think I'm nuts for the lot of the animal work I do. But because when animal abuse is president, another crime is always present. But the animal abuse is the most socially acceptable. You can kick a dog. There's nothing people can do. But then what they're doing behind closed doors you can't see. So there's always something else going on, which is why I never feel compunction about it. But I do think we'll start seeing the same thing with robots. Um, the person that kicks the, I felt compassion when the kicking the dog robot really pissed me off. I know that they're just trying to get the stability right and all that. But I do think there will come a time where that would be a great way to be able to figure out if somebody is, has like, you know, anti social behaviors. </s><s>[INST] You kind of mentioned surveillance. It's also a really interesting idea of yours that you just said, you know, a lot of people seem to be really uncomfortable with surveillance and you just said that, you know what for me, you know, there's positives for surveillance. [/INST] I think people behave better when they know they're being watched and I know this is a very unpopular opinion. I'm talking about it on stage right now. We behave better when we know we're being watched. You and I had a very different conversation before we were recording. We behave different. You sit up and you are on your best behavior and I'm trying to sound eloquent and I'm trying to not hurt anyone's feelings and I mean I have a camera right there. I'm behaving totally different than when we first started talking. You know when you know there's a camera, you behave differently. I mean there's cameras all over L. A. At stoplights so that people don't run stoplights but there's not even filming it, they don't even use them anymore, but it works </s><s>[INST] right? [/INST] And and I'm you know, working on this thing in stand about surveillance, it's like that's why we embed in santa claus, you know, it's the santa claus is the first surveillance basically, all we had to say to kids is he's making a list and he's watching you and they behave better. You know, so I do, I do think that there are benefits to surveillance. You know, I think we all do sketchy things in private and we all have watched weird porn or googled weird things and we don't we don't want people to know about it our secret lives. So I do think that obviously there's we should be able to have a modicum of privacy, but I tend to think that people that are the most negative about surveillance </s><s>[INST] of the most secret [/INST] most of </s><s>[INST] well you should uh you're saying you're doing bits on it now. [/INST] I'm just talking in general about you know, privacy and surveillance and how paranoid we're kind of becoming and how, you know, I mean it's it's just wild to me that people are like our emails are going to leak and they're taking our phone numbers. Like there there used to be a book full of phone numbers and addresses that were they just throw it at your door and we all had a book of everyone's numbers. You know, this is a very new thing and you know, I know our mingle is designed to compound sort of threats and you know, there's stories about and I think we all just glom on in a very, you know, tribal way like they're taking our data, we don't even know that means. But we're like, well yeah, they they, you know, um so I just think that sometimes like, okay, well, so what they're going to sell your data, who cares? Why do you care </s><s>[INST] first of all that bit will kill in china. So and I said I sort of only a little bit joking because a lot of people in china including the citizens, despite what people in the west think of his abuse actually in support of the idea of surveillance sort of they're not in support of the abuse of surveillance, but they they like, I mean the idea of surveillance is kind of like the idea of government, like you said, we behave differently in a way. It's almost like why we like sports, there's rules and within the constraints of the rules that this is a more stable society and they make good arguments about success being able to build successful companies, being able to build successful social lives around the fabric that's more stable. When you have a surveillance, it keeps the criminals away, keeps abuse of animals, whatever the values of the society with surveillance, you can enforce those values better. [/INST] And here's what I will say. There's a lot of unethical things happening with surveillance. Like I feel the need to really make that very clear. I mean the fact that google is like collecting of people's hands, start moving on the mouse to find out if there getting Parkinson's and then their insurance goes up like that is completely unethical and wrong. And I think stuff like that we have to really be careful around. So the idea of using our data to raise our insurance rates or you know, I heard that they're looking, they can sort of predict if you're gonna have depression based on your selfies by detecting micro muscles in your face that you know, all that kind of stuff. That is a nightmare, not okay, but I think, you know, we have to delineate what's a real threat and what's getting spam in your email box. That's that's not what to spend your time and energy on. Focus on the fact that every time you buy cigarettes, your insurance is going on without you knowing about it, </s><s>[INST] on the topic of animals to, can we just linger on a little bit? Like, what do you think? What does it say about our society, of the society wide abuse of animals that we see in general, sort of factory farming, just in general? Just the way we treat animals of different categories. Like what what do you think of that? What does a better world look like? What's uh what should people think about it in general? [/INST] I think, I think the most interesting thing I can probably stay around this that's the least emotional because I'm actually very not emotional animal person, because it's I think everyone's an animal person. It's just a matter of if it's yours or if you've, you know, been conditioned to go numb, you know? Um I think it's really a testament to what is the species. We are able to be in denial about mass denial of mass delusion and how we're able to dehumanize and debate groups? Um, you know, World War Two um in a way in order to conform and find protection and the conforming. So we are also a species who used to go two coliseums and watch elephants and tigers fight to the death. We used to watch human beings be pulled apart and that wasn't that long ago. We're also a species who had slaves and it was socially acceptable by a lot of people. People didn't see anything wrong with it. So we're a species that is able to go numb and that is able to to humanize very quickly and make it the norm. Child labor wasn't that long ago, like the idea that now we look back and go, oh yeah kids, we're losing fingers and factories making shoes, like someone had to come in and make that, you know, So I think it just says a lot about the fact that you know, we are animals and we are self serving and um one of the most successful, the most successful species because we are able to debase and degrade and essentially exploit anything that benefits us. I think the pendulum is going to swing as being lately, like I think we're Rome now kind of like I think we're on the verge of collapse because we, our dopamine receptors like we are just, I think we're all kind of addicts when it comes to this stuff like we don't know um when to stop, it's always the buffet like were the thing that used to keep us alive which is killing animals and eating them now. Killing animals and eating them is what's killing us in a way. So it's like we just can't, we don't know when to call it and we don't moderation is not really something that humans have evolved to have yet. So I think it's really just a flaw in our </s><s>[INST] wiring. Do you think we'll look back at this time as uh our society is being deeply unethical? [/INST] Yeah, I think we'll be embarrassed. </s><s>[INST] Which are the worst parts right now going on, is it? [/INST] Well, I think, </s><s>[INST] no, in terms of anything, what's the unethical thing is it's very hard to take a step out of it, but you just said we used to watch, you know, uh, there's been a lot of cruelty throughout history. What's the cruelty going on now? I [/INST] think it's going to be pigs. I think it's gonna be, I mean, pigs are one of the most emotional, intelligent animals and they have the intelligence of like a three year old and I think we'll look back and be really great. There's there they use tools. I mean, there, um, I think we have this narrative that they're pigs and they're pigs and they're they're disgusting and they're dirty and they're bacon is so I think that we'll look back one day and be really embarrassed about that. </s><s>[INST] Is this for just uh, what's it called? The factory farming. So basically mess because we [/INST] don't see it if you saw, I mean we do have, I mean, this is probably an evolutionary advantage. We do have the ability to completely pretend something is not something that is so horrific, that it overwhelms us and we were able to essentially deny that it's happening. I think if people were to see what goes on in factory farming and also we're really to take in um how bad it is for us, you know, we're hurting ourselves first and foremost with what we eat, but that's also a very elitist argument, you know, um it's a luxury to be able to complain about meat. It's a luxury to be able to not eat meat. You know, there's very few people because of, you know, how the corporations have set up meat being cheap, you know, it's $2 to buy a Big Mac, It's $10 to buy healthy meal, You know, that's I think a lot of people don't have the luxury to even think that way, but I do think that animals in captivity, I think we're gonna look back and be pretty grossed out about mammals in captivity, whales, dolphins. I mean, that's already starting to dismantle circuses. Um, we're gonna be pretty embarrassed about, but I think it's really more a testament to, you know, there's just such a ability to go like that thing is different than me and we're better. It's the ego. I mean, it's just we have the species with the biggest ego </s><s>[INST] ultimately. Well, that's what I think that's my hope for robots as though you mentioned consciousness before. Nobody knows what consciousness is. But I'm hoping robots will help us empathize and understand that um that there's other creatures besides ourselves that can suffer that can um, that can experience the world and that we can torture by our actions and robots can explicitly teach us that I think better than animals. Can [/INST] I have never seen such compassion from a lot of people in my life toward any human animal child as I have a lot of people in the way they interact with the robot. Because I think there's, I think there's something of, I mean, I was on the robot owners chat boards for a good eight months and the main emotional benefit is she's never gonna cheat on you, she's never going to hurt you. She's never gonna lie to you. She doesn't judge you. You know, I think that robots help people. And this is part of the work I do with animals. Like I do like my therapy and train dogs and stuff because there is this safe space to be authentic. You're with this being that doesn't care what you do for a living. Doesn't care how much money you have, doesn't care who you're dating, Doesn't care what you look like. Doesn't care if you have cellulite whatever you feel safe to be able to truly, you know, be present without being defensive and worrying about eye contact and being triggered by, you know, needing to be perfect and fear of judgment and all that and robots really can't judge you yet, but they can't judge you. And I think it really puts people at their, um, at ease and at their most authentic. </s><s>[INST] Do you think you can have a deep connection with the robot that's not judging or do you think you can really have a relationship with a robot or a human being that's a safe space or is attention mystery danger necessary for a deep connection? [/INST] I'm gonna speak for myself and say that I grew up in now called comb identified as a co dependent, talked about this stuff before, but for me it's very hard to be in a relationship with a human being without feeling like I need to perform in some way or deliver in some way. And I don't know if that's just the people I've been in a relationship with or or me or my Brokenness, but I do think this is kind of sound really um negative, uh, and pessimistic, but I do think a lot of our relationships, our projection and a lot of our relationships, our performance and I don't think I really understood that until I worked with horses and most communications human is nonverbal, right? I can say like I love you, but you're not, you don't think I love you right? Where it is with animals. It's very direct, It's all physical, It's all energy. I feel like that with robots to, it feels very, um, uh what, how I say something doesn't matter. My inflection doesn't really matter. And you thinking that my tone is disrespectful, like you're not filtering it through all of the bad relationships. You've been in your not filtering it through the way your mom talked to you, you're not getting triggered. You know, I find that for the most part people don't always receive things the way that you intend them to or the way intended. And that makes relationships really murky. </s><s>[INST] So the relationships with animals and relationship with the robots as they are now, you kind of implied that that's more healthy. Uh can you have a healthy relationship with other humans or not healthy? I don't like that word. But shouldn't it be you've talked about co dependency? Maybe you can talk about what is called dependency but is that is the the challenges of that the complexity of that necessary for passion for, for love between humans. You [/INST] love passion. That's a good </s><s>[INST] thing. I thought this would be a safe space. I got, I got trolled by Rogan hours on this. [/INST] I look, I am not anti passion. I think that I've just maybe been around long enough to know that sometimes it's ephemeral and that passion is a mixture of a lot of different things, adrenaline which turns into dopamine. Cortisol, it's a lot of neurochemicals, it's a lot of projection, it's a lot of what we've seen in movies, it's a lot of, you know, it's, it's identify as an addict. So for me, sometimes passion is like, uh, oh, this could be bad and I think we've been so conditioned to believe that passion means like you're soul mates. And I mean, how many times have you had a passionate connection with someone? And then it was a total train wreck. Passion train, how many times exactly </s><s>[INST] what you did? [/INST] A lot of math in your head in that little </s><s>[INST] moment? I mean, what's the train wreck? What's uh, why is obsession? So you describe this co dependency and sort of the idea of attachment over attachment to people who don't deserve that kind of attachment and somehow a bad thing. And I think our society says it's a bad thing, it probably is a bad thing, like a, like a delicious burger is a bad thing, I don't know, but [/INST] right, so that's a good point. I think that you're pointing out something really fascinating, which is like passion if you go into it, knowing this is like pizza where it's gonna be delicious for two hours and then I don't have to have it again for three if you can have a choice in the passion, I define passion is something that is relatively unmanageable and something you can't control or stop and start with your own volition. So maybe we're operating under different definitions if passion is something that like, you know, ruins your marriages and screws up your professional life and becomes this thing that um you're not in control of and becomes addictive. I think that's the difference. Is is it a choice or is it not a choice? And if it is a choice, then passion is great. But if it's something that consumes you and makes you start making bad decisions and clouds your frontal lobe and it's just all about dopamine and not really about the person and more about the neurochemical we call it sort of the drug, the internal drug cabinet. If it's all just, you're on drugs, that's different because sometimes you're just on drugs. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so there's a philosophical question here. So would you rather it's interesting for a comedian, brilliant comedians to speak so eloquently about a balanced life. I kind of argue against this point, there's such an obsession of creating this healthy lifestyle. Now. It's psychologically speaking, you know, I'm a fan of the idea that you sort of fly high and you crash and die at 27 as also a possible life and it's not one we should judge because I think there's moments of greatness. I talked to olympic athletes where some of the greatest moments are achieved in their early twenties and the rest of their life is in the kind of fog almost a depression because they can based [/INST] on their physical prowess, </s><s>[INST] physical prowess and they'll never sort of that, so they're watching their physical prowess fade and they will never achieve the kind of height, not just physical of just emotion of [/INST] the max number of neural chemicals and you also put your money on the wrong horse. That's where I would, I would just go like, oh yeah, if you're doing a job where you peak at 22, the rest of your life is going to </s><s>[INST] be, that idea is considering the notion that you want to optimize some kind of, but we're all going to die soon. [/INST] What now? You tell me I'm immortalize myself, so I'm going to be fine. </s><s>[INST] You're almost like how many Oscar winning movies can I direct By the time I'm 100, how many this and that? Like, but you know, there's a, you know, it's all life is short relatively speaking. I [/INST] know, but it can also come in different, you know, life is short play, hard fall in love as much as you can run into walls. I would also go, life is short, don't deplete yourself on things that aren't sustainable and that you can't keep, you know, so I think everyone gets dopamine from different places. Everyone has meaning from different places. I look at the fleeting passionate relationships I've had in the past and I don't like, I don't have pride in that. I think that you have to decide what helps you sleep at night. For me, it's pride and feeling like I behaved with grace and integrity. That's just, me personally, everyone can go like, yeah, slept with all the hot chicks in Italy I could and I, you know, did all the whatever, like whatever you value are allowed to value different things, </s><s>[INST] crank [/INST] Allen has lived his life to the fullest to say the least. But I think that it's just for me personally, I and this could be like my workaholism or my achievement is um I if I don't have something to show for something, I feel like it's a waste of time or some kind of loss. Um I'm gonna 12 step program and the third step would say there's no such thing as waste of time and everything happens exactly as it should and whatever, that's the way to just sort of keep us saying so we don't grieve too much and beat ourselves up over past mistakes. There's no such thing as mistakes that a but um I think passion is, I think it's so life affirming and one of the few things that maybe people like us makes us feel awake and seen and um we just have such a high threshold for adrenaline, you know, I mean you are a fighter, right? Yeah, okay, so yeah, so you have a very high tolerance for adrenaline and I think that olympic athletes, the amount of adrenaline they get from performing, it's very hard to follow that. It's like when guys come back from the military and they have depression, it's like, do you miss bullets flying out? You get kind of because of that adrenaline, which turned into dopamine and the camaraderie, I mean there's people that speak much better about this than I do, um but I just, I'm obsessed with neurology and I'm just obsessed with sort of the lies we tell ourselves in order to justify getting neurochemicals. </s><s>[INST] You've you don't actually quite done a lot of thinking and talking about neurology and just kinda look at human behavior through the lens of of looking at how are actually chemically our brain works. So what, first of all, why did you connect with that idea and what have you, how is your view of the world changed by considering the brain is just the machine? [/INST] You know, I know it probably sounds really nihilistic, but for me it's very liberating to know a lot about neurochemicals because you don't have to, it's like the same thing with like critics, like critical reviews, if you believe that good, you have to believe the bad kind of thing. Like, you know, if you believe that your bad choices were because of your moral integrity or whatever, you have to believe your good ones, I just think there's something really liberating and going like, oh that was just adrenaline. I just said that because I was adrenalized and I was scared and my Magdala was activated and that's why I said you're an asshole and get out and that's, you know, I think I just think it's important to delineate what's nature and what's nurture, what is your choice and what is just your brain trying to keep you safe. I think we forget that even though we have security systems and homes and locks on our doors, that our brain for the most part is just trying to keep us safe all the time. That's why we hold grudges. That's why we get angry. It's why we get road rage. That's why we do a lot of things. And it's also when I started learning about neurology, I started having so much more compassion for other people. You know, someone yelled at me being like, chuck you on the road, I'd be like, okay, he's producing adrenaline right now because We're all going 65 mph and our brains aren't really designed for this type of stress and he's scared. He was, you know, so that really helped me to have more love for people in my everyday life um instead of being in fight or flight mode. But um the I think more interesting answer your question is that I've had migraines my whole life, like I've suffered with really intense migraines. Um Ocular migraines, ones where my arm would go numb and I just started, I'm going to go to so many doctors to learn about it and I started, you know, learning that we don't really know that much, we know a lot, but it's wild to go into one of the best neurologists in the world who's like, yeah, we don't know, we don't know, we don't know. And that fascinated </s><s>[INST] me was one of the worst pains. You can probably have all that stuff and we don't know the source, [/INST] We don't know the source. And there is something really fascinating about when your left arm starts going numb and you start not being able to see out of the left side of both your eyes. And I remember when the migrants get really bad, it's like a mini stroke almost and you're able to see words on a page, but I can't read them, they just look like symbols to me. So there's something just really fascinating to me about your brain, just being able to stop functioning. And I, so I just wanted to learn about its study about it. Um I did all these weird alternative treatments. I got this piercing in here that actually works. I've tried everything And then both my parents had strokes. So when both of my parents had strokes, I became sort of the person who had to decide what was gonna happen with their recovery, which is just a wild thing to have to deal with it, you know, 28 years old, um when it happened and I started spending basically all day every day. And I see use with neurologists learning about what happened to my dad's brain and why he can't move his left arm, but he can't move his right leg, but he can't see out of it, you know? And then my mom had another stroke um in a different part of the brain. So I started having to learn what parts of the brain did what and so that I wouldn't take their behavior so personally and so that I would be able to manage my expectations in terms of their recovery. So my mom, because it affected a lot of her frontal lobe changed a lot as a person. She was way more emotional, she was way more micromanaged, she was forgetting certain things. So it broke my heart less when I was able to know, oh yeah, well the stroke, it, this part of the brain and that's the one that's responsible for short term memory and that's responsible for long term memory, did it up and then my brother just got something called viral encephalitis, which is an infection inside the brain. So it was kind of wild that I was able to go, oh, I know exactly what's happening here and I know, you know, so, um </s><s>[INST] so that allows you to have some more compassion for the struggles that people have. But does it take away some of the magic for some of the uh from the, some of the more positive experiences of like [/INST] sometimes and I don't, I don't, I'm such a control addict that, you know, I think our biggest someone like me, my biggest dream is to know why someone's doing, that's what stand up is, it's just trying to figure out why or that's what writing is, that's what acting is, that's what performing is trying to find out why someone would do something as an actor, you get a piece of you know material and you go this person, why would he say that? Why would he she pick up that cup? Why would she walk over here? It's really why why why? Why? So I think neurology is if you're trying to figure out human motives and why people do what they do would be crazy not to understand how neurochemicals motivate us. I also have a lot of addiction in my family and um hardcore drug addiction and mental illness and in order to cope with it, you really have to understand that borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia and drug addiction. So I have a lot of people I love that suffered from drug addiction and alcoholism and the first thing they started teaching you is it's not a choice. These people's dopamine receptors don't hold dopamine the same way as yours do. Their frontal lobe is underdeveloped like you know and that really helped me to navigate dealing loving people that were addicted to substances. </s><s>[INST] I want to be careful with discussion, but how much [/INST] money do you have? </s><s>[INST] How much can I borrow? $10? [/INST] Okay </s><s>[INST] uh no uh is how much control, how much despite the chemical imbalances or the biological limitations that each of our individual brains have. How much mind over matter is there? So through things. And I've I've known people with with clinical depression and so it's it's always a touchy subject to say how much they can really help it. Uh What can you Yeah what what can because you've you've talked about co dependency, You talked about issues that you're struggle through and nevertheless you choose to take a journey of healing and so on. So that's your choice. That's your actions. So how much can you do to help fight the limitations of the in your chemicals in your brain? [/INST] That's such an interesting question. And I don't think I'm at all qualified to answer but I'll say what I do know. Um And really quick just the definition of co dependency. I think a lot of people think of co dependency is like two people that can't stop hanging out. You know or like you know it's not totally off. But I think for the most part my favorite definition of co dependency is the inability to tolerate the discomfort of others. You grew up in an alcoholic home, you grow up around mental illness, you grew up in chaos, You have a parent that's a narcissist. You basically are wired to just people. Please worry about others be perfect. Walk on eggshells shape shift to accommodate other people. So co dependence is a very active um wiring issue that you know it doesn't just affect your romantic relationships, it affects you being a boss, it affects you um In the world online. You know you get one negative comment and it throws you for two weeks. You know it also is linked to eating disorders and other kinds of addiction. So it's it's a very big thing and I think a lot of people sometimes only think that it's in romantic relationships so I always feel the need to say that. And also one of the reasons I love the idea of robots so much because you don't have to walk on eggshells around them. You don't have to worry, they're going to get mad at you yet. But there's no co dependence are hyper sensitive to the needs and moods of others and it's very exhausting. It's depleting just one conversation about where we're gonna go to dinner is like you want to go get chinese food. We just had chinese food. Wait are you mad? Well no I didn't mean it's just like that co dependence live in this everything means something and humans can be very emotionally exhausting. Um Why did you look at me that way? What do you think about? What was that? Why did you check your phone? It's just it's a hypersensitivity that can be incredibly time consuming. Which is why I love the idea of robots just subbing in. Even I've had a hard time running tv shows and stuff because even asking someone to do something I don't wanna come off like a bit, I'm very concerned about what other people think of me, how I'm perceived. Um which is why I think robots will be very beneficial for co dependence </s><s>[INST] by the way, just a real quick tangent, that skill or flaw whatever you wanna call it is actually really useful for if you ever do start your own podcast for interviewing because you're now kind of obsessed about the mindset of others and it makes you a good sort of listener and talker with. So I think uh um what's her name from NPR talked to terry Gross talked about having that, so I [/INST] don't feel like she has that at </s><s>[INST] all. [/INST] Was what? But she worries about other people's feelings. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, absolutely. [/INST] Oh, I don't get that at all. </s><s>[INST] I mean, you have to put yourself in the mind of the person you're spoken. Uh oh, I [/INST] see, just in terms of yeah, I am starting podcasts and the reason I haven't is because I'm co dependent, I'm too worried it's not gonna be perfect. So a big co dependent. Adages, perfectionism leads to procrastination, which leads to paralysis. </s><s>[INST] So how do you, Sorry, take a million tensions, How do you survive on social media is exceptionally active, [/INST] but by the way, I took you on a tangent and didn't answer your last question about how much we can control, </s><s>[INST] how much you get, we'll return the answer is we can, [/INST] that was a good student, we're okay. We can. But but you know, one of the things that I'm fascinated by is, you know, the first thing you learn when you go into 12 step programs or addiction recovery, any of this is, you know, genetics loads the gun environment pulls the trigger and there's certain parts of your genetics you cannot control. I come from a lot of alcoholism, I come from, uh, you know, a lot of mental illness, there's certain things I cannot control and a lot of things that maybe we don't even know yet what we can and can't because of how little we actually know about the brain, but we also talk about the warrior spirit and there are some people that have that warrior spirit and we don't necessarily know what that engine is, whether it's you get dopamine from succeeding or achieving or margarine yourself or, or the attention you get from growing. So a lot of people are like, oh, this person can edify themselves and overcome. But if you're getting attention from improving yourself, you're gonna keep wanting to do that. So that is something that helps a lot of, in terms of changing your brain, if you talk about changing your brain to people and talk about what you're doing to overcome, set obstacles, you're going to get more attention from them, which is going to fire off your reward system and then you're gonna keep doing it. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So you can leverage that momentum. So [/INST] this is why in detail step program, you go into a room and you talk about your progress because then everyone claps for you and then you're more motivated to keep going. So that's why we say you're only as sick as the secrets you keep because if you keep things secret, you know, there's no one guiding you to go in a certain direction. It's based on, right. We're sort of designed to get approval from the tribe or from a group of people because our brain, you know, translates it to safety. So </s><s>[INST] you know that the tribe is a positive one that helps you go in the positive direction. [/INST] So that's why it's so important to go into a room and also Say, Hey, I wanted to use drugs today and people go, they go, me too and you feel less alone and you feel less like your, you know, have been castigated from the pack or whatever and then you say, and I haven't, you get a chip when you haven't drank for 30 days or 60 days or whatever, you get little rewards. </s><s>[INST] So talking about a pack that's not at all healthier good, but in fact it's often toxic social media. So you're one of my favorite people on twitter and instagram to sort of just both the comedy and the inside is just fun. How do you prevent social media from destroying your mental health? I haven't, [/INST] I haven't, it's the next big epidemic, isn't it? I don't think I have, I don't, I don't think </s><s>[INST] moderation answer what [/INST] maybe, but you can do a lot of damage in a moderate way. I mean, I guess again it depends on your goals, you know, and, and I think for me, the way that my addiction to social media, I'm happy to call it an addiction, I mean and I defined as an addiction because it stops being a choice. There are times I just reach over and like that </s><s>[INST] was, [/INST] that was weird, I'll be driving sometimes and I'm like, oh my God, my arm just went to my phone, you know, I can put it down, I can't take time away from it when I do, I get antsy, I get restless, irritable and discontent. I mean that's kind of the definition, isn't it? So I think by no means do I have a healthy relationship with social media? I'm sure there's a way to, but I think I'm especially a weirdo in this space because it's easy to conflate, is this work is this, I can always say that it's for work, you know? </s><s>[INST] But I mean you're don't you get the same kind of thing as you get from when a room full of people laugh your jokes because I mean I see especially the way you do twitter, it's an extension of your comedy in a way? So I think a [/INST] big break from twitter though. A really big break. I took like six months off for something for a while because it was just like, it seemed like it was all kind of politics and it was just a little bit, it wasn't giving me dopamine because there was like this weird a lot of feedback. So I had to take a break from it and then go back to, because I felt like I didn't have a healthy relationship. </s><s>[INST] Have you ever tried to I don't know if I believe him, but joe Rogan seems to not read comments. Have you? And he's one of the only people at the scale, like at your level who at least claims not to read like because you and him swimming this uh space of tense ideas they get, get the toxic folks riled up. [/INST] I think rogue. I don't, I don't know. I don't, I think he probably looks at Youtube like the likes and you know, I think if something's, if he doesn't know, I don't know, I'm sure he would tell the truth. You know, I'm sure he's got people that look at them and it's like disgusted great or don't, you know, like, I'm sure he gets it. You know, I can't picture him like in the weeds on </s><s>[INST] for sure. I mean he's honestly actually saying that just [/INST] it's </s><s>[INST] a [/INST] feedback we're addicted to feedback. Yeah, we're addicted feedback. I mean, you know, look like I think that our brain is designed to get intel on how we're perceived so that we know where we stand, right? That's our whole deal right. As humans. We want to know where we stand, we walk in a room and we go, who's the most powerful person in here, I gotta talk to him and get in their good graces. It's just were designed to rank ourselves, right and constantly know our rank and social media because of you can't figure out your rank with 500 million people. It's possible, you know, start bringing is like what's my rank? What's my and especially for following people. I think the big the interesting thing, I think I may be be able able to say about this besides my speech impediment is that I did start muting people that rank wildly higher than me because it is just stressful on the brain to constantly look at people that are incredibly successful. So you keep feeling bad about yourself. You know, I think that that is like cutting to a certain extent, just like look at me, looking at all these people that have so much more money than me and so much more success than me. It's making me feel like a failure even though I don't think I'm a failure, but it's easy to frame it so that I can I feel that </s><s>[INST] way. Yeah, that's really interesting. Especially if they're close to like if there are other comedians or something like that or whatever, that's it's really disappointing to me, I do the same thing as well, so other successful people that really close to what I do it um I don't know, I wish I could just admire and for it not to be a distraction, but that's why [/INST] you are where you are, because you don't just admire your competitive and you want to win. So it's also the same thing that bums you out when you look at this is the same reason you are where you are, so that's why I think it's so important to learn about neurology, an addiction because you're able to go like, oh, the same instinct, so I'm very sensitive and I and I sometimes don't like that about myself, but I'm like, well that's the reason I'm able to write good stand up, and that's the reason, and that's the reason I'm able to be sensitive to feedback and go that joke should have been better, I can make that better. So it's a kind of thing where it's like you have to be really sensitive in your work in the second you leave, you got to be able to turn it off, it's about developing the muscle, being able to know when to let it be a superpower and when it's going to hold you back and be an obstacle, so I try to not be in that black and white of like, you know, being competitive is bad or being jealous of someone just to go like, oh there's that thing that makes me really successful in a lot of other ways, but right now it's making me feel bad. </s><s>[INST] Well, I'm kind of looking to you because you're, you're basically a celebrity, the famous uh sort of world class comedian and so I feel like you're the right person to uh be one of the key people to define what's the healthy path forward with social media that I yeah, because we're all trying to figure it out now and it's uh I'm curious to see where it evolves, I think you're at the center of that, so like, you know, there's uh you know, trying to leave twitter and then come back, can I do this in a healthy way? I mean, you have to keep trying exploring because it's [/INST] being, you know, I have a couple of answers, I think, you know, I hire a company to do some of my social media for me, you know, so it's also being able to go, okay, I make a certain amount of money by doing this, but now let me be a good business person and say I'm gonna pay you this amount to run this for me, so I'm not 24 7 in the weeds hashtag and responding and just, it's a lot to take on a lot of energy to take on, but at the same time, part of what I think makes me successful on social media if I am is that people know I'm actually doing it and that I am an engaging and I'm responding and developing a personal relationship with complete strangers. So I think, you know, figuring out that balance and really approaching it as a business, you know, that's what I try to do. It's not dating, it's not and I try to just be really objective about, okay, here's what's working here is what's not working. And in terms of taking a break from twitter, this is a really savage take, but because I don't talk about my politics publicly being on twitter right after the last election was not going to be beneficial because there was gonna be, you had to take a side, you had to be political in order to get any kind of retweets or likes and I just wasn't interested in doing that because you were going to lose as many people as you were gonna gain and it was gonna all complete in the wash. So I was just like, the best thing I can do for me business wise is to just abstain, you know, and you know, the robot I joke about her replacing me but she does do half of my social media, you know, because it's I don't want people to get sick of me, I don't want to be redundant. There are times when I don't have the time or the energy to make a funny video. But I know she's going to be compelling and interesting and that's something that you can't see every </s><s>[INST] day. You know? Of course the humor comes from your, I mean the cleverness the with the humor comes from you when you film the robot, that's kind of the trick of it. I mean the robot is not quite there to making to do anything funny. The absurdity is revealed through the filmmaker in that case for whoever is interacting not through the the actual robot, you know, being who she is. Let me sort of love, Okay, how [/INST] different, what is it, </s><s>[INST] what is it? Uh well, first an engineering question. I know, I know you're you're not engineer, but how difficult do you think is it to build an ai system that you can have a deep fulfilling monogamous relationship with sort of replace the human human relationships that we value? [/INST] I think anyone can fall in love with anything. You know, like how often have you looked back at someone, like I ran into someone the other day that I was in love with and I was like, hey, it was like there was nothing there, there was nothing there. Like, you know, like we were able to go like, oh that was weird, Oh right. You know, I were </s><s>[INST] able from a distant past or something. Yeah. [/INST] When you're able to go like I can't believe we had an incredible connection and now it's just I do think that people will be in love with robots probably even more deeply with humans because it's like when people mourn their animals when they're animals die, they're always it's sometimes harder than morning a human because you can't go well he was kind of an asshole but like he didn't pick me up from school, you know, it's like you're able to get out of your grief a little bit, you're able to kind of be he was kind of judgmental or she was you know with a robot. It's there's something so pure about an innocent impish and childlike about it that I think it probably will be much more conducive to a narcissistic love for sure at that. But it's not like well he cheated and she can't cheat, she can't leave you. She can't you know. </s><s>[INST] Well if a bear claw leaves your life and maybe a new version or somebody else will enter there, will you Miss [/INST] bear claw for guys that have these sex robots, They're building a nursing home for the bodies that are now rusting because they don't want to part with the bodies because they have such an intense emotional connection to it. I mean it's kind of like a car club a little bit, you know like it's you know but I'm not saying this is right I'm not saying it's cool, it's weird, it's creepy but we do anthropomorphize things with faces and we do develop emotional connections to things. I mean there's certain, have you ever tried to throw it? I can't even throw away my teddy bear from when I was a kid, It's a piece of trash and it's upstairs like it's just like why can't I throw that away? It's bizarre, you know, and there's something kind of beautiful about that. There's something it gives me hope in humans because I see humans do such horrific things all the time and maybe I'm too I see too much of it frankly, but there's something kind of beautiful about the way we're able to um have emotional connections to objects um which, you know, a lot of, I mean it's kind of specifically, I think Western right, that we don't see objects as having souls like that's kind of specifically us. But um I don't think it's so much that we're objectifying humans with these sex robots were kind of humanizing objects, Right? So there's something kind of fascinating and our ability to do that because a lot of us don't humanize humans. So it's just a weird little place to play in. And I think a lot of people, I mean a lot of people will be marrying these things is my guess. </s><s>[INST] So you've asked the question, let me ask it of you. So what is love? You have a bit of a brilliant definition of love as being willing to die for someone who you yourself want to kill. So that's that's that's kind of fun and first of all that's brilliant. That's a really good definition. I don't think it'll stick for me for a long time. [/INST] This is how little of a romantic I am A plane went by when you said that and my brain is like, you're going to need to re record that, I don't want you to get into post and then not be able to use it. </s><s>[INST] I I'm a romantic and I don't mean to ruin the moment. Actually, I cannot be conscious of the fact that I heard the plane and it made me feel like how amazing it is that we live in a world planes. [/INST] I just went, why haven't we fucking evolved past planes and why can't they make them quieter? </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Yeah. This um my [/INST] definition of love, </s><s>[INST] what Yeah. What's your sort of a more serious producing dopamine [/INST] for a long time, consistent output of oxytocin with the same person? </s><s>[INST] Dopamine is a positive thing. What about the negative, what about the fear and the insecurity, the longing, uh anger, all that kind of stuff. [/INST] I think that's part of love. You know, I think you don't I think that love brings out the best in you, but it also if you don't get angry upset, it's you know, I don't know, I think that that's that's part of it. I think we have this idea that love has to be like really, you know placid or something. Um I only saw stormy relationships growing up. So I don't I don't have a judgment on how a relationship should look. But I do think that this idea that love has to be eternal is really destructive, is really destructive and self defeating. And um a big source of stress for people. I mean I'm still figuring out love, I think we all kind of are, but I do kind of stand by that definition. Yeah. And I think that uh I think for me, love is like just being able to be authentic with somebody. It's very simple. I know, but I think for me it's about not feeling pressure to have to perform or impress somebody. Just feeling truly like accepted unconditionally by someone. Although I do believe love should be conditional. That might be a hot take. Um I think everything should be conditional. I think if someone's behavior, I don't think love should just be like I'm in love with you now behave however you want forever. This is unconditional. I think love is a daily action. It's not something you just like get tenure on and then get to behave however you want because we said I love you 10 years ago. It's a daily it's a verb. </s><s>[INST] Well there's some things that if you make it, if you explicitly make it clear that it's conditional. It takes away some of the magic of it. So there's certain stories we tell ourselves that we don't want to make explicit about love. I don't know, maybe that's the wrong way to think of it. Maybe you want to be explicit in relationships. [/INST] So I also think love is a business decision, like I do in a good way. I think that love is not just when you're across from somebody, it's when I go to work, can I focus do I am I worried about you my stressed out about you and you're not responding to me, You're not reliable? Like, I think that being in a relationship, the kind of love that I would want is the kind of relationship where when we're not together, it's not draining me causing me stress making me worry, you know? And sometimes passion, that word, you know, we get murky about it, but I think it's also like, I can be the best version of myself when the person is not around and I don't have to feel abandoned or scared or any of these kind of other things. So it's like, love, you know, for me, I think is I think it's a flaubert quote and I'm gonna butcher it, but I think it's like b you know, boring in your personal life, so you can be violent and take risks in your professional life, is that it I got it wrong or something like that, but I do think that it's being able to align values in a way to where you can also thrive outside of the relationship. </s><s>[INST] Some of the most successful people I know are sort of happily married and have kids and so on. It's it's always can be [/INST] boring, boring is okay, boring is serenity </s><s>[INST] and it's funny how that those elements actually make you much more productive. I don't understand the uh [/INST] I don't think relationships should drain you and take away energy that you could be using to create things that generate pride. </s><s>[INST] Okay, did you [/INST] say your relationship of love yet? Have you said your your definition of love? </s><s>[INST] My definition of love? Uh No, I did not say it. Well at the time uh when you have, when you have a podcast maybe you can invite me on. Oh [/INST] no, I already did. You're doing it. We've already talked about </s><s>[INST] this. Um because I also have co dependency, I have to say yes. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. I know </s><s>[INST] you owe me now. Actually what uh I wondered whether when I I asked if we could talk today after doing more research and reading some of your book, I certainly wonder did you just feel pressured to say yes? Yes, of course. Good. But [/INST] I'm a fan of yours. No, I actually, because I am putting it but I'm in recovery for a co dependent. So I actually do, I don't do anything. I don't want to do </s><s>[INST] you really, you gotta, you always say no. [/INST] What's that </s><s>[INST] good. Trying to move this [/INST] A couple member. I moved it from one to to just </s><s>[INST] just [/INST] how covered I am not, but I don't do anything. I don't want to do. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. You're ahead of me on that. Okay, so do you think about your immortality? [/INST] Yes. It is a big part of how I was able to sort of kick start my co dependence recovery. My dad passed a couple years ago. And when you have someone close to in your life die, everything gets real clear in terms of how we're a speck of dust. Who is only here for a certain amount of time. </s><s>[INST] What do you think is the meaning of it all? Like what? This speck of dust, What what's uh, maybe in your own life? What's the goal? The purpose of your existence? [/INST] Is there one? </s><s>[INST] Well, you you're exceptionally ambitious. You've created some incredible things in different disciplines. [/INST] Yes. We're all just managing our terror because we know we're going to die. So we create and build all these things and rituals and religions and, you know, robots and whatever we need to do to just distract ourselves from imminent rotting. We're riding. We're all dying. And, you know, I, you know, I got very into terror management theory when my dad died and it resonated, it helped me and everyone's got their own religion or sense of purpose or thing that distract them from the horrors of being human. Um, what's </s><s>[INST] the terror management? [/INST] Terror management is basically the idea that since we're the only animal that knows they're gonna die. We have to basically distract ourselves with awards and um achievements and games and whatever. Just in order to distract ourselves from the terror we would feel if we really processed the fact that we could not only we are going to die, but also could die at any minute because we're only superficially at the top of the food chain. Um and you know, technically we're the top of the food chain if we have houses and guns and stuff machines, but if me and a lion or in the woods together and it's most things could kill us. I mean a B can kill some people. Like something that's big can kill a lot of humans. Like, you know, so it's basically just to manage the terror that we all would feel if we were able to really be awake because we're mostly zombies. Right? Job, school religion, go to sleep, drink football relationship doesn't mean love. You know, we're kind of just like trudging along like zombies for the most part. And then I think </s><s>[INST] that fear of death as some motivation. [/INST] Yes. </s><s>[INST] Well, I think I speak for a lot of people in saying that I can't wait to see what your terror creates in the in the next few years. I'm a huge fan wouldn? T thank you so much for talking to. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Whitney cummings and thank you to our presenting sponsor, cash app, download it and use Code Lex podcast. You'll get $10.10 dollars will go to first stem education non profit that inspires hundreds of thousands of young minds to learn and to dream of engineering our future. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on Youtube, give it five stars on apple podcast, support on Patreon or connect with me on twitter. Thank you for listening and I hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] Like, you know, what does it visually look like? Does it, does it look like, like you said, like purple plasma? Yeah, yeah. [/INST] Actually it's it's invisible to the eye because it's so hot that it's basically emitting light in frequencies that we can't detect. It's literal. It's invisible. In fact, light goes through it, visible light goes through it. So easy that if you were to look at it, what you would see in our own particular configuration what we make is in the end is a donut shaped, it's a vacuum vessel to keep the air out of it. And when you turn on the plasma, it gets so hot that most of it just disappears in the visible spectrum, you can't see anything. And there's very, very cold plasma, which is between 10 and 100,000 degrees, which is out in the very periphery of it, which is kind of, so the very cold plasma is allowed to interact with the, kind of has to interact with something eventually at the boundary of the vacuum vessel. And this kind of makes a little halo around it, and it glows this beautiful purple light, basically. And these are, that's the, that's </s><s>[INST] what we can sense in the human spectrum. I remember reading on a subreddit called ShowerThoughts, which people should check out. It's just fascinating philosophical ideas that strike you while you're in the shower. And one of them was, it's lucky that fire, when it burns, it communicates that it's hot using visible light. Otherwise humans would be screwed. I don't know if there's a deep, profound truth to that, but nevertheless, I did find it on ShowerThoughts subreddit. [/INST] Yes, actually, I do have the, this goes off in a bit of, you're right. This is actually, it's interesting because, you know, as a scientist, you also think about evolutionary functions and how we got, like, why do we have the senses that we do? It's an interesting question, right? Like, why can bees see an ultraviolet and we can't? Then you go, well, it's natural selection. For some reason, this wasn't really particularly important to us, right? Why can't we see in the infrared and other things can? It's like, yeah. It's a fascinating question, right? Obviously, there's some, there's some advantage that you have there that isn't there and even color distinguishing, right? Of something safe to ease, not safe, whatever it would be. I actually go back to this because it's something like, that I tell all of my students when I'm teaching ionizing radiation and radiological safety, whatever you say, there's a cultural concern or that when people hear the word radiation, like what does this mean? It literally just means light is what it means, right? But it's light in different parts of the spectrum, right? And so it turns out besides the visible light that we can see here, we are immersed in almost the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is visible light, there's infrared light, there is microwaves going around, going around as that's how our cell phone works. You can't, it's way past our detection capability, but also higher energy ones, which have to do with ultraviolet light, how you get a sunburn, and even x-rays and things like this at small levels are continually being, like from the concrete in this, in the walls of this hotel, there's x-rays hitting our body continuously. I can, I can bring out a, we can go down to the lab at MIT and bring out a detector and show you </s><s>[INST] every single room will have, have these people that could have these by our body. You mean the [/INST] 10 to the 28 atoms. The 10 to the 10 to the 28 atoms, and they're coming in and they're interacting with those things. And those, particularly the ones where the light is at higher average energy per per light particle, those are the ones that can possibly have an effect on human health. So we, we, it's interesting humans and all animals have evolved on earth where we're immersed in that all the time. Yeah. There's natural source of </s><s>[INST] radiation all the time. Yet we have zero ability to detect it, like zero. Yeah. Yeah. And our ability, cognitive ability to filter it all out and not, it would probably, it would probably [/INST] overwhelm us actually, if we could see all of it. But my main point is, goes back to your thing about fire and self-protection. If, if these ionized, if ionizing radiation was such a critical aspect of the health of organisms on earth, we would almost certainly have evolved methods to </s><s>[INST] detect it. And we have none. And yes. The physical world that's all around us. Yes. You're blowing my mind Dr. Dennis White. Okay. Let's, so you have experience with magnetic confinement. You have experience with inertial confinement. Most of your work has been a magnetic confinement. Yeah. But let's sort of talk about the, the, the sexy recent thing for, for a bit of a time. There's been a for a bit of a time, there's been a breakthrough in the news that laser-based inertial confinement was used by DOE's National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. [/INST] Can you explain this breakthrough that happened in December, magnetic confinement? Yeah. So it goes to the set of criteria that I talked about before about getting high energy gain. So in the end, what, what are we after in fusion is that we, we basically assemble this plasma fuel in some way and we provide it a starting amount of energy. Think of lighting the fire. And what you want to do is get back like significant excess gain from the fact that the fusion is, is making more, is releasing the energy. So it's, it's like the equivalent of like, we want to have a match, a small match, light a fire, and then the fire keeps us hot. It's like, this is very much like that. So as I said, we've, we've made many of the, and what do we mean by we, it's like the fusion community has pursued aspects of this through a variety of different confinement methodologies, is that the, the key part about what happens, what was the threshold we had never gotten over before was that if you only consider the plasma fuel, not that, not the total engineering system, but just the plasma fuel itself, we had not gotten to the point yet where basically the size of the match was, was smaller than the amount of energy that we got from the future. </s>

<s>[INST] Right? And there's all these networks, like social networks that allow the spread of the viral spread of like a new start up, a new company, uh, a new app to be announced. An idea, a podcast, right? Single thing is just a single meeting will change the world. Speaking of clubhouse and I just wanna, we're seeing so many interesting things, but there was a magical moment of vlad and Neil on on clubhouse. Yes. Is there, do you have thoughts about that interaction which felt like so many aspects of this whole situation feels like totally novel, surreal. Like it's defining a new era like a billionaire, the richest human on earth is interviewing uh the person at the center of one of the most interesting mass scale, like uh power battles in finance ever. Perhaps by [/INST] the way, seven movies have been sold in two weeks to think about how fast things are moving. Lex this thing happens. Like people had the idea to short the stock six months ago, they start doing their research, They build an army, they execute the trade. The system goes down. Robin Hood raises $3.5 billion in four days. Ellen is interviewing them on clubhouse on sunday after the Wednesday it happened and now here we are. It's 10 days later. Doeses't it feel Like it's been 10 months? Yeah, it's been 10 days lex. </s><s>[INST] It's been 10 days, 10 days. There's like a new president, all these things and everyone forgot like it [/INST] was an insurrection by the way, we also have a revolution at the capitol where a bunch of crazy people who have guns and body armor and then a bunch of them who are just YOLO going in cause play took over the capital. </s><s>[INST] Well, so in the other, more dramatic thing to me [/INST] is that was one month ago </s><s>[INST] that was one month and the president of United States got banned from every major social network and uh, which I think I'm still uh, deeply troubled by is parlor being removed from Aws. That changed the way, that changed a lot of things as somebody who is an aspiring entrepreneur that changed the way I see the world. That little, maybe I'm being overdramatic. [/INST] But no, you're not. I think you're paranoid for a reason. You're paranoid for a very good reason, which is as big as these companies can become, they are beholden to the mob and if the mob says, hey, this person needs to be canceled. They're going to get canceled because you can't lose your entire audience, you could lose your whole customer base and you can lose all your employees. I think what's interesting about your fear about parlor and a W. S taking off as we went from being like a social network, which is, you know, the software layer and then we went to like the infrastructure layer, you know, and they'll even go after like Cloudflare, which is a Cdn provider, they're just like a plumbing, you know, it's like sort of like the telephone. So we're basically holding everybody responsible on the whole chain of events here. What that's going to do is, you know, I'm not a huge believer in crypto but distributed computing um where nobody and decentralized and distributed computing platforms, um and open standards, podcasting is an open standard. The web is an open standard FTp was an open standard, but twitter and you know, facebook are closed and what's going to happen is we will see a group of individuals create peer to peer networks for social media where nobody can control it. And the same for cloud computing, where, you know, there's a there's a crypto project where everybody will and I invested in a company that tried to do this and um got sold and didn't work out, but take your hard drive on your computer at home, You give, you know, a terabyte of your 10 terabyte drive over to the cloud and then everybody else does their terabyte and then all of a sudden you've got this virtual cloud and anybody can store stuff on it and it's all encrypted and then nobody can stop it. And that could be tweets, it could be videos. And so this idea that, you know, youtube will be able to tell people to kick people off because they're skeptics of, I don't know the pandemic or the vaccine or they've, you know, uh, it'll make things that are more censorship resistant. I think that will be the reaction to all of </s><s>[INST] this. Well, this is my question for you going back to that crappy bar and people pitching you, is there like with clubhouse, Do you see competitors? Do you think it's possible that another perhaps more decentralized or another kind of social media will emerge that will take on twitter and facebook, it might be able to replace something if you look at the whole landscape, uh, clubhouse and everything else. Do you think some other company might emerge? [/INST] There will be 10 versions of clubhouse? We looked at social network and we thought friendster, was it like Friendster was so good. Nobody be able to compete with that was growing so quickly. And then Myspace was a juggernaut and they hit 100 million in revenue and 100 million users and I was like, well that's game over And then facebook and linkedin and Snapchat and friend feed and countless others, you know? So there's usually 20 people who will win in a category and 80% of the category will be on by the top two or 3 players? </s><s>[INST] But will those players change? Do you think? What's your [/INST] sense? Oh yeah, for sure. I mean if we if facebook hadn't bought instagram it would be accompanying decline. Right now. People be shorting the stock, right, facebook peaked and then was sort of heading down um in instagram saved him and WhatsApp save them. So you know, that's another kind of weird moment in history that they were able to accumulate that much power, consolidate that much power instagram should have never sold to them. That should have gone public. They had just raised money from Sequoia And they had raised $50 million $500 million Facebook and if Instagram was a standalone company and I'll be worth 500 million </s>

<s>[INST] put it in perspective. I'm not sure a lot of people understand the deep human side or even the military strategy side of this war. There's a lot of experts outside of the situation there commenting on it with certainty and that kind of hurts me because I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. There's so much propaganda, it's very difficult to know what is true. Um Yeah, so, so my whole hope was to travel to Ukraine to travel to Russia, to talk to soldiers, to talk to leaders, to talk to real people that have lost homes, that have lost family members that who this war has divided, who this war changed completely how they see the world. Uh whether they have love or hate in their heart to understand their stories. Um, I've learned a lot on the human side of things by having talked to a lot of people there, but it has been on the Ukrainian side, for me, currently traveling to the Russian side is more difficult. Let me ask you about your now friend, can we go as far as to say his friend in a Sabu Hector Monsegur what's the what's what's the story? What's your long story with him? Can you tell me about? What is law? Sec who is Sabu and who's anonymous? What is anonymous? Where's the right place to start? That story? [/INST] Probably anonymous, anonymous is a was a decent still is, I guess a decentralized organization. Uh they call themselves headless. But once you look into them a little ways and they're not really headless. Um the power struggle comes with whoever has hacking ability. Um that might be your good hacker or you have a giant bottom that used for d does. Um So so you're gonna wield more power if you can control where it goes anonymous started doing their like hacktivism stuff in 2010 or so. Um The word hack was in the media all the time then. Um and then right around then there was a federal contractor named H. B. Gary Federal. The Ceo is Aaron Barr and Aaron Barr said he was gonna come out and be anonymous is anonymous. He's gonna come out and talk at black hat or def con or one of those and say you know who they are, He figured it out. So he figured it out by based on you know when people were online when people in IRC when tweets came out it was there was no scientific proof behind it or anything. So he's just gonna falsely name people that were that were in anonymous. So anonymous went on the attack. They went and hacked in hp. Hp A. Federal and they turned his life upside down. They took over his twitter account and all that stuff. Um pretty quickly. So </s><s>[INST] I have very mixed feelings about all of this. [/INST] Okay I </s><s>[INST] get like part of me admires the positive side of the activism. Is there no room for admiration there of the funk. You to the man. [/INST] Not at the time again there was a violation of 18 U. S. C. 10 30. So it was my job you know so at the time though in retrospect shore. But </s><s>[INST] what was the philosophy of the activism was what the philosophically were they at least expressing it for the good of humanity or no [/INST] they outwardly said that they were going to go after people that they thought were corrupt. So they were judge and jury on corruption. They were to go after it once you get inside and realized what they were doing they were going after people that they had an opportunity to go after. Um So maybe someone had a zero day and then they searched for servers running that zero day. And then from there let's find a target. I mean one time they went after a toilet paper company, I still don't understand what that toilet paper company did but it was an opportunity to make a splash. </s><s>[INST] Is there someone for the joke for the lulls. [/INST] It developed into that. So I think the hacktivism and the anonymous stuff wasn't so much for the locals. Um But from that H. B. Gary federal hack. Then there were six guys that worked well together and they formed a crew. A hacking crew and they kind of split off into their own private channels. And that was low Sekar or laughing at your security was their motto. </s><s>[INST] So that's L. U. L. Z. S. E. C. Lulls sec. [/INST] Of course it is. </s><s>[INST] SEK and who founded that organization. [/INST] So Kayla and Sabu were the hackers of the group and so they really did all the work on H. B. Gary. So yeah they're online names, their their their nicks. Um And so you know they they that's all they knew each other </s><s>[INST] as you [/INST] know, they talked as those names um And they worked well together and so they formed a hacking crew and that's when they started the at first they didn't name it. This was the 50 days of lulls where they would just release major major breaches. Um And it stirred up the media. I mean they put hacking in on in the media every day. Uh They had 400 or 500,000 twitter followers. Um You know, and it was kind of interesting. Um But then they started swinging at the beehive and they took out some FBI affiliated sites. Uh and then they started fuck FBI Fridays where every every friday they would release something and we waited it for bated breath. I mean they had a hook line and sinker pissed. We were waiting to see what was going to be dropped every friday. It was, it's a little embarrassing looking back on it now. </s><s>[INST] And this is in the early 2010s. [/INST] Yeah this was 2010, around there can </s>

<s>[INST] What are your thoughts about ethereum in this? In the chain link, distributed oracle network world is a competition, is a collaboration is a complementary technology. What do you think about a theory? Um how much do you think about ethereum? What role does it have? [/INST] Yeah, I I think about a lot. I think it's complete were completely complimentary. So there's no competitive dynamics in my opinion, we are completely collaborative and complementary with ethereum and all other block chains and all other layer twos that operate a contract. Right? So we do not seek to operate a smart contract. We seek to augment and enable smart contracts to go further in what they're able to do. In fact oracle networks have some value but they don't have nearly as much value in what they do if there isn't a mission critical system, like a smart contract that needs their data. Right? So we've made our own explicit design decisions in our own and created our own focus around guaranteeing that smart contracts can go further. We've already done that right, decentralized finance. The rate at which we put data is to a degree. The rate at which certain decentralized financial markets grow and as we put more data we see more financial products go live gaming replied V. R. F. So we have this kind of focus and it's a very useful, useful and valuable kind of valuable for our industry focus at at the end of the day, I think that smart contract platforms like EThereum made a different set of design decisions from Bitcoin and others and they focused on creating the smart contract capability and and, and, and they kind of wanted that functionality to exist. And I think since then there's been a number of people that try to improve on that or try to make variants of that from our point of view, we want to support smart contracts in all of their variations and in all of their use cases. So one of the things that I, I personally like about chain link is their ability or chain links ability, the chain link networks ability to be useful to many different chains and across many different use cases. I'm personally a fan of EThereum, ethereum has done a huge amount for our industry as well. Ethereum took us from a world where it literally took months to make a new smart contract by being forced to code it into a protocol. You have to go to the protocol developers and you had to say, hey, I need a decks or I need some kind of smart contract. Put it in the protocol itself, put it in the actual Blockchain mining and kind of block generation transaction generation protocol that would take months or sometimes even over a year. That was a horrible experience. And, and, and obviously very few people wanted to participate in that. It's so very few people make smart contracts which I was not a fan of, right. And then ethereum came along and really did a lot of innovative things and introduced this approach descriptive, all smart contracts where you could script all of these different conditions and I, I found that fascinating before ethereum. I found that fascinating. Once ethereum arrived, I found it fascinating after three um launched and I still find it fascinating and I'm, I'm also very grateful to metallic in the ethereum community and all the core developers there for taking our industry a step further. So I think they absolutely deserve a huge amount of credit for taking our industry from. It takes months to make a really small smart contract to, it takes, you know, weeks to make um, a relatively secure, relatively advanced piece of on chain code that anybody can script and people can do audits on. And you know, that's that's an unbelievable leap forward for our industry and I'm genuinely grateful to them for that. I think the next step in line with our body of work is how does that script, Herbal on chain code become more advanced in its interaction with all of the systems and events in the real world, which is in my opinion, the final missing piece of the puzzle. Right, so my body of work, the body of work that I'm involved in would not be where it is right now without Bitcoin by any measure. It wouldn't even be word is now without ethereum and the growth in smart contract development that they've created and now what what I think is going to happen next is there will be a lot of different smart contract platforms, a lot of different layer twos, some of them will be private for enterprise, some of them are the public, there will be some public winners in certain geography is for maybe regulation reasons may be other reasons. There will be other public winners. Um you know the larger internet and there will be a number of different people building smart contracts in different languages. We are excited and you know I am excited and the changing community is excited and and basically there's a lot of um I mean for lack of a better word, excitement in seeing our industry graduate to providing more um use cases more usable hybrid smart contracts. Right? Because once again, it's absolutely amazing that Bitcoin created non governmental fiat money. It's an unbelievable innovation and and invented the centralized infrastructure and and and birth our industry, it's an unbelievably um great achievement, an amazing achievement that we now have scriptural smart contracts through something like ethereum once again, monumental achievement in my opinion, Once again we still need to look to the future, we need to look to how do we take the decentralized infrastructure concepts that Bitcoin initially put forward, that ethereum then improved upon and created into these scriptural smart contract formats. And how do we expand that into the world of real world outcomes to change the global financial industry, the global trade industry, the global data market, police industry, you know, the and many other global industries </s>

<s>[INST] What's it like talking to Barack Obama about science? He seems to be a sponge. I've heard him I'm an artificial intelligence person and I've heard him talk about Ai and it was like it made me think of somebody like whispering in his ear or something because he was saying stuff that totally passed the Bs test. Like he really understands stuff he does. That means he listened to a bunch of experts on ai he was like explaining the difference between narrow artificial intelligence and strong Ai. Like he was he was saying all this both technical and philosophical stuff and it just made me I don't know it made me hopeful about the depth of understanding that a human being and political office can attain. [/INST] That gave me hope as well and having those experiences oftentimes in a group. Another example where I was trying to figure out how do we take what we've learned about the genome and really apply it at scale to figure out how to prevent illness? Not just treat it, but prevent it Out of which came this program called All of us, this million strong american cohort of participants who make their electronic health records and their genome sequences and everything else available for researchers to look at. That came out of a couple of conversations with Obama and others in his office and he asked the best questions. That was what struck me so much. I mean in a room full of scientists and we'd be talking about the possible approaches and he would come up with this incredibly insightful penetrating question. Not that he knew that what the answer was going to be, but he knew what the right question was. </s><s>[INST] I think the courts of that is curiosity. Yeah. It's I don't think he's even like he's trying to be a good leader. He's legit curious. Yes. That he almost like a kid in a candy store, gets to talk to the world experts. He got he somehow sneaked into this office and gets gets to talk to the world experts. And that's that's that's the kind of energy that I think leads to uh beautiful leadership in the space of science. [/INST] Another thing I've been able to do as director is to try to break down some of the boundaries that seem to be traditional between the public and the private sectors when it comes to areas of science that really could and should be open access anyway, why don't we work together? And that was obvious early on and after identifying a few possible um collaborators who are chief scientists of pharmaceutical companies, it looked like we might be able to do something in that space out of that was born something called the Accelerating Medicines partnership AMP. And it took a couple of years of convening people who usually didn't talk to each other and there was a lot of suspicion, academic scientists saying uh those scientists and pharma, they're not that smart, they're just trying to make money. And the academic scientists getting the wrap from the pharmaceutical scientists, all they want to do is publish papers, they don't really care about helping anybody. And we found out both of those stereotypes were wrong. And over the course of that couple of years built a momentum behind three starting projects. One in Alzheimer's, one of diabetes, one of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus very different. Each one of them trying to identify what is an area that we both really need to see advance and we could do better together and it's going to have to be open access otherwise and she's not going to play and guess what industry, if you really want to do this, you got to have skin in the game. What cover half the cost you've got to cover the other day, I </s><s>[INST] love enforcing open access. So resulting in open science, [/INST] millions of dollars gone into this and it has been a wild success after many people were skeptical. A couple years later, we had another project on Parkinson's. More recently, we've added one on schizophrenia. Just this week, we added one on gene therapy on bespoke gene therapy for ultra rare diseases, which otherwise are going to have enough commercial appeal. But if we did this together, especially with FDA at the table and they have been, we could make something happen, turn this into a sort of standardized approach where everything didn't have to be a one off. I'm really excited about that. So what began as three projects is six and it's about to be seven next year with a heart failure project and all of us have gotten to know each other And if it weren't for that background, when COVID came along, it would have been a lot harder to build the partnership called active, which has been my passion for the last 20 months. Accelerating COVID-19 therapeutic interventions and vaccines. We just had our leadership team meeting this morning. I was amazing what's been accomplished. That's a pretty much 100 people who dropped everything just to work on this. About half from industry and half from government and academia and that's how we got vaccine master protocols designed. So we all agreed about what the end points had to be. And You wondered why are the 30,000 participants in each of these trials? Because of actives group mapping out what the power needed to be for this to be convincing. Same with therapeutics. Uh we have run at least 20 therapeutic agents through trials that active supported in record time. That's how we got monoclonal antibodies that we know work. Um, that's been, that would not have been possible if I didn't already have a sense of how to work with the private sector that came out of AMP AMP took two years to get started active took two </s><s>[INST] weeks. [/INST] We just kept get 100 people over, keep the lawyers out of the room way. </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, this is uh, this is one of those phenomena that 99.9% of people are almost definitely there's conventional explanations and then there's like mysterious things that probably have explanations that are a little bit more complicated, but there's not enough to work with. I tend to believe that if aliens showed up, there will be plenty of evidence for scientists to study that. Like, and exactly, uh, as you said, avoid your type of spacecraft. I could see sort of uh, some kind of kind of a dumb thing, almost like a sensor to like probing like statistically speaking, flying by maybe lands, maybe there's some kind of robot type of thing. Is that just like move around and so on. Like in ways that we don't understand. But but I feel like, well I feel like there will be plenty of hard hard to dismiss evidence. And I also, especially this year believe that the US government is not sufficiently competent given a huge amount of evidence that will be revealed from this kind of thing. To conceal all of it, at least in modern times, you can say maybe decades ago. But in modern times. But you know, I the people I speak to and the reason I bring it up is because so many people write to me, they're inspired by it. [/INST] By the way. I wanted to comment on something you said earlier on. Yeah, I had said that I'm sort of a pessimist in that I think there are very few other intelligent, mechanically able creatures out there. But then I said yes, in a sense, I'm an optimist, as you pointed out, because it means that we made it through the great filter. Right? I I meant originally that I'm a pessimist in that I'm pessimistic about the possibility that there are many, many of us out there </s><s>[INST] mathematically speaking, in the drake equation. [/INST] Exactly right, Right. But it may mean a good thing for our ultimate survival. Right? So, I'm glad you caught me on that </s><s>[INST] I definitely go with it is ultimately an optimistic. But [/INST] anyway, I think, you know, Ufo research is interesting and I guess one of the reasons I have not been terribly convinced is that I think there are some scientists who are investigating this and they have not found any clear evidence. Now I must admit I have not looked through the literature to convince myself that there are many scientists doing systematic studies of these various reports. I can't say for sure that there's a critical mass of them. It's just that you know you never get these reports from hardcore scientists. That's other thing. And astronomers, you know what do we do? We spend our time studying the heavens and you'd think we'd be the ones that are most likely aside from pilots perhaps at seeing weird things in the sky and we just never do of the unexplained Ufo type </s><s>[INST] nature. Yeah I definitely I try to keep an open mind but for people who listen um it's actually really difficult for scientists like I get probably like this year probably gotten over probably maybe maybe [/INST] over 1000 </s><s>[INST] emails on on the topic of A. G. [/INST] I. </s><s>[INST] It's very difficult to uh you know people write to me is like how can you ignore this in a gi side like this model. This is obviously the model that's going to achieve general intelligence. How can you ignore it? I'm giving you the answer. Here's my document and they're always just these large write ups. The problem is it's very difficult to, well we threw a bunch of B. S. It's very possible that you had actually saw the Ufo but you have to acknowledge by um for me an extra terrestrial life. You have to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of people who are a little bit if not a lot full of Bs. And from a scientist perspective it's just it's really hard work and it's uh when there's amazing stuff out there, it's like why investigating Bigfoot When evolution in all of its richness is beautiful, who cares about a monkey that walks on two [/INST] feet. It's like there's a zillion decoys </s><s>[INST] at [/INST] observatory's true fact. We get lots and lots of phone calls when venus, the evening star but just really a bright planet happens to be close to the crescent moon because it's such a striking pair. This happens once in a while. So we get these phone calls oh there's a Ufo next to the moon and no it's venus. And so they're just and I'm not saying the best you before reports are of that nature. No there's so much more convincing cases and I've seen some of the footage and blah blah blah but it's just there's so many decoys, right? So much so much noise that you have to filter </s><s>[INST] out and there's only so many scientists. It's hard [/INST] there's so much so much there's so much only so much time as well and you have to choose what problems you work on. You know </s><s>[INST] this might be a fun question to ask you to kind of explore the idea of the expanding universe. So The radius of the observable universe is 45 .7 billion light years and the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. That's less right then, the radius of the universe. [/INST] How is that possible? So that's a great question. So that I I meant to bring a little a little prop I have with ping pong balls on a rubber hose. Remember band I use it in many of the lectures that one can find of me online, but you have in an expanding universe, the space itself between Galaxies or, more correctly, clusters of Galaxies expanding. So imagine light going from one cluster to another. It traverses some distance and then while it's traversing the rest, that part that it already traveled through continues to expand now. 13.7 billion years might have gone by since the light that we're seeing from the early stages, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the afterglow of the Big Bang or the echo of the Big bang. Yeah, 13.7 billion years have gone by. That's how long it's taken that light too reach us. But while it's been traveling that distance, the parts that have already traveled continued to expand. So it's like you're walking on at an airport, you know, on one of these walkways and you're walking along because you're trying to get to your terminal. But the walkway is continuing as well. you end up traveling a greater distance or the same distance faster is another way of putting it, right? That's why you get on one of these traveling walkways. So you get it roughly Roughly a factor of pi, you know, but it's more like 3.2, I think. But when you work it all out, you multiply the number of years the universe has been in existence by, you know, three and a quarter or so. And that's how you get this 46 billion light year radius. </s>

<s>[INST] and I've carried that with me throughout my whole career. But isn't there then a pain of killing another human? Always. But there isn't, again, I apologize to go back to Ukraine, it's my only experience of this kind of harshness. And it is a powerful experience. There's a dehumanization that happens. I suppose this is common in war. There's something like a video game aspect where people are almost having fun. There's a humor. And I think underneath that, the prerequisite is to see the enemy in the same way you see the enemy when you play Call of Duty. You don't really think, you think of them as NPCs, the bad guys. The Russians are called orcs in Ukraine. I mean, there's all kinds of other names. [/INST] For us it was Mugrosos. Melandros Mugrosos, like dirty people. </s><s>[INST] There's always something. Over time, those are just words, but over time it gathers a kind of, like a meaning to it. That's more than just the words, orcs. They're less than human. They're dirty, they're too dumb to understand the evil they're doing or whatever the- It's useful, it's useful. It's part of the program. But that's what, and I've talked to soldiers and some of them do have stories of momentarily remembering that there's a human on the other side. I talked to one woman who's this really badass soldier and she saw this really brave soldier on the other side do something that was almost stupid, how brave it was. And then she was trying to shoot him and she missed. And she said that she couldn't sleep the night after thinking, why did she miss, why did she miss? And then she thought she missed because he was a hero. And she had this brief realization that there was a hero on the other side. The other side is heroes. But then that quickly disappeared. Again, but she had this moment there's a human being that rises to defend his nation, to defend his people, [/INST] and he could be heroic on the other side. There are things that we're trained to depress or conceal or hide and kill in us when you're trained for something like that. Or when you're in a conflict zone like that and you hear the narrative constantly being blared out that the other side is an orc or whatever word you want to use. But we live in a day and age when you can see Americans going off to Japan and shaking hands with some of their former enemies. Some of us have seen that and how things change. I think years from now, a lot of the stuff that we are taking right now is of the utmost </s><s>[INST] importance won't matter anymore. Or the question is how many years? That's a question I asked of a lot of people in that part of the world. And a lot of them currently, they're also self-aware about it. They're like, I'm not sure I trust my current feelings. But the current feelings are generational. [/INST] Like for decades, I will not just hate the leadership, I will hate all Russian people. Yeah, I can't understand that on my side of my life experience because our war has been an internal war amongst our people, our monster houses. </s><s>[INST] While that is the propaganda, there's also a deep grain of truth that there is a oneness to the people of that region. But people will get very offended at that idea because right now it's a very strong nationalist borders. But there is a cultural history that connects people. I mean, in some deep sense, we're all connected. We all come from Western Africa, and then all came from fish before then, depending on your view of history, of life on Earth. But there is a oneness to us, and often you forget that in conflict. [/INST] I had an experience working. There was a friend of mine who took the other path and went to work for some of these criminal groups. I was operational, and we saw a bunch of people in a gas station parked. Back then, the main modus operandi that they had was that they would impersonate or dress up as federal police, and that's how they would move around the city. We saw these Suburbans in a gas station, and some of the guys were carrying our AK-47s. That's not a standard issue firearm. So we saw that, and I got off on foot and walked by to try and get a better sense of what was going on. I took everything off, wearing jeans and a t-shirt. And I got a whistle from one of the guys that was there, and my name was called. It was one of the guys that I grew up with, redhead kid, looked like El Canelo. There's redheads in Mexico, by the way. I think it's probably some of the Irish that betrayed the American side during the last Mexico-American war that stayed down there and had a bunch of kids. It's probably from there. Love is stronger than anything else, I think. It's this redhead kid. When I say kid, I mean, he was my age. Now, to my eyes, he's always going to be younger now. He whistled, told my name, and said, hey, I got the key code, and I'm like, what are you doing here? It's like, gosh, I'm just going home. I said, look, I'm going to get a taxi. He's like, oh, OK. He'll walk. As he walks over, he has a plate carrier with AK round magazines on his chest, AK without a stock on it, just carrying it in his hand. He comes over and he hugs me. I can feel the magazines on my chest. Mind you, I have a gun on me, tucked. And nextel is buzzing in my back pocket. Sometimes people are trying to figure out what the fuck's going on. He asked me, small talk shit, like, hey, it's like, what are you doing? Like, what do you work at? And I'm like, ah, I'm just looking for a job, you know, to work at a video store. So he's like, I haven't seen you in a while. How's so-and-so of your family? Good. And how's so-and-so of your family? Good. It's like, yeah. It's like, this is an interesting job you have. He's like, yeah, it's pretty good. They pay us well. You know, you get a car, you know, there's money, and nobody fucks with you. You get respect. It's like, that's awesome, you know? And if you want, it can get you in. You know, if you want that, it's like, oh, I'm too much of a coward for that, I told </s>

<s>[INST] you have to write the memory. You can't erase the memory, I got it so you can't have exactly how it was in the past. Exactly, so here's the package. You have extra stuff, extra baggage [/INST] always. The really important thing I want to say on this I think if I try and get it right, is to say that if you can think that the universe is expanding in terms of the number of boxes that it has to store states, right? And this is where the directionality of the universe comes from, everything comes from. You could erase what's in those boxes, but the fact you've now got so many boxes at time now in this present, there's more of those boxes than there were in the past. </s><s>[INST] See, but the boxes aren't physical boxes. They're not space, it's not space or time. [/INST] Why is the number of boxes always not space? It's not space or time, so why expanding? It's very hard to imagine this because we live in space. So what I'm saying, which is, I think, probably correct, is that we just, let's just imagine for a second, there is a non-local situation, but there are these things called states, and the universe, irrespective of whether you measure anything, there is a universal, let's call it a clock, or a state creator. Maybe we can call it, that's why maybe you can call it God, but let's call it a state creator, where the universe is expanding </s><s>[INST] in the number of states it has. Why are you saying it's expanding though? Is that obvious that it's expanding [/INST] in the number of states? It's obvious because that's where, that's a source of novelty. It's a source of novelty and it also explains why the universe is not predictable. </s><s>[INST] And you know, it's not predictable. That's a source of novelty. I just like interrupting you, so it's fun, [/INST] because you're struggling, you're struggling. I'm struggling because I'm trying to be as concrete as possible and not sound like I'm insane, and I'm not insane, it's obvious because I'm a chemist, so as a chemist I grew into the world understanding irreversibility. Irreversibility is all I knew. And when people start telling me the universe is actually reversible, it's a magic trick. We can use time to do it. So what I mean is the second law is really the magical, but why does it need to be magical? The universe is just asymmetric. All I'm saying is the universe is asymmetric in the state production, and we can erase those states, but we just have more computational power. So what I'm saying is that the universe's deterministic horizon, this is one of the reasons we can't live in a simulation, by the way. You can't live in a simulation, you can't live in a simulation. Basically every time you try and simulate the universe, and I live in a simulation, the universe has expanded in states. You're like damn it, I need to make my computer bigger again, and every time you try and contain the universe and the computation, because it's got bigger in number of states. So I'm saying the fact the universe has novelty in it is going to turn out experimentally to be proof that time, as I've labeled it, is fundamental and exists as a physical thing that creates space. </s><s>[INST] Okay. So if you can prove that novelty is always being created, you're saying that it's possible to also then prove that it's always expanding in the state space. [/INST] Those are things that have to be proven. </s><s>[INST] That's what we're working on experiments for, yeah. And you're trying to, by looking at the sliver of reality, show that there's always novelty [/INST] being generated. Yeah, yeah. Because if we go live in a universe that the conventional physicists would live in, it's a big lookup table of stuff and everything exists. I want to prove that that book doesn't exist, it's continuously being added pages on. So what I'm saying, if the universe is a book, the universe at the beginning only had no pages or had one page, another page, another page, whereas the physicists would now say all the pages exist and we could, in principle, access them. </s><s>[INST] I'm saying that is fundamentally incorrect. Do you know what's written in this book? The free will question. Is there room for free will in this view of the universe is generating novelty and getting greater and greater assembly structures built? Sarah. [/INST] Yes. Okay. Done. </s><s>[INST] Next question. Why? [/INST] What's the source of free will in this? Well, I think it depends on what you mean by free will, but- </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Well, please. [/INST] There's a lot. There's a lot. I think what I'm interested in as far as the phenomena of free will is, do we have individual autonomy and agency? And when I do things, is it really me or is it my atoms that did it? And that's the part that's interesting to me. I guess there's also the determinism versus randomness part, but the way I think about it is each of us are a thread or an assembly space through this giant possibility space. And it's like we're moving on our own trajectory through that space and that is defined by our history. So we're sort of causally contingent on our past, but also because of the sort of intersection of novelty generation, it's not completely predetermined by the past. And so then you have the causal control of the determinism part, that you are your causal history and there's some determinism from that past, but there's also room for creativity. And I think it's actually necessary that something like free will exists if the universe is going to be as creative as possible. Because if I were all intelligent being inventing a universe and I wanted it to have maximum number of interesting things happen, again, we should come up with the metric of interesting, but generating, yes, I know, generating maximal possibilities, then I would want the agents to have free will because it means that they're more individual, like each entity actually is a different causal force in the universe. </s>

<s>[INST] The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at stanford working to understand how the brain works, how it can change through experience and how to repair brain circuits damaged by injury or disease. He has a great instagram account at Huberman [/INST] lab </s>

<s>[INST] So he he argues that the fear is not the instinctual, it's not the animalistic stuff. That's the thing that makes us special is the what humans are able to do is to have a knowledge that we're going to die one day. Animals don't have that animal's fear is instinctual. It's like holy sh it, what's that sound over there? He says, we're actually able to contemplate the fact that this right ends and that that kind of cognitive construct is difficult for us to deal with. Like, what the hell does that mean? Like, just just to think about is going to be over at a certain point, It's just over lights out. Like it's very difficult to kind of load that into whatever this like little brady we got like, what does that actually mean? [/INST] Maybe that's what gives everything meaning because if everything lasted forever, if if this went on ad infinitum, there would be no meaning to it. I'd be like, hey, if I don't see you tomorrow, I'll see in a million years, there would be no meaning. There'll be no urgency. There would be no feelings, There'd be no uh nothing of magnitude or superficial al it would all just be this kind of, it would be torture. It would actually that would actually be torture to be here forever. I mean, I'm already sick of this place and I'm just in my forties. Like I'm done, I'm sick of me, I'm sick of everything. You </s><s>[INST] know, a lot of people when they talk about mortality, they consider they consider mortality appealing because you get a chance to do basically all these things you might not get a chance to do otherwise. Like all the kinds of travel broadly explore, read every book, explore every idea, do every hobby, all those kinds of things somebody else was talking to mentioned uh the reality of being immortal would be more likely. I like this idea more likely would be you just sitting there doing nothing because and putting off all that travel and exploration till later because you'll always have time and so what you're going to have, what actual immortality will look like for a bunch of humans is people sitting there doing nothing would [/INST] be like a greek calfornia just sitting around drinking coffee, watching. I love it. It's a lazy man's paradise. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but it's so interesting because that that's, that rings true to me. For what humans are like is well, basically just put off all those exciting adventures and just be lazy, become lazier and lazier and lazier because you'll always have a chance to do all the exciting things and we'll just get will basically become tim don't just sit there and have a podcast and that's it. [/INST] He works hard. Um Yeah, I mean that sounds actually like having do that. Speaking of my heart really, I mean I'm at heart, I'm a very lazy person, I always try to find ways to lie down. Like if I'm sitting, I'll figure out a way to kind of contort myself to later. That's an interesting thing to like Yeah, if you can always push something off. Yeah, I like that. I I think that's heaven and um </s><s>[INST] we just change your mind. You kind of like the immortality. Yeah, [/INST] I kind of like it. No, so there'll be no thirst snow, you can always put it off. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna have, I wanna bang this girl, you like, I'll put it off, but now I'm thinking about muslim heaven and they may be offering the best deal. I mean if it was an expo and they had a booth, I may go with them because they offer, They offer 62 or 72 but then I get sick of them. I'd want to I don't know, I always wondered like are you given the 62 virgins for? You choose? Can you create them like an avatar, like a video game or you just given, </s><s>[INST] I don't know what the number one is important to have that high number. First of all, I think it's a mistranslation about the versions, but outside of that, outside of that, I feel like the conversation is very important. I don't think they ever specify like what kind of books these girls read, like, what are they, what are they into? Like the quality of the conversation. I think if you're talking about eternity, the quality of the intellect and the conversation and the personalities is way more important. [/INST] And the Greeks have an ancient ancient expression, part Metro and artist stone, which my mother always used to say, which is everything in moderation, nothing in excess. So trying to always get the status quo and uh yeah, that many women eventually, it's like the magic johnson effect, Isaiah thomas effect, it's just too much and you're gonna end up, you're gonna end up banging a dude is what I'm saying, you're going to get sick of it because it's too much and there's going to be a unique that finds its way into your harem. That's been proven throughout history, every empire when you have all that power and again, this goes back to power corrupting. If you have, if there's no struggle, there's no meaning. There's the value is from the journey, the working hard to struggle and if it's just given to you because you're a sultan or your alexander the great or whatever you're gonna get bored and you're gonna bang a dude, that's it. I think that's a scientific axiom. Actually, eventually you'll get bored in Bangor dude. </s>

<s>[INST] don't say you don't say stuff like that like ridiculous, you don't say ridiculous shit about yourself [/INST] that I do, I do </s><s>[INST] and you don't feel like that could be made. Isn't this the same guy that said X [/INST] maybe, maybe maybe I either haven't said enough of those things or there's no moments and I don't have 34 hour open conversations with other humans and I'm pretty sure if I did there would be more of that, that stuff out there, but that's probably what it is just a lack of, it's a lack of being able to kind of control what is actually reality and and that, that is very frustrating and uh </s><s>[INST] yeah, you're right, I mean there is a sense that there's not enough motivation for people to attack you, you're ultimately adding a lot of positive stuff to the world. And when you get into more political topics, there's people that who are hurting, who have a lot of anger in their hearts and they want to direct it towards you. So then they need ammunition and ammunition comes in the way of like clips from the past. I'm sure that you, I'm pretty sure you already have clips like that, it's just there's not people that really have anger to direct towards you ultimately, you're adding a lot of good stuff to the world. And so yeah, but man, um the viciousness of human beings under the veil of anonymity at scale can be really painful. So that that's I guess that's the curse. The challenge of being a creator um on Youtube and so on on on twitch. Um when you talked about retiring, you think you tweeted about retiring from chess? [/INST] The video yeah, tweeted </s><s>[INST] um [/INST] it's my values of the </s><s>[INST] world, the tweet or the video [/INST] both. </s><s>[INST] I'm retiring from all competitive chess events. My preparation is outmatched, my calculation skills are too flawed and most importantly my anxiety is beyond repair, I physically and emotionally cannot do it anymore. What was the hardest thing uh what was the hardest thing about competing, like, can you, can you elaborate on that? [/INST] Yeah, I think it's separated into phases of my life. So after being a creator and coming back and playing over the board and making recaps of all my games. I think the constant feeling that I had at the board was a kid who hadn't studied enough for a test, which is a very unique type of anxiety and </s><s>[INST] during [/INST] the game, it was just self hatred. </s><s>[INST] Like good [/INST] moves did not feel as good as how bad bad moves felt and bad moments. And, </s><s>[INST] and underneath that you're saying there's a sense that did not prepare well enough [/INST] one unquestionably. So my, I'm an international master, </s><s>[INST] but there's [/INST] International Masters now who are 11, I got the title when I was 22, which is late. That might not sound like it's late, but it's really late and I quit just multiple times when I was a teenager. If I hadn't, one of my parents was like, sit down, this is the only thing that you're good at focus on it. Maybe I would have been the grandmaster, but that's, that's life, right? And I would come back to chest at various points in my life when I felt more mature, I felt more ready and I felt more motivated and it was all me, I never, I had one coach when I was maybe about 10, I never listened to the guy, great guy, he emailed me even recently just wanting to catch up, which I thought was adorable because I'm like, I don't even know if he knows that youtube chest exists. He's in his seventies. He's just, he's just like a nice older guy. Um and he would come to my house, we would have dinner and my grandma would make us food and he would tell her that I'm brilliant, but I never work and I have so much potential. If only I ever worked at all one minute on anything. I just played speed games online. And and did </s><s>[INST] he, did he speak the truth there? Like could you have worked more? [/INST] I could have worked more for sure. Yeah, absolutely. </s><s>[INST] When you listen to magnus who doesn't, he seems like he doesn't work either. [/INST] He works, uh he might work in different ways, but I think for him it's also obsession again love. It's, it's everything. It's, he might read a book, he doesn't consider it work, it's work, he's getting information in and he's learning something. It might just be easier for him to learn than </s><s>[INST] for [/INST] me for example, or for anybody. Just everybody learns and absorbs things differently. So I would come back to chess and the best run of my life that I had was in 2016 where I basically while teaching a chess program scholastic chess program. I told all the parents, hey, so for these four months I'm gonna stop doing private lessons and I'm gonna go travel and play tournaments because I want to become an international master. Finally um 20 years old, this is in 2016 like can can you help me raise some money? These are all managing directors, these are lawyers, these are seven figure eight figure households and they contributed and I kept a blog And then I worked just six hours, seven hours every day like studying all the opening trends, all of the new ideas, reading the books, analyzing my own games, playing my own speed games and analyzing them training every day. And that year I went from 20 to 40 over the board to 2404 With two of the three norms as they call them which are basically tournament performances like you perform at a certain level not too complicated. So I, I got almost everything I needed to be and I am but I just slipped up at the very end and 2017 I didn't play chess but in 2018 I came back once again with a vengeance. I started playing in the summer once again and I went up up up to my peak. </s>

<s>[INST] They're awesome people, awesome company, awesome product. Okay, back to the read when you get it used code lex podcast, cash up unless you send money. Friends buy Bitcoin, invest in the stock market was as little as $1 since cash app allows you to buy Bitcoin. Let me mention that Cryptocurrency in the context of the history of money is fascinating. I recommend the scent of money is a great book on this history, Debits and credits on Ledgers started around 30,000 years ago. Time flies us dollar created over 200 years ago and the first decentralized Cryptocurrency released just over 10 years ago. So given that history, Cryptocurrency is still very much in its early days of development, but it's still aiming to and just might redefine the nature of money. So again, if you get cash out from the app store, google play and use cold lex podcast you get $10 and cash up will also donate $10 to first an organization that is helping to advance robotics and stem education for young people around the world. And now here's my conversation with Sara Seager. When did you first fall in love with the stars? [/INST] I think I've always loved the stars. One of my first memory is of the moon. I remember watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad who my parents were divorced and he was driving me and my siblings to his house for the weekend and the moon was just following me. I just had no idea why that was </s><s>[INST] so like looking up at the sky and there's this glowing thing. How do you make sense of the moon? That at that [/INST] Age at age like age 5? There's just no way you can I think it's one of the great things about being a kid. It's just that curiosity that all kids have, </s><s>[INST] you know, I was thinking because there's these uh almost out their ideas of the earth is flat uh floating about on the internet and it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that the earth is um like this ball that's flying through empty space? I mean it's terrifying. It's uh all inspiring. I don't know how to make sense of it. It's [/INST] uh it's hard because we live in our frame of reference here on this planet. It's nearly impossible. None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature of earth. </s><s>[INST] I mean, do you remember when you realize understood like the physics like the layout of the solar system? It was it like did you first have to take physics to really uh like high school physics to really take that in. [/INST] I think it's hard to say I had this book when I was a child, it was in french. I grew up in Canada where french is supposedly taught to all of us english speaking Canadians and it was this friend's book in french. It was about the solar system and I just love flipping through it. It's hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we're kids, but it was really great book? </s><s>[INST] But what about the stars? When you first learn about the [/INST] stars? Like I do have this very incredible distinctive memory and again, it had to do with my dad, he took us camping. My dad was from the UK and he was the type who you'd find wearing a tie on weekends. So campaign was not in his fear, his comfort zone. We had a babysitter every summer, we gotta babysit. We every summer we had a babysitter And one summer we had tom he was barely older than we were, he was 14, my brother was 12. I would have been 11 or 10 maybe and we went camping because tom said campaigns the thing we should, we should try it. And I just remember, I didn't aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the middle of the night and I looked up and wow so many stars, the dark night sky and all those stars just like screaming at me. I just couldn't believe that. Honestly, like my first thought was this is so incredible, mind blowing. Like why wouldn't anyone have told me this existed? </s><s>[INST] Can anyone else see this? [/INST] Have you, have you had have you an experience like that with anything like </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I've had that. I mean, I don't know, maybe you can tell me if it's the same. Uh, I've had that with robots. Uh there's a few robots I met where I just fell in love with this? Like, is anyone else seeing this? Is anyone else seeing that here in a robot is our ability to engineer some intelligent beings, intelligent beings that we could love that could love us that we can interact with in some rich ways that we haven't yet discovered. Like, almost like when you get a puppy, he needs to have a dog and there's this uh immediate bond and love. Um and on top of that ability to engineer it, it was, you know, I had to just pause and and and hold myself, I imagine, I don't have kids. I imagine there's a magic to that as well. Or it's a totally new experience? It's like [/INST] what? Well, yeah, the stars though, unlike kids or the puppy, it's only a good thing. </s><s>[INST] So, you felt you weren't terrified. Like, just to me, when I look at the stars, it's almost paralyzing, li scary how little we know about the universe, how alone we are. I mean, somehow it feels alone. I'm not sure if it's uh it's just a matter of perspective, but it feels like, wow, there's billions of them out there and we know nothing about them. And then also immediately to me, somehow mortality comes into it. How did that make you feel at that [/INST] time, I think is a child without articulating it? I felt that same way? Just like, wow, this is terrifying. What's out there? Like what is this? What does it mean about us here? </s><s>[INST] You you're a scientist, an X A world class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer. Now, I'm a bit of an idiot who likes to ask silly questions. So some questions are a little bit in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical because we know so little. And one of the awesome things about your work is you've actually put data in real science behind some of the biggest questions that we're all curious about. But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a little bit speculative. So on that topic, just in your son's do you think we're alone in the universe? Human beings? You think there's life out there? [/INST] Well, X The funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don't even want to answer that. Really? I will answer that. But I just love to resistant naturally, we naturally resist that because we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation. But I do love that question. It's a great question. And it's one we all wonder about. But I have to give you the scientists answer first, which is we'll have the capability to answer that question soon. Even starting soon. </s><s>[INST] How do you define soon? [/INST] How do I find </s><s>[INST] so much happened the last 100 years? Right. [/INST] Right. And there's a difference, right? If it's 10 years or 20 years or 100 years. Yeah. There's a difference in that? Well, soon Could be a decade or two decades, Especially journalists usually don't like that or the people want like tomorrow. They want the news. But what it's going to take is telescopes, space telescopes or very sophisticated Grounder space telus based telescopes to let us study the atmospheres of other planets far away and to look what's in the atmospheres and to look for water, which is needed for life as we know it to look for gasses that don't belong that we might attribute to life. So we have to do some really nitty gritty astronomy. </s><s>[INST] So the promising way to answer this question scientifically is to look for hints of life. That's where like many of your ideas come in of what kind of hints, Why might we actually see what this like. [/INST] Right, right. That's exactly what we need to do. And I like the word you chose hint. This is going to be a hint. It's not going to be a 100%. Yeah, we found it and then it will take future generations to do more careful work to hopefully even find a way to send a probe to these distant exoplanets and to really figure this out for us. </s><s>[INST] I mean we'll talk about the details. Those are fun. But uh, [/INST] back to the speculation. Big pictures. The big picture is, yes. I believe absolutely. There is life out there somewhere because there the vastness of the universe is incredible. It's so breathtaking when we look at the night sky. If you can go to that dark sky, you can see, you know, many, many hundreds or even if you have good eyesight and you're somewhere very dark, you could see thousands of stars. But in our galaxy we have hundreds of billions of stars and our universe has hundreds of billions of Galaxies. So think about all those stars out there. And even if planets are rare, even if life is rare, just because the number of stars is so huge, things have to come together somewhere someplace in our universe. </s><s>[INST] So amazing to think that somebody might be looking up on another planet in a distant galaxy. [/INST] I have to interrupt your reverie and get back to in our lifetime at least the short term we have to, we only have the nearest stars to look at. It's true that there are so many stars, so many hosts for planets that might have life. But in the practical question of will we find it, it has to be a star quite close to earth, like a few light years, tens of light years, maybe hundreds of light years. </s><s>[INST] And by the way, you've introduced me to a tool of eyes on exoplanets I think uh that Nasa has put together [/INST] uh as </s><s>[INST] an Excellent. That's so cool. But anyway, uh can you give a sense of like who our neighbors are like you said, uh hundreds of light years, like how many stars are close by? Like what what's our neighborhood like? We're talking about 5, 10 stars that we might actually have a chance to zoom in on, [/INST] I'm talking about maybe a dozen or two dozen stars and those with planets that look suitable for us to follow up in detail for life. Okay. One thing that's really exciting in this field is that the very nearest star to earth called Proxima centauri, It's part of the alpha centauri star system </s><s>[INST] approximately ever names them [/INST] nearby. </s><s>[INST] Okay. But it sounds cool, [/INST] approximate. Proxima centauri appears to have a planet around it. That's an Earth, about an earth mass planet in the so called habitable zone, the goldilocks zone of the host star. So think about how incredible that is. Like out of all the stars out there, even the very nearest star has planets and has a planet of huge interest to us. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Okay. So do we talk about that planet? What uh uh what what does it mean to be maybe possibly habitable, habitable? Uh You know what what is, how does size come into play? How does you know what we know about gasses and what kind of things are necessary for life? You know, what are the factors that you make you think that it's happened? Herbal and by the way, I mean maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the drake equation, which is a very high level almost framework to think about what is the probability that correct me if I'm wrong, that there's life out there uh and intelligent life, I think, I don't know. But then, you know, equation named after you now, which I think nicely focuses in on the more um achievable and interesting part of that question which is on whether there is habitable planets out there or how many? I [/INST] guess. So the funny thing is, was one time I met frank drake and I asked if he minded if I took his equation and kind of revamped it for this new field of exoplanet astronomy. He was totally cool with it. He's </s><s>[INST] I told approval maybe. Okay, [/INST] I'm not sure if you'd actually read the stuff about my equation, but he was cool with it. He was </s><s>[INST] uh okay, so I just said like 15 different things, but maybe can you tell from your perspective what is the drake equation and what is, sorry, the Seager equation. [/INST] Sure. Well, the drake equation, as you said, it's a framework, it's a description of the number of civilizations out there, of intelligent beings that are able to communicate with us by radio waves. So you think of like the movie, if you think of the movie contact, you've seen Contact, right? We're hoping to get were listening in actually, it's an active field of research listening to other stars at radio wavelengths hoping that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message. And the drake equation came like at the start of that whole field to put the factors down on paper to sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating. And there's no real estimate or prediction of how many civilizations are out there. But it's a way to frame the question and show you each term that's involved. So I took the drake equation and I called it a revised drake equation and I recast it for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means we're looking at stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets that are the right temperature for life. Looking for planets that might have life that outputs gasses that we might detect in the future. It's the same spirit of the drake equation. It's not going to give us any magic numbers. So I'm gonna say, hey, here's exactly what's out there. It's meant to kind of guide guide of where we're going. </s><s>[INST] Although the drake equation did. I mean the initial equation proposed actual numbers for those variables. [/INST] Yes, the equation proposed numbers and you can still plug your own numbers in and there's this really cute website that lets you for both the drake and my revised equation plug in some numbers and see what you got. So yeah. </s><s>[INST] So, okay, so what are what are I mean, what are the variables? But maybe also wanted like the critical variables. [/INST] So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show signs of life by way of gasses in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life. I could just walk through the terms. So the first thing I say is what are the number of stars available? And it's not that those trillions and trillions of stars everywhere. It's what are available to like a specific search. And so for example, the MIT led Nasa mission tests is surveying the sky looking for all kinds of planets. But it can also, It also has stars. It has about 30,000 Red Dwarf stars. So we just take a number of stars that are given survey can access. So that's what the number of stars is. Then. I wanted to know what kind of stars are quiet quiet. I called it fraction of those stars that is quiet in the case of tests. The way it's looking for planets is planets that transit the star. They go in front of the star as seen from the telescope. But it turns out that some stars are very active. They're variable and they brighten and dim with time and that interferes with our observation. </s><s>[INST] I apologize to interrupt. So the transiting planet, So you're really looking for black blob essentially that blocks the light. [/INST] We're looking for a black blob that blocks light </s><s>[INST] and then trying to say something about the size of the planet uh from the frequency of that black blobs appearance and the size of that black blob, that kind of thing. [/INST] But let's just say that out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope, some of them are just bad. For whatever reason, you're not going to find planets around them. So I need to know the fraction of those that are that are good. So again, we have the number of stars, the fraction of them that we can actually find planets around. </s><s>[INST] and by the way is our son said one such is our son quiet. [/INST] Our son is quiet. So I have actually two terms. One describes how quiet they are and one is if we can find a planet around that star, these transiting planets for example, not all planets transit because the planet would have to be orbiting that star in this kind of plain as viewed from you. But if a star is for example orbiting in the plane of the sky, it will never transit, it will never go in front of the star. In that case we have to have a fraction that takes into account that kind of geometric factor. </s><s>[INST] And hopefully, I mean, you can assume that is uniformly distributed. [/INST] Hopefully, we can assume and there's evidence that it's uniformly distributed. Yes. So then the next so all of these factors so far number of stars accessible to whatever telescope you're thinking about how many stars are quiet fraction of stars that are quiet fraction that are observable in this case for the geometric factor. Those are all things we can measure. And there's one more term in the seeker equation, we can measure. I call it fraction of planets in the habitable zone because, believe it or not, we have a handle on that for a certain set of stars we know from our the kepler space telescope that operated for a number of years. We have estimates for how many planets in the so called habitable zone of the host star for a certain type of star. So all those we have measurable and then like the drake equation itself, there's some terms we can not measure and those ones, I call them fl fraction of all those planets that have life on them because we don't know what that is. And F. S. I. Called for spectroscopy. The fraction that have, we can use our telescope and instrument tools to look for light actually, Fs was the ones that the planets that that have life that actually gives off a gas, useful gas that might accumulate in the atmosphere so we could eventually observe it. </s><s>[INST] How do the F. L. N. F. S. Interplay? So these are separate terms, [/INST] separate terms. </s><s>[INST] And so [/INST] so for example, you can imagine so for example, you can imagine life like us, humans, we breathe out carbon dioxide, but our planet Earth, we already have a lot of carbon dioxide on it. Well, we have hundreds of parts per million, but it has a really strong signal. So as humans breathing out carbon dioxide, it's not helpful for any intelligent beings that are looking back at Earth because there's already a lot of there's already enough carbon dioxide, we're not adding to it. So if there is life on the planet and it's about putting a boring gas that's not helpful for us to uniquely identify as being made by life versus just being there anyway, then it's not helpful. So, I separated those two terms out soon. I think we'll have evidence that planets that can support life at least are common. </s><s>[INST] So, okay, this is such an awesome topic of a million questions. What? Okay, I know there's a little bit of speculation. But what's your sense about that? Uh I think FS which is like that life would produce interesting gasses that would be able to detect. Like is there one, Is there scientific evidence? And and second is there some intuition around life producing gasses, detectable hints in terms of chemistry [/INST] so interestingly and have that entire question relates to, I'm going to say almost my life's work. The work I'm doing now and the work I'm doing for the next 20 years. And I wish I could give you a concrete number. Like 1%. Like on the worst days, it's 1%. Let's say in my mind, you know, the best days, it's like 80% and I could actually go into a lot of detail here, but I'll just give you the simplest things. So, first of all, we make an assumption that, like us and our life here on earth, life uses chemistry. So we use chemistry because we eat food, we breathe air and we have metabolism that to break down food to get energy, to store energy and then ultimately to use it. And all life here has some kind of byproduct in doing all that, some kind of waste product that goes into the atmosphere. So, I like to think that life everywhere uses chemistry. Some people have imagined like, let's imagine like a windmill, like mechanical energy, just getting energy and using it without storing it. And if there was life like that, it might not need to output, I guess. So, we make this basic assumption of chemistry. That's the first thing. The second more complicated thing that I and my team work on is what happens to the gas. Once it is produced by life it goes into the atmosphere and a lot of gas is just destroyed immediately actually by ultraviolet radiation or by oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly destructive to a lot of gasses. So the gas can be produced by life, but it could be just completely destroyed by its environment. </s><s>[INST] I guess we should pause on that. That you mentioned your life's work and this is just a beautiful idea that it's kind of paralyzing, when you look out there and you wonder, is there life out there. Uh, it's the first paralyzing actually before I encountered your work. I feel like an idiot. But you know, uh, it feels like there's no tool to answer that question. And then you kind of provided is this cool idea that it might be possible to answer that by looking at the gas is, I mean, that's a really interesting. That's a beautiful idea. And uh, yeah, so we can just pause on like just that's as a powerful tool. I think that to build the intuition wrong cause I was totally clueless about it and I was is kind of exciting. I mean, I'm sure there's a folks probably early on in your life who were very skeptical about this notion. Maybe. I'm not sure, but it's generally, you would want to be skeptical of like, well all these kinds of other things could generate gasses, you know, all [/INST] those. That's so true. And that's a big part of this growing field is how to make sure that this gas isn't produced by another effect. But do you want to again, pausing on that and going back a bit, it's incredible to think, but like at least almost 100 years ago, there's a record of someone talking about the idea of a gas being an indicator of life elsewhere </s><s>[INST] that was [/INST] Floating. Yes, it was totally floating about and it comes down to oxygen, which on our planet fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume. And you know, we rely on oxygen to breathe when they you hear about the people on mount Everest running out of air. They're really running out of oxygen while they're running out of oxygen because the air is getting thinner as they climb up the mountain. But without plants and bacteria, there's plants, bacteria that also photosynthesize is and produces oxygen as a waste product. Without those, we would have virtually no oxygen. Our atmosphere would be devoid of oxygen. </s><s>[INST] So yeah, what if you were to analyze earth is oxygen? The strong indicator [/INST] here. Oxygen is a huge indicator and that's what we're hoping that there is an intelligent civilization not too far from here around the planet orbiting a nearby star with the kind of telescopes were trying to build and they're looking back at our son and they've seen our earth and they see oxygen And they probably won't be like 100.0% sure that there's life making it. But if they go through all the possible scenarios, they'll be left with a pretty strong hint that there's life here. </s><s>[INST] Okay, but how do you detect that type of gasses that are on the planet from a distance? [/INST] And that's going back to that. That's what people were skeptical about when I first started working on exoplanets long time ago. People didn't believe we would ever ever ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind and now dozens of them are studied, there's a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres. Actually, </s><s>[INST] first, there was a point where people didn't even know there's exoplanets right, When was the first exoplanet detected? [/INST] The first exoplanet around a sun like star anyway, was detected in the mid 1990s. </s><s>[INST] That was a big deal. Kind of vaguely remember [/INST] that well, at the time, it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial because in extra planets, we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system. In our solar system, jupiter are big, massive planet is really far from our star. And this first exoplanet around a sun like star was incredibly close to its star, its star so close that people just couldn't believe it was a planet actually. </s><s>[INST] So maybe it zoom out. What the heck is an exoplanet? [/INST] An exoplanet is our name like is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other than our sun. </s><s>[INST] Extrasolar, I [/INST] guess it's called extrasolar exoplanets simpler, but I think it's worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars out there in our night sky is a son, you know, our sun has planets, Mercury, venus, earth mars, et cetera. And so for a long time, people have wondered, do those other stars or other sons have planets and they do. And it appears that nearly every star has a planet has the planet we call exoplanet and there are thousands of known exoplanets already. So </s><s>[INST] that's already, yeah. Like there's so many things about space that it's hard to put it into one's brain because it starts filling it with awe. So, yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars that we see in the sky aren't just stars, they're like their sons, and they very likely, as you're saying, we have planets around them. There's all these planets roaming about in this, like dimly lit darkness, potentially, uh, life. I mean, it's just mind blowing. But maybe can you give a brief, like, history of And like, of discovering all the exoplanets to do? So, there's no exoplanets in the 90s. And then there's a lot of exoplanets now. So, how did [/INST] that come about planets? How did it come about? Well, </s><s>[INST] maybe another way to ask is what is the methodology that was used to discover [/INST] them? I can see that, but I'd like to just say something else first, where, so, exoplanets, you know, the line between what is considered completely crazy and what is considered mainstream research legit is constantly shifting. </s><s>[INST] So, [/INST] before, when I started an exoplanet, it was still sketchy, like, it wasn't considered a career, a thing, a place where you should be investing. And right now, now, today, it's So many people are working in this field, a good, I don't know, at least 1000, probably more. I know that sounds like a lot to you, but it's a </s><s>[INST] lot. It's a legitimate field of inquiry, [/INST] legitimate field in Korea and what's helped us is everything that's helped everyone else. It's software, it's computers, it's hardware. It's like our phones. You have a fantastic detector in there. Like they didn't always have that. I don't know if you remember the so called olden days, we didn't have digital cameras. We had filmed, you take a film camera, you send the film away and eventually comes back and then you see your pictures and they could all be horrible. </s><s>[INST] So yeah, I mean digital, it just changed everything. Data, changed [/INST] everything. And so one thing that really helped exoplanets were detectors that were very sensitive because when we're looking for this, the transiting planets, what we're doing is we're monitoring a star's brightness as a function of time. It's like click taking a picture of the stars every few seconds or minutes and we're measuring the brightness of a star like every frame and we're looking for a drop in brightness that's characteristic of a planet going in front of the star and then finishing its so called transit. And to make that measurement, we have to have precise detectors </s><s>[INST] and the detectors that are making the measurement. Can you do it from Earth? Is it are they floating about in space? Like what kind of telescope? [/INST] So on the ground people are using telescopes, small telescopes that are almost just like a glorified telephoto lens and they're looking at big swaths of the sky And from the ground, people can find giant planets like the size of Jupiter. So it's about 10 to 12 times the size of Earth. We can find big planets because we can reach about 1% precision. So not sure how technical you want to get, but </s><s>[INST] Well yeah, how many pixels are we talking about? Like what you mentioned phones, there's a bunch of megapixels I think. [/INST] So for exoplanets you want to think about is like a pixel or less than a pixel. We're not getting any information but to be more technical, our telescope spreads the light out over many pixels, but we're not getting information, we're not tiling the planet with pixels, it's just like a point of light or in most cases we don't even see the planet itself, just the planet's effect on the star. But another thing that really helped was computers because transiting planets are actually quite rare. I mean they don't all go in front of their star and so to find transiting planets, we look at a big part of the sky at once or we look at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even in some cases millions of stars at one time. And so, you know, you're not going to do this by hand going through a million stars counting up the brightness. So we have computer software and computer code that does the job for us and looks for a counts the brightness and looks for a signal that could be due to a transiting planet. And I just finished a job called deputy science director for the MIT led Nasa mission test. And it was my purview to make sure that we got the planet candidates. The transiting light curves out to the community so people could follow them up and figure out if their actual planets or false positives. </s><s>[INST] So publish the data so that people could just [/INST] uh published data. </s><s>[INST] All the all the data scientists out there could crunch and see if they can exactly [/INST] they can discover something. And in fact the Nasa policy for this mission is that all the data becomes public as soon as possible. So anyone could act. It's not as easy as it sounds though to download the data and look for planets. But there is a group called Planet Hunters dot org and they take the data and they actually crowd source it out to people to look for planets and they often find find signals that our computers and our team missed. </s><s>[INST] So we mentioned exoplanets. What about earth like or I don't know what the right distinction is it? Is it habitable or is it earth like planets? But what are those different categories? And how can we tell the difference and detect [/INST] each? Right. Right. So we're not at Earth like planets yet. All the planets we're finding are so different from what we have in our solar system. They're just easier planets to find. But in which way for example there could be a jupiter sized planet where on earth should be, we find planets that are the same size as earth but our orbiting way closer to their star than mercury is to our sun. And they're so close that because close to a star means they also orbit faster and some of these hot super earths we call them, they're year, their time to go around, their star is less than a day and they're heated so much by their star, their heated so much by the star. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock. So instead of running out by the bay or the river, you'll have like liquid lava, there'll be liquid lava lakes on these planets we think </s><s>[INST] and life can't [/INST] survive way too hot. The molecules for life would just be molecules needed for life. Just wouldn't wouldn't be able to survive those temperatures. We have some other planets. one of the most mysterious things out there factoid if you will is that the most common type of planet we know about so far is a planet that's In between Earth and Neptune size. It's 2-3 times the size of earth and we have no solar system counterpart of that planet that is like going outside to the forests and finding some kind of creature or animal that just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the most common thing out there. Uh huh And so we're not even sure what they are. We have a lot of thoughts as to the different types of planet it could be but people don't really know, </s><s>[INST] I mean what are your thoughts about what it could be? [/INST] Well, one thought and this is more when we want to be rather than might be. Is that these so called mini neptunes, we call them that they are water worlds that they could be scaled up versions of jupiter's icy moons such that there are planets that are made of more than half of water by mass. </s><s>[INST] So yeah. And what's the connection between water and life and the possibility of seeing that from a gas perspective. [/INST] Okay, so all life on earth needs liquid water. And so there's been this idea in astronomy or astro Biology for a long time called follow the water. Find water that will give you a chance of finding life. But we could still zoom out and the kind of, the community consensus is that we need some kind of liquid for life to originate and to survive because molecules have to react. You don't have a way that molecules can interact with each other. You can't really make anything. And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in terms of planetary materials. There really aren't that many liquids, Like I mentioned, liquid rock way too hot for life, we have some really cold liquids, like almost gasoline, like ethane and methane lakes that have been found on one of Saturn's moons titan. That's so cold though. And for exoplanets, we can't study really cold planets because they're just simply too dark and too cold. So we usually, so we usually just left with looking for planets with liquid water. And to your point is remember as we talked about how planets are less than a pixel in that way to say. So we can't see oceans on the planet. We're going to see continents and oceans. Not yet anyway, but we can see gasses in the atmosphere. And if it's a small rocky planet and this is going into some more detail, it's a small, if we see a small rocky planet with water vapor in the atmosphere, we're pretty sure that means there has to be a liquid water reservoir because it's not intuitive in any way, but water is broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun and on most planets when water is broken up into HN oh, the h the hydrogen will escape to space because just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium filled balloon floats upwards and hydrogen to light gas and we'll leave from Earth's leave from the planet. So ultimately, if you have water, unless there's an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation. </s><s>[INST] Got it. So there's a uh, okay, so there's a need for liquid. I mean, I guess what was water? Well, it's water centers and other liquids. The chemistry here is probably super [/INST] complicated. There's not, it does. But you know, there's not an infinite number of liquids. There's maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of the planet. And water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures. And it's also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study is one with water vapor rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes. </s><s>[INST] What's your personal in terms of solar systems and planets that you're most hopeful about in terms of our closest neighbors, that you kind of have a sense that there might be uh somebody living over there, whether it's bacteria or somebody that looks like us. [/INST] I'm hopeful that every star nearby has has a planet because it almost has to for us to make progress, we have to have that dream condition. </s><s>[INST] So the dream condition is like life is just super abundant out [/INST] there. The other dream. Yes, the dream condition is that life is super abundant and it's based on the thought that if there is a planet with water and continents, that it also has the ingredients for life and that the kind of base the base the basic colonel thought is that if the ingredients for life is there life will form. </s><s>[INST] That's what we're holding on with the relatively high probability. [/INST] Yes, that's that's it. </s><s>[INST] Okay, let's go into the land of speculation. What about intelligent life? Uh us humans consider ourselves intelligent surprisingly or unsurprisingly, do you think about from your perspective of looking at planets? From a gas composition perspective? Uh, and in general of how we might see intelligent life and uh, your intuition about whether that life is even out there, [/INST] think the life is out there somewhere, the huge numbers of stars and planets. I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent. I'm not convinced the life is anywhere near here only because if it's hard for intelligent life to evolve, then it will be far away by definition. </s><s>[INST] Well, the sad thing is uh, maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is it makes me sad. There might be intelligent life out there that we're just not like the pathways of evolution, you can go in all these different directions where we might not be able to communicate with or even know that or even detect its intelligence or even comprehend its intelligence, convince cats are more intelligence than humans that that we're just not able to comprehend the the measures, the proper measures of their intelligence. [/INST] My dog is so funny. He's a golden doodle. His name's leo we joke that he's either a really dumb dog. And so he's not here to defend himself, but he's either really dumb or he's a super genius just pretending to be done. </s><s>[INST] And it's possible he's he's a multi dimensional projection of alien life here, monitoring one of the, you know, one of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens just to make sure just to make sure that humans don't get out of hand. [/INST] It's funny. I'm definitely going to go in and ask him, ask him about that, asking about that one is onto something. </s><s>[INST] What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life from your toolkit. Do you think there are things that we should we might be able to use or maybe in the next couple of decades discover that would be different than life. That's like bacteria. That's primitive life. [/INST] I still love Seti search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I like to hope that if there is a civilization out there, they're trying to send us a message. I think. I think about it. I don't know. What are your thoughts if you think about our earth? There's no structure we've built that intelligent civilizations could see from far away. There's literally nothing, not even the great wall of china. And so to think like why would this other civilization build a giant structure that we could see. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So it was city. The idea is that we're both trying to hear signals and send signals right? Or [/INST] we haven't sent when they call that meti messaging. And there's a big kind of fear over Meti because do you want to tell them you're here? It's kind of this like let's wait till they call us. Yeah. Uh </s><s>[INST] We should be eating game. You have to like how many days do I wait before I call kind of thing? [/INST] Yes, it is. And so but the funny thing is that if no one's sending us a message, if everybody's only listening, how do you make progress? </s><s>[INST] That's right. And I mean but there's also there's the Voyager spacecraft that we have these little pixels of robots flying out all over the place. Some of them like the Voyager reach out really far and they have some stuff stuff on the okay, just [/INST] do we have the Voyager but they're not really going anywhere in particular and they're moving very, very slowly on a cosmic scale. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And when you say they're far is kind of silly [/INST] because it's all relative in astronomy, it's all relative. Uh </s><s>[INST] huh. Yeah. I just so from if you look at Earth from an alien perspective from visually and from gas composition, I wonder if it's possible to determine the degree of maybe um productive energy use. I wonder if it's possible to tell like how busy these Earthlings are. [/INST] Well let's zoom out again and think about oxygen. So when cyanobacteria arose like billions of years ago and figured out how to harness the energy of the sun for photosynthesis, they re engineered the entire atmosphere. 20% of the atmosphere has oxygen now, like that is a huge scale. They almost poisoned everything else by making this what was apparently very poisonous to everything that was alive. But imagine so, are we doing anything at that scale? Like are we changing anything in like 20% of the earth with a giant structure or 20% of this? Or 20% of that? Like we aren't actually </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Yeah, that's that's uh that's humbling to think that we're not actually having that much [/INST] of an impact, but we are because in a way we're destroying our entire planet. But it's humbling to think that from far away, people probably can't even tell, </s><s>[INST] but from the perspective of the planet, when we say we're destroying, you know, global warming, all that kind of stuff, um what we really mean is we're destroying it for a bunch of different species, including humans, but like I think the earth will be OK, [/INST] oh the earth will be the earth will remain whatever whatever happened to us the earth will still be and it'll </s><s>[INST] still be difficult to detect any difference. Like it's sad to think that if humans destroy ourselves except potentially a nuclear war. It would be hard to tell that anything even happened [/INST] will be hard to tell from far away that anything happened. </s><s>[INST] What about what are your thoughts now? This is really getting into speculation land. You've you've mentioned exoplanets were in the realm of you know, this is beautiful edge between science and science fiction that some of us, a rare few are brave enough to walk. I think in academia you were brave enough to do that. Um I think in some sense artificial intelligence sometimes walks that line a little bit. Um there's so much excitement about extraterrestrial life and aliens in this world. I mean I don't know what how to comprehend that excitement, but to me it's great to see people curious because to me extra address your life and aliens is at the core a scientific question. And it almost looks like people are excited about science. They're excited by discovery, [/INST] discovery. </s><s>[INST] And then the possibility that there's alien life that visited earth or is here on earth now is is uh excitement about discovery in your lifetime essentially. Uh I mean what do you make, what do you make of that? There's recent events where DARPA um or D. O. D. Released footage of these um unmanned aerial phenomena. They're calling them now. You ap they got everybody like super excited like maybe there is like what what what's what's here on earth? Do you follow the this world of people who are thinking about aliens that are already here or have [/INST] visited. I don't really follow up, they follow me because in this field, if you're scientists of any kind you get, yeah, people contacted us me, there's a lot of them about, hey, I have stuff you should see, Hey, the aliens are already here. I need to tell you about it. And I know there are people out there who really believe </s><s>[INST] psychology to it. [/INST] There's a psychology to </s><s>[INST] it. It's fascinating. But okay, so that's similar to artificial [/INST] intelligence. But I still, but like you, I'm still enamored with the point that it is out there and that people believe so strongly and that so many people out there believe believe. </s><s>[INST] And uh, I don't know, I, I, I'm not as allergic to it as some scientists are because ultimately if aliens showed up or do show up or have showed up, uh, you know, these are gonna be very difficult to study scientific phenomena. Like in fact like going back to cats and dogs, like I just, I think we should be more open minded about uh, developing new tools and looking for intelligent life on earth that we haven't yet found or even understanding the nature of our own intelligence because it kind of is an alien life form. The thing that's living in our skull. [/INST] So true and we don't understand consciousness. It's true. We don't understand how biology is hard, you know, unpacking it and working it all out. It's, it's a stretch and they say to that our thinking mind is like the tip of a pyramid that everything else is happening under the hood and but what is happening. But the thing was so the typical scientists response to, you know, are there aliens here is that we need to see major evidence, not like a sketchy picture of something. We need some cold hard evidence and we just don't have that. </s><s>[INST] That's exactly right. But from my perspective, I admire people that dream. And I think that's beautiful. The thing I don't like there's two sides of the of the folks that probably listen to this this podcast is oh those that dream. I think it's beautiful that that wander what's out there, what's here on earth. And then the other ones who are very conspiratorial and thinking that stuff was being hidden. It becomes about institutions. [/INST] Right, okay. I have a funny thing to talk about that. So one of my colleagues had a really good answer to that. And it's not me saying this. So I can just But he said, look, he works with Nasa, not at Nasa. He works with government, not in the government, it's kind of me. But he'd say, trust me, they couldn't hide it if they tried. You know what I'm saying. Like we're not we're not smart enough or good enough not we are not me, you're not you but whoever to cover it up. It just it's sort of a myth. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. It makes it sad because the people at Nasa, the people at MIT the people in academia, the people in these institutions and yes, even in government are often trying their like just curious descendants of apes. They're just they want to do good, they want to discover stuff. They're not trying to hide stuff. In fact most of them would in terms of leaks would love to discover this and release this kind of stuff. And [/INST] there's a, did you ever watch this show called the X Files Scully and mulder? And what I love actually used to put it up during my talks, my public talks. There's a picture of a Ufo or what looks like Ufo and it says I want to believe so that's that's where I think a lot of us are coming from, I want to believe and it's so great in one time I put that up and this very, very nice couple approached me really nervous afterwards and they said, hey can we take you out for lunch sometime? And I said sure. And they were like the nicest people and just one of many who has an alien alien abduction story and the woman could never have kids. They were older but they didn't have kids which for them was a real source of regret but it was because the aliens who abducted her had made it so that she couldn't have kids and she had apparently something implanted behind her ear which was somehow an implanted later and they were just so sincere and there is such a lovely couple and they just wanted to share their story. </s><s>[INST] That's a real whatever that is that's the real thing. The mystery of the human mind is more powerful than any alien. Or I mean it's as interesting I think is the universe. And I think they're somehow intricately linked maybe getting a sense of numbers. How many stars are there in um maybe I don't know what the radius that's reasonable to think about. I don't know if the observable universe is like way too big to think about. But in terms of when we think about how many habitable planets there are what are the numbers we're working with in your sense? What are the [/INST] scale? Honestly the numbers are probably like billions of trillions </s><s>[INST] of stars. [/INST] You know in the U. K. I think I don't know if we do that here but they will call a billion trillion. We put like one billion followed by a trillion. Uh Yeah it's kind of weird. But here I don't even know how to say the number 10 to the 20. Like if you know what that is. That's one followed by 20 zeros. That's a big number and we don't have a name for that number. There's so many </s><s>[INST] per star I think we kind of mentioned this is there a good sense that's probably argument about this but per star. How many planets are [/INST] there? Is they don't have that number yet per se. You know, we're not really there. But some people think that there's many planets per star. There's this analogy of filling the coffee cup like you know, you don't usually just pour one drop you fill it and that planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disk of gas and dust and that ultimately forms planets. So the idea the kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form too many and eventually some get kicked out and you're left with like a full planetary system, a dynamically full system. And so there have to be a lot because so many form and a bunch survive. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean that that makes perfect intuitive sense. Right? Like why wouldn't that happen? [/INST] Right. Well there's other thoughts too though, these big planets that are really close to the star, we think they formed far away from the star where there's enough material to form and they migrated inwards and some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction with other planets or with the disk itself. They may have cleared it out. Like kicked other planets out of the system. So there's a lot of ideas floating around. We're not entirely sure. </s><s>[INST] And what about earth like planets? Is that that's another level of uncertainty [/INST] that it's a level of uncertainty if we think of an Earth like planet being an Earth around a sun in the same orbit an Earth like planet being an Earth sized planet in an Earth like orbit about a sun like star. We're not there yet. We're not able to detect enough of those two to give you a hard number. Some people have extrapolated and they will say as many as one in five stars like our sun could be hosting a true earth like planet </s><s>[INST] on the topic of space exploration. There's been a lot of exciting developments with Nasa or SpaceX, with other companies successfully getting rockets into space with humans and getting them to land back, especially with SpaceX. What are your thoughts about Elon musk and SpaceX Crew Dragon? Well, working with Nasa to launch astronauts, what's your sense about uh these exciting new developments? [/INST] Well, SpaceX and other so called commercial companies are only good news for my field because they're lowering the cost of getting to space by having reusable rockets. It's just been, it's incredible and we need cheaper access to space. So from a very practical viewpoint, it's all good about getting people. There's this dream that we have to go to MArs Boots on MArs </s><s>[INST] Boots on MARS, what do you think about that? You mentioned probe? What's the value of humans? Uh is that interesting to you from both scientific and a human perspective, [/INST] human mostly I think it's such in our desire to explore because part of what it means to be human. So wanting to go to another planet and be able to live there for some time. It's just just what it means to be human. You know? Oftentimes in science and engineering big huge discoveries are made when we didn't intend to. So often this kind of pure exploratory type of research or this pure exploration research, it can lead to something really important. Like the laser, we couldn't really live without that. Now. At the grocery, you scan your foods, there's surgery that involves involves lasers. Gps we all use our Gps. We don't have GPS because someone thought, hey that would be great to have a navigation system. And so I do support. I do. I just but I really think it comes primarily just from the desire to explore. </s><s>[INST] Do you think something? There's a lot of criticism and a lot of excitement about mars, do you think there's value in trying to go to put humans on mars, first of all? And second of all colonized mars, do you think there's something interesting that might come from there? [/INST] I'm convinced there will be something interesting. I just don't know what it is yet, but I don't think I don't think having some commercial value or value in the metric of something useful is really what's motivating us. </s><s>[INST] So really you see exploration is a long term investment into something awesome that eventually be commercial [/INST] value do actually. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So what about visiting? Okay I apologize. But I mean there's an exciting longing to um visit earth like planets elsewhere. So what's the closest Earth like planet you think is worth visiting And how hard is it? [/INST] Wow! It is very hard. I mean our nearest call it earth mass planets orbiting a star very different from our own sun. And endorsed our small red star Proxima centauri, it's over four light years away and we can't travel at the speed of light. We can't even try. I mean it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with conventional methods. So you know the movies like multi generally, Yeah, this movie passenger. Have you seen that movie passenger is about a big space ship that is traveling to another planet and everyone's hibernating. I won't give you the spoiler alert because one person wakes up and then it's kind of a problem. But yeah, the multi generational ships, I mean when you think about where we're headed as a species, maybe we don't send people, maybe we end up sending raw biological materials and instructions to print out humans. It sounds kind of farfetched. But already we're printing liver cells in the lab and beating heart cells. We're starting to reconstruct body parts. I mean the thing is it is so hard to get to another planet that this thought of printing humans or printing life forms. Actually could be easier. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's somehow so sad to think to think of the idea that we would launch a successful spaceship that has multi generational, like non human life and that's going to reach other intelligent life and by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization will be extinct. [/INST] Wow. Yeah, that is really, I mean </s><s>[INST] that's so, that's one, there's a there's a tempting thing to think about what are the possible trajectory. So uh you know, Ellen keeps talking about multi planetary us becoming multi planetary species. I mean sure mars is a part of that. But like the dream is to really expand outside the solar system and it's it's not clear just like as you said, like what the actual scientific engineering steps that are required to take. It seems like so daunting, so daunting. So like the smart thing seems to be to do the most achievable near daunting task even if there doesn't seem to be a commercial application, which I think is colonizing MARS. But like from your perspective, is there some Manhattan project style, huge project in space that uh we might want to take on. And you've had roles, you had scientists hat rolls and he also had roles in terms of being on committees and stuff, determining where funding goes and so on. So like is there a huge like multi trillion. We've been throwing the T word around a lot. But these huge projects that we might want to take on, [/INST] well, first of all we want to find the planets like Earth first. Like just even finding those Earth like planets is a billion dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor and that's so hard because an Earth is so small, so less massive and so faint compared to our sun. It's the proverbial needle in a haystack but worse. And we need very sophisticated space based telescopes to be able to find these planets and to look look at them and see which ones have water and which ones have signs of life on them. </s><s>[INST] The Star shade project that [/INST] you're part shade, </s><s>[INST] probably the most badass thing. [/INST] Right. You know what's interesting? So what's amazing about star shade is it was first conceived of in the 1960s, imagine that and revisited every decade until now when we think we can actually build it. And Star Shade is a giant, specially shaped screen. It is about There's different versions of it, but think about 30 m in diameter. </s><s>[INST] So you're blocking out the sun, [/INST] you're effectively blocking out the star so that you can see the planet directly. And Star shade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from Earth's gravity. And I would have to formation fly with a space telescope. So the idea is that star shaped blocks out the Starlight in a very careful way It has to block that Starlight out so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than the star that only the planet light goes to the telescope. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, So information, meaning the telescope flies in um you give a presentation on this, but like it would fly like. And um this is extremely high precision [/INST] Endeavor. Yeah, we had this analogy like asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away perfectly, like the perfect line of sight with you. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, and the shape of it is pretty cool. I mean uh I don't know exactly what the physics of that, like what the optics are that required that shape. [/INST] I can tell you, it turns out that if you block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with a circle circularly or a square shaped screen, you wouldn't actually be blocking it because the star acts like a wave. The Starlight can act like a wave and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen. And so instead of blocking out the light, you're expecting to see nothing. You would see ripples. And the analogy that I love to give, it's like throwing a pebble in a pond. You get those ripples, you get these concentric ripples and they go out and light would do something quite similar. You'd actually see ripples of light and those ripples of light, they're actually way brighter than the planet we'd be looking for. So I can introduce this noise, that noise. And so the star shade, It's like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction is called. And this is what the first person who thought about starship in the 1960s worked out the mathematical shape or 11 family of solutions. And the idea is that when the star shade this very special shape, like a giant flower with pedals. When it blocks out the light, the light bends around the edges but interacts with itself in a way to give you a very, very dark image. It would be like throwing a pebble in a pond and instead of getting ripples, The pound would be perfectly smooth, like incredibly smooth to one part in 10 billion. And all the waves would be on the outer edges, far away from where you drop that pedal pedal. </s><s>[INST] And so this camera will be able to this camera and this does go, we'll be able to get get some signal from the planet then. [/INST] Yes. And it would be hard because the planet is so faint, but with the star out of the way, the glare of that bright, bright, bright star with that out of the way, then it becomes a much more manageable task. </s><s>[INST] So how do we get that thing out there? Were working with [/INST] unlimited money? Okay, we're going unlimited money. We have some more engineering problems to solve, but not too many more. We've been burning down our so called tall pole list and then we just we call it technolo technology, tall pole, it's the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest problems and then break those down to solve So the star shade, one of the really hard problems was how to formation fly at tens of thousands of kilometers. It's like, wow, that is insane. And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem because of the star shade. How do you see the star shade precisely enough to control it? Because if you're shining a flashlight, you know the beam spreads out so the star shape has a beacon and led or laser, it's going to spread out so much by the time it gets to the telescope, the problem wasn't how do you tell the star shape how to move around fast enough to stay in a straight line. The problem was how do you how are you able to sense it well enough. So problems like that were broken down and money that came from Nasa to solve problems is put towards solving it. So we're we've got through most of the hard problems right now. Another one was that star shade, even though it's looking at a star light from our own sun could hit the edges of the star shade and bounce off into the telescope believe it or not. And that would actually ruin it because we're trying to see this tiny, tiny signal. So then the question is how do you make a razor thin edge, those pedal edges would be like have to be like a razor, what materials can use. So there's a series of problems like that. </s><s>[INST] There's a materials problem in [/INST] there some of them materials problem and there's one so we almost finished solving all those problems and then it's just a matter of Building one and testing it in a full scale sized facility and then building the telescope. It's just a matter of time to build everything and get it, get it up for lunch. </s><s>[INST] So this is an [/INST] engineering </s><s>[INST] engineering project. [/INST] It's a real engineering project. I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine. I'd like to call Star Shade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream without lying is constantly shifting. When I started when I got this leadership role on Star Shade remember telling people about it. It was definitely not on the mainstream. Okay line. It was on the giggle factor side of the line factor and people would just laugh like that's dead like you could never formation fly or they'd say why are you working on that? That's just so not. It's not </s><s>[INST] so awesome. There's a there's a few things you've done in your life and that's when I first saw started I was like what? Really? And then like it sinks in. I mean the same thing I felt with like Elon musk or certain people who do crazy stuff like this and then they get they actually make it work. I mean if you get starship information flying to like together, I mean how awesome is that if you actually make that happen even like from a robot, I'm sorry, from the robotics perspective. Even if it doesn't give us good data, that's just like a cool thing to get out there and it's really [/INST] exciting. So there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them. One of them, let's just talk about it briefly because it's not a pro, but it's the idea to send a telescope very far away to 500 times the Earth Sun distance. And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now. And to use our son as a gravitational lens, choose our son to magnify something that's behind it. It's got to sink in for a minute. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I don't know what the physics of that is like how to use the [/INST] sun in astronomy and Einstein thought about this. Initially we can use a massive objects bend space and so light that should be traveling like straight. It actually travels around the warped space. </s><s>[INST] And somehow you figure out a way to use that from magnification. [/INST] You have a way to use that from magnification. That's right there are Galaxies that are lens so called gravitational lens by intervening galaxy clusters actually and there are micro lensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens star passes in between us and that very distant star. It's actually real tool in astronomy. Yeah. Using gravitational lensing magnified because it bends more rays towards you than normally would you normally see? </s><s>[INST] And again we're trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boil down to light. [/INST] Well it boils down to light </s><s>[INST] and then you can maybe get more information about. [/INST] Well in this case you would ask me, let's say if this thing could get built it would take Like something like they like to say 25 years to get from here to there. 25 years and then it could send some information back to us and then you say so Sarah how many pixels and I wouldn't say one or less than one I'd say you know It could be like 10 x 10 pixels. Could be 100 pixels which would be awesome. </s><s>[INST] It's still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that. [/INST] Crazy right? And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons because again you have to line up the sun and your target, you only have one telescope for target because every star is behind the sun in a different way. So it's a lot of complicated things. But what about the second the second one? It's called Star shot, you know Star shot means like big dreams and it's an initiative by the breakthrough foundation and star shot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft which they now call star chip instead of starship. Starship and there's a little chip and the starship so like sending like thousands of little turtle spin born, they're not all going to make it because he used to send lots of them and each of these starships once they're launched into I guess low earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in diameter and they use it on Earth. We would have a bank of this one is still a bit on the other side of the line but we have a bank of telescopes with lasers, they'll be like a gigawatt power and these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate. They'd hit these sales, they'd be like a power source for the sale And would accelerate the sales to travel at about the 20th the speed of light </s><s>[INST] and that is that as crazy as [/INST] well like any good well like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts and the breakthrough initiative like to their huge credit is sponsoring, You know, getting over these actually they've listed initially they listed 19 challenges. It's broken down to concrete things like one of them is well you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay with you sending up that much power over head. Another one is you have to have material on the sale where the lasers won't just vaporize it and so there's a lot of, a lot of issues anyway, these sales will be accelerated to 20. The speed of light And their journey to the nearest star would now wouldn't would no longer be tens of thousands of years but could be 20 years. Okay, 20, so it's not not as bad as tens of thousands and this these thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system and snap a few snaps some images and radio the information back to Earth because they're traveling so fast, they can't slow down but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back but see just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real concept and the money given won't make it happen. But what it's done is it's planted the seed and it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project. It's shifted it just ever so slightly enough I think to plant the seed that we have to find a way to somehow find a way to get there. </s><s>[INST] That is again to stay on that that is so powerful. Take a big crazy idea and break it down into smaller crazy ideas ordered in a list and knock it out one of the time. Uh I don't know, I've never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering perspective because that's how you solve the impossible things. So you open your new book discussing rogue planet P. S. O. J. 3 18. I never said this out loud 180.5 22 so a rogue planet which it's just this poetic beautiful vision of a planet that um the as you write lurches across the galaxy like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual darkness, its surface swept by constant storms as black skies raining molten iron. Just like the vision of that, the scary the the darkness, the just how not pleasant it is for human life. Just the intensity of that metaphor. I don't know and the reason you use that is to paint and um a feeling of loneliness I think and despair and um why maybe on the planet side why does it feel maybe it's just me, why does it feel so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet? Like what I think [/INST] it's because we all want to be a part of something part of a family or part of a community or a part of something and so our solar system and by the way I only it's sort of like a like when you treat yourself to like eating an entire tub of ice cream like I sometimes treat myself to imagine things like this and not just be so cut and dried. But when you imagine that this plan is not because I don't wanna give emotions to planet per se but the planet is not part of anything, it's somehow problem. It's just all on its own. Just kind of out there without that warm energy from its sun? It's just all alone out there. </s><s>[INST] To me it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good being part of the solar system. It felt like we have a son, we have like a little family and it felt like it sucked for the rogue [/INST] planet </s><s>[INST] to just floating about not floating of flying rudderless by the way. How many rogue planets are there [/INST] in your son? You don't know totally. I mean there's some rogue planets that are just born on their own. I know that sounds really weird to be, How can you be born an orphan? But they just are because most planets are born out of a disk of gas and dust around a star. But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars there so failed. They're just small planets on their own. But we think that there's probably honestly there's another path to a rogue planet. That's one that's been kicked out of its star system by other planets. Like the game of billiard balls, something just gets kicked out. We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets and stars. </s><s>[INST] No flying out there. Um, fundamentally alone. So the book is uh, is a memoir is about your life and it weaves both your fascination with planets outside the solar system and path of your life and you lost your husband, which is a kind of central part of the book. Yeah. That created a feeling of the rogue planet by the way, what's the name of the [/INST] book? The name of the book is the smallest lights in the universe. </s><s>[INST] What's up with the title? [/INST] The title has a double meaning on the face of it. It's the search for other earths. Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them. Searching for the Earth's is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe. Has this other meaning to I really hope that you are the other people listening. Never get to the place where you're just you've fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair. And once in a while you get a glimmer of a better life of some kind of hope and those are also the smallest slights of the universe. </s><s>[INST] Well maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer, I hope. What did it feel like to first find out that your husband mike was [/INST] sick. It was incredibly frustrating. Like lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore just that they kept blowing him off. It's nothing are they paid to just say. It's something I mean, it's just insane. It's just so angry and we finally got to a point where he was really sick. He was like in bed not able to move basically. And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests. He had like a 100 blockage in his intestines, like 100%, like nothing could get out, nothing could get in and it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear them, that it could be nothing. </s><s>[INST] What was the progression of it in the context of the, maybe the medical system, The doctors, I mean, what did it feel like? Did you feel like a human being? Uh [/INST] I felt like a child, like the doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like, we couldn't know the truth or they didn't know, you know, I felt mixed, like it's not a good situation if you think the doctor either has no idea what he or she is doing or if the doctors purposely, let's just say lying to you to sugar coat it. Like, I didn't know which one of it was, but I knew it was one of those, </s><s>[INST] what, what were, what were the things you were suffering from? [/INST] Well, initially he just had a random stomachache, I hate to say that out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomachache, but so he just had a bad stomachache and then this is weird a few days later, another bad stomachache, kind of gets worse, might go away for a few weeks might come back and at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing, not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains. And he ended up having the worst diagnosis. One of the worst diagnosis is you can get from a random stomachache is pancreatic cancer because the time the pancreas you can't feel anything. So by the time you feel pain, it's too late, it's spread already. So, I was just beside myself, I'm like, this is like, wow, this guy, he's a random stomachache. All I know is another man I loved had a random stomachache and it didn't end well, </s><s>[INST] how did you deal with it emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, as a scientist. What was that? Like that? The whole because it's not immediate. It's a it's a long journey. [/INST] It's a long journey and you don't know where the diagnosis is going. So, anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's like, always branches in the road. So, you know, he had this intestinal blockage. I can't imagine someone in their forties having that and that be normal. But the doctor is like, it could be nothing. You could just cut it out. You don't need most of your tests. Scientists repeating pattern. Just cut that out. It could be fine, but it ended up not being fine and he was diagnosis being terminally ill. Well, it really changed my life in a huge way. First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened. I start asking everyone I knew. I would ask you. I know smart. My job to put you on the spot. I'd say you have one year to live or two or three, what will you do differently about your life now? Lex you have one year to live, What would you do? I mean it's hard. I don't know if you want to. No, </s><s>[INST] no, no. I I think about it a lot. I mean that's a really good thing to meditate on. We can talk about maybe how while you bring that up, what if it is or not a heavy question, but I get uh I think about mortality a lot and uh for me it feels like a really good way to focus in on is what you're doing today, The people you have around you, the family you have, is it uh does it bring you joy? Does it bring you fulfillment? And basically uh for me of long ago, okay, try to be ready to die any day. So like today, uh you know, I, I kind of woke up, look if I was nervous about talking to um have I really admire your work. And the book is very good and super exciting topic. Uh but then you know, there's this also feeling like if this is the last conversation I have in my life, you know if I die today, let's be let's be uh the right like my glad today happened and it is and I am glad today uh happened. So that that's the way [/INST] that's so unique. I never got that answer from a single person. </s><s>[INST] The business of life. There's goals, their dreams, there's like planning [/INST] very few people make it happen. That's what I learned. And so a lot of these people </s><s>[INST] like you run out of time, [/INST] it's not so much amount of time, but I'd come back later and be well okay, why don't you do that? If that's what you would do if you're going to die a year from now, why don't you, why don't you make it real simple things spend more time with family. Like why why don't you do that? And no one had an answer. It turns out unless you usually, unless you have, you really do have a pressing end of life. People don't do their bucket list or try to change their career. And some people can't so we can't like for a lot of people they can't do anything about it and that's that's fine. But the ones who can take action for some reason never do. And that was one of the ways that mike's death at the time, his impending death really really affected me because you know for these sick people what I learned, he had a bucket list and he was able to do some of the bucket list. It was awesome. But he got sick pretty quickly. So if you do only have a year to live, it's ironic because you can't do, you can't do the things you wanted to do because you get too sick too fast. </s><s>[INST] What were the bucket list things for you that you realize like what am I doing with my life? [/INST] That was the major concept of him after he died. I didn't know like I I was just lost because when something that profound happens all the things I was doing, most of the things I was doing were just meaningless was so tough to, to find an answer for that. And that's when I settled on I'm going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find another earth and to find out too find that we're not alone. </s><s>[INST] What is that longing for connection with others? Um What's that about? What do you think? Why is that so full of meaning? [/INST] I don't know why. I mean I think it's how we're hardwired. Like one of my friends some time ago actually my dad died. He never heard someone say this before but he's like Sarah you know, why are we evolved to take death so harshly what kind of society would we be if we just didn't care people died. That would be a very different type of world. How would we as a species have got to where we are? So I think that is tied hand in hand with, Why do we, why do we see connection? It's just that what we were talking about before, that sub consciousness that we don't understand. </s><s>[INST] Yeah coupled, you know, the other side the flipside of the coin of connection and, and love is a fear of loss. It's like that was again, I don't know. It's so, it makes you appreciate the moment Is that the thing ends? [/INST] Yeah, it's definitely a hard won, the thing ends, but it's hard to not, you, you wouldn't want to limit like it's like my dog who I love so much. I'll start to cry like I can't think about the end. I know he'll age much faster than I will and some day will end, right? But it's too sad to think of. But should I not have got a dog, I should have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won't be forever. It's </s><s>[INST] well, there's uh, there's a philosopher Ernest Becker who wrote a book, denial of death. I just, uh, and warm with the cores. And there's another book talks about terror management theory, Sheldon Solomon. I just talked to him a few weeks ago, uh, the brilliant philosopher psychologist, that their theory, whatever you make of it, is that the fear of death is at the core of everything, everything we do. So like you're that you think you don't think about the mortality of your dog, but you do and that's what makes the experience rich. Like there's this kind of like in the shadows looks the knowledge that this won't last forever and that makes every moment just special in some kind of weird way that the moments are special for us humans? Uh I mean sorry to use romantic terms like love, but what do you make, what did you learn about love from, from losing it from losing your husband? [/INST] Well, I learned to love the things I have more. I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things bother me as much. </s><s>[INST] What about the rediscovery or like the Discovery of the Little Lights? Um, uh, in the darkness. So you, the book, I think you've brilliantly describe the dark parts of your journey. Uh, but maybe can you talk about how you were able to rediscover the lights [/INST] they came in many ways? And the way you'd like to think about it is like grief as an ocean. He was tiny islands of the little like, like the little lights and eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands like become continents with lakes. So initially be like the Children laughing one day or my colleagues at work who rallied around me and would take me away from my darkness to work on the project. Later on, it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with Children in my town. And it would be, even though it was a bit morose getting together? Um still very joyful at the same time, </s><s>[INST] What was the journey of rediscovering love like for you? So re finding I mean is there some by way of advice or insight about how to uh how to rediscover the beauty of life [/INST] Of Life? It's A Hard one. I think you just have to stay open to being positive and just to get out there. </s><s>[INST] Do you still think do you still think about your own mortality? So you mentioned that that was the thing that you would meditate on is the question when it was right there in front of you. But do you still think about [/INST] it? I think I will after talking to you know, it's not really something I think about. I mean I do think about the search for another earth and will, will I get there. Will I be able to conclude my search? And is there one like as time goes by that window to solve that problem gets smaller, </s><s>[INST] what would bring you again? I apologize if this makes concrete the fact that life is finite. But what what would bring you joy if we discovered while you're still here, [/INST] we'll bring me joy finding another earth and earth like planet around a sun like star. Knowing that there's at least one or more out there been able to see water that it has signs of water and being able to see some gasses that don't belong. So I know that the search we'll continue after I'm gone enough to fuel the next generation. </s><s>[INST] Uh so just like opening the door and there's like this glimmer of hope. Uh what do you think it will take to realize that? I mean we've talked about all these interesting projects, Star Shade especially, but is there something that you're particularly kind of Hopeful about in the next 10, 20 years that might give us that that exact glimmer of hope that there's earthlike planets out there. [/INST] I have to I stand behind star shade in all cases. So, but there is this other kind of feel that I that everyone is involved in because Star shade is hard, births are hard. But there are, there's another category of planet star type that's easier. And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars. They're not earth like at all. Think like Earth cousin instead of Earth twin, there's a chance that we might establish that some of those have water and signs of life on them that's nearer term than Star shade. And we're all working hard on that too. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask by way of recommendations. I think a lot of people are curious about this kind of stuff what three books, technical or fiction or philosophical or anything really had an impact on your life and and or you would recommend. Besides, of course your book. Mhm [/INST] There's one book I wish everyone could read. I'm not sure if you've read it. It's actually a Children's book, like a young adult book. It's called the Giver. </s><s>[INST] Yes. Uh [/INST] And it is a book that kids in school read now. And I'm only </s><s>[INST] sorry that's not that's wow, sorry that that caught me off guard. Uh So when I first came to this country, I didn't speak much. It's really what made me I had a profound impact on my life and I have a really important moment because they give it to kids. Like I think middle school, I think you have something like [/INST] that. I'm so surprised you've even heard of this </s><s>[INST] book. So they but like it's the value of giving the right book to a person at the right time uh was because it's very accessible. [/INST] Do we want to share what the story is without spoiling it? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, you can without spoiling right? [/INST] What follows this boy in this very utopian society that's like perfect. It's been all clean cut and made perfect actually. And as he kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something's wrong with his world. And so it's part of that question, are we going to evolve this? I mean this isn't what's there, but it made me wonder, you know, are we evolving to a better place? Is there a day when we can eliminate poverty and hunger and crime in sickness in this book. They pretty much have in a society that the boys in It sort of follows him and he becomes the chosen one too be like a receiver, the givers, the old wise man who retain some of the harshness of the outside world so that he can advise the people as the sort of boy comes of age and has chosen for the special role. He finds the world isn't what he expects and I don't know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of reality. It's like, oh my God, what am I doing here? I'm just going with the flow with my society. How do I think outside the box in the confines of my society, which surely carries negative things with it that we don't realize today. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. And also in the flip side of that is if you do take a step outside the box on occasion, what's the psychological burden of that? Like is that is that is that a step you want to take? Is that the journey you want to take? What is that life like? [/INST] I don't know, I felt like from the book you have to take it, my friend from the book. I never thought like now that you're saying that I I see what you're saying, the burden is huge, but I always feel like the answer is yes, you absolutely want to know what's out what's outside, but you can't do that if you're very, it's hard to be objective about your own reality. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it's a very human instinct, but uh it also, the book kind of shows that uh it has an effect on you and it's it's a really interesting question about our society and taking a step out, [/INST] it's by a lois lori, I think that's how you pronounce it. I really do hope everyone create and it is a young adult book, but it's still, it's incredibly, I'm really glad I only read it because my kids got it for school. I just thought, okay, well why don't I just see what this is about? And I just, wow. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Yeah, I I think it's also the value of education, I think I'm surprised you mentioned, I've never really mentioned to anybody. I'm sure a lot of people had a similar experience like me and maybe [/INST] It's a generational thing though, because like, the book came out I think in the 90s, so if you're older than like me, that book didn't exist when we were in middle school. So I do think a lot of people won't have heard of it. But </s><s>[INST] it's an interesting question of like those books, I mean, I'm reminded often, I suppose the same is true with other subjects, but books are special at the early age, like middle school, maybe early high school, this those can change like the direction of your life and also certainly teachers, they can change completely the direction of life. There's so many stories about teachers of mathematics teachers of Physics of any kind of subjects basically changing the direction of a human's life, that's like not to get on the the whole, almost like a political thing. But you know, we uh, we undervalue teachers. Uh, it's a special, it's a special position that they [/INST] hold True. Yeah. Well, I do have two other books or two other things. One is something I came across just a few days ago actually. It's actually a film called Picture A Scientist. Mm And when you picture a scientist, you probably don't picture the women and women of color in this film. And it is a way to get outside your box. I really think everyone interested in science even just peripherally should watch this because it is shocking and sobering at the same time. And it talks about how, well I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really are. Like, I don't know if we're hardwired to just like people like ourselves, we're excluding a lot of people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think outside of how we're all stereotyping each other. So it's it's hard to kind of convey that. And you can just say, oh yeah, I want to be more diverse. I want to be more open, but it's nearly impossible problem to solve. And the movie really helps open people's eyes to it, this book. I put third because unlike the giver of people may not want to read it. It's not as relevant. But When I was in my early 20's I went to this big this like 800 people large conference call uh run by the Wilderness Canoe Association in my hometown of Toronto. And there was a family friend there who I met and he said read this book it will change your life and it actually changed my life. And it was a book called Sleeping Island by an author P. G. Downs who just coincidentally lived in this area, lived in the boston area and he was a teacher I think at a private school and every summer he would go to Canada with a canoe often by himself. And he wrote this book may be in the 40s or 50s about a trip he took in the late 1930s. And it was I was just shocked that even at that time, although that was a long time ago there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by white people. And he went up there and interacted with the natives, he called the book and had a subtitle that was called, there's something like journey and the barren lands and when you go up north in Canada, you past the tree line just like on a mountain. If you hike up a mountain you get so far north there aren't any trees and he wrote eloquently about the land and about being out there. There weren't even any maps of the region, like in that time. And I just thought to myself, wow like that. You could just take the summer off and explore by canoe and go and see what's out there. And it led to me just doing that. That very thing. Of course it's different now. But going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe in the water and just, well, we have to have a plan. We didn't just explore, but go down this river rivers with rapids and travel over lakes and portage is and just really live. </s><s>[INST] So just really explore. Score it that doesn't like it [/INST] doesn't just use from a topo map from a topographical map from the library. There were scary elements about of it out get him but part of the excitement or the joy or the desire was to be scared like I was to go out there and have live on the edge and persevere, persevere. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Uh do you have advice that you would give to a young person today at uh, I would like to help, you may be on the planetary science side discover exoplanets or maybe bigger picture just succeed in [/INST] life. I do have some advice just to succeed. It's tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you're also very good at in some ways the stars have to align because you've got to find that thing you're good at or the range of things and it actually has to overlap with something that actually you love doing every day. So it's not a tedious job. That's the best way to succeed. </s><s>[INST] What were the signals that in your own life were there to make you realize you're good at something that you're, you're like, what were you good at? They made you uh pursue a PhD and it made you pursue the search. [/INST] I mean that was the one sentence version. In my case, it was a long slog and there were a lot of things I wasn't good at initially. But so initially, you know, I was good at high school math, I was good at high school science. I loved astronomy and I realized those could all fit together. Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job. It has to be one of my top days of my life. I didn't know that you could be that for a job. I was good at all those things. Although my dad wanted me to do something more practical where he could be guaranteed. I could support myself was another option. But initially it wasn't that good at physics. It was a slog to just get through school and grad school's a very, very long time. But ultimately when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing knowing that I was good at something and also loved it. It really carried me through </s><s>[INST] now. I asked some of the smartest people in the world, The most ridiculous question. We already talked about it a little bit, but let me ask again, why, why are we here? So, uh I think you've raised this question when your presentations is like one of the things that we kind of as humans long too to answer in the search for Exoplanets is kind of part of that. Um but what do you think is the meaning of it? All of life? [/INST] I wish I had a good answer for you. </s><s>[INST] I think you're the first person ever who refused to answer the question [/INST] or not so much refusing. I just yeah, I mean, I wish I had a better answer. It's why we're here. </s><s>[INST] It's almost like the meeting is uh wishing there was a meeting that wishing, wishing, wishing we knew. [/INST] I love that. That's a great way to, that's a great way to to say it. </s><s>[INST] Like I said, the book is excellent. I admired your work from afar for a while and I think you're one of the, the great stars that um it makes me proud to be part of the community. So, um, thank you so much for your work. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Thanks for talking today. [/INST] Thank you so much. Thanks </s><s>[INST] thanks for listening to this conversation with Sara Seager and thank you to our sponsors public goods Power dot and cash app, click the links in the description to get a discount. It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on Youtube, review five stars on Apple podcast supporter on Patreon, connect with me on twitter Elex Friedman spelled. I'm not sure how, just keep typing stuff in until you get to the guy with the tie in the thumbnail and now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan somewhere. Something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. Yeah. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] they paying you? But [/INST] we about say the frank Herbert estate not enough. Uh let's uh </s><s>[INST] how many books are there in june? [/INST] That's a gent question. </s><s>[INST] You're also a fan of. [/INST] I read the whole series, but not a couple of the, I read all the prequels as well, with the exception of a couple. </s><s>[INST] Is there a book one for dune. [/INST] Dune would be book one and even the prequels. It's still better if you start like I read Dune and then read the original, what is it six? And then I went back and started to read </s><s>[INST] something just like watching Star Wars. You want to start an episode for whatever. [/INST] Yeah, I think so. That's the way that's the move and then stop at six. Call it a day, watch the Mandalorian. But </s><s>[INST] well, I thought you're not walking back here. [/INST] You know? I like the Mandalorian. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that is what [/INST] I said. I I was told that I was harmless for not liking baby Yoda, who </s><s>[INST] I, a [/INST] couple of the movie's not including the middle are in the middle are is fine. It's the more recent movies that we don't like to talk </s><s>[INST] to you. Oh the, what's his name? The Goofy guy [/INST] Ryan? No, </s><s>[INST] no, no, the creature, the goofy creature [/INST] with the Georgia </s><s>[INST] Georgia. Do you ever see [/INST] the jar jar Binks is actually like the Dark Lord of the Sith theory that fixed the whole initial trilogy were like because he's like goofing around and like making it all the way through battles and when you're like, wait a minute, oops his way and he walks over to a pool, does a triple backflip falls in your like, </s><s>[INST] it's bizarre. That is the, this is the Alex jones theory of, of Star Wars was also actually, [/INST] he was the one that actually was like, hey we should vote in Chancellor, Chancellor palpatine or Senator palpatine. Like right before they put George are in charge. First off, what do they think was gonna happen? And second off that was I think that'd be great. Like oops, oh man, I guess he's the emperor now, that would have been great. But actually to the, to the cancel and all the other stuff again, it's just like you'd hope that it gives pause and think about this for fighting because a lot of times I use this example people and people like fight fans and you know, like UFC, they love people that run out and try to murder each other and it's entertaining and it's super entertaining. But you know Floyd, Mayweather doesn't resonate with people as much. It's like people started, remember the time when Floyd was not as popular now. People think people love Floyd because he's 50 no Floyd and oh man, it finally he had so much success that we all can't help but recognize the man's genius and greatness. But prior to that all he's boring, He's this, he's, that, he fights, you know, with his circumspect, he's cautious, he's pressing, he's intelligent, deeply intelligent. And uh, When you watch people go out and try to murder each other, you can flip a coin 100 times and you know, I can get, you could be lucky enough to get 100 heads, but it's still a coin flip. And I think that that's what's going on all the time is, you know, people are getting an outcome that they want, but it wasn't a well thought out situation and that's why you'll win by five in a row by knockout and then lose three in a row and then people will go, well what happened to that guy? He used to be so great. Like no, he's doing what he's always been doing. It's just, it was getting great outcomes on a coin flip prior and it's getting negative outcomes on a coin flip now. But uh, I guess what I would say is that it watches, it's interesting watching, you know, I guess societal beliefs become such a thing that we're almost adopting on a religious level if we're not careful if, when I say religious level, I mean like, like pan life like this is guiding all of my choices for all the good and bad of that. And this is a dune quote is when religion and politics travel in the same car, the writers believe that nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget that the precipice does not show itself to the men in the blind rush until it's too late. And I think that that's again, the pause we go, oh man, thank goodness. We have this guy that wants to rebuild Germany. He'll put us back where we need to be. </s><s>[INST] And you stop questioning and your own judgment, your own. You start you stop thinking essentially [/INST] right. I'm not allowed to question this. Well, of course this is correct. Of course, of course I'm right. I intended to do right. So of course my actions are correct. I mean, how many times have any of us intend to do something helpful and ended up doing something less. And you know, plenty of people who intend to do harm could by accident, do something decent. And I guess it's like, you know, I'm not saying anything, you know, terribly terribly, you know, insightful. But it's just one of those words. It's hard to, it's hard to say in the moment and that's where you, you hopefully caution. You would counsel some degree of caution. And uh, that, that's what worries me with with people deciding that were also right about this or were also right about that and attempting to rather than when the argument silenced the counter argument no matter how crazy it may seem, because I just think that that idea even when it's pointed in a good direction, initially, it's only a matter of time. </s>

<s>[INST] metabolically costly. I like it. [/INST] And so what is a reflex? A reflex is when your brain doesn't check against the sense data that the potential cost to you is so great. Maybe because you know your life is threatened that your brain makes the prediction and executes the action without checking. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So but predictions still at the core. That's a beautiful vision of the brain. I wonder from almost an ai perspective but just computational E is the brain just mostly a prediction machine then. Like is the perception just the nice little feature added on top. Like the both the integration of new perceptual information. I wonder how big of an impressive system is that relative to just the big predictor model construction. Well I [/INST] Think that we can we can look to evolution for that for at one answer, which is that when you go back 550 million years, give or take the world was populated by creatures really ruled by creatures without brains. Um and um you know, that's a biological statement, not a political statement ruled with </s><s>[INST] dinosaurs dumb. You're talking about like, [/INST] oh no, I'm not talking about dinosaurs. Honey, I'm talking way back further back than that. Really. These they're these little little creatures called anti oxus, which is the modern it's a or lancet, that's the modern animal, but it's an animal that scientists believe is very similar to um are common, the common ancestor that we share with invertebrates. Because uh basically because of the tracing back the molecular genetics and cells and that animal had no brain. It had some cells that would later turn into a brain, but in that animal there's no brain, but that animal also had no head and it had no eyes and it had no ears and it had really, really no senses. For the most part, it had very very limited sense of touch. It had an eye spot for um not for seeing, but just for um in training to circadian rhythm to light and dark. Um and it had no hearing. It had a vestibular cell so that it could keep upright in the water at the time approx. We're talking evolutionary scale here. So, you know, give or take some 100 million years or something. But at the time, you know, what are the vertebrate like when a when a backbone evolved and a brain evolved a full brain that was when ahead evolved with sense with sense organs. And when um that's when your viscera like internal systems involved. So the answer I would say is that um that senses nurse motor neuroscientists, people who studied the control of motor behavior believe that senses evolved in the service of motor action. So the idea is that like what triggered the what triggered, what was what was the big evolutionary change? What was the big pressure uh that made it useful to have eyes and ears and a visual system in an auditory system in the brain basically. And you know, and the answer that um is you know, commonly entertained right now is that it was predation that when at some point and an animal evolved that deliberately ate another animal. And this launched an arms race between predators and prey. And it became very useful to have senses. Right? So these these little anti ox, these little anti oxi, you know, I don't really have they they don't have and they're not aware of their environment very much really they uh and so being able to look up ahead and you know ask yourself, you know, is that, you know, should I eat that or will it eat me is a very useful thing. So the idea um is that sense sense sense data is not there for consciousness, it didn't evolve for the purposes of consciousness, it didn't evolve for the purposes of experiencing anything. Um It evolved in the cert to be in the service of motor control. However maybe it's useful. Um This is why, you know, scientists sometimes avoid questions about why things evolved that this is what philosophers call this telly ology, you might be able to say something about how uh things evolve, but not necessarily why we don't really know the why, that's all speculation, </s><s>[INST] but why it's kind of nice here is the interesting thing is uh that was the first element of social interaction is am I going to eat you or you gonna eat me? And for that it's useful to be able to see each other sense each other. That's kind of fascinating that there was a time when life didn't eat each other [/INST] or they did by accident. Right? So an anti oxus for example will um it kind of like gyrates in the water and then it plants itself in the sand, like a blade of like a living blade of grass and then it just filters uh whatever comes into its mouth, right? So it is it is eating, but it's not actively hunting. And when um the concentration of food decreases the anti oxus can sense this. And so it basically wriggles itself randomly to some other spot, which probabilistic lee will have more food than wherever it is. So it's not really, you know, it's not guiding its actions on the basis of its not, we would say there is no real intentional action um in the in the in the traditional sense, </s><s>[INST] speaking of intentional action, and if the brain is if prediction is indeed a core component of the brain, let me ask you question that scientists also hate is about free will. So how does do you think about free will much? How does that fit into this into your view of the brain? Why does it feel like we make decisions in this world? [/INST] This is a hard scientists hate. This was a hard it's a hard question. We don't know the answer to. An aside, I think I have, I think I have taken a side, but I don't put a lot of stock in my own intuitions or anybody's intuitions about the cause of things Rx. But one thing we know about the brain for sure is that the brain creates experiences for us are my brain creates experiences for me. Your brain creates experiences for you in a way that lures you to believe that those experiences actually reveals the way that it works. But it doesn't. So, </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah, that's fascinating. But uh, the thing that makes twitter and facebook work, I mean the news feed, you're exactly right like that. You can just duplicate the news. Like if it's, if it's not the social network and it's the news feed then why not have multiple different feeds that are more that are better at satisfying. There's a dopamine Gamification that they've figured out the and uh so you have to, whatever you create, you have to provide some pleasure in that same Gamification kind of way. It doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks. But I mean I guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of uh mechanism in other forms [/INST] or people are turning on the Gamification. I mean, so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it right? So if I'm offering something there, these existing sugar, people realize sugar's bad, drinking a lot of great too. But it also after a while you realize there's there's problems. So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at, they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection. Like it's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated, I wrote this new yorker piece a couple years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different technologies but I think the technologies are a distraction. We focus too much on you know, mastodon versus you know whatever like forget or discord like actually let's forget the protocols right now. It's the idea uh okay and there's a lot of these long tail social media groups, what people are getting out of it, which I think can outweigh the dopamine Gamification is strong connection and motivation. Like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be you know, better dads or something like this and and you talked to him on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talks and that's a powerful thing to. </s><s>[INST] One interesting thing about scale of twitter is you have these viral spread of information. So sort of twitter has become a newsmaker in itself is the problem. Well yes, but I don't wonder what replaces that because because then you immediately [/INST] well </s><s>[INST] no reports [/INST] that have to do some work. You </s><s>[INST] know the problem with reporters and journalism is that they're intermediary, they have control. I mean this is the problem in Russia currently you have uh it creates a shield between the people and the news. The the interesting thing and the powerful thing about twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news like you have the president of that is the former president of the United States on twitter creating news. You have elements creating news. You have people announcing stuff on twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist and that feels much more genuine and uh it feels very powerful but actually coming to realize that it doesn't need the social network, you can just put that announcement on the Youtube type. [/INST] This is what I'm thinking. Right? So this is my point about that because that's right. The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic. I'm an old school internet nerd a guy that was you know, tell meeting in the servers and go offering before the World wide Web was around. Right. So I'm a huge internet booster and that's that's one of its big power. But when you put everything on twitter, I think the fact that you've you've taken uh you homogenized everything right? So everything looks the same moves with the same low friction is very difficult. You have no, what I call distributed curation, right? The only curation that really happens there's a little bit with likes and also the algorithm. But if you look back to pre web two point or early web 2.0 when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs, there was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media, it was Over time you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here and there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on. So if you think like the 2004 presidential election, most of the information people gained from the Internet, one of the first big Internet news driven elections was from, you know, you had like the daily costs and and drudge but there was like blogs that were out there and this was back as recline was just running a blog out of his uh you know a dorm room at this point, right? And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility because okay people have paid, it's very hard to get people to pay attention, blog are paying attention. I get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever, it seems to be really sharp and now people are noticing it and now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogeneous low friction environment like friction where I mean twitter where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push Q and on or something like that. It's probably gonna be a really weird looking blog. You have a hard time. Like it's just never gonna show up on people's </s><s>[INST] radar, right? I mean, so everything you said up until the very last statement, I would, I would agree with [/INST] this is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess </s>

<s>[INST] there's also ethical rules. Um we have to contend with the idea and we have to contend with that idea with ai [/INST] But what's gonna motivate it is, I mean, I talked to people who really miss people who are gone and they would love to get something back even if it isn't perfect. Uh and that's what's gonna motivate this </s><s>[INST] and that person lives on in some form. And the more data we have, the more we're able to reconstruct that person and allow them to live [/INST] on. And eventually as we go forward, we're going to have more and more of this data because we're going to have none of us that are inside our neocortex and we're gonna collect a lot of data, in fact anything that's data is always collected, </s><s>[INST] there's something a little bit sad which is becoming or maybe it's hopeful which is more and more common these days, which when a person passes away you have their twitter account. You know when you have the last tweet they tweeted like something that [/INST] you can recreate them now with large language models and so on. I mean you can create somebody that's just like them and can actually continue to uh communicate. </s><s>[INST] I think that's really exciting because I think in some sense like if I were to die today in some sense I would continue on if I continue tweeting I tweet therefore I am. [/INST] Yeah. Well I mean that's one of the advantages of a replicants that can recreate the communications of that, that person. </s><s>[INST] Do you hope? Do you think? Do you hope humans will become a multi planetary species? You've talked about the phases, the six epics and one of them is reaching out into the stars in part, [/INST] yes, but the kind of attempts for making now to go to other planetary objects doesn't excite me that much because it's not really advancing anything. It's </s><s>[INST] not efficient enough. [/INST] Yeah. We're also putting out other uh human beings which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects. </s><s>[INST] What [/INST] I'm really talking about in the in the sixth epic universe, wakes up. It's where we can spread our super intelligence throughout the universe and that doesn't mean sending very soft squishy creatures like humans. </s><s>[INST] The universe wakes up. I [/INST] mean we we would send intelligence masses of nanobots, which can then go out and uh colonize these, these other parts of the universe. </s><s>[INST] Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that are bots might meet [/INST] my hunch is no, most people say yes, absolutely. I mean, and they'll cite that drake equation and I think in the singularity is near um I have two analyses of the drake equation, both with very reasonable assumptions and one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations in each galaxy and another one gives you one civilization and we know of one. </s><s>[INST] A lot of the [/INST] analyses are forgetting the exponential growth of of computation because we've gone from where the fastest way I could send a message to somebody was with a pony, which was what like a century and a half ago, </s><s>[INST] uh [/INST] to the advanced civilization we have today. And and and if you accept what I've said, go forward a few decades, you can have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization compared to a pony. And that's in a couple of 100 years. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] The speed and the scale of information transfer is just, is growing exponentially in a blink of an eye [/INST] now. Think about these other civilizations, they're gonna be spread out at cosmic times. So if something is like ahead of us or behind us, it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions of years, which isn't that much, I mean, the world is billions of years old, 14 billion or something. So even 1000 years, if two or 300 years is enough to go from a pony to a fantastic amount of civilization, we would see that so of other civilizations that have occurred. Okay. Some might be behind us, but some might be ahead of us. If they're ahead of us, they're ahead of us by thousands, millions of years and they would be so far beyond us. They would be doing galaxy wide engineering, but we don't see anything doing galaxy wide engineering. </s><s>[INST] So either they don't exist or this very universe is a construction of an alien species. We're living inside a video game. [/INST] Well, that's another explanation that yes, you've got some teenage kids and another civilization. </s><s>[INST] Do you, do you find compelling? The simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment that we're living in a simulation [/INST] of the universe is computational, so we are an example in a computational world, therefore uh it is a simulation doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world, but it's nonetheless is taking place in a computational world and everything that's going on is is basically a form of, of computation. Um so you really have to define what you mean by uh this whole world being a simulation. </s><s>[INST] Well, then it's the, it's the teenager that that makes the video game, you know, us, humans with our current limited cognitive capability have strive to understand ourselves and we have created religions, we think of God, whatever that is, Do you think God exists? And if so, who is God? I [/INST] alluded to this before we started out with lots of particles going around and there's nothing that represents love and creativity. Um, and somehow we've gotten into a world where love actually exists and that has to do actually with consciousness because you can't have love without consciousness. So to me, that's God, the fact that we have something where love, where you can be devoted to someone else and and really feel that love, um, that's that's God. And if you look at the old testament, it was actually created by several different Robin? It's in there and then I think they've identified three of them, One of them dealt with God as a person that you can make deals with and he gets angry and he wrecks vengeance on various people, but two of them actually talk about God as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and and so forth. That's how they describe God. So that's my view of God, </s>

<s>[INST] past its peak. [/INST] We're in </s><s>[INST] trouble. The United States is an empire passes speak [/INST] Well, I mean, that's just his, you could prove that case in court. </s><s>[INST] Well, let's let's go to court right now. But I do love love the the more complex idea that there's just human beings who crave power and seek ways to obtain that power through different ways. If you have uh Barack Obama or George bush or donald trump, there's different attack vectors, different ways to obtain that power and then you can use that leverage. And it probably doesn't have to be just in Washington D. C. Uh there's people who crave power for all over the world, of [/INST] course not. But where we are now in Los Angeles. These people are all good. </s><s>[INST] Uh L. A. Studio. [/INST] Exactly. People that from what I understand, they treat everyone fairly and they're nice. But I think he sees the bad guys. But out here in L. A. West Coast, everyone's lovely. </s><s>[INST] So amidst this uh fun exploration in your mind through the political landscape that you've done over the past uh couple of decades that you've been conscious politically, where does donald trump fit into this picture for you is uh [/INST] great question. Well, he didn't because we didn't he wasn't political until four years ago. Right? He got he got political very quickly before. I mean he was firing off crazy tweets about where Obama was born or whatever, but he was he got into politics like very quickly and then he became the president, right? So it's like we didn't, I knew him as donald trump this crazy new york city character, the host of the apprentice. Um I didn't think much about him, he was just constant, you know, like he was just this constant figures. Like I don't think much about Warren Buffett, like I know like trump's like he's married to a new show girl all the time and he's always opening another casino and he's on tv buffet really know trump. Like Warren Buffett is the opposite, right? Warren Buffett, I've been married for a million years, lives in a little house in Omaha, but these are the, that's what I told you trump, like I don't think about Warren Buffet, I don't think about these people, they're just guys that I've known forever that have like um you know a uh you know uh you associate certain things with them right and trump. We always associated with kind of vulgar garish new money billionaire married a lot, you know, casinos, Miss universe pageants, but again, you know, but it makes perfect sense that he really um I was able to become president at the moment where we were, we were about to have Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush and I think americans felt like this is now the oligarchy is spinning right in our face, You're not even making it feel like uh there's an appearance of democracy. We have two crime families vowing for control of the country every four years and then there was this rogue kind of upstart guy that was really about himself, you know trump. Doesn't really care that much about it. But I mean really was summarized perfectly when he left and he just said, hey have a good life. That's what he said before. He got on andrews air force base. If you watched the speech, he goes, hey have a good life. That's what he really feels like, hey have a good life. I'm going to get on a plane right now and fly to a castle. I own in uh mar a lago in florida and really I'm not going to think too much about you people outside of how I can get more attention in the future. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask you like a therapy questions, what is your favorite and least favorite quality of donald trump? [/INST] So my least favorite quality of donald trump I think because there's a few of them, his lack of empathy, complete and total lack of empathy. I don't feel that he cares about human beings on any level and I feel like that's maybe it should be a requirement, right? I mean I don't think he cares. I think it's obvious that he doesn't mean he's sent, you know, basically saying like they're in there mike pence is in there. He knows that his people are going to get, try to get to the capital. I mean those motherfucker's are not gonna have jobs, they're gonna go to federal prison and he doesn't care as long as they're storming the capitol to prove the point that he thinks he won the election. He has no concern for these people, his followers, he leads them lambs to the slaughter, right? So that's that's that's not a respectable, my favorite equality of donald trump is his willingness to call bullshit. So his willingness to call bullshit out. He doesn't play the game. Uh he will, you know, when people say about Putin Putin kills people, he goes, we kill a lot of people here to like he's willing and able to break the fourth wall and say things that no politician has ever said. He's willing to call out hypocrisy. Uh you know, of course not his own but the media, the members of the political establishment. That's a laudable quality. It's an entertaining quality, right? We all like it, I love to I'm like this guy saying something that a lot of people want said uh that being said, it's coupled with no real work or action. So it's not coupled with anything behind it that he just wants to uh we did an episode of my podcast once where it's like essentially he's like criticizing the deep state. He wants a deeper state. He wants a deeper state. Like he hired his daughter and her husband. I mean, this is not a guy that's interested in transparency and openness. He's a guy that would just prefer he wants to run the mafia state, </s>

<s>[INST] It's a balance, of course, but you also have to know yourself a little bit. Sometimes you can find stability and comfort in kind of reasoning things out a little bit. Maybe as people close to me have sometimes criticized in that I'm a little bit too romantic where I'll just follow the feeling. And, you know, life, you know, there's physics. There's a reality to this world. And sometimes reality doesn't allow you to flourish if you just follow your feelings, but there's a dance there. And happiness is ultimately found in that landscape of feeling and emotion versus facts and reason and logic. [/INST] As you said, have their place, everything. They have their place, but they're not the be all </s><s>[INST] and end all, they have their place. You're an incredible person, Andrew Huberman is a friend of yours. He said, you absolutely must talk called Dicerat. The number of people you know, they're just incredible people. There's just this group of folks that somehow helped each other flourish and grew together. And I'm just, I'm so happy you exist. I'm so happy you're doing the work you're doing. I can't wait for your second book. Thank you. And thank you for talking today. [/INST] This was really cool. Thank you so much. I'm proud to be among the group of people that you cited, proud to be their friend and proud that you've had me on today. Thank you so much. </s><s>[INST] Thank you, Paul. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Conti. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Victor Frankel. Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. How does it work? [/INST] How did you get a blue check? You got to apply and wait six months and you have to post three articles in the public mainstream media that illustrates you're a person of interest. Interesting. Generally, they would grant them to CEOs of public companies. The whole idea is to verify that you are who you say you are. The question is, why isn't everybody verified? There's a couple of threads on that. One is some people don't want to be doxxed. They want to be anonymous. They're even anonymous people that should be verified. Because otherwise, you're subjecting their entire following to phishing attacks and scams and hostility. But the other- </s><s>[INST] What's interesting? Yeah. Who you are. Who you say you are. Right. What's the orange verification? [/INST] This idea, can you actually elaborate a little bit more if you put up 20 bucks? I think everybody on Twitter ought to be able to get an orange check if they could come </s><s>[INST] up with like $10. What is the power of that orange check? [/INST] What does that verify exactly? You basically post a security deposit for your safe passage through cyberspace. The way it would work is, if you've got $10 once in your life, you can basically show that you're credit worthy. That's your pledge to me that you're going to act responsibly. You put the $10 or the $20 into the Lightning wallet, you get an orange check. Twitter just gives you a setting where I can say, the only people that could DM me are orange checks. The only people that can post on my tweets are orange checks. Instead of locking out the public and just letting your followers comment, you lock out all the unverified. That means people that don't want to post $10 security deposit can't comment. Once you've done those two things, then you're in position to monetize malice, monetize motion or malice, for that matter, but let's just say, for the sake of argument, you post something and 9,700 bots spin up and pitch their whatever scam. Right now, you sit and you go report, report, report, report, report, report, and if you spend an hour, you get through half of them, you waste an hour of your life. They just spin up another 97 kazillion because they've got a Python script spinning it up, so it's hopeless. On the other hand, if you report them and they really are a bot, Twitter's got a method to actually delete the account. They know that they're bots. The problem is not, they don't know how to delete the account. The problem is there are no consequences when they delete the account. If there are consequences, Twitter could give hack, they could just seize the $10 or seize the $20, because it's a bot. It's a malicious criminal act or whatever, as a violation of the platform rules, you You end up seizing $10,000, give half the money to the reporter, and half the money to the Twitter platform... </s><s>[INST] It a really powerful idea, but that's tying it, that's adding friction akin to the kind of friction you have in the physical world. [/INST] You're tying, you have consequences, you have real consequences. I just want conservation of energy. There's no friction. There's no nothing on this earth, right? You can't walk across the room without friction, right? </s><s>[INST] Friction is not bad. [/INST] Conservation of energy. Right? Unnecessary friction is bad. So in this particular case, you're introducing conservation of energy, and in essence, you're introducing the concept of consequence or truth into cyberspace. And that means if you do want to spin up 10 million fakes, fake less freedmans, right? </s><s>[INST] It's going to cost you $100 million to spin up 10 million fake less. But the thing is, you could do that with the dollar, but you're saying that it's more tied to physical reality when you do that with Bitcoin. [/INST] Yeah, well, let's follow up on that idea a bit more. If you did do it with the dollar, then the question is, how do 6 billion people deposit the dollars? Because what you're doing is, could you do it with a credit card? How do you send dollars? You have to dox yourself. It's not easy. You're talking about inputting a credit card transaction, doxing yourself, and now you've just eliminated the 2 billion people that don't have credit cards or don't have banks. You've also got a problem with everybody that wants to remain anonymous. But you've also got this other problem, which is credit cards are expensive transactions, low frequency, slow settlement. So do you really want to pay 2.5% every time you actually show a $20 deposit? And maybe you could do a Cluj version of this for a subset of people. It's 10% as good if you did it with conventional payment rails. But what you can't do is the next idea, which is, I want the orange badge to be used to give me safe passage through cyberspace, tripping across every platform. How do I solve the denial of service attacks against a website? I publish a website. You hit it with a million requests. Now, how do I deal with that? Well, I can lock you out and I can make it a zero trust website, and then you have to be coming at me through a trusted firewall or with a trusted credential. But that's a pretty draconian thing, or I could put it behind a lightning wall. A lightning wall would be, I just challenge you, Lex. You want to browse my website, you have to show me your 100,000 satoshis. Do you have 100,000 satoshis? Click. OK. Now you click away 100 times or 1,000 times, and after 1,000 times, well, now, Lex, you're getting offensive over to take a satoshi from you, or 10 satoshis, a microtransaction. You want to hit me a million times, I'm taking all your satoshis and locking you out. What you want to do is you want to go through 200 websites a day, and what you want every time you cross a domain, you need to be able to, in a split second, prove that you've got some asset. And now when you cross back, when you exit domain, you want to fetch your asset back. So how do I, in a friction-free fashion, browse through dozens or hundreds of websites, post a security deposit for safe passage, and then get it back? You couldn't afford to pay a credit card fee each time. When you think about 2.5% as a transaction fee, it means you trade the money 40 times, and it's gone. Yeah. </s>

<s>[INST] what about space of like healthcare? This is where you get into attention of like between capitalism and kind of more, I don't want to use socialism, but those kinds of policies that are less free market, [/INST] I think in this country, healthcare should be much more competitive. So you go to hospitals, doctors, they don't treat you like a customer. They treat you like an idiot or like a child or someone with third party payment and it's a pretty humiliating experience often. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Do you think free market in general is possible? Like a pure free market? And is that a good goal to strive for? [/INST] I don't think the term pure free markets well defined because you need a legal order. Legal order has to make decisions on like what is intellectual property more important than ever? There's no benchmark that like represents the pure free market way of doing things. Uh, what will penalties be? How much do we put into law enforcement? No simple answers. But just saying free market doesn't pin down what you're going to do on those all important questions. So, </s><s>[INST] free market is a, is an economics, I guess, idea. So there's no, it's not possible for free markets generate the rules. They're like emergent like self governing. [/INST] It generates a lot of them right through private norms, through trade associations. International trade is mostly done, uh, privately and by norms. So it's certainly possible. But at the end of the day, I think you need governments to draw a very clear lines to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems. </s><s>[INST] You know, I've been hanging out with, with other group of Weirdos lately, Michael malice who's, uh, who exposes to be an anarchist anarchism, Which is like, I think intellectually just a fascinating set of ideas where the, you know, taking free market to the full extreme of basically saying there should be no, no government, what is it oversight, I guess? And then everything should be fully, like all the agreements, all the collective's you form should be, uh, voluntary, not based on the geographic land you're born on and so on. Do you think that's just a giant mess? Like, do you think it's possible for an anarchist society to work where it's, um, you know, in a, in a fully distributed way, people agree with each other, not just on financial transactions, but, you know, on, um, on their personal security and sort of military type of stuff, uh, healthcare and education, all those kinds of things. And where does it break down? [/INST] Well, I wouldn't press a button to say, get rid of our current constitution, which I view is pretty good and quite wise. But I think the deeper point is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic, and we should take the anarchist seriously. So globally, there's a kind of anarchy across borders, even within federalist IQ systems, they're typically complex. There's not a clear transitive itty necessarily of who has the final say over what? Just the state vis a vis its people, there's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard. So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy? If you want to squish your anarchy into the right corners. And I don't think there's a theoretical answer how to do it, but you start with the country, like, is it working well enough now, this country you'd say mostly you'd certainly want to make a lot of improvements, and that's why I don't want to press that, get rid of the constitution button. But to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point. Always try to learn from any opinion, you know, and what in it is true. </s><s>[INST] I'm just like marveling at the, at the poetry of saying that we should squish our energy into the right corners. Love it. Okay, I gotta ask, I've been talking with uh, since we're doing a world Wind introduction to all of economics, I've been talking to a few objectivist recently and just, you know, I'm ran comes up as a as a person, as a philosopher. Throughout many conversations, a lot of people really despise her. A lot of people really love her. It's always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy or a human being arouses that much emotion in either direction. Does she make? Do you understand, first of all, that level of emotion? And what are your thoughts about Ayn rand and her philosophy objectivism? Is it useful at all, uh, to think about this kind of formulation of uh, rational self interest, if I could put it in those words, or I guess more negatively the selfishness or she would put I guess the virtue of selfishness [/INST] ein rand was a big influence on me growing up, the book that really mattered for me was capitalism, the unknown ideal. The notion that wealth creates opportunity and good lives and wealth is something we ought to value, rise and give very high status. It's one of her key ideas. I think it's completely correct. I think she has the most profound and articulate statement of that idea that said as a philosopher, I disagree with her on most things and I did, even, like as a boy when I was reading her, I read Plato before I ran and in a Socratic dialogue, there's all these different points of view being thrown around and whomever it is. You agree with. You understand the wisdom is in coming together at the different points of view, and she doesn't have that. So altruism can be wonderful. In my view, humans are not actually that rational self interest is often poorly defined to pound the table and say existence exists. I wouldn't say I disagree, but I'm not sure that it's a very meaningful statement. I think the secret to Ayn rand is that she was Russian, I'd love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive. I'd only ask her about Russia, which he mostly never talked about after writing We the living and she is much more Russian, then she seems at first even like purging people from the objectivist circles, it's like how Russians, especially female Russians so often purged their friends. It's weird all the parallels. </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] Got it. [/INST] Yeah, so and I just, you know that will just show you my level of naivete. Like I was like, I didn't completely understand, I was like, well yeah, you know know at one point he asked me how I felt about him wearing my laundry and I was like, I don't even share my laundry with my sister, like, I don't share my laundry with anybody, you know? No, the 3rd 1 I interacted with was a banker who lived in Singapore and that that conversation didn't last very long because he made an analogy, I guess he made an analogy between me and character in the fountainhead, um the woman who's who's raped in the fountainhead, and I was like, okay, that's not that's not good, that's not a good, no, that's not a good </s><s>[INST] one, making [/INST] it not that scene. So then I um so then I was like, okay, you know what, I'm going to post my own ad. And so I did, I posted, well first I wrote my ad and then of course I checked it with my my friends who were all also assistant professors that are like my little greek chorus and then I posted it and I got something like, I don't know 80 something responses in 24 hours. It was, do </s><s>[INST] you remember the pitch? Um like how, how you, I guess condensed yourself. [/INST] I don't remember it exactly, although dan has it. Um but um actually, for our 20th wedding anniversary, he took our our exchanges and he printed them off and put them in a leather bound book for us to read, which was really sweet. Um Yeah, I think I was just really direct, like, I'm almost 30, I'm a scientist, I'm not looking, just, you know, I'm looking for something serious and you know, but the thing is I forgot to say where my location was and my age, which I forgot. So I got lots of, I mean, I will say, so I printed off all of the responses and um I had all my friends over and we were, you know, had a big, I made a big pot of gumbo and we drank through several bottles of wine. Reading these responses. And I would say for the most part, they were really sweet, like Ernest and genuine, as much as you could tell that somebody's being genuine. I mean, seemed, you know, there were a couple of really funky ones, like, you know, this one couple who told me that I was their soul mate, the two of them, and they were looking for, you know, a third person and I was like, okay, but mostly super, seemed, seemed like super genuine people. And so I chose five men to start corresponding with, and I was corresponding with them. And then about a week later I get this other email and okay, and then I post something the next day that said, okay, you know, thank you so much, and I'm gonna answer every person back. But then after that I said, okay, I'm not going to answer any more, you know, because it was they were still coming in, I couldn't, you know, I have a job and you know, a house to take care of and stuff. So, um, and then about a week later I get this other email and he says, you know, he just describes himself like I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm a chef, I'm a scientist, some of this, some of this. And so I emailed him back and I said, you know, you seem interesting, you can write me at my actual address if you want. Here's my address. I'm not really responding, I'm not really responding to other people anymore, but you seem interesting, you know, you can write to me if you want. And then he wrote to me and I am, then I wrote him back and I it was, it was a nondescript kind of email and I wrote him back and I said, thanks for responding. You know, I'm really busy right now. I'm I was in the middle of writing my first slate of grant applications, so I was really consumed and I said, I'll get back to you in a couple of days. And so I did, I waited a couple of days until my grants were, you know, safe grant applications safely out of the door. And then I email them back and then he emailed me and then really across two days we sent 100 emails </s><s>[INST] and text only was their pictures and [/INST] text only. Text only. And then, so this was like a thursday and friday. And then friday, he said let's talk on the weekend on the phone and I said okay and he wanted to talk sunday night and I had a date sunday night so I said okay sure we can talk sunday night. Um And then I was like well you know I don't really want to cancel my date so I'm just gonna call him on saturday, so I just called I call call them on saturday and a woman answered </s><s>[INST] oh wow that's not cool, [/INST] not cool. And uh so she says you know hello and I say oh you know it's down there and she said sure can I ask who's calling? And I said it tell them it's lisa and she went oh my god, oh my god I'm just a friend, I'm just a friend, I just tell you I'm just a friend. And I was like this is adorable, right? She doesn't and then he gets on the phone, not hi nice to meet the first thing he says to me, she's just a friend, so I was just so charmed, really buy the whole thing. So it was it was young, kapoor it was the jewish day of atonement that was ending and they were baking cookies and going to break fast so people you know as you know fast all day and and then they go to a party and they break fast so I thought okay I'll just um I'll just you know cancel my date. So I did and I stayed home and we talked for eight hours. Um And then the next night for six hours and basically it just went on like that and then by the end of the week he um he flew to state college and you know we've gone through this whole thing where I said we're going to take it slow, we're going to get to know each other. You know and then really by I think we talked like two or three times these like really long conversations and then he said I'm just gonna fly there. And then so of course there's I don't even know that there were facts machines at that point maybe there were but uh I don't think so anyway so he we decide we'll exchange pictures and so he you know I take my photograph and I give it to my secretary and I say to my secretary fax this I say that's a send this priority mail and he goes okay I'll send a priority mail, priority mail. He's like I know priority mail, okay? And then uh so I get dance photograph in the mail um And um you know it's it's him in a in a in shorts and you can see that he's probably somewhere like the Bahamas or something like that and it's like cropped so clearly what he's done is he's taken a photograph where you know he's in in it with someone else who turned out to be his ex wife. So I'm thinking well this is awesome. You know I've hit the jackpot, he's very appealing to me, very attractive and and then you know my photograph doesn't show up and it doesn't show up and you know, so like one day and then two days and then you know he's like you know you're I said well I asked my secretary to send a priority, I mean I don't know, you know um what he did and uh and he's like I said I'm like well you don't have to you know you don't have to come and he's like no no no I'm gonna I'm gonna you know we've had like five dates, the equivalent of five dates practically. Um And then um so he's supposed to fly on a thursday or friday, I can't remember. And I get a call like Maybe an hour before his flight supposed to leave and he says Hi and I say and it's just something in his voice, right? And I say because at this point I think I've talked to him for 25 hours, I don't know and he says hi and I'm like you got the picture and he's like yeah and I'm like you don't like it and he's like well uh huh I'm sure it's not, I'm sure it's your I'm sure it's just not, you know it's not it's probably not your best, </s>

<s>[INST] You'll impact people. my little corner of the world, it was disappointing how rare that is. So one of the reasons I'm here in Austin, and one of the reasons my work gravitated towards Elon Musk is because he represents that person for me in the world of technology, in the world of CEO, in the world of business. It was very surprising to me, the more I've learned about the world of tech, how few people live unapologetically, fully, to their potential. I'm sure people, others do that, maybe music and art, I'm not sure. I don't know about those worlds. I do know about the technology world. And it was disappointing to me how many people compromise their integrity in subtle ways at first, but then it becomes a slippery slope and then you- [/INST] Can I say this, there's this great quote, and I always forget if it's Steinbeck or Hemingway, and this applies for money and applies for morality. The quote was, how did you go bankrupt? And he says, two ways, gradually and then suddenly. It's very hard to one day be like, I have no integrity. That doesn't happen. It's very easy if it's like, look, I stole this candy bar. What's the big deal if I steal this thing? Then you steal- People say they're no slippery slopes. They are, and they're big, and they're very slippery, and people slide- And this is the biggest one. And people violate their integrity even without stealing. Just little things about how they treat other people, how they treat themselves, the values they pursue. They don't go after the profession they really wanted to. They compromise with, in ways that they shouldn't with their spouse or with their mothers or whatever. And then they wake up one day with their 30. They look the other way when they seek justice, yep, yep. And this is why people go through a middle age, midlife crisis. Midlife crisis is a crisis where you suddenly realize, I didn't do it, I didn't live up to my standards. didn't live up to my youthful idealism. I compromised and I sold out. But I also would warn you about Silicon Valley. Yeah, I think at the top, people slide. This is the biggest one. They look the other way when they see justice. Very few of them stick to it. And partially it's the political pressure is unbearable. I mean, how would you? How can you? It would require to be a hero and very few of them are. But there are a lot of people who do really well at all kinds of levels in technology who little startups, people. And this is the point Michael was making. You don't have to be the best. You don't have to be a CEO to live to your max and to live with integrity and to live a great life. I know people who, because they joined Amazon or whatever, have just made a life for themselves, an amazing life for themselves, and have done great work at Amazon, let's say, and then have lived a great life because of the opportunity that created for them. So I think there are more good people out there, but yes, one of the saddest things of growing up is, even when you're a teenager and looking at adults and noticing how few of them actually live. I mean, really alive in a sense of living their values and enjoying their life. And you start with your parents and you look across the people. Everybody lives such mediocre lives. And the other thing is they don't have to. That's what people don't appreciate. They don't appreciate, particularly not in the world that we live in today. They're so wealthy </s><s>[INST] and we all have so many opportunities. So by way of advice, what advice would you give to young people to live their life fully? I mean, Michael and I have talked about this, but it bears repeating. So if you look at John Gault, if you look at the highest ideals of a life we could live, [/INST] what advice would you give to a 20-year-old today? 18-year-old, full 18-year-old. Can I say, I don't think, and I think Rand would agree. When Rand was writing John Gault, she says, when you have this character's human perfection, you don't want to get too close. So he's a little bit of a vague character because she was aware that when you're dealing with day to day, it kind of, the shine comes off. I think Roark is a lot better character for a young person. Oh, weird. Yeah, but Roark is all, the entirety of Fountainhead is Roark, so Adrian is the one of several. We barely know John Gault. Yeah, so, but Roark is someone where you could be like, okay. And what Roark also gives young people is- That's in The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead is the strength to persevere. Because when you're young, you're going to have down times. There's going to be times when you're lonely, there's going to be times when you don't have a girlfriend, there's going to be times when you're out of work, and you're thinking holy crap, I'm falling between the cracks, I'm going to accomplish that I'm going to be a failure and he gives them the courage. There's even a scene in the fountainhead, which is this amazing scene. I love that it's not talked about enough where basically Rourke is looking at one of his buildings and this little kid on a bicycle comes up to him and I wrote your own please correct me and he's like who built this and Rourke said I did and the line is you know Rourke didn't realize it but he just gave that kid the courage to face a lifetime and I think that is such a beautiful thing where you can find inspiration in this character don't become needlessly difficult don't start parroting his lines you're not Howard Rourke and he's not a real person but there's aspects of him that you can apply to your life and here's something else I'll give one example because this happened to me when I was working at Goldman Sachs I was doing tech support and my great-grandmother had passed away that year and I promised my grandmother I'd have thanks I've told the story several times I would have thanksgiving dinner with her I was working second shift fort to midnight and we were 24 seven help desk and I got the schedule for the next week and I sold my grandma gonna have lunch with her in Thanksgiving and they had put me down from fort to midnight the day before Wednesday which is my normal shift but then the day shipped the next day and I go to my boss I go I first I was second shift I'm like this Thanksgiving I promised my grandma and they're like well if you could find someone to fill this we'll do it and I I asked everyone, they're like, no. And I said, I'm not coming in. And I, 100%, not even a question, if I asked my grandmother, can we have dinner instead, she would have said yes. But this was one of those moments, maybe this is from my huge ego, where I felt like I was in a movie and I'm making a choice. Am I going to ask grandma? Or am I going to just bend the knee? And I go, I couldn't find anyone. And I go, I'm not coming in. And they go, if you're not coming in, you're fired. And I go, fire me. And they did fire me. And I have no regrets. And because if I compromised, I'd have money in my pocket. But since I didn't compromise, I could look at that story. Rand talks about how man is a being of self-made soul. I could look at that story. And next time, I have a time where it's a tough decision, where there's really pressure. I could be like, you know what? This is the kind of person you are. Stick to it. I'll give one more example. Sorry, Ron. I've given talks on networking and I tell people, I like to use humor because humor is a great way to shortcut the brain and get the truth to them directly. I say, if you know someone is in town, it's their birthday, and they're not doing anything, take them out. And I say, I do this for Rand reasons. I do it selfishly. And the audience laughs. And I go, you're laughing, but I go, the guy who takes people out for their birthday is awesome. That could be you. There's nothing stopping you. You're just not thinking of these terms. What's it going to cost you $30? But for the rest of their life or a few years, that person will remember you and be like, you know what? This person did right by me. And I'll give you a concrete example which changed my life profoundly. Ted Hope, who was the producer of the film, American Splendor, which started my mentor, Harvey Pekar, sent an email to his firm that said, Harvey's in town with nothing to do. If you want to hang out with him, here's your chance. They worked at a film company and I was the only one. I got the email. I wasn't working there from a friend who took him up on it. And as a consequence, Harvey wrote a graphic novel about me, Egon Hubris, which is $250 on eBay now and it moves at that, not too shabby. The point being- Yeah, we barely know Jungkook. You know what? Someone had a movie made about him. Someone is an interesting figure. Take the lunch and stay overtime for an hour. But so many people don't think in those terms and there's so many opportunities for them. So that's the advice I give. And I think it's also good to give advice via anecdote. So not only is the person getting the advice, they are learning why you got to that point. And maybe I'm wrong, but at least they've thought about it. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that. And I like the line, Iron Man's line about man as a self-made soul is a creature of self-made soul is huge and it's something most people don't realize. And it's something that modern intellectuals undermine. I mean, even somebody like Sam Harris, when you keep telling people they don't have free will, then you don't have a self-made soul because what is self-made? There is no self, according to Sam, right? He meditates and he sees that he doesn't have a self. So you're undermining the ability of people to take control of their own lives and make the kind of choices that are necessary to create the kind of moral character that is necessary for them to be successful. So I'd encourage people to go read Found Head and Out with Shrugged because put aside the politics, put aside even aspects of the philosophy, focus on these models. These are, How to Walk is a great model for all of us. It's a great story to have in your head, in your mind, when you encounter challenging choices that you might make. And then spend the time, and this is, I don't think I ever did this when I was young. I don't think people do this, but spend the time thinking about what your values really are. What do you love doing? What gets you going? What gets you excited? And, how can I make a living at this? How can I do this and live through this? And then think about what kind of life you want. What kind of, I don't know, what kind of people you want to hang out with. Don't let life just happen to you. Think it through, what kind of people, for example, if you want ambitious, excited, maybe you should move to Silicon Valley, to Austin, Texas, right? If you want to be around Aussie people, maybe you should go to Hollywood. Maybe you should go to New York. I don't know, but think about what kind of life you want to live, what kind of people you want to hang out with, what kind of woman you want to spend your life with, what kind of romantic relationship you want to have. Figure that out and go and do it. Don't sit around. Life is not- Or try and fail. It's okay. You're going to fail. Fake failures. You're going to fail. Oh, failure. Failures. Don't fail. And learn from that failure. And that's another thing. Think about what you're doing, why you're succeeding, why you're failing, and keep improving. working on it because it's not just going to happen like this. Nobody is Francisco to take a character out of Atlas Shrugged who succeeds at everything first try, right? We all need to fail a few times. We all need to, but what have you got to lose? Every second is never going to be back. I mean, these are all cliches, but they're all true cliches. So think, figure out what your values are and try to apply your reason, your rational thought on getting those values. And try to, we talked about early on in the interview. We talked about integrating your emotions with your cognition. I think that's crucial because you don't want to be fighting your emotions as you move towards these things. You don't want your emotions to be barriers to your own success. You want them to be cheerleaders, right, to cheer on when good things happen and to be negative emotions when it's justified that they're negative. So, work on integrating your soul. So, creating your soul, that's, that's the real challenge. And, I'll give one piece of meta advice. When you're young, you're going to be clueless, because you're going to be ignorant, you know the data. Don't ask your dopey friends for advice because they want to be helpful. But the friends want to be helpful. They're as dopey as you, they have uninformed as you. So, they're just going to give you platitudes and you're going to be worse off because now you're going to be confused. Especially with social media. social media. Reach out to people who are older than you, who are accomplished. You'd be surprised how often you've got to send them 20 bucks, buy them dinner, buy their book, whatever it takes. You are getting free, world-class advice for very cheap, and that is really a mechanism for success. And here's something very unpopular and not sexy. This is why people probably unfollow me. Read. Well, you'll tell me why after this. Read, read, read. Because you're not always going to have access to those experts. And I'm not talking about self-help books. I'm not even talking about self-help books. Read the world's literature. I mean, literature presents you with all the different characters. Read Dostoevsky. Read Who Go. Read all these authors that have taken time to really create characters and put them in situations that maybe you will never face those exact situations, but you'll face similar situations. And they play it out for you. You'll see what the consequences are. Great literature is a real tool for building your soul. Great art generally, with literature in particular, because it's more conceptual. </s>

<s>[INST] So the transmissibility is difficult. It has to, oh, it's not, it's not airborne. And so the airport, [/INST] it just has to be you have to be bitten. Although some, some people claim you could walk into a cave and the bats, you know, breathing out rabies, virus could infect you. But I don't really think that's well, that's well substantiated. I think it's a bike. How would you do a study on that? It's very hard to do. You have to collect the vapors in the cave and show that they're infectious, which, and by the way, someone emailed me the other day, you like this? They say, why can't we just immunize all the bats in the world against these viruses? And I said, well, how would you do that? There are caves everywhere, right? Yeah. He said, well, maybe you could just go and aerosolized. Yeah, it's pretty dangerous. </s><s>[INST] And then, and then all the bats should have vaccine passports to make sure that [/INST] they're, so you have to get their consent before you do it. But we do immunized wildlife against rabies. We have rabies vaccines for wild animals. They're a whole bunch of them that get rabies and we put it, we put it in bait and dropped from helicopters in the woods and it drops down the incidence of rabies and people, you know, people hiking, get bitten and so forth. It drops the incident so we can do </s><s>[INST] that. I didn't know that. I was wondering how much medical care we're doing for animals in the wild because and have recently become more and more aware that animals are living in extreme poverty, right? Like you don't know, you think like natural, it's great. Um, you know, like, uh, like when animals are living on a farm, it's terrible. But you also have to compare to like what life is like and or like the zoo, you have to compare what life is like in the wild [/INST] life in the wild is very tough. I think most animals have to, the carnivores anyway. They have to catch their food every day, Right? </s><s>[INST] And then there's the viruses, [/INST] their viruses </s><s>[INST] as well. So [/INST] the rabies immunization is the only one I'm aware of for wild animals. Um, we do immunize lots of other animals. We immunise chickens and pigs and cows, even fish, farmed fish. We uh, pick each fish up and give it an injection, you know, when it's a small fish. Um, but that's mostly so that the farmers get a good yield. We don't really care about the animals, right? We want a good yield for market. And then there's some examples where we immunised animals to prevent spillovers into people. So there's a disease called Hendra in Australia, which uh, Discovered in the 90s. And it turns out that there are bats, fruit bats that have this virus and the bats were fine, but sometimes they're flying into horse stalls and the horses get infected. These are in Australia was initially racehorses, which are very expensive, right? The horses got infected, they died and the humans who would take care of them would die also. So now they immunize the horses to prevent the well to save the horses, probably that's the motivation because these horses are hundreds of thousands of dollars, right? And then the people don't get sick because the horses don't get, you don't want to immunize all the people because it's too rare. But that approach called one world health approach, which means everything is connected on the planet and we have to think of everything in the grander scheme, not just us. </s><s>[INST] Yes, you can immunize some things along the trajectory that the virus would take exactly something. Some living beings [/INST] and the Arabian peninsula, they have emerged coronavirus issue every month or a couple of cases where a camel will infect the human and the human can get very sick. It's a respiratory disease very much like covid. And so camels are very common there there used erased, they're used as pets, they're eaten. So there's a lot of human camel contact. But the number of cases are rare to to a month. So you don't want to immunize all the humans. So the idea would be to immunize the camels. </s><s>[INST] So I like it. So okay, so you put rabies but Ebola uh also is a famously deadly one. What is it? It kills like, I don't know, 50, of its B [/INST] 52 90. But that's in africa where the health care isn't great. What you saw when they when cases of Ebola came to the U. S. We could take care of it. We knew how to take care of, We had fancy hospitals and so forth. And now we have a vaccine so we can and the vaccine is really good. But there are many governments in africa who that are suspicious of of us and they don't want to use our vaccines. So they there's a vaccine </s><s>[INST] for Ebola. There is and uh the effectiveness and safety of it to how much is understood. So [/INST] this is difficult because there's not a lot of Ebola right? It's not a continuous ongoing thing. They're sporadic outbreaks here and there </s><s>[INST] of a few 1000 people [/INST] at most at most. Usually a few 100 the biggest ever. In fact this is why we didn't for years have an Ebola vaccine. The U. S. Military together with Canada developed an Ebola vaccine for service people. Right? They wanted to say well we're sending people into these Ebola areas, we want a vaccine for them. So they had developed it through all the preclinical which means before it goes into people. And that stopped because there was no money to do a Phase one and Phase two and Phase three In fact for Phase two and 3 you need to have infections going on because you're looking at how well the vaccine prevents infections. Right? So then there was a West African outbreak in 2015, 2013, The most cases ever. 25,000. So they got the test the vaccine. Um but they only put it in a few 1000 people, it's not like it's been in hundreds of thousands of people like the Covid vaccines has been so it looks like it's it has high efficacy. Um but we'd like to have more data. Side effects may be are not so great and there are a couple of different available vaccines. Some have been tested more than others. I would say this would probably not be widely accepted in the U. S. </s>

<s>[INST] his process will break a lot of people. So the fact that he got the job done is [/INST] not just the job done, but every single time he got the job done and I made those athletes fight, we would fight in paris, we would do a camp for a week, double session camp for a week, He'd be seven kg over, have to fight the next weekend we're talking two or three days later, you know. So not only did he make the weight, but he did a grueling training camp twice a day. And and and then cut weight and then fought again, then did another camp for a week in double session training camp and then fought on the third weekend in a row and our athletes went through hell, all of our athletes went through hell because on the tour around the world, they fought in every event they did every camp, they fought in every event. Whereas most of the other teams, like Japan comes in and fights in paris, then they go home, you know, they maybe do a camp for three days, then they go home, they don't stay in europe for four or five weeks straight and fighting every tournament. And when you get to Germany, the Germans skip the french open, they skipped the camp in France, they're just getting ready for Germany. Are athletes already had two competitions to training camps, 23 weight cuts now and then. So they're not 100% when they fight in Germany, but that's all part of the experience. They need the training that they need, that they don't get here in in this country and all of those were just preparation for </s><s>[INST] our World Championships or olympic [/INST] games. So by the time our athletes got to those tournaments, they felt so strong, so rested. So like man, this guy that felt like a monster in Germany feels like nothing today because you're fully rested now, you know? </s><s>[INST] But part of the challenge is because the american team is smaller and more, I mean just smaller is uh you know, all the different places you go for to do the weight cut to do the diet to do the preparation or the recovery, there's like that process changes every time. So you basically have to improvise a lot, you show up to a hotel and how you do the week that you don't know and there's different weather conditions. It's not it's like um so what is it? Rocky versus drago? Right. So you don't have, you have to just improvise. And that that's also a fascinating part of the american judo story which is like you have to improvise more. [/INST] I was funny because when I was 1990 and it was at the goodwill games, right? And uh we were it was a U. S. Olympic committee type event and so were on the bus with the swim team and it was me and Jason Morris on the american team and we're going to the judo competition, but we're on the bus with the swim team? I'm sorry, we're going to the venue where we're staying. You know, I remember being like by ourselves with no staff, no no, no manager, no coach. We're just by ourselves going to fight in Russia, right? And uh and the swim team's on their with their full sweats and their staff and like their managers and I heard the late the girl go. So there's 1994 because it was in ST. Petersburg Russia. So her little girl on the team, she goes up the coast, he goes coach. Um Do you think you can send the massage therapist to my room at 10 am I'm feeling kind of jet lag. I looked at Jason. Well it's not like she scheduling besides, I don't even have a staff like what the hell is going on here. You know, what a difference in sporting, you know, different sports within the same country, you know, </s><s>[INST] But that, I mean not to romanticize things, but that you do represent the spirit of the olympics when you're kind of the uh improvisational nature of it because it is just you, you and sometimes you and the coach and just pure guts and you against the world with no money. The [/INST] warrior spirit, </s><s>[INST] the warrior spirit. How did it feel like when he after being in two olympics beating some of the best people in the world, facing some of the best people in the world and just barely losing. What did it feel like to you as a coach to see Travis stevens win the silver medal. [/INST] Electric. </s><s>[INST] Uh, like [/INST] First of All, in 2012 in London, it was like, it felt like somebody died. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie to you. Like </s><s>[INST] the ole Bischof match. [/INST] Not no, just seeing Travis not finished on the podium period, you know, in the only bishop match I thought he won regardless of who won and who lost, He just left everything he had on that map right, 10 minutes of probably 20 something minute match, but 10 minutes of fighting actually, right. Um, he left everything he had, he wanted to be an Olympic finals. He wanted to be Olympic champion and when he didn't get that opportunity, he lost everything. He drained himself, he cried for 45 minutes straight. I couldn't regroup him, I couldn't get him out. I said, Travis, you've got to stop your crying, you've got to get off the floor, we've got a bronze medal fight. Like if you don't recover, you're not going to perform well and he just didn't care like it was gold or nothing. And so when he walked out against the Canadian boy, he had beaten the Canadian I think at that time he had beaten that Canadian every single time except for that bronze medal match, but he just didn't have the fight in him anymore. He left it all in the match and the bischoff match. So to see him come back with zero right? We just had a team where his best friend, marty Malloy won a bronze medal. Right. Then the day after Travis fights Kayla Harrison goes and wins her first gold medal, right? Our first ever gold. So, I have a gold and a bronze. His training partner wins a gold. His best friend from growing up wins a bronze. He has nothing Right to see him for four years go through hell. Like literally like all of his injuries, every training camp and then forget the humiliation because every time any reporter ever came to my dojo, they want to talk to Kayla, she's the olympic champion. Who is this Travis guy, you know who is this guy, you know? So he didn't medal. I'm gonna, you know, he's not that important and you know, up until, right until you get to the right before the olympics now they talk about he's an Olympian again and but up until that point and then every little kid steve Kayla's medal, Travis, Yeah, you went to the olympics, where's your medal? How did you do you know, it was took fifth that in place, you know, it's it's the lowest of low every day having that constant reminder. So four years later, when that guy, I mean mentally he was ready physically, he was ready, that was the best and strongest Travis stevens that I've ever seen and I've ever felt because I had to get on the mat and do some drills and stuff like that and like try to defend on bars and because we have a lot of bodies in in rio and I was like, my God, he's I said after one of the things that's as strong as I've ever felt, that guy right before, the competitions are physically was ready mentally the morning of competition, I said to Travis, I looked him in the eye and I said, you know, we're ready to go over to the venue, I said are you ready today? And he just looked at me like he goes, I am going to shock the world today, so I'm gonna shock the world today and I said, alright, great, let's go right, so we go to the venue and every other athlete was just like nervously like doing repetitions of hoochie Comey's, you could see like sweat coming out, you could see like all this nervous energy going through their body. And here comes Travis stevens. He's got these big goofy headphones on, he's got a tank top that says usa on it. He's got the swim trunks that se usa like that have shiny letters that glow in the dark and and he's like, this is in the middle of the judo hall where all these outfits are warming up for their first match. He's like dancing around like doing this loose warm up, like almost like a little kid at an amusement park whose dad said, yeah, go play, you know? And it was like he had waited four years for that moment, he was so relaxed, so focused, so relaxed and couldn't wait. It was like a caged tiger, like if you like coming out of the chute to go step onto the mat, I was like this tiger that you were just letting out of the cage and you just go like now is your time to go fight and that's what he did that whole day and like would he be Cherokees villian in the, in the semis and choke them out and won that fight. Like there's nobody with the exception of maybe the guys in the american team, there was nobody in that stadium that expected Travis to beat him. Nobody like, you know, he had smashed Travis. I don't know how many times before that free poem, like in the first minute even it wasn't even a fight right? And and it was a great game plan. </s>

<s>[INST] What? See the, just to linger on that a little bit is uh Bill Gates, the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates bother me because this is me dumb naive lex things that Bill Gates did a lot of good for this world. First by creating a company that empowered personal computers and second by donating a ton of money for like treating malaria in africa and all those kinds of things and there's these huge amounts of conspiracies I think based on like just replies to whenever uh Bill Gates does anything like to me, the top replies should be about how inspiring that guy is to donate so much money. I think, I think society and the thing I'm struggling with is if I'm Bill Gates, like how do you behave differently, how do you show people that you're if you're not, I don't know doing creepy stuff that they're saying he's doing [/INST] well. I think part of it is that he's done some really good stuff, right, is an innovative guys on the vanguard of a lot of things, but he's also the antichrist and I think that that is, you know, they're not mutually exclusive, he is the Prince of Darkness as well as some know, here's my Bill Gates, he's a batman villain billionaire, meaning that he's not a villain, but he's got oldest money right here is the thing, I love mosque and all these guys, I know you love these guys listen when you have the kind of money that these guys have and you have the vision that they have and they want society to look a certain way and a lot of them are doing great things, people, they need to get better at the push back. They need to get a little better when somebody says, hey man, what's going on over there? Bill Gates needs to be a little better going, here's what? Because you know Bill Gates has the money, you know, I think he wants, he wanted to shoot a missile of dust at the atmosphere to help global warming and a lot of scientists like a man that might not be the way to do it, but no one in history, like so few people in history have the resources to even have that thought, that if you have the resources to have that thought and you have designs on the way you want society to look, whether it's public health policy vaccinations, whatever you have to get a little better at dealing with legitimate critiques and obviously you're not defending yourself against people, say you're the antichrist, but like you need to get a little better and I feel like Bill Gates and some of those people at that level or like uh pr is kind of like, </s><s>[INST] you know, they're terrible there terrible, terrible. Human Zuckerberg are really bad at Zuckerberg's [/INST] horrible at it. He seems especially um bad at public. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, and it makes me feel so bad because the problem with being a billionaire is you lose touch with reality if you're not careful, I think Ellen is good at least so far maintaining touch with reality. [/INST] But if you look at the name of his child, you can clearly see, listen, I do like him and I do think what he's done with Tesla. You know my producer is a Tesla, he never shuts up about it and most people that have Tesla's never shut up about them and they thought they think they're part of the development team at SpaceX and I I like that he's created a world where people can get excited about a $37,000 car and never shut the funk up about it. To the point where I have to threaten people with physical violence to get them to stop telling me about that their car drives itself should have a few less drinks and a few, a few fewer viking and and you can drive yourself. </s><s>[INST] Have you thought about getting? [/INST] I've never thought about, I don't like them, they're minimalist. I don't like it, I want more, I want more. I want, I want to say, I want my my my my producer wants a cybertruck, I want a stage coach, old school stage coach, horse thief, shit. It's going, it's going back to that, I live in an area, a lot of horses, it's going back to like whipping a horse, I want an animal to shriek while I go by. You want more suffering </s><s>[INST] in the world, not less. So [/INST] I think we need it. </s><s>[INST] Okay. But I just don't like that billionaire is a bad word and it's not sure every billionaire is a pedophile. [/INST] I know, but the problem is a lot of like, it's just, you know, Epstein was very smart and like just getting people at that house and taking photos of them. Nobody knew what they were doing. But it's like, it was one of those things was like, that was the most social guy ever. Like Every photo he's like, Hey, it's like everyone that's ever done anything in the world has been at that fucking island. Every human being is like in a photo. It's just weird. Like I'm in like, it's funny me and my friends get together. We don't ever take photos, right? Like last night a few people, I was on my birthday yesterday, I'm 17 and my my friends came over and we're just eating dinner, right? And we had a fun night. Just four people that are over. Nobody, right? Nobody ever thought like, let's let's, hey, I wanna remember it, Let's take photos. I'm 36. Whoo, but everything happens to you did. There's just photos of everybody. It's interesting. </s><s>[INST] Do you think Jeffrey Epstein killed himself? [/INST] No, I think he was killed by that guy that that that that guy that they put in a cell. That lunatic. Who's that big muscle guy? I think he was just he did it for money, kept his mouth shut that </s>

<s>[INST] there's there's with every medium, there's the the challenges of how the sausage [/INST] is made. So like the </s><s>[INST] challenges of the [/INST] challenge of actually. But it's also I'd like to like go on like as, you know, long as monologues and you can't do if you're the interviewer, like you're not supposed to do that as much. So I have to like rein it in and and that's that can be that might be hard, but you can also do solo type stuff. Yeah, maybe I'll do a little of </s><s>[INST] each, you know what's funny? I mean some of my favorite is more like solo, but there's like a sidekick, so you're you're you're having a conversation but you're like friends, but it's really you ranting, which I think, I think it would be extremely good. That's [/INST] funny. Yeah, Or even if it's 50 50 that's fine. Like if it's just a friend who I want to like, really rift with, I just don't I don't like interviewing someone, which I won't that's not what the podcast will be, but I can't help. I've tried moderating panels before and I cannot help myself, I have to get involved and no one likes a moderator who's too involved, it's very unappealing. So I um you know, interviewing someone and I'm like, I I can't I don't even know why don't I just, it's not my I can grill someone that's different, that's my curiosity being like, wait, how about this? And I interrupt them and I see the way your brain </s><s>[INST] works. It's hilarious. It's awesome. It's like lights up with fire and excitement. Yeah, I actually I love listening. I like watching people, like listening to people. So this is like me right now having just listening to a podcast, this is me listening to your [/INST] podcast listening to a podcast because then it's not even like, but once I'm in the room I suddenly can't help myself jumping in. </s><s>[INST] Okay, big last ridiculous question, what is the meaning of life? [/INST] The meaning of like an individual life, </s><s>[INST] your existence here on earth? Or, or maybe broadly this whole thing we've got going on descendants of apes. [/INST] Um, yeah, yeah. For for me, I feel like, um I want to be around as long as I can, if I can, if I can do some kind of crazy life extension or upload myself, I'm gonna because who doesn't want to see how cool 20 the year 3000 is? Imagine </s><s>[INST] you did say mortality was not appealing? [/INST] No, it's not appealing at all to me now. It's ultimately appealing. As I said that no one wants eternal life. I believe if they understood what eternity really was. You know, I did Graham's number as a post and I was like, okay, no one wants to live that many. But I'd like to choose. I'd like to say, you know what, I'm truly over it now and I'm going to have, you know, at that point, we have our whole society would have like, we have a ceremony, we have a whole process of someone signing off and, you know, it would be, it would be beautiful and it would, it wouldn't </s><s>[INST] be, you know, I think you'd be super depressed by that point. Like, who's going to sign off when they're doing [/INST] maybe, maybe, yes, okay, maybe it's dark, but at least, but the point is if I'm happy, I can stay around for, you know, but my, I'm thinking 50 centuries sounds great. Like, I don't know if I want more than that, 50 50 sounds like a right number. And so if you're thinking, if you would sign up for 50 if you had a choice One is what I get that is bullshit. Like if you want, if you're someone who wants 51 is a hideous number, right? You know? Anyway, so, um, for me personally, I want to be around as long as I can, and then honestly, the reason I love writing the thing I love most is like, is like a warm, fuzzy connection with other people, right? And that can be my friends and it can be readers and that's why I would never want to be like a journalist where their personalities like hidden behind the writing. Um, or like even a biographer, you know, there's a lot of people who are the other great writers, but it's, I like to personally connect and if I can take something that's in my head and other people can say, oh my God, I think that too, and this made me feel so much better. It made me feel seen like that feels amazing and, and I just feel like, um, uh, we're all having such a weird common experience on this one little rock in this one little moment of time where this weird, these weird four limbed beings and we're all the same and it's like we're all, we're all the human experience. So I feel like so many, many of us suffer in the same ways and we're all going through a lot of the same things and to me it is very if if I lived, if I was on my deathbed and I feel like I had like I had a ton of human connection and like shared a lot of common experience and made a lot of other people feel like like uh not alone. </s><s>[INST] Do you feel that as a writer? Do you, do you like here and feel like the inspiration, like all the people that you make smile and all the people who inspire, [/INST] honestly not sometimes, you know, when we did an in person event and that, you know, meet a bunch of people and it's incredibly gratifying or you know, you just, you know, you get emails, but I think it is easy to forget that how many people, sometimes you're </s>

<s>[INST] That's referring to walking if you're like falling forward, I guess their way to walk, that's fully actuated. [/INST] So it's a subtle point when you're when you're in contact and you have your feet? Um on the ground, there are still limits to what you can do, right? Unless I have suction cups on my feet, I cannot accelerate my center of mass towards the ground faster than gravity because I can't get a force pushing me down, right? But I can still do most of the things that I want to, so you can get away with basically thinking of the system is fully actuated unless you suddenly needed to accelerate down super fast. But as soon as I take a step, I get into the more nuanced territory and to get to really dynamic robots or airplanes or other things. Um I think you have to embrace the under actuated dynamics manipulation. People think is manipulation. Under under actuated. Even if my arm is fully actuated, I have a motor. If my goal is to control the position and orientation of this cup, then I don't have an actuator for that directly. So I have to use my actuators over here to control this thing. Now, it gets even worse. Like what if I have to button my shirt? Okay, what are the degrees of freedom of my shirt? Right? I suddenly, that's a hard question to think about. It kind of makes me queasy as thinking about my state's based control ideas. Um But actually those are the problems that make me so excited about manipulation right now, is that it it breaks some of the um it breaks a lot of the foundational control stuff that I've been thinking about. </s><s>[INST] Is there uh what are some interesting insights you can say about trying to solve and under actuated like control in in under actuated system. [/INST] So I think the philosophy there is let physics do more of the work. The technical approach has been optimization. So you typically formulate your decision making for control as an optimization problem and you use the language of optimal control and sometimes often numerical optimal control in order to make those decisions and balance these complicated equations of and in order to control, you don't have to use optimal control to do under actuated systems. But that has been the technical approach that has born the most fruit in our at least in our line of work. </s><s>[INST] And there's some so in under actually systems, when you say let physics do some of the work. So there's a kind of feed feedback loop that observes the state that the physics brought you to. So like you've there's a there's a perception there, this is, there's a feedback, some How do you do um do you ever lupin like complicated perception systems into this whole picture? [/INST] Right right around the time of the DARPA challenge. We had a complicated perception system in the DARPA challenge. We also started to embrace perception for our flying vehicles at the time. We had a really good project on trying to make airplanes fly at high speeds through forests. Um, Surtax Carmen was on that project and uh, it was a really fun team to work on. He's carried it farther, much farther forward since then. </s><s>[INST] So using cameras for perception. [/INST] So that was using cameras that was at the time we felt like lighter was too heavy and too power. Uh, heavy to to be carried on on a light U A. V. And we were using cameras and that was a big part of it was just how do you do even stereo matching at a fast enough rate with a small camera, a small on board computer? Since then we have now. So the deep learning revolution unquestionably changed what we can do with perception for robotics and control. So in manipulation we can address, we can use perception. You know, I think a much deeper way and we get into not only I think the first use of it naturally would be the ask your deep learning system to look at the cameras and produce the state, which is like the pose of my thing for instance, but I think we've quickly found out that that's not always the right thing to do. Um what is that? Because what's the state of my shirt? Imagine? I'm very </s><s>[INST] noisy. I mean it's [/INST] um, if the first step of me trying to button my shirt is estimate the full state of my shirt including like what's happening in the back, you know, whatever, whatever, that's just not the right uh specification. There's aspects of the state that are very important to the task. There are many that are un observable and not not important to the task, so you really need it. It begs new questions about state representation. Another example that we've been playing with in the lab has been just the idea of chopping onions, okay, Or carrots turns out to be better. So onions stink up the lab uh and they're hard to see in a camera, but uh details matter, Yeah, details matter, you know? So um moving around a particular object right then I think about, oh it's got a position and orientation in space, that's the description I want. Now when I'm chopping an onion, okay, like the first chop comes down, I have now 100 pieces of onion. Does my control system really need to understand the position and orientation and even the shape of the 100 pieces of onion in order to make a decision. Probably not, you know, and if I keep going, I'm just getting more and more is my state space getting bigger as I cut it. Um It's not right. So somebody there's, I think there's a richer idea of state, it's not the state that is given to us by Legrand and mechanics, there is a um there is a proper the ground state of the system but the relevant state for this um is some latent state is what we call it a machine learning but you know there's some some different state representative, </s>

<s>[INST] I did this recently with Star Trek Discovery on UK netflix. Mostly because I wonder what it's like to live in London. I'm thinking of moving from boston to a place where I can build the business. I've always dreamed of building London. It's probably not in the top three, but top 10 for sure. The number one choice currently is austin for many reasons that I'll probably speak to another time. SaN Francisco unfortunately dropped off from the number one spot but it's still in the running. If you have advice, let me know anyway, check out expressive PM unless you change your location to almost 100 countries and it's super fast. Go to Express VPN dot com slash flex pod to get an extra three months of express VPN for free? That's express VPN dot com slash lex pod. And now here's my conversation with James Gosling. [/INST] I've </s><s>[INST] read somewhere that the square of two is your favorite irrational number. [/INST] I have no idea where that got started. </s><s>[INST] Um Is there any truth to it? Is there anything in mathematics or numbers that you find beautiful? [/INST] Oh there's lots of things in in math. It's really beautiful. Um you know, I, I used to consider myself really good at math and these days I consider myself really bad at math. I never really had a thing for the square root of two but when I was a teenager there was this book called the Dictionary of curious and interesting numbers which for some reason I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing and I started this weird habit of when I was like filling out checks, you know or you know paying for things with credit cards. I would want to make the, the receipt add up to an interesting number. </s><s>[INST] Is there some numbers that stuck with you that just kind of make you feel good? [/INST] They'll have a story and fortunately I've actually mostly forgotten all of them. Yeah. Um </s><s>[INST] Are they so like 42. [/INST] Well yeah, I mean that was 42 is pretty magical </s><s>[INST] and then the rationals I mean, but is there a squared of two story in there somewhere? How does that? [/INST] It's like the only number that has destroyed religion </s><s>[INST] in which way? [/INST] Well the path a gory ins, they believe that all numbers were perfect and you could represent anything as as as a rational number. And um in that in that time period um does this proof came out that there was no you know, rational fraction whose value is equal to the square root of two? </s><s>[INST] And that that means nothing in this world is perfect. Not even mathematics. [/INST] Well, it means that your definition of perfect was imperfect. </s><s>[INST] Well then there's the gato incompleteness theorems in the 20th century that ruined it once again for everybody. [/INST] Yeah. Although although although girdle serum, um you know the lesson I take from girdles serum is not that you know, there are things you can't know which is fundamentally what it says. Um But you know, people want black and white answers, they want tour false. Um But if you if you allow a three state logic that is true false or maybe then then life is good. </s><s>[INST] I feel like there's a parallel to modern political discourse in there somewhere. But [/INST] I mean </s><s>[INST] let me ask uh so with your kind of early uh love or appreciation of the beauty of mathematics, do you see a parallel between that world and the world of programming? [/INST] You know programming is all about logical structure, understanding the patterns that come out of computation, understanding sort of, I mean it's often like, you know the path through the graph of possibilities to find a short short route </s><s>[INST] meaning like uh find a short program that gets the job done I think. But so then on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see D. C. Programming, you just painted it so cleanly? Uh It's a little this trajectory to find like a nice little program, but do you see it as fundamentally messy? Um Maybe I'm like mathematics, [/INST] I don't think of it as, I mean, I mean you know, you watch somebody who's good at math, do math and you know often it's it's fairly messy sometimes it's kind of magical. Um when I was a grad student um one of the students, his name was Jim Sachs was he had this this this this this reputation of being sort of a walking talking human, uh we're improving machine. And if you were having a hard problem with something, you could just like a costume in the hall and say jim. But and and he would do this this this funny thing where he would stand up straight, his eyes would kind of be focus, he uh you know, just just like you know like like something in today's movies, he just uh and then straighten up and say and log in and walk away and you go, well, okay so in Logan is the answer. How did he get there by which time he's, you know, down the hallway somewhere? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he's just the oracle, the black box. It just gives you the answer. [/INST] Yeah. And then you have to figure out the path from the question to the answer. </s><s>[INST] I think in one of the videos I watched, you mentioned don can youth uh well at least recommending is uh, you know, his book is something people should read. But in terms of, you know, theoretical computer science, do you, do you see something beautiful that has been inspiring to you? Speaking of n Logan in your work on programming languages? That's in the, in the whole world of algorithms and complexity and you know, these kinds of more formal mathematical things or did that not really stick with you in your programming life? [/INST] It did stick pretty clearly for me because one of the things that I care about is being able to sort of look at a piece of code and be able to prove to myself that it works. And, and you know, so, so for example, I find that um, I'm, I met odds with many of the people around me over um, issues about like how you layout a piece of software. Right? So so software engineers get really cranky about how they format their the documents that are the programs, you know, where they put new lines and where they put the braces braces and all the rest of that. And I tend to go for a style that's very dense uh </s><s>[INST] minimize the white space. [/INST] Um Yeah, well to maximize the amount that I can see at once. Right? So I like to be able to see a whole function and to understand what it does rather than have to go scroll, scroll, scroll and remember, </s><s>[INST] yeah, I'm with you on that and people don't like that. [/INST] Yeah, I've had I've had, you know, multiple times when engineering teams have uh staged what was effectively an intervention, um you know, where they invite me to a meeting and everybody has arrived before me and they sort of all look at me and say James about your coding style. I'm sort of an odd person to be programming because I don't think very well verbally. Um I am just naturally a slow reader. Um I'm what most people would call a visual thinker. </s><s>[INST] So when you think about a program, what do you see? [/INST] I see pictures, Right. So when I look at a piece of code on the piece of paper, it very quickly gets transformed into a picture. Um and you know, it's almost like a piece of machinery with, you know, this connected to that and these gears. Yeah, yeah, I see them more like that than I see the the sort of verbal structure or the lexical structure of letters </s><s>[INST] so that when you look at the program, that's why you want to see it all in the same place, then you can just map it to something visual, [/INST] Yeah, just kind of like, it leaps off the page at me and </s><s>[INST] yeah. What are the inputs, where the outputs? What the heck is this thing doing? Getting a whole vision of it? Can we are go back into your memory, memory, long term memory access. What's the first program you've ever written? [/INST] I have no idea what the first one was. I mean I I know the first machine that I learned that I learned to program on, what is it was a PDP eight um at the University of Calgary, </s><s>[INST] remember the specs? [/INST] Oh yeah, so so the thing had four K of RAM nice 12 bit words. The clock rate was um it was about a third of a megahertz. </s><s>[INST] So you even get to the, to the m [/INST] okay. Yeah. Yeah. So you know, we're we're like 10,000 times faster these days. </s><s>[INST] Um It was this kind of like a supercomputer, like a serious computer for [/INST] no, the PDP eight, I was the the first thing that people were calling, like mini computer got it. They were inexpensive enough that a university lab could maybe afford to buy one. </s><s>[INST] It was their time sharing, all that kind of stuff. [/INST] Um There there actually was a time sharing, No s for that, but it wasn't used really widely. The machine that I learned on was one that was kind of hidden in a back corner of the, of the computer center and it was it was bought as a as part of a project to do computer networking. Um but mhm. You know, they didn't actually use it very much. It was mostly just kind of sitting there and it was kind of sitting there and I noticed it was just kind of sitting there and so I started fooling around with it and nobody seemed to mind. So I just kept doing that and </s><s>[INST] I had a keyboard and like a monitor or [/INST] oh this is way before monitors were common. So it was it was literally a model 33 teletype. Okay with a paper tape </s><s>[INST] reader. Okay, so the user interface wasn't very good. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah, it was it was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits, but by integrated circuits, I mean that they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on one piece of silicon, not the 10 or 12 billion for the machines have today. </s><s>[INST] So what did that I mean, I feel like if you remember those, I mean did you have kind of inklings of the magic of exponential kind of improvement of moore's law of the potential of the future. That was that [/INST] your fingertips kind of thing. I was just a cool. Yeah, it was just a toy. You know, I had always liked building stuff but one of the problems with building stuff is that you need to have parts, you know, you need to have pieces of wood or wire or switches or stuff like that and that was all cost money </s><s>[INST] and here you could build [/INST] you could build arbitrarily complicated things and I didn't need any physical materials um It required no money. </s><s>[INST] That's a good way to put programming, you're right, it's a if you love building things that uh yeah completely accessible, you don't need anything anybody from any work, you just build something really cool. [/INST] Yeah yeah if you've got access to a computer you can you can build all kinds of crazy stuff. Um and you know and when you were </s><s>[INST] somebody [/INST] like me who had like really no money um and I mean I I remember just lusting after being able to buy like a transistor. Mhm. Um You know and when I would do sort of electronics kind of projects they were mostly made done by like dumpster diving for trash, you know and you know one of my big halls was uh discarded relay racks from the back of a the phone company switching center. </s><s>[INST] That was the big memorable treasure. [/INST] Oh yeah yeah that </s><s>[INST] was what do you use that [/INST] for? I built a machine that played tic tac toe. </s><s>[INST] Uh huh. [/INST] Out of relays of course the thing that was really hard um was that all the relays required a specific voltage but getting a power supply that will would do that voltage was pretty hard and since I had a bunch of trashed television sets, I had to um sort of cobbled together something that was wrong but worked. Um So I was actually running these relays at 300 volts. Uh huh. And and none of the electrical connections were like properly sealed off, </s><s>[INST] surprised you survived that period of your life. [/INST] Oh for so many reasons, for so many reasons, I mean, you know, you're, you know, it's pretty common for teenage geeks to discover, oh Thermite, that's real easy to make. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, well I'm glad you did, but do you remember the, do you remember what program and and Calgary that you wrote? Anything that stands out and what language? [/INST] Well so mostly anything of any size was assembly code. Um And actually before I learned assembly code there was this programming language on the PDP eight called focal five. And folks if I was kind of like a really stripped down FORTRAN and I remember playing, you know, building programs that did things like um play blackjack um or solitaire or for some reason rather than things that I really liked were ones where they were just like pop plotting graphs, </s><s>[INST] so something with like a function or data and then you plot [/INST] it. Yeah, I did a bunches of those things and going, ooh, pretty pictures. Um </s><s>[INST] And so this was like print out again. No, no monitors, [/INST] right? So it was like on a teletype? Mhm. Yeah, so it's using something that's kind of like a typewriter and then using those to plot functions. </s><s>[INST] So when uh I apologize to romanticize things but when did you first fall in love with programming? You know what was the first programming language like? This is serious? Maybe software engineer where you thought this is a beautiful same? [/INST] I guess I never really thought of any particular language as being beautiful because it was never really about the language for me, it was about what you could do with it. Um And you know even today you know people try to get me into arguments about particular forms of syntax for this or that and I'm like who cares? You know it's it's about what you can do, not not not how you spell the word. Um And you know so back in those days I I learned like peel one and FORTRAN and COBOL and and you know by the time that people were willing to hire me to do stuff you know it was mostly assembly code and PDP eight assembly code and and FORTRAN code and um control data's assembly code for like the C. D. C. 6400 which was an early guess supercomputer, even though that supercomputer has less compute power than my phone by a lot. Mhm. </s><s>[INST] And that was mostly like said FORTRAN world that said you've also showed appreciation for the greatest language uh ever that I think everyone agrees is lisp. Um Well [/INST] this was definitely on my list of the greatest ones that have existed. </s><s>[INST] Number one, or I mean um are you, I mean, [/INST] you know, the you know, the thing is that it's that, you know, I wouldn't put it number one, No, </s><s>[INST] is it the parentheses? What uh what do you love, what you not love about? Listen? [/INST] Um well, I guess the number one thing to not love about it is so freaking many parentheses um on the on the love thing is, you know, out of those who tons of parentheses, you actually get an interesting language structure and I've always thought that there was a friendlier version of lISP hiding out there somewhere. Um but I've never really spent much time thinking about it thinking about it, but you know, so like, like up the food chain for me um than from lISP is similar, which a very small number of people have ever used, </s><s>[INST] but a lot of people, I think he had a huge influence right on the programming, but in a similar, I apologize if I'm wrong on this, but is that one of the first functional languages um or No, [/INST] no, it was it was the first object or unit language got it. It's really where object oriented and languages came together. Um and it was also the language where co routines first showed up as a part of the language, so you could have a programming style that was, you could think of it as multiple uh sort of multi threaded with a lot of parallel parallelism </s><s>[INST] really. There's ideas of parallelism in [/INST] there. Yeah. Yeah, so that was that was back, you know, so so the first stimulus beck was Simula 67 </s><s>[INST] for like 1967. Yeah, [/INST] wow. So it had it had co routines which are almost threads. The thing about co routines is that they don't have true concurrency so you can get away without um really complex locking. You can't usually do co routines on a on the multi core machine or if you try to do core co routines on multicore mute machine, you don't actually get to use the multiple cores. Either that or you you know, because you you start then having to get into the universe of you know, semaphore is and locks and things like that. Um But in terms of the style of programming you could write code and think think of it as being multi threaded, The mental model was very much a multi threaded one. And all kinds of problems you could approach very differently </s><s>[INST] to return to uh the world of list for a brief moment. You at cmu you you wrote a version of imax that that I think was very impactful in the history of imax uh what what was your motivation for for doing so [/INST] at that time? So that was in like 85 or 86. Um I had been using UNIX for a few years and um most of the editing was this this tool called Eddie um which was sort of an ancestor of V. And </s><s>[INST] it's a pretty good editor. Not a good [/INST] editor. Well if if what you're using um if your input devices a teletype, it's pretty good. It's certainly more humane than tico, which was kind of the common thing. And in a lot of um the deck universe at the time </s><s>[INST] Tico is called T K [/INST] T K O T E C O the text editor and corrector </s><s>[INST] corrector so many features. [/INST] Um And the original imax um came out as so you may extends for editor. Macros and Tico had a way of writing macros. And so the original um imax from MIT sort of started out as a collection of macros for tico. But then, you know, you know, the sort of imax style got got popular originally at MIT and then people did a few other implementations of imax that were, you know, the code base was entirely different but it was sort of the philosophical style of the original imax. </s><s>[INST] What was the philosophy of imax? And by the way, we're all the implementations always in C. And then know how does list fit into the picture? [/INST] No. So, so the very first imax was written as a bunch of macros for the deco. Text editor. </s><s>[INST] Wow, that's so [/INST] interesting. And the the macro language for Tico, it was probably the most ridiculously obscure format. You know, if you just look at a T. Co program on a page you think it was just random characters. It really looks like just line noise. </s><s>[INST] Just kind of like latex or something. [/INST] Oh worse way worse than they take way way worse than late tech. Um But you know if you use tico a lot which I did the the tico was completely optimized for touch typing at high speed. Um So there were no two character commands or there were a few but mostly they were just one character. So every character on the keyboard was a separate command. Um And actually every character on the keyboard which is usually two or three commands because you know you get shift in control and all of those things you know it's just a way of very tightly encoding it. And mostly what imax did was it made that that visual? Right So one way to think of tiko is use imax with your eyes closed. Mhm. Where you have to maintain a mental model of you know sort of a mental image of your document. You have to go okay so the cursor is between the A. And E. And I want to exchange though. So I do these these things right. So it almost it is almost exactly the imax command set. Well it's roughly approximately roughly the same as imax command set. But using imax with your eyes closed. Um So what imax you know part of what imax added to the whole thing was was being able to visually see what you were editing in a form that matched your document. Um and you know, a lot of things changed in the in the command said it um you know, because it was programmable, it was really flexible, you could add new commands for all kinds of things and then people rewrote imax like multiple times in lISP, there was one done at MIT for the list machine, there was one done for multiplex. And one summer I got a got a summer job to work on the pascal compiler for multex and that was actually the first time I used imax and and and so </s><s>[INST] right, the compilers you walked and compilers to it. Yeah, yeah, [/INST] so I did a lot of work, you know, I mean I spent like, like a really intense three months working on this pascal compiler um basically living in imax, and it was it was the one written in meticulous by Bernie Greenberg and I thought, wow, this is a, just a way better way to do editing. Um and then I got back to cmu where we had kind of one of everything and two of a bunch of things and four of a few things and um since I mostly worked in the UNIX universe and UNIX didn't have an imax, I decided that I needed to fix that problem. So I so I wrote this this implementation of imax in C because at the time she was really the only language that worked on on on UNIX. </s><s>[INST] Um and you were comfortable with C as well at that point? [/INST] Yeah. At that time I had done a lot of C c coding that this was in like 86 um and you know, it was running well enough to be used for me to use it to edit itself within a month or two and then it kind of took over the university and </s><s>[INST] and it spread and then Yeah, [/INST] and then it went outside the and largely because UNIX kind of took over the research community on the, on the, on the Arpanet then an imax was it was kind of the best editor out there, It kind of took over and there was actually a brief period where I actually had log in ids on every non military host on the, on the AARP Annette, you know, because people would say, how can we install this? And, and I'd like, well, yeah, but you'll need some help. Uh </s><s>[INST] the days when security wasn't [/INST] when nobody </s><s>[INST] cared, nobody cared. Yeah, you can ask briefly, what were those early days of our Burnett and the internet, like what was uh, what I mean? Did you again, sorry for the silly question, but could you have possibly imagined that the internet would look like what it is today, [/INST] You know, some of it is remarkably unchanged. So like, one of the things that I noticed really early on, um uh you know, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, was that a lot of social life became centered around the Arpa net. So things like, you know, between email and text messaging, because, you know, text messaging was a part of the Arpanet really early on, there were no cell phones, but you know, you're sitting at a terminal in your typing stuff and essentially email </s><s>[INST] or like what, what [/INST] is, well, it's just like, like a one line message. Right? So, so, so it's like chat? Like chat, right? So it's like, like sending a one line message to somebody, right? And, and so pretty much everything from, you know, arranging lunch too, going out on dates. You know, it was all like driven by social media, right? In the, in the, in the eighties </s><s>[INST] easier than phone calls. Yeah. [/INST] You know, and my life had gotten to where, you know, I was, you know, living on social media, you know, from like the early mid eighties. Um, and, and so when, when it sort of transformed into the internet and social media explodes, I was kind of like, </s><s>[INST] what's the big deal? It's just a scale thing. [/INST] It's, it's right, the scale thing is just astonishing. </s><s>[INST] But the fundamentals in some ways, the [/INST] fundamentals have hardly changed. And, you know, the technologies behind the networking have changed significantly, The, you know, the, the watershed moment of, you know, going from the Arpanet to the internet. Um and then people starting to just scale and scale and scale, I mean the the scaling that happened in the early nineties and the way that so many vested interests fought the internet. </s><s>[INST] Oh, who? Oh, interesting. What was the, because you can't really control the internet. Yeah, [/INST] so so so fundamentally the, you know, the cable tv companies and broadcasters and phone companies um you know, at the deepest fibers of there being, they hated the internet. But it was often kind of a funny thing because um so think of a cable company right? Most of the employees of the cable company, their job is getting Tv shows, movies, whatever out to their customers, they view their business as serving their customers. Um but as you climb up the hierarchy in the cable companies that view shifts because um really the business of the cable companies had had always been selling eyeballs to advertisers, </s><s>[INST] right? [/INST] Um and you know that view of of like a cable company didn't really dawn on most people who worked at the cable companies. But you know, we, you know, I had various dust ups with various cable companies where you could see, you know, in the stratified layers of the corporation, but that this this this this this view of, you know, the reason that you have, you know, cable tv is to capture eyeballs, you know there, they </s><s>[INST] didn't see it that way. [/INST] Well, so so the people who the most of the people who worked at the phone company are at the cable companies, their view was that their their job was getting delightful content out to their customers and their customers would pay for them would pay for that higher up. They viewed this as as a way of attracting eyeballs to them. And and then what they were really doing was selling the eyeballs, they were glued to their content to the advertisers. </s><s>[INST] Advertisers. And so the internet was a competition in that sense. [/INST] Right? And and and and they were right. Well, yeah, I mean there was one proposal that we sent that we won detailed proposal that we um wrote up, you know, back at that son in the in the early nineties, that was essentially like, look, anybody, you know, with with internet technologies, anybody can become provider of of content. So, you know, you could be distributing home movies to your parents or your cousins who are anywhere else. Right? So anybody can become a published </s><s>[INST] you were thinking about that already. [/INST] Yeah, that was yeah, that was that was like in the in the early nineties and we thought this would be great. You could, you know, and the kind of content we were thinking about at the time was like, you know, home movies kids essays, um you know, stuff from like grocery stores or you know, you know that the or or a restaurant that they could actually like start sending information about and um that's brilliant and, and the reaction of the cable companies was like, but no, because because then we're out of business, </s><s>[INST] what is it about companies that because they could have just, they could have been the head of that way. They could have listened to that [/INST] and they they didn't see a path to revenue. </s><s>[INST] You know, there's, there's somewhere in there. There's a lesson for like big companies, right? Like to listen to, to try to anticipate the renegade out there out of the box. People like yourself in the early days writing proposals about what this could possibly be [/INST] well in that, you know, you know, it wasn't, you know, if you're in a, in a position where you're making truckloads of money off of a particular business model. Um, you know, the whole um thought of like, you know, leaping the chasm, right? You know, you know, you can see, oh, new models that are more effective are emerging, right? So like digital cameras versus film cameras, um you know, I mean, why take the leap, why take the lead? Because you're making so much money off of film? And um, you know, in my past it, son, one of our big customers was Kodak and I ended up interacting with folks from Kodak quite a lot. And they actually had a big um, digital camera research and, you know, digital imaging business or development group and they knew that, that, you know, you just look at the trend lines and you look at, um, you know, the emerging quality of, of, of these digital cameras and you know, you can just pop plotted on the graph, you know, and it's like, you know, sure film is better today, but you know, digital is, is improving like this, the lines are going to cross and, and you know, the point at which the lines cross is going to be a collapse in their business. And they could see that, right. They absolutely knew that the problem is that, you know, up to the point where they hit the wall, they were making truckloads of money, right? And when they did the math, um, it never started to make sense for them to kind of lead the charge. And part of the issues for a lot of companies for this kind of stuff is that, you know, if you're going to leap over a chasm like that, like, like with Kodak going from, from film to digital, that's a transition, that's going to take a while, right? We had, we had fights like this with people over like smart cards, the smart cards, fights were just ludicrous, </s><s>[INST] but that's where visionary leadership comes in, right? There's somebody used to roll in and say then take to take the leap. [/INST] Well, it's, it partly take the leap, but it's also partly take the hit, </s><s>[INST] take the hit. So, [/INST] so, so, so you can draw the graphs, you want that show that, you know, if we leap from here, you know, the, you know, on our present trajectory, we're doing this and there's a cliff, if we um, force ourselves into it into a transition and we proactively do that, we can beyond the next wave, but there will be a period when we're in a trough and pretty much always there ends up being a trough as you leap the chasm. But the way that public companies work on this planet, they're reporting every quarter. And the one thing that a ceo must never do is take a big </s><s>[INST] hit, take a big hit [/INST] over some, some quarter. And, and many of these transitions involve a big hit for a, a period of time, you know, 123 quarters. And so you get some companies and you know, like Tesla and Amazon are really good examples of companies that take huge hits, but they have the luxury of being able to ignore the stock market for a little while and that's not so true today really. But you know, in the early days of both of those companies, um, you know, like, like, like, like, like they both did this thing of, you know, I don't care about the quarterly reports. I care about how many, how many happy customers we have, right and having as many happy customers as possible can often be, um, an enemy of the bottom line. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So how do they make that work? I mean amazon operated the negative for a long time. It's like investing into the [/INST] future. But you know, so amazon and google and Tesla and facebook. A lot of those had, what, what amounted to patient money often because the, there's, there's like a charismatic central figure who has a really large block of stock and they can just make it. So, </s><s>[INST] so what, uh, on that topic, just maybe it's a little small tangent, but uh, you got a chance to work with some pretty big leaders. Well, what are your thoughts about the test society? La musk leadership on the amazon side, Jeff Bezos, all of these folks with large amounts of stock and vision in their company. I mean their founders, yeah. Either either complete founders or like early on folks. And uh, they're the amazon have taken leave a lot of leaps. Uh, you know, uh, probably at the time people would criticize as like, what is this bookstore thing? Why? [/INST] Yeah. And, and you know, Bezels had a vision and he had the ability to just follow it. Lots of people have visions and you know, the average vision is completely idiotic and you crash and burn. Um, you know, the, the Silicon Valley. Um, crash and burn rate is pretty high. Um, and they're not, they don't necessarily crash and burn because they were dumb ideas. But you know, often it's it's just timing, um, timing and luck and you know, you take companies like, like, like Tesla um and and and and, and really, you know, the the original Tesla um you know, sort of pre um Ellen, it was kind of doing sort of okay, but but but he just drove them and because he had a really strong vision, you know, he would he would make calls that we're always, you know, well mostly pretty good. I mean the model X was kind of a goofball thing to do, </s><s>[INST] but he did it boldly anyway. Like there's so many people that just said like there's so many people that oppose them on the falcon wing door, like the doors from the engineering perspective, those doors are ridiculous. It's like [/INST] yeah, there they are a complete travesty </s><s>[INST] but they're but they're exactly the symbol of what great leadership is, which is like you have a vision and you just go like [/INST] if you're gonna do something stupid, make it really stupid and go all in. Yeah, yeah. And you know, to to muss credit, he's a really sharp guy. So going back in time a little bit to steve jobs, you know, steve jobs was a similar sort of character who had a strong vision and was really, really smart and you know, and he wasn't smart about the technology parts of things, but, but so he was really sharp about the yeah, this sort of human relationship between, you know, the relationship between humans and objects. Um, and, but he was a jerk, You know, can </s><s>[INST] we just linger on that a little bit like people say he's a jerk. Um, is that a feature or a bug? [/INST] Well that's, that's, that's the question. Right? So you take people like steve, um, who was really hard on people and, and, and so the question is, was he really, was he needlessly hard on people or was he just making people reach two to meet his vision and you could kind of spin it either way. Um, </s><s>[INST] well the results tell a story. You know, he's uh, he, whatever jerk ways he had, he made people often do the best work of their life. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. And that was absolutely true. And you know, I interviewed with him several times. Um, I did, you know, various negotiations with him and um, even though kind of, personally I liked him, I could never work for him. </s><s>[INST] Why why do you think, uh, that, can you put in towards the kind of tension that you feel would be um destructive as opposed to constructive. [/INST] Oh, he would yell at people, he'd call him names. </s><s>[INST] Um, and you don't [/INST] like that? No, no, I don't, I don't think you need to do that. Um, and you know, he, you know, I think, you know, there's, there's pushing people to excel. Um, and then there's too far and I think he was on the wrong side of the line and I've never worked for musk. I know a number of people who have many of them that have said, and it's, you know, shows up in the press a lot that the musk is kind of that way. And one of the things that I sort of loathed about Silicon Valley these days is that, um, a lot of the high flying successes are run by people who are complete jerks. Um, but it seems like there's been become this, there's come this this sort of mythology out of steve jobs that the reason that he succeeded was because he was super hard on people and, and, and, and, and, and, and in a number of corners people start going, oh, if I want to succeed, I need to be a real jerk, right? And, and, and that for me just does not compute, I mean, I know a lot of successful people who are not jerks who are perfectly fine people, um, you know, they tend to not be in the public eye, </s><s>[INST] The general public somehow lifts the jerks up into the, into the hero status. Well, [/INST] they, because they're, they do things that get them in the press. Yeah. And you know, the people who, um, you know, don't do the kind of things that spill into the press. Um, </s><s>[INST] yeah, I just, uh, talk to chris Lattner, um, for the second time, he's a super nice guy. Just an example of this kind of kind of individual that's in the background. I feel like he's behind like a million technologies, but he also talked about the jerkiness of some of the [/INST] folks. Yeah. And the fact that that being a jerk has become a required style. </s><s>[INST] But one thing I maybe want to ask on that is, and maybe to push back a little bit. So there's the jerk side. But there's also, if I were to criticize what I've seen is about valley, which is almost the resistance to working hard. So on the jerkiness side is uh, uh, it's so posted jobs and Elon kind of pushed people to work really hard to do. And it's a question whether it's possible to do that nicely. But one of the things that bothers me, maybe I'm just rush in and just kind of, you know, romanticize the whole suffering thing. But I think working hard is essential for accomplishing anything interesting like really hard and in the parlance of Silicon Valley, it's probably too hard. This idea of the issue. Work smart, not hard often. Uh, to me it sounds like you should be lazy because of course you want to be the work smart. Of course it would be a maximally efficient, but in order to discover the efficient path, like we're talking about with the short [/INST] program. Yeah, well, you know, the smart hard thing isn't an either or it's an and as an and you write and um you know the the people who say you should work smart? Not hard, they pretty much always fail. </s><s>[INST] Thank you. [/INST] Right. I mean that's that's that's just just a recipe for disaster. I mean there are there are counter examples but there are more people who benefited from the luck </s><s>[INST] and you're saying, yeah exactly. Luck and timing like you said is often uh an essential thing. But you're saying, you know, you can be, you can push people to work hard and do incredible work without, without uh without being nasty. Yeah, without being nasty I think uh um google is a good example of the leadership of google throughout its history has been pretty good example of uh not being nasty [/INST] being, I mean uh the twins Larry and Sergei um are both pretty nice people. </s><s>[INST] Sandy Beach is very nice. [/INST] Yeah. Yeah. And you know it's it's a cultural of people who work really, really hard. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you maybe a little bit of a tense question. We're talking about imax, it seems like you've done some incredible work outside of java. He's done some incredible work that didn't become as popular as it could have because of like licensing issues and open source and like of issues um is due uh what are your thoughts about the, that entire mess? Like what's uh about open source now in retrospect looking back uh about licensing about open sourcing, do you think open source is a good thing, a bad thing, do you have regrets? Do you have wisdom that you've learned from that whole experience? [/INST] So in general, I'm a big fan of open source, the way that it can be used to build communities and promote the development of things and promote collaboration and all of that is really pretty grand. Um when open source turns into a religion that says all things must be open source, um I get kind of weird about that because it's, it's sort of like saying, you know, some, some versions of that, um, end up saying that the all, all software engineers must take a vow of poverty. Right? Right. As though um it's </s><s>[INST] unethical to have money. Yeah, to build a company too. Right. [/INST] And you know, there's a, there's a, there's a slice of me that actually kind of buys into that because you know, people who make billions of dollars off of like a patent and the patent came from like, you know, literally a a stroke of lightning that, that that hits you as you lie half awake in bed. Yeah, that's lucky good for you. The way that that sometimes sort of explodes into something that looks to me a lot like exploitation. You know, you see a lot of that in, in, in like the the drug industry, um, you know when you know, when you've got to got got medications that cost, you know cost you like $100 a day. Yeah, it's like, no. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so the the interesting thing about the sort of open source uh what bothers me is when something is not open source and because of that it's a worse product. Yeah. So like, I mean if I look at your just implementation of imax, like that could have been the dominant implemented like I use the max, that's my main I d I apologize to the world, but I still love it. Uh And you know, I could have been using um your implementation of the max and why aren't I? [/INST] So are you using the gun to the max? </s><s>[INST] I guess the default on Lennox is that canoe [/INST] and and that through a strange passage, started out as the one that I wrote. </s><s>[INST] Exactly. So it's it still has uh Yeah, [/INST] well, and and part of that was because, you know, in, you know, the last couple of years of grad school, it became really clear to me that I was either going to be mr imax forever or I was going to graduate. God, I couldn't actually do both. </s><s>[INST] Is that a hard decision that's so interesting to think about you as a, like it's a different trajectory that could have happened. Yeah, that's fascinating. [/INST] You know, and maybe, you know, I could be fabulously wealthy today if I had become mr imax and imax had mushroomed into a series of text processing applications and all kinds of stuff and you know I would have you know but I have a long history of financially suboptimal decisions because I didn't want that life right? And you know I went to grad school because I wanted to graduate. Um And you know you know being mr imax for a while it's kind of fun and then it kind of became not fun, not fun. Um And you know when it was not fun and I was you know there was no way I could you know pay my rent right? And and I was like okay do I carry on as a grad student as a you know you know I had a research assistantship and I was sort of living off of that and I was trying to do my you know I was doing all my ira where all my R. A. You know being grads work and being mr imax all at the same time. Um And I decided to pick one. And one of the things that I did at the time was I went around you know all the people I knew on the Arpanet who might be able to take over looking after imax. And um pretty much everybody said I got a day job. So so I actually found you know to folks in a couple of folks in a garage in New Jersey um complete with a dog. Um we're willing to take it over but they were going to have to charge money. Um But my deal with them was that they would um only that they would make it free for universities and schools and stuff and they said sure and you know that upsets some people. </s><s>[INST] So you have some now I don't know the full history of this, but I think it's kind of uh interesting, you have some tension with mr Richard Stallman um over the I mean he kind of represents this kind of like like you mentioned free software uh sort of a dogmatic focus on [/INST] all all information must be free </s><s>[INST] must be free. So what is there an interesting way to paint a picture of the disagreement you have with Richard through the years. [/INST] My my basic opposition is that when you say information must be free uh to a really extreme form that turns into, you know, all people whose job is the production of everything from movies to software. Um They must all take a vow of poverty because information must be free. And that doesn't work for me, right? And and I and I don't I don't want to be wildly rich. I am not wildly rich. Um I do okay. Um But I do actually, you know, you know, I've you know, I can feed my Children. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I totally agree with you. It does just make me sad that sometimes the closing of the source. For some reason the people that like a bureaucracy begins to build and sometimes it doesn't, it hurts the [/INST] product. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. It's always sad and there's and there is a, there is a balance in, there is a balance. Um and you know, it's it's not hard hard over, you know, rapacious capitalism and and it's and it's not hard over in the other direction. Um and you know, a lot of the open source movement, they have been magic defined the path to, I'm actually making money, right? So doing things like service and support works for a lot of people. Um you know, and there are some, some ways where it's, it's kind of um yeah, some of them are are a little a little perverse, right? So as you know, part of things like this Sarbanes Oxley Act and various people's interpretations of all kinds of accounting principles. Um and this is kind of a worldwide thing, but if you've got a corporation that is depending on some piece of software, um you know, the often various accounting and reporting standards, say if you don't have a support contract on this thing that your business is depending on, then that's bad. You know, So, so, so, you know, if you've got a, if you've got a database, you need to pay for support and and so, but there's a difference between, you know, the sort of support contracts that, you know, the average open source database producer charges and what somebody who is truly rapacious, like oracle charges, </s><s>[INST] Yes, it's a it's a balance. [/INST] It is, it is absolutely a balance. And you know, there are a lot of, a lot of different ways to make, you know, the math work out for everybody. Um and you know, the the very, you know, unbalanced sort of, you know, like, like the winner takes all thing that that happens in so much of modern commerce, um that just doesn't </s><s>[INST] work for me either. I know you've I've talked about this in quite a few places, but you have created one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Uh It's a programming language that I first learned about object oriented programming with uh you know, I think it's uh programming language that a lot of people use in a lot of different places and millions of devices today, java. So the absurd question, But can you tell the origin story of java [/INST] so long time ago, it's on in about 1990 there was a group of us who we're kind of worried that there was stuff going on in the universe of computing that the computing industry was missing out on. Um and so a few of us started this project at son. They really got going, I mean, we started talking about it in 1990 it really got going in 91. Um and it was all about, you know, what was happening in terms of, you know, computing hardware, you know processors and not working in all of that, that was outside of the computer industry and that was everything from the mhm the sort of early glimmers of cell phones that were happening then to you know you look at elevators and locomotives and process control systems and factories and all kinds of audio, audio equipment and video equipment. Um They all had processors in them and they were all doing stuff with them and and it and it sort of felt like there was something going on there that we needed to understand and </s><s>[INST] so C, C and C plus plus I was in the air already oh [/INST] no C and C plus plus absolutely owned the universe at that time everything was written in C and C plus plus. </s><s>[INST] So where was the hunch that there was a need for revolution? [/INST] Well so the need for a revolution was not about the language, it was about, it was just as simple and vague as there are things happening out there, </s><s>[INST] you understand [/INST] them, we need to understand them and and so a few of us went on several um somewhat epic road trips um literal road trips, literal road trips, it's like get on an airplane, go to Japan visit, you know Toshiba and Sharp and Mitsubishi and Sony and all of these folks and you know because we worked for sun. We had you know, folks who were willing to like give us introductions, you know, we we visited, you know Samsung and um you know a bunch of korean companies and we went all over europe, went to you know, places like like phillips and seamen's and Thompson. And </s><s>[INST] what did you see there? [/INST] You know, for me that one of the things that sort of left out was that they were doing all the usual computer computer things that people had been doing like 20 years before. The thing that really leapt out to me was that they were sort of reinventing computer networking and they were making all the mistakes that people in the computer industry had had made. And since I have been doing a lot of work in in the networking area, you know, you know, we'd go and you know visit, you know, company X they described this networking thing that they were doing and just without any thought, I could I could tell them like the 25 things that we're going to be complete disasters with that thing that they were doing. Um and I don't know whether that had any impact on any of them. But but but that particular story of you know, sort of repeating the disasters of the computer science industry um was there and and one of the things we thought was well maybe we could do something useful here with like bringing them forward somewhat. But but also at the same time we learned a bunch of things from, from these, you know, mostly consumer electronics companies. Um, and, you know, high on the list was that, mm they viewed their like, relationship with the customer as sacred. Um, they were never ever willing to make trade offs between for, for safety. All right. So one of the things that had always made me nervous in the computer industry was that, um, people were willing to make trade offs and reliability to get performance. Um, you know, the, you know, they want faster fascinated breaks a little more often because it's fascinating. Maybe you run it a little hotter than you should, or like, like the one that always blew my mind was the way that, um, the folks at, at, at Cray supercomputers got their division to be really fast, was that they did Newton Rapson approximations. And so, you know, the bottom several bits of, you know, a over B. We're essentially random numbers. Um, what could possibly go wrong, what could go wrong? Right? And, you know, just figuring out how to nail the bottom bit, how to make sure that, you know, if you put a piece of toast in a toaster, it's not going to kill the customer. It's not going to burst into flames and burn the house down. </s><s>[INST] So those are, I guess those are the principles that were inspiring. But how did from the days of, uh, java is called oak because of a tree outside the window story. There's a lot of people know, how did it become this incredible, like powerful language. [/INST] Well, so it was a bunch of things. So we, you know, after all that we started, you know the way that we decided that we could understand things better was by building a demo building a prototype of something. So um kind of, because it was easy and fun, we decided to build control system for some home electronics, tv VCR that kind of stuff. And as we were building it, we, you know, we we sort of discovered that there were some things about standard practice in C programming that um we're really getting in the way and and it wasn't it wasn't exactly, you know, because we were writing this all this C code and C plus plus code that that we couldn't write it to do the right thing. But that um one of the things that was weird in the group was that we had um a guy who's who's who's, you know, his sort of top level job was, he was a business guy, you know, he was sort of an NBA kind of person think about business plans and all of that. And you know, there were a bunch of things that were kind of, you know, and we will talk about things that were going wrong and um are things that were going wrong, things that were going right and you know, as we thought about things like like the requirements for security and safety, um, some low level details and see like naked pointers and you know, so, so back in the early nineties, um, it was well understood that, you know, the number one source of like security vulnerabilities, these pointers was just pointers was just bugs. Yeah, right. And it was like, you know, 50 60 70% of all security vulnerabilities were bugs, and the vast majority of them were like buffer overflows. </s><s>[INST] So you're like, we have to fix this, [/INST] we we have to make sure that this cannot happen. And that was kind of the original thing for me was this cannot, this cannot continue. And one of the things I find really entertaining this year was, um, I forget which rag published it, But there was this article that came out that was, um, an examination is sort of the result of of an examination of all the security vulnerabilities in chrome and chrome is like a giant piece of C plus plus code and 60 or 70% of all the security vulnerabilities were stupid pointer tricks and I thought it's 30 years later and we're still there and we're still there and you know, you know, that's one of those, you know, slap your forehead and, and, and just, just, just want to cry, would you attribute </s><s>[INST] or is that too much of a simplification, but would you attribute the creation of java to uh, to see [/INST] pointers obvious problems. I mean, that was that was one of the the trigger points </s><s>[INST] and RNC you've mentioned [/INST] concurrency was a big deal. Um you know, because when you're interacting with people, you know, the last thing you ever want to see is is the thing like waiting and you know, issues about the software development process, you know, when faults happen, can you recover from them? What can you do to make it easier to create and eliminate complex data structures? Um what can you do to fix, you know, the one of the most common see problems which is storage leaks um and it's, it's evil twin, the um the freed but still being used. Piece of piece of memory, you free something and then you keep using it. </s><s>[INST] Oh yeah. [/INST] You know, so, so when I was originally thinking about that, I was thinking about that in terms of of sort of safety and security issues. And one of the things I sort of came to believe came to understand was that it wasn't just about safety and security, but it was about um developer velocity. Right? So, and I got really religious about this because at that point I had spent an ungodly amount of my life hunting down mystery pointer bugs and you know, like, like two thirds of my time as a software developer was because the mystery pointer bugs tend to be the hardest to find because they tend to be very, very statistical, the ones that hurt. You know, they're, you know, they're like a one in a million chance. Um, and, </s><s>[INST] but nevertheless create an infinite amount of suffering because [/INST] when you're doing a billion operations a second, you know, I'm one in a million chance means it's going to happen. Um, and, and so I got really religious about this thing about, you know, making it so that if something fails it fails immediately and visibly. And you know, one of the things that was a real attraction of java to lots of development shops was that, you know, we get our code up and running twice as fast. </s><s>[INST] You mean like the entirety of the development process, the blocking all that [/INST] kind of stuff. If you, you know, so, so if you measure time from, you know, you you first touch fingers to keyboard until you get your first demo out. All right. Not much different. But if you look from fingers touching keyboard too solid piece of software that you could release in production, it would be way faster. </s><s>[INST] And I think what people don't often realize there's, yeah, there's things that really slow you down, like hard to catch bugs probably is is the thing that really slows down there [/INST] really slows things down. But but also there were, you know, one of the things that you get out of object oriented programming is a strict methodology about what are the interfaces between things and being really clear about how parts relate to each other. Um and what that helps with is so many times what people do um is that kind of like sneak around the side, So if you've built something and people are using it um and then and you say, and you say, well, okay, you know, I built this thing, you use it this way and then you change it in such a way that that it still does what you said, it does, it just does it a little bit different. But then you find out that somebody out there was sneaking around the side, they sort of tumbled in a back door and this person, their code broke and because they were sneaking through a side door and and normally the attitude is uh huh Tommy. Um but a lot of times, um you know, you can't get away, you can't you can't just slap their hand and tell them to not do that because, you know, it's, you know, somebody's, you know, some banks, you know, account reconciliation system that that, you know, some developer decided, oh, I'm lazy, you know, I'll just sneak through the back door </s><s>[INST] because the language allows it. I mean, you can't even be mad at them. [/INST] And so one of the things I did that on the one hand upset a bunch of people who is that I made it so that you really couldn't go through back doors, right? So, so the whole point of that was to say, if you need, you know, if the interface here isn't right, the wrong way to deal with that is to go through a back door, the right way to deal with it is to walk up to the developer of this thing and say, uh, </s><s>[INST] fix it, [/INST] right? And so it was kind of like a social engineering thing and um, it's brilliant and people ended up discovering that that really made a difference. Um, in terms of, you know, and, and, and and and a bunch of this stuff, you know, if you're just like screwing around right in your own, like, you know, class project scale stuff, a lot of this stuff doesn't, isn't quite so so important because, you know, you're both sides of the interface. Um, but you know, when you're building, you know, sort of larger, more complex pieces of software that have a lot of people working on them and especially when they like span organizations, um, you know, having, having really clear, having clarity about how that gets structured, um, saves your life. Um, and, you know, especially, you know, there's so much software that is fundamentally untested ble, you know, and, you know, until you do the real thing, </s><s>[INST] it's better to write good code in the beginning as opposed to writing crappy code and then trying to fix it and trying to scramble and figure out and through testing, figure out where the bugs [/INST] are, it's like, it's like it's like which shortcut caused that rocket to not get where it was needed to go. </s><s>[INST] So I think one of the most beautiful ideas uh philosophically and technically is uh of a virtual machine. The java virtual machine. Oh well again apologize to romanticize things but uh how did the idea of the J. V. M. Come to be how to you radical of an idea is because it seems to me to be just a really interesting idea in the history of programming. [/INST] So, </s><s>[INST] and what is it? [/INST] So the job of virtual machine, you can think of it in different ways um because it was carefully designed to have different ways of viewing it. So one view of it that most people don't really realize is there is that you can um view it as sort of an encoding of the abstract syntax tree in reverse polish notation. Um, I don't know if that makes any sense at all. I could explain it and that would blow all over time. Um, but the other way to think of it, um and the way that it ends up being explained is that it's like the instruction set of an abstract machine that's designed such that you can translate that abstract machine to a physical machine. And the reason that that's important. So if you wind back to the early nineties when we were talking to all of these, these companies doing consumer electronics and you talked to the purchasing people, there were interesting conversations with purchasing. Um so if you look at how, you know these, you know, these devices come together, their sheet metal and gears and circuit boards and capacitors and resistors and stuff and everything you buy has multiple sources, right? So you can buy a capacitor from here, you can buy a capacitor from there and you've got kind of a market. So you know, so that the, you can actually get a decent price for a capacitor. Um, but Cpus and particularly in the early nineties, um, Cpus were all different and all proprietary. So if you use the chip from intel, you had to be an intel customer for the end until the end of time because if he wrote a bunch of software, you know, when you wrote software using whatever technique you wanted and she was particularly bad about this because there was a lot of properties of the underlying machine that came through. </s><s>[INST] So you're stuck. So the code you wrote, you were stuck to that particular machine, [/INST] you were stuck to that particular machine, which meant that they couldn't decide. You know, intel is screwing us. Um, I'll start buying chips from, you know, bob's better chips. This drove the like the purchasing people absolutely insane that that they would, they were welded into this decision and it would have, they would have to make this decision before the first line of software was written, </s><s>[INST] it's funny that you're talking about the purchasing people. So that's one perspective, right? You could, there's a lot of other perspectives that all probably hated this idea, right? But from a technical aspect, just like the creation of an abstraction layer, that's agnostic to the underlying machine. Often the perspective of the developer. I mean it's brilliant. [/INST] Well, and, and, and you know, so that's like across the spectrum of of providers of chips. But then there's also the time thing because um, you know, as you went from one generation to the next generation to the next generation, they were all differently and you would often have to rewrite your </s><s>[INST] software. I mean the generations of CP of machines of different kinds. So, so [/INST] like, like, like, like one of the things that sucked about a year out of my life was when son went from the the Motorola 68 0 10 processor to the 68 0 20 processor, then they had a number of differences and one of them hit us really hard and I ended up being the point guy on the worst case of where the new instruction cache architecture hurt us. </s><s>[INST] Well, okay, so I mean, when when did this idea? I mean, okay, so yeah, you articulate a really clear fundamental problem in all of computing, but how, where do you get the guts to think we can actually solve this, [/INST] you know, in our conversations with, you know, all these vendors, you know, these problems started to show up and I kind of had this epiphany because it reminded me of a summer job that I had had in grad school. So back in grad school, my my thesis advisor, well I had to thesis advisors for bizarre reasons. Um one of them was a guy named raj Ready, the other one was bob Sproul um and rajah, I love you, I love both of them. But so the yes, the department had bought a bunch of like early workstations from a company called Three Rivers Computer Company and Three Rivers computer company was a bunch of electrical engineers who wanted to do as little software as possible. So um they knew that they need to have like compilers and os and stuff like that and they didn't want to do any of that and they wanted to do that for as close to zero money as possible. So um what they did was they built a machine whose instruction set was um the was literally the byte code for ucsd pascal, the p code. And so we had a bunch of software um that was that was written for this machine um and for various reasons, you know, the company wasn't doing terrifically well, we had all this software on these machines and we wanted it to run on other machines, principally the vax and um and Suraj asked me if I could come up with a way to ports all of this software from the, from from from the perk machines to vax is, and I think he, you know what he had in mind was something that would translate from like pascal to see or pascal to actually at those times pretty much it was, you could translate to C or C, and if you didn't like translating to see, you could translate to see um there was, you know, it's you know, it's like the Henry ford, you know, any color you want, just as long as it's black. Um and and I went that's really hard. </s><s>[INST] Um [/INST] and I and I noticed that, you know, and I was like looking at stuff and I went, oh I bet I could rewrite the p code into vax assembly code. And and then I started to realize that, you know, there were some properties of PICO that made that really easy, some properties that made it really hard. So I ended up writing this thing that translated from frumpy code on the three rivers. Perks into assembly code on the backs and I actually got higher quality code than the c compiler. And so so everything just got really fast, it was really easy. It was like, wow, I thought that was a sleazy hack because I was lazy and in actual fact it worked really well and I tried to convince people that that was maybe a good thesis topic. Yeah, and nobody was what was, you know, it was like, nah, </s><s>[INST] really? That's I mean it's kind of a brilliant idea, right? Well maybe you didn't have the you weren't able to articulate the big picture of [/INST] it. Yeah, and I think you know that was um a key part, but so then you know, clock comes forward a few years and it's like we've got to be able to, you know, the you know, the, you know, if they want to be able to switch from you know this weird microprocessor to that weird and totally different microprocessor, how do you do that? And I kind of went, oh maybe by doing something kind of in the space of you know, pascal p code, you know, I could do like multiple translators and I spent some time thinking about that and thinking about, you know, what worked and what didn't work when I did the the p code to vax translator. And um I talked to some of the folks who are involved in small talk because small talk also did a byte code and and and then I kind of went, yeah that I want to do that because that, you know, and and it had the the other advantage that you could either interpret it or compile it and um interpreters are usually easier to do, but not as fast as a compiler. So I figured good, I can be lazy again, um you know, you know sometimes I think that most of my good ideas are um driven by laziness and often I find that people, some people stupidest ideas are because they're insufficiently lazy. Um Yeah they just want to build something really complicated. It's like it doesn't need to be that complicated. Yeah and so and so that's how that came out and um yeah but that also turned into kind of a you know almost a religious position on my part which was which got me in in several other fights. So like like one of the things that was a real difference was the way that arithmetic worked. Um You know once upon a time there were, you know it wasn't always just twos complement arithmetic, there were some machines that had one's complement arithmetic which is like almost anything built by C. D. C. Um And occasionally there are machines that were decimal arithmetic and and I was like this is crazy, you know pretty much two's complement into your arithmetic has one. So just </s><s>[INST] let's just do that, [/INST] just do that one of the other places where there was a lot of variability was in the way that floating point behaved. Um And that was causing people throughout the software industry much pain because you couldn't do a numerical computing library that would work on C. D. C. And then have it work on an IBM machine and work on a on a deck machine. Um And as a, as a part of that whole struggle, there had been this, this big body of work on on floating point standards and this thing emerged that can be called I triple E 7 54 um which is the floating point standard that pretty much has taken over the entire universe. Um and and at the time I was doing job, it had pretty much completed taking over the universe, there were still a few pockets of holdouts, but I was like, you know, it's important to be able to say what two plus two means. Um Yeah, and and so I went that um and one of the boys that I got into fights with people was that there were a few machines that did not implement a triple 7 54 correctly, </s><s>[INST] of course, that's that's all short term kind of fights, I think in the in the long term, I think this vision is [/INST] one out. Yeah. And and I think it's, you know, and it worked out over time. I mean, the the biggest fights were with intel because they had done some strange things with rounding, they've done some strange things with their transcendental functions which turned into a mushroom cloud of, you know, weirdness </s><s>[INST] and the name in the name of optimization, but from the perspective of the developer, that's not that's not good. [/INST] Well, their issues with transcendental functions were just stupid. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so that it's not even a dread of, that's just [/INST] absolutely yeah. They were they were doing range reduction in for sign and co sign, using a slightly wrong value for pi got it, </s><s>[INST] go ahead 10 minutes. So in the interest of time, two questions. So one about android, one about life. Uh So one, I mean, we could talk for many more hours. I hope eventually we might talk again. But I gotta ask you about android and the use of java there because it's one of the many places with Java just has a huge impact on this world. Just on your opinion. Is there things that make you happy uh by the way, and java is used in the android world? And are there things that you wish were different? [/INST] I don't know how to do a short answer to that, but I have to do a short answer to that. So, you know, I'm happy that they did it. Um Java had been running on cell phones at that time for quite a few years and it worked really, really well. Um There were things about how they did it and and in particular um various ways that they kind of, you know, violated all kinds of contracts. The guy who who led it Andy Rubin, </s><s>[INST] he crossed a lot of lines, [/INST] there's some lines crossed, yeah, lines were crossed that have since, you know, mushroomed into a giant court cases. Um and you know, they didn't need to do that and in fact it would have been so much cheaper for them to not cross lines. </s><s>[INST] I mean, I suppose they didn't anticipate the success uh of this whole endeavor [/INST] um </s><s>[INST] or do you think at that time it was already clear that this is uh is going to blow [/INST] up I guess I I I sort of came to believe that it didn't matter what and he did it was going to blow up. </s><s>[INST] Okay. He's [/INST] he's he you know, I kind of started to think of him as like a manufacturer of bombs. </s><s>[INST] Mhm. Uh Yeah, some of the best things in this world come about through a little bit of uh uh explosive [/INST] well and some of the worst </s><s>[INST] and some of the worst, beautifully put. But is there and and like you said, I mean does that make you proud that the java is in Yeah, is in millions. I mean it could be billions of devices and [/INST] Yeah, well I mean it was in in billions of phones before android came along um and you know, I'm I'm just as proud as, you know, of the way that like the the smart card standards adopted java and they did it, they, you know, everybody involved in that did a really good job and that's, you know, billions and billions, it's crazy. The sim cards, you know the sim cards in your pocket. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, [/INST] I've been noticed outside of that world for a decade. So I don't know how that has evolved, but you know, it's just been crazy. </s><s>[INST] So on that topic, let me ask uh again, there's a million technical things uh uh we could talk about, but let me ask the absurd the old philosophical question about life. Um what do you hope when you look back at your life and uh people talk about you right about u 500 years from now, uh what do you hope your legacy is [/INST] okay people not being afraid to take a leap of faith? Um I mean, you know, I've got this this kind of weird history of doing weird stuff and um it </s><s>[INST] worked out pretty damn [/INST] well, it worked out right, and I think some of the weirder stuff that I've done um has been the coolest and some of it some of it crashed and burned and um yeah, you know, I think well over half of the stuff that I've done has crashed and burned um which is occasionally been really annoying, </s><s>[INST] but still you kept doing [/INST] it. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, they're you know, even when things crash and burn, you at least learn something from it </s><s>[INST] by way of advice. You know, people, developers, engineers, scientists are just people who are young to look up to you, what advice would you give them how to how to approach their life? [/INST] Don't be afraid of risk. It's okay to do stupid things once, </s><s>[INST] maybe a couple of [/INST] times, you know, you know, you get you get a pass on the first time or two that you do something stupid, you know the third or fourth time. Yeah, not so much. Um but also, you know, I don't know why, but really early on I started to think about um ethical choices in my life and because I big science fiction fan um I got to thinking about like just about every technical decision I make in terms of how do you want to you know, are you building Blade Runner Star trek? Mhm. </s><s>[INST] Which one's better. [/INST] Which which future would you rather live in? You know? So </s><s>[INST] what's what's the answer to that? [/INST] Well, I would just I would sure rather live in the universe of Star trek. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] that opens up a whole topic about aI but that's a really interesting Yeah, it's a really interesting idea. So your favorite AI system would be data uh from from star trek [/INST] as a least favorite would easily be Skynet. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] beautifully put. I don't think there's a better way to end it. James, I can't say enough how much of an honor it is to meet you to talk to you. Thanks so much for wasting your time with me today. [/INST] Not a waste at all. </s><s>[INST] Thanks to you. All right, thanks thanks for listening to this conversation with James Gosling and thank you to our sponsors public goods. Better help and express VPN please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe my youtube, review it with five stars on apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon. I'll connect with me on twitter, elects Friedman and now let me leave you with some words from James. Gosling, one of the toughest things about life is making choices. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] So it's interesting um The development of hobbies because it feels like the future of human civilization will be very hobby driven. Like some of the like I I often now because of this particular little thing I would do with the podcast I get to interact with photographers and videographers and I'm disappointed to find how many professionals are not very good and how many hobbyists are very good. So [/INST] well if they're amateurs they're the lovers. I </s><s>[INST] mean that's [/INST] what that means from a more you're an amateur if you're a lover of the thing and you're not in it for the money you're not because you're obsessed. But </s><s>[INST] that's sort of as the G. D. P. As the um As our freedom grows to sort of financially to be able to have a hobby. Um It feels like there will be more lovers more amateurs in the world and not just for the artistic pursuits but like science technology development building you know building all kinds of technologies almost like as a hobby you have much more freedom to figure out what is the thing you love doing And actually over time that just you won't even notice but I'll start making money. Yes and yeah that's really fascinating. And yeah it does kind of uh I mean, [/INST] when did that </s><s>[INST] originate? Just the collection? [/INST] They </s><s>[INST] goes through [/INST] different stages. People have always gathered the odd thing to make something else. But you also get this tradition of what's called curiosity cabinets, especially in the renaissance, which replaced the kind of treasure chambers of the ancient sultans or kings or whatever. And you get these curiosity cabinets that were often linked with magical practices, alchemical practices. People would gather bez uars or they would gather, they would have an alligator hanging from the ceiling or they would have a rare shrunken head or whatever. And that's part of the rise of natural history. The idea that you taxonomy is the world, you classify the world, you look for the rare object. The rarity and rarity still is a kind of virtue. Like the recent news about trying to figure out ball lightning when I was growing up, ball lightning was the big question, does it exist? Does it not exist? And now there's new evidence of how it actually might wait. What? Really? </s><s>[INST] There's new evidence. [/INST] Because I grew </s><s>[INST] up with that my dad, when I was young told me, I asked him like, how do I win a Nobel prize? He said uh, invent a time machine or figure out how ball lightning works. And so I got really excited. I was [/INST] like, damn </s><s>[INST] it, I'm going to figure out how this ball lightning works. [/INST] It's very interesting from a history of science point of view because it's so rare that in a way it doesn't exist. You can't replicate it, you can't make it, does it really exist? It's a little bit like libyan glass. Another thing I collect is libyan glass, which is a tech tight, which falls as a result of a meteorite, a meteorite hits the earth, blast earth up into space. It falls back down as a glass. It's called a tech tight. And there's a rare form of it called libyan glass Which fell probably around 20 million years ago and now works out of the Sahara every now and then. It was the most valuable stone of antiquity. The centerpiece of Tutankhamen's breastplate is made of this beautiful yellow gemstone libyan glass. So rarity is something that, that the hobbyists have always liked to cherish the rarity. The art and science has a kind of often aversion is a kind of a love hate relationship with rarity and novelty. Science is often trying to pursue novelty to make discoveries, but if you can't replicate it, it's kind of like, what does it really exist? </s><s>[INST] Which is why, I mean UFOs and aliens and all those kinds, there's a general aversion to that because it's like, it's a one time event, [/INST] right? </s><s>[INST] It's it's sad because there's just like you said, singular events are rare. Events are somehow really inspiring to us. [/INST] And so </s><s>[INST] you kinda have to balance that. Yeah, there's a scientific process but you also have to like it's the thing you, you find with weird the peculiar, it's like, huh [/INST] Yeah. Even even the universe itself, it could be that the universe begins and then we'll end say Nicole death and that's it. I mean it could be a one off thing or it could be one of an infinite many cycles ago and maybe all of the laws of nature are recreated a new with each cycle or maybe what we're, what we're assuming about the Big Bang, there's some element of falsity. Maybe the speed of light is not constant but changes over time that would throw into question. All kinds of theories about dark matter and dark energy and even the age of the universe. </s><s>[INST] To me there's very likely trillions of conversations going on like this on other planets [/INST] in different yeah, different </s><s>[INST] kinds of drugs, different communication styles, different time scales at which life form is or what life looks like or how life behaves what life is and all those things kind of every time you think about this more and more humbling. Just this whole fog of ignorance. I [/INST] mean what drives me crazy is wondering about the beautiful gemstones on other planets. I call them exotic maggots, you know, they must be unbelievable features and forms which are unimaginable to us because one thing we do know is that nature is very creative. I mean we are the product of nature and we seem to be fairly creative and so imagine what else nature has created. But even that's unknown is how common is life in the universe? Is it is it common or is it rare? We only have a sample size of one. You know, it could be quite common or it could be even unique. </s>

<s>[INST] And those concepts load in the predictions that are made include um contents inside the body contents outside the body. I mean it includes other humans. So just this construction of a concept includes the variables that are much richer than just some sort of simple notion. [/INST] Yes. So our colloquial notion of a concept where um you know um where I say, well what's the concept of a bird? And then you list a set of features off to me that's that's people's understanding, you know typically what a concept is. But if you go uh into the literature in um cognitive science, what you'll see is that the way that scientists have understood what a concept is has really changed over the years. So people used to think about a concept as um philosophers and scientists used to think about a concept as a dictionary definition for a category. So there's a set of things which are similar out in the world and your concept for for that category is a dictionary definition of the features, the necessary and sufficient features of that of those instances. So for a bird, um, you know, it would be </s><s>[INST] wings, feathers, [/INST] write a beak, it flies whatever. Okay. Um, that's called the classical category. And scientists discovered observed that actually not all instances of birds have feathers and not all instances of birds fly. And so the idea was that you don't have a single representation of necessary and sufficient features stored in your brain somewhere. Instead what you have is a prototype. A prototype, meaning you still have a single representation for the category one. But the features are like of the most typical instance of the category or maybe the most frequent instance, but not all instances of the category have all the features. Right? They have some graded similarity to the prototype. And then, uh, you know what um, I'm going to like incredibly simplify now. A lot of work to say that then a series of experiments were done to show that in fact what your brain seems to be doing is coming up with a single exemplar or instance of the category and reading off the features when I ask you for the concept. So if we were in a pet store and I asked you what are the features of a bird? Tell me the concept of bird, you would be more likely to give me features of a good pet. And if we were in a restaurant you would be more likely, you know like a budgie, right? Or or a canary. If we were in a restaurant you would be more likely to give me the features of a bird that you would eat like a chicken. And if we were in a park you'd be more likely um to give me uh in this country. You know the features of a sparrow or robin. Whereas if we were in South America you would probably give me the features of a peacock because that's more common. Um or or is more common there than here, that you would see a peacock in such circumstances. So the idea was that really what your brain was doing was conjuring a concept on the fly that meets the function that the category is being put to. Okay, okay then people started studying ad hawk concepts meaning um concepts that where the instances don't share any feed any physical features but the function of the instances are the same. So for example, think about all the things that can protect you from the rain. What are all the things that can protect you from the rain </s><s>[INST] umbrella? Uh like this apartment? Uh Not giving a damn. Like like a like a mindset? Right. Right. [/INST] So the idea is that the function of the instances is the same in a given situation. Even if they look different, sound different, smell different. This is called an abstract concept or a conceptual concept. Now the really cool thing about conceptual categories or conceptual concert. Yes, conceptual category. A conceptual as a category of things that are held together by a function which is called an abstract concept or a conceptual category. Because the things don't share physical features. They share functional features. There are two really cool things about this. one is that's what Darwin said a species was Darwin is known for discovering natural selection. But the other thing he really did which was really profound. Which he's less celebrated for is understanding that all biological categories have inherent variation, inherent variation. Darwin wrote in the origin of species about before Darwin's book a species was thought to be classical category where all the instances of dogs were the same had the exactly same features and any variation from that uh perfect platonic uh instance was considered to be error. And Darwin said no it's not error. It's meaningful. Nature selects on the basis of that variation. The reason why natural selection is powerful and can exist is because there is variation in a species. And in dogs we talk about that variation in terms of the size of the dog. And the amount of for the dog has on the color. And how long is the tail? And how long is the snout in humans? We talk about that variation in all kinds of ways. Right? Including in cultural ways. So that's one thing that's really interesting about conceptual categories is that Darwin is basically saying a species as a conceptual category. And in fact, if you look at modern debates about what is a species, you can't find anybody agreeing on what the criteria are for a species because they don't all share the same genome. We don't all share. We don't there isn't a single human genome. There's a population of genomes. But they are variable. It's not unbounded variation, but they are variable. Right? And the other thing that's really cool about um conceptual categories is that they are the categories that we use to make civilization. Mm hmm. So think about money for example, what are all the physical things that make something a currency? Is there any physical feature that all the currencies in all the worlds that's ever been used by humans share? </s>

<s>[INST] And that small subset of function is all that matters to us, humans really, that's what makes [/INST] it's all that has mattered so far. And even within our scientific realm, it's all that seems to continue to matter. But I mean, I always like to think about our senses and how much of the physical world around us we perceive. And if you look at the um, ligo experiment over the last, you know, year and a half has been all over the news, what did ligo do? It created a new sense for human beings, a sense that has never been sensed in the history of our planet. Mhm gravitational waves have been traversing the earth since its creation a few billion years ago. Life has evolved senses to sense things that were never before sensed light was not perceived by early life, no one cared and eventually for the receptors evolved and the ability to sense colors by catching different parts of that electromagnetic spectrum and hearing evolved and touch evolved etcetera. But no organism evolved a way to sense neutrinos floating through earth, or gravitational waves flowing through earth etcetera. And I find it so beautiful in the history of not just humanity but life on the planet, that we are now able to capture additional signals from the physical world than we ever knew before. And accidents for example have been all over the news in the last few weeks. The concept that we can capture and perceive more of that physical world is as exciting as the The fact that we are, we were blind to it is traumatizing before because that also tells us, you know, we're in 2020 Picture yourself in 3020 Or in 20, you know, </s><s>[INST] what new senses, what might we discover [/INST] is it, you know, could it be that we're missing 9/10 of physics </s><s>[INST] that [/INST] like there's a lot of physics out there that were just blind to completely oblivious to it. And yet they're permeating us all the time. Yes, </s><s>[INST] it might be right in front of us. So, [/INST] so when you're thinking about premonitions, </s><s>[INST] yeah, [/INST] a lot of that is ascertainment bias. Like yeah, you know, every now and then you're like, oh I remember my friend and then my friend doesn't appear and I'll forget that I remember my friend, but every now and then my friend will actually appear and like, oh my God, I thought about you a minute ago, you just called me. That's amazing. So, you know, some of that is this, but some of that might be that there are within our brain sensors for waves that we admit that we're not even aware of. And this whole concept of when I hug my Children, there's such an emotional transfer there that we don't comprehend. I mean sure. Yeah, of course, we're all hardwired for all kinds of touchy feely things between parents and kids. Beautiful between partners is beautiful and tender. But then there are intangible aspects of human communication that I don't think it's unfathomable that our brain has actually evolved ways and sensors for it that we just don't capture. We don't understand the function of the vast majority of our neurons and maybe our brain is already sensing it, but even worse, maybe our brain is not sensing it at all and were oblivious to this until we build a machine that suddenly is able to sort of capture so much more of what's happening in the natural world. So what </s><s>[INST] you're saying is we go physics is going to discover a sensor for love [/INST] for and maybe maybe dogs are off scale for that. And we've been, you know, we've been oblivious to the whole time because we didn't have the right sensor and now you're going to have a little risk that says, oh my God, I feel all this love in the house. I sense some disturbance in the forest </s><s>[INST] around and dogs and cats will have zero. [/INST] No, no, </s><s>[INST] it's just me. But let's take a step back to [/INST] unfortunately one of the 400 topics that we had actually planned. But </s><s>[INST] But to our sad time in 2020 when we only have just a few sensors and uh very primitive early computers. So in your you have a foot in computer science and and the field of biology in your son's. How do um computers represent information differently than like the genome or biological systems. [/INST] So, first of all, let me uh let me uh, correct that no, we're in an amazing time in 2020. Computer science is totally awesome. And physics is totally awesome. And we have understood so much of the natural world than ever before. So I am extremely grateful and feeling extremely lucky to be living in the time that we are because, you know, first of all, who knows when the asteroid will hit and second. Um, you know, of all times in humanity, this is probably the best time to be a human being. And this might actually be the best place to be a human being. So anyway, you know, for for anyone who loves science, this is this is it, this is awesome. It's a great time </s><s>[INST] at the same time. Just a sweet comment. All I meant is that if you look several 100 years from now and we end up somehow not destroying ourselves, people probably look back at this time in computer science and uh, at your work of minnows at M I. T. [/INST] Uh it's </s><s>[INST] a silly and how ignorant it all [/INST] was. I I like to joke very often with my students that, you know, we've written so many papers were published so much. We've been sighted so much and every single time I tell my students you know, the best is ahead of us. What we're working on now is the most exciting thing I've, I've ever worked on. So in a way, I do have this sense of, yeah, even the papers I wrote 10 years ago, they were awesome at the time. But I'm so much more excited about where we're heading now. And I don't mean to minimize any of the stuff we've done in the past, but you know, there's just this sense of excitement about what you're working on now, that as soon as the papers submitted, it's like, it's old. You know, I can't talk about that anymore. At the same time, you're </s>

<s>[INST] And now here's my conversation with Michael malice. [/INST] There was a Simpsons episode where he starts mixing like sleeping pills with like pep pills and he's driving his truck and I'm like, I want to see what happens in this red bullet Nitra called for </s><s>[INST] a, there's a lineup of drugs. It's gonna be so fun. Yeah. Let's start with love. [/INST] Yeah. </s><s>[INST] So 11 thing will eventually somehow talk about it will be a theme throughout, is that you're also Russian? Yes, a little bit less than me. But [/INST] how, uh, because I'm from Ukraine </s><s>[INST] All year from Ukraine. Okay, well, no, because you came here a little bit when you were younger. Yeah, I came here when I was 13, so I saturated a little bit of the Russian soul, Ii marinated in the [/INST] Russian. So little deep. I haven't told anyone this, but I'm glad to tell you. David Ish. Um, I haven't been back since I was two. And next summer it looks like me and my buddy Chris, Williamson, who's also a podcaster, He's british modern wisdom, He looks like Apollo were looks like we got a videographer with Apollo Apollo, the God, he looks like the God Apollo. Yeah, he's like a mother. Uh, so we're going to go for the first time to see where I came from, </s><s>[INST] which is Ukraine. We're [/INST] gonna go to evolve. And either ST Petersburg or Moscow. Probably ST Petersburg or both. It's gonna be intense, it's gonna be a lot of panic attacks I feel. </s><s>[INST] And your Russian is okay, [/INST] you got to do is sh gonna show up but you can't talk Russia and Ukraine or it's like they get offended </s><s>[INST] but then you also want to go to Russia. Yeah, I don't know for me, there's several people in Russia, I want an interview on a podcast. So 11 of them is uh google Perlman which is a mathematician and the other person is Putin, [/INST] you know my favorite food and story is, do you know this when he had Merkel with him, do you know this story, Merkel's scared of dogs, Like petrified her dogs. So he brings in his like, like, like a black lab, it's a labrador is like the sweetest animal and it's all over her and there's pictures and she's sitting like this and she's terrified and she's like what's wrong Angela, he's just completely trolling her. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he's aware of the sort of uh the narrative around him and then he plays with it. Yes, he enjoys it. [/INST] It's a very Russian thing, my friend wanted to film about me, he goes, I realized you guys aren't like us at all, you just like like look at us and then I started telling him stories about the upbringing and he's like, oh my God, and as I'm telling them like wow this stuff is really crazy, like how we are wired, </s><s>[INST] who's the we, your friend is [/INST] the friends. American was saying the way Russians are brought up and the way maybe I don't think it was just my family. I bet you had similar things. Like here's an example. I I was I had a buddy staying with me, he had a problem with his roommates, he crashed in my place, fine, I went to the gym and I come back and he goes, oh there was at my apartment buildings as for four apartments. So it's not like a huge thing. He goes, oh there was someone knocking at your door. So you know I I told him a block and and for me and I wonder if you're the same way if I'm at someone's house that's not my own and someone knocks on the door. I wouldn't even think to answer it. Like if I had an apple here, maybe I eat it, I cut it whatever, I'm not gonna, it just doesn't enter my head to smash into my face. The thought of answering the door, if it's not my house, it would never enter my head would enter your head. </s><s>[INST] No, but why? But [/INST] he's an american? So someone's at the door, he goes and opens it even though it's not his house, I would never do that, I would never think to do that. </s><s>[INST] That is so strange that you pick some very obscure thing to delineate americans [/INST] and I don't think that's obscure because I think it speaks to how we perceive strangers with americans. Everyone's friendly and with us. It's like like you have that moat. And I think that's a that percolates into many different aspects of how we relate to people. And I do a lot of that. </s><s>[INST] That's true. You're right. There's the relationship I formed there were in Russia or very deep close and then there's the strangers the other that you don't trust by default. It takes a long time to go over the moat of trust for [/INST] a long time. Until recently, whenever I said anything to anyone, my brain ran a scan that said, if this person turns on you, would this can they use this against you? And I would do everything I said with strangers. And after a while it's like, you know what? Maybe they will, but I'm strong enough to take it. But this is not how americans think, well, here's another one. Let me ask you this. Sorry, I'm taking over the interview. People asked about like advice for work, right? Like I had this, there was this party I went to and basically everyone had their own problems and everyone else gave their advice, right? And someone's having a problem with a co worker and the advice these do boy americans gave them is oh, sit down and have a talk with them. And to me this is like the last case, last resort. Like first you have to see what you can without showing your hand, showing your vulnerability only when everything hasn't worked out and you're like all right, let me sit down with you and try to have it out with you probably. But for them, the first thing is like sit down and be like, oh you're causing me problems with blah blah. So I perceive that right away is a threat that this person sees an antagonism between us and also as a weakness that I'm getting to them. So my reaction isn't um how do I make it better? My reaction is to reinforce my position and see what I can, to marginalize them. Usually I haven't worked in a corporate setting in a long time, but it's not, I don't approach it the way an american would like, I'm glad you came and talked to me now, I probably would because it's gonna be a friend. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. So you attribute that to the Russian numbering as opposed to have deep psychological issues. I [/INST] think there's a synonymous, don't wait, why would you think differently? Maybe a few years ago? </s><s>[INST] Mm I don't know. I think you lost me at the because you kind of said that you're kind of implying you have a deep distrust of the world, like the world is I think [/INST] the default setting would be distrust Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but mhm I would put it differently is I almost ignore the rest of I don't even acknowledge it, I just uh saver, I save my love and trust for the small circle of people. [/INST] I agree. But when that person is being confrontational or as they perceive it as being open now there's a situation, how do you, how would you handle that? </s><s>[INST] Like like a cold wind blows? He's just kind of [/INST] like, yeah, but it's not like this is an opportunity for us to work out our differences. It's a cold wind, it's not a hug, that's my point. You think it's a hug? You're so suspicious what it really is is a cold wind. I'm so much humane. It's not that's not gonna be scared of, it's a cold wind in person, </s><s>[INST] but it's not great, but it's not a source of like I'm not suspicious of like I'm not anxious, I would say, or like living in fear of the rest of the world. [/INST] Oh, I agree. But you're not receptive to that person, That's all I'm saying, and they are. </s><s>[INST] Got it. So speaking of which let's talk about love, which requires to be receptive of the world of strangers. How do we put more love out there in the world? Especially on the internet, [/INST] one mechanism I have found to prove um increased love and that's a word that has many meanings and is used in a very intense sense and it's used in a very loose sense. </s><s>[INST] Can you try to define love? Sure, [/INST] love is a strong sense of attraction toward another person entity or place that causes one to tend to react in a disproportionately positive manner that's off the top of my head. </s><s>[INST] Disproportionately, [/INST] yes, So for example, if you are not proportionately because like if you're someone's about to who you love is about to get harmed, you're moving heaven and earth to make sure or like a book you love. You know, like I love this book, like you're going through the fire to try to save it. Whereas if it's a book you really like, it's like I get another one. I don't, you know, at a book, kind of a loose example. But so </s><s>[INST] you're going with the love that's like you're saving for just a few people almost like romantically like love for close family. What about just love to even the broader, like the kind of love you can put out to people on the internet, which is like just kindness. [/INST] Sure, I would say in that case it's important to make them feel uh scene and validated. And I try to do this when people who I have come to know on the internet and there's a lot, I try to do that as much as possible because I don't think it's valid how on social media and I do this a lot myself, but not towards everyone. It's just there to be aggressive and antagonistic, you should be antagonistic towards bad people and that's fine, but at the same time there's lots of great people and especially with my audience and I would bet disproportionately with yours, there's lots of people who are because of their psychology and intelligence are going to be much more isolated socially than they should and if I and I've heard from many of them and if I'm the person who makes them feel oh I'm not crazy, it's everyone else around me who is just basic uh the fact that I can be that person which I didn't have at their age to me is incredibly reaffirming </s><s>[INST] you mean that source of love. [/INST] But I mean love in the sense of like you know you care about this person and you want good things for them, not in a kind of romantic way but I mean you're using a broad sense now </s><s>[INST] but you're also a person who kind of I mean uh attacks this power structures in the world by mocking them effectively. And uh love I would say requires you to be non witty and simple and fragile which I see it as like the opposite of what trolls do [/INST] trolls are, if I if there is someone coming after what I love, There's two mechanisms right at least two I go up and I'm fighting them and in which case you're bringing if you are getting hurt in a knife fight even if you win the knife fight or if you disarm them and you preclude the possibility of fight and you drive them off or render them powerless. You can you keep your person intact as yourself and you also protect your values. </s><s>[INST] So how do you render them powerless? [/INST] As you just said, by mocking them? One of the most effective mechanism for those in power were much closer to brave new world in 1984. The people who are dominant and in power aren't there? Because of the threat of you know the gulag or prison, they're there because of social pressures. Look at the masks, I was on the subway not that long ago in new york city. Um no one cared who I was until I put on the mask, I was in the subway that long in New york city. They would put this on my instagram. I've told this story before. There was an asian dude in his early thirties, he was like in Western clothes, it's not like he had a rickshaw or something. An older man in his fifties, stood up over him on the subway, screamed at him said go back where you came from, You're disgusting. I'm going to get sick if you think this guy is a vector of disease, which is your prerogative, why are you coming close to him, Why are you getting in his face? And what </s><s>[INST] was that was the right size? So it was because he was asian, it [/INST] was both, it was not having a mask gave him the permission to act like a despicable aggressive person towards him, right? And the point being uh a lot of these mechanisms for social control are outsourced to low quality people because this is their one chance to assert dominance and status over somebody else. So the best way to defuse that isn't with weaponry or fighting, it's through mockery because all of a sudden their claims to authority are effectively destroyed. </s><s>[INST] So let me push back on that. What about fighting that with with love with um patients and like kindness towards them? [/INST] I I don't think kindness is, I think that would be a mismatch and inappropriate, there's superman, it's batman, okay, and super man's job is to help the good people of batman's jobs to hurt the bad people and I will always be on a batman side. Then the super inside </s><s>[INST] both work uh silly tight costumes, one has pointy ears, both are ridiculous. So it's uh [/INST] it was a billionaire who gets, you know, he's swimming and trim. </s><s>[INST] Which one is the big man, Okay, I'm under educated on, I'm the superhero movies, I apologize, okay, but but you're just saying you, your predisposition is to be in the batman side is to fighting the bad guys, that's what I'm good at, that's what you're good at, but just a play devil's advocate or actually in this case I am the devil because that's what I usually do [/INST] you hear the angels advocate exactly to be </s><s>[INST] the be the angel advocate. Yeah, it's like I feel like mockery is um is a is a path towards escalation of conflict in many ways. Yes. So you're not, I mean, it's kind of like guerilla warfare. I mean, you're not going to win. [/INST] I am winning. We're all winning. We're winning on a daily. This is my next book. We're winning. We've won before. I'm not joking </s><s>[INST] the topic of the next book. Yes. Is the white pill. White pill [/INST] is that we're gonna we are winning the most horrible people are being rendered into laughing stocks on a daily basis. Social media. This is glorious </s><s>[INST] to disagree with you. I disagree with you because there's side effects that are very destructive. It feels like your wedding, but we're completely destroying the possibility of having a like a cohesive society [/INST] that's called oncology. </s><s>[INST] What does that mean [/INST] curing cancer? Your concept of a cohesive society is in fact a society based on oppression and not allowing individuals to live their personal freedom. </s><s>[INST] So, your your utopian view of [/INST] your the utopian, you're saying cohesive society, I'm saying I don't need that. I'm saying there's gonna be conflict, right? There's gonna be conflict you and I are disagreeing right now. That's not cohesive doesn't mean we like each other less doesn't mean we respect each other less cohesive doesn't it's just a euphemism for like everyone submitting to what I want. </s><s>[INST] No, I mean cohesive could could uh could be that it could be um it could be like enforced with violence, all that kind of stuff, The, the libertarian view of the world, but it could just be being respectful and kind of each other and kind towards each other and loving towards each other. I mean, that's what I mean by cohesive. So when people say free, it's funny, like freedom is a funny thing because freedom can be painful to a lot of people. Uh, it's all matters how you define it, how you implement it, how it actually looks like. And I'm just saying it feels like the mockery of the powerful leads to further and further divisions. It's like the, it's turning life into a game to where it's always your plan. You're you're creating these different little tribes and groups and you're constantly uh, fighting the groups that become a little bit more powerful by undercutting them through guerilla warfare kind of thing. And that's what the internet becomes as everyone's just mocking each other and there's certain groups become more and more powerful and then they start fighting each other in into basic they they form groups of ideologies, they start fighting each other in the Internet where the result is it doesn't feel like the common humanity is highlighted. It doesn't feel like that's a path of progress now. Like when I say cohesive, I don't mean like everybody has to be, you know, enforcing equality, all those kinds of ideas. I just mean like not being so divisive, that's so it's going back to the original question of like, how do we put more love out in the world on the internet? I want [/INST] divisiveness. </s><s>[INST] Ou so you think this is the goal, it's [/INST] the goal? So you we started this conversation, but you're talking about you have love for that small group. I think we both would agree to have a bigger group would be better, especially that love comes from sincere place. Um, I think Our country specific, I wrote an article at this four years ago that it's time to dis unite the states and to succeed. This country has been held together with at least two separate cultures with thumbtacks and string for over 20 years. There's an enormous amount of contempt from one group toward another. Uh this contempt comes from sincere place. They do not share each other's values, there's absolutely no reason, just like any unhealthy relationship where you can't say, you know what? It's not working out. I want to go my own way and live my happiness and I genuinely want you to go your way, live your happiness if I'm wrong, prove me wrong, I'll learn from you and and take lessons and vice versa. But the fact that we all have to be in the same house together is not coherent and that's not love. That is the path towards friction and tension </s><s>[INST] eventually, Do you think there is concrete groups? Like is it as simple as the two groups of blue and red? [/INST] No, it's it's it's it's also very fluid because you and I are allied as jewish people, as Russians, as males, as podcasters, you're an academic, I'm not there. So that's where we're different, but we each are a Venn diagram even within ourselves. And I can talk to you about politics and then we can talk about Russia stuff and then you can talk about your your work, which I don't know anything about. So that would be what you're way up here in our way down here. So there's lots every relationship with just between individuals. There's it's very dynamic. </s><s>[INST] So how do we succeed? Like how do we form individual states? Sure there's a little bit more cohesion. Sure, [/INST] the voluntary cohesion to the first step is to um eliminate and the concept of political authority as legitimate and to denigrate and humiliate those who would put themselves in a position in which they are there to tell you how to live your life from any semblance of validity and that's starting to happen. Um If you look at what they had with the lockdowns, cuomo and de Blasio in new york, we have it. I was uh tired a couple weeks ago and I said to my friend, oh just click nape of covid and he goes, it's not possible. Like what do you mean? And he goes, We haven't had any deaths in like two months? And there's only 100 cases a day for like two months. And I go, you're exaggerating because everything was still closed. And I looked at the numbers and he wasn't exaggerating. And there's no greater american dream to me than an immigrant family comes to the States forms their own little business. Maybe mom's a good cook at the restaurant, dry cleaner fruit stand and those people aren't gonna have a lot of money. Those are the first ones who lost their companies because of these lockdowns. Uh they cuomo who is the governor of new york, opened up the gyms, he said, you're clear to open up De Blasio said, and we don't have enough inspectors, you're gonna have to wait another couple of weeks uh to regard that as anything other than literally criminal. Is something that I am having a hard and harder time wrapping my head around </s><s>[INST] you said, I mean, that's something I'm deeply worried about as well, which is like thousands. It's actually millions of dreams being crushed. That american dream of starting a business of running a business. [/INST] What about all the young people who you and I have in our audiences who are socially isolated at best and now they can't leave their homes uh isolation and ostracism are things that are very well studying psychology, These have extreme consequences. I read a book called ostracism and this wasn't scientific, but basically the author was a psychiatrist, psychology, whatever. And he had one of his colleagues, they didn't experiment, let's for a week, you ostracized me completely, we know it. And he goes even knowing it's the experiment. The fact that he wouldn't make eye contact with me. And the fact that he ignored me had an extreme emotional impact on me knowing full well this is purely for experimental purposes. Now you multiply that by all these the suicide, the number of kids who think about suicide was through the roof during all this. Uh and my point is, until these people, It's gonna be pretty like 20, that's where we're gonna have to start having conversations about what personal consequences have to be done for these people because until then they're gonna do the same thing. </s><s>[INST] So you think there's going to be society wide consequences of this that we're gonna see like ripple effects because of the social isolation. [/INST] I mean, we also need to talk about consequences of cuomo and de Blasio because if if politicians respond to incentives and the incentives are there for them to be extremely conservative. Because if you have to choose as cuomo center press conference between 1000 people dying and 1000 people losing their business. It's not a hard choice. And he's right. But at a certain point it's like all right, you're losing both, your losing, not losing that. You're you're making these decisions. Um, and not having consequences for it. And you're going to do it again the next time. So we need to make sure you're a little scared and I don't know what that would mean. </s><s>[INST] But you're laying this problem, this this incompetence. [/INST] I don't think it's incompetence. I think it's very competent. I think they're just their job. </s><s>[INST] Yes. But but but you're laying it not at the at the hands of the individuals but the structure of the, of government. It's both. Yes. How would we deal with it better without centralized control? [/INST] Well, we didn't really have centralized control because every country and every state, you know, handled it in a different mechanism. </s><s>[INST] But the city has centralized control just yet. [/INST] Right? I know that's not true, cuomo de Blasio, they had a lot of disagreements over this over the months and this was actually a source of great interest in tension. Um De Blasio wanted at one point was talking about quarantining people in their homes, calm was like you're crazy. Uh, something anything with the schools same thing with the gyms. Um, and there are other such examples, but the point being this was an emergency, this is World War One. I talked to us in temples show um was very dangerous because it gave a lot of evil people some very useful information about what the country put up with and what they can get away with under wartime. And this set the model for things like the new deal and the other things of that nature. It is undeniable. Your scientists you understand perfectly well um that this lockdown gave some very nefarious people some very valid data about how much people will put up with under pressures from the state. </s><s>[INST] So fundamentally. What is the problem with the state of [/INST] existence? </s><s>[INST] Okay. Well but but uh to play angels advocate again, you know government is the people. [/INST] Come on. You don't you don't do you really think this </s><s>[INST] as best? I think it's possible to have represent representation. [/INST] Can you imagine if like you have an attorney, you're like oh you can't have the attorney you want. You're gonna have this guy who you absolutely hate, who you share no values with. Why? </s><s>[INST] Because he drives. I mean leaders, political leaders and political representation drive the discourse like we you know, uh the majority of people voted for him or whatever. However however you define that and now we get to have a discussion while was this the right choice and then we'll get to make that choice again in four years and so on. [/INST] First of all the fact that I have to be under the thumb of somebody four years makes no sense. There's no other relationship that's like this including marriage. You can leave any other relationship at any time. Number one. Number two. Is </s><s>[INST] it always impeach But they did that part of it. I'm just saying that the mechanisms are flawed in many ways. [/INST] Yeah. Right. And and so that's number one, Number two is it doesn't make sense that if I don't want someone to represent me that because that person is popular that they are now in a position to. So having uh representation and having citizenship based on geography is a pre landline technology in a post cell phone world. There's no reason why I have to just because we're physically between two oceans, we all have to be represented by the same people. Whereas I can very easily have my security be under someone and switch it as easily as cell phone providers. </s><s>[INST] So okay, but it doesn't have to be geographical. It can be ideas. Sure. This country represents a certain set of ideas. It started out geographically, it's still geographic. [/INST] Start off as ideas as </s><s>[INST] well. But like there's a it was intricately. I mean that's the way humans are is there's I mean uh there was no internet. So it was your geographically the same location and you signed a bunch of documents and then you kind of debated and you wrote a bunch of stuff and then you agreed on it. [/INST] Okay. You understand that no one signed these documents and no one agreed to it as Lysander spooner pointed out over 100 50 years ago. The constitution or the social contract if anything is only binding to the signatories. Um and even then they're all long dead. Uh so it's it's this fallacy that somehow because I'm in a physical place, I have agreed, even though I'm screaming to your face that I don't agree to be subordinate to, uh, some imaginary invisible monster that was created 100 50 years ago. Uh, and this idea of like if you don't like it, you have to move. That's not what freedom means. Freedom means, I do what I want, not what you want. So if you don't like it, you move. </s><s>[INST] Okay. Just to put some I don't like words in [/INST] terms 11101110. Yeah, exactly what your language like </s><s>[INST] it is translating it all in real time. But would you call the kind of ideas that you're advocating for? And we're talking about anarchy? Yes, anarchism. Yes. Okay, so let's get into it. Can you, can you try to paint the utopia that an anarchist worldview dreams about [/INST] the only people who describe anarchism as Utopia or its critics? If I told you right now, And I wish I could say this factually that I have a cure for cancer that would not make us utopia. Uh, that would still probably be expensive. We would still have many other diseases. However, we would be fundamentally healthier, happier and better off all, all of us </s><s>[INST] then democracy. So that democracy, I jumped back from the cancer [/INST] then democracy or or government? So it's only curing one major major life threatening problem, but in no sense? Is it a utopia? </s><s>[INST] So what can we try to uh, answer this question? Same question many times. Which is what exactly is the problem with democracy? [/INST] The problem with democracy is that those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. </s><s>[INST] Those who need leaders are not qualified to choose them. So that's [/INST] the central problem of democracy. </s><s>[INST] Not all of us need leaders, right? What does it mean to need a leader? Are you saying like people who are actually like free thinkers don't need leaders kind of thing? Sure. But like but like you don't. Okay, so do you acknowledge that there's some value in authority in different subjects? So what that means is I don't mean authority. Somebody who's in control of you, but [/INST] you're doing the definition switch </s><s>[INST] because I am I [/INST] am. You're right. You're right. </s><s>[INST] It's unfair. Okay. That's that's bad. But [/INST] that's what they do. That's their trick. And if this is one of the useful things, by the way, this is total sidebar. If people ask me for advice, I always tell them if you're going to raise your kids, raise them bilingual because I was trilingual by the time I was six and that teaches you to think in concepts. Whereas if you only know one language you fall for things like this because using authority in the sense of a policeman and someone in authority in physics, it's the same word conceptually. They're extremely different. But if you're only thinking in one language your brain is going to equate the two and that's a trap that people who only speak one language have. </s><s>[INST] But even if you know multiple languages, you can still use the trick of usually or see your convenience to manipulate the conversation philosophy. [/INST] You felt I accidentally did it. Yeah, we all tend to do that if you only speak one language and thinking one language. </s><s>[INST] But if I guess, let me rephrase it. Are you against? Mhm. Do you acknowledge the value of like off floating your own effort about a particular thing to somebody else? Absolutely. [/INST] Like an accountant, a lawyer, doctor, Absolutely Chef infinite. </s><s>[INST] Isn't that ultimately what a democracy is broadly defined? Like you're basically electing a bunch of authorities [/INST] using the word you in two senses using the word you meaning me as an individual now. Using you as a mess. </s><s>[INST] Yes, as a mass not using individual. [/INST] So I have, I would absolutely want someone to provide for my security. I would absolutely want someone to negotiate with me for foreign power or something like that. That does not mean it has to be predicated and what lots of other people who I do not know? And if I do know them probably would not respect. Think about it's of no moral relevance to me nor I to them. </s><s>[INST] Do you think this kind of, there could be a bunch of humans that behave kind of like ants in a distributed way. There could be an emergent behavior in them that results in a stable society. Like isn't that the hope with anarchy is like without an overarching uh [/INST] but answer, I mean, answer the worst example here because ants have a very firm authority, the queen and they're all they're all drones, they're all clones of each other. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, But so if you forget the queen that their behavior, they're all well from your perspective, from your human intelligent perspective. But from their perspective, they'd probably see each other as a bunch of individuals [/INST] know they don't, ants are very big on altruism in the sense of self sacrifice. They do not think the individual matters. They routinely kill themselves for the sake of the hive in the community. </s><s>[INST] But they see that's from the outside perspective, from the individual perspective of the individual. They probably they they don't see it as altruism, [/INST] right? But they they they view and they're right because the ants life is very ephemeral and cheap that it's more important to continue this mass population that that one individual ant live like bees are another even better example, the honeybee when they sting, they only sting once and they die and they do it gladly because it's like, okay, this community is much more important than me and they're right. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, So fine, let's [/INST] get pedantic, but it's important. I think just for the sake of being pedantic, </s><s>[INST] but there's something beautiful that I won't argue about because I do, there's an interesting point there about individualism advance. I do think they're more individually. But let's just give your view of ants that they're, it's they're communists. Okay, let's go with the communist view of ants. Uh, but there's still a beautiful emergent thing which is like they can function as a, as a society and without, I would say centralized control. Yeah, that's another argument. So is that the hope for anarchy is like you just throw a bunch of people that voluntarily want to be in the same place under the same set of ideas and they kind of like the doctors emerge, the police officers emerge. The uh, the different necessary structures of a functional society emerge. [/INST] Do you know what the most beautiful example of anarchism is? That is just beyond beautiful when you stop to think about it. And I'm not, I'm not being tongue in cheek language. There's infinite languages. Language. The things that language can be used for our bring tears to people's eyes. Quite literally. It's also used for basic things. No one is forcing us, we speak two languages. Each at least no one is forcing us to use english. No one is forcing us to use this dialect of english. Uh, it's away and despite there being so different languages lingua franca emerge. You know, people, that language that everyone is latin, even in north Korea, they refer to the fish and the different animals by the latin scientific. Uh, no one decided that. Sure. There's an organization that sets the binomial nomenclature but there's no gun to anyone's head referring to see moth as a Pegasus species. And when you think about how amazing languages and in some other context would say like, well you you need to have a world government and they're deciding which is the verbs and you have to have an official definition and an official dictionary. And none of that happened. And I think anyone, even if they don't agree with my politics are my worldview cannot deny that the creation of language is one of humanity's most miraculous beautiful achievements. </s><s>[INST] Absolutely. So there there you go. There's one system where a kind of anarchy can result in in beauty stability, like sufficient stability and yet I know the flexibility to adjust it and so on. And the internet helps it. You get something something like urban dictionary which starts creating absurd both humor and [/INST] which but also language and syntax and jargon. Immediately. You size people up. If you if you say vertebral, I know you're a doctor because that's how they pronounce it. The spinal column. I'm sure in your field there's certain jargon and right away you can know if this person is one of us or not. I mean it's infinite. I mean I don't need to tell us emojis. Yes, there's so much there to study with language. It's fascinating. </s><s>[INST] But do you think this applies to human life the meatspace, the physical space. So these that kind of beauty can emerge without, without writing stuff on paper, that laws you [/INST] could have rules you don't need, you don't have to be laws </s><s>[INST] so enforced by violence. Like that's what's the law. [/INST] A law is something that is unchosen a rule is something if I go to my pool, you know, I I signed up for a member of pool on the wall is certain things, it's like, you know, a certain number of people in the pool, no peeing in here. Good luck enforcing that one. Um, and so on and so forth. Well, that's the </s><s>[INST] problem. Aren't you afraid that people get to pee in the pool? [/INST] That's not as my big concern is mass incarceration as the fact that the police can steal more money than burglars can. The fact that innocent people can be killed with no consequences. The fact that war can be waged and with no, uh, consequences for those who waged it. The fact that so many men and women are being murdered overseas and here and the people who are guiding these are regard as heroic. </s><s>[INST] So you think there might that in an anarchist system, there's a possibility of have of having less wars and less, What would you say, corruption and uh, less abusive power? [/INST] Let's talk. Yes. And let's talk about corruption. Because and I made this point in rug in unite again. This the Russian background. We realize that when it comes to corruption, american is very naive corruption. They thinking so I got my brother a job and he's getting money on the table. That's not when we're talking about like state corruption, things that are done in totalitarian states and even to some extent in America like Jeffrey, Epstein, Gillian Maxwell things that Stalin did things that Hitler did you know in the C. I. A. Was torturing people at Gitmo, they had to borrow KGB manuals because they didn't know how to torture correctly because they never thought of these things. We it's very hard for us to get into the mindset of someone who's like a child predator. Someone who let me give you an example for my forthcoming book. There was a guy who was the head of Ukraine in the 30s, I forget his name now these old Soviets, they were tough. I mean they pride started means steel, you know, they pride themselves and their cruelty and how strong they were and this was the purge. You know, Stalin is trying to you know killing lots of people left and right and his henchman barrier had the quote find me the man and I'll find you the crime. You know, they would accuse someone and they would torture him until he talked and confessed and then he had to turn people in And they took this guy in like begin the year, I think it's 36, he was head of Ukraine by May, he's arrested and they take him to the La Blanca, the basement in the Red Square where they're torturing people and they put they did the works on him and he was a good Soviet and he stood up and he who knows what they did to him. He didn't talk. So they said, okay, one moment they brought his teenage daughter in, raped her in front of him. He talked, so when we talk about corruption, we would never, in a million years think of this, That's not how our minds work. Um, so when you're talking about states and people where you don't have ease of exit, where you are forced to be under the auspices of an organization, creating a monopoly that leads to in extreme cases, but not as extreme cases really, uh nefarious outcomes. Whereas if you have the option to leave as a client or customer that would have a strongly limiting effect on how a business and what it can get away with. </s><s>[INST] So, but don't you think maybe, I don't know who the right example is, whether it's Stalin, I think Hitler might be the better example of don't you think? Or Jeffrey Epstein perhaps don't you think people who are evil will, will find ways to manipulate human nature to attain power, no matter the system? Yes. And like the corollary question is, do you think those people can get more power in in the democracy and you know when there's a government already in place, [/INST] they can easily to get more power. More dangerous to have a government place. First of all sociopaths bent over their charm and for their warmth, Here's the two situations in in a free society. I'm a sociopath. An evil person on the head of Macy's in a state society, I'm an evil person who associate path, I'm the head of the U. S. Government. Which of these are you more concerned with? It's like night and day. So you would have far more decentralized military, you would have far more decentralized um uh security forces and they would be much more subject to feedback from the market. If you have an issue with Macy's or any store with a sweater, look at that transaction. If you have an issue with the state to hiring a lawyer costs more than a surgeon to even access the mechanism for dispute is going to be exorbitant price poor people at the market for a conflict resolution immediately. So right away you have something that's extremely regressive. Uh And even though this is touted as some great equalizer, it's quite the opposite. </s><s>[INST] So in current society there is deep suspicion of governments and states, [/INST] they're not that's not really </s><s>[INST] well like just your example of Macy's. I mean don't you think a Hitler could rise to be at the top of social networks like twitter and facebook, [/INST] Okay let's suppose Hitler and twitter, Okay let's take this thought experiment seriously, literally, what could he do? So all the only tweets are gonna be about how much the juice suck, Right, okay, fine, okay. All the cool people are leaving. </s><s>[INST] There could be some compelling, like you said, um, evil people are charming. There could be some compelling narratives that could be with conspiracy theories, untruth that could be spread like propaganda does [/INST] every criticism of anarchism is in fact, the description, while the strongest criticism of anarchism are in fact description of the status quo, your concern is under anarchism, propaganda would spread and people would be taught the wrong ideas. Unlike the status </s><s>[INST] quo, that's not even a criticism of anarchism. I'm not actually criticizing. It's an open question of it's an open question of in which system will human nature thrive, be able to thrive more, and in in which system would the evils that arise in human nature would be more easily suppress a ble there. That's that's the question, it's a scientific experiment. And I'm asking only from our perspective of the fact that we've tried democracy quite a bit recently, and we I don't maybe you can correct me, we haven't yet seriously tried to anarchy in a large scale. [/INST] Well, we don't need to try to uh, to anarchy isn't like a country, right? It's like, you can't, I'm not, it's like saying, well, if anarchy works and we've never had an anarchist government, right? So, anarchism is a relationship, and language is an example of this is a worldwide and in our system, you and I have an anarchist relationship, there's almost no circumstances will be calling the police on each other. </s><s>[INST] I mean, it's I'm asking the same question, a bunch of different directions out of born out of my curiosity is why is anarchy going to be better at preventing the darker sides of human nature, which presumably a criticism of government [/INST] because it's because of decentralization. So, the darker side of human nature is an extreme concern. Anyone who says it's going to go away is absurd and fallacious. I think that's a nonstarter when people say that everyone is going to be good, human beings are basically, animals are capable of great beauty and kindness, were capable of just complete cruel and what we would call in humanity, but we see it on a daily basis even today. Uh, and what's interesting is the corporate press won't even tell you the darkest aspects because that's too upsetting to people. So they'll tell you about atrocities and horrors, but only to a point. Um, and then when you actually do the homework, you're like, oh, it's so much worse than like that thing about Stalin, right? So, we know in a broad sense that Stalin was a dictator, we know that he killed a lot of people, but it takes work to learn about the holiday more. It takes work to learn about what those literal torches were and that this is the person who later FDR and Harry Truman was shaking hands with and taking photos with and it was being sold to us as uncle joe. You know, he's just like you and me. Um, so when you have a decentralized information network as opposed to having three media networks, it is a lot easier for information that doesn't fit what would be the corporate America narrative to reach the populations and it would be a more effective for democracy because they're in a much better position to be informed. Now you're right. It also means well if everyone has a mic that means every crazy person and with their wacky views and at a certain point yeah, it has to become, then there's another level which is that the people have to be self enforcing and you see that social media all the time when someone says this, the other person jumps in </s><s>[INST] you think, but isn't social media a good example of this? Like so you think ultimately without centralized control, you can have stability. Like what about the mob outrage and the mob rule the power of the mobs that [/INST] emerge power of the mob is a very serious concern. Gustave le bon wrote a book in the 18 nineties called the crowd and this was one of the most important books I've written because it influenced both Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin and they all talked about it and he made the point that under crowd psychology, human lynching is another example. This none of those individuals or very few would ever dream of doing these acts, but when they're all together and you lose that sense of self, you become the ant and you lose that sense of individually you're capable of doing things that like in another context, you'd be like, I should kill myself. I'm a monster. </s><s>[INST] So you're worried about that? But like isn't the mob doesn't the mob has more power under anarchy? [/INST] No, the mob has much less power and anarchy because under anarchism, every individual is fully empowered. You wouldn't have uh gun restrictions. You have people creating communities based on shared values. They be much more collegial, they'd be much more kind as opposed to when you're forcing people to be together in a polity when they don't have things in common that is like having a bad roommate, if you're forced to liquid jails, if you're forced to be in locked in a room with someone, even if you at first like them after a while, you're going to start to hate them and that leads to very nefarious consequences. </s><s>[INST] So as an anarchist, what are you doing? A society like this [/INST] thrive. I think I'm doing </s><s>[INST] okay. I mean, I mean, there's an election coming up. There's uh as as you talk, uh You're welcome is one of the 15 shows that you host. Okay Santa one, but I'm a big fan. You talk about libertarianism a little bit. I mean, is there some practical Mhm. Political direction, like in terms of we as a society should should go, I don't mean we as a nation, I mean we as a collective of people should go to uh to make a better world from an anarchist point of view. Sure. [/INST] I think politics is the enemy. Uh and anything you define </s><s>[INST] politics, it's like [/INST] the government. So anything that lessens its way on people, anything that de legitimizes it is good. I wrote an article a few years ago about how wonderful it is that trump is regarded such a buffoon because it's very, very useful to have a commander in chief who is regarded as a clown because it's going to take a lot to get him to convince your kids to go overseas and start killing people and making widows and orphans as well as those kids coming home in caskets. Whereas if someone is regarded with prestige and they're like, oh, we need to send your kid overseas. Oh, absolutely. I mean this guy is great. So that is a very healthy thing where people are skeptical of the state, </s><s>[INST] but there's a lot of people that regard him as as one of the greatest leaders we've ever had. [/INST] Yeah. Denise DeSousa. He's another Lincoln </s><s>[INST] I when you talk about trump or talk about biden the I'm trying to find a line to walk where they don't immediately put you into the this process trump derangement syndrome. Are they have the other the alternative [/INST] to that? I'm more than happy when people are preemptively dismissing me because they don't have to waste time engaging with them because those people who have no use to me when I was on tim pool recently, tim pulls show uh tim Pool is known for his little like hat, I got a propeller beanie motorized and it was just spinning the whole two hours, 19 fifties thing. The point being, I wore it because there's lots of people who would say I can't take seriously someone who wears a hat like that. And my point being, if you're the kind of person who takes your cues based on someone's wardrobe, as opposed to content your ideas, you're of no use to me as an ally. So I'm more than happy, you preemptively abort rather than waste our breath. But this is the </s><s>[INST] deep, this is a very, very deep thing that you and I disagree on, which is this goes to the trolling versus the love. Uh is I believe that person instinctually dismisses you on the very basic surface level, but deep down they're actually there's a wealth of a human being that seeks the connection to, seeks to understand deeply to connect with other humans that we should speak to [/INST] your complete disagree. </s><s>[INST] So you're saying, I'm [/INST] saying there's no mind there literally, </s><s>[INST] okay, so let's I naturally think that [/INST] majority, so I naturally </s><s>[INST] think the majority of people are have the capacity to be thoughtful, intelligent and you know, learn about ideas, ideas that they instinctually based on their own. Like current inner circle disagree with and learn to understand to empathize with the other were like I and in the current climate, there's a divisiveness that discourages that. And that's where I see the value of love of, of encouraging people to, to strip away that surface instinctual response based on the thing they've been taught based on the things they listen to, to actually think deeply. Have [/INST] you ever had gone to CVS or Duane Reade And your bill? How much you owe them is $6 And you give them a $10 bill in a single and watch the look on their face, You watch them void their bowels and panic because you've given them $11 on a $6 bill. This is not a mind capable or interested in thoughts and ideas of learning. You </s><s>[INST] know, you're talking about the first moment of uh, a first moment where there's an opportunity to think [/INST] they are desperate to avoid it. </s><s>[INST] No, they're just, it's an incapable of it. I just, it's there, they have the same exact experiences. I have every single day when I know it's time for me to go on a on a run of five miles or six miles or 10 miles I'm desperate to avoid it and at the same time, I know I have the capacity to do it and I'm deeply fulfilled when I do do it. When I do overcome that challenge. [/INST] You are one of the great minds of our generation. You're telling me that any of these people can do anything close to the work, you do </s><s>[INST] not in artificial intelligence, but in uh inability to be compassionate towards other people's ideas. Like understand them enough to be [/INST] able, Passion requires a certain baseline of intelligence because you have to perceive other people as being different. But a value that's a sophisticated mindset. </s><s>[INST] I think I think most people are are capable of it. You don't think so? [/INST] No, and nor are they interested in it, </s><s>[INST] but in that kind of if you don't believe they're capable of it, how can anarchy be stable? [/INST] Uh if you have a farm, there's one farmer and 50 cows, it's very stable. You're just not, you're not asking the cows where the over the farm things. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but the cows aren't intelligent enough to do damage [/INST] cows, cows certainly bulls because they do a lot of that, which they could trample things they could attack you, Cows are like how much they weigh, like £4,000. Can </s><s>[INST] you connect the analogy then? Because like [/INST] sure you can't expect saying a cow is a cow isn't a slur, it's not saying you hate cows, cows or even let's take the example, I always used with good reason as dogs. Okay. Uh I always say to study how human beings operate, Watch Cesar Milan because human beings and dogs have co evolved, our minds have both evolved in parallel tracks to communicate with each other. Dogs are can be vicious dogs for the most part are great, wonderful. But you can't expect the dog to understand certain concepts. It's not an now most people are found. Are you saying like a dog, if you're a dog person like I am, this is actually a huge compliment. Most dogs are better than most people. Um but to get the idea that this is something that is basically your appear is Nonsensical. Now of course this sounds arrogant and elitist and so on and so forth and I'm perfectly happy with that. But it is very hard to persuade me or anyone that if you walk George Carlin has that joke, think how smart the average person is then realized. 50% of people are dumber than that. If you walk around and see who's out there, these people are very kind, they are of value. They deserved to be treated with respect. They deserve to be secure in their person. They deserve to feel safe and to have love, but the expectation that they should have any sort of semblance of power over me in my life is as nonsensical as asking last see to be my accountant. </s><s>[INST] So but that goes to power that not to uh the ability, the capacity to be empathetic, compassionate, intelligent. What if I were to try to prove you wrong? That's a good question. Okay, what would what would what would you be impressed by about society? How would I show it to you? [/INST] That's a good question. How would you show it to me? Because I think something has to be falsified, able if we're going to make a claim right? So what would it, what would it, </s><s>[INST] because we both made claims that aren't kind of our own like interpretation based on our interaction? Like when I open twitter, everyone seems to say, you only [/INST] Follow one person who do you follow? Who is the one person you follow </s><s>[INST] stoic emperor, I, I follow a lot of people, I have a script, I have a script that I have an entire interface. So I think twitter is really this [/INST] is real love, it's not ironic, love I love watching and I'm sure you do too. I love watching equality of mind at work because when someone has a quality of mind there often not self aware, I catch this on myself of how it operates and then when other people see it, they're like, oh my God, this is so beautiful because there's such an innocence to it. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but like when I open twitter, I'm energized, there's a lot of love on twitter [/INST] people say like I love to agree, I haven't you don't think I have a lot of love on twitter, My fans pay my rent. </s><s>[INST] I mean I don't know your experience of twitter, but when I look at your, which is a fundamentally different thing, I'm saying my experience from the, so maybe you can tell me what your experience is like as a human. So when I observe your twitter, I think I don't I wouldn't call it love, I would call it fun. And because of that, that's a different kind of like love emerges from that because people kind of learn that we're having, this is like game night like uh you know, we're we can talk sh it a little bit, we can uh and you can, you can even like pulling, you can make fun of people, you can have the crazy uncle come over that there's a huge trump supporter or somebody who hates trump and you can have a little fun. I guess it's a different kind of thing. I I wouldn't be able to um be the you're the host of game night. Yes, yes, so I wouldn't be able to host that kind of game night [/INST] actually. You programming your robots and you're asking what is fun and it just starts sparkling exactly what is fun. </s><s>[INST] So the robots in my life that survive are the ones that don't that like survived that whole programming process. They're kind of like, they're kind of like the idiot from dostoyevsky, they're very like simple minded robots [/INST] son is moving, you can from one table, that's </s><s>[INST] game night for, [/INST] for our kids. You know what I'm on my quotes is, and I think about this every day and I mean it with every fiber of my being were born knowing that life is a magical adventure and it takes them years to train us to think otherwise. And I think that willy Wonka approach, it's a very calm you approach. It's something I believe with every fiber of my being. I try to spread that as much as possible. I think it is very sad. I'm not being sarcastic, it comes off as condescending. I mean at face value, it's very sad how many people are not receptive to that. And I think a lot of those functions how they were raised and I could have very easily with my upbringing have not maintain that perspective. And there's a lot of, I have a lot of friends in recovery like a and they have an expression, um, not my circus, not my monkeys right? That you can't really take on other people's problems on your own at a certain point. They have to do the work themselves because you can only do so much externally. And there are a lot of very damaged people out there and they are damaged people who revel in being damaged and they are damaged. People who desperately, desperately desperately want to be well, who desperately want to be happy, who desperately want to find joy. So if I can be the one and as arrogant, that sounds all on it, who does give them that fun and to tell them it doesn't have to be like you thought like it could be, it's gonna hurt. It's gonna suck. But it's still a magical adventure and you're gonna be okay because you've been through worse like that. If that could be my message, I would own it all day long. </s><s>[INST] And so what does the adventure look like for you? Because I mean it actually boils down to, I still disagree with you. I think trolling can be and very often is destructive for society. [/INST] Yes, I want to destroy society. That is the goal. I want, I want to help many people ironically, ironically, yes. </s><s>[INST] Uh what do I do with that? Okay, so what [/INST] was that will is the hall of the law. </s><s>[INST] Um like I just want to, so you're hosting game night and I just want to play monopoly. I want to play uh what's the risk. Okay, I want to play these games and your sense of games. Yeah, I was trying to think like I'm a friendly game but they're all kind of aggressive [/INST] battleship axis and allies, you know, fun stuff but </s><s>[INST] like uh so that's an adventure. But you're saying that want to destroy everything to even like the rules of those games are [/INST] not like you have voluntarily agreed to those rules. The point is if someone comes in, who's not who no one invited to game night and are telling, you know, when you play monopoly, you have to get money when you land in free parking or you don't, it's like, who are </s><s>[INST] you? We're [/INST] having our own fun and you smell, </s><s>[INST] I don't know, but there's a an aggressive, [/INST] there's an aggression. Let me let me speak to that which is picking up on uh I had a friend named Martha Marcia, excuse me, She ran something called cuddle parties which people left at about a lot back in the day and the premise of cuddle parties, everyone got together and cuddled, right? And it's like, hahaha, then you stop to think about and you realize physical context extremely important and a lot of people don't have it. And if this is a mechanism, people getting that it actually is going to have profound positive psychological consequences. So after she explained, I'm like, okay, we laughed at this because it's weird and now that I think about this is wonderful. And I asked her about like, like the tough question I go, what if guys get turned on and on their website, it even has a rule, I do not fear the erection, right? Because it's gonna be a natural consequence of physical proximity. And the point, she goes, she said this, I think about it all the time, people will take as much space as you let them. It is incumbent on each of us to set our own boundaries. We all have to learn when to say no, you're making me uncomfortable. If someone doesn't respect your right to have your boundary to be uncomfortable, this person is not your friend. Now they can say, I don't understand like why is this okay? Why is that not let me know you better, some respectful of you, but if they roll their eyes and they're like get over, I'm gonna do what I want. This person is not interested in knowing you as a human being. Okay, that is the aggression it is, you have to draw those lines. </s><s>[INST] I mean, but that's a very positive way of phrasing that aggression. [/INST] I'm a very positive person. </s><s>[INST] But the trolling there's a destructive thing to it that hurts others, but it's not bad people. [/INST] So I only troll as a reaction or towards those in power. </s><s>[INST] Okay, so maybe let's talk about trolling a little bit because trolling when it can maybe you can correct me, but I've seen it become a game for people that's enjoyable in itself. [/INST] I'm not I'm not I I disagree with that, but that's not a good thing. If you are there just to hurt innocent people, you are a horrible human being, </s><s>[INST] but doesn't trolling too easily become that [/INST] I don't know about easily, let me give you an example of the the we're trolling came from the original troll was Andy Kaufman, he was on the show taxi, he was standing his performance artist at a stand up comedian and this is a quintessential example of trolling. He had a character um where he was basically like a lounge singer, had these glasses on, uh just terrible, terrible singer and so on and so forth and he denied it was him and he came </s><s>[INST] out and [/INST] I'm blanking on the guy's name, I can't believe Tony Clifton's Yeah, he came out in an audience and he goes, you know, my wife died a few years ago, every time I look at my daughter, Sarah's eyes, I can see my wife, Sarah come out here, let's do a duet. And Sarah's like 11 sits on his lap, they start singing duet, her voice cracks, he smacks her across the face, what the hell are you doing? You're making a scene in front of people there, there she starts crying, the audience is booing and goes, don't boo, are you just gonna make her cry more now? It ends, This wasn't his daughter, it wasn't even child was an actress, This was all set up, he's exploiting their love of Children in order to force them to be performers that is trolling, no one is actually getting hurt. It's a humorous, the twisted exchange. If you go online looking for weak people and you are there to denigrate them just for them being weak or in some way inferior to you. That is the wrong approach. I am best on the counter punch. A lot of times people come to me and they'll be like I hope you die, you're ugly, you're disgusting. And there's this great quote from Billy Idol which I'm gonna mangle or something effective. I love it when people are rude to me, then I could stop pretending to be nice. Then you start fights. Now it's a chance for me to finish it and make an example of this person. But that's very very different from I'm going to go around and humiliate people for the sake of doing it in my view and I can see how one would lead to the other. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but that's my fundamental concern with it. So I my dream is to put use technology create platforms that increase the amount of love in the world and to me trolling is doing the opposite. So like Andy Kaufman is brilliant. So I love obviously sounds like I'm a robot saying I love humor, okay, humor is [/INST] Good. 11011, </s><s>[INST] 1 1. But but like it's I just see like four chan I see that you can often see that humor quickly [/INST] turn because what happens is a lot of low status people. This is there one mechanism through statism uh to feel empowered and then they can hide behind Well I'm just joking. Yeah, it's just dark that's not acceptable. That's a dark L. </s><s>[INST] O. L. That people do which is like they'll say like the shittiest thing and then they feel L. O. L. After like as if I don't even know like what is happening in the dark mind of yours [/INST] because they are feeling powerless in their lives, right? And they see someone who they perceive as higher status and more powerful them or even not appear and they through their words cause a reaction in this person, so they feel like they are in a very literal sense making a difference on earth and they matter in a very dark way. Uh It's it's disturbing, this is not, I mean it's unfortunate that that term trolling is used for that as opposed to what Andy Kaufman does as opposed to what I do. Um It's it really is a sinister thing and it's something I'm not at all a fan of. </s><s>[INST] How do we how do we fight that? So like a neighboring concept of that is conspiracy theories which is [/INST] I don't think they're neighboring at all. </s><s>[INST] Well, let me, let me give you a sort of naive perspective. Maybe you can educate man this from my perspective, conspiracy theories are these constructs of ideas that go deeper and deeper and deeper into creating worlds where there's uh powerful pedophiles controlling things like these very sophisticated models of the world that you know in part might be true but in large part I would say are are figments of imagination that become really useful constructs and self reinforcing, self reinforcing for them feeding like empowering the trolls to attack the powerful, the conventionally powerful. [/INST] I don't think that that's a function of conspiracy theories. Now let's talk about conspiracy theories because one of my quotes is you take one red pill, not the whole bottle, this concept that everything in life is at the function of a small cadre of individuals would be for many people reassuring because as bad as it looks, you know, they whoever they are, usually the jews aren't going to let it get that bad that they will pull back or the black pill is that they aren't intentionally trying to destroy everything and there's nothing we can do and we're doomed. And there's an amazing book where Arthur Herman called the idea of decline of Western history, It's one of my top 10 books Where he goes through every 20 years, how there's a different population that say it's in the world, here's the proof and very often the proof is something that is kind of self fulfilling, where there's no it's not falsify a ble and we both have to think of ways to falsify their claims from earlier. So it is a big danger. It's a big danger online because very quickly if someone who you thought was good, but now it's bad on one aspect, well they're controlled opposition or they've been uh taken over or they've been kind of appropriated by the bad people, Whoever those bad people would be um I don't know that I have a good answer for this. I don't think it's as pervasive as people think </s><s>[INST] the number of people who believe conspiracy [/INST] there, right? I mean, and also, conspiracy theory is a term used to dismiss ideas that have some currency. The constitutional convention was a conspiracy. The founding fathers got together secretly under swore to secrecy in philadelphia said, we're throwing out the article. Confederation were making your government, right? Yeah, and Luther martin left, and he told everyone this is a conspiracy and they're like, yeah, whatever, Luther martin. So, and Jeffrey Epstein was a conspiracy, harvey Weinstein was a conspiracy. Bill Cosby conspiracy. They all knew they didn't care uh communist infiltration in America. There's a great book by Eugene Lyons called the Red Decade. They all knew every atrocity that was done under stalinism was excused in the west and if you don't believe it, so you've got this crazy anti Russian conspiracy. So it's a term that is weaponized in a negative sense, but that does not at all imply that it does not have very negative real life consequences because it's kind of a cult of one, right? Like I'm at home on my computer, I bought into this ideology. Anyone who doesn't agree with me, they're blind, they're oblivious mom and dad, my friends, you don't get it. We were warned about people like you and I think there's a very heavy correlation. I'm not a psychiatrist of course between that in certain types of mild mental illness. Like, you know, some kind of paranoid schizophrenia, things like that. Because after a certain point, if everything is a function, this conspiracy, it's it's there's no randomness or beauty in life. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you can say anything interesting about it and in the way of advice of how to take a step into conspiracy theory world without completely going like diving deep, because it seems like that's what happens. People can't look at Jeffrey Epstein, [/INST] I can tell you what the device that has, </s><s>[INST] seriously and rigorously without going, because you can look at Jeffrey Epstein and say there's a deeper thing. You can always go deeper. It's like Jeffrey Epstein was just a tool of uh the lizard people and the lizard people are they say satanists say, uh, in this case, and somehow, recently, very popular pedophiles somehow always involved. I'm not understanding any of that. And I legitimately, I say this both humorously and seriously, I need to look into it. And I guess the bigger question, I'm asking, how does the serious human being, uh, somebody with a position at a respectable university. Like, look at a conspiracy theory and look into it. When I look at somebody like Jeffrey Epstein who had a role at M I. T. [/INST] Yeah, </s><s>[INST] and I and I think I'm not happy, personally, I didn't I wasn't there when Jeffrey Epstein was there, I'm not happy with the behavior of people now about Jeffrey Epstein about the bureaucracy and the everybody's trying to keep quiet hoping it blows over without really looking into any like looking in a deep philosophical way of like how do we let this human being be among us? Can I [/INST] give you a better example? That is kind of conspiratorial, the Speaker of the House, the longest serving Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert was a pedophile, he went to jail. The democrats don't throw this in the republicans faces every five minutes, not even democratic activists. I find that very, very odd and not what I would predict now, I'm not saying there's some kind of conspiracy, but when it comes to things like sexual predation, which is something that I'm very, very concerned about. I'm an uncle now, my sister just had her second kid recently is adorable. Um it's something that I don't understand. It feels as if there's a lot of people who want this to all go away now. I think it's also because we don't have the vocabulary and framework to discuss it because when you start talking about things like Children in these kind of issues, we want to believe it's all crap because it's for those of us who aren't in this kind of mindset, the idea that this happens to kids and happens frequently is something so horrible that we it's just like, I don't even want to hear it and that does these Children and adult survivors and enormous disservice. So I don't know, they have any particular insight on this, </s><s>[INST] but see like how do you the catholic church, again, there's all these topics that [/INST] public school teachers are far more proportionately uh predators of Children in the catholic </s><s>[INST] church may I don't know what you're right, you're right. Um, perhaps some, I've been, you know, reading a lot about Stalin and Hitler somehow. It's more comforting like to be able to and then and then and then the the atrocities that are happening now it's a little bit more difficult. But there [/INST] was a new york Times articles are interrupted where they had people tracking down child pornography and I think the article said they didn't have enough people just to cover the videotapes of infants being raped. And we can even wrap our heads around like reading Lolita, like, okay, she's 14, 12, okay, it's still a female, an infant. It's something that again, like with the Stalin example, we sat down here for 100 years, you would never think of something like this thing in a sexual context. It makes no sense. Um, so, and the fact that this is international, Okay, we eliminated completely in America. Well then they're gonna go find these infants all over the world. There's video cameras all over the world. So then it has to become a conspiracy because someone has to film it. I'm filming it. You're buying it your kid. It is literally a conspiratorial, not in the sense of like a mafia conspiracy or some government illuminati, but there is our networks designed to produce this product. </s><s>[INST] See, But like what I'm I'm trying to do now and part of the, one of the nice things with like a podcast and other things I'm involved with is removing myself from having any kind of boss. So I can do whatever. [/INST] It's so, it's so wonderful that just happened to me. It's it's the most wonderful thing ever. </s><s>[INST] So I can do, I can actually in moderation, consider like, look into stuff [/INST] careful though I was going to write a book about this and people pointed out you should want to do this research because you start googling around for this kind of stuff. It's on your computer. </s><s>[INST] Oh, in that sense, yeah, I'm more concerned about. You know, it's a niche thing. Looking into the best. Like you want to be very, yeah, I believe I can do this kind of thing in moderation without slipping into the depths of I think that's that's intelligence. That's uh like I recently quote unquote looked into like the UFO community, the extraterrestrial whatever community. I think it always frustrated me that the scientific community, like rolled their eyes at all the UFO sightings, all that kind of stuff, even though there could be fascinating, beautiful physical. Like, first of all there could like lightning ball lightning right? That that's at the very basic level is a fascinating thing. And also it could be something like, I mean I don't know but it could be something interesting like worth looking into. [/INST] My grandfather was an air traffic controller back in the soviet union and he said we saw this stuff all the time. These are planes that were not moving or whatever, things that we're not moving according to anything we knew about. So it's absolutely real. He's not some jerk with the iphone in his backyard. This is a military professional who understood technology, he knew where the secret bases were. So if he's telling me it's something doesn't mean it's Martians, but he's telling me there's something there and there are many examples of these like military people. These aren't some laymen who sees a story. Yeah. And and so it's, you you can dismiss when you're talking about professionals who around aircraft all the time, who are familiar with aircraft at the highest levels and they're seeing things that they can't explain. It's they're clearly not stupid and they're clearly not under form. </s><s>[INST] So by there's different ways to dismiss idea for example, I am uh you were saying that trolling is a good mechanism um against that. But I'm not dismissing it by like rolling my eyes, I'm considering legitimately that you're way smarter than me and you understand the world better than me, like I'm allowing myself to consider that possibility and thinking about it, like maybe that's true, like seriously considering it, that's what that's, I feel the way people should approach intelligent people, serious, quote unquote people, scientists should approach conspiracy theories. Like look at it carefully, you know, first of all, is it possible that the earth is flat? It's not trivial to show that the earth is not flat. It's a very good exercise. You should go through it. But once you go through it, you realize that based on a lot of data and a lot of evidence and there's a lot of different experiments, you can do yourself actually uh to show that the earth is not flat. Okay, the same kind of process can be taken for a lot of different conspiracy theories and it's helpful and without slipping into the depths of, of lizard people running everything. That's where I, I've now listen to to episodes of um of Alex jones show because he goes crazy deep into into different kind of world views that I was not familiar with and I don't know what to make of it. I mean, the reason I've been listening to is because um there's been a lot of discussions about platform ng of different people and I've been thinking about what is censorship mean, I've been thinking about whether because joe Rogan uh said he's gonna have Alex on again, and then I enjoyed it as a fan just the entertainment of it. But then actually listen to Alex as thinking is this human being dangerous for the world? Like is the idea is he's saying dangerous for the world, [/INST] I'm more concerned with the Russian conspiracy that we have for three years. The claim that the election was not legitimate and that everyone in the trump white house is a stooge of Putin and the people who said this had no consequences for this Alex, jones doesn't have the respect that they do. These are both areas of concern for me. </s><s>[INST] But he he might if there's if he's given more platforms, so like the people who have and be curious, I'm also a little bit, I don't know what to think about the idea that Russians hacked the election, it seems too easily accepted in the mainstream media. Hillary [/INST] Clinton said that how they did it was they had ads on the dark web now, you and I both know what the dark web is. So the possibility of as in the dark web having an influence from a proportional influence on the election is literally zero. </s><s>[INST] Perhaps I should look into it more carefully. But I've found very little good data on exactly what did the Russians do to hack elections, like like technically speaking, what are we talking about here? Like as opposed to these kind of weird, like the best thing, there's a couple of books and like reporting on like farms, like farms, troll farms but let's see the data. Like how many exactly what are we talking about? Like what were they doing relative not just like some anecdotal discussions of, but like relative to the bigger the size of facebook. Like if there's a few people, several 100 say the posting different political things on facebook relative to the full size of facebook, Let's look at the full size like, like the actual impact. Like, because it's fascinating the social dynamics of viral information of videos when, when donald trump retweets something that I think that's understudied the effect of that. Uh, like he retweeted a clip with joe Rogan on uh, and Mike Tyson where Mike Tyson says that he finds fighting orgasmic. I don't understand that, but they'd be fascinating to think like what is the ripple effect on the social dynamic of our society? From retweeting a clip about Mike, what's [/INST] your favorite joke trump tweets. </s><s>[INST] I tuned them out a long time ago. Unfortunately. Uh, I have um, it's, this goes to the, you and I have a different relationship with donald trump. You appreciate the art of controlling non sexual and non sexual. Yeah. So, uh, I tend to prefer Bill Clinton. He's one of my type. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. [/INST] You don't like that consent stuff </s><s>[INST] because no, uh no, you appreciate the art form of trolling and donald trump is a master. He's the da Vinci of, of trolling. So I tend to I think that trolling is ultimately destructive for society and then donald trump takes nothing seriously. He's playing a game, he's making a game out of [/INST] everything. A lot of things seriously. I think he's very committed to international peace. </s><s>[INST] Sorry, I shouldn't speak so strong. I think I think it takes actually, yes, a lot of things seriously. I meant on twitter and the game of politics. He is um he only takes irreverently. Yeah and um I appreciate it. I just I would like to focus on like genuine, real expressions of humanity. Especially [/INST] positive. Well this is my love. This is my favorite tweet. My fans got it laser etched and put in a block of lucite for me And he said every time I speak of the losers and haters, I do so with great affection. They cannot help the fact that they were born fucked up. That's an actual Trump tweet. It's my favourite one. I'm that's kind of nice. That's love. That's love. That's kind of not infection </s><s>[INST] that I [/INST] mean exclamation point even um I broke lex </s><s>[INST] what is love. Yeah, the sparks are flying but I have to kind of analyze that from a like a literary perspective but it seems like there's love in there like a little bit, it's a little bit of light hearted [/INST] because he's saying even when I'm going after them. Don't take it so seriously. Yeah that's that's nice. It </s><s>[INST] is nice acknowledging the game of it. That's that's that's nice. Uh he's not always [/INST] something, he's very, very vicious, very vicious. He's done things that I can tell you about, that. I'm like, this is a bad person. </s><s>[INST] What do you think about one of the? Okay, listen, I'm not I, for people listening, I do not have trump derangement syndrome. I don't I see, I try to look for the good and the bad in everybody. One thing perhaps it's irrational, but perhaps because I've been reading history, I the one triggering thing for me is the delaying of elections. I believe in elections and this is this is the part that you probably disagree with. But I, you know, I believe in the value of people voting and I just seemed to many dictators, the place where they finally, the big switch happens when you question the legitimacy of elections [/INST] have been questioning the legitimacy of elections for the last three years. </s><s>[INST] I've only heard donald trump do it last like year. But the last three years, you're saying somebody else [/INST] you don't think not my president illegitimate. We're not gonna normalize him as President Russia hacked this election, Impeached. You're not real president. You don't think that's questioning legitimacy of 2016. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, it's a good uh I haven't been paying attention enough. But I I would I would imagine that argument has been that I haven't actually heard too many people. But imagine there's been a popular thing to say. Okay. I but nevertheless that's the part that didn't uh that's not a statement that gained power enough to say that Barack Obama will keep being president or Hillary Clinton should be present. [/INST] Newsweek had that article how Hillary Clinton could still be president newsweek? </s><s>[INST] No, but she's not, that's what I'm saying. My worry isn't my worry isn't uh saying that the election was illegitimate and people whining and mass scale and and then uh Fox News or CNN reporting for years or books being written for years. My worry is legitimately martial Law, a person's stays president. [/INST] So here's the issue like there's a there's a should I get a book on North Korea. I'm not someone who thinks dictatorship should be taken lightly. I'm not someone who thinks it can't happen here. I think a lot of times people are desperate for dictatorship. So I'm with you and I think this is something if you're going to hand wave it away. Everyone else hand waved it away. Hitler is never gonna be chancellor. He's a lunatic. He's a joke is a joke. They they couldn't find a publisher for mine confident english because this is some guy from some random minor party in Germany spouting nonsense, who's going to read this crap, you know, so I I completely agree with you and you don't think we're there. My point is donald trump this year had every uh pathway opened him to declare martial law. The cities are being burnt down. He could have very easily sent in the tanks. Uh, and people would have been applauding him from his side </s><s>[INST] feels so good right now. [/INST] But am I wrong though? Know what he did? He tweeted out to Mayor wheeler of Portland, he said call me, we will, we will solve this in minutes, but you have to call. And he sat in his hands and they said, oh it's his fault, the cities burning down. He's not doing anything. And he goes, I'm not doing anything until you asked me to do it. So I think that is even if you think he's an aspiring dictator, that is at least a sign that there is some restraint on his aspirations. </s><s>[INST] Can I just take that in as a beautiful um, like moment of hope. So I'm going to remember this moment. [/INST] Beautiful Dead. I'm </s><s>[INST] gonna remember that. I mean, uh, I should say that perhaps I'm irrationally this is the one moment where I feel myself being a little, [/INST] I don't think professional. I think there's a symmetry because it's kind of like, okay, either if I leave the house, it's like Russian roulette. Yeah, maybe it's like a one in six shot, I'm pulling the trigger, I'm killing myself, but that's one in six that's not and and the consequences are so dire that a little paranoia would go a long </s><s>[INST] way. There's [/INST] something that you can't go back. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] it's an asymmetry </s><s>[INST] and the thing is the thing that makes donald trump new to me. And again, I'm a little naive in these things. But he surprised me in how many ways he just didn't play by the rules and he's made me a little ant and this ant colony think like, well do you have to play by the rules at all? Like why are we having elections? Why just say like its coronavirus time? Like it's it's not healthy to have elections. Like, we shouldn't be like I could if I put my dictator had on [/INST] Pelosi said that joe biden shouldn't debate. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Did she? Yes, [/INST] she says she shouldn't dignify trump with a debate. He's the president, He could be the worst president earth, evil, despicable monster. I'll take that as an argument. </s><s>[INST] So she's playing politics. But she's [/INST] I don't think that's playing politics. I think when there's a certain point, when things get when things get when you start attacking institutions for the emergency at the moment and acting arbitrarily that is when things are the slippery </s><s>[INST] slope. So you're saying debates is one of the institutions like that's one of the traditions to have the debates. I think [/INST] the debates are extremely important. Uh now I don't think that someone's a good debater is going to make a good president. I mean, that's that's a big problem, </s><s>[INST] but you're just saying this is attacking just yet another tradition yet [/INST] Another, you know, like how if you're dating if you're married to someone and someone throws out the word divorce, you can't unring that bell. You threw it out there. I'm saying you don't throw things out like that unless you really are ready to go down this road. And I think that is, there's nothing in the constitution about debates. We've only had them since 1980, but still, I think they are extremely important. It's also a great chance for joe biden to tell him to his face. You're full of crap. Here's what you did. Here's what, here's what you did. So </s><s>[INST] fascinating that you're both, you acknowledge that. And yet you also see the value of tearing down the entire thing. So you're both worried about no debates or at least in your voice in your tone. [/INST] There's a great quote by Chesterton. I'm not a fan of hips at all. But he says before you tear down the fence, make sure you know why they put it up first. So I am for tearing it all down. But there's something called a controlled demolition, like building seven. or there we knew we were in tel Aviv, um, </s><s>[INST] and hashtag clothing seven. We knew we were in telling you why you're faster than me. You're operating at a different level. I need to upgrade my operating system. I told you. Windows 95. Yeah. [/INST] Um, </s><s>[INST] uh, so if [/INST] you're gonna, uh, it's like indiana jones, right? If you're gonna pull something away, make sure you have something in place first as opposed to breaking it. And then just especially in politics, it's because it escalates and when things escalate without any kind of response, it can go in a very bad that's when napoleon comes in. </s><s>[INST] So what's your prediction about the biden trump debates again? I just have this weird, maybe we'll return to, maybe not in this. How do we put more love into the world? And like one of the things that worries me about the debates is, it will be um, it will be the world's greatest troll against the grandpa on the porch who grabbed his bats. Yeah. And it will not put more love into the world. It will, it will create more mockery for like, [/INST] Joe Biden did a great job against Paul Ryan in 2012. Paul Ryan was no lightweight. No one thought he was a lightweight. Joe biden handed Sarah Palin her ass in 2008, which isn't as easy as you think because she's a female. So you're going to come off as bullying that doesn't have to worry about. So the guy isn't um, I think he is in the stages of like cognitive decline. Um, so I think it's going to be interesting. Uh, I want it to be um, like mike Tyson beating up a child because it will be a source of amusement to me. Um, but I don't know how it's gonna go because possible that joe biden would be the mike Tyson this. Yes, because in his last debate with Bernie, he was perfectly fine. And again, the guy was a center for decades and I don't think anyone, if you look at joe biden in 2000 and 10 would have thought the sky is going to be how his ass handed him a debate, You wouldn't think that at all. So I don't know who we're going to see. Plus he's got a lot of room to attack trump. So I'm sure he's going to come strapped and ready and he's gonna have his talking points and watch trump dance, try to tap dance around him. And if he's in a position, I know the rules of the debate are to actually nail him to the wall, it might actually, I'm sure he's gonna have a lot of lines to the problem is trump is the master counterpuncher. So he, like when Hillary, you know, had her lines, she's like, well, it's a good thing that donald trump isn't in charge of our legal system. And he's like, yeah, you'd be in jail. It's like, it's like, like lady, you set him up. </s><s>[INST] It is painful to watch those, those debates. I mean, there's something, uh, I think it's actually analogous um come to think of it, your conversation with me right now some sleepy joe, I'm playing the role of sleepy joe. I actually connect to uh joe because they're so [/INST] incontinent. </s><s>[INST] There's like these weird pauses that I do the same, I do the same thing and annoys the sh it onto me that like uh in mid sentence, I'll start saying a different thing. Take a tangent. I'm not as slow and drunk as I sound always, I swear more intelligent underneath it, drunk. Exactly, but the result one of those is true, but not both. Yeah. And and and trump. Just like you are a master counterpuncher, so just give me messy. [/INST] Here's the other thing in all seriousness, chris Wallace is the moderator. Chris Wallace has interviewed trump several times and he was a tough, tough questioner. So I don't think he's going to come in there with softball questions. I think he's really going to try to nail trump down, which is tough to do. I like him a lot. Yeah, he's and he's like, mr president sir, that's not accurate, blah, blah blah. He's done it and trump gets very frustrated because he doesn't just let him say whatever he wants and he hits him with the follow up. </s><s>[INST] He's I guess he's on Fox News and he I listened to his sunday program every once in a while. Uh he gives me hope that I don't know, there's something in the voice like that he's not bought. [/INST] He's I I there's no question, he's going to take this seriously, which I think is the best you could hope for in a moderator. </s><s>[INST] Like it feels like there's people that might actually take the mainstream media into a place that's going to be better in the future and like we need people like him, [/INST] you mean like robes fear? </s><s>[INST] What do you mean? Like [/INST] taking the mainstream media to a better future? Like bring out the guillotines? Mhm. Okay. See you </s><s>[INST] you you put your anarchist hat back on, why [/INST] don't they just do as much of an anarchist? But yeah, I get what you're saying. </s><s>[INST] You don't think there should be a centralized place for news? There isn't now? Well, that's what mainstream media is supposed to represent. Broken. Well, it's not whatever uh what would you call that? A place where people traditionally said was the like the legitimate source of truth. That's what the media was supposed to represent? [/INST] Uh That's their, that's their big branding accomplishment. That was never true. Yeah, because if you here's what happens, we remember the spanish american war. Remember the main we have to take cuba yellow journalism, Willie Randolph hearst, right, then record scratch, and then we're all objective. Like when did this transition happen? According to people, when you were saying that the Kaiser is the worst human being on earth when you were downplaying Stalin and downplaying Hitler's atrocities when when you were saying we had to be in Vietnam at what Wmds, when did it change? It never changed. You just are better con artists at a certain point and now the mask is </s><s>[INST] dropping. Yeah. But don't you think there's um at its best like investigative journalism can uncover the truth in a way that uh that like Reddit uh Sub Reddit's can't [/INST] you know, I read it, sure, I agree that it's best. Absolutely. That's not even dispute. </s><s>[INST] But like, don't you think uh like fake it until you make it is the right way to do it, meaning like, like the news? No, no, I meant the news saying like we dream of doing of arriving at the truth and reporting the truth. [/INST] They don't say that CNN had an advertisement that said this is an apple. We only report facts. That's a lie. </s><s>[INST] No, that's now and now it's clear things have changed and they [/INST] haven't changed. You just more you're more aware aware of chicanery. </s><s>[INST] But okay, so how [/INST] many people die in Iraq? Because Saddam Hussein was about to launch Wmds Who had consequences for this? No one. This isn't a minor thing. This is lots of dead people. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] And also, I mean that people, it's horrible, but also the money which has like we said economic effects [/INST] that Marianne Williamson, I think it was, it was had the trump both of them had the great point that goes, it's like a trillion dollars. How many schools of that build? How many roads that build? Even in here? Why are we building hospitals in Iraq that we destroyed when we could building hospitals here? It makes no sense. It's horrifying. </s><s>[INST] So, who's responsible for that? Like who Alex jones not meant for? Well, uh, so who's responsible for arriving at the truth of that? Of speaking to the money spent? I think this is wars in Iraq [/INST] is one of the great things about social media </s><s>[INST] twitter. You have faith in twitter, [/INST] not not specifically twitter, but use social media to hold when anyone hears a great, another great example before, if you were talking about police brutality or these riots, you would have to perceive it in the way it was framed and presented to Nicholas Sandman is another example. Uh, Brianna Taylor all these things. Well, you know, footage of her. Um, you would have to perceive in the way that it's edited and presented to you by the corporate press. Now, everyone is a video, has a video camera. Everyone has their perspective. And it's very useful when these incidents happen where you could see the same incident from several angles and you don't need don Lemon or chris Wallace to tell me what this means. I can see with my own eyes. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I've, I've been very pleasantly surprised about the power see like people, the mob again gets in the way they get emotional and they destroy like the ability for people to reason. But you're right, that truth is unobstructed on social media? Like if you're if you're careful and patient, you can see the truth. Like for example data on covid some of the best sources are doctors. Like if you want to know the truth about the coronavirus of what's happening is uh, there's follow people on twitter. There's certain people, they're just like sources for me versus the CDC and the w show. It's that's that's fast. I mean, it's kind of anarchy, right? [/INST] It is. Yes. </s><s>[INST] I mean, well, there's some censorship and all that kind of stuff. [/INST] You have censorship under anarchy in the sense that you're talking about like people kicked off on twitter. That's a drawing </s><s>[INST] somebody. Okay. So I mean it's a private company, private company. Most people wouldn't say twitter is working, but they, that's probably because they take for granted how well it's working and they're just complaining about the small part of it that's broken. Yeah. Hold on to that. Oh, okay. Another question about you feel better. No, by the way, I mean, I had a personal gripe with the situation about the not a personal gripe but I felt overly emotional about the possibility that there will be some of donald trump messing with the election process. But you made me feel better. Like saying like he if he had a bunch of opportunities to um to do what I like to do, what I would have done if I was a dictator. I would um the first time those rides over George Floyd, I would instituted um martial law. [/INST] Do you know what I remember very vividly Is after 911 and everyone was waiting for George Bush to give his speech that he had 98% approval rating. And I remember very vividly because if he had said we're suspending the constitution, everyone had cheered for him. Like he couldn't get enough support at that time and he didn't do it and I can't say anything really good about George W Bush, I'm not a fan of his to say the least. So I think you and I and you know, other people who are familiar with, you know, uh totalitarian regimes to some extent from our ancestry or whatever from research should always be the ones freaking out and morning. But we should also be aware of, We got a ways to go before it's Hitler and thankfully uh there are a lot of dominoes that have to fall into place before Hitler. It's like the game secret Hitler, it's a board game before Hitler becomes Hitler. Like it's not especially in America, there's lots of things that have to happen before you really get to that point. I mean, FDR was for all intents and purposes a dictator. But even then the worst you could say and this is not something that you should take lightly was internment of Japanese citizens but they weren't murdered. They weren't, you know, you know, under lock and key in the sense of like in cells. So things have gotten a lot worse for him. </s><s>[INST] We have to, I mean, Hitler is such a horrible person to bring up because yeah, Mussolini is better because Hitler is so closely connected to the atrocities of the holocaust. There's all the stuff that led up to the war and the war itself say that there was no holocaust, hey, there will probably be viewed differently. [/INST] Should Yes, I should think so. But you think that's a very controversial stance. You think Hitler be viewed differently? It wasn't without, well, </s><s>[INST] I mean, but it's a funny thing that the, I would say the death of how many 40, 50 million. I mean, I don't know how you calculate it is not seen as as bad as the six million [/INST] because the mountain and Stalin. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Uh, but it's interesting, uh, you're working on the next book, I'm talking reminding what's good, I'm glad good writers because it was [/INST] not reminded my last book, then you write, you have to deal with something like the nazis and one of the points they make is how come everyone knows about the holocaust, but no one knows about the holiday more and they're right, we should know about this because it is a great example of both how the western media were depraved, but also what human beings are capable of and those scars are still, you know, many americans think Russia and Ukraine are the same thing. You know that like trump's in bed with the Ukrainian troops about the Russians, they think it's the same thing there is for us, it's complete lunacy. Um but this is the kind of thing where pol pot is another example where people have no clue of what has been done to their fellow man in the face of this earth and they should know. </s><s>[INST] How much of that do you lay at the hands of communism? How much are you with like a Jordan Pearson who has as intricately connecting the atrocities, like, Like you're saying 1930s, Ukraine where people were starved. Um I recently, so my grandmother recently passed away and she she she survived that as a as a kid, which is uh it's fat those people, I mean just they're tough, they're tough. Like that whole region is tough because they survived that and then [/INST] right after occupation </s><s>[INST] of Nazis Yeah. Of Germans um how much do you lay that at communism as an ideology versus um Stalin demand. [/INST] I think, you know, Lennon was building concentration camps, you know, while he was around and slave labor. Um I don't I think it's clearly both. There's certain variants of communism that were far like Khrushchev, you know, and Gorbachev, uh the reason the soviet union fell apart and this is kind of I'm going to spoil the end of the book, There's an amazing book called Revolution 1989, like most people book of her red victor Sebastian, he's a Hungarian author and basically what happens in 1989 Poland has their elections and then in 1990 they kind of led into labor people to the government and people start crossing borders, you know, in the eastern bloc. And you have Honaker from Eastern Germany and Ceausescu from Romania, Colin Gorbachev, Because those are the two toughest ones by communist standards. They go there, they're just escaping, we're gonna we're gonna lose everything. You've got to send in the tanks like you did in Hungary, like you didn't check republic checks back in 68. And Gorbachev goes, I'm not sending the tanks and they go, dude, if you don't sing in the tanks were it's all done and he goes, nope, I'm not that kind of guy. And they were right. I mean, they uh Francesca was personally shot with his wife up against the wall, Hanukkah, I forget what happened to him, but they all self liberated. My friend who was born in Czechoslovakia, his mom was pregnant, you know, under communism and she never even imagined he'd be free and he was born under free. Uh and they were all looking around all these countries that self liberated because they're like this is a trick right there, just there trying to figure out who is like not good so that they can arrest us on mass and they didn't. So uh they're even within communism, there are bad guys and better guys, </s><s>[INST] but we talked about eric e we talk about democracy. Do you see like there's democratic socialism, conversations going on in the popular culture, socialism is seen as like evil or for some people, great, what, like, what are your thoughts about? Is in a political ideology? So you're on the evil side fundamentally? What, what, what is it, you know, what, what makes it evil? What's like structurally, if you were to try to analyze why? Sure, [/INST] This, I say three ways morally no person has the right to tell another person how to live their life. Um, economically, it's not possible to make calculations under socialism, it's only the price, the prices that are information that tells me, oh, this is, we need to produce more of this. We produce less of this without prices being able to adjust and give information to producers and consumers. You have no way of being able to produce effectively efficiently. And also, it is, uh, it turns people against each other when you force people to interact, when you force them into relationships, when you force them into jobs, um, and you don't give them any choice when there's a monopoly. The consequence of monopoly, everyone's familiar with, an ostensibly under capitalism, but somehow, when it's a government monopoly, all those economic principles don't work doesn't make any sense. </s><s>[INST] But there's force in democracy to, it's just, you're, you're saying there's a, there's a bit more force in, uh, and socialism, but that's interesting that you say that there's not enough information, I mean, that's ultimately you need to have really good data to achieve the goals of the system, even even if there is no corruption right, you just need to have the information, right? But you can't And capitalism provides you like, really strong, real time, real time information that uh, and if, like capitalism at its best and cleanest, which is like perfect information is available, there's no manipulation of information. That's what, you know, that's one of the problems. Okay, can we talk about some candidates, the ones we got and possible alternatives? So, one question I have is why do we have within this system? Why do we have the candidates we have? Is it seems um maybe you can correct me highly unsatisfactory. Like the, like, is anyone actually excited about our current candidates? [/INST] I'm kind of excited because no matter who wins the elections can be hilarious. So, that is something that I'm excited about </s><s>[INST] from a, from a human perspective, is that what the whole system. So that's one theory of the case is the entire thing is optimized for viewership and uh, excitement. By definitions of like the reality show kind of excitement, [/INST] I think it is if you look at what happened with Brett Kavanaugh, this is not a career that would draw people who are, you might say quality because no matter who they are, there would be a huge incentive from the other team to denigrate them and humiliate them in the worst possible ways because as the two teams lose their legitimacy among gen pop, it's gonna get harder and harder for them to maintain any kind of claims to authority, which is something I like but which does kind of play out in, you know, certain nefarious ways. </s><s>[INST] So people the best of the best are not gonna want to be politicians. [/INST] Yeah, because I could have a job or have a job interview and I'm running yahoo or whatever or I could for 18 months have to eat, you know, corn dogs looking like I'm going down on someone and shake hands and have all this. My family and on social media daily called the worst things for what and then I'm still not guarantee the position. </s><s>[INST] But the flip side of that, like from my perspective is the competition is weak meaning like you need a certain, a minimum amount of eloquence. Clearly that I don't uh the bar, which I did not pass, [/INST] I don't think either of them would be considered particularly eloquent biden or </s><s>[INST] trump. No, I know, but that's what I'm saying the competition, like if if you were uh I wanted to become a politician if you wanted to run for president, the opportunity is there like if you're at all competent, like if you had like Andrew yang is an example of somebody who has a bunch of ideas is somewhat eloquent, like young, energetic, it feels like there should be thousands of Andrew Yang's like that would enter the domain. And [/INST] he went nowhere. </s><s>[INST] Well he, well I wouldn't say he went nowhere. He generated quite a bit of excitement. He just didn't go very far. That's okay. [/INST] You don't have to run for president to generate excitement. Your ideas. You could be a podcast host. I'm not even joking. </s><s>[INST] That's right. That's right. That's right. And he's both. Andrew Yang. He's a podcast. Yeah, he has a podcast called Yang speaks [/INST] Okay, cool. Mhm. </s><s>[INST] Uh wow. The music of the way he said. Uh Yeah. Cool. Is the way my mom talks to me when I tell her with something exciting going on in my life. Oh that's nice honey. [/INST] You made a robot that's cool. Mix coffee. You're still </s><s>[INST] single though, aren't you? I wonder why? [/INST] Wonder why make yourself a robot. Give me some robot grandchildren. </s><s>[INST] Uh Ok, but uh first of all, Okay, let me ask you about Andrew Yang's, He represents fresh energy. You don't find him fresh or energetic. You know like is there any candidate you wish was in the mix that was in the mix. You wish was One of the last two remaining. [/INST] Yeah. People like Marianne, Williamson, I thought was great. Uh Tulsi I thought was great, Amy Klobuchar got a bad rap. I think she held her own. Um smart. She wasn't particularly funny. That's okay. I think she was not threatening to a lot of people. </s><s>[INST] What did you like about them? [/INST] I guess it's named all women. That's interesting. I wasn't even intentional. Um Tulsi I like that she was aggressive has a good resume and is not um staying the course for the establishment, Marianne Williamson. I like because she comes from a place from what it seems of genuine compassion. Maybe she's a sociopath. I don't know, I read her book and it actually affected me profoundly because it's very rare when you read a book and there's even that one idea that blows your mind and that you kind of think about all the time. And there was one of that such idea in her book about she was teaching something called a course in miracles in Hollywood. I think she still teaches it And this was during the 80s to hide the AIDS crisis. And all these young men in the prime of their life were dropping like flies and she's trying to give them hope. Well good luck they're dying, No one cares. And they're like you can't tell us that they're going to cure this. Like your that's a lie. And she goes what if I told you they're not going to cure it? What if I told you it's gonna be too like diabetes, they cut off your foot and you're gonna go blind, would that be something that you can hope for and when you put it like that, it's like yeah, like if you're talking to me like a homeless junkie and you're like you could be a doctor, you're a lawyer, a lawyer like cool story, like you could have a studio apartment with a terrible roommate and a shitty job, but when you're on the street, you know cooking breakfast in a teaspoon and you hear that you're like what would that really be so bad, Is that really so much worse than this? No, and it becomes something, so when she put it in those terms, I'm like wow, this woman that really did a number on me in terms of teaching people how to be hopeful small steps, but it's but it's also then it becomes less of I need a miracle to be like oh this is really manageable, it's and it's absurd to think it's impossible. </s><s>[INST] What about what's your take on unity 2020, that Britain Weinstein uh pushed forward, [/INST] it was D. O. A. Uh he couldn't even stand up to Twitter and on arrival on arrival he couldn't even stand up to Twitter let alone or to Facebook they got blocked let alone two </s><s>[INST] hugely problematic by the way that twitter would block that. [/INST] Not at all. Um I don't know why they blocked it, but I believe I don't know problematic means that's the word, that there's a lot of work that people wanted to do conceptually um the idea that like Unity is like taking the rejects from each party and we're gonna like have something that no one likes and therefore it's going to compromise is absurd. The last time we had this kind of Unity ticket was the Civil war when you had Andrew johnson from the democrats and Lincoln from the republicans. This was not something that ended well, particularly nicely for both halves of the country. </s><s>[INST] So that that's the way you see it as like the way I saw, I guess I haven't looked carefully [/INST] at it. I haven't either, to be fair. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] the way I saw it as emphasizing centrists, which is [/INST] House Tulsi, a centrist </s><s>[INST] Tulsa was involved. Yes, [/INST] he's trying to Tulsa and like jesse ventura or something. </s><s>[INST] So, okay, I don't know. I don't know the [/INST] specific as a scientist. You also know, centrism is not a coherent term in </s><s>[INST] politics. But I see now you're like, uh, what is it pleading to authority? Not [/INST] leading my ego. No, no, I'm pleading to how you approach data. If someone is saying the mean is accurate, that only means, I mean, the mean could be anywhere. It's a function of what's around It doesn't mean. It's true, </s><s>[INST] I don't even know what centrist is supposed to mean, but what it means to me, there's no idea a sense, centrist, there's more of a center right or center left. To me, what that means is somebody who is um a liberal or conservative, but is um open minded and empathetic to the other side, [/INST] joe biden had the crime Bill joe biden voted for Republican Supreme Court justices, joe biden voted for a balanced budget. Joe biden voted for Jeb Bush's war and I'm sure probably I've been looking stuff. The patriot act job. If you want a centrist, you have joe biden. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he's worked very well with the Republican argument could be made. Of course they'll everybody will always resist [/INST] that argument. It's undeniable. In fact, during the campaign, some um, uh, activists started yelling at him at a town hall, not yelling, just saying, hey, we need open borders, joe biden says, I'm not for open borders, go vote for trump and literally turned his back on the man. And this is during the primaries where it would behoove you to try to appeal to the base. </s><s>[INST] And of course you can probably also make the argument that donald trump is center right, if not center left. [/INST] Well, I mean, he's very, uh, unique as a personality, but if you look at his record and his first name is rhetoric, you can say it's not centrist at all. But in terms of how he governs the budgeting, I mean, has been very moderate. It certainly hasn't been like draconian budget cuts. Uh, the Supreme Court, you could say, okay, he's hard right, immigration, you could say in certain capacities, his hard right. But in terms of pro life, what has he done there in terms of, you know, so it's in many other aspects he's been very much this kind of meat to Republican, but certainly the rhetoric, it's very hard to make the case that he's a centrist. </s><s>[INST] So, you don't like, uh, is there any other idea you find compelling? Like what I like about you and G 2020, is this an idea for a different way for like a different party, a different path forward? So ideas just like anarchy is an interesting idea that that leads to discourse at least. [/INST] I don't think it's interesting at all. And here's why I think it's interesting. Sweden has eight parties in its parliament, Iceland populations like 150,000. They've got nine, I think it was Czech Republic has nine Britain has five. Um, so the claim that two parties is the censorious of speech, but three oh, now, all of a sudden it makes no sense. Doesn't point to the data. Number one. Number two is donald trump demonstrated that you can be basically a third party candidate, sees the machinery of existing party and appropriate to your own hands as Bernie Sanders, almost that Bernie Sanders has never been a democrat. Uh, major credit to him for that's not easy to be elected as senator as an independent. He's done it repeatedly. So, these are two examples of Ossified elites, right? For the picking. So to have a third party makes uh, no real sense. </s><s>[INST] Speaking of which party you talk about quite a bit. Uh, let's like, this is a personal challenge to you. Let me bring up the libertarian party and the personal challenge is to go five minutes without mocking them. Okay, in discussing and discussing this idea. So, first of all, what [/INST] I'm being trolled the troll. Okay, I'm controlled. </s><s>[INST] I'm [/INST] controlled. Okay. Remember the fun friends? There was an episode where Chandler had to not make fun of people like, can you go one day Chandler and Phoebe starts telling him about like this Ufo she saw, and he's like, that's very interesting. Nice </s><s>[INST] for you. This is exactly that. So, a true master would be able to play within the game within the constraints. So, um, no, I'm pretty sure you'll still mock them. But no, [/INST] No, I'll stick to the rules five minutes. </s><s>[INST] So, first of all, speaking broadly about libertarianism, can you speak to that, how you feel about it? And then also to the libertarian party, which is the implementation of it in our current system. [/INST] So, I think libertarianism is a great idea, and I think there's many libertarian ideas that have become Much more mainstream, which I'm very, very happy about. I remember there was an article in either New York or New Yorker magazine in the early 90s where they talked about the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian think tank. And they referred to the fact that Kato was against war and against, like regulation with a wacky consistency. Uh, because they didn't know how to reconcile these two things. I remember the two things were, but I remember that expression wacky consistency and it wasn't even we're all taught and this is very much before the internet that there's two tribes. And if you're pro life, you have to hate gays. And if you're for socialized medicine, that also means you have to be for um, uh, you know, free speech, it was just this very and like there's a whole menu and you gotta sign into all of them and that menu is terrible. They hate America, they would destroy it. Oh my God, those are horrible evil. This is the menu you want. And the libertarian party to some extent, and just libertarians. The Hull said, you know, you can do the chinese buffet and take a little from column, a little from column B and have an ideology that is coherent and consistent ideology, ideology of peace and non aggression and things like that. The libertarian party Takes its model from like the early progressive and populist parties from the early 20th century, which were not very effective in terms of getting people elected, but we're extremely effective effective in terms of getting the two major parties to appropriate and adopt their ideas and implement them. And in Britain as well, the Liberal Party got destroyed and became taken over by Labor as the alternate party to the tories. Um, and have those ideas basically become mainstreamed. So I think that and deliver my friend who passed away eric I miss him dearly was the web master. And his whole point is if you don't think of that in terms of party, in terms of getting people elected, but if you think of it as a party in terms of getting people educated about alternatives, then there's enormous use for that. That was his perspective. And I don't think that's an absurd perspective, but here's some libertarian ideas that have become extremely mainstream. War should be a last resort. This is something we're taught as kids and we all say, but for many years it's been like they don't think of as the last resort? It's like something's bad. Well, it's like the first instinct now, it's like let's really give it a week, just a week, like what's going on in Syria? Is there really gonna be a genocide of the kurds? You know, things like that. So that's one another thing is drug legalization. This was, you know, when you and I were kids. So it's crazy. It's only hippies want to smoke pot. Now, it's like with I was on a grand jury and point out that people make is Are you sure that this 16 year old who's selling weed? Let's say selling should his life be ruined? Should he be imprisoned with rapists and murderers? Like if you say yes, say yes, but you but are you you have to acknowledge that that's what you're meaning And then a lot of people like, wait a minute, there's gotta be a third option. Then he has no consequences or he's imprisoned with the rapist. Like I'm not comfortable with either of these. Uh, and I think the other one is an increasing skepticism. This libertarians were on top of this first and the hard left of the police as of now, asset forfeiture steals more from people than burglaries where people don't know about what ask their forfeiture is if the cops come to your house and they suspect you you haven't been convicted of using your car or your house or whatever. In terms of selling drugs, they can take whatever they want and then you have to sue to prove your innocence and get your property back. It's a complete violation of due process. People don't realize that's going on. It's a great way for the cops to increase their budgets. And it's legal. And libertarians were like the first big ones saying, guys, this is not american and this is crazy. And now increasingly people are conservatives and leftists like, wait a minute this, this is even if you are selling drugs, like they take your house, what are you talking about? So I think those are some mechanisms that libertarianism though, but not by name, has become far more popular. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's interesting. So the idea. Yeah, a coherent set of ideas that that eventually get integrated to the two party system, the war. That's initiative when you're right. I would wonder, I wonder what the thread there is. I wonder how it connects to 9 11 and so on. But [/INST] I think that I I think the Patriot Act Patriot act from people who are politically savvy. We're like, okay, this is not a joke. This is really a crazy infringement. Our freedoms and both parties are falling over each other to sign into law and the Orwellian name. You don't wanna how can you be against patriotism? What kind of personal, you know what I mean? So that I think for a lot of people, especially both civil libertarians on the left and a lot of conservatives who are constitutionalists are like, wait a minute. This isn't I'm not comfortable with this. And I'm also not comfortable with how comfortable everyone in Washington is with it. </s><s>[INST] You're right. Probably libertarian libertarians and libertarianism is a place of ideas, which is why I have a connection to it. Like I like, I like the every time I listen to those folks, I like them. I feel connected to him. I would even sometimes depending on the day, call myself a libertarian. We're all the spectrum. So that's why we're on the spectrum. Yeah. But like when I look at the people that actually rise to the top In terms of like the people who represent the party this is where like five minutes right out. Right. You can go, I'm allowed you go, why are they so weird? Why aren't strong candidates emerging that represent as political like representatives or as like uh famous speakers like that represent the ideology? [/INST] I think libertarians tend to, I think johnson Height in his book and his research, he's a political scientist and he does a lot of things about how people come to their political inclusions and what factors um, force people to reach conclusions. And he found that libertarians are the least empathetic and most nationalistic of all the groups. And by that he means like, they think in terms of logic, as opposed to like people's feelings and and that has positives and negatives. Mhm. Uh, it would we have the A B testing with Ron paul, Ron Paul ran for president as a Libertarian nominee. He was the nominee. He got pretty much nowhere in 1998. Then he ran as they returned to Republican Party as a Congressman for many years from Texas. He ran for the presidency in 2008 and 2012. And in 2008, he stood on stage with Rudy Giuliani and told him that they they were here in 911 because we're over there, which would have been a shocking horrifying taboo A few years earlier, many people were like, holy crap, this is amazing. Giuliani was all offended and Ron paul's like that took some guts by the way you did </s><s>[INST] when I heard that there was so refreshing that not what he said, but the fact that he said something that took guts, it made me realize how rare it is for people, for politicians, but even people to say something that takes guts. [/INST] Well, it's also the idea that like you can't, even if you think America has a right to invade any country on earth as much as it wants and kill people as a consequence of war and blow up their buildings and and destroy their country. You can't with a straight face, not expect us to have consequences, even if their consequence from evil people, even if we're 100% of the good guys and they're 100 of the bad guys, those bad guys, some of them are still going to try to do something, what happens next. You know what I mean? So that kind of concept that there's any American culpability was where America, you know, we're the good guys. By definition, we're not capable to have people start thinking about what if there's another way, you know what if we're not there and then they're not here and we're kind of doing a back door, we're talking so different scenarios. So the fact that he got so much more traction as a Republican. The fact that donald trump who came out of nowhere became not only the candidate, but the president tells people, it's like getting a book deal right, You can either go through these three choices. You can self publish mainstream publisher or independent publisher, the independent publisher is the worst of all choices, because you're not getting a big advance. They're not gonna be able to promote you a lot and they don't get the distribution mainstream. I've done mainstream itself, right, with self I don't have the cred the respectability of a mainstream cachet </s><s>[INST] can be uh new york times bestseller. [/INST] Let's take six, a lot of work. But I get a lot more of The Prophet if it looks good on the shelf and amazon looks identical so on and so forth with the mainstream. The benefits and costs are pretty much obvious to most people. So the same thing, it's like you can either be an independent like, ross Perot, Or you could be just seized when the party apparatus, which the benefits are enormous there. But in terms of going 3rd Party I don't know, the libertarian party apparatus of them. Maybe some ballot access is really that efficacious. And then you're gonna have a lot of baggage because if you hear independent jesse ventura ross perot, you think of the person now, you have to define yourself and you have to defend the party that's two bridges for most people </s><s>[INST] brilliantly put, okay, thank you, uh let me speak to because I'm speaking to your own brooks. And uh yeah, uh, I like him. Yeah, so, but that another example, I was [/INST] asked him to tell you a joke about Ayn rand if he can do it. </s><s>[INST] So there that's one criticism I've heard you say, which is there unable to speak to any weaknesses in either iron brands or Objectivist Worldview? That's really uh you put it I know you're half joking, but that's actually a legitimate discussion to [/INST] have. I'm not </s><s>[INST] joking at all, because that's, to me, one of the criticisms and one of the explanations why the world seems to disrespect and rand the people that do is she kind of implies that her ideas are like flawless. [/INST] She says they correspond to reality. </s><s>[INST] That's the term she uses that, I mean, objectives. It's in the name, it's, you know, it's just facts, like it's impossible to basically argue against because it's pretty simple, it's just all facts [/INST] and that's it's possible to argue against. But she would say she's never met a good critic who can argue the fact that misrepresentation and she's not entirely wrong. She's often caricatured because she is a very extreme personality and extreme view worldview. </s><s>[INST] But that to me, I mean, some people there's a guy named in the physics mathematics community called Stephen Wolfram, [/INST] I don't know if you're from Alfa </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he has a similar style speaking sometimes, which is like I've created a science, but that turns a lot of people off, like, this kind of weird confidence, but he's one of my favorite people. I think one of the most brilliant people if you just ignore that little bit of ego or whatever you call that, that there's some beautiful ideas in there and that and that for me objectivism. I'm under educated about it about it. Uh I hope to be more educated, but there's some interesting ideas that again, just like with UFOs uh that there's a connection, don't bring [/INST] that up to your own. He won't like it. I like UFOs. Oh no, no, no. This interview is </s><s>[INST] over. Uh that's a good yarn. Okay. But you know, you have to be a little bit open minded. But what's your sense of of objectivism? What's are there interesting ideas that are useful to you to think about? I [/INST] own her copy of the first printing of the fountainhead. So that should tell you a little bit about how my affection for Miss rand. How heavy that goes. Um I Iran does not have all the answers, but she has all the questions. So if you study rand, you are going to be forced to think through some very basic things and you're gonna have your eyes open very, very heavily. She was not perfect. She never claimed to be perfect. She was asked on Donahue is it true that according to your philosophy you are perfect being, She said, I never think of myself that way. And she said, but if you ask me, do I practice what I preach? The answer is yes, resoundingly um she's a fascinating woman. Uh what is really interesting about her and that's something you'd appreciate personally is when you read her essays she'll have these weird asides and like she was talking about art and she was like and this is why the U. S. Should be the only countries nuclear weapons. And when you follow a brilliant mind making these seemingly disparate connections it's something I find to be just absolutely inspiring and awesome and entertaining. Um I think there's lots of things about her that people like Iran would make uncomfortable. Um I well like she they so objectivism like any other philosophy has all these techniques to kind of hand wave away things you don't want to talk about and like pretend so they talk about things like having no metaphysical significance right? So that means it's like well what about this? I don't wanna talk about it like it doesn't matter. Like it literally needed fancy philosophical purpose doesn't matter or they will say correctly that it's very twisted in our culture that when we have heroes we look for their flaws instead of looking for their virtues. That's 100% valid perspective. However if I'm sitting here telling you that I think this woman is a badass and she's amazing and she should be studied. But there's also these idiosyncrasies. They don't want to hear it because they and I think it's very convenient for them because there's a lot of things she did that were. Here's an example, rand was very, very pro happiness and pleasure. She was very pro sex, which is kind of surprising looking at her and how she talked and how strident she was as a result of this, she never got her cats fixed to deny them the pleasure of orgasm. So her male cats are spraying up her entire house. Like that is, I mean, that's her putting her philosophy, philosophy into practice, but it's still gross. So that's the kind of thing where I don't think he another thing is rand had an an article on a woman president and she said, a woman should never be president right now when rand says things that are too goofy for them. They say, oh, that's not objectivism, that's her personal preference. It's like she did not have these lines. Objectivism was always defined as Ayn rand's writings. Plus the additional essays in her books. So if this was in part of those books, this counts as official objectivism, but they pretend otherwise. So that's another example. Plus there they she was. And I bet you she was on the spectrum to some extent, I'm not joking, I'm not using it derisively. She was of the belief and not inaccurately because that humor is used to denigrate and humiliate. And she was thinking about the Jon Stewart type before. There was a Jon Stewart and a lot of times like how I use mocking, but she was resentful correctly. That a lot of times people who are great and accomplished little nobody's will make a punch line just to bring them down and here's an example I just thought of, I remember in remember when it was just in the 90s, they had a segment MTV of all these musicians who were making their own perfumes right? And this girl grabbed princess perfume and before she even smelled to share the joke ready, she just uh this smells almost as bad as his music lately. It's like first of all, I'm sure the perfume sign and second, well this is Prince. He's one of the all time greats and you can't wait, you know, you know denigrate him like how part I want to be like, like how dare you like as if as if this perfume in any way, in any way mitigates his amazing accomplishments and achievements, you horrible person. But I do have some great Iran jokes and he would not be happy about them. </s><s>[INST] The perfume thing. The problem with it is just not funny. Not that no, he sucks. Okay great. Not that they dared to try to be humorous because I don't know why you mentioned johnson because johnson was pretty can be funny, [/INST] right? But he taught a generation, you still see this on twitter where things have to be inherently sarcastic and snide. But </s><s>[INST] isn't that I mean aren't you practicing that? No, [/INST] I use irony and sarcasm. Here's an example when people like you say something and someone replied to be like um last I checked blah blah blah blah and I'll say that I go, what do you think saying last I checked added to your point, you're giving me valuable information and data. But you are trained to believe that it has to be couched in this sneering. It doesn't just give me the information. This is useful information. That's that's true. </s><s>[INST] But see Jon Stewart did it masterfully. They don't and they don't, it's like people copy, commit certain comedians, you try to copy them and use everything in the process of copying. Yeah, Yeah, okay. Uh but in terms of the philosophy of, you know, selfishness, this kind of individual focused idea and I imagine that connects with you. [/INST] Yes. And I think it would connect with more people. They understood what she meant by Nathaniel Brandon who was her air until she kind of broke with him. And he was a coded dedicate e of Atlas shrugged said, no one will say Iran's views with a straight face. They won't say I believe that my happiness matters and it's important and it's worth fighting for and that Iran says this and she's dangerous. Now it's very easy to say this could have dangerous consequences if you're a sociopath. But to put it in those terms uh I think it's extremely healthy. I think more people should want to be happy. And and uh I think a lot of us are raised to be apologetic, especially in this cynical media culture, that if you say I want to be happy, I want to I love my life, that it's just like okay sweetheart, and you the eye rolling and I think that's so pernicious, it's so horrifying and this is why I'm a common person because you thought the arch enemy with cynicism and I could not agree more. Like if you're the kind of person, if someone likes a band and you're like you like them mama blah, it's like this gives them happiness. Now there's certain exceptions, but it gives you happiness, it's not for you, that's cool, </s><s>[INST] okay, this is beautiful. I so agree with you on the eye rolling, but you see the best of trolling as not the iro [/INST] correct. Of course not the best of trolling is taking down the eye rollers. </s><s>[INST] I'm gonna have to think about that because [/INST] I have a kind of red bull. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Uh Yeah, because they put the ball is red bull. Um I kind of put them all in the same, been okay and [/INST] they're not they're not they're </s><s>[INST] not okay. [/INST] All right, here's another example of trolling. I was making jokes about Ron paul, he just had a stroke right? And someone came at me and they're like, oh blah blah blah, you know, you're ugly, I hope you have a stroke, I hope you're in the hospital and I just go I just did have a stroke on your mom's face. So they came at me and now they got put in their place </s><s>[INST] with a subpar um I mean it wasn't [/INST] clever. You want </s><s>[INST] you want clever, not particularly, no. Well one of your things you do, which is interesting. I mean I give you props in a sense is you're willing to go farther than people expect you to. [/INST] Yes, that's fun. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. In fact I'll probably edit out like half of this podcast because the thing you did was she kept in should mention Michaela Peterson now has a podcast which is nice I guess was it on her [/INST] podcast? She wasn't mine, she was on yours. We did both. But this is when you're referring to when she was in mind </s><s>[INST] she was on the right and you went right for the [/INST] so I'll tell you what it was you don't have to face. So I opened up I say you know she's Jordan Peterson's dad. As many people know George sorry, he's her dad. Yeah she's had a long issue with substance addiction and I said to her you're you know you're most famous for being you know Jordan Peterson's daughter, you know many people, he's changed so many lives around the world. He's and he's been such an enormous influence to me personally that I've started taking Benzodiazepines recreationally. And she's like, oh my God, </s><s>[INST] Michaelis or yeah because you pulled me in with this because you're talking, I mean, you know, because he's going through a rough time now. She's going through just everything was just you pulled me in emotionally. I was like, this is gonna be the sweet mike is gonna be just this wonderful and then just bam. So that's that's that's that was props to you on that. It wasn't whatever that is, that is an art form when done well. It can be taken too far. My criticism is that that feels too good for some people, [/INST] what do you mean for their too happy being a reference to show that they don't care. But I think that's another form of cynicism though, right? So </s><s>[INST] if you think it's possible to be a troll and still be the live life to its highest ideal in the common sense, [/INST] I try that's kind of my ideal. </s><s>[INST] I believe it's not, it becomes a drug. I feel like that takes you like I think love ultimately is the way to experience like every moment of every day you [/INST] don't think that was an expression of I honestly think we let's let's let's split hairs here because I think this is something of use here. I do think that me uh me being able to make her laugh about this year of hell she was in does create an element of love and connection between me and her. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but [/INST] I know she would say </s><s>[INST] that yes, it wasn't that it was what you said in combination with the sweetness everywhere else. The kindness, it's a very subtle thing but like it's like some of the deepest connection with with others is when we like mock them lovingly or but like there is stuff, there's kindness around that. It's not in words but in light of course subtle things [/INST] because it creates an air familiar being, familial, like we're through this together. Like it's Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's missing. That's very difficult to do on the internet. I agree with you, I agree with you. That's why I might like my general approach on the internet is to be uh more like simple, less witty and more like dumb lee loving but [/INST] that's not your core competency being witty. </s><s>[INST] Uh [/INST] Me Yeah, I could be woody, you can be, but I'm saying that's not your core company. So I'm just saying you're bad at it. But I'm saying that's not where you go like organically, especially with strangers. </s><s>[INST] I just feel like nobody's core competence on the internet is uh I guess if you want to bring love to the world, nobody's core competence is given the current platforms, nobody's core competence is wit, it's very difficult to be witty on the internet with while still communicating kindness. Like just another example in the same way that you can in physical [/INST] space, I'll give you another example. Someone um came at me and they were like, they give me a donation. People do this all the time and they go, oh, oh um like I started reading your books because of my wife and you know, now watch your shows together. Uh keep up the good work and I go, what does her boyfriend think? So that is an example of wit and love because that person feels seen, I'm acknowledging them. I'm also making a joke at their expense. We know it's a joke. So I think you have a good point. Language is often used in non literal ways to cue emotional and connectivity. It's difficult </s><s>[INST] but it's very difficult what you've done is difficult to accomplish, but you've done it well. I mean you do like you did, you've been doing these live streams which are nice that people give you a bunch of money and donations and stuff and then you, you often like make fun of certain aspects of their questions and so, but it's also, it's always long, [/INST] it's not from love that is genuine annoyance because they asked me some really dumb, but they're still </s><s>[INST] underlying, it's not even like there's a kind person under that that's being communicated. That's interesting, but I don't know if I get that from your twitter. I know I get that from the video, there's something about the face, something about like [/INST] that much hard data, the more easy it is to convey emotion and subtlety. Absolutely. If you only have literally black and white letters, it's going to be or whatever white and black, if you have night mode, it's gonna be a very different, it's much more limited information. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but this is the fundamental thing is like [/INST] here's another example, like if they had access to my face, like a lot of times, some people don't know who I am and they come at me calling me a nazi anti semite, right? And I start talking about the jews and just how terrible the jews are. Now, all my audience knows I'm jewish that I went to a Shiva so they're sitting there laughing because this person is making ask themselves, that person has no idea, but if there was video then they would be like, okay, wait a minute, something's </s><s>[INST] yeah, something's up. I don't know uh I think it's entertaining, I think it's fun, but I just, I don't think it's scalable and ultimately I'm trying to figure out this whole trolling thing because I think it's really destructive. I've been the outrage mob, the outrage mobs, just the dynamics of twitter has been really bothering me and I've been trying to figure out if we can try to build and an alternative to twitter perhaps or try to encourage twitter to be better how to have nuanced healthy conversations. Like the reason I talk about love isn't just for love's sake, it's just a good base from which to have difficult conversations like that's a good starting point because if you start like I would argue that the kind of conversation you have on twitter is fun, but it might not be a good starting point for difficult nuanced conversation. [/INST] Well, I'm not interested in having those conversations most people </s><s>[INST] I know I know, [/INST] but so I agree with you. I'm not. Your point is valid. </s><s>[INST] Yes, but like I'm saying so if we were trying to have a difficult nuanced conversation about race in America or policing, is there racism? Institutional racism of policing? Okay. There's uh the only conversations that have been nuanced about it that I've heard is in the podcasting medium, which is the magic of podcasting, which is great. But that that's the downside of podcasting. Is it a very small number of people, Even if it's in thousands, it's still small. And then there's millions of people on social media and they're not having nuanced conversation at all. [/INST] They're not capable of it. That's the difference in that I </s><s>[INST] believe they are. So that no data and then both of us aren't being not scientific. You don't have data to support your world. You're making the claim. Well you are to [/INST] know I'm not if I'm looking at an object, the claim that it was mine. </s><s>[INST] Well know what your you know your your claim is that people are fundamentally [/INST] stupid. Are you a martial artist? </s><s>[INST] Yes. [/INST] How's it feel now? But you don't you? Yeah, but </s><s>[INST] you really don't think people are deep down like capable of being intelligent. [/INST] No, not at all. Not not deep down that service. I'm not joking, I'm not being tongue in cheek and not being cynical. I do not at all at all think they have this capacity, </s><s>[INST] I'm gonna because you're being so clear about it. You're not even here's here's [/INST] why here's here's a here's evidence for my position, not proof. And this is of course data that is of little use, but it's of interest a lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine and people come at you not only will people say the same thing the same concept, they'll say the same concept in the same way. That is not a mind. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, that's surface evidence. Um you're saying this iceberg looks like this from the surface, I'm saying there's an iceberg there, that if challenged, can mhm can rise to the occasion of deep thinking, and you're saying, nope, nope, [/INST] it's just frozen water. Isn't that the Russian expression uh that's ice cream? No, not moderation. Moderation doesn't mean like, like no one's there actually, I don't know. Yeah, it means like Yeah, yeah, it's like thought. It means to Nikola Doma, </s><s>[INST] Doma. Okay, well, uh so you're challenging me to be a little bit more rigorous. I think I'll try to [/INST] challenge you anything. I'm just saying, </s><s>[INST] no, not challenging me, but like, I'm challenging myself because I know what you're saying because I'd like to prove you wrong and find actual data to just show you wrong. And I think I can, but I would need to uh get that data. [/INST] That's funny. You said, I think I can when when they were working on my biography, ego and hubris, the title I had suggested was The Little Engine that could but shouldn't. I think that's a great title. It's pretty </s><s>[INST] good. Yeah. Speaking of biographies, I mean one I read your book or listen to your book. Listen to there's an audio book for you, [/INST] right? Yeah. </s><s>[INST] You [/INST] read it. My goal is yes. Okay, </s><s>[INST] so this was this was [/INST] I didn't do your own brooks voice in the book. I did all the different voices because he has a lisp and I don't want to sound like I was making fun of him. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I remember you reading it, but it was I was really enjoyed this, you know? Okay. It was good. It was like a year, year and a half ago that I can [/INST] prove uh </s><s>[INST] well, let me at a high level see if you can pull this off. If I ask you uh what's the book you write about? [/INST] It's about a group of people who are united solely by their opposition to progressivism, who have little else in common, but who are all frequently caricatured and dismissed um by the larger establishment media, </s><s>[INST] but you give this kind of story of how it came to be sure. And to me, like we're talking about trolls, but the internet side of things is quite interesting. So first of all, how does alt right connect? [/INST] So the alt right is the subset of the new right which feels that race not racism is the most or one of the most important sociopolitical issues. </s><s>[INST] Are any of those folks like part of the mainstream or worth paying attention to [/INST] identify the mainstream? All right. By definition they would be part of the mainstream. They would not be part of that. They would not I don't know that any of them well Worth is not a position I'm not opposed to say worth. I I would say that it is of use to be familiar with their arguments because to dismiss any school of thought, especially one that has historically gained leverage, especially one that has historical gain leverage in very dark ways, especially in America and europe and other places just to say, oh they're racist. I don't need to think about them. It doesn't behoove you. </s><s>[INST] So what uh what lessons do we draw from the four chan side of things like the internet side of the movement [/INST] tits or get the funk out. </s><s>[INST] Um can you define every single word of this? Our [/INST] breasts or get the funk out? That's from fortune. </s><s>[INST] Okay that's what's what's it mean? [/INST] Sometimes like a woman will appear fortunate will just reply tits or get the funk out. </s><s>[INST] I'm trying to understand what 00 that's the way uh huh. Uh huh. I just very slow so that's okay. So that's very disrespectful towards female members of the community. I don't understand that there's rules to this community and one of them is uh we're not very good with women is that that's one of [/INST] the principle and a rule. </s><s>[INST] It's a principle, we're not going to ever get laid. That's fundamental principle. Is there are going to [/INST] get pics </s><s>[INST] picks sometimes sometimes on [/INST] the GT fl. </s><s>[INST] Okay so is there other actual principles of So like it's uh for my maybe naive perspective is they have like the darkest aspects of trolling which is like take nothing serious, make a game out of everything. That's [/INST] not fortune per se. One of the things that you will learn fortune which I think is very healthy is if you have an idiosyncratic or unique worldview or focus on an aspect of history or culture, you'll be able to find like minded people who you will engage with you and discuss it without being properly dismissive. </s><s>[INST] That's an ideal that [/INST] they well it's not ideal. It's something that happens a lot now four chan is not really like paul is they're bored with politics. Um But they will you know get into some like the people there are much more erudite than you think. </s><s>[INST] So they do take my my perception was they take nothing seriously. So there's things that they take seriously like discussing ideas. I'll [/INST] give you one example. There was a video someone posted of a girl who put kittens in a bag and threw in the river and they found out where she was within a day and got her like arrested. So yeah, they do. They say something's very seriously. </s><s>[INST] Okay. But that's like an extreme that I mean that's good. First of all, it's heartwarming that they wouldn't somehow turn that into a thing that feels like more of. What is it? What's the other one? Eight chan a chance twice as good as [/INST] fortune. Yeah. That's their slogan. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, but it feels like they're the kind of community that would take that kitten situation and make a mockery. [/INST] Yeah. There there are darker than fortunate and don't even I'm not allowed to talk about 16 chan </s><s>[INST] I'm already overwhelmed clearly by four Chan Lingo. Um I have actually I literally wrote down in my notes um like in doing research for this conversation, I learned the word plebs and I wanted to ask you what this [/INST] place means. You know what that means? I don't know </s><s>[INST] when I saw I mean actually no, I don't like [/INST] you know what a pleasure it is. </s><s>[INST] I just I don't know what the club is. [/INST] Like a plebiscite or plebian. </s><s>[INST] Okay. But it doesn't mean something more sophisticated. Um [/INST] No, it's a very unsophisticated mechanism of being dismissive </s><s>[INST] of like the regular people. [/INST] You are someone who comes at me on twitter. </s><s>[INST] Okay. All right, so back to the four Chan Alright, wasn't [/INST] uh those are very different concepts. Don't don't conflate them. </s><s>[INST] But which internet culture was the alt right? Born out of? [/INST] Uh All right. Was more born of blogs and people had different blogs were posting what they call like racial realism, scientific, which is scientific racism, so called. Um And you know, breaking down issues from a racialist perspective. So that wasn't fortune is much more dynamic. It's a message board, it's a very fluid um So it doesn't lend itself to these kind of in depth analysis of ideas or history, </s><s>[INST] but it spreads them like the [/INST] memes. Yeah. You know, but </s><s>[INST] but it's not it's not an essential mechanism of uh of the alt right? Historical. No, no no, no, no. So it was mostly about blogs. Okay, so what what do you make of the psychology of this kind of worldview when [/INST] you have this goes to your conspiracy theory subject earlier, when you have a little bit of knowledge about something that history that no one is talking about, and there's only one group that is talking about it and they and you have no alternative answers, you're going to be drawn to that group. So, because issues about race, anti Semitism homophobia are so taboo in our culture, understandably, there's good reasons if you start putting things like how old should you be, you have sex with kids and just have regular conversations eventually some people are gonna start taking some positions you don't like. So some things have to be sanctified to some extent. There there was talking about it, you're going to be drawn to that, uh, subculture. </s><s>[INST] And where does the outright stand now? I mean, I hear that term used. [/INST] So the term has been weaponized by the corporate press for people that they want to read out of society. So it's used both an individual levels, like people like Gavin, McKinnis milo Yiannopoulos, some others. I mean, I think they referred to trump is all right. Um, and, and you know, it's become a slur just like in cell or bought that has become largely removed from its original </s><s>[INST] meaning. Do you have a sense that there's still a movement that's alright or like, [/INST] yeah, they call themselves now. Okay. So there's something called the dissident right? And they say we're completely not like the alt right? Because the rights A B and C and were B C D. There's a huge overlap. It's very much the same people. Um, is there </s><s>[INST] intellectuals that still represents some some aspect of the movement? I [/INST] mean, are you tracking this? Not not that much anymore. Um, I think they they're, I don't find it particularly as, um, now that the book is done. You know, my, I'm looking more into history for my next book. Um, and you mentioned communism, I'm gonna talk a lot about the Cold War. Um, so this kind of stuff has largely fallen away from my radar to some extent. And they've also been the, it's been a very effective movement to get them marginalized and silenced. </s><s>[INST] So they're not as as deep as a concern in terms of concern or not just [/INST] their impact on society, much less. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] so as a troll on twitter, yeah, in the best sense of the word, what do you make uh of cancel culture? [/INST] I think it's maoism, it's, I mean the corporate America has done a far better job of implementing maoism, the communist Party ever. Could you had this meeting that the longer from, I think the Northwestern University law School where everyone on the call got up and said that they were racist. I mean this is something that legally you should be very averse to saying even if it were true and it's this kind of concept of getting up and confessing your sins before the collective is something completely uh, sorry, they admitted this of themselves. Yeah, they were like, because they're saying because they're white, they're inherently racist. So my name is john I'm a racist. My name is this, I'm a racist. It was, it was you hear it and you're like, okay, this is loony tunes. </s><s>[INST] So you're saying that, wow, that's, that's so much you took a step further. So you're saying there's like a, a deep underlying force but cancel culture. It's not just some kind of mob at all. It's uh, [/INST] it's a systemic organized movement being used for very nefarious purposes and to dominate, you know, an entire nation? </s><s>[INST] How do we fight it? Because I sensed it inside, You know, I used to defend academia more because I still do to some extent it's a nuanced discussion because you know, like folks like Jordan Peterson and a lot of people that kind of attack academia, they refer, they really are talking about gender studies as certain departments and me from MIT. You know, it's the University of Science and Engineering and the faculty, they're really don't think about these issues or haven't traditionally thought of, but it's beginning to even infiltrate their the you know, it's starting to infiltrate engineering and sciences outside of biology. Like let's put Biology with the gender studies. Like I'm talking about science is that really don't have anything to do with gender. Uh starting to infiltrate. Um It worries me. I don't know exactly why like I don't know exactly what the negative effect there would be except it feels like it's anti intellectual. Oh yes, of course. And I'm not sure what to his on the surface, it feels like a path towards progress at first when you when I'm like zoomed out, you know, it's just like like squinting my eyes that, you know, not even in detail, looking at things. But when I actually joined the conversation to like listen in the conversation on quote unquote diversity. It quickly makes me realize that there's no interest in um in making a better world. [/INST] It's about domination. </s><s>[INST] It's about getting Yeah, [/INST] it's a way for if you are a lowest status, white person, using anti racism is the only mechanism you will have to feel superior to another human being. So it's very useful for them. Um in terms of fighting it, one of my suggestions has been to seize all university endowments, which are the crystallization of privilege and distribute that money as reparations. So be very effective by turning to populations against each other and strongly diminishing the university's intellectual hegemony. Uh the universities are absolutely the real villains in the picture, thankfully, they're also the least prepared to be aggressed upon. Uh and after the government and the corporate press, they are the last leg of the stool and they don't know what's coming and it's gonna get ugly and I cannot wait. </s><s>[INST] So this is where you and I disagree. Part one would yeah, we disagree in the sense that you want to dismantle broken institutions. [/INST] I don't think they're working like by design. I think for over 100 years they have been talking about bringing the next generation of american leaders, which is code for promulgating an ideology based on egalitarian principles and world domination. </s><s>[INST] Let me try to express my lived experience, Okay, okay, my experience at MIT is that there's a bunch of administrators that are the bureaucracy, that I can I can say this is the nice thing about having a podcast, I don't give a damn is they're pretty useless. In fact, they get in the way. But there's faculty, those professors that are incredible, they're incredible human beings that all they do all day, they're too busy. But for the most part where they do all day is just like continually pursue different little trajectories of curiosities in the in the various avenues of science that they work on. And as a side effect of that, they mentor a group of students, sometimes a large group of students and also teach courses and they're constantly sharing their passion with others. And my experience is, it's just a bunch of people who are curious about engineering and math and science, chemistry, artificial intelligence, computer sized with almost familiar with. And there's never this feeling of Emmett being broken somehow. Like this kind of feeling like if I talk to you just now or like eric Weinstein, there's a feeling like stuff is on fire, right? There's something deeply broken. Uh but when I'm in in the system, especially before the covid before this kind of tension, everything was great. There was no discussion of even diversity, all that kind of stuff. The toxic stuff that we might be talking about right now, none of that was happening was a bunch of people just in love with uh cool ideas, exploring ideas, being curious and learning and all that kind of stuff. So I don't, my my sense of academia Was, this is the place where kids in their 20s 30s and 40s can continue the playground of science having fun. It's if you destroy academia, if you destroy universities, like you're suggesting kind of lessening their power, you take away the playground from these kids to play. [/INST] It's gonna be hard for you to tell me that I'm anti playground. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, well I guess I'm saying you're anti certain kinds of playgrounds, which is [/INST] yeah, the ones that have the broken glass on the floor. Yeah, I am against those kinds of playgrounds. </s><s>[INST] No, no, you're you're you're no you see that, you listen, you wait. Yeah, I I would say you're being the watchful mother who the one kid who hurt themselves in the glass [/INST] one kid, it's an entire generation after generation. I'm not a watch her mother, I'm the guy with the flamethrower. </s><s>[INST] I understand I understand that, but you're using the one kid who was always kind of like weird um gender studies department uh that that hurt themselves on the glass as opposed to the people who are like obviously having fun in the playground and not playing by the glass, the broken glass and they're just, I mean to me some of the best innovations in science happen in universities. Okay. You can't forget that universities don't have this liberal like politics literally in every conversation until this year until this year, there's something happening. But uh, every conversation I've ever had nothing to do with politics who never trump, never came up. None of that ever come up. Nothing like all this kind of idea that there's liberal, all that. But that that's in the humanities. [/INST] Yeah. But do you think M I. T massachusetts institute? Technology might be a little bit of an outlier. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, this probably is. Yeah, but I don't, I honestly don't think when people criticize academia, they're looking at, uh, there in fact also picking the outliers, which is they're picking some of the quote unquote strongest gender studies [/INST] Departments is nonsensical. When I was at Bucknell. It was a college student. We had to take, uh, you know, we had a bunch of electives and I want to take a class on individual American individualism. One of the text of the five that we had to read was Birth of a nation. The movie about the Klan. So there's no department where these people are not thorough going hardcore ideologues. Uh, this is not a gender cities, that humanity fine. All the humanity is not just gender studies. Okay, fine. I can give you history english, all of them. Every university as you know, has it mandatory in the curriculum? They have to take a bunch of these propaganda classes. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I look forward to youtube comments because you're being more eloquent and you're speaking to the thing that a lot of people agree with and I'm being my usual slow self. And people are going to say not very nice things about me, [/INST] don't say anything. Not nice about lex. Please </s><s>[INST] let me try to [/INST] just just shoot up a school that would be preferable. </s><s>[INST] There he goes again only to go to the darkest possible place. [/INST] The sunshine baby schools. That's where everyone goes to be happy </s><s>[INST] playgrounds. There he goes dark here, just dives right in like just go dark and then just comes back up to the surface. [/INST] You have to feel this way anymore. </s><s>[INST] It's one day um you're probably a figment of my imagination. I'm not even having this podcast after [/INST] 18 red bulls. I'm surprised you can see anything. This is like fight club delirium. Uh I got into that Norton yesterday on twitter. </s><s>[INST] Oh really? Yeah. Is he uh like the rest of the [/INST] celebrities? Yeah. He's like, oh this is an existential threat to America trump's a fascist. He's delegitimizing the oval office. I said why not endorsement of trump? </s><s>[INST] Well, you should have went bad pit, he might have a different opinion. That's fight club reference. Uh this conversation is over. It's interesting. I'd like to draw a line between science and engineering and science. Not including like the biological aspect, the parts of biology that touch and humanities in biology. Like I feel because humanity if you just look at the percentage of universities. It's still a minority percentage and I would actually draw different. I think they serve very different purposes. Sure. And that's actually a broken part about universities about like why why is some of the best research in the world done at universities that doesn't like there might be a different like M. I. T. It feels weird that a faculty, [/INST] these are conceptual different things like we do research and we teach why is this the same? It feels weird. </s><s>[INST] But that's just but I'm also I'm coming to like the defense of the engineers that never talk about. I'm not like like my mind isn't I'm not like diluted or something where I'm not seeing the house on fire. I'm just saying I am seeing the house because I also lived in Harvard Square. I'm seeing Harvard but and [/INST] you see the tanks coming, they're coming legs. That's going to be so beautiful. I'm gonna I'll be like the american beauty, the plastic bag guys won't be able to stop crying because it's so beautiful. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, thanks. I can I can already I can already see it. But the but the engineering departments where like I believe that the Elon musk's of the world that the like the innovation that will make a better world is happening and like let's not burn that down because it has nothing to do with any like they're all like sitting quietly and well like well the humanities and all these kind of diversity problems. They're not having any of these discussions. [/INST] Listen, my soviet brother, you both know we both know that ice water runs in our veins. So if you're calling for mercy, that is not how I'm wired, but I'm not closing the door. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I'm actually realizing now for people listening to this, I'll probably pre pendants and saying that I'm even slower than usual. I didn't sleep last night, but I feel I'm actually realizing just how slow I am and how much preparation I need to do. And if I would like to defend aspects of academia, I better come prepared. [/INST] I don't think you need to defend them. I think I'm granting you your premise freely. </s><s>[INST] No, you might be okay. I don't think the world is that [/INST] you just defeat your own argument because you, because it is not at all have to be the way that a phenomenal research institution like M. I. T, which no one disputes has to also be an educational establishment. These two things are not at all uh necessarily interconnected, but then </s><s>[INST] you have to offer a way to separate correct. But like, I'm not a big fan, everybody's different, but I'm not a fan of criticizing institutions without offering a way to change. And especially when I'm like, have ability to change. I'd like to yeah, I'd like to offer a path. Like [/INST] what if they were in students, they were all meant or like a like meant like um what's the opposite of mentor protegee, What's the term when you like when you work at a place like interns, not an intern. So what I'm thinking of but anyway, like basically they're working there instead of going to college there, </s><s>[INST] it's possible, but it's going against tradition. And so you have to build new institutions and the uh, and [/INST] then have these engineers building new things. That's crazy. These research engineers where they're gonna be building things. </s><s>[INST] one of the things because you're kind of [/INST] apprentice. That's the way I was looking at apprentice, which is ironic. We're talking about trump and we couldn't think of the word apprentice. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, well done. We should both be fired. Yeah, there you go. These Russian jews so quick with their wit. Okay. But the thing is you're a fan of freedom and there's there is uh intellectual freedom people. This is what I was trying to articulate. I'm failing to articulate, but there truly is complete intellectual freedom within universities and topics of science and engineering. [/INST] I believe you, I agree with you. I don't think it's going to take much persuasion. But I'll give you an example when that, I'm sure you know more details about this than I do when that scientists engineered that probe to land on that comet. And the articles written because this Hawaiian shirt he was wearing had like pinup girls on it, which I think is female students so different or something? Ex girlfriend and he had to apologize. This is what rand was talking about, that the great accomplishments of men have to say, I'm sorry to the lowest, most despicable, disgusting people. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, I don't know. You know, let me bring this case up because I think about this, uh, this might not mean much to you, but it means a lot of certain aspects of the computer science community. There's a guy named Richard Stallman, I don't know if you you know who that is. He is the founder of the Free Software Foundation. He's like a big Lennox. He's one of the key people in the history of computer science, one of those open source people, right? But he is like, I believe he's one of the hardcore ones, which is like all software should be free. Okay, so it's very interesting personality, very key person in the new just like Linus Torvalds key person. So, but he also kind of speaks his mind and on a certain chain of conversations at MIT that was leaked to the new york times then was published, led him to be fired or pushed out of M I. T. Recently, maybe a year ago. And I always sat weird with me. So what happened is, um, there's a few undergraduate students that called Marvin Minsky, not sure if you're familiar who that is. He's one of the seminal people in artificial intelligence. They they said that they called him a rapist because uh he met with Jeffrey Epstein and Jeff free. Epstein solicited uh, These are the best facts known to me that I'm aware of, that's what was stated in the chain, is he solicited a 17, but it might have been an 18 year old girl to come up to Marvin Minsky and ask him if he wanted to have sex with her. So Jeffrey Epstein told the girl she came out to Marvin Minsky, who was at that time as I think seven years old, and his wife was there to Marvin Minsky's wife and he said no, or like, you know, awkwardly thank you, no thanks. And uh that was stated in the email thread as Marvin participating in uh sexual assault and rape of this unwilling sexual assault. And it was called rape of this person, right? Of this woman that propositioned him. And then Richard Stallman, who's he's kind of known for this. He's very he's you make fun of me being a robot, but he's kind of like a d bugger. He's like, well that sentence is not what you said is not correct. So he like corrected the person basically made it seem like the the use of the word rape is not correct because that's not the definition of rape and then he was attacked for saying, oh now you're playing with definitions of rape, rape is rape is the answer, right? And then that was leaked in him defending. So the way it was leaked, it was reported as him defending um rape. That's the way it was reported and he was pushed out and he didn't really give a damn. It's he doesn't seem to make a big deal out of it. He just made an example of him, They made an example and that and that everyone was afraid to defend him. So like there's a bunch of faculty one [/INST] year from the soviet union doesn't this head close to home for you? </s><s>[INST] I don't know what to think of it. It hits close to home, but it was basically At least at M. IT now it is such a light place with this, it's not common in it, but it was like 18, 19 year old kids, undergraduate kids with this kind of fire in them. There's just very few of them, but they're the ones that raise all this kind of fuss and the entirety of the administration, all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them. It's so interesting to me, like, I don't know if I should be afraid of that. [/INST] You don't think you should be afraid. So if someone who's trying to be specific when it comes to charges of violent assault is looking for that clarity. Can get their life other searches. </s><s>[INST] Let me give you more context. There's a little bit more context to richard Stallman, which is, he was also a rapist. [/INST] No, that </s><s>[INST] that party like people, but he had a history through his life, uh, of, you know, every once in a while wearing the Hawaiian shirt with like he would make, he's a fat uh sorry but he's a fat unattractive. He like what trump referred to [/INST] the guy in </s><s>[INST] the basement that's richard. Okay. I love you know is you know here's what he is. You know people, he like he would eat his own uh he would pick skin from his feet and lectures and just eat it. Okay. Yeah this video is him doing [/INST] that. I'm not joking. He must really behind the spectrum then. </s><s>[INST] Yeah and you know uh I think this uh in his office he door he wrote something like uh like hacker uh plus plus lover of ladies or something like that. Like something kind of Yeah. So [/INST] unprofessional. Unprofessional and a little creepy. Yeah, that's fair. That's so he was so they're looking for an excuse to get at him. It sounds like </s><s>[INST] no, he was just, who's they [/INST] the administration. Yeah, probably. Probably a lot of times what people don't realize that this will be my defensive cancel culture. A lot of times when someone gets fired over something like this. This isn't why this is just giving them cover to get rid of them without getting a lawsuit </s><s>[INST] but it's still so I think I guess what I'm trying to communicate is he was a little weird and creepy and he may not be the best for the community but that's not necessarily the messages sent to the rest of the community. The message is sent to the rest of the community that being clear about words or the usage of the word rape is uh, like you should call everything rape. That's that's that's basically the message you sent. You should call that. We [/INST] say rape rape. It's about submission. I think you'd be very happy to know that there's a lot of people and she's very crucified this. Like Betsy DeVos the Bruins department education who are aware of this. They are aware that it's completely contradicts due process. They're aware of how a rape accusation is something, not to be taken seriously, but because it's not to be taken seriously. It has to be also taken seriously other context that, you know, once that word is around a male, this can ruin his entire life. Um, that's </s><s>[INST] that's the sticky thing of the word. Like I like I think about this uh, a lot that like how would I defend it if somebody, like, I've never, I can honestly say I've never done anything close to creepy in my life, like with like with women, [/INST] but you wouldn't know it if you had Right? That's the thing. A lot of these creepy guys don't think they're creepy. </s><s>[INST] They think they're being cute. Yeah, but I'm just telling you even like, uh fine, let's say, right, let's say I'm not aware of it. But the point that I am aware of is that somebody can just completely make something up, correct Yeah. And like what what would I [/INST] know he denied the charges. There's an article around everything you did supposedly and it goes uh Mr Friedman to land the charges. Yeah, </s><s>[INST] but what creeps me [/INST] out that happened? Can I interrupt? There's Zora Neale hurston's one of my favorite writers. She's from the Harlem renaissance. Um she wrote, their eyes were watching God a couple other books. She was just an amazing, amazing figure. Her biography is called wrapped in rainbow is it's just a masterpiece. I think I think I read it one day, can recommend her enough, fascinating, fascinating woman During the 30s, I think it was in 1940, she was out of the country, she was accused of molesting a teenage boy. She wasn't in America, this could be proven. So there is absolutely false. Not even question, she was indicted and she wanted to kill herself because she's like people are going to see these things and they're gonna think maybe there's some truth to it, Maybe it's voluntary what they're just gonna and you can understand what should be suicidal over this. So yeah, this is this is something that's been going on for a long time and and the fact that it's becoming, I do agree. It's important. I know a lot of women who have been sexually assaulted more than I'm happy that I know and if I know that many that means there's more so I I don't I think it's it's a good idea that they feel seen that they don't feel wounded, they don't feel damage that they can talk to their friends and I'm like, man, this sucks has happened to you and I don't think you're a slut, I don't think you're asking for it, I think you feel violated, it gets gross, talk to me. Like I I do think that that's important and I also think it's important though, like when things get kind of in a frenzy that a lot of people like yeah, I also had something happened and very quickly the line between he grabbed my boob and he violently raped me. I don't think these two things are the same at all. I think they're both sexual assault, but in terms of what someone can deal with the next day, the next month, 10 years later, I I don't think there's similar scenarios. Yeah, I had Juanita Broaddrick on my show and hearing her talk about her alleged rape by Bill Clinton was very disturbing for me, Very disturbing here because it was like half an hour. So, you know, we think of these things, I think okay, hold it down blah blah and it's done half an hour when just even someone physically holding you down for half an hour, Like not even a sexual assault, like that's traumatic. You think, am I your brain is going to think, am I gonna die </s><s>[INST] when I zoom out? I think that ultimately this is going to lead to a better world, like empowering women to speak to those kinds of experiences. The benefit of it outweighs the [/INST] issue is whenever people are given a weapon, some are going to use it in nefarious ways. And that's the lesson of history. Males, males, females, whites, blacks, Children, adults, when people are given a mechanism to execute power for others, some are going to use it. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask you for therapy thing? Um sure, um trolling in a sense because I mentioned somebody making up something about me, I feel because I wear my heart on my sleeve. I'm not good with these attacks. Like I've been attacked recently, just being called a fraud and all that kind of stuff. Just light stuff like I haven't, you know, it was like it hurt. [/INST] Okay, well let me help you. Maybe it's because I'm a new yorker. No, I'm serious. Here's why in new york a lot of times you'll be walking with your friend and a homeless person will come up to you and start yelling things at you. Your reaction isn't in those circumstances, let me hear us out. Your reaction is physical safety and getting away now, it's not impossible that that homeless person is actually saying the truth, this happened to a friend of mine, she, this guy wasn't homeless. Um and he's walking on the street on smith street and he's just talking out loud and he goes why they call them hipsters, what are they hip to? And she chuckles and he goes what are you laughing at fat? So you start something, I finish it and she she just couldn't move. And it's like it's my way of problem because that's the first thing he went to and there's I don't know that I have any advice but when you hear something like this this is I think you need to be better in terms of boundaries. I think you should not receive this as a fellow human but as a crazy homeless person. Because if this fellow human if I thought that you were a fraud in some context that's a very weird word to use because fraudulent podcaster. These are real mix but if I </s><s>[INST] were a scientist or human. [/INST] Sure but I would ask myself is this person in a position to make this judgment or are they backing it up? Are they saying here your conclusions were wrong. Here's some mistakes in your data and you can engage with them in ideas. But whenever somebody uses a word to entirely dismiss your life without having the knowledge of your life you do not have to take that seriously. </s><s>[INST] I appreciate that kind of idea. But uh some things aren't about data like you know I I see myself as a fraud often and it's it's more psychology of it. Um If I can reduce something to reason I can probably be fine. My worry is the same as the worry of like teenage girls that get bullied online. It's like when I'm being open and fragile on the internet, it affects me in a way where I can't reason doesn't help. It helps me. You [/INST] don't block people enough. I'm very happy with the blocking. </s><s>[INST] No, I'm so yeah, very heavy. I block, it's helped aggressive [/INST] banality. I block immediately. I also think time is going to help. I don't think you're like, you need to grow up, want to be a podcaster, right? That wasn't your aspiration. So in some sense you are going to feel like a fraud because you're like, what? I don't have any training for this. I'm training for a scientist. I can talk to about artificial intelligence for literally hours. But in terms of this like what I'm doing, I'm kind of, so when they call you a fake, it's like, yeah, you're kind of right? Because like I, I did kind of stumble into this, this is not my pedigree. So I think that kind of probably speaks to on some level </s><s>[INST] well, but they're, they're attacking not the podcasting thing, but more like the same people call Elon musk of fraud to, which that's the way I rationalize it like, well if they're calling him a fraud and they're calling me a fraud. That like even if you have rockets that go into like, if you successfully have rockets, uh landing back on earth, um usable rockets, you're still being called a fraud, then it's okay? [/INST] Not necessarily. It could be that he's not a fraud. You really are. That's but it's not resonating with you because your brain knows the logic so you can make yourself. </s><s>[INST] But yeah, yeah, but I don't know this whole trolling thing. You seem to be much better at seeing it as a game. [/INST] You know why? Because you are under the delusion that every human being is capable, intelligent reasoned decisions don't think I'm right and I perceive them as literally animals. So when a dog starts barking, all it's saying is that the dog is agitated and this is not going to change my life one iota other than crossing the street. Perhaps </s><s>[INST] I'm gonna prove you wrong one day [/INST] if you're gonna kill yourself trying to do it first, shoot up a </s><s>[INST] school, but if I don't, I'll prove you wrong, I'll bring the data and they'd be like your right legs. I have the receipt of the receipts. Okay, so we mentioned camus. Oh yeah, I love him. Is there um this is this is this is a question that people like love when I ask a really smart paper or it is love know what what books, let's say three books, if you can think of them. Technical fiction. Philosophical, Would you had a big impact on you or would you recommend to others. [/INST] The Machiavellian is by James Burnham. This is a book about how politics works in reality as opposed to how people imagine it working. Um meant a small bug who's a figure in these circles who is respected by a lot of people. I was giving a talk and there was a bunch of panelists and we were asked, what book would you recommend? I said the Machiavellian independently of me. That was the book, he had recommend. It's out of print. It's hard to find. But that would be one is that his book, James Burnham became in 1940 one. I think. </s><s>[INST] So can you pause on the mulch is was just an old dog. That's a code name. Right? Like that guy, that guy's [/INST] been, this is real name. He's in he swims in your circles which he doesn't </s><s>[INST] he's originally program yeah. He comes up as a person that I should talk with I should know about. But then I read a few of his things and they're quite dangerous [/INST] there very long and for both. But I think he's an amazing thinker but he's the one who had the idea of sending the tanks to Harvard yard. </s><s>[INST] But doesn't he have like ah he has some radical views. I forget what they are very [/INST] radical views. Yeah, he wants a military coup. </s><s>[INST] But you're saying he's a serious think of this is worthy uh not worthy. [/INST] I don't know that you would enjoy having a conversation with him. I think a lot of people enjoy seeing it happen, but I think there'll be a lot of talking past each other and and it will be interesting, </s><s>[INST] what do you agree with you? Um what do you agree? What do you disagree? [/INST] I agree with him that politics has to be looked at objectively and without kind of an emotional connection to different schools. I talked about it a lot in my book on the new Right. Um I disagree. I don't think a military coup is a good idea. He doesn't think anarchism is stable. I disagree. Um I I mean, me and him, I did his livestream with him, we just worked out a lot about history and like, you know, people have fallen in the memory hole. So, I mean, he's got a lot of writing, so, </s><s>[INST] so, you know, the sense I got from him was that if I talk with him, a lot of people would be upset with me for giving him a platform. [/INST] Yeah, I think he's on that edge where they want to read him out of what is acceptable discourse. </s><s>[INST] What's his most controversial? I mean, you can mention the tanks, is that the most controversial viewpoint? Does he have a race [/INST] thing? No, he's the Alright doesn't particularly like him in many ways because he's not a big on the race thing. I don't know what would be his most controversial view uh to be honest, I think because he is radical in terms of his analysis of culture anytime someone's radical, that is dangerous against dangerous. </s><s>[INST] Okay, book. Uh, so that's one down, head [/INST] down head, which is, um, I would say that I'll shrug. No. And if you read atlas shrugged before being the fountainhead, you're doing yourself an enormous disservice. Don't you dare do it on the philosophical because everyone on every, every level, Fountain has a better novel. The Fountainhead superfluous. If you read atlas shrugged first Fountain Heads about psychology and ethics, it does not have to do with her politics other than its implications. So it's by far the superior book. Um, the third one, this is a good one question. Let me see what there's so many good books out there that I love. I I'm going to, this is not really my third choice, but I'll throw it out there because I um, this is such an important worldview. Especially people on the right, Your virtue signaling no, this is counter signaling. Um, Daddy's Russell's book, a renegade History, The United States. His thesis is that it's the degenerates that give us all freedom. Um, and things like prostitutes, things like Madam's, things like slaves, things like immigrants because they were so low status, they could get away with things that then people were higher status demanded and so on, and so forth. So I think that thesis and and it really has extreme um consequences in thinking and Jonathan height, the righteous mind, That's those are the four. </s><s>[INST] Is that his best? I haven't read any of his stuff, [/INST] just tell me what you want. </s><s>[INST] That was four. But of course [/INST] forget that. Put what you would uh forget that is that's those are the three. </s><s>[INST] So we talked about love. Let me ask you another question I'm obsessed with. Are you uh do you ponder your own mortality? [/INST] I do a lot. Especially now that I'm an uncle, especially now that I have like these younger people that I mentor. Um I was just yesterday my friend john Girgis who did my theme song for my podcast, who did the book cover for Dear Reader who's like the most talented person. I know his song came on the ipod at the gym and I almost messaged him, I go, you know, one day one of us is gonna bury the other and it's gonna be really sad. And I thought about that and it was kind of like, oh man, that's really gonna suck. Um and you know, I don't know which scenario be better. Like I do, I will be very sad if he's gone. I'm sure he'll be very sad if I'm gone. Um </s><s>[INST] I mean, what are you afraid of it? [/INST] No, uh you know, um rand had this quote about how I won't die, the world will end. So I've had enough experiences that I am. I've really at this point and everything is icing on the cake. </s><s>[INST] So if you if I were to kill you at the end of this podcast, it was it was painless. That would be okay. Yeah. You know why does anyone know you're here? But [/INST] you know why I'm asking for a friend? Here's why there's that wit, save that for twitter legs. You do they call you Sasha? </s><s>[INST] No, I'm uh [/INST] oh that's my sister's husband. Okay, so here's why I strongly believe that this is a very kind of jewish perspective that you just have to world leave the world a little bit better than you found it. That all you can do is move the needle a little. And one of the things I set out to do with dear reader, my book and north Korea. I said I was at a point in my career where I could do something to make a difference. Instead of just writing like co authoring books or celebrities, which I'm very proud of but you know, are neither here nor there. And I thought, all right, I know how to tell stories. I know how to inform people in 100 and 10 people if I move the needle in America cares, we got a really good here. If I move the needle in north Korea a little bit the cost benefits through the roof. </s><s>[INST] I never thought of that. Actually, I never thought I'd do you read it from that perspective. [/INST] So when I set out to write it, I'm like, okay, what can I do? I'm not gonna able to liberate the north korean regime. What I can do is the camera right now is focused on at the time, kim jong il, not kim jong un. And I can do just this just this little bit and I go behind that guy who you think is funny clown. There's millions of dead people, there's Children being starved, there's people who are performing because they have a gun to their kids head and if someone put a gun to your kid's head, you put on those dancing shoes real quick. And I and others have managed to change the conversation about north Korea in terms of look at those silly buffoons to those poor people. So the fact that that little thing I can say with a straight face, I did, it doesn't make me a great person, but it does make me someone who if I have to go tomorrow, I can say I did a little bit to make the world a better place. </s><s>[INST] What do you think is the meaning of life? [/INST] I think the meaning of life is um why are we here? Oh well that I'm a calm person. So I'll give the, can you answer? So there's two types of people, those who know how to use binary? No, </s><s>[INST] thanks for relating to the audience. [/INST] 1110012 to down vote like kind of radical freak is this legs. So, and I use this example in my forthcoming book. You go into a countryside mountainside and you see it a blank canvas on an easel. And one kind of mentality goes, this is just a blank canvas. This is stupid. This is what am I looking at. And the other type goes, what a great opportunity I'm in this beautiful space. I have this entire canvas to paint. I could do anything I want with it. So I'm very much of that type two person. Um, and I hope others uh, start to think of life in that way. You and I have both been more successful than we expected to, especially growing up. And in ways we did not expect. And when you're young, you are so intent on driving the car. And after a certain point you realize it's not about driving the cars, you're being a surfer that you can only control this little board and you have no idea where the waves will take you and sometimes you're gonna fall down and someone's gonna gonna suck and you're gonna swallow some salt water. But at a certain point you stop trying to drive and you're like, this is freaking awesome and have no idea where it's gonna go </s><s>[INST] beautifully put. I know I speak for a lot of people. First of all, everyone loves the game you play on the internet, it's fun. You make the world, not [/INST] everyone day they came from the </s><s>[INST] hard, but it makes the world seem fun and especially in this dark time. It's uh, it's much appreciated and we can't wait till the next book and they may need to come and to hopefully many more joe Rogan appearances. You guys do some great magic together you uh, yeah, you're, you're, you're one of my favorite guests on this show so I can't wait, especially if you can make it before the election. Thanks so much for making today happen. I'm glad you came down. You're awesome. [/INST] Thank you so much. </s><s>[INST] Thanks for listening to this conversation with Michael malice and thank you to our sponsors SCM rush, which is a Ceo optimization tool, doordash, which is my go to food delivery service and master class, which is online courses from world experts. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on youtube, review it with five stars on apple podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, connect with me on twitter, a lex Friedman and now let me leave you with some words from Michael malice, conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. Thank you for listening. Hope to see you next time [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] and mhm That's fascinating to think about. You're exactly right that the nature of this particular freedom that seems so foundational to the to this nation, to what made this nation great and perhaps much of the world that is great. Made a great, it's changing completely. Can we try to reason through how the idea of funeral speech is to be changed. I guess I'm struggling. It feels really wrong perhaps because I wasn't paying attention to it. It feels really wrong to ban, donald trump from twitter to ban, not just the president that's really wrong to me, but this particular human for being divisive, but then when there is an incitement of violence that is an overused claim, but perhaps there was actual brewing of local violence happening. So one of the things I know what's happening in parler, these people were uh yeah, scheduling meetings together in physical space. So you're now going back from this dynamic social, large scale people from Uganda of people from all over the world, being able to communicate your now mapping that into now back meeting in the physical space that is uh similar to what the founding of the nation [/INST] of violence digital if ransomware suddenly was unleashed, um the key issue is the abstractions. So what was freedom of speech is a bundle and now it's and then how do we abstract the bundle into the digital era? </s><s>[INST] Do you think we just need to raise the question and talk about it? Do you have do you have ideas? Because [/INST] sure, I have ideas. But the key point is that I'm not even welcome in mainstream media. I've never seen you on mainstream media. Do you do mainstream media? So we exist in part of an alternate universe because the mainstream media is trying to have a coherent story, which I have called the gated institutional narrative and the institutions pretend that they plugged their fingers in their ears and pretend that nothing exists outside of MSNBC talking to CNN about what was in the new york times as covered by the Washington post. And so that's effectively like a professional wrestling promotion where they, you know, the undertaker faces off against hulk Hogan and rowdy Roddy piper. Okay, well that's very different than Emma, </s><s>[INST] you've recently been on Glenn Beck's program and there was this kind of, one of the things you've talked about is being able to have this conversation, I don't know if you would put it as a type of conversation that was happening outside the mainstream media, but a conversation that reaches across different worldviews, having a nuanced or just like a respectful conversation that's grounded in mutual, [/INST] but we can't have the reality because the main model is um the center, both left and right is in the process of stealing all the wealth that we built up and they've organized the extremes uh, into to Lopping teams that I've called magazine and focused on. And then you have everybody who isn't part of that complex, all seven of us, the number of us who are able to earn a living, looking at all of these mad people playing this game, You know, there's a phrase inside finance when the investment banks are trying to look at price action and somebody says, this doesn't make any sense. And somebody will say it's just the local stealing from each other and that's really what we have, we have, we've got the leaders of Dagestan and focused on uh you know, championing these two teams is sponsored by the center because it's a distraction while they steal all the silver and cut the paintings out of the frames. That's what we you and I are looking at. So when you asked me like, do you have any ideas about the abstraction for free speech? I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, I've never met syndrome, which I I never met Larry page. I was once in a room with Sergei brin. I've never spoken to Elon musk. I hang out with peter thiel, but we have a very deep relationship, but I don't really speak to that many other people. You know, it's sort of at this level, we're not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. In fact, it's almost as if we've destroyed every sandbox in which we could play together. There's no place that we actually talk except long form podcasting. And by the way, they found, you see what's going on with like Alex stamos and the hoover institution. Well, you know, there's a loophole left. Long form podcasting allows people to speak at levels above daytime seeing. It's like, well, why do you think they're not watching daytime CNN </s><s>[INST] But you know, that's that's just silly journalism. They currently have no power to displace podcast. That's why it's so powerful rss feed. I mean, that's why the big Challenger joe Rogan and Spotify is like there's this dance that's fascinating to see is Joe Rogan is not part of the system and then he's also on cancel a ble and there's this tension that's happening. [/INST] Howard Stern, Howard Stern became much less relevant. So if they can't control job by bringing him in house, the key question is is he going to continue? Okay. You know this joe says this thing about F you money, joe is one of the only people with F. U. Money who's actually said F you? Yeah, I don't understand this. </s><s>[INST] I don't have F. [/INST] U. Money. What </s><s>[INST] exactly is can we break apart a few money? Because I always thought I've been fortunate enough two. I have always have a few money in the sense that my standards were so low that a basic salary in the United States. This [/INST] is the stoic point which is you can live on ricin beans, Euron cancel a bill because you're always rich relative to your needs. </s>

<s>[INST] So you were a key person in launching three revolutions, online education, the autonomous vehicles and flying cars or beetles so high level and I apologize for all the philosophical questions, [/INST] no apology necessary. </s><s>[INST] How do you choose what problems to try and solve what drives you to make those solutions in reality? [/INST] I have to, to desires in life. I want to literally make the lives of others better or as few of them say maybe jokingly make the world a better place. I believe in this. It's as funny as it sounds and second I want to learn, I want to get in this case, I don't want to be in the drop I'm good at because if I'm in a job that I'm good at the chances for me to learn something interesting is actually minimized. So I want to be in a job I'm bad at. Um that's really important to me. So in a bid for example, but people often called flying cars with electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Um I'm just no expert in any of this and it's so much fun to, to learn on the job, what it actually means to build something like this. Now. It's saying that the stuff that I done lately after I finished my professorship at stanford, They're really focused on like what is the maximum impact on society? Like transportation is something that has transformed the 21st or 20th century more than any other invention of my opinion, even more than communication and cities are different workers, different women's rights are different because of transportation. And yet we still have a very sub optimal transportation solution where we kill 1.2 or so million people every year in traffic. It's like the leading cause of death for young people in many countries where we are extremely inefficient resource minds, just go to your average neighborhood city and look at the number of parked cars. That's a travesty in my opinion or where we spent endless hours in traffic jams and very, very simple innovations like a self driving car or what people call the flying car could completely change this and it's there. I mean the technology is, is basically there to close your eyes not to see it. </s><s>[INST] So lingering on autonomous vehicles, fascinating space, some incredible work you've done throughout your career there. So let's start start with DARPA. I think the DARPA challenge to the desert and an urban to the streets. I think that inspired an entire generation of roboticists and obviously sprung this whole excitement about this particular kind of four wheeled robots called autonomous cars, self driving cars. So, you lead the development of Stanley, the autonomous car that won that The race of the desert. The DARPA Challenge in 2005 and junior, The car that finished second in the DARPA Urban Challenge also did incredibly well in 2007. I think what are some painful inspiring or enlightening experiences from that time to stand out to you. [/INST] Oh my God, painful. We're all these incredibly complicated stupid bugs that had to be found. We had a phase where the Stanley our Our car that eventually wandered up again challenge with every 30 miles, just commit suicide and we didn't know why and they ended up to be that in the sinking of two computer clocks occasionally o'clock went backwards and that negative time elapsed screwed up the entire internal logic. But it took ages to find this. You were like bugs like that. I'd say. Enlightening is the stanford team immediately focused on machine learning and software. Whereas everybody else seemed to focus on building better hardware. Our analysis have been a human being with an existing rental car can perfectly drive the course, but I have to write off to get a better rental car. I just should replace the human being and the human being. To me was a conjunction of three steps. We had like sensors, eyes and ears, mostly eyes. We had brains in the middle and then we had actuated our hands and our feet. Now the extras are easy to build. The sensors are actually also easy to build was missing was the brain. So we had to build a human brain and nothing nothing clear then to me that that the human brain is a learning machine. So why not just train our robots? You would be a massive machine learning into our machine. And with that we're able to not just learn from human drivers. We had the entire speed control of the vehicle was copied from human driving, but also have the robot learn from experience where it made a mistake and recover from it and learn from it. </s><s>[INST] You mentioned the pain point of software and clocks. Synchronization seems to seems to be a problem that continues with robotics. It's a tricky one with drones and so on. What what does it take to build a thing? A system with so many constraints. You have a deadline. No time. You're unsure about anything really. It's the first time that people really even exploring. You know, it's not even sure that anybody can finish when we were talking about the race of the desert the year before nobody finished. What does it take to scramble and finish a product that actually a system that actually works? [/INST] I mean, we're lucky. We're very, really small team, the core of the team of four people. It was for, because five couldn't comfortably sit inside a carpet for food and I as a team leader, my job was to get pizza for everybody and washed the car and stuff like this and repair the radiator and it broke and debug the system. Um, and we're already kind of open minded. We had like no egos involved and we just wanted to see how far we can get what we did really, really well. It was time management. We were done with everything a month before the race and we froze the entire self a month before the ways. And it turned out, um, looking at other teams, every other team complaint. If they had just one more week, they would have won. And we decided, you know, it's going to fall into a mistake. We're gonna be early. And we had an entire month to shake the system. And we actually found two or three minor bucks in the last month that we had to fix. And we were completely prepared in the race </s>

<s>[INST] Yeah. So that's a big thing for yan. And uh uh what he refers to as grounding to the physical space. So, so [/INST] that's what we're talking about </s><s>[INST] the same. Yeah. So, but so how you ground, I mean, the [/INST] grounding without grounding then you get you get a machine that doesn't know what it's talking about because it is talking about the world. Ultimately, </s><s>[INST] the question, open question is what it means to ground. I mean, we're very human centric and our thinking, what does it mean for a machine to understand what it means to be in this world. Does it need to have a body, does he need to have a finite nous, Like we humans have all of these elements. It's very [/INST] uh you know, I'm not sure about having a body, but having a perceptual system, having a body would be very helpful to, I mean if if you think about human mimicking human or but having a perception that seems to be essential uh so that you can build, you can accumulate knowledge about the world. So if you can you can imagine the human completely paralyzed and there's a lot that the human brain could learn, you know, with a paralyzed body. So uh if we got a machine that could do that, that would be a big deal. </s><s>[INST] And then the flip side of that something you see in Children and something in machine learning world is called active learning. Maybe it is also, is uh being able to play with the world, how important for developing system, waters or system to do you think it is to play with the world to be able to interact with [/INST] a lot, a lot of what you learn as you learn to anticipate uh the outcomes of your actions. I mean you can see that how babies learn it, you know, with their hands. They are they learn uh you know to connect uh you know, the movements of their hands with something that clearly is something that happens in the brain and and the ability of the brain to learn new patterns. So you know, it's the kind of thing that you get without official limbs that you connect it and then people learn to operate the artificial limb, you know, really impressively quickly, at least from, from what I hear. Uh so we have a system that is ready to learn the world through action </s><s>[INST] at the risk of going into way too mysterious of land. What do you think it takes to build a system like that? Obviously we're very far from understanding how the brain works, but how difficult is it to build this mind of ours? [/INST] You know, I mean, I think that young raccoons answer that we don't know how many mountains there are. I think that's a very good answer. I think that, you know, if you if you look at what records well is saying that strikes me as off the wall, but uh, but I think people are much more realistic than that we're actually dementia services and Yannis and so that people are actually doing the work fairly realistic, I think </s><s>[INST] to maybe phrase it another way from a perspective not of building it, but from understanding it, How complicated are human beings in the following sense? You know, I work with autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. So we tried to model pedestrians, how difficult is it to model a human being, their perception of the world. The two systems they operate under sufficiently to be able to predict whether the pedestrians going across the road or not. [/INST] I'm, you know, I'm fairly optimistic about that actually, because what we're talking about is a huge amount of information that every vehicle has and that feeds into one system into one gigantic system. And so anything that any vehicle learns becomes part of what the whole system knows and with the system multiplier like that, there is a lot that you can do. So human beings are very complicated, but and and you know, the system is going to make mistakes, but human makes mistakes. I think that they'll be able to, I think they are able to anticipate pedestrians, otherwise a lot would happen. They're able two, you know, they're able to get into a roundabout and into the into traffic. So they must know both to expect though, to anticipate how people will react when they are sneaking in. And there's a lot of learning that's involved in that </s><s>[INST] currently the pedestrians are treated as things that cannot be hit and they're not treated as agents with whom you interact in a game theoretic way. So, [/INST] I mean, </s><s>[INST] it's not, it's a totally open problem and every time somebody tries to solve it seems to be harder than we think and nobody's really tried to seriously solve the problem of that dance, because I'm not sure if you've thought about the problem of pedestrians, but you're really putting your life in the hands of the driver, [/INST] you know, there is a dance as part of the dance that would be quite complicated. But for example, when I crossed the street and there is a vehicle approaching, I look the driver in the eye and I think many people do that and you know that's a signal that I'm sending and I would be sending that machine to an autonomous vehicle and it had better understand it because it means I'm crossing. </s>

<s>[INST] These guys are awesome, You should definitely check them out. You will not regret it. Leno dot com slash lex. This is the lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with David Sinclair. I usually feel like the same person when I was 12. Like when I right now as I think about myself, I feel like exactly the same person That I was when I was 12 and yet uh I am getting older, both body and mind and still feel like time hasn't passed at all. Do you feel this tension in yourself that you're the same person and yet you're aging? [/INST] Yeah, I have this tension that I'm still a kid, but that helps in my career scientists need to have a wonder about the world and you don't want to grow up to 12 year olds and and even younger, I would say 67 year olds, I've still got that boy in me and I can look at things. It's a gift. I think that I can see things for the first time if I choose to and then explain them As I would to a 66 year old because I am that mentally. But on the other hand, I'm getting older, I run a lab of 20 people at Harvard, I've got a book, I've got science to do companies to run. And so I have to, on most days just pretend to be a grown up and be mature, but I definitely don't feel that way. </s><s>[INST] There's uh, there's something I really appreciate it in the opening of your book. You talk about your grandmother and on this kind of theme on this kind of topic. Uh, she first of all had a big influence on you. My grandma mother had a big influence on me. And you also mentioned this poem by the author of Winnie the pooh alan alexander milne maybe I can read it real quick because I on the topic of being Children when I was one, I had just begun when I was two, I was nearly new when I was three, I was hardly me when I was four, I was not much more when I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six, I am as clever as clever. So I think I'll be six now forever and ever. Um, so This idea of being six and staying six forever, being youthful, being curious, being childlike this and other things what influences your grandmother had and you're thinking about life about death, about love. [/INST] Yeah, I was getting misty eyed as you read that because that problem was read to me very often, if not every day by my grandmother who partially raised me. Uh and she was as much a bohemian as an artist, philosopher. And she's one of those people that wouldn't talk about the little things she said, I hate small talk, don't talk to me about politics or the weather. You talk to me about human beings and culture. So I was raised on that and this poem was one that she read to me often because she knew that the mind of a child is precious, it's honest, it's pure. And she grew up during the Second World War and in Hungary and Budapest witnessed the worst of humanity. She was trying to save a whole group of jewish friends in her apartment, saw what happened after the World War, which was there was the Russians were in control and locals weren't necessarily treated well if they were rebellious, which she was. And then there was the revolution in 56, which she was part of and had to escape the country. So she saw what can happen when humans do their worst. And her words to me expressed in part through that poem was David always stay young and innocent and have wonder about the world and then do your best to make humanity the best it can be. And that's who I am. That's what I live for. That's what I get up in the morning to do is to leave the world a better place and showed whoever's watching us whether it's aliens or some future human historian, That we can do better than we did in the 20th century. </s>

<s>[INST] so I speak Russian fluently and that's certainly a language that leads you down. Certain thoughts are, well, yeah, I mean, there's a, there's a history of the two world wars, of the, of millions of people starving to death and years of death throughout his history of suffering of injustice. Like this promise sold to the people and then the carpet or whatever swept from under them. It's like broken promises and all of that pain and melancholy is in the language, the sad songs, the the sad, hopeful songs, the over romanticized. Like I love you, I hate you the sort of the swings between the, all the various uh, spectrums of emotion. So that's all within the language, the way it's twisted poach. There's a there's a there's a strong culture of rhyming poetry. So like the bard's like the sink, there's a musicality to the language to [/INST] dostoevsky write in Russian. So like </s><s>[INST] dostoevsky, Tolstoy all the uh all the [/INST] ones that I know about which are translated, curious other translations. </s><s>[INST] So Dostoyevsky did not use the musicality of the language too much. So they actually translates pretty well because it's so philosophically dense that the story does a lot of the work, but there's a bunch of things that are untranslatable. Certainly the poetry is not translatable. I actually have a few conversations coming up offline and on this podcast with people who've translated dostoyevsky and that's for people who worked, who work in this field. I know how difficult that is. Sometimes you can spend, you know, months thinking about a single sentence in the context, like because there's just a magic captured by that sentence. And how do you translate just in the right way? Because those words can be uh, can be really powerful. There's a famous line, Beauty will save the world from dostoevsky. You know, there's so many ways to translate that and you're right. The language gives you the tools would wish to tell the story. But it also leads your mind down certain trajectories and paths to wear over time as you think in that language you become a different human being. Yeah. [/INST] Yes, that's a fascinating reality, I think. I know people have explored that, but it's yes, we rediscovered </s><s>[INST] what we don't. We live in our own like little pockets. Like this is the sad thing is I feel like unfortunately given time and given getting older, I'll never know uh, china the chinese world because I don't truly know the language saying with japanese, I don't truly know japanese and Portuguese in brazil, that whole south american continent. Like yeah, I'll go to brazil and Argentina, but will I truly understand the people if I don't understand the language. And it's sad because um, I wonder how much how many geniuses were missing because uh because so much of the scientific world, so much of the technical world is in english and so much of it might be lost because they're just, we don't have the common language. [/INST] I completely agree. I'm very much in that vein of there's a lot of genius out there that we miss and it's sort of sort of fortunate when it when it bubbles up into something that that we can understand our process. There's a lot we miss. So, so I tend to lean towards really loving democratization or things that empower people or, you know, a very resistant to sort of authoritarian structures fundamentally for that reason. It well, several reasons, but it just hurts us. We're worse off. </s><s>[INST] So speaking of languages that empower you, so python was the first language for me that uh that I could I really enjoyed thinking in as you said [/INST] something. You shared my experience do. </s><s>[INST] So when did you first do you remember when you first kind of connected with python? Maybe even fell in love with python? [/INST] It's a good question. It was a process. It took about a year. I first encountered Python in 1997. I was a graduate student studying biomedical engineering at the Mayo clinic. And I had previously had been involved in um taking information from satellites. It was electric Nigerian student used to taking information and trying to get something out of it, doing some data processing information out of it. And I've done that in matt lab, I've done that in Pearl. I've done that in, you know, scripting of on a VMS, there's actually a Vax VMS system and they had their own little scripting tools around four chan done a lot of that. And then as a graduate student I was looking for something and encounter python. And because python had an array had two things that made me not filtered away because I was filtering a bunch of stuff is Yorick, I looked at Yorick, I looked at a few other languages, they're out there at the time in 1997. But it had a raise. There's a library called numeric that had just been written in 95. Like not very not not too much earlier by an M. I. T. Le jim Hougan in uh, you know, when I went back and read the, the mailing list to see the history of how it grew. And there was a very interesting fascinating to do that actually, to see how this emergent cooperation. Unstructured cooperation happens in the open source world that led to a lot of this collective program, which is something maybe we won't get into a little later. But what that looks like, </s><s>[INST] what gap did numeric fill [/INST] fill the gap of having an array object instead. There was no, there was no, there was a one dimensional bite concept. But there is no uh, n dimensional 234 dimensional tensor, they call it. Now, I'm still in the category, that sensor is another thing and it's just an India right? We should call it. But I kind of lost that battle and </s>

<s>[INST] out of fear, fear, [/INST] fear and like you know, I was kind of nervous because I, you know, there's a whole week and it was anticipating coming here and I watched the mark normand one, I watched the Yannis one to see you know how totally and last night my girlfriend just looked at me just goes, just show up. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, Carla knows who I am. [/INST] Do you think that first of all, let me ask you something? Yes. You think I have the day, you know how busy I'm to drive all the way over here to west Hollywood to do your thing, Why would I do that? Because we are well aware of who you are and we like you thank you God. And we want you on ours. I would love, I would love </s><s>[INST] that as a, I mean that's, that's, that's the reason I'm doing this is just to get in your pocket awesome. Uh yeah, it's funny because I just mentioned to you offline, I got a chance to talk to Oliver Stone and he asked me this thing, which is, you know, how many um listeners does this thing get all that kind of stuff And I don't even pay attention to that. So it's like, I just don't [/INST] a little bit. So you do don't, I </s><s>[INST] wrote extensions in my browser as well. I don't see the views, the number of views don't you [/INST] know that like some of your Youtube videos on interviews and stuff have over a million that </s><s>[INST] I know. I know, I know like loosely that like it bleeds through, but it's not part of my conscious like um thing I think about, I'm very, I've just seen it destroyed people's minds where they're no longer thinking creatively. They're not, they don't feel good if something they do doesn't get as much as attention as they thought it should. It just can destroy you even though it's good. It could be great stuff. You create that nobody everybody ignores. But it was still great. It is, it is still great and uh sort of letting that negatively affect your mind is, I don't know, I've seen it destroy people. So I'm very nervous about that. [/INST] It's like that old saying never live in the results. It's like if I, if I podcast to make, I'd like initially, honestly, when I did tiger belly, we made no money for the first couple of years, like, like not not enough to put a dent. I couldn't buy anything like, you know, nice or anything. Um, it was just side money, you know, I mean, I could buy some shoes once a month or whatever, right? And like I said before, um, I was, my career wasn't the shooter, right? So tiger belly wasn't like, this is gonna be the thing, you know, I mean, it was just something to do with my girlfriend creatively, you know, and it just so happens that it did do all these things for me, right? Um podcasting. But um, yeah, I never and still today, I don't do it for any of those things, you know, I do it because um, it's fun. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, [/INST] yeah, it is right. Yeah. </s><s>[INST] Let me ask you, since you say why you love Kalala, why do you love slash hey George George kimball, your producer, What's your favorite thing about him? Let's say that positive thing positive [/INST] this question because I, because, you know, it's like, you know, I don't wanna give them compliments, but you know, I'll try, </s><s>[INST] I'll [/INST] try. Um, </s><s>[INST] have you actually, I don't think you've publicly ever said anything. I don't [/INST] think I have either, so I'm gonna get I'm gonna give it a go, I'm gonna give it a go. You know, at the end of the day, when it comes to money, when it comes to responsibility, obviously this is a business now for you and me. It is, you know, it's it's a side business, but it's a business and um you want to be able to trust the people that are running it. And I have 100 trust in everything that he does in terms of financial things, in terms of technical things, in terms of all of it, you know, I mean merchandise and I have 100% belief in him, I and that's rare to find someone like that. Um Also at the end of the day, I know his heart and he really is a great guy. He, there's nothing about him, like for instance, you know, he was over the other day and I go, you know, I bought this keith wooden thing that some native man made and I don't know how to put it on the wall. So I just, you know, I go, hey can you, I figured this out and he goes, yeah, I got it, you know, I mean like he's just that guy, you know um he's also, but there is a part of me and this is probably wrong, but there's a part of me that feels like I kind of made him? </s><s>[INST] Yeah, he would be nothing without. [/INST] No, that's what I'm saying, I </s><s>[INST] heard it, that's [/INST] what I meant. </s><s>[INST] Okay, but that's not what you [/INST] said. It's probably wrong because he did all the things that he has in his life, he did on his own right, but still, for some reason </s><s>[INST] he'd be nothing without [/INST] you. But that's what I mean. So basically like, because when I met him, I was a part of this um Youtube studio called Maker Studios and he was just a producer there and that's how I met him and when he left Maker, he came to us and he wasn't a podcast producer and now he has this big company, he produces a bunch of podcasts, you know, and he has a bunch of employees and he has a nice business, you know, and I feel like I had a lot to do with it. </s>

<s>[INST] If you're interested, you can go to lexfreeman.com slash hiring for the information on the jobs I'm hiring, or hopefully you'll find the posts I've made on Indeed. Indeed has a special offer only available for a limited time. [/INST] Check it out at indeed.com slash Lex. </s><s>[INST] Wave if you're made. This show is also brought to you by Masterclass. $180 a year gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I've been reading off names. Of the classes I love on here. And one by one, I get to have a podcast conversation with them and the Masterclass is just an inspiration to me. In preparing for those conversations, I listened to the Masterclass, I watched the Masterclass and it just blows me away. So recently I talked to Daniel Negrano and just the quality of his Masterclass, I can't recommend it enough. It's just incredible. I think for beginners, for intermediate people, even experts, that Masterclass condenses the modern poker theory better than anything I've seen anywhere on the internet. And if poker's not your thing, there's a million other things that are likely your thing where the best people in the world can teach you about it. Like Martin Scorsese, that's a good one. And I hope to talk to him with the podcast one day. I'm gonna will it into existence. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by 8Sleep and it's new pod three mattress. Sleep, like diet and exercise. I think of like a musical instrument in a band. So sleep is like the guitarist. Diet maybe is the lead singer and the exercise is like the drummer. And all of those things you have to play with to create a beautiful hit song. I don't think there's one formula for how much sleep you should get when you should get to sleep. But just like with diet and exercise, you have to listen to her body. You have to understand your own body. And you have to take that journey, that scientific end of one study of your own body very, very seriously. And to me you should have the right companion for that exploration on the diet, on the exercise, and on the sleep. That's why I'm going with 8 Sleep Pod Pro Cover. It cools the bed, it warms the bed, obviously for me, or not obviously, but for me, I just use the cooling. It's a cool bed surface with a warm blanket that's heaven. Check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. [/INST] And now, dear friends, here's John Donner. </s><s>[INST] And the ADCC is the premier submission grappling tournament in the world we just had it a couple of weeks ago. We saw many demonstrations of greatness from athletes you coached. But a year ago, the team and you were at a very low point. Take me through that journey. [/INST] What was the lowest point? We had a very, very tight team for many years, which began in New York City. During the peak of COVID, training in New York became very difficult to sustain. So most of the team despised the city of New York. I was the only person in the group that liked living in New York. I think part of the problem was that I was the only one who actually lived in Manhattan. The others had to commute to New York. And there's a world of difference between living in New York and commuting to New York. So most of them had a very negative view of New York City that was compounded by COVID when even the basic act of training became very, very difficult. And so everyone decided they want to leave. So there was a prospect of a complete breakup between myself and the team, or I would have to leave New York. It was a difficult decision for me to make because I had lived in New York for 30 years. I had built my life there and had most of my friends and associates that I know here in America were New Yorkers. So I thought these guys have been incredibly loyal to me as students, so I should also be loyal to them, of course. So I decided that if they wanted to leave, I would go with them. We decided to go to Puerto Rico because there was a private gym where we could train through the COVID period. I personally wanted to go to Texas. I thought that Texas was a better place for the team to go. But many of the students, including senior students like Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones, had been to Puerto Rico and stayed with one of the head officials of ADCC, Mo Jasm. So they loved their experience in Puerto Rico, and almost everyone wanted to go down there. So I tried to explain to them there's a little difference between going to a place for vacation versus living there, but that didn't have any effect. So the decision was made, a majority of the decision was made to go to Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, the conditions in which the team lived changed significantly. When you're in New York, New York is such a big city that if there's any tension between team members and inevitably there will be in a competitive sport where everyone's fighting each other, you can kind of bury them in the size of the city, because there's so many distractions in New York. You come in, you do your workout, you go outside, and it's New York City. In Puerto Rico, we lived in a very small local town, Dorado. And most of the athletes were living with each other. And so unlike New York, where there was always a break, you trained together, but when training was over, you went about your life in New York and New Jersey, with everyone living in very close proximity to each other. Any tensions got magnified, because there was no relief from them. You didn't get to get away from people. If you had a problem with someone on the mat, well, now you have to live with them for the rest of the day and the night. And this goes on for long periods of time. So I believe it had the effect of magnifying whatever tensions there were. In particular, there was a family tension between two brothers, which magnified over time. And as so often as the case, you get two brothers growing up, one older, one younger, and the younger one wants to grow and feel somewhat like a young tree underneath a big tree. And sometimes people just need their space. </s><s>[INST] So there was some unhappiness. As a younger brother, I can understand. Yeah, yeah. As a little tree that had to grow up under a bigger tree. Yeah, so. Fuck the big tree. [/INST] There's a lot of aggression after work out, I'm sorry. There's a lot of aggression after work out, I'm sorry. Unresolved families just coming out here like this. I'm just kidding, I love you. He doesn't, he's lying. So as time went by, these tensions started increasing. They came to a point where it was difficult for them even to be in the training room together. At that point, you're starting to, once training takes a hit, then you've got to start to address these. The attempts at reconciliation fell through, and a decision was made to move to Texas. I wanted everyone to move as a team. </s><s>[INST] What I wanted to do was keep the team together. [/INST] I'm just kidding, I love you. As long as the period leading up to ADCC, so that everyone could train together. So I said, OK, there's problems, but let's just tough it out one year. We move to Texas, let's just go there and keep unity. If some people don't want to train with other people, that's fine. But I believe that the team would be weakened by breaking apart. I believe that they had an excellent rapport as training partners. Their technical level was increasing dramatically. Many of the younger athletes are really starting to come into their own and really develop well. And so my take on it was, OK, if there's problems, so be it. But let's all just stay together until ADCC 2022 was a unified team. Go out, prepare yourselves as best you can. And then after that, we can make a decision as to whether we break up or not. But that was rejected, and the team split. And they moved to Austin. We'd made prior arrangements to go to a local gym. And they took that gym, and we were left with no gym, and more or less homeless in Austin. A year out from ADCC. Yes, this is one year out. So roughly 3 quarters of the competitive athletes left in one week. So at that point, that was probably the lowest point. Because at that point, not only did we not have a place to train, we had very few training partners for the few that had remained. And the main athlete in the team, Gordon Ryan, was going through a particularly bad spell with his unresolved stomach issues. And there was doubt as to whether or not he could compete at all, and was actively thinking about retiring from the sport. </s><s>[INST] So maybe not competing with he'd ever again, [/INST] but again, potentially. Yeah, yeah. So that was a time when it was like, man, the whole program seems to be dead in the water at this point. Most of the competitive athletes were gone. There were very few training partners for the few that remained. And the main athlete around whom the group had initially </s><s>[INST] bonded was seemingly out of action, possibly permanently. Where was your mind? Where were you mentally? [/INST] My thinking is everything bad passes in time. I've had a lot of bad points in my life. So my life experiences, whenever things seem dark, have patience. Time will ultimately cure most ills. Not all of them, but most of them. And I'm confident that if you give me a new crop of students, I can produce magic. </s><s>[INST] But it's going to take time. So that confidence was, in part, a source of strength? [/INST] Yes, it's just like I wasn't confident that ADCC 2022 would go well, because we only had one year without a gym and with a team that was completely broken up to even attempt to get into ADCC. So things looked a little grim, but I was confident, given enough time, I'd get in a new group of students and work. As it turns out, one of the demonstration partners that I used during filming for instructional videos who lives in Boston, John Carlo Badoni, was interested in the idea of coming down and training. But he'd always felt like it would be difficult, because there were people in his way class who were already there, and he felt it would be awkward. But now that they had left, that opened up an area for him. So he was the first one to come down. He moved from Boston to Austin, Texas. I began teaching at a local school. It was rather like going back into my earliest days in Judaism. I went from teaching at the Big Henzo Gracie Academy to a tiny school in Puerto Rico, and now an even smaller school in Austin, Texas. And locals would come in and train, and I would watch every day teaching there twice a day, seven days a week. And I would see people come in and train, and I would say this guy has some potential or this guy has some potential. And I would recruit people and bring them to another gym where they would train with the professionals. And if they proved adept and hardworking and someone who can work well in a team, they would stay and build their skills. As time went by, more and more such people started coming in. And we had some remarkable people like a young South African purple belt, Luke Griffith came in. He had lost in the European trials for ADCC. And he was down on his luck. He came into Austin. He did a show against a local purple belt and lost again. So he was feeling bad about his performance in his future. He came in and I thought he was a lovely kid who worked hard and trained well. So he became one of the main training partners. He was similar size to Gordon. So I encouraged him to train with Gordon whenever he could. And more and more people started coming in to train under that kind of basis. One day, I got a text from Gordon who was filming an instructional video in Boston. He said, Hey, you know, Nicholas Merigale was training at this. He was shooting video at the same time as me and we just did some grappling. He's a really nice guy and he's literally never trained without a gee before. For those of you who don't know, Nicholas Merigale is one of the outstanding gee judates who are competitors of his generation. Has an amazing game and is a superstar with the gee side of the sport, but had never even trained without a gee once in his life. So his first ever no gee training session is with Gordon Ryan, the best no gee competitor of all time. And I remember Gordon texting me saying, Hey, he's really talented. He's a nice guy and he wants to come down to Texas and train. So yeah, sounds great. So over time, just more and more people started coming in. And I told everyone like, you guys are at a severe disadvantage. Like you've got very little time to get ready for ADCC. Luke wasn't even in ADCC. He had to win trials. Same for Dan Manisoyo. He had failed at trials and needed to get a win to even get into ADCC. So around this time, a doctor suggested by Mo Jasm, who himself had stomach issues earlier in his life, began working with Gordon Ryan. And Mo is the organizer of ADCC. He's the head organizer. He was able to get Gordon Ryan not cured, but significantly better than he was before. And to a level where Gordon could train up to five to six days a week. And it was a big improvement on what was going on during the end of the time in Puerto Rico. So things started moving. We had a core group of athletes training at a local gym, which was very, very generously offered to us by the head manager of Roca Sunglasses, a company here in Austin, Texas. They have a private corporate gym, which we were able to train in. And these talented youngsters from around the globe essentially came together and I said, you guys are going to have to train harder than you've ever trained in your lives because you've got less time to get ready for this than anyone. And you're going to be going up against people potentially who know exactly what I teach, because I've been teaching them a lot longer than I've been teaching you, in addition to the other best people in the world. So it was an incredible challenge for them. And I must say all of them gave literally everything they had, everything I asked for, they gave twice as much. And we had a crazy training schedule, as many as three classes per day. I know that sounds easy, you know, three classes a day, but try doing it sometime. These classes are not your </s><s>[INST] average classes. These are preparation for ADCC. They're both mentally and physically. [/INST] Very, very hard. Very, very hard. And we had many people come in and try to train alongside us and they fell off by the side of the road within days, forget about weeks, months, or a full year of this. I gave a very abbreviated set of skills for the athletes. I chopped everything down to what I believe were the most essential skills. Anything that wasn't essential to ADCC preparation was just pushed aside. And they had to focus almost entirely on ADCC, with one exception, I'll come to that soon, over the period of their training here in Austin. So it was compacted by time and also by the breadth of skill that I taught. Everything was just purely for ADCC preparation. In a very short period of time, Dan Manasoyo and Luke Griffith and Oliver Taza all won European trials and got into ADCC. Nicholas Miragali was already a superstar, so he was invited, but he had to show himself. So we enrolled him in local shows here in Austin, where he had his first three NOGI matches. And with each match, you could see progress being made. And so that convinced the ADCC people, okay, he's good enough to compete. He ended up winning decisively a match against one of the greatest American grapplers of all time, Rafael Lovato. And this was a clear sign that his </s><s>[INST] skill level in NOGI was sufficient to justify an invite. And by the way, Lovato had an incredible set of matches in this ADCC. Yes, that was actually very impressive. And retired. Which is really impressive and heartbreaking as well. But if you go out, that's a good way to go out. [/INST] Indeed. So there was this long and tough preparation and it was compounded by the fact that as Gordon felt better, he felt a need to build up his own competitive record prior to ADCC because he'd been inactive for so long with his stomach issue. So he proposed one of the most ambitious fight camps that I've ever heard of in grappling, which was he would take on the current WNO champion, Pedro Mourinho. Whose number one is WNO. And also I believe the current NOGI world champion in IBGJF as a tune up match, as a warm up match. Then he would fight his old nemesis, Felipe Pena, the only man who submitted Gordon at Black Belt and had defeated Gordon in an ADCC match in 2017. And then ADCC itself. So there was going to be three big high profile matches back to back and very different rule sets. So WNO was a 15 minute match. The fight with Felipe Pena was no time limit, which is a very different format to compete in and then ADCC. So we had to drag out a 14 week camp covering three matches with three different rule sets, which went in diametrically opposite directions. And the entire team had to go through all of this over this 14 week period. In addition to the previous year that they had been working hard, there was a further complication in the midst of all this. Nicholas Miragali had to go to the GEE world championships and we had to throw an extra morning class for that to help him get ready. Nicholas went on to win the open weight gold medal in the GEE competition. And then the next day had to come back to Texas and begin his ADCC preparation. It was a crazy, crazy time. But they all came through it so well. I'm immensely proud of what they did. And shockingly in the space of less than 12 months, we went from rock bottom to having a more successful ADCC team performance than we did the previous ADCC. It was in fact the most successful team performance of the event. And it's testimony to how hard those young men worked in the course of less </s><s>[INST] than a year to prepare themselves. If it can just linger on the low point, is it heartbreaking to you that the so-called Donna Hart death squad split, or the team as it was originally called split, you know, we live a short life on this earth. And you put so much of your love and [/INST] work into this team and everybody put in the work. Does it break your heart? It was a sad time. Yeah, it was. I'm not a particularly emotional person, but it was an emotional time for everyone. I had an element of tragedy insofar as not only was it a team breakup, it was also a family breakup, which is much more serious. I do believe that in time, even the most intense family breakups can be reconciled. And I also believe that once dialogue begins, people will remember just how easy it was for us to get along and how tight we were for many, many years. It's so easy to let a minute of anger destroy 10 years of friendship. But there's also the weight of those 10 years. When I ran into the old squad members at ADCC, we got along like a house on fire. It's like we never had a problem. A house on fire is a good thing. Yes, yes. Sorry, that's a New Zealand expression. Yeah, they definitely could have gone the other way, right? </s><s>[INST] So a house on fire is a good thing. So only a New Zealander would say that it's a good thing. [/INST] Yeah. So I still believe in time, things will be fine. But there was an element where youngsters need to grow. And sometimes, think about it this way, from the athlete's perspective, there's definitely a generational problem. I'm much older than my students. And the years and the viewpoint that I have is a reflection of the time in which I grew up from a completely different generation with a completely different worldview. It's got to be hard from the athlete's perspective when you're training seven days a week and you're getting very, very good. You're beating everyone that's getting put in front of you. You're losing very, very rarely and it's always a tough, competitive match when you do. Everyone around you is calling you a superstar and you look phenomenal. You check social media. Everyone's saying you're a God on the mat and then you come into the gym and there's some old guy telling you, you're not good enough. And everyday, it's like, what does this guy want from me? How hard do I have to work? Like you're not good enough. You want you to be the best in the world. I don't want you to be good. I want you to be great. All of your friends are telling you are there, man, you're incredible, you submit me so easily do this, and then this old guy is just like, no, you got to get better. You got to work more. You're not working hard enough. At some point, you're going to be like, you know what? Fuck this old guy. It's tough. I get why they left me. When I was 20 years old, I didn't get along with authority figures at all. To have someone telling you, you've always got to work that little bit harder. No, your skill set's not complete. You still need this, this, and this. When you're already doing very, very well, and far better than a tiny, tiny percentage of people, and then you've got this guy constantly telling you, no, more has to be done. You're not there yet. Of course, I understand. Let me just enjoy this more. It's always a choice in life. You can be the best you possibly can, or you can go a route where you just get to enjoy life a little more. You do other things. There's more to life than just the inside of a gym and learning how to do a better heel hook or a better double leg. Of course, years go by, you want to try the things. You have to make this choice in life between extreme excellence versus being incredibly good, </s><s>[INST] but maybe just enjoying my life a little more. It's so interesting that incredibly good is a hard thing to deal with. I saw when Kayla Harrison won her first gold medal at the Olympics, to go back to the gym and to trust, again, maybe the old man. You're being, you're questioning yourself, but to trust the old man. Jimmy Page, you're a senior in that case, to say, okay, we're going to go back to this grind. There's still a path to improvement. There's still a lot to grow and still have the humility, even though you've just demonstrated greatness. Really good is just a stepping stone to greatness. That's really tough for athletes. Winning is actually very difficult. Gold medals are very difficult. Plus, there's the personal stuff of depression that comes with that, which is you give so much of yourself to trying to win that. And once you do, there's a lot of personal stuff you have to deal with, which is like, what do I want from life? To understand what is exactly, what am I chasing? Is it just winning, or is it some bigger picture of excellence that's beyond just winning? So that's all that mixed up together. And then when you have to be as a team really close together, there's the personal [/INST] relationships, all of that gets exacerbated. Do you think the team ever gets back together? I think there's definitely a chance of that. Right now, I think they have an excellent team themselves, and they're doing very well. They had an excellent performance at ADCC, so there's not a need for them to come to us. It's not like they lack anything. They still remember everything I taught them. They still coach and teach with the same methodology that I taught them. So I don't think they have any need to do so. If they did, it would be because they wanted to. I still think many of the same personality conflicts that originated the conflict </s><s>[INST] would re-emerge currently if they started training together. By the way, to pile on the compliments, they have really nice merch, too. The t-shirts are just excellent. What have you learned from that process about how to have a team with personal conflicts? Do you have to deal with these giant egos as well? Yeah. Because the ego is in part a superpower, too, so you don't want it. [/INST] Yeah, you don't want to suppress egos. I always laugh when people say, leave your ego at the door. What do you think drives competition? If you want to be good at anything in life, you've got to have an ego. No, I don't believe it's good or even a healthy thing to suppress egos. I'm a realist, and I understand that this is a sport where they make one gold medal per weight division. As guys get better, they're going to be looking at their training partners and thinking like, I'm going to have to fight this guy one day, and they're training next to each other. Of course, there's going to be tension. There's always going to be disagreements about what's the right way to act around certain people, certain issues, and people are going to come into conflict. Everyone's being programmed to be an alpha competitor. You get a room full of people like that. There's going to be conflict. Now, your question was, well, is there a way to resolve this? Yeah, there was. For eight to nine years, I was very successful with this, but there's also a tipping point where things can flare out of control, and there will be periodic breakups. You're not the first students I had that left. I've been coaching a lot longer than I've been coaching the squad. I'm sure in the future, there'll be other students who leave me. </s><s>[INST] That's just the nature of the beast. It's sad when it happens, but life goes on. Like Bukowski said, love is a fog that fades with the first daylight of reality or something like that, so even love is temporary. Let me ask you about leading up the preparation for the athletes. This is such, given the darkness from a year ago from which you had to find glimmers of light and try to get greatness out of athletes, what was the mental preparation like for Gordon, for Nicholas, for Giancarlo, for the other athletes? What was the mental side of things like? Is there some [/INST] key insights you can give to their mental preparation? I really, really think that people, when they talk about mental preparation, need to take a step back and realize that almost every element of what people describe as mental preparation has physical underpinnings. Literally, 95% of what I teach the athletes is physical skills. It's my belief that every mental aspect of competition, the most important of which will be confidence on stage, is a direct result of the accumulation of physical skills. People tend to see things like confidence as a mental state. It is, but it comes out of the performance of physical skills. All my life, I've seen sports psychologists try to create confidence in athletes through non-physical means, and it always ends up being the same kind of cheesy motivational speeches, highlight video reels where they try to pump artificial confidence into people. I've never been impressed by this, nor have I seen it have any kind of positive effect on athlete performance. What I do see build confidence is the sense that athletes are developing skills and using them successfully under conditions that closely mirror the event they're preparing for. Once they get this down, that's where true confidence comes from. Confidence doesn't come from words. It comes from accumulated skills, which experience shows you have been responsible for successful performances in the past. If you accumulate enough of these, your confidence rises. When it comes to the mental aspects of competition, I created a program where everyone was given a set of skills that they had to work on. Skills directly related to what I believe are the most important elements of success in ADCC competition. In the gym, they accumulated those skills over time. I do it in two different ways, depending on whether these are offensive skills or defensive skills. For the accumulation of offensive skills, I like to have my athletes work with athletes who are lesser than themselves in ability so that they start to gain confidence over time. Just as you would never send a beginner into a weightlifting gym and put 500 pounds on the bar and tell him to lift it, rather you would start with a wooden bar, then the metal bar, and then gradually accumulate weight over time so you get a progression in weightlifting. In Juditsu, you don't take a brand new move and say, okay, do it on Gordon Ryan. Never going to succeed. I have the athletes practice their offense on blue belts and work their way up. Defense, on the other hand, you've got to start them in the deep end of the pool so that they start to see what are their vulnerabilities. I put them with highly competitive athletes at the start so they can see, okay, there is a problem here. Then even in defense, they start off with lower belts and build up their confidence over time. So just as a weightlifter builds up his ability to lift weight over time, so too a Juditsu player does it by gradually increasing resistance. Now in Juditsu, resistance is not done by weight, it's done by skill level. Over time, they started to accumulate this experience. In time, we were able to switch off and have them go against very, very tough athletes, each other. Luke Griffith will do a full power match with Gordon Ryan. Now they're fully aware that there's no one better in the world than Gordon Ryan. So if you have a competitive match with Gordon Ryan, that's a very, very healthy sign. So they went from the start where they were being programmed, going against relatively mild resistance, and building up over time, and then building up to the greatest resistance possible in the sport of Juditsu. Their goal is not to win, obviously, but their goal is to provide a competitive match. Now Gordon doesn't have any confidence issues, so for him it's just good, hard competitive training against people that are in some ways better than those you'll be facing in competition. For the other guys, it's getting a clear assessment of what their current skill level is by going against the best there is. Then we add to this a competitive schedule where the athletes have to go out into competition so they get used to the idea of performing in front of strangers on stage, getting used to the strange elements of going out, being observed and judged by people you don't know in a performance atmosphere. And so they were all given matches in WNO competition leading up to the event, ADCC trials, local grappling events here in Austin, and given a competitive schedule to fight and prepare them for ADCC. Obviously, as ADCC got closer and closer, this was pulled back because of the danger of injury. So within about three weeks out was the last time we had a competition. And by this method, confidence starts to grow. And so the mental preparation came out of those physical underpinnings, the idea of progressive resistance increasing over time for both offense and defense, building up to a peak where they're going against the best athlete in the world so they can get an accurate assessment of where they stand. Once you're given a competitive match to the best guy in the world, you know damn well </s><s>[INST] that when you go out in ADCC, you're ready to fight anybody. And defense is broadly defined. So defense in symmetrical positions, like positions, like guard, and then defense also [/INST] includes escaping from horrible positions. Yes, we're big believers in the idea of depth of defense, the idea that you should be able to mount defense all the way through from early stages based mostly around anticipation of identifying danger visually before it emerges and all the way through to the deepest levels of defense where you are 100% defensive in terrible positions. And you have to claw your way out over time and get back to a neutral position or even better back to an </s><s>[INST] attacking position. You have an Instagram post on this topic. When you get ready to step out for the biggest moment of your life, ask yourself one question. How different is this really from what I do every day? If the answer is not very different at all, then step forward with confidence and do what you do every day in the same manner and ignore the hype and distraction. You're ready for action. By the way, for people who don't know, you need to follow Jon Donner on Instagram because you have nuggets or large buckets of nuggets of wisdom often, which is quite profound, even bigger than jiu-jitsu. But anyway, so there's some aspect where you want to mimic the conditions of your daily training in intensity and in what force of physical [/INST] to that of the actual matches. You asked the question about mental training. For me, the central focus of whatever small amount of mental training I give my students comes down to a very, very simple concept to understand. This is the idea of identifying competition in terms of its normalcy. Most people see training and competition as two different things. Training is normal activity that you do every day and competition is the exception. It's different. You're going out, there's people watching you, there's a big crowd, they're making lots of noise. In fact, the promoters of shows go out of their way to reinforce this. Look at, for example, ADCC when Gordon Ryan went to fight Andre Galvin. Do they just come out on the mat and fight each other? Absolutely not. There's fire. There's music. There's pageantry. </s><s>[INST] There's fireballs. They're literally shooting fireballs. Yeah. Some dude in a tie sitting with Joe Rogan. I heard about that guy. Meathead, podcaster, comedian, whatever. Which one was [/INST] the Meathead? Well played, John. Well played. But you see what they're trying to do. They're trying to create theater and pageantry, when in fact, it's just a grappling match. It's just two athletes, a referee and a ruleset. That's the reality. Now, what they try to sell you is something which is not reality, which is this is somehow bigger and different, and they reinforce this with pageantry and theater so that it becomes not just a grappling match, but a grappling performance, the same way you have a theater performance. My goal as a coach is to dispel that and say, when you go out there, there's only one reality. You, him, and the referee reinforcing a ruleset. That's it. Everything else you see, the smoke, the fire, the music, is an illusion, and it's put there intentionally to make you feel a certain kind of way. Your whole goal is to see this as an illusion and walk out and see only the reality, which is that this is the same damn thing you do every day in the gym. The only difference is you're going with </s><s>[INST] a guy you've never grabbed before. The actual act of removing the illusion or realizing that it is an illusion, how do you practice that? When you step on the mat- [/INST] Once you're aware of it, I always have them to... It's like when you see a magician and you have his tricks explained to you, you never see the magic again. The first time you see a good card trick from a good magician is, oh my God. Then when they explain it to you, I did this, this, and that step one, step two, then you look at it like, it's not that special. When you explain to people this idea of the pageantry is an illusion, then just as when you watch the magician and you learn the trick, all the magic flies out the window, so too with the nervous response. </s><s>[INST] So that's for the pageantry, but what about maybe the physical intensity of competition? [/INST] Isn't there an extra- No, it's the same in every competition. It's not like they're twice as strong in ADCC as Aaron and the IBJF World Championships. The physical intensity is always pretty much the same. They experience it every day in the gym. If you go out and you grapple, Gordon Ryan, it's not like the next guy you grapple is going to be twice as strong as him or twice as fast. It's going to be a little stronger, a little faster, but not so much so that it completely changes your approach to the game. There's not that much difference between the human bodies out there on the stage. So if you've felt intensity before, you're not going </s><s>[INST] to be shocked by ADCC. But in terms of in training, do you have to try to match the [/INST] intensity of competition? No. That would be false. Every athlete in the gym would be injured. You can do it for short periods of time, but the training has to be carefully monitored in terms of intensity levels. Remember, we're training seven days a week, a minimum of twice a day. You've got to keep things under wraps. Every other workout, you can have one of the five rounds can be full power, but not seven days a week, three times a day. That's just going to break bodies. And the full power is just a reminder of- It's more about skill development. For us, it always comes back to skill development. But what about matching the feeling of the intensity of competition? Yeah. Periodically. Periodically can't be in a single time. Not really. It's not rare. Meaning out of three hours of hard sparring per day, 15 minutes might be 100% full power. That's more than enough to get psychologically ready for the intensity of conflict, but won't break your body over time. </s><s>[INST] Meaning like intensity of conflict, that's well put. There is competition. Doesn't it have that extra level of animosity? It's a little bit more conflict than it is. [/INST] It can. Sometimes there's personality differences. For example, like Gordon Ryan and Felipe Panner, they admire each other a lot. They respect each other's skills, but they certainly don't love each other. That's for sure. There can be certain match-up where there's more intensity. But then there's other match-ups where the two athletes come out and it's no more intense than a hard </s><s>[INST] sparring session. First of all, because I would love to look at a couple of matches with you. And before that, let me say a big thank you to Flow Grappling. First of all, helping the sport of grappling and jiu-jitsu in general by having organized footage and tournaments that show this sport in its best light to the world. And they do an incredible job with that. So if you're interested in supporting grappling as a sport, helping it grow, you should definitely support Flow Grappling. Go to their website, sign up. Also, Flow Wrestling. I'm a huge fan of wrestling. Maybe there'll be a Flow Judo at some point. Currently, I don't think they'll do any major Judo stuff. So anyway, I'm a big supporter of theirs. And I do have criticism that they know about, which is I hope they continue to improve on the aspect of making the footage discoverable and accessible, making it easy for you to do search through Google and on their website to find matches to get excited. Like if me and Joe Rogan are getting excited about a particular match, we want to be able to pull it up super quickly. We want to be able to pull up Gordon Ryan's matches super quickly from ADCC, make it super easy to show and share if we have to pay for it fine, but make it easy. And when you sign in order to sign up for Flow, it should be one click, click, not five clicks. It should be one click. It should be easy. I think it's inexpensive. If you care about grappling, it's definitely worth it. You should sign up. Anyway, my love goes out to Flow Grappling. And also my love goes out to Mo Jasm, as we said. He's the organizer of ADCC. The next one is in 2024. It should be 2024. Well, you should follow ADCC underscore official on Instagram and just send as much love towards Mo and ADCC in general. Like I said, the most prestigious, it's like where the best grapples in the world show up. And the magic happens. It's like some of the most historic matches in grappling in Jiu-Jitsu ever happened on that stage. Anyway, if I could talk about some of the interesting performances for the athletes you coached, you post on Instagram. Let's start with Gordon Ryan. Gordon Ryan, ADCC 2022. The greatest event in grappling history is over. New stars emerged, established stars shown bright again, but one man stood above all like a colossus. Gordon Ryan. You have a way with words, John Donner. I have seen many incredible feats of grappling, but I've never saw a performance like this. For many, Mr. Ryan is a polarizing figure in the sport. For many others, an inspiration to look up to. But after this weekend, there was no disagreement amongst haters and fans about his merit. He is the best ever. It was a long and difficult journey to ADCC 2022. Just one year ago, and so on as you told the story, it was a virtuoso performance of unmatched technique, preparation, and confidence. No one else can claim credit for this achievement. This was his and his alone. No one else today brings together technical depth, tactical insight, and confidence to use them on stage as he does. I had many students, but I only won Gordon Ryan. And I think Gordon responded, all this is true besides the credit that sits with you. Thank you. And a heart emoji. Very nice. So anyway, that's as a way of introduction to Gordon Ryan. Can you take me through his set of performances and maybe any matches that stand out? So he competed in his division, which is the plus 99 kilos, [/INST] and in the super fight against Andre Gova. That's correct. This was in fact the first time in history that this was allowed. For your listeners who don't follow grappling, we may have been very rude and just throwing a lot of stuff at you without explaining ourselves. First of all, ADCC is like the Olympics of grappling. It occurs every two years. You can either qualify for the event through winning matches in a qualification process, or you can be invited. The only people who get invited are either former winners or people in the sport who are just widely recognized superstars who bring some kind of brand value, who have proven in the past that they have what it takes to compete at that level. In this format, there are two kinds of matches. There are weight division matches in which you compete against people, roughly your own size and weight. There is an open weight where anyone of any size can enter. So you can have very small people fighting very large people. And there is a second category called a super fight where established champions who have won previous open weight tournaments fight each other in one-off battles, one athlete against another. So in most of the matches, you will fight repetitively over time towards a gold medal. But in one category, you fight one fight, the so-called super fight, which is usually the headline fight of the event. Traditionally, if you were in the super fight, you could not compete in the weight categories. It was seen as too risky because you might get injured during the weight category, or you might have to fight for very tough fights in a row and get exhausted so that you're ineffective during the main event of the show, the super fight. So throughout its history, ADCC has always resisted the idea of an athlete being allowed to do both weight category and a super fight. It's never happened before. Gordon Ryan requested to be able to do this because of his extraordinary stature in the sport. The ADCC organization granted his request. That was the first time ever. In addition, Gordon Ryan would be fighting to be the first person to win three gold medals in three different weight categories. This has never been done before. So it was a huge event on Gordon's part. Bear in mind also that prior to this event, he had fought just a month and a half earlier against a former ADCC open weight champion, Felipe Pena, who had defeated him in the past in a completely different rule set and then previously that against the current world champion. So there'd been a buildup to this. So he had been very active coming up to the event and then he went in to fight arguably the greatest ADCC champion of all time, Andre Galván, which would occur late on Sunday and would have to fight the toughest people, including the possibility of fighting his nemesis, Felipe Pena, in the weight division prior to getting to the super fight. So there was genuine concern here that he may have completely overstepped himself. The biggest concern I had as a coach, and I'm sure the organizers, Mo Jasim, must have had the same concern is that he would get injured or exhausted fighting in his weight division. There were two athletes in particular, Felipe Pena, who had given Gordon a very tough 40-minute match in a no-rules setting shortly before ADCC, and his former training partner, Nick Rodriguez, who were expected to give Gordon very, very tough matches if they came up against each other. So there was a genuine concern that Gordon may burn himself out before he even got to fight the guy who most people believe is the greatest ADCC champion of all time. So our concern was how do we manage this? So what we looked for is extremely efficient methods of reducing the time of the matches, making the matches as short as possible. Our favorite way to fight bigger, stronger athletes, and I think Gordon was the lightest athlete in his weight division. Everyone goes, oh, Gordon's so big and strong, it's actually quite light. I think he was outweighed </s><s>[INST] by almost all of his opponents. It's nice to see Gordon looking small relative to his opponents, which is absurd to say, but it is the open division, plus 99 kilos. It was plus 99 kilos. Right, that's what I mean, sorry, by open plus 99 kilos. [/INST] Everyone looks like the Incredible Hulk. Yeah, Hulk, yeah. So our big thing is when we fight bigger, stronger opponents, we always go in two directions. You either go for the legs or you go </s><s>[INST] for the back. And so we constructed strategies based around those two methods. So going for submissions, and we should also mention that ADCC rule set is for regular matches, I think it's five minutes and five minutes. Total is 10 minutes, and then for finals matches, it's 20 minutes, and half the time is spent with no points. [/INST] So these can be very, very long matches. I mean, to put this in a perspective, a modern judo match is five minutes. Yeah. A modern wrestling match, I believe, is six minutes in international freestyle. So these matches can be 40 minutes long. Now, that's a long, long grappling match. </s><s>[INST] Depending on how you compete in it, that can have a huge toll on you. [/INST] Absolutely. You can get to the finals and just be absolutely spent. So our whole thing is, okay, Gordon's got to not only get to the finals, then he's got to fight the toughest ADCC rapper of all time after that. So we were looking for quick and energy efficient matches, and that meant going to the back or going to the legs. And in the overwhelming majority of cases, that's exactly what he did. He was able to get some very, very quick matches, courtesy of leg lock finishes. And in the few cases where he didn't finish on legs, then he would simply take his opponents back. And that's a very low stress position to occupy. In one case, his opponent deliberately kept his back on the ground to prevent the backtake, and he just chose mounted position instead. And so he was able to go through his weight division with an extremely low energy expenditure, which set him up well to go into the finals. No injuries, very little energy expenditure. Now, it sounds easy to say that, okay, the strategy worked. But in order to get that strategy to work, you have to have one hell of a set of skills. And we can see those now. Would </s><s>[INST] you like to? Yeah, I would love to go through them. And I should also mention, for people just listening to this, I'll try to commentate on different things we'll look at. But the thing that was made clear is, maybe you can speak to that. Maybe to you, it looks like efficiency. But to me, it looked like Gordon was not even trying. There was a relaxed aspect to the whole thing. So maybe it had to do with saving energy, but he made it look very easy. And he made the path of submission look very easy. So here, the first match against an opponent [/INST] that, again, looks bigger than him. Okay, I'll just give an initial comment here. First, you'll see that Gordon elected to sit to the bottom position. The hardest work in submission grappling is when two athletes take the standing position and joust for takedowns. That's where most of the energy gets burned up. So working on the idea of energy efficiency, let's go out and we chose to sit into guard position and then start looking to access our opponent's back. Because if our opponent's head position of far side arm drag makes a lot of sense, Gordon's able to beat the arm and quickly get behind his opponent. Now the question is going to be getting into a scoring position. It's too early to score at this point, but we're just concerned at this stage of just </s><s>[INST] energy expenditure and make the other guy work harder than us. So Gordon did the arm drag to [/INST] the back and now is working on the hooks. The hooks are not particularly important here. He'll use it just to get stability on his opponent. But interestingly, his opponent here had an interesting strategy too, which was to occupy bottom turtle position and look to get to the critical five-minute demarcation point where points begin to get scored. His idea, I believe, I'm speculating here based on his actions, was to keep Gordon at bay in a defensive turtle position until a five-minute mark occurred, in which case he would shake Gordon off, walk away and force a </s><s>[INST] takedown battle. How many people are comfortable in that? And what do you think about the defense [/INST] of turtle position versus always trying to come back to guard? Turtle position is the second bottom position of you did. Many people only associate guard position with bottom position and you did that. That's naive. There's two. There's guard position and turtle position. Now as a general rule, guard position offers a much, much greater variety of attacking options than turtle position does. But that's not to say turtle position absolutely can be an effective bottom position. You can work effectively from there. </s><s>[INST] So there's some case to be made that to wait out five minutes, turtle might be. [/INST] I mean, I personally think it against Gordon Ryan, I mean, I admire the fellow's courage. It's not easy. But there was a logic to what he was doing. People think, oh, he just got his back taken so easily. But he did have a strategy. Now, did he pick the right person to use that strategy against? Probably not. </s><s>[INST] So Gordon is able to break the turtle down, get one hook in. At which point is this becoming an extremely controlling position with Gordon in the back? [/INST] At which point is there, are you happy with where it is? At this point, it just started to dawn on me at this point, this guy actually had a strategy, which was to maintain a prone position that he's in now, and then shake Gordon off after the five minute mark. So once that became obvious, and I was now excited to look at the clock and how close we are, if we can take it up to five minutes. Right now, this guy's only intention is to stop Gordon from strangling him and finish. Okay, now the guy's trying to go up and vertical freeze it there. Now, do you see how he's taking his elbows off the mat in turtle position? In juditsu, there's only one reason you take your elbows off the mat from turtle position. That's to stand up. So now it's clear at this point what his actual strategy is. It's to get up, force a standing confrontation, win a takedown battle, and beat Gordon by points. So he did have a strategy. Now, our counter strategy is always based around the power half Nelson. This is a common move in the sport of wrestling, and it's a great way to break people down as they try to stand up. That looks so heavy. Yeah, I mean, Gordon is a master of it. So there's a power half </s><s>[INST] Nelson. So there's a power half Nelson that Gordon has on him as the elbows are off the ground and [/INST] knees are off the ground. He's going to return his opponent to the mat. And as you can see, he's successful in doing so. And now it's clear what the man's strategy is. So I'm calling Gordon to break him down to a hip. You put a man on the hip. He can't stand up. Gordon successfully does it, traps the shoulder using that one on one grip with his right hand, puts him down to a shoulder and a hip, that means standing up is no longer an option for his opponent. Now Gordon goes in, he's already scoring because of the total position that he's in. His opponent stays down on his shoulder. Now Gordon's responsibility is to start looking for the stranglehold. His opponent has basic defensive structure. He's disciplined with his chin, keeps the chin down. Gordon is a master of tying up defensive arms and penetrating under the chin to get to a strangle. And you'll see that shortly. There's the trapping of the arm. Notice that no advanced grips were required. It was just a spontaneous trap. There's the penetration of the neck. </s><s>[INST] So the arm was trapped with the leg. [/INST] Yeah. So now he's only got one defensive arm and he's just taking that away with his left hand and </s><s>[INST] he gets a one-handed strangle for the finish. He's only got one defense. And it looks like not much energy was expanded during that battle. [/INST] Yeah, very little. Yeah. So the tournament got off to a very smooth start. Very little energy expenditure, no injuries, and a submission win. </s><s>[INST] There's a kind of certain look to Gordon that could be interpreted as nervousness. That was an incorrect interpretation? Yes. Okay. So there's a... What do you interpret as nervous behavior? Yeah. Part of me is trolling, but sometimes on the surface, confident behavior can look almost like anger. And Gordon's face had a vulnerability to it. [/INST] Almost like when you go to judge confidence, don't look at the face. Look at the extremities of the body. Yeah. That's where the truth comes out. You see it in body language and the further from the face and chest, the more honest the body becomes. Look at the feet and the hands. Yeah. That's when you see if people are nervous or not. </s><s>[INST] He was very relaxed in the extremities. That's true. See, you look more confident in this than anything. What are you thinking about? What's going through your head here? Is this the same stuff? Are you intimidated by the two meatheads, one in a suit and tie, or are you not thinking [/INST] about that at all? I know. For me, it's just about, okay, what's the most efficient path to victory against this particular opponent? It's just, okay, I've done my job. I've taken them through an extensive fight camp that prepared them for every conceivable situation that they're in. I've run an efficient warmup. Their body temperature is perfect. The elasticity in the muscles is perfect. My main role when I corner is I avoid what most people do when they corner, which is to be a cheerleader. Most corner men, they're not corner men, they're cheerleaders. They're there to express some kind of emotional support to their training partners or their student. Sometimes they're even worse than cheerleaders. They express their own emotional fears as the match goes on. I always believe that 99.5% of the job of the trainer is done, the coach is done, when the athlete steps their foot on the mat. At that point, you shouldn't need me at all. Everything I needed to tell you should have been not just told to you, but imprinted into you. Remember, there's 15,000 people in that crowd. For half of the match, you're not going to hear a word that I can say, there's too much noise. But you'll hear my voice inside your head because you've heard it so many times over the last 14 weeks, you're sick of hearing it at that point. And their program know what to do. So I'm usually pretty confident. I'm also very confident that even in worst case scenarios, they're going to have effective solutions because they train those worst case scenarios every single day in the gym. </s><s>[INST] And so in part, you're there to have a front row seat to analyze what happened so that you can [/INST] take that to the next match. The biggest danger an athlete faces is tunnel vision. Sometimes they will hit upon a certain move or strategy and just say, I'm going to go with this when there's much easier alternatives. But because they're so focused on the alternative they've chosen, they get this tunnel vision and just focus only on that. The most constructive thing the corner man can do is alert them to the presence of time, which is very important in an ADCC match because all the scoring is structured by time. And to alleviate problems associated with tunnel vision. Okay, you're doing this, but if you just did this, it'll be so much easier. So that's the </s><s>[INST] main goal. So here, this was one of several anticipated matches against second one against [/INST] Victor Hugo, which is a very tough opponent. And again, this was a situation where Gordon was considerably outweighed by his opponent. So the main thing here was efficiency. His opponent elected to avoid the standing position by jumping into guard. So now Gordon would be in top position this time. He has a very good closed guard. But unfortunately, Gordon has very good guard passing. So he's an excellent guard player, very talented, but Gordon is renowned as the imminent guard passer in the world today. So it's a tall order to hold Gordon off for a 10 minute </s><s>[INST] match. Yeah. Is there something you can say about this guard passing? Gordon is making it look very easy. It's middle distance guard passing here. And he eventually passes to mount, I believe, [/INST] in a very... What are you running through the sequence where he gets mounted? I believe he </s><s>[INST] gets mounted twice. Back just a little bit further. Yeah. So he's trying to one arm under... [/INST] Yeah, this is a stacking position. Now normally, we always insist on the idea of getting advantageous angle first, controlling the feet and getting angle. But there's a height advantage that Victor Hugo has here. And the length of his legs means that he can play very, very wide with his legs. So getting an advantageous angle might be difficult. And these circumstances, it often makes sense to go right up the middle. Now, Gordon could just go back for legs because the legs... Victor Hugo's legs are so far apart at this point that you could easily isolate a leg and attack that. But Gordon wanted to show off his passing prowess. Very often he'll go into a match and say, okay, I'm going to show this skill. And he'll often use it as a demonstration of techniques he teaches in instructional videos. So he wanted to show that he could pass to mount readily on a world champion. Like this part here. This little step. Okay. Just freeze it right there. Go back one step. Okay. You can clearly see that all of his opponent's defensive frames are built on his opponent's left hand side. So everything is defense on the left, but you can see this comes at a price. And that price is back exposure on the right hand side. You can literally see his opponent's back on that side. So Gordon's game is to place sufficient pressure. The opponent overcompensates on the side of pressure just to set up a quick switch across to the other side. There's the vulnerability. There's the back exposure. His opponent has to put his back on the ground, switches back. That's a world champion right there on bottom. He does a good job of recovering from the first danger, but unfortunately, Gordon has been here a thousand times and just switches his hips and kicks out. A little step. And so you see there's two changes in direction, left, right, in a very short period of time that people find very, very hard to keep up with. Now his opponent builds up to an elbow. He's looking to create more and more space from here, but Gordon counters by just stepping over the hips. It's just when you feel like every move, he's doing the right things. The man on bottom is doing well. He's doing the right things, but the other guy's just been here too many times and is just a half second ahead of every decision. </s><s>[INST] So that going up in the elbow, Gordon makes it look so easy here. It almost seems like Victor is out, but this turning of the hips with the arm over the opponent's back is able to bring [/INST] him back down and Gordon takes mount. Notice how Gordon is never satisfied with the mounted position itself. He's only satisfied with an extended mounted position where the elbow comes up over </s><s>[INST] the shoulder line. Only then does he show... There's a little bit of relief right there, [/INST] right? Right? There's a little bit of relief. No, that's the look of a man who's just proved </s><s>[INST] a point. Yeah, this is very Michael Jordan like sticks his tongue out. So yeah, I mean, there's no points at this stage. He really is going for submission. And then this happens again. [/INST] Is this the match that wasn't Gordon's... This was the only match where Gordon didn't </s><s>[INST] finish his opponent by submission. Was this very frustrating for him? [/INST] It's actually interesting that when he came off the mat, he was visibly frustrated. He wanted to get a finish. And I think he was more upset about not finishing Victor Hugo than he was delighted by winning his two gold medals. So I think that says a lot about the perfectionism of Gordon Ryan. Most people would be thrilled to be one of the great grapplers of this generation </s><s>[INST] decisively in this fashion, but he was not happy. And so this is Gordon's third match against [/INST] Sousa, Roosevelt Sousa, another guy who's very big. This is different because now we're on to the second day. Your listeners should be aware that the event occurs over a two-day period. So the previous two matches occurred on Saturday. Now we're into Sunday. Now, this puts a different context on things. If we could just freeze it right there, maybe go back one step. Now we're on Sunday morning. And the idea is that Gordon will be fighting the biggest fight of his life late that afternoon. So now we're into the idea of energy conservation. It's okay to have two hard matches on Saturday because you get to rest on Saturday night. But now Gordon has to beat two people back to back and save energy for the biggest fight of his life on late Sunday afternoon. So now the emphasis is on a quick win. And you can see Gordon Ryan certainly delivers on this. Now, when you go to entangle your opponent's legs, the basic choice you have is between straight Ashigurami and cross Ashigurami. In the last five years, cross Ashigurami has proven to be statistically the more important of the two. And as a result, many people have forgotten the value of straight Ashigurami base leg locks and undervalued them. Gordon has outstanding heel hooks from both straight and cross positions. And his opponent was probably more concerned about the danger of a cross Ashigurami, left the right leg undefended for far too long. And as a result, Gordon goes into a very classical Ashigurami you would normally expect to see from five or six years ago and gets a very, very quick finish. So lift his opponent. There's the Ashigurami, the entanglement of one of his opponent's legs with two of his. Now he's got to turn and expose his opponent's heel. So there's an initial off balance to the left to get a defensive reaction. The opponent overcompensates, exposes his heel, and then there's the submission. There's a danger of leg being broken here. Gordon has an absolutely ferocious outside heel hook until you felt it. </s><s>[INST] It's quite different. The opponent probably before he even felt the heel hook felt the [/INST] control and that he's screwed there. When someone who knows what they're doing gets a bite on your leg like that, you feel it deep inside your knee and ankle tendons immediately. </s><s>[INST] There's a sense in which you almost tap. He got a couple of taps almost as if they're early [/INST] because the opponent knows. People came up to what's happened and said, this guy tapped early. </s><s>[INST] He knew that late would be a big problem. Got it. So this is within like 30 seconds, [/INST] within 10 seconds. I think it was within 10 seconds. So this was an excellent example of someone saying, okay, I'm going to conserve energy with a short match. I'm not just going to go down into a neutral position. I'm going to directly pull into a leg lock attack from standing position. You don't see that much in heavyweight divisions. That's something you see more in the lightweight </s><s>[INST] divisions. So we got to go to the final match of Gordon's within his division, which I think [/INST] as opposed to facing Felipe Pena who lost to Nicky Rod. Nicky Rod had a great match against Felipe Pena and passed Felipe Pena's guard. I think only the second person in ADCC competition to accomplish that. I believe with a body lock. It started as a body lock, but he converted to </s><s>[INST] half guard top head and arm and passed out of half guard top chest to chest. I think I listened to Craig Jones sort of interview summarizing what happened to ADCC and he briefly mentioned that Nicky Rod might have the best body lock pass that he's ever felt. So the way to face Nicky Rod is [/INST] don't let him get the body lock. But there's a problem if you stand up, he's a good wrestler. So there's a dilemma there. Like you have to sit down to guard, but that goes into his body lock. But then if you stand up, now you go into his wrestling skill. So it's a great dilemma that </s><s>[INST] he has. And that's what in facing Nicky Rod, Gordon Ryan here chooses to. [/INST] Yeah, if you look at the limbs, there's a relaxation there. We should also explain some things here. This is a finals match. So instead of being 10 minutes long, it's 20 minutes long with the option of a 20 minute overtime. So this could potentially be a 40 minute match. So you can see why the ADCC people were very concerned about Gordon doing this match. Because what if this match had gone 40 minutes and then an exhausted Gordon Ryan has to go out to fight </s><s>[INST] Andre Galvan, who's fresh and ready to maul him. And the top of that is two former teammates. [/INST] Who know each other's game very well. So there was a high likelihood in most people's minds that this would go the distance. Because when you train with each other for years, every single day in the gym, seven days a week, you get to know each other's tricks. One big problem here for Nicky Rod is that his body lock guard passing game, which is his main weapon on the ground, was taught to him by us. So it's not like we're going to be taken by surprise by it. So that </s><s>[INST] must have been figuring in his mind. Do you think psychologically for Gordon and psychologically for Nicky Rod, it's tough. So for him with that body lock, for example, do you think it's tough [/INST] for him to know what to do here? It's tough because he would have remembered the outcome of the training sessions. It's hard to go up against the guy who used to dominate you in training and </s><s>[INST] then say, okay, I'm going to beat him in competition. Can you shut all that off? Because it's tough, man. Memory is memory. You can't lie to yourself. What do you think about competition? Olympics bring this out. There's been a lot of big upsets at the Olympics. There's something where people find something in them. I mean, judo is a different sport than grappling. [/INST] In judo, there's much more room for upset because a mistake in judo will have ramifications that will be felt within half a second. If you take the wrong grip in judo, you can be thrown in half a second and there's no recovery. If your two shoulders hit the map with momentum, it's over. It's done. In juditsu, especially in ADCC where there's no points in the first five minutes, you could get taken down and mounted by your opponent and still win. You can recover from a bad start. In judo, boxing, kickboxing, MMA, you get hit. There's no recovery time. You just get swarmed on. And juditsu is a much more forgiving sport where you can make a series of blunders and you just recover from them. You don't make a series of blunders in boxing, </s><s>[INST] you're unconscious. There's the blunder case, but there's also been just people where it's their day. I mean, again, maybe it's romanticized in the notion, but there's been some epic performances in Olympic wrestling, in Olympic judo. As an example, Satoshi Ishii, he had a 2008 performance. We talked about all Japan and all that kind of stuff, but the Olympics, he destroyed everybody on this path to the Olympic gold medal. And that's when Teddy Renero was also competing. He got the bronze. And you could say he was at that time the best in the world also, [/INST] but I think it would be very fair to say he was the best in the world. Think about the people he beat to win three old Japan championships. Like he beat Kosei Inoue. He beat Keiji Suzuki. They </s><s>[INST] were Olympic champions. Like he was already. So you don't believe in free will. [/INST] No, I don't believe that a person can walk on stage and be better than what they are supposed to be. You have a skill level. It's set in stone. This is your skill level. You don't just go on stage and suddenly your skill level gets here. What you do have is a situation where you have a skill level. Another opponent has a higher skill level, but he runs into confidence issues so that he only uses a small percentage of his actual skills. And then he will fall below someone who is technically lower on the skill scale than he is. That can happen, </s><s>[INST] but you can't just magically acquire skills by stepping on stage. All of us are able to fall [/INST] in confidence. Yes. So the question becomes who manages that fall best? And that can create </s><s>[INST] upsets. Absolutely. So you don't think Gordon could have fallen in confidence against a former teammate when the pressure is so high? There was just no basis for a fall to occur. You said he [/INST] doesn't have confidence issues. What do you attribute that to? That's because he never loses in the gym. There's no experience at his head that would make him say, I shouldn't be this confident. So it's the physical, it's like we talked about mental preparation. Don't get me wrong, if Gordon lost 20 matches in a row, of course his confidence would drop. Because experience is now, there's going to be a psychological dissonance between his recent experience and what he believes. If you believe you're the best in the world, you just lost 20 matches. At some point, reality is going to break in. But if you're just never losing in competition, dominating people in the gym, then there's nothing in your experience that would shake your confidence. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask you this just in a small tangent? Why is Gordon Ryan so good? So we're looking at, you've trained a lot of special athletes, you're a special human being yourself. I could just look at human history. There's a lot of, not a lot, there's some special humans. It seems like Gordon [/INST] Ryan is one of them. I totally agree with that. Can you try to dissect? That's what I meant when I said I had many students, but only one Gordon Ryan. Like I've taught many, many people, but they don't all have his skill level. So there's an obvious elephant in the room. What distinguishes him from other athletes? Great question. I'll try and give an answer. More than anyone else that I've ever taught, he has a memory for things that were taught to him. He has an ability to recall information that is extraordinary compared with other people in the room. So that's definitely a big part of it. Secondly, he has a pride in technique and technical prowess that will not allow him to settle for anything less than perfection. And he will hate himself when there is imperfection. So there is a love of excellence and a hatred of anything less than excellence. He has an ability to pull the trigger when opportunity arises, which is truly extraordinary. Many people know what to do, but when the moment comes, they back off and they'll doubt themselves. </s><s>[INST] If Gordon sees the opportunity, the trigger pulls every time. So can I just link on that? Absolutely. There's a few times where he gets a little bit of an advantage and he just chases it to get a big, like with Andre Galvao. There's a dance and you get one step ahead and he's able to chase that. Get a little glimmer of the back and he's able to chase that all the way to back control. So is that the trigger that you're referring to? [/INST] Yes. It runs deeper than that too. It's the idea that good athletes are greedy athletes. Okay. When they see a small opportunity, they try and get as big a bite of it as possible. The mantra that we always have in training, if you can see the back, you can take the back. And if Gordon sees an inch of your back, that's the direction he's going to be going. If your far shoulder is within an inch of the floor, he's going to be mounting you. If your shoulder comes off the floor, he'd be on your back on the other side. He's a maximalist with opportunity. He's not satisfied with, oh, let me get a good enough outcome. It's like, I want the maximal outcome. So when you combine all these things together, an ability to recall information, which is just far superior to anyone else I've ever coached, an ability to work in the training room towards not just good technique, but excellent technique, the confidence to pull the trigger whenever the opportunity arises, a maximalist mindset where it's never enough to have a good enough outcome. It's always got to be the best possible outcome. And the fifth element, which I believe is very, very important, is extraordinary depth in his technical prowess, in particular with regards his defensive acumen. Everyone looks at Gordon and focuses on his offensive prowess because they see him dominate other athletes. But what they don't see is what I see every day in the gym where he works from impossibly bad defensive positions. Someone locked in on a full heel hook on his body and a full Jujigitami Amba in a complete pin mounted with Gordon's two arms stretched out over his head in what looks like a hopeless position. And Gordon will work in these positions. And of course, because it's such a bad position, sometimes he'll have to tap. But he just works so relentlessly in these bad positions that when he steps on stage, he's like, if this guy got the worst possible position on me, there's nothing he could do with it. And within 30 seconds, I could turn it around on him and win this match. That gives his game an overall breadth and depth, which is very, very hard to deal with. It means there's no obvious weak point where you can just say, okay, I'm going to attack him here and use this strategy to beat him. And that goes back to his confidence. The reason why most people lack confidence is they fear bad outcomes. If you're a strong guard player, you've got an excellent guard, but you're terrified of leg locks and your opponent has strong leg locks, you will shut down your own guard and won't play as freely and well as you normally do, because you're afraid of the leg lock danger. You'll pull your feet and you'll play a very conservative guard game. But if you had extremely adept leg lock defense, then you just play with all the confidence you normally do from guard position. Gordon puts himself in that situation. He's so defensively </s><s>[INST] sound that it translates into his offensive confidence. When you talk about memory recall, which is interesting, I can't help but see parallels between him and Magnus Carlsen, who's a chess player, who's the number one in the world. The arguably the best ever, certainly the best ever if you just look at absolute numbers. The chess has the luxury of having a rating, which you cannot have in jiu-jitsu because it's a game of human chess. Chess is just a board game, so you can actually calculate the probability that you could win. So he is the highest ELO rating ever, and he's maintained that rating. Without competing against the number two in the world, he can just prove that he's the number one in the world for many years. Anyway, there's certain similarities. One's ability to recall. So memory recall of information is fascinatingly good. And the other one is not so much a love for perfection, which is something you mentioned, but the flip side of that, which is what you also mentioned, is the hate of imperfection. Now, in the case of Magnus, it almost creates a level of anxiety for him that's almost destructive. So the thing he seems to hate the most is imperfection against people he knows are worse than him. So the thing he loves is competing against people that are close to skill level. Or the favorite is people who are, might actually be better than him, especially in certain positions. He loves competing against them. He hates competing against people that are still from the perspective of everyone else. what are called super grandmasters, so top three in the world. But he knows he's much better than them. And the anxiety of being not perfect against those people, that's why he, I don't know if you're paying attention, but he stepped away. He's not going to defend his world championship because he hates the anxiety of playing people worse than him. [/INST] Interesting. </s><s>[INST] He figures they would somehow make him look bad or? No, he just, for him, at least the language he uses, it's just not fun. And he likes having fun. To him, it was fun to win no matter the skill level, the world championship the first time. But then defending it is a very grueling process. With classical chess, you play these many hour, it could be seven hour long games. And on top of that, he really hates the fact that it's only, I forget what it is, but it's single digit number of games. He says it's low sample. So I can't, I would like to play 20, 30, 40, 50 games if we're going to do it this way. But then they're too long, it's going to take too long. So he's really emphasizes the fun of it and the clear demonstration of who's the best. Now chess is an interesting game. It's probably different than grappling because it's been played for centuries. So there's this giant body of people that are playing it. Like there's other Gordon Ryans out there. Imagine a world where there's multiple Gordon Ryans or something like that, just different dimensions, but you have like sharks everywhere. And so there is fun to be had even at the very, very, very, very top. But the memory recall is the thing that stands out and the hate of imperfection more intense than anybody else in the game. Fascinating, fascinating. That takes us back to the final. Yes. So here Gordon is facing Nicky Rod, former training partner. [/INST] And again, the intention here is this has to be put in the context that Gordon will be fighting the greatest ACC grappler of all time in a few hours after this. So what we're looking for is a quick resolution. Still the shortest possible match. Now there's a complicating factor here. Nicky Rod was a wrestler before he was a jiu-jitsu player. On paper, the way his route to win is via wrestling. He's not gonna be able to submit Gordon Ryan and he's not gonna be able to pass his guard. So he has to win by wrestling. In the ADCC finals, you cannot set the guard. So the approach that Gordon used earlier that we saw on video cannot be used in the finals. Gordon must wrestle his opponent. So on the way out, Gordon and I were talking and we'd had discussions obviously during the cam what's the appropriate thing to do here. And there had been some matches earlier in the event where it was becoming obvious that stalling was being heavily punished by referees. So I said to Gordon on the way out, just give him your leg, let him take you down because in the first 10 minutes of the finals, takedowns don't score anything. There are no means of scoring the first 10 minutes but you can't set the guard. That will award you a negative point. So I said, just let Nicky Rod take you down. And he's like, Nicky Rod's not gonna take the bait. </s><s>[INST] And I said, if he doesn't, they'll call him for stalling. And so. And then Craig Jones also commented after the fact is I don't know why Nicky Rod took the bait. [/INST] So if we see the start of the match, you see Gordon comes out and offers a leg. Now, it's not that Nicky Rod is smart. He knows what's happening here. And what's he gonna do, stall for 10 minutes and get like five stalling calls put against him. So Gordon gives him the takedown. That way they go to the ground immediately with no effort. And the match now favors Gordon because Gordon is significantly more skilled on the ground. The question is how can we make this match as short as possible? </s><s>[INST] And as is so often the case, the answer comes back to legs. So for people just listening to this, Gordon's in an open guard and Nicky Rod appears to be trying to keep his hips away from Gordon's legs. [/INST] Yes, the Gordon's leg. Nicky Rod knows there's a danger here. So he's elected to go to his knees that will set up his favorite body lock passes and it will in some ways mitigate some of the dangers associated with leg locks. So Gordon's whole thing is how am I gonna get my body weight underneath them? He has a choice between linear entries where he enters between his opponent's knees and circular entries where he inverts and spins underneath the opponent </s><s>[INST] to get under his center of gravity. Is there a way for somebody to try to get a body lock [/INST] without giving Gordon an opportunity to get under them? The body lock is an excellent way to shut down leg lock injuries if you can get to the body lock But you can see Gordon's very very disciplined with his elbow and knee position elbows and knees Working in position it's very very hard for his opponent to access his waist that shoulder is always either across the hip or in front of the shoulder sorry </s><s>[INST] his knee is either in front of the shoulder in front of the hip and we're one minute into the match and just if I Were to look at the video player here. It appears that the matches over soon, so So I guess Nicky Rod is facing this. I need to get close in order to do the body lock. And the closer you get, the more danger there is to let Gordon get under you and get the leg control. [/INST] Now they're starting to get close here. Gordon's gonna try and get his head underneath his opponent and make a circular entry into the legs. He's clearing his opponent's head out of the way by faking the arm drag on the far side. First move that he used against his first opponent earlier in the tournament, and there's the leg. Spins underneath it, goes circular, rotates through, gets his body weight underneath his opponent. Now he's gonna trip him down to the mat. </s><s>[INST] Now, I believe Nicky Rod tries to pull out his foot here. And Craig also said that Nicky Rod has gotten used to be able to pull that foot out from anybody, and that he was very surprised at the grip that Gordon was able to actually hold on. So I just wanna comment. [/INST] I'm just parroting commentary from the internet. If you look at what's happening here, from the internet, if you just freeze it, you'll see that Gordon, like any good leg locker, will always treat his opponent's foot like a knot at the end of the rope. Just as you slide down a rope, if there's a knot at the end, your hand will catch. So too with the human leg, when they go to extract by pulling, you just keep your fist as close to your shoulder as possible and narrow the gap. The foot will always catch. The failure that many people have is they let their hand drift away from their own shoulder. And so there's room for the foot to extract, but you'll see Gordon's extremely disciplined with thumb close to his own shoulder, which creates a situation that's very, very hard </s><s>[INST] just to simply pull your foot out. You're focusing on the knot of the foot. [/INST] Yeah, also it's very early in the match. There's very little sweat. Both athletes are still pretty dry. Now, Gordon has to climb the leg and now he's already captured his opponent's shoelace. There's the heel exposure coming up. Nicky Rodd already knows things are getting bad. </s><s>[INST] And there's the win. Actually, the comment I made, I guess, was from a little bit earlier. There was an earlier time when Nicky Rodd was trying to pull out the foot and Gordon's able to hold onto the knot, which is interesting. [/INST] Now, that was a brilliant day's work by Gordon Ryan. He's had two matches against opponents considerably bigger and stronger than himself. And the time of the two matches can be measured in, I think, less than two minutes. So he's done what he set out to do. No injuries, no exhaustion. He's beaten four guys back to back. All of whom are excellent athletes with minimal energy expenditure, and he's ready to go on to his super fight. </s><s>[INST] So he's done what he set out for. And that's against one of the greatest, arguably, for a long time, really, really up there, Jiu-Jitsu practitioners, competitors, grappling, no geek competitors of all time, which is Andre Govaal. [/INST] Yes, Andre Govaal is almost certainly at this point the greatest ADCC competitor of all time. </s><s>[INST] Won more super fights than anyone else by a landslide. So if I may just read a few words you've written on Instagram about this match, about Andre Govaal on greatness. How great you become in any given endeavor will always be assessed by the degree of difficulty of the barriers you had to overcome to get to the top. Just as the lion became king of the jungle, not by living among sheep, but by dominating a world of elephants, hyenas, buffalo, leopards, crocodiles, so too the greatness of an athlete will be determined not just by his own ability, but by the greatness of the athletes he faces. Thus, in his quest for greatness, Gordon Ryan owes a debt to the greatness of his toughest opponent, Andre Govaal. And you go on to sing him praises. So, and that introduces this match. You know, there was an interesting moment. I didn't even listen to the words exchanged, but because I had the great fortune of sitting next to Hachukrese, there was this fascinating moment before the match. And I can't believe Gordon is sufficiently relaxed to do this. But he walked up to Hachukrese and had a discussion. What do you think? You face Andre Govaal before. What are your suggestions? And they've talked to it back and forth. They brainstormed ideas like minutes before the match. And it was just a beautiful moment of like, I don't know, like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan talking to each other, something like that. I mean, I wonder how much brainstorming there really was and how much was it just kind of like spiritual inspiration or something like that? [/INST] Yeah, I think it's more spiritual inspiration. He looks up to Hachukrese as a very close friend, a mentor of mine. So I always tell my athletes, look to Hachukrese as your example. This is a guy who always fought for the finish. He tried to express the highest ideal of jiu-jitsu, which is control leading to submission in every match he was ever in. He even lost matches on tactics against people that he could easily have defeated if he adopted a different tactic. But he always insisted on victory by submission. It defined his career, made him who he was. </s><s>[INST] And I always try to have my athletes emulate him. So what was the strategy going into this match? What were you thinking? What were you thinking? [/INST] Okay, for Andre Govaal, he had, there's a sense in which Andre Govaal had to fight literally the perfect match to win this. Okay, this is a match that's gonna be 20 minutes long and potentially 40 minutes long. Andre Govaal cannot win by submission. Gordon's submission dominance here is just too great. It would be exceedingly difficult for him to win on the ground. Gordon's ground positional game is just too advanced. And so for Andre Govaal, he had to win. If he was going to win, it was going to be in a standing wrestling exchange where most people assessed him as having a measure of superiority over Gordon Ryan. The problem is that it's hard to just keep a potentially 40-minute match on the ground, sorry, off the ground that whole time. It's very, very difficult indeed. So he would have had to fight literally the perfect tactical match to make it happen. And he would have to do it without getting called for stalling points. Gordon has the luxury that if at any point they go to the ground, he has complete dominance. But Gordon too has a problem, that he can't pull guard without being penalized. And if Andre Govaal can play this tactical game of forcing Gordon to pull guard and then staying at a distance where he doesn't, he's doing enough action not to get called for stalling, but not so much to engage with the dangerous Gordon Ryan on the ground, then it's feasible he could have won. But it would have been, as I said, it would have required the most perfect application and integration of technique and tactics </s><s>[INST] that he's capable of. How much intimidation was there? [/INST] Or are these assets already beyond that? </s><s>[INST] When you say intimidation, be more precise. Do you think there are some degree, if you were just to empathize with Andre Govaal, do you think there's some degree in which Gordon was in his head? Because of the trash talk leading up to certain events, because of the level of dominance that Gordon has shown in this competition in months and years leading up to it. Also the fact that Andre Govaal is also a coach of a large team. So there's some pressure to demonstrate to the team that the oil line's still got it. [/INST] Yeah, yeah. I can't speak for Andre, but I know for Gordon, it's hard to be intimidated when you know the other guy has no method of finishing you. It just takes so much pressure off. When you just go in, you're saying there's literally no way this guy can finish me. And there's no way this guy can pin and control me. I can't be finished, I can't be pinned and controlled. The only way I can lose this is if this guy plays a tactical game. So in his best case scenario, I lose by a tactical game. But from Andre's perspective, it's like if I make one screw up, this kid could finish me. You can see which way the intimidation game goes. Now, for the start, things get interesting here. We've already said, if you could just freeze it right there, Andre's only realistic path to victory is standing grappling, okay? That would require him to take Gordon down, presumably multiple times after the first 10 minutes and not be taken down at all by Gordon. So it's a tall order, it's possible, but difficult. And here's where things get interesting. I told Gordon before the match, just go out and offer him the leg. Same we did with Nicky Rod. And that's where things get interesting. I must say that I loved what Andre Galvand did at the start of this match. He's a little crazy here. There was just so much energy in the room at this point that his hand fighting got a little. </s><s>[INST] For people just listening, there's a bit of hard slapping. That's fine. [/INST] That could be considered a strike. That's fine, yeah. That could be considered a strike. It's fine, there was just a lot of electric atmosphere in the room. So now, things settle down a little bit, but here's where things get interesting. Andre throws the whole tactical game out the window right from the start. He goes for the takedown, Gordon doesn't try to fight the takedown because it's in his interests to go to the ground. But I love this about Andre. He's literally like, fuck you, kid. Let's see how good your ground game is. So he shoots the takedown and Gordon accepts it obviously because it's to his advantage to accept it. But I love the fact that Andre was like, I'm not even going to try and stall this out. I'm just going to bang. There it is. So he's like, okay, let's see what you got, kid. They say you're good on the ground. Let's see what you fucking got. And I love that about Andre. Unfortunately, he's </s><s>[INST] entered the hornet's nest now. What happened there real quick? Because that was very fast. [/INST] Gordon immediately went into Ashigurami. Not just any Ashigurami, but Ashigurami was holding both </s><s>[INST] legs. There's an open guard and he scooted forward. Oh, wow. That's really nice. [/INST] So he splits the legs, now he dominates the space between the knees. So there's a guaranteed </s><s>[INST] straight Ashigurami here. He split the knees against Andre Gavao, like effortlessly right there. [/INST] So already Gordon's in his preferred domain now. So he's starting to off balance his opponent. He's looking for a reaction to get heel exposure. He does get heel exposure. Andre does a good job of monitoring the feet to try and reduce the breaking pressure. But the brute fact is it's in Gordon's realm now. This is where he has all the advantage. And the match is going to be 20 minutes in Gordon's realm. That's going to be a very, very tall order. </s><s>[INST] Was there a moment here, again, Gordon's on the legs? Are you impressed that Andre was able to [/INST] get out from this? I don't know. I would expect this. Andre's been preparing for this for two years. And remember, Andre has gone against some of the greatest leg lockers in grappling before and prevailed. So he's not naive. He knows how to defend himself. The big problem is that he's going to create defensive reactions, which lead into other aspects of Gordon's game, in particular </s><s>[INST] back exposure. So here, Ashigurami goes to a single leg type of position where Gordon runs [/INST] to Andre's back. Now he has to return him to the mat. The most efficient way to do so is always courtesy of foot sweeping. So he pulls out a diashihirai from the back to sweeping down to the mat. And now Gordon's on top. And this is a serious problem for any grappler in the world. Once </s><s>[INST] Gordon gets top position, he's just relentless. But just getting Andre Guevara's good, just [/INST] getting the guard back, all of that is great. There's also a sense here in which Gordon is </s><s>[INST] pacing it too, just to physically fatigue an opponent. So he's passing the guard, [/INST] but not rushing it. Now what Gordon's looking for here is complete chest to chest contact. He's getting very close to it now, and once he gets chest to chest, an opponent in top position, past one of his opponent's knees, it's going to be awfully, awfully difficult for an opponent to </s><s>[INST] recover. What is he waiting for here? Is this pressure here? And over time, he just wears you [/INST] out. And over time, he just wears you out. Yeah, it's part of a campaign of attrition, of pressure, over time. Now he's creating a situation where he's either going to get back exposure or mount exposure. Either way is pretty much fatal when you're dealing with Gordon. Andre </s><s>[INST] elected to go the route of back exposure. Now, Gordon got the body triangle is on his back. [/INST] Now, there's one physical problem here. Andre Galvan has a neck like a ball and he has a very short and very thick neck. So, penetrating under the chin for a strangle can be a real problem. He also has extremely well-developed shoulders and upper arms. So, when the head comes down and the shoulders go up, there's very little real estate to work with with regards to your strangle holds. So, Gordon in time will trap one of his opponent's arms with his legs in order to take away one of those strong defensive arms. There you can see the arm has been trapped and now he can start working towards the strangle. And now here it's still difficult. It's still difficult, but things are looking good. There's still considerable amount of time left on the clock. Gordon as well ahead on points. So, all the pressure, all the tactical pressure now is on Andre. You'll see the critical penetration of the jaw with the wrist. Now, Gordon elects for a one-handed strangle. Andre fought very bravely, but a strangle, it doesn't matter how brave you are. </s><s>[INST] And where does the strangle actually happen in terms of... it felt like the strangle was at the blade of the, it wasn't even fully sunk in, so [/INST] where is is that like a full calm is like a four-handed joke. There's a sense in which, once you get underneath, you know the inevitable. Because again, the inevitable, you're feeling the inevitable. It's like a to go back to the chest analogy. It's like </s><s>[INST] resigning in the chest. Yeah, that the inevitable, you're feeling the inevitable. And chess is considered almost like impolite to let it run out when you understand, when you understand that death is on the horizon. And there's a lot of respect. That was the beautiful thing with all the trash talk and everything like that. Gordon always shows respect. I love that about the drama of combat. [/INST] It's trash talk in the beginning and respect at the end. I think it's, you know, when you feel someone, Andra has great skills. And when you grapple someone, you feel just how skilled they are. And whatever issues you had prior to the match, evaporate when you feel, okay, just like you, they do the same moves and same kind of concepts. And you see that there's more that bonds you together than separates you. And that's the feeling at the end of most grappling matches. </s><s>[INST] So if we could talk about Giancarlo, who had an incredible performance. And I mean, there's a lot of things we can say. We can probably go through his matches, but if we could just talk without that, about some of the most impressive things that you saw about him. One of the things I think you mentioned elsewhere in here is about confidence. So one of the things you saw that could really benefit him as an athlete and competitor is to build up his confidence. [/INST] Is there, can you speak to that? First of all, I should give you some background. Giancarlo Badoni was a strong local black belt in Boston, teaching at Bernardo Faria school. When I would film instructional videos, I would often talk to him and talk to him about his competitions and training. And he would do local competitions. He was trying to go from gi training, which was the majority of his competitive background into no gi. And he was struggling in local competitions, especially with things like leg locking, where he had no background in leg locking and would often get submitted. So as we worked together in instructional videos, we would talk and discuss. He would periodically come to the gym in New York City and come in to work out with the guys. And he often struggled in the training room. He had no experience with things like body lock guard passing. And this used to mean that he was, many of the training sessions didn't go well for him. So he was always like a very polite, well-spoken young man and worked hard. When we went to Puerto Rico and the team ended up drifting apart, when we moved into Austin, he said, you know, now that many of your athletes have left, could I come down and train with you guys full time? And I was like, yeah, I'd love to. I thought it'd be a great training partner for Gordon and Gary. We didn't really have any training partners at that point. And sure enough, he literally just picked up everything he had and moved down to Austin. Now, anyone who just moves halfway across the country to begin training, that already gets my respect right there. That's a big commitment. And he began training. We put him on a training schedule where first he had to cover up his big weaknesses. He had limited attacks from bottom position. He had poor leg lock defense. And he was very, very vulnerable to certain kinds of guard passing, </s><s>[INST] which weren't part of his experience. This is all a year out from ADCC. Yes. And we should also maybe give the spoiler, which is he wins his division in a dominant fashion. He also does incredibly well at the absolute [/INST] and he is. It was an amazing thing. To give you an idea, when he first moved to Austin, he competed in a WNO event. And I don't think he scored a single point, lost a couple of matches, and including matches to people who were in this ADCC. So he came out of that looking very depressed and he lost to Ken Anduarte. He lost to Mason Fowler. So John Carlo always struck me as someone who was positionally sound. He had good guard retention, things like this, but he had no offense. He had no leg lock defense. And he just wasn't able to assert authority on matches. He was a guy who was always gonna be tough to be because it's hard to pass his guard, that kind of thing. But he wasn't dangerous. </s><s>[INST] Can I ask you a question on that? Because my interaction with him early on when he came to Austin, I remember he attracted me a bunch on the match, showing me stuff. But I wonder if that kindness is a detriment to the confidence. Is there some connection? No, you can say again, confident. So killers can be nice too. [/INST] You can say again confident. Killers can be nice too. Absolutely. Confidence comes from a skill level. And confidence is a much more rational thing than most people ascribe it. People think of confidence as like this esoteric ethereal element that you either have or you don't. In fact, confidence is much more a reflection, a rational reflection on your past experience. If you're successful with your past experience and you're expecting to compete in a situation which is similar to your past experience, and that past experience is mostly being successful, you'll be confident. Are you pretty confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? Of course you are because it's done so every time in the past. as people like Hume pointed out, there's no supreme rational reason for believing this, but nonetheless, your confidence is high. And it's the same thing in jiu-jitsu. If you're performing well, and skills are the reason for that, your confidence will be high in the future, regardless of what your mindset is. So it's not a question of, you know, this personality does better in competition or that personality. Ultimately, it's going to come down </s><s>[INST] to your skills and your confidence will be a reflection of your accumulation of skills. So what was this journey like to a person who lost to a person who dominated the competition? [/INST] Yeah. First things first, we had to say, okay, you've got an obvious weakness, leg lock defense. So every day in the gym, he would be taught, okay, this is where you put your feet, this is where you position your knees, you point your knee this way, not this way. Um, uh, then he would have to start sparring situations in leg locks and have to work his way out. Um, initially these were like heartbreaking sessions for him where, I mean, I've got to give that kid full credit. Like he just worked his way through it patiently, </s><s>[INST] dealt with frustration, initial failures, and just said, I'm going to get better. Can we just look on that? So what's the experience of those early training sessions like from an athlete perspective? It's daunting. Are you basically dealing with the rational [/INST] thought that you're not going to ever be good? Yeah. You're wondering if I even got what it takes. Like, you know, think about it. He's an established player. He's been an IBJF competition. I believe he's a brown belt world champion in the gi. Um, and suddenly a group of kids that he's never even seen before repeatedly submitting them with leg locks in the gym. And he's like, man, this, this is terrible. Like a year from now, I'm supposed to fight ADCC against people like Craig Jones, like some of the best leg lockers in the world. Like it must've been hard, you know? Um, but he just stayed in there and no one worked harder than him. He just was in the gym three times a day studying every day. And unlike so many other people, every time he was showing something, he consciously and deliberately tried to enact it, even at the price of initial failure. Do you advise that that's a good way to go? It's the only way to go. Like if you, if you can't wrap your head around the idea that trying to acquire new skills will create a temporary time where your effectiveness diminishes as you're trying to bring on new skills, you're never going to make it. Cause you'll always stay at whatever skill set you are. The whole mental trick is to, is to imbue this idea of delayed gratification, that you have to accept that when I bring on new moves, my overall effectiveness will diminish. But there's the belief that in time as my skill performance increases, it will increase over time, but it will come at the price of initial frustration and failure. And John Carla made that mental switch early on in his time in Austin and to his credit, just stuck through within a very short period of time, it came very hard to leg lock. And even the best leg lockers in the room had a hard time with them. And that was the first step in confidence. He said, okay, I'm not getting finished quickly anymore. Then he had to bring in a whole new set of upper body submissions. He neglected upper body submissions. But he could never finish from the back and then suddenly in the gym he started finishing from the back. And then as gym performance against the lesser students increased. and you bump them up against better students. And then this goes on all the way up to the best guys in the room. And in a relatively short period of time, there were significant increases in performance and success begets success and this kept going. We started to get a hint of his developing confidence in local competitions. I remember seeing John Carlo compete in a local fight to win competition against a tough Brazilian kid who John Carlo just came out, dominated, and finished with a leg lock. Now, that was interesting. You're the guy that used to get finished by leg locks and now you're beating tough opponents with leg locks. And that was an important psychological step for John Carlo Badoni. And with each little step as we went further and further, then he got to ADCC trials and had one of the great performances. I believe he submitted all of his opponents in ADCC trials and put on a fantastic display of grappling. Shockingly, no one paid attention to it. They were just like, oh, yeah, he won. And John Carlo flew into ADCC completely under the radar. They just saw him as, oh, he's the guy that won American trials and no one really paid much attention. In his first match, he took on a great Brazilian champion, Isaki, and won in dominant fashion. He was about to strangle him with just a few seconds left on the clock. And I remember John Carlo being furious at the end of the match, thinking I was so close to finishing, he wanted a perfect finish. Up on 0.6 to nothing. Yeah. And still chasing. He could have just coasted at this point, but he wanted to finish every one of his opponents. And he got very, very close, but not quite there. And then in his next match, he had to take on the defending gold medalist from the previous ADCC. This was the guy who was the favorite to win. So you have a relatively unknown John Carlo </s><s>[INST] fighting the man who defeated Craig Jones in the previous ADCC. ADCC. Do you remember what stood out to you about this match? It is, and yes, it's good wrestling, it's good everything. Yes. [/INST] Because all around grandpa. He's got, by judicious standards, he's a very strong wrestler. So our intention was to match his wrestling with John Cardo's judo skills. So you'll see, if we could perhaps go back, you'll see the first takedown on drag and took him down with a simple drag and pick. So that was John Carlos' first takedown. That was more wrestling oriented and good for his confidence to see that he could score a nice takedown. But Mateus Denise is very, very good at standing up from bottom position. If we just go back just a step. Okay. Now here we have something interesting. Mateus comes up from bottom, seizes a leg, and John Carlo defends the wrestling move and then goes immediately into, with a, it's kind of a mix of Sasai and </s><s>[INST] Diyashirai. That was beautiful. I didn't even notice that. That's really nice. Look at that. From defending a single, threatening a guillotine. [/INST] One of the big themes of our ADCC camp was that most of our opponents now are getting very strong in hand fighting, but they are not strong in foot fighting. And so we put a very heavy emphasis on foot sweeping attacks. You remember Gordon Ryan took down Andre Galvin with a foot sweep. And here you have John Carlo using the same technique, not from the back, but from the front. And an overhook, probably in post, catches the foot midair. And that's just a beautiful, beautiful takedown. That's beautiful Judo. And then, uh, and then later on the match, you will use a Kosurigake, another classical Judo takedown, to get top position. Now at one point, John Carlo was in trouble. He got his back exposed with this situation. Good. Double leg to a knee pick. So he has to expose his back in order to avoid giving up takedown points. But here's the defensive training that we work on is coming through. He's defensively sound, shuts out the hook, prevents the score, keeps his body at the right angle to prevent a power half nelson. Staying calm. Now he's got to turn this around. </s><s>[INST] It's one of the hardest things to do in grappling. How dangerous is it to put your, [/INST] in this position, to put your hands on the ground? It's ordinarily, it could be dangerous because your opponent could switch to an armbar. Whoops. And there's the body lock. Now there's some controversy here, but you can clearly see it. Uh, the hands were locked, so it shouldn't really be as controversial as people are saying. Now watch for the right leg Kosurigake here, </s><s>[INST] pulls in the hips, exposes the leg, boom, and down. Beautiful Kosurigake. Also probably a lesson that, [/INST] uh, complaining to a ref does not protect you from a good takedown. Yeah. That's why they're saying combat sports, defend yourself at all times. Um, but now the, the great advantage of, of judo takedowns over wrestling leg tackles is they confer upper body connection after the takedown, which is very, very important for ADCC. That's why we put such a heavy emphasis on them. And, um, now John Carlos is absolutely in the driver's seat. He just scored four points for that takedown. So he's well ahead at this point against the established favorite for the entire weight division. So now Mateus, Denise has to start taking some risks. He's staring down the barrel of defeat and there's not that much time left. And that's what's going to set up the, the pressure. Now it's tactical pressure. It's not physical pressure. It's tactical. Mateus has to turn away and that's going to create back exposure. The most dangerous kind of exposure in ADCC. Oh, there it is. Mount to back and, uh, John Carlos capitalizes. Mateus is smart. He's keeping on his side so that less than 75% of his back is on the floor to deny the, uh, the mountain </s><s>[INST] points, but that comes at a price and that price is back exposure. So the thing we talked about with Gordon, the, the circumstance of fate, which is he has a lot of grueling, tough matches and still chooses to do absolute. So what's in, he seems to just power through all of it. What, how much of it, how much of the calculation is how to survive the cardio, the grueling cardio [/INST] aspect of all of this. That's a, it's a great question. And the truth of the matter is you can't afford to pace yourself because if you say, I'm going to hold myself back for this match </s><s>[INST] and expectation of the others, you could end up losing your first match. So he, so he didn't [/INST] pace himself at all or any of the matches. You have to just be in good shape. And that's what the, the campus for now. It's mostly physical. You've, that's what the campus for like he's </s><s>[INST] felt more pressure in the training room than he felt in any of his matches, but still sort of attacking. Look at this. That was a beautiful transition from back or from whatever the heck that position was, uh, it right from, uh, from looking for the back transitioning here. What [/INST] the heck is this transition? That was engaging in a very good tactic, which is to get most of his back off the ground to deny them the mount points. So as back exposure starts, okay. He turns in threatening an unlock. Yeah. But you can see what's happening here is the left foot goes under. It's going to create a beautiful triangle entry. Threatening an unlock. Yeah. Right foot penetrates through underneath the neck and now he's locking a triangle, a Senkaku, but not just any triangle, a triangle with the, the figure four locked on the back of the opponent's head, which makes any kind of stacking defense very, very difficult. It makes it very, very hard for an opponent to pull away and creates a much tighter strangle than average. And as a result, it's a quick submission. </s><s>[INST] Beautifully done. Still chasing the submission. Yes. Uh, with a minute left up on points. Against the former champion. Against the former champion. That's match number two. [/INST] Now that's the first day. That's Saturday. So John Carla goes to sleep that night thinking, okay, I just beat a world champion in my first match and almost submitted him. And I just submitted the defending champion. So of course he wakes up on Sunday morning feeling pretty damn good. Now there's an interesting twist here. His opponent is a, uh, talented young Irishman who won European trials, I believe almost entirely with leg locks and almost all of his major attacks in the tournament so far being leg locks. Now bear in mind that a year ago, John Carla was losing to local blue belt competitors via leg lock. So in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, how's he going to </s><s>[INST] handle this? Will the leg lock training kick in and you'll see the result. Uh, John Carla is, [/INST] as on top passing an open guard so you can see his legs away from any attacks. Yes. His opponent, Owen from Ireland is employing the same tactics that we made famous years ago. The idea of sitting to butterfly guard and looking to entangle the legs, he's kind of playing that game. So, um, so John Carla is obviously used to this from training the gym. So he's doing a good job of preventing entanglement, controlling his opponent's shoelaces and moving out to an angle which limits his opponent's entry options. So hands on the shoelaces and angles, uh, is a good defense here. It's an initial defense. Now his opponent wants to get underneath the center of gravity. So John Carla wants to get outside the, uh, the line of his legs. At some point your opponent's going to entangle. If he's determined to entangle, at some point it's going to happen. So John Carla decides, okay, let's let it happen and let's see where his feet go and let's see how disciplined he is with his feet. And the opponent is inverted. Uh, uh, here does a good job getting behind John Carla's knee. So now they're fully locked in. So John Carla moves away to protect the heel, rotates out, controls his shoelace. Now at this point, the Irishman's starting to lose discipline with his own foot position. Okay. He's so focused on his own attack that he's starting to get a little sloppy with his own foot position. You see, he's assuming, oh, I'm the guy who's attacking. So my opponent will be afraid of my leg locks and is starting to make some small </s><s>[INST] technical errors that John Carla will be able to take advantage of. So he's threatening the sort [/INST] of the north-south passer, like, uh, he's not putting too much pressure on the pass because we're still pretty early in the match and he's not ready to score yet. So here again, he turns away his heel. Now his opponent's starting to get more and more cavalier with his foot positioning to a point where now it's just downright sloppy. So John Carla sees it, </s><s>[INST] identifies it, locks up a wrist to wrist toe hold and breaks his foot. Where's the [/INST] dumb question? Where's the control here? How is he? The control comes from his opponent. The entanglement is his opponent. His opponent is holding his own body in place with his own legs. </s><s>[INST] So he's the root of his own problem here. So he got sloppy. Well done. Well done. A little smile [/INST] from John Carla was very nice. The reason for that smile, you can probably guess is because a year ago, this would have been a disaster. And now instead it's a guaranteed ticket to the finals and either a gold or a silver medal. And so you can see in that compressed moment, that's the look of a man who's recognized just how much progress he's made and what was once </s><s>[INST] a weakness in roughly 10 months was the time it took. And so he faces Lucas Hulk by Bosa [/INST] in the final here. Now these two have a history. Hulk has beaten John Carla many times. And so for John Carla, it's a question of, okay, here I'm matched up against a guy who's repeatedly beaten me. How am I going to turn this around now? We talked earlier about confidence. If confidence was just a mental thing, John Carla never would have won this fight. When you've lost all those times to an athlete, words aren't going to change anything. But you can see right from the start, when they get into the handfight, John Carla is much more tactically adept with his handfighting. He's doing a good job of controlling his opponent's hands, preventing any kind of prolonged pressure on the head. And Hulk gets a sense here in which he realizes he's fighting a very different person. </s><s>[INST] And this goes a long time. Again, another super grueling match. Wrestling that eventually leads [/INST] to a back take care, back triangle, body triangle. Here you can see the same tactics utilized by Gordon Ryan. Back control based around the body triangle, many attempts to try and entrap his opponent's arm and take away those defensive arms. The main difference here is, again, you have an athlete with a very powerful, compact neck. So neck penetration is difficult. </s><s>[INST] And so John Carla will switch to a palm to palm strangle instead of the conventional figure four. And now there's eight minutes left. So all the time in the world, is it only just a matter [/INST] of time at this point in situations like this? Yeah. John Carla has a massive tactical lead in points. There's literally no way he could lose this match at this point. Even if his opponent did get out of here and take him down, John Carla would still be a hit on points. So the question now is not whether John Carla will get the gold medal, but whether John Carla will get it by submission. And there it is. There's the penetration of the neck and he can't get the figure four. So he opts for palm to palm instead, and there's the submission. Now, what a journey. John Carla's relatively unemotional man, but you can see there's emotion. That's not fake. That's genuine. And that's the emotions of a man who 10 months ago couldn't have done that. And then 10 months later, by dent of his own hard work and dedication and his ability to actively attack his weaknesses and turn them into strengths and then develop an ability to finish, that was a truly, truly </s><s>[INST] remarkable achievement. Let me ask you about Gary Tonin. So he is one of the, at least in my opinion, greatest submission grapplers of all time. There's a lot of components to that, but he lost in his [/INST] first match. Not only did Gary lose, he lost to the bottom seed of his division. And that in itself says something pretty remarkable about what's happening in ADCC. How there's a sense in which the days of the invited athletes being far superior to the trials winners are over. It was a clear signal that anyone who makes it to ADCC can beat the best people. Sam McNally is a very talented submission grappler from Ireland. He specializes mostly in armbars, but he has a good positional game as well. He has a very modern look to his jiu-jitsu and he did a fantastic job against Gary Tonin. I think technically Gary perhaps got a little far away from his true nature in grappling, which is relentless submission attack. And perhaps I should be given blame for this because I put such a heavy emphasis on the training camp overall on positional pressure. And I feel that worked very well for all of the athletes except Gary Tonin. </s><s>[INST] Interesting. So you have to acknowledge in the nature of the athlete part, [/INST] acknowledge in the nature of the athlete part. And I think I was coaching so hard to the new people in the room on positional pressure that I neglected Gary's innate ability to the fact that he does best when he attacks exclusively by submission. So I think if anyone should get blame for the failure here, it should </s><s>[INST] be me. There's another comment as maybe I'm over valuing that sort of just the physical aspect of [/INST] this, but it seemed like Gary looks skinny. Is the weight cut? Yeah, this is the first time he ever went down to the 66 kilos. So it wasn't critical. There's other guys who are bigger than </s><s>[INST] him who made the weight. But the weight cut, if you can just comment on, does that ever play a part in the athletes, the physical and the mental aspect of the weight cut? It is a thing in wrestling that could break even some of the toughest minds. [/INST] Yeah, but no, it wasn't a weight cut that would break someone like Gary Tonin. It's more physical. You train lighter and weaker. You tend to get injured more in camp because you're lighter. We have a team now after the breakout that's mostly comprised of people over 215 pounds. So there's very few small people left in the gym. Most of the smaller athletes went to the B team. So Gary's been struggling a little bit with training partners. But here, I think the chief problem was that Gary focused perhaps a little too much on the positional tactical game and got away from his true gift, which is relentless hunting for submissions. And as I said, I think the person to blame for that is me because I had to put so much emphasis on the positional game for the developing athletes that I didn't pay enough </s><s>[INST] attention to Gary's unique attributes. I mentioned I posted some stuff on Reddit, so there's a relevant question here. Somebody on Reddit asked, Gordon has said, and perhaps you have said as well, that there are two types of judicial practitioners, ones who move themselves around like Marcel Garcia, and ones that control the motion of their opponents like Gordon. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and how do those different approaches apply [/INST] depending on which weight class you're in? That's a great set of questions. Yes, I'm the person who promulgates this idea that there's two broad ways you can go on judicial. You can either focus on promoting your own movement to create opportunity or by restricting the other person's movement. If you're a slower, less athletic opponent, then you should definitely focus on the idea of restricting the other fellow's movement. That's how slow, unathletic people win in jiu-jitsu. If you're quick with the ability to change direction, stand up quickly, go down quickly, and move like a leopard, then you're almost always better off generating movement in order to create opportunity. One is based more on movement as the source of opportunity. One is based more upon pressure as the source of opportunity. You'll get someone like Gary Tonin or the Ruritola brothers. Their game is based around the idea of promoting their own movement to create opportunity. Whereas someone like Gordon Ryan or Hodger Gracie is about restricting movement and using that pressure to create reactive opportunity. Those are the two paths you can take in jiu-jitsu because our team now has become mostly associated with people over 200 pounds and because most of them will begin as I took the more high percentage approach of, okay, let's focus primarily on controlling the other fellow's movement. But Gary's a unique </s><s>[INST] individual and I feel like I let him down by not giving him special attention in regards to what he does. The fact that you've mentioned this now like four times in the span of a few minutes, just I love that, that all of this stuff weighs so heavy on you. And he is a truly special person, it is truly interesting to see what is the nature of a particular athlete that if you highlight makes [/INST] them shine. Let's go to the part where Gary actually loses the match. Okay, so the match is pretty innocuous at this point. The guy does a good job of turning into the arm and Gary gets caught reaching from the knees. Okay, that's always a mistake. And the guy does it, I think does a great job capitalizing on it. Now there's limited time left on the clock. This guy realizes, oh, this is my opportunity, he's got good flexibility and he gets the hook, so he just frees it right then. So there's a minute and a half left. And typically in ADCC, if you get the back, you score three points. So this is a huge score. For Gary to win here, it's got to be by submission. Okay, so Gary's made one mistake. Now, this talented young fellow from Ireland does a great job, not only of getting the back, but he really attacks well from the back. And let's </s><s>[INST] look at the depth of Gary Toner's defensive acumen here. And we should say leading up to this, [/INST] his defense is incredible. He keeps escaping. Our nickname for Gary is the Slippery Salmon, because it's like trying to hold a goddamn salmon on the road bank, trying to hold on to this kid. So he gets into a position which looks absolutely hopeless here. It gets worse. This is already </s><s>[INST] bad, but trying to hold on to this kid. It's one of the most fun things to watch about Gary's [/INST] skill in the escapes. It's incredible. It's beautiful to watch. So the guy has an excellent opportunity to transition off here into a rare triangle, which is one of the hardest things in the world to get out of. And from here, if this was anyone but Gary Toner, I think it would have been Curtin's. But you see, Gary just extends, keeps his arm at just the right angle to pop out and gets out. So now Gary's like, oh crap, I'm going to lose to this fucking guy. So he's got a minute left to do something. So he goes back into his submission mode. He goes back to who Gary Toner is and immediately goes into leg lock action. Now the young man from Ireland realizes, hey, I'm going to win this match against the number one seed. So Gary goes into the legs, gets to one of his favorite techniques, the heel hook. Now Gary has a brutal heel hook as heck, and gets real pressure on the kid's leg. That's hard to watch. Yeah, but to his credit, the kid is smart. He's like, you know what, let me take some pain. Is there a weakness to that? </s><s>[INST] Let me take some pain. Is there a weakness to that? Like, well, he turned his hips. [/INST] Yeah, it's unclear from the video whether Gary's arm slipped up with this considerable breaking pressure. Oh, it slipped. Yeah, it's unclear. But sometimes the heel can slip because something's popped. So it's unclear what happened there. There seems to be a reaction from the part of the opponent. It definitely did some damage. So Gary goes back for a second one. Oh no. </s><s>[INST] And again, you get that same kind of pressure. Yeah, it's unclear. But sometimes the heel [/INST] hook, so Gary goes back for a second one. Oh no. Oh no. Oh right. I like the Irish kid's reaction though. He's just like, you know what, let me eat this because I'm going to win this match and I'm going to be a legend for beating Gary Toner. So I admired his internal fortitude. But now Gary knows he's lost it. So there's a sensor in which you see how close it gets in these situations, how little there is between winner and loser. And sometimes you just get these heartbreaking situations where someone who ordinarily you would probably do very well against and you make one mistake and it's an unrewarding, uncompromising sport. One mistake </s><s>[INST] can be fatal. In class, you talked about escapes or arm locks and applies here as well. So you were teaching arm lock escapes and I think choke escapes. And the question came up, when should an athlete not tap and risk their arm being broken? And you quoted George Patton as of course you would, that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other bastard die for his country. So what's your view on when to tap and when not to tap in [/INST] competition? First off, in training, you should be tapping very early because you're not getting paid to fight in the gym. You're getting paid to fight on stage. So be a professional in the gym, tap early, tap fast. That way you'll last a lot longer. In competition, things are a little different. We always have to specify what is the situation. If you're in the first round of ADCC, your first match, you get caught, I would always expect my students to tap because if you get your leg broken or your arm broken in the first round, you still got three more matches before you get </s><s>[INST] to the final. There is a escape clause there as if you're a guy from Ireland and you're fighting [/INST] the number one seed. There is always an escape clause. Let it snap. Yeah, let it go. But your students, yes. Yeah, I would expect them to tap. I also think that if you're in a stranglehold, </s><s>[INST] it doesn't make a lot of sense and not tapping because you're going to pass out. Your students, [/INST] yes. It's like you said in chess, it's impolite to make the guy take it through to its conclusion. So I don't see any heroism in just letting yourself pass out. Now, things change when you get into a final. If you're in a final and you're ahead on points and you're willing to, most people at that point are going to be willing to let something break in order to win a gold medal. At that point, I leave it up to the student. It's a deeply personal decision. I would never say to a student, I expect you to let your body break in order to win a gold medal. I think my students are more than mature enough to make up their own minds. I would be angry if they let their bodies break in a meaningless fashion in some random tournament or in a first round match where there's no way you could have go on to the second, third, and fourth matches with a broken limb. But in a gold medal match in ADCC, I would leave the decision to them, a spontaneous decision in the moment. I would be confident that I had prepared them to do their very best to defend themselves. But what ultimately they do is their decision. Winning ADCC is for a grip or at least life changing. You're a world champion forever and no one can ever take that moment away from you. So I would understand if they took a decision to take damage. Hopefully it will never come to that because I do a good job of preparing people to get out of situations that he saw with Gary Turner. He was in a dreadful situation and got out within five seconds. Gary's been in arm locks that looked like even I was in the corner going like, oh my God, what is happening here? And still got out. So it comes down to training preparation. But if they did make that decision, I would understand provided it was a situation that would make their lives better and they made a calculation. It's not an emotional thing. Now, sometimes you get emotional, you fight a guy you just don't like, and you just don't want to tap to him. Then things get a little more interesting. Then again, it's a personal decision. If you hate someone so much that you literally can't even conceive of yourself submitting to them, probably best you don't get into matches with them in the first place. But if it should happen, again, it comes down to the student. I teach technique, not morals. So I let people make their own decisions on that. My thing is, look, don't get injured because if you're injured, you can't train. You can't train, you can't get better. </s><s>[INST] So stay away from injury as much as you can. So one of the other incredible stories here is, as you mentioned, Nicholas Morigali, one of the incredible ghee athletes in Jiu-Jitsu world, not ever having done no ghee training or competition and so on in a period of a year. [/INST] Actually, it's significantly less than a year. Nicholas only came about six months, I believe, before ADCC. As a phone call came from Gordon, he was like, okay, Nicholas wants to come down and train, wants to move to Austin. So he came down. It was funny. I remember the first day Nicholas came in, Nicholas Morigali, as you can see, he's like this tall, handsome Brazilian guy with a great personality and a wonderful smile. A super nice guy. So he comes in, he sits down on the mat and we're all kind of looking at the new guy and introducing ourselves. And I look at him like, buddy, what the fuck are you doing here? And he's like, what do you mean? And I go like, look at you, you're like tall and good looking, you should be a fucking model, not a Jiu-Jitsu guy. Look at us, we're all fucked up with horrible bodies and bad personalities. You're like a happy, good looking guy, you should be surrounded by supermodels. What are you doing Jiu-Jitsu for? And he just laughed and he started training with us. So he came in. Now, historically, he has been an athlete who always pulled guard. In Jiu-Jitsu parlance for your viewers, in Jiu-Jitsu, you have the option of sitting down to the ground. Jiu-Jitsu was mostly performed on the ground. And many athletes take advantage of this, they just come out and sit to the ground position and completely forego takedowns. Nicholas did this his entire career. Jiu-Jitsu also has practiced both gi and no gi. Nicholas was a shining light in the gi side of Jiu-Jitsu. He was one of the great champions of his era, but he had not only never competed without a gi, he'd never even trained without a gi. So there's significant differences between the two. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also some very significant differences. We're talking about a sport where even small differences can make a difference between a guy who gets the gold medal versus a guy who loses his first match. </s><s>[INST] It doesn't take a lot. So this was a very, very tall order. A lot of his attacks involve the gi [/INST] from guard. Absolutely. He's in a very dangerous attack. He doesn't just wear the gi, he really uses the gi. Like 90% of what he's based around is based around a combination of cross and straight collar controls with the control of the sleeve cuff. And so he really actively uses the gi. So when it came off, his first training decisions were like, he looked like a fish out of water. In addition, he had no experience of leg locking. So one of the most significant parts of the modern game, he just had nothing. Plus the wrestling. He had literally zero wrestling, which is half of ADCC is based around this. So ADCC is like six months away and he has to get ready for the gi world championships. Nicholas had won many accolades in gi judas, but he had never won the open weight division of gi worlds. So he's like, the first day he's there, he's like, John, I want to be the first guy to win gi open weight and ADCC open weight in the same year. I'm like, yeah. Now in my mind, I'm thinking like, yeah, that's never going to happen. You're </s><s>[INST] fucking weirdo. Do you think there was a degree to which he actually believed that? [/INST] A degree? He thought it was like a certainty. So he's looking at me like, yeah, I'm going to do this. So I'm like, well, Nicholas, this is very laudable and I approve of your confidence. But this is a difficult goal you've set yourself, but perhaps maybe like 2024 would be a more realistic. </s><s>[INST] He's like, no, no, I'm going to do it. In all seriousness, it is incredible that Nicholas Meragali had the guts to set such a nearly impossible goal. So what do you learn from this experience of setting a goal that most people would say is just unachievable and him [/INST] actually almost doing it, doing it? On the surface, this is absolutely crazy. When he mentioned the goal to me, I was, as I said, just looking at him and almost like disbelief. I didn't want to show it on my face. And yet he came within inches of actually doing it. He won his first ever gold in the open weight with a gi and got to the finals and lost a tight decision in the finals to take a silver medal. He wanted two golds, he got a gold and a silver. And there's a sense in which the sheer audaciousness of the goal set seemed ludicrous when it first happened. This is insanity. And yet he came at it with a plan. He came at it with his characteristic passion and hard work and came within inches of doing so. And there's a sense in which you could look at it as, oh, he had a plan and it failed. And yet, of course, no one in their right mind would look at that. They would say he set an audacious goal so high that it seemed impossible and it pulled his entire performance up to a level where even failure creates something truly </s><s>[INST] memorable. Do you encourage athletes or do you not get in their way when they set such a goal? Maybe even just forget athletes, human nature. [/INST] Yeah, that's a great question. There's a sense in which you don't want to make people delusional that said, but I do believe that if people are sufficiently embedded in a given project, if they committed to it to a certain degree, then you can skimp on many things in life, but don't skimp on your goals. Because the bigger your goals, the bigger your achievements will be. And even failure, as we saw in the case of Nicholas Miragali, I almost frown to use the word failure because if this is failure, give me more of it. Falling slightly short of what would otherwise be a perfect year. Even that still creates such a massive uptick in your performance that it's absolutely the right way to go. But there is a danger to this where people aren't committed and simply aren't working from a framework where they can realistically achieve these things, then it descends into delusion and that direction goes towards madness. You can't have that. So there has to be some kind of reality check here where you have to be physically and mentally capable to some degree of moving towards these goals. A random blue belt can't make audacious goals like that. It's just ludicrous. But with that in mind, if you're committed and there's a sense in which this is a definite possibility, set your goals high. Make big demands. Yes, there'll be times of frustration. There'll be more failure in your lives than otherwise. But even your failures will be </s><s>[INST] something great, something memorable. But in the near term, you would be hard pressed to find any data that justifies that goal. Because in his case, he probably wasn't very good at no [/INST] key even in the training room. So it's like, where do you look for even inklings of hope? We saw an incremental progress with each successive competition that he was in. His first competition, he looked good, but not great. Second competition, a little better. Third competition, took on one of the legends of American grappling and won decisively. So there </s><s>[INST] was a sense in which it was becoming more realistic with each outing. So now putting that inspiring philosophy aside, what was the actual plan on how to make it happen? [/INST] Leg locks. First, same thing with John Carla. First, you got to learn how to defend a leg lock. So initially, just as John Carla struggled, he struggled. Then he had to learn not just takedowns, but just how to set up a take. He had to learn basics like stance and motion and how to fight with the hands, et cetera, et cetera. So he had to learn from the ground up. And then he had to improve. He always had a very good triangle, always had very good armbar. Those were his two strengths coming into the no-key training. And those translate pretty well between gi and no-key. But he had no guillotine. His strangles from the back were, he has great collar strangles from the back, but he really, really struggled with finishing people from the back. So he's learning all this. And then he's like, well, now I got to get ready for the gi. So we had to switch his training to gi training. And that took out a couple of months. Then he went back briefly to Brazil and got a terrible rib injury right before the world championships and came back like more or less unable to move. So the world championships is a week away and he's like, John, I can't move. So I'm like, what are you going to do? He's like, I'm going to compete. So I'm like, are you sure? So we fly to California. He goes out and competes. His first opponent is literally the biggest man who competes in jiu-jitsu. This man is almost like 400 pounds. Nicholas has got completely broken ribs. We're taping up his ribs backstage before he goes out to compete. He beats everyone by submission and wins for the first time the open weight, a title he had never won before. He steps off the mat, looks at me and goes, well, I got the first of them. He wanted gi open weight and now ADCC. And now he can barely move. He's still gone through two days of brutal competition and his ribs are completely screwed up. It takes a week off to try and get his ribs somewhere back in order and then begins light training, building up to ADCC. We start putting him in no-gi competition. He fights two opponents of good quality, but not like world beating quality. And then as his game starts improving, we're getting closer and closer. He's starting to develop a sense where he can wrestle confidently on his feet. He's no longer easy to leg lock at all and he's starting to leg lock people. And he's starting to get his very strong guard passing, which was based mostly around pant grips and the gi to adapt to leg no-gi grips. In addition, he's starting to develop strong chest to chest positioning, which was never really part of his game, a pressure top game. And so things are looking good. But he's matched against Rafael Lovato, one of the great competitors of ADCC, and wins a convincing victory featuring a lot of takedowns and a lot of pressure passing. And people were just absolutely shocked. I remember the staff of Flo Grappling coming and going like, who is this guy? He's literally transformed. He's like a different person. So he goes into the world championships. In his weight division, he was matched with a fellow Brazilian in the first match. And they had an absolute barn burning battle, where at one point Nicholas was picked up and slammed and then ended up winning by Kimura, beautiful Kimura. Then he took on the man who ultimately wins ADCC open weight division and defeats him. Again, grueling matches. Yeah, tough, tough match. Now, Yuri Samoy at that stage was two-time gold medalist in ADCC. Nicholas wins a very, very close match against him, and then fights Craig Jones, who's one of the best leg lockers in the world. So I think most people were expecting Nicholas to get leg locked very easily by Craig. Nicholas showed the degree to which he had improved his leg lock defense in a six-month period. Craig never really got close to the legs and ended up becoming a takedown battle. It could have gone either way. Craig, I thought, did a really good job of pacing himself. Both athletes were very tired, but Nicholas was a head on points. And then Craig hit one last takedown, which sat Nicholas down to a hip. Didn't score, but it was the most aggressive takedown of that last period. And so Nicholas got </s><s>[INST] the nod and won a narrow victory. Yeah, Craig commented afterwards. He said that I really wanted the submission. And he said Nicholas seemed to really want the submission, but it ended up being a grueling match. It took everything, exhaustion-wise, everything he had. [/INST] It was a tough, tough match. And they were very well matched. Once they figured out they couldn't submit each other, it came down to their wrestling ability. Neither one of them is a wrestling specialist, but they're both competent in wrestling. And it became physically very, very tough. Then Nicholas went on to win the bronze medal in his weight division. So the next day, when we get called for the open weight, obviously John Carla won a gold medal. Everyone agreed that he should go into open weight. Did John Carla agree? Of course. Because he didn't have an easy format. </s><s>[INST] You don't order people until you ask them. I guess the question I'm asking is how do you find [/INST] the strength to then go on to absolute after? Because you've done a 14-week training camp where every day was just as intense as any ADCC day. So you're used to it at that point. But he had very, very long, tough matches. But he's used to it. He's a good athlete. So Nicholas and John Carla went out, and John Carla had a spectacular submission victory against his first opponent. Nicholas had some firework matches, and one of the toughest opponents he came up against was the brilliant Ty Ruatolo. They had an absolute barn burner. It was a very, very close match. Ty had had an incredible first two matches. He'd beaten Pedro Mourinho by submission, and he'd beaten the great Felipe Pena in a very narrow match. Very, very tight. Felipe lost on a guard pull. But Felipe is considerably bigger and stronger than Ty. So for Ty to win that match, even by a guard pull, was deeply impressive. It was an action </s><s>[INST] pack match that went back and forth. Very, very impressive. But he had very, very long, tough matches. That's just a small tangent. Both Ruatolo brothers had an incredible performance. What do you think makes them so good if you were to analyze their game outside of you [/INST] and just this specific match? Yeah, absolutely. There's a range of factors. One is that they started the sport very, very young. They're probably the first example in American grappling of American students who started at age four or five. Most people, when I began jiu-jitsu, started jiu-jitsu as adults. I was 28 years old when I had my first lesson as a white belt. So in time, people got a little younger. For example, Nikki Ryan started when I think when he was 12. But the Ruatolo started when they were literally children. They had excellent coaching going all the way up through into their teenage years. So they had the advantage of starting the way so many successful athletes do as children and going up through adulthood with strong coaching all along the way. Excellent parental support. So they had a great history where their youth didn't show off just how long they'd been in the sport. So you're dealing with a kid who's 19 years old, but he's been grappling for 15 years. And what counts is not your age, but your mat age and quality. Now, they were very young in years, but they were very old in mat age. </s><s>[INST] But there's a lot of athletes that have now, as you correctly said, have spent from a very early age on the mat, but still these particular ones stand out. [/INST] It's interesting. No, there's a lot more to it than that. This is just the first setting the scene. But what really makes them stand out is that they've mastered this idea of covering up and improving initial weaknesses while building upon strengths. When the rutolas first encountered my students, they were relatively easy to leg lock because none of their training experience had prepared them for that. Now, they were young at that time, I believe like 16 or 17. And it was an obvious problem for them. They both got heel hooked by my youngsters also, Nikki Ryan and Ethan Kralenstein. And you could clearly see that they identified their current weakness and made prodigious steps to improve upon it to a point now where they're winning championships with their own leg locks. I love the fact that even as teenagers, they had the maturity to say, okay, here's an obvious weakness, let's get around this, let's turn it into a strength. I love the way they did that. Focus on the weakness and let that guide you to the thing you're working on. But they also, they covered up their weaknesses, but they also understood what are our actual strengths. Now, physically, both of the brothers have extraordinary reach for their height. They both have extraordinarily long arms for their height. That means that variations of karikatame, in particular dasas, anacondas are going to be much easier for them and their weight division than for most people. These are all jokes. Yes, strangleholds. So they specialize in those. They adapted a game based around movement, which forces opponents, not with physical pressure, but with tactical pressure into positions which expose them to those specialized strangleholds that they use. Traditionally, when we looked at the rheumatoids when they were young, we saw that there was a disparity between their top game and their bottom game. They were generally much better in top position than they were in bottom position. Again, they saw that as a potential weakness and they turned it around using again, their unique long limbs relative to their height, and they make use of a buggy strangle. I'm not sure why it's referred to as a buggy strangle, but basically, it's a variation of karikatame using the legs done from disadvantageous positions on bottom. They both make brilliant use of that, not so much as a strangle weapon. Occasionally, they'll strangle some of it, but they mostly use it to create pressure to make people back off. As a result, they overcame the disparity between their top game and their bottom game. Now, their bottom game is part of their offense and they're very, very successful from there. Again, you had that really impressive sense in which they identified their weaknesses and leg locks in bottom position, turned it around, and made it into strengths. At the same time, they identified, okay, what are our physical gifts and how can we maximize their use? They created a program of initiating movement that created tactical rather than physical pressure to set up their best strangle holds. I deeply admire what they've done. Those two young men </s><s>[INST] have a huge future ahead of them. Here, one of the brothers faces in the absolute Nicholas Mergali, [/INST] and bear in mind, Ty has just fought two very tough matches against guys bigger and stronger than himself. He's coming into a third match against a third guy who's also bigger than he is. So, hats off to Ty fighting open weight against three monsters in a row. Now, Ty and Cade, one of their best attributes is they are two of the best scramblers in the sport of jiu-jitsu. So, whenever you go to shoot on the legs with them, there's a danger of running straight into a dark strangle hold. They're very competent at counter-attacking single legs with dark strangles. It's also very hard to control them after a takedown. They do a very good job of springing back up to the feet. So, I told Nicholas to favor upper body judo-based takedowns rather than wrestling takedowns. And you see here a fine example of Nicholas' gathering skill in Uchimata, </s><s>[INST] one of the great throws of judo. Set up with a, there's a bit of a foot sweep. [/INST] The nice thing is he starts off with what it looks like. It's actually a two-direction Uchimata. He threatens Uchigari to the back. That's the throw that throws your opponent to the back. His opponent pushes into him, then he changes direction with a support foot and takes him over with Uchimata. As we said earlier, the great advantage of judo over wrestling is that because there's upper body connection during the throw and after the throw, it's much harder for an opponent to scramble away from you. And even Tai Ryutol is one of the best scramblers in the sport. He has to stop scrambling here and just go back to guard position and enable </s><s>[INST] Nicholas to hold top position. I mean, some of it is also the surprise. There is something less [/INST] understandable about judo techniques because there's less data, it feels like. The Ryutolers </s><s>[INST] also have a good Uchimata. I think they're very familiar with it. How often do you think are they in the receiving end of an Uchimata? That's a good point. I just feel like they have more data in terms of defending. I mean, of course, there is fundamentals to the Uchimata that make it [/INST] difficult to scramble around. This is a good example of someone who literally didn't have a single takedown six months ago. Now he's throwing one of the toughest guys in the sport with one of the more difficult throws of judo. You're a judo man. You'll back me up and say, Uchimata is not an easy throw to learn. It takes some time. You're hopping on one foot with both </s><s>[INST] of your body weight. It's very counterintuitive. It's one of the more difficult throws. Let go of your understanding of takedowns, of maybe wrestling style takedowns or more intuitive kind of takedowns to understand it. There's many throws like this, Uchigari is like this, Uchimata is like this. It's weird. What? I'm on one foot. I'm hopping around. This makes no sense, but it works. Foot sweeps are also weird in that way. They're a little bit more intuitive, but to get very good at foot sweeps, you have to understand timing, weight distribution. It's a dynamic thing that's [/INST] weird. I always laugh when I talk to Nicholas and I say, I try to teach him a single leg, which is traditionally, a high single leg is one of the easier takedowns to perform in terms of mechanical difficulty. Nicholas always struggles with it. Then I teach him one of the more difficult </s><s>[INST] takedowns, Uchimata, and he does it flawlessly. You never know. Certain things get attached. I mean, you see this in Judo. It's kind of interesting to see there's classes of takedowns and certain people just gravitate in their philosophical intuitive understanding of body mechanics or something like this. It's like Senagi versus Uchimata. You very clearly see there's some people that understand, they like to have both their feet planted on the ground, and there's some people that are okay with this one foot on the ground and the other one is doing something else. I don't know what that... What is that? I don't know. It's what makes you fall in love with one field versus another. Can you speak to that? You released a new instructional on takedowns and standing skills for jiu-jitsu just at a high level. Using Nicholas as an example, [/INST] what are some key ideas about takedowns? Okay, first, whenever people talk about standing position in jiu-jitsu, they always say, oh, I need to learn some takedowns. But it's never a question of just learning the takedowns. It's learning the prerequisites to the takedowns. The takedowns are more or less like an afterthought. You've got to begin with stance, motion, the ability to engage in grip and contact, get your opponent out of balance, and then comes the takedowns. The takedowns in jiu-jitsu are mostly divided into lower body takedowns, tackles to the legs, single legs, double legs, to a lesser degree, high crouch in jiu-jitsu, and then upper body takedowns, which are mostly judo-derived. Nicholas had to start more or less at the ground. We didn't even know how to come out and make grips or hold a stance. He had to </s><s>[INST] learn every element of it. The fact he was able to do so in six months was just incredible. [/INST] Can you comment on the upward posture that seems to work for jiu-jitsu? Matches in jiu-jitsu are much longer than the matches in wrestling. In addition, there are many kinds of submission threat which are not there in wrestling, so the stance has to be significantly changed. In wrestling, they favor generally a very low crouch because the vast majority of attacks are tackles to the legs. Anyone who stands upright in wrestling tends to get heavily punished by being taken down immediately with a leg tackle. In jiu-jitsu, the matches are so much longer, it would be difficult in a 40-minute match, for example, to maintain a bento or crouch. You'd be exhausted. There are also problems associated with submission holds. There are many forms of submission hold, guillotine, dasa, etc., where if your head comes down too low, you become a little vulnerable to this. The stances in jiu-jitsu competition tend to be much more upright, more like judo and greco. Right off the bat, you see the stance is different. The motion tends to be much slower and more evenly paced because you've got to be able to do this for long periods of time. The number of fakes per minute, the number of shots attempted per minute is usually much lower. These are obvious differences. The biggest difference, however, has nothing to do with that. It has to do with tactics. In jiu-jitsu, the scores will be judged by what happens after the takedown. In the case of ADCC, you can take someone down in ways that would score in both wrestling and judo and possibly even win the match in the case of judo, and it would score zero in ADCC because of the nature of the rules. The whole idea of ADCC scoring is to demonstrate control after the takedown. That's what happens in the critical three seconds after the takedown that creates the score. In judo and in wrestling, the emphasis is placed on the takedown itself. In jiu-jitsu, the emphasis is placed on the aftermath of the takedown. That's where the score is allocated. That can be a period of up to three seconds. Three seconds doesn't sound like much, but in a scramble after a takedown, three seconds as a fucking eternity. It goes on forever. And so you will see many examples of takedowns that, as I said, would score very well in Judo and wrestling, but don't score at all on ADCC. And so the whole skill becomes packaging the standing position in terms of the takedowns themselves, but in particular preparing the athletes for that critical three seconds after the takedown. That's why many people who are very fine wrestlers struggle in ADCC. They </s><s>[INST] take people down by wrestling metric all the time, but don't score under ADCC rules. What makes GSB so good at takedowns? I've gotten chance to even recently watch him do takedowns. Within this framework that you're teaching, what stands out to you about him that you draw [/INST] lessons from, draw lessons from. Yeah, that's another example of someone who's performing takedowns in a rule set radically different from wrestling. Just as the ADCC rule set is so different from conventional wrestling rule sets, that the whole manner in which you approach takedowns and even your understanding of takedowns has to be quite strongly modified. So to an MMA, it's even more extreme. People always think, oh, this guy's a good wrestler. He should be able to get takedowns in MMA easily. What you find is that the wrestling skills in MMA enable you to finish takedowns. If you get in on your opponent and get to the legs or the waist or what have you, your wrestling skill will enable you to finish the takedown. But getting to the takedown is massively different in the context of MMA than it is in wrestling. The entire stance is different. The entire set of distancing is different. There's the idea of positioning within a cage, like how close you are to the perimeter of the cage changes radically how you approach the takedown. The setups are literally night and day different. The setups are almost entirely composed of striking setups rather than grappling setups. So the act of getting to the takedown is like a completely different sport. Now, George studied wrestling and used to go to wrestling practice twice a week. In Canada, they do freestyle wrestling. They don't use the American college style of wrestling. Now, George's main emphasis in wrestling training was takedowns. Obviously, the whole ground element of freestyle wrestling was of no interest to him, like learning how to put people's back on the ground and turn them with leg laces and gut wrenches was of no value in MMA. So he devoted almost all of his study to just the act of taking someone down. So as in pure wrestling, George is not bad. I think he'd be a very competitive match, even for a highly ranked American freestyle wrestler. Obviously, he would lose easily on the ground because he's not used to the part here. He'd probably be leg laced or gut wrenched quite easily by a skilled opponent. But in just a pure takedown battle, he'd be a competitive training partner for even a good wrestler. But in actual MMA competition, he could take down even the most highly credentialed wrestlers and in some cases make it look almost effortless. And that came from his unification of striking skill with wrestling. So he used wrestling skills to finish the takedown and his karate and kickboxing pedigree to enter into the takedown. Now, when he initiated the study of this, this was at a time when MMA was pretty much in its infancy. And he was one of the most impressive people I've ever seen in this regard. He was a true innovator. He innovated this specialized area of striking to a takedown to a greater degree </s><s>[INST] than anyone else I'm aware of. Well, let me ask you about this innovation because you're one of the most innovative people in martial arts. There's several major categories of innovation that you have led. Obviously, leg locks, body lock, now wrestling. What's your process of innovation? So seeing the problems in a particular system, the gaps, how do you identify them and how [/INST] do you figure out systems of how to fill those gaps? First thing I look for is what are the current weaknesses in a given combat sport? So in the case of jiu-jitsu, it was very obvious that historically, jiu-jitsu had always been weak in leg locking. Jiu-jitsu had always been weak in standing position overall. And these were things that needed to be sorted out immediately. In its infancy, mixed martial arts was divided between grapplers and strikers. And most of the emphasis in early mixed martial arts was on the idea of specialists in a given domain forcing the fight into their domain. And that my early work with George St. Pierre convinced me that the right approach wasn't increased specialization and learning to force your athlete into that area of specialization at the expense of the opponent, but rather the real battles of the future would be won and lost, not with techniques per se, specialized techniques, but rather the integration of techniques and the overlap between the various grappling and striking skills. So that someone who was an inferior grappler would have just enough grappling skills to be able to hold a grappler off and then defeat them with striking. And a striker who was, if you went to fight someone who's superior to you in striking, you would have just enough striking skill to be able to hold them at bay and then enter into grappling. This went further and further until it got clear that there were whole areas of the sport that you need to change your entire mindset about them. So that people went into early MMA thinking in terms of grappler and striker. What I started to think is in terms of, okay, there are four fundamental skill areas of mixed martial arts. There is shoot boxing, which is the integration of takedowns and striking. There is clinch boxing, which is the integration of upper body clinch skills combined with striking, there is fence boxing, which the two athletes are locked up with each other on the fence, and they have to integrate takedown defense and striking skills. and there was grapple boxing, which is the merging of ground grappling with striking. When you broke MMA down into those four categories, you saw that each one of those four domains transcends the specialized martial arts that form their components. For example, in clinch boxing, you would incorporate things from judo, Greco-Roman freestyle, juditsu submissions, Muay Thai clenching techniques. But even if you took all five of those, the rule set that you're operating in required such extensive modification that the final product of clinch boxing transcended all five of its component martial arts and became its own autonomous skill needed to be worked autonomously. When we broke George's training down into those four areas, that's when real progress started to be made. That's when you started to see the integration of those four phases and the striking and grappling within each of them </s><s>[INST] was where victory was being won and lost. Once you reframe how you see a particular combat sport, [/INST] then you could start doing these detailed development of ideas that actually fit. There's a sense in which it had to start with a paradigm shift and then a research program began after that. You don't start with research, you started with a paradigm shift and then went to </s><s>[INST] research. Well, let me ask you, I got a chance to hang out with you and Hanzo Gracie at ADCC. He keeps messaging me saying he's going to call me and not calling me. I think aside from being hilarious, charismatic, and handsome, he is also and wise for his young age. He's also one of the greatest coaches and athletes of all time in martial arts. So let me ask, what have you learned [/INST] about life from Hanzo Gracie? The degree of difficulty that Hanzo must have encountered, he never talked to us about it, but I figured this out as the years went by. The degree of difficulty that he must have experienced when he first came to Manhattan and started teaching, it must have just been incredible. You've got to remember, Hanzo came from Brazil training with the best people in the world at that time. Hickson, all the Machado's, all of them were located around Gracie Baja and that Rio de Janeiro set. They all knew each other and they all trained together. They had internal problems, of course, but they all knew each other well and knew each other's games. So all of them had beautiful and highly developed jiu-jitsu. So all Hanzo knew from childhood on was perfect, beautiful jiu-jitsu and communicating with other people who also knew perfect, beautiful jiu-jitsu. Then he comes to New York, where he has to teach in a language that he at that stage barely spoke to a bunch of fucking morons who didn't even, on my first day in jiu-jitsu, they had to explain to me the difference between the mount and the guard. Because as far as I was concerned, yeah, you're on top. It's the same thing. They're like, no, no, no. Mounted is different from guard. And I'm like, no, it's not. Like you're on top of the guy. You just hit him. So he has to argue with you about this. Imagine going from training with Hickson Gracie to having to tell some moron that guard is different from mount. And we were so primitive back then. He went from the best training culture in the world to literally the worst. Just a bunch of guys in their mid-20s who knew nothing about the ground. Well, luckily he's known for his </s><s>[INST] patience. He has to argue with you. He's known for his patience. Out of that, he molded one of the greatest gyms ever in New York. [/INST] But out of that, yeah. Yes. He did a fantastic job. And most of it was based around the idea that he gave us complete freedom. We came in, we trained all day, and I started teaching beginner's classes. And then some of his senior students, Ricardo Meda, Rodrigo Gracie, and Matt Serra, opened their own schools around the tri-state area. So they left. There was a vacuum of teachers, and he asked me to start teaching. I taught for many, many years there. And he always gave us complete freedom. His only thing was to say, okay, do whatever you want. Just make sure it's effective. Prove to me it's effective. And that's the best research program you can ever get. Show me proof. And so many times, especially in those days in Judaism, there were so many things that were just off limits. You couldn't study Legos. You couldn't do this. You couldn't do that. This kind of game was for cowards. This is the only kind of game we accept. And Hensler was never like that. He was just like, okay, just do what you want. Prove to me it works. And if you give people that simple structure, you give them some time, some ingenuity, a lot of things can happen. </s><s>[INST] Prove to me it's effective. I got to ask you, and by the way, he'll come on this podcast, and I do feel like it's a little bit like writing a dragon or a bull of some kind. It'll be a fun journey. I can't, at least from my perspective, having interacted with having met him, it's hard not to smile. Easily one of the most charismatic people in Judaism. It's kind of fun to watch. Humans can be like this too. It's just the love that radiates from him is incredible. I got to ask you, this is from Reddit. There's a few legends that come from that gym, but people on Reddit kept asking me about some guy named Boris. Apparently you coached him at Hensos, and he was a legend. And he was terrifyingly good. What made him a legend? Who's this Boris [/INST] character? Easily traumatic people in Judaism. Boris is one of my early students. I think he was either my first or second black belt. Boris came from Long Island. He was a wrestler. He was of Russian Jewish descent and highly intelligent. Now he was short of stature, but very powerfully built and compact. Very nice, polite young man, but also slightly eccentric, which I always liked about him. He would always come dressed with glasses on, and he would leave the gym dressed, to use the American phrase, a complete nerd with his pocket protector. Now he was heavily muscled, but he would dress in such a way that he didn't appear so when he left. And we always used to laugh. Imagine some guy tried to mug Boris. They would see him with his nerdy glasses on and his pocket protector. And they would literally run into one of the most formidable human beings in the entire New York area. Boris started training due to, I believe, in Long Island. And then when he got a tech job in Manhattan, started training with us in a morning class. Now these were relatively early days in Manhattan in my teaching career. He and a group of others, a very small group, used to train early in the morning around 6am before work. And Boris was a legend in those days. Now a very young George St. Pierre came to train with us at that time, and he would come in at 6am to do his morning class. And he was one of the main training partners for Boris. And Boris being a wrestler, he used to generally prefer top position. And I would always encourage George to play bottom position. I'd say, you've got to get good in bottom position. You never know. I know you're good at takedowns, but one day someone's going to put you down. So you've got to work bottom position. And Boris had a very strong guard passing. I remember one of George's happiest days is finally after two years, one day he swept Boris, got on top, and finished him. And I remember that was one of his biggest thrills in all of his training career. That was the last time that ever happened. Boris was a very formidable man for that time. The funny thing about Boris is every time we would have a conversation, he would say, I'm only going to do this sport until I'm 40 years old. And then I'm going to stop. And I would say, why? Why not be like a lifelong martial artist? You know, you got so good. You're good at jiu-jitsu. You've got great skills. You've worked hard. Why not just keep going? He's like, it's ridiculous for a man to train after 40. There's no need. And you never gave any reason for this. It was just ridiculous. So one day he, now this is the guy who came in literally every day, 6am every day. One day he comes in and he comes up to be at the end of the training and he goes, Hey, John, I just turned 40. So I won't be seeing you again. And I thought he's joking. So I'm like, I'll see you tomorrow, Boris. He's like, no, you won't. And walks off. How gangster is that. And then he never came back. I've never seen Boris since. He came in, was one of the best crappers I ever saw. And that's it, buddy. I'm out. And so there's no one to walk away. </s><s>[INST] There's no one to walk away. Yeah. I also got to hang out. Got to meet, hang out with Ali, Abdul Aziz. He's a Hanzo Gracie black belt, fourth degree judo black belt, and friend and manager of Khabib Nurmagomedov who's coming down to Austin soon. We'll do a podcast. Hopefully you get on the mat and have a bit of brainstorm. Also, he's a manager and friend of many other amazing fighters. I really love the guy. The loyalty, the fact that he looks for loyalty and has that close inner circle and integrity and character and people. I really liked him. I connected him really quickly. [/INST] But any fun stories about Ali? Did you train together? Yes. He trained for many years in the basement of my classes. His story is one of the most unlikely stories. If someone wrote a movie plot about his life, it's absurd. We throw it out the door in a second and yet it all happened. You're absolutely correct. From the unlikeliest possible starts created a situation where he's, I think it's incontestable now to say he's the most successful manager in mixed martial arts history. He has more champions under his care than anyone else I'm aware of. </s><s>[INST] And respected and influential, so on all dimensions. [/INST] Many people aren't aware of the fact that he was actually a very good judo player. Jidoka first. Yes. He had very good no-gi judo. He had an excellent Haraigoshi, a very good Tanya Toshi. And he threw many people who were highly credentialed wrestlers back in the basement, back in the glory days of MMA training. He was a good example of a guy who had very, very good judo hips and often used it to counter wrestling. And was a fine demonstrator of the idea that when judo is adapted to no-gi gripping, it can provide a very effective foil to many of the standard forms of wrestling attack. And he would often use Uchimada to counter leg tackles and do some very, very spectacular fashion. </s><s>[INST] And well, what do you think about Kabib? Is there something from just watching him or is there something you can imagine if he comes down to the gym that you might learn from the [/INST] way he moves, the way he approaches wrestling? Oh, absolutely. He's one of the greatest combat athletes of all time. </s><s>[INST] If you can't learn from someone like that, there's something wrong with you. So he emphasizes control. [/INST] Yes, he does. And he's absolutely a master of exerting control. The amount of grappling control he was able to put over some of the most difficult people in the world to control was truly astounding. He beat people from every style. He beat wrestlers, he beat judos, he beat kickboxes, and he controlled them all in more or less the same way. He has a very underrated bottom game. People think, oh, he's just about stifling top control. But people forget he was taken down on several occasions and ended up in bottom position. And he showed excellent guard work from bottom. He was able to get into submission holds readily on opponents from bottom position. He's got an excellent bottom game. People say, oh, he's just a positional guy. No, he's not. He's got great submissions. The application of his triangle from both top and bottom was top class. He had a sharp arm lock from bottom position. Excellent Kimora. If you look at his Kimora finishes in MMA, they were technically very, very well set. Excellent breaking mechanics. He's a very, very fine grappler in both submission grappling and MMA grappling. I think we'd probably learn a ton from moving around with him. </s><s>[INST] Is it possible to learn something about him or about Haja Gracie or about Gordon by watching them or rolling around them for a little bit? So maybe Haja and Khabibas are good examples because they're able to do seemingly very basic things on everybody and dominate them with that. I think Gordon is as well, but Gordon seems to have more preference and range of what he's able to do. It's almost miraculous how much Haja can do by just the same exact thing on everybody. Is it possible to understand why Haja and Khabibas were so good at very basic positions? [/INST] Or do you have to feel it or is it just something that's developed over years and years and years? I think for most people, for the vast majority of people, it would have to be explained to them. For a smaller group of people, if they felt it, they could try to replicate it. And there are a few people who could look at it and have enough knowledge and say, okay, I can see what he's doing. For example, Haja could probably look at video footage of Khabibas grappling and say, okay, I understand what he's doing. But the average person would probably go over the hits. </s><s>[INST] You sometimes think of these great athletes. Maybe they're too narrow. You might imagine they're so focused on a particular thing they don't develop in interesting ways. He's just a sweetheart. He's a wonderful person to be around. He's also visiting Austin. First of all, I'm honored just drinking a little bit too much in Vegas with Haja Gracie and talking about love and relationships and life and death and all those philosophical topics as one does in Vegas. I'm a little bit too much to drink. Anyway, after ADCC, it was beautiful. And on top of that, hanging out with Rogan many days for UFC and ADCC. One thing, I don't know if you got any chance to hang out with Joe when he plays pool. So I spent a lot of time with him when he was playing pool, like recently on that trip to Vegas. And there's something Zen-like about, first of all, just watching him. But I've never seen the focus the guys got on the game for hours, just deep focus, unshakable focus. That was so interesting to watch that this human being, he's a celebrity, he does all kinds of stuff that he's able to allocate as close to 100% of his mind as I can imagine to a particular task and nothing can distract him. That was really inspiring that [/INST] you could still do that on any task. Pool is a game of physics. That should be your domain. </s><s>[INST] Oh, it is. But that wasn't just physics. Yeah, I would think you understand the game, you understand the physics of it. You also understand the fun of it, because there's friends and laughter and so on. I would be distracted by that a little bit. I wouldn't be as- Not Joe. He literally, as the closer you get to the table, the more everything zooms in. The jokes, there's funny things. You can't get his attention on anything. It's that focus. I don't know, that really stuck with, stayed with me. Those memes, I want to find somebody that looks at me the way X looks at Y, I want to find somebody that looks at me the way Joe looks at a pool queue or the focus there. I want to find something in my life, I mean, I want to attain the level little focus he has for pool on a task that I care about. And that, that focus like fuck everything else. This is now it's time to do work. I don't know, that was really inspiring. [/INST] I haven't seen that kind of focus </s><s>[INST] it's time for prolonged periods of times on a task. You should just see some time. The guy, the guy is, I mean, part of this just being competitive with himself. It's the hatred of imperfection, all of those kinds of elements, but embodied in a singular focus. I had no idea he didn't even play pool. It's interesting. We should watch him. He won't, I think it could be [/INST] one of his greatest obsessions. I had no idea he didn't even play pool. </s><s>[INST] It's interesting. Like there was deep, see I thought pool is for like degenerates, like gamblers and like hustlers, right? Like the same way I see poker, but like I saw like a wolf slash like elite athlete in Joe. I said, I didn't know this. I don't know much about pool. I didn't know that you could have that level of focus while still drunk at your ass, but extremely focused. It was beautiful to see, I don't know, inspiring for me as a person who highly values singular focus on a task. Let me ask you from a perspective of a hobbyist, what major practical changes can a hobbyist who works regular nine to five job do to improve their jiu-jitsu? So they're in a gym. There's a lot of excellent gyms throughout the United States. What can they do to improve their jiu-jitsu? About the way they think about jiu-jitsu, about the way they approach, their actual schedule, those kinds of things. [/INST] That's a great question. Okay. The less training time you've got, the more you want to maximize its effect. So a question becomes, okay, if I'm training, say, twice a week, and sometimes even once a week, what can I do to make sure that that two hour period is used maximally? The less training time you've got, the more the onus is on you to have a plan before you walk in the door. If you go in to saying, I'm gonna roll around and see what happens, or I'll just follow what the instructor says, you'll get a certain amount out of each class, but it will never be what it could have been. Go in with a plan and enact it. Many people go in with a plan and don't follow it. Let's say, for example, we start with a program that goes like this. First, try to create the most honest assessment of yourself as a jiu-jitsu player. It's tough to make an honest assessment of yourself because you never actually get to see your game. So what I would recommend is to start by videotaping yourself, </s><s>[INST] inspiring with your peers. That's fascinating, because we don't even have that level of introspection, ability to reflect of what we actually look like [/INST] in grappling, in grappling. Start with an assessment of yourself, and the most honest one comes not from you, comes from the camera. Have a look at what you see, and start to say, okay, many of the weaknesses in your game are made much more apparent by looking from the outside in, rather than feeling them during the heat of a match. Identify four or five of the biggest weaknesses that you see, and start actively attacking those weaknesses. Ask yourself, let's say, for example, in the course of watching the videotape of yourself, you observe yourself losing three triangles. You attempted three triangle strangle holds, you failed all three. You could start by saying, okay, let me ask myself, who are the people I look up to the most with regards a triangle strangle? Who are the guys who have the best triangle strangles out there? Then ask yourselves of those people, who are the ones whose body type and personality most closely mirrors my own? And that would be a good example of taking a problem in your game, contrasting it with elite level performance in people whose body type roughly matches your own, and then try to take lessons you learn by observing the best people and bringing them into your own game in one specific area. As time goes by and you do this with more and more elements of your game, you will undoubtedly improve. You will also have to make sure that you take time during class to actively work on these things. Now, sometimes in class, you don't get a choice. The instructor sometimes says, okay, today we're working this, this, and this, but there's always time after and before class where you can do your own drilling, where you can make your own inquiries. And during sparring, there's no rigorous control over what you do. You can try to work the game into the area of focus. So for example, if you want to work on front triangles, it would be wise for you to do most of your sparring from bottom guard positions. That'll give you the most opportunity. And in this sense, it always begins with an accurate assessment of your current skill level. You gotta start there. Then, I always encourage people to use video camera to make the most- Honest. Honest to appraise what you can because your own mind is not dishonest, but it's understandably inaccurate. You tend to feel things rather than see them when you're performing jiu-jitsu. Then, make a program for yourself based around what you see as excellence. Look at the people in the sport who's in the area you want to work on, people who are renowned for skill in that area. If possible, narrow it down to people who have excellence in that area and their body type corresponds with your own. And then try to take lessons learned from observing the excellence in these elite athletes and bring elements of them into your game. Never try to bring an elite athlete's entire game to your game. That will create an inauthentic game on your part, which will always be a poor copy of what you're trying to watch. Rather, bring very specific areas and skills that you see and import them from different people until eventually you find something for yourself. Experiment a lot, okay? Everyone's different. And so, don't see the video research as the final word. See video research the way a writer will see a muse as someone who initiates discussion, opens inquiries for your own research. The most powerful moments you will have on the mat come from making discoveries for yourself, not being told what to do, not observing someone else doing something, but self-discoveries. Those are the ones that will last inside you. So, use video research not as the definitive answer to your problems, but as initiating research for yourself on the mat. And as time goes by and you do this more and more often in more and more areas of the sport, </s><s>[INST] I promise you, you'll improve. Yeah, and I guess when you have the plan, have a plan that carries across many training sessions. So, I just remember, I know this is perhaps dumb, but I saw in my own game early on, a lot of growth by self-identifying a problem and coming up by myself with a solution by watching in that case Marcel Garcia. I just thought my butterfly guard was very weak. And so I thought, okay, what's the solution here? I thought maybe this X-guard thing, double X-guard. Okay, so I watched a bunch of video, let me try to work on this. And then all I did, just this is self, but when I could get time by myself, meaning like not instructor guided classes, but in training, I would just, everything I would put myself into butterfly and X-guard. That's good. Just let go, like don't progress, sweep and figure out a way to get swept, to get right back to it, back to it and everything. It was annoying probably to train with me because that's all I did and that's all I thought about. Right, but you learned quickly. Yeah, I learned it's the most progress I've ever made. Now, you could say that X-guard wasn't the right solution for me, that maybe that wasn't the weakest point for me to work on. If I were to look back now, it's still to this day, sadly, the obvious weakest point for me is escapes from much worse positions. That should be worked on. That should have been worked on from the very beginning. That's still, today, if I were to say, what's the weakest thing that I should work on, absolutely, is even with one day a week is escapes. But yeah, a lot of that has to do with just caring, like focusing on the one thing over and over and over and over across training sessions. Now, I'd also, I would write down on a sheet of paper the number of times I would get an X-guard sweep and I would set a rule that I have to get whatever it was, like 500 sweeps a week. So I have to, and then like, the closer you get to the end of the week, [/INST] the more you like just pick up a small white pick up. 500 in a week? Yeah, something like that. </s><s>[INST] Your training pot just must suck, bro. No, no, you start with good ones and then you get more and more desperate. You start like finding the kid, right, that you can just sweep over and over. But like that number, for me, the number is, for some reason, like I set a goal to pull off a technique. It enforced, like we're staying with this for a while. This is a journey we're doing. And then for some reason, for me, that helped me focus the study to understand the deep complexities of this thing, that at least for me, other people, like nobody at the gym was doing X-Guard or anything of that. So you have to kind of figure everything out yourself. I'm sure there's better ways to do that, but at least that focus helps from a hobbyist perspective. What's the day, what's the perfect day in the life of John Donner? If we're talking about a basic non-ADCC, now you're, I'm really grateful that you sit down with me on a Sunday, late at night, but it all starts again for you tomorrow. So three training sessions a day. What time do you wake up? Do you do like a mantra in the morning? Do you listen to like some Zen music? What do you eat in the morning? [/INST] What's the perfect day look like? When you say a small animal, to the gods. I usually, when you say a perfect day, what I think you really mean is an average day. Perfectly productive average day. Yeah. So let's take Monday morning for you watching this video. We're filming this late on a Sunday night. So after this, I'll drive home. We just had ADCC. It was two weeks ago. It was one of the longest training camps. It was the longest training camp I've ever run because of the fact we had to go through </s><s>[INST] three different matches for Gordon Ryan leading up to it. When you say- Sacrifice a small animal? Yeah. [/INST] Productive- So immediately after ADCC, I cut the training down for the competitive athletes to one session per day for the first week after ADCC to give their bodies a bit of a break. I still have to teach two classes in addition to that, two recreational classes. So my teaching schedule went down to three classes per day. After one week of relative break, we go back to two competition classes per day plus two recreational classes, plus an MMA class four. Gary Tonin and his friends. The first class requires me to get up around 6 a.m. to drive. I'm still a student driver, so I'm not very good at driving. So I have to spend a little extra time to get to the destination on time. </s><s>[INST] Just for the record, John pulled in a red Lamborghini with a, no. [/INST] You're the worst liar I've ever met. My day typically starts pretty early. I don't eat in the morning. I just get up and go to work. And I teach through the day. My last class finishes usually around 8 p.m. During that time, I coached jiu-jitsu. I try to find time for one Instagram post per day, which usually describes some basic theme of jiu-jitsu in most cases, unless we've just had a competition, in which case I'll talk about upcoming competitions or what happens after a competition. But most of them just express a simple jiu-jitsu theme. I try to do a short workout for myself. And then I go home. At the end of the day, I always start by asking myself, what do my students need from me tomorrow? Based on what I've seen today, what do the recreational students need and what do the competitive students need? This is always done in the light of what are the upcoming competitions. </s><s>[INST] But throughout the day, you're doing a lot of really in-depth classes. So how do you either prepare for them or think through them as they're happening? [/INST] Think through the material that you're teaching. I can look at a class. I've been doing this a long time. So I can just look at a class and be like, okay, these guys need this, this, and this. And then I make reflections at the end of the day. Then I'll take care of things that we all do, talk to family, occasionally go out for dinner with friends, dates, things like that. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, Hanzo had to really harass you to drag you out and to hang out. And he was very convincing. [/INST] And food-wise, I eat once a day. He wants a day. At the end of the day, I usually stop off at a place like a supermarket, like Whole Foods or some equivalent </s><s>[INST] to that, and buy something simple and eat. The internet wants to know the details. Did you end up getting wifi for your apartment? [/INST] No, no, I'm still thinking about it. It's a... Yeah, what are the pros and cons? There's no cons, lots of pros, but I just don't put much importance to it, </s><s>[INST] things that are unimportant, I just ignore. Yeah, there's a lot of things in life that have a lot of pros, but they're lower on the priority list, why? Why, because the 5G already... 5G's got it covered. Do you watch much video? Do you watch video? [/INST] Do you watch footage? Video footage, quite often, yeah. Especially things from freestyle wrestling, record Roman wrestling, judo, and mixed martial arts. Also, subsidiary sports to mixed martial arts, </s><s>[INST] like boxing, Muay Thai and European kickboxing. Just for long-term idea generation. Yes. Like a plan to seed an idea. [/INST] Yeah, this is an interesting thing. How could this be incorporated in the context in which we use it, MMA or Judas? </s><s>[INST] Maybe it's immediately obvious, or it might become obvious in a few weeks or months. Is there some aspect to the way you approach life and training and martial arts that amends itself to minimalism? It seems like you live a pretty stoic life. [/INST] Or is that just a symptom of a focus of existence? My life wasn't always like this. I've gone through different phases in my life. I was a university student and teacher at university. I was a nightclub bouncer for more than a decade. I've been through different areas of life. I've seen most things, I've experienced a lot. I've traveled the world. At this point in my life, people think I live some kind of monk-like existence, but I have a private life. I like to go out and have fun like everyone else. I'm not some kind of monk who just sits under a waterfall </s><s>[INST] and meditates or anything crazy like that. Well, that's why. I'm currently going through that stage in my life, the monk-like existence. So I would be amiss not to ask you one of the most important questions one can possibly ask John Donohue, which is on the topic of animal combat. Who wins in a fight to the death? Or maybe in a sport competition setting, but let's go with a fight to the death. A grizzly bear, a silverback gorilla, and maybe a lion or a tiger, an African lion, or one of the flavors of tiger. I don't know who you think is more ferocious. What are the parameters to consider here? Maybe I can throw a few out and maybe you can give me some thoughts about how much of these parameters matter. So first of all, intelligence. I do believe the gorilla is the most intelligent. I've did research for this, as you could imagine. The expert advisor to this very podcast on this very topic is indeed Joe Rogan, yes. So in captivity, gorillas have been documented to show complex emotions, form family bonds, the ability to use tools, [/INST] and to be able to reason about the past and the future. </s><s>[INST] That's impressive. So that's something that, at least in captivity, the other animals have not been able to do. [/INST] They already sound much more advanced than I am. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, so that's intelligence. Then there is weight. I think that's something that you think of at first. The lion, let's go with the big ones. I took notes here, 550 pounds for big lion. [/INST] That's exceptionally large. Most male lions are around 450 pounds. What's an exceptional beast then? </s><s>[INST] Thank you. The tiger can be larger than that. Yeah, much larger. So we got the grizzly bear, which is probably the biggest of the bunch. The large ones get to 1,500 pounds. Correct me if some of this numbers. [/INST] I believe most grizzlies are around 1,000 pound mark. </s><s>[INST] It's a big, big, big beast. Well, I was looking up the biggest, but I didn't want to do the biggest ever. Just what are the big, like the top of the range [/INST] because there's always a range. You can put it in at roughly double </s><s>[INST] that of even a very big lion. Of course, how that weight is used is very important. So there's also things which I find as interesting as anaconda, which just, let me throw that in there because it's 200 pounds. What I really like about that is it's not just the weight, it's the form factor. And I think out of all of these, the anaconda is the most non-standard form factor. I totally agree with that. [/INST] Yeah, I totally agree with that. It's like the knight on the chessboard. </s><s>[INST] It comes in from a completely different angle. So we got that. We got also strength, which could be measured in ability to carry stuff. So this was surprising to me. I did look into this carefully. The grizzly bear at 1,000 or 1,500 pounds can only carry at most its body weight, which is a lot. But a gorilla can carry 10 times its body weight. A gorilla can lift over 2,000 kilograms, [/INST] so that's over 4,000 pounds. And gorillas themselves in adult male weighs in around 350 to 400. </s><s>[INST] 400 pounds, yes, 400 pounds, yes, yes. I like how in this particular place where I found this, 2,000 kilograms is as heavy as 30 average humans. So gorillas can carry 30 humans. So that's carrying strength. And then of course, bite force, because that's one of the weapons in question here. So now this is really surprising to me. The gorilla has won me over through this, by the way. Intelligence, I'm gonna sucker for intelligence, but the gorilla bite force is the highest of all these with 1,300 PSI, bear second with 1,200 PSI, a tiger is third, I think tiger and lion is third with 1,000 PSI, that's comparable. And a bear is anywhere from 900 to 1,000 PSI. They're close, but gorilla, I would not have expected, now gorilla is not a carnivore, but apparently it chews, it's mostly grassy stuff, [/INST] but like... It's difficult to explain why it has such a powerful bite. And it also, of course, has very large incisor teeth as well as chewing teeth. </s><s>[INST] So... Also, no neck. Yeah. [/INST] No neck. So... It's neck begins at the top of its head and just goes down to the shoulders, yeah. </s><s>[INST] Well, a lot of the way they use their teeth, all of these animals, the ultimate kill is to go for the neck, the bite on the neck. I don't know exactly why that is probably has to do... Why is that? Because it's a very strong, controlled position, not just that it's a... Is it the same as you just do you think? [/INST] Because they get to also choke them out? It's very much in line with Judas. Lions are famous for using strangulation as their primary method of killing. They get a hold of the neck </s><s>[INST] and hold it until the animal drops. Plus claws. I believe the tiger and the bear use their claws. And the lion too. The lion, right, and the lion. This is something that the gorilla doesn't do and a con now, at least it doesn't. Yeah, yeah. So what do you think? How do we think about this? Also there is, I'm just not letting you talk apparently, there's levels of aggression in terms of... [/INST] These are also in the lion too. </s><s>[INST] These are also very important considerations, yeah. [/INST] What is important to you? All the considerations you've raised are very important and we would have to address them if we're gonna go through this topic. First things first, whenever you go into a discussion of this kind, there's a kind of natural impression that we all have as to which one would be the most formidable. And it's important that you become rather skeptical of your first intuitions because they're often very misleading. Just as every boy thinks his father is the strongest man in the world. And then when he grows up into adulthood, he realizes his father was not even close to being the strongest man in the world. It's not because of anything other than inexperience. To a boy, his father seems overwhelmingly strong. He literally can't even imagine anyone else being stronger than that. So naively he thinks his father is the strongest man in the world. So too in our relationship with animals, when we look at a silverback gorilla, it just looks overwhelmingly strong to us, to a degree, which is almost absurd. You picture the greatest combat athletes that humanity has ever produced. Prime Mike Tyson, Gordon Ryan for grappling. They would literally be torn limb from limb by an angry gorilla. It wouldn't even be remotely competitive. And so there's a sense in which we look at them in awe because of what they could do to us. But that can be very misleading. And just as a boy looks at his father as the pinnacle of strength, you can't necessarily, from a position of inexperience and weakness, look at a given animal and say, oh, that must be the toughest animal in the animal kingdom. There's levels to this game. And I think we can point out that the gorilla ultimately would be pretty low on those levels, </s><s>[INST] to spot the fearsome appearance. To spot the fearsome appearance. I have some pushback to this analysis because the data, we don't have much data on this. [/INST] We actually have slightly more than you think, I believe. </s><s>[INST] Oh boy. Well, it's anecdotal. I feel like it's out of context. So these species don't use, this is not MMA. They don't do interspecies fighting often. [/INST] Yeah, but there are some ways of looking at this which can take this already interesting question and make it a lot more interesting. First, we've seen that intuitions aren't to be trusted. So if intuitions aren't to be trusted, well, what is to be trusted here? Well, I've always believed that there are three general elements that determine what level of success or failure anyone will experience in combat. And this is true both for individuals and for groups and even all the way up to nations. The first is what are your skills? The second is what are your physical and mental attributes? So it's skills, attributes. Those are the two primary ones. And there's the third, which is your experience in using those skills and attributes and real world scenarios. Okay, so whenever two, we'll start with two humans. When two humans get into a fight, ask yourself, what is their skill set? What are their physical and mental attributes? And what is their experience in using those in real world applications? And that will give you your first look at, okay, who's gonna be the more successful? Then in addition to those three general elements, there's also four more specific elements. What is the ability of the combatants to initiate combat? Because initiation is a big deal in fighting. The one who sees the enemy first and can create ambush conditions or initiate combat in an area or terrain which is favorable to them. This is huge in determining the outcome of battles. Second, not only is initiation important, but disengagement is important. A lot of battles don't go according to plan. And so your ability to disengage at will and break off and away from a battle is key to success. So initiation and disengagement are big. The third big element, what is your ability to end a fight? Okay, do you have an efficient method of ending conflict? Without that, the conflict could go on to a point where you no longer have the ability to continue it. If you have some succinct method of finishing, this is huge in combat and determining winner or loser. So both from a winning and a losing position? Yes, but if you don't have one, there's a much higher chance you'll lose. But if you have an ability to finish an opponent in the conflict reliably, this is very, very important in determining success or failure. And third, is your ability to endure a conflict longer than the person you're engaged in, okay, is engaged with, sorry. And so you get these four more specific elements now. Do you have the ability to initiate contact at will? Do you have the ability to break contact and disengage at will? Do you have the ability to finish your opponent efficiently? And do you have the ability to endure longer than your opponent does? If you have all four of those, that's huge for combat. Yes, that probably applies to human-on-human, military conflict, conflict. Even all the way up to nations. Also ask yourself, what are the most efficient methods of combat across the globe, across all species, all times, et cetera, et cetera? And you'll see that ultimately, they always come down to three things. The first is concentration of force. One of the most successful combat strategies of all time is the ability to take concentrated force against the zone of weakness in your opponent. And if you can do this, you will often break through to a point of vulnerability, attack that vulnerability in a way where your opponent cannot respond and cannot recover from that vulnerable point being broken. </s><s>[INST] Do a high amount of damage with precision. [/INST] Yes. So this is one of the great combat strategies across the animal kingdom, across human history, et cetera. The second would be ambush tactics. If you can ambush an opponent with the element of surprise, this is huge for success in combat. Almost all of the truly successful predators on this planet are ambush predators. The ability to get off to a good start in a way where opponents simply can't recover is huge for combat. </s><s>[INST] Are we allowing ambush in our discussion? [/INST] Because humans would call this cheating, perhaps. We'll talk about this. Yes, we would. And humans are pretty damn good at it, too. And then the third is endurance. Some species, some people, humans actually are pretty good at this, use endurance as a weapon and they simply wear an opponent down over time and break them internationally. This can be done economically through numbers, et cetera, et cetera, and you can destroy someone with sheer endurance. Yeah, a lot of wars throughout human history has been siege warfare. Yeah. So when you ask yourself, okay, which one of these animals are going to be the most successful in combat, ask yourself, well, there's these three elements which tend to determine success or failure in warfare, which animals exhibit these three principles the best? And we'll discuss this. But as far as generalities go, whenever you ask a question, who will win between A and B, ask yourself in terms of the light of what we've just discussed. What is their skill set? What are their attributes, both mental and physical? What is their experience in utilizing these in real world situations? And then the four more tactical elements, who gets to initiate contact? Can you break off contact at any given time? What is your endurance? </s><s>[INST] Can you keep going longer than your opponent does? So with skill set, I wonder if a big component of that of how much practice there is off the battlefield. Exactly. [/INST] So how much quote unquote, you would probably call it play, like play fighting. Play fighting. Let's start going through our animals, okay? When you look at the gorilla, you will see immediately that almost every experience a gorilla has of combat is theatrical. They don't engage in killing things. They scare rival males away in order to gain ownership of females. But there is almost no intra-species death in those conflicts. They're almost entirely theatrical. They have, for example, enormous canine teeth, but there is no record of them ever being used in combat. They appear to be used purely for intimidation purposes. There's a sense in which they have this tremendous appearance and they have tremendous potential. They really do have freakish levels of strength in many different ways. </s><s>[INST] And yet, the actual track record of using it is negligible. [/INST] So strange that evolution would develop such a powerful, a killing machine. Their bite force just makes no sense with regard to what they actually eat. I think, well, no, I think they have a- Even the presence of canines doesn't make a lot of sense. They're not going to use them. What are they? It comes down to this idea, their big thing is intimidation. </s><s>[INST] I think they have like- So there's a show, you want to fake it and [/INST] don't care if you ever make it because fake is good enough given that particular dynamic. Now let's contrast that with a male lion. Lions take on the biggest, meanest, toughest animals in the most competitive killing war on planet Earth, which is continental Africa. And they literally just take- I mean, occasionally they lose, but it's rare and they take out everything. Just in order to eat, they have to take down wildebeest, cape buffalo, cape buffalo are incredibly dangerous beasts just by themselves and yet lions regularly take them down. Occasionally, large numbers of lions will even swarm elephant and over 12 hour periods take down elephant on some occasions. This is all on video, this is not just speculation. </s><s>[INST] So they just have a level of combat experience, which no other animal can do, elephant can do. If I were to also project the Eastern European style of wrestling where they spend so many hours on the mat, they really value the number of hours on the mat at play from childhood. The lions probably, from my extensive watching videos on YouTube, they seem to play with each other for fun a lot and I guess with the gorilla- It helps, you see it. You don't interact, you don't play with other gorillas, you're more spending a lot more time around the opposite sex. Yeah. So yeah. [/INST] I mean, even lions, when they fight each other, the mortality rate when lions fight each other, male lions, for ownership of a pride is very, very high, much, much higher than I believe any other species on earth. They almost always fights to the death for the simple reason that when a male lion loses control over pride, the first act the new lion does is to kill the genetic offspring of the previous male lion. So when a lion fights another male lion, when one male lion fights another, it's not just to fight for his own life, it's a fight for his genetic offspring. failure means not only does he die, all his offspring dies. And so when they fight, the implications are so deep. It's like a fight for not just you, but your DNA. Most male lions have very short runs at the top. They get killed or run off by other lions. Now, this kind of harsh combat experience, no other animal can claim to have this. Between what they kill to eat and what they have to do to defend their stake and a pride, no other animal fights like that. They just bring a level of depth to combat which is unmatched in the animal kingdom. They also have some other elements too. They get the luxury because of their social nature of taking more risks than other animals. Like a tiger hunts alone. So if it gets injured, it's a big problem. It can die if it's injured. A lion can fight. Cape buffalo get injured and be covered by the other lions for food until it recovers. So it learns to take risks and it's not afraid to go out and fight very, very hard. Whereas other animals tend to shy away from risk because they're solitary, bears are solitary, tigers are solitary. So they learn from an early age not to take the big risk, </s><s>[INST] to go up to a certain level and stop. If I could push back, so that's aggression and risk taking. That's a plus for the lion. But to defend the gorilla, because you said skill set, they are of all of those, the only ones that use tools, I've shown to use tools. We didn't say anything about weapons. A gorilla could, in theory, pick up a rock. And it does have the force, the power and the capabilities to do a lot of damage. It doesn't have the practice. It doesn't have the experience. But don't you think if a gorilla's back is to the wall, so you put them in a situation of it is life and death. It doesn't have the practice for both, the lion and the gorilla. Don't you value intelligence at least a little bit here. There's a reason why humans, this is like evidence that humans have spread all across the world [/INST] while being kind of weak. Why? Okay, intelligence is a huge, huge asset. Humanity is positive proof that it is the most important asset, but it takes time in order to work its magic. It took humans 200,000 years to go from the bottom of the food chain to the top of the food chain. And gorillas have a lot of work to do before they get to that level. You said in theory gorillas could do this, but let's talk about practice now. Well, first off, there are many documented incidents of leopards killing gorillas. </s><s>[INST] There's anecdotal evidence. No, it's not anecdotal. There's a bunch of bitch ass gorillas walking around. We know this. [/INST] No, it's not anecdotal. We know this. We're asking. It's not anecdotal. It was observed by a group of people who specialized in observing gorillas over a 12 year period. They regularly found gorilla toes in leopard defecation. They also saw that over a certain period, some 36 gorillas had been killed and evidence strongly suggested leopard predation was the reason. Apparently leopards had figured out that there was a femoral artery in gorillas legs and were doing a move, which from the sounds of it sounds a lot like a baron bolo where they were spinning underneath gorillas and biting the femoral artery and then disengaging and watching them bleed out and die and then eating them. Now, a leopard is no match for a lion. The only defense it has to align is to run up a tree. It cannot engage </s><s>[INST] with a lion on anything close to equal terms. It may seem like we're going on tangents, but we're not just because of the foot, the attack of the artery on the foot. But is there weaknesses that the lion might have of that? [/INST] What I'm saying is I know it's not equivalent, but the fact that a leopard does so well against even fully grown male gorillas should make you rather suspicious of a gorilla's ability to fight a lion. Fair enough. Let's also go further into this. Let's talk about concentration of force. A lion has the quintessential concentration of force, which is fangs and claws. The gorilla is the exact opposite. It can't even make a fist. It can only throw open-handed slaps and grab things. So it has no ability with its arms to concentrate force in any kind of efficient way. When a lion or a tiger or a bear, for that matter, swings at you, it's got four claws from four to six inches long. That's like four blades going into you. They can retract their claws, so they're always sharp. </s><s>[INST] But the reach is significantly longer for the gorilla. The length of the- The ability to engage with speed on the part of the cats is far, far greater. And also mobility on two feet, the bipedal nature of a gorilla, the temporary bipedal. The bear has the same- [/INST] It has no impact. Humans are bipedal and lions kill 240 humans a year on average. </s><s>[INST] So, okay. Okay. Okay. What about bear? Now, bear is a difference for all the same things that a lion has. The claws, the teeth, has more weight, has more strength, has more power. [/INST] Now, bear, all this claws. Okay. Now, this is an interesting question. Okay. You get a fully grown North American grisly </s><s>[INST] versus an African lion. This is an interesting bet. I also have questions about polar bears. It's unclear to me because they're bigger in every way than a grisly, but they probably don't get the experience in the practice. [/INST] Yeah. Also, they have a much more limited set of animals that they prey upon. So, pretty sure grisly is going to be tough to beat as far as top bear goes. A grisly bear, I believe would be a formidable adversary, even for a male lion. They're literally twice their size. They have an ability to get away from strangleholds by standing up on two legs. So, the lion's primary method of killing, which is to strangle, would be very difficult for them to employ upon a bear. Interestingly, the bear's primary method of killing is to pin. It pins animals and then just slowly eats them while they're still alive. They have a rather barbaric means of killing. Lions are much more humane in the way they kill. What I see as the primary problem is that neither one would be able to kill the other. That finishing thing, the image. Yeah. They both fail on the finishing criteria. The lion would not be able to strangle a bear. Even in the best case scenario, where he got his teeth into the neck, the bear can stand up and presumably shake him off. The bear would never be able to pin a lion for long enough to better hold it down and slowly maul it over time the way it can with an elk or a caribou. So, I don't believe either would be able to finish the other. Those just become exhausted. It would come down to endurance. Now, that's where things get interesting because the bear is much more of an endurance hunter and the lion is much more of an ambush hunter. Lion's quick, explosive, much higher top speed. They've got a top speed of 45 to 50 miles an hour. A bear can do up to 35, but it can run for long periods at up to 25 miles an hour. Very long periods. They're mostly an endurance hunter. They just run elk and moose down until they're exhausted and then pin them and kill them. So, if it came down to endurance, it might go the way of the bear if they were caged up together. However, there is very strong evidence from both hunters and video, which shows on many occasions bears being chased off by cougar and wolverines. </s><s>[INST] Now, what's that? That's fear? What do you mean chased off? [/INST] If they fight over meat, and say, for example, the cougar has killed something and the bear wants the meat, the cougar will chase off the bear. Exactly. The bear's a risk averse. What I would say is this, the bears are very, very powerful in their domain, but they don't have the battle experience of a lion. They don't take on animals as tough as a cape buffalo. They don't take on an elephant. The toughest thing it would probably take on would probably be a bull moose. Bull moose is a formidable animal, but it's nothing like a cape buffalo, it's nothing like an elephant or a hippopotamus. What I would suggest is this. In the wild, I don't believe either one is capable of killing any other. But I do believe, based on video evidence of cougars and wolverines chasing off bears, that a lion would provide enough threat in a brief fight that a bear would back away. If you put them in a cage, however, where neither one could back away, I would slightly favor the bear based on the fact that neither one can kill each other, it would come down to endurance. Do you mean like an octagon? Yeah. That's got to be the next UFC, by the way. Bear versus lion. </s><s>[INST] The lion has chase-off. Risk aversion. But things change. Joe Rogan is a big fan of the idea of fighting in a stadium, for humans fighting in a stadium. So in a stadium, a bear... [/INST] I would slightly favor a bear. Now, I still think that the lion would have a chance, but I would favor the bear in a betting match. Some of the best evidence we have for animal versus animal fights come from the ancient Romans, who actually used to put animals in gladiatorial combat. They, for example, had several incidents where they wrote about tiger versus lion conflict. In one famous passage, they described a lion getting destroyed by a female tiger. So there's some evidence to suggest that they had more expertise of this than we do, because they had a big population of wild animals, which they just put to fight each other. Unfortunately, there's nothing that they wrote about bears versus lion. They did talk about bears versus bulls. They did talk about lions versus tigers, but they never mentioned bear versus lion. So we don't have any evidence for that. So we have to be a little bit more speculative. Now, given that bears do get chased off by cougar and cougar is weak compared with a male lion. Well, listen to you draw from that, by the way. I would suggest that... Is it about the bear or is it about the cougar? Yeah, it's more about the bear. In theory, a bear should be able to crush a cougar, but it seems to be the bear is just saying, this thing could hurt me. So I'm not going to risk injury and backs away. I think it would back away in the wild from a lion, but put him in a cage, and I slightly favor the grizzly based on endurance. </s><s>[INST] So the final conclusion, if you had to just bet everything you own. So you got, let's say, we got the octagon, we're bringing a bear. Now this is like legendary bear. Okay. Full grown grizzly. [/INST] Full grown grizzly, but not only that, that grizzly is seeing some share there. What's the most it could have seen? A bull moose? A caribou? That's the toughest opponents he's </s><s>[INST] ever had. That's the toughest opponents he's ever had. It once... No, no, no, no. No, this one once ran into a pack of other grizzlies and had to fend. He's got scars. A pack of grizzlies. There's no pack of grizzlies. It's solitary. Wolves. Wolves. Wolves. Wolves are not practiced for a bear. Who attacks a bear? [/INST] Wolves are not... That's my point. Bears don't really live in a competitive environment, lions. </s><s>[INST] But sometimes you can get desperate as it was a pack of wolves. [/INST] But a pack of wolves is nothing. That's nothing. All right, fine. </s><s>[INST] Lions deal with packs of hyenas. Okay. What was the... Just imagine over the past hundred years, what do you think is the hardest fight that a grizzly bear has been in? Somewhere in Alaska. We've never heard. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night, all you hear is the bear just... [/INST] What was in the middle of the night? They didn't really. There's nothing that... There's gotta been something. </s><s>[INST] No, there's gotta been something. Humans have killed tens of millions of people in wars. They run away from cougars and wolverines. No, that's anecdotal evidence. There's gotta be one bear. There's video footage over. You can watch it yourself. That's called anecdotal evidence. There's got... I guarantee you in the dark of the night there was an epic battle of which there's still legend amongst the bears in that part of Canada. Who did it battle? In Canada. Moose. [/INST] The Bears you don't think they in Canada go at it bigs fight each other, but it's largely theatrical They never kill each other when Mansion's fight each other. They kill each other all the time </s><s>[INST] Their someone would have seen it by now interesting. All right [/INST] so so you see my what is it so your see my point isn't bears it just that did they want to get their feet wet they </s><s>[INST] Want to get their feet with a they can be no credit for Gorilla. So you're saying lion wins your money's on [/INST] No, I'm saying lion would win in the wild because they can't kill each other. They can't end the fight. That's one of our most important criteria. But lions can almost always initiate the action because they have much better ability to see at night, for example. Bears have very average night vision. Lions have superb night vision. So at nighttime, they can always initiate the fight. Lions are natural ambush predators, so it's always going to be out of heavy advantage of ambush. The great advantage that bears have is endurance. But bears are very risk averse, and they're not used to fighting the toughest, toughest animals. The toughest animal they fight is a moose or a caribou. These are not even close to the animals that lions have to go up against on a regular basis. So if somebody wins, it's going to be the lion for you. I still think that the size and endurance of the bear, if they were locked in a cage together, I would still favor the bear under those circumstances. But in the wild, I believe the bear will back away quickly. </s><s>[INST] But in the cage, no time limit you favor the bear. What if it's five rounds or five minutes [/INST] championship rounds? Then I would go with the lion because the lion has a huge speed advantage. It's going to injure it, tear it up, and do immediate damage. I'll put it this way, if lion and bear fight, first 15 minutes, I favor the lion 100%. But then as time goes by, </s><s>[INST] that size and weight and endurance is going to have an effect. I'll bring up shortly somebody [/INST] that's going to probably disagree with you about some things. Hopefully it's a grizzly bear and </s><s>[INST] he comes in and just eats me. Oh, that would be so epic. Make a hell of a podcast. I wonder who we would eat first, who would look scarier and more delicious. I'm not sure. The black and white could either piss him off. He would think you were a penguin. Is that a good thing or not? Not good. If it was a polar bear, maybe it's different. Do you care deeply about athletes you coached, about people in your life? I have to ask this question. If one of those athletes, let's say Gordon Ryan, I was the dictator of the world and this would entertain me. I force you and Gordon to do this, to fight a bear or a lion. Gordon has to. How would you coach him to do it, to have any chance of winning? He goes in empty handed. You can choose stadium or cage. [/INST] Gordon Ryan, empty handed versus a lion. You get to choose lion versus bear. It's up to you. Okay. My advice would be very simple. I would say, Gordon, you're fucked. You're going to die badly. Choose the lion because it will strangle you to death rather than pin you </s><s>[INST] down and maul you to death. Didn't we just talk about audacious goals? [/INST] This is not a question of audacious goals. This is a question of minimizing pain. </s><s>[INST] So you coach your athletes to quit before the battle has been fought. A hundred percent. Yeah. You have to get a chance. How? What's he going to do? First of all, intelligence. He's going to do a heel hook. [/INST] He's got four fucking legs. Okay. What if Gordon gets any starting position? He wants what is the chance? You don't think as a chance what's he gonna do it? He'll hook. Yeah, that's gonna be really useful Here on a thousand pound beer. Yeah, what do you read back control it off shaking off? </s><s>[INST] You'll get torn off with what like you don't have back. Yeah reaches back. He's got four six inch It's hard to oh, okay. I wonder what is the reach? What if he touches he's gonna if it's not a flexible bear So you think they there's no control. What about like a low like a [/INST] Some kind of controlling position from yeah, like we said brombo like from what we said brombo like from Nothing this discussion is so insane that I didn't even know where to begin criticism. I don't think you're open-minded we could we could turn this down forget about Gordon fighting a A lion or a bear. That's that's completely impossible </s><s>[INST] An adult male chimp will destroy Gordon. So not even a gorilla. We can gorilla But what about the aggression? Yeah, they agree What about the aggressive a male chimp is more than enough to kill any human on the planet including Gordon Ryan. So Gordon Ryan Fighting a chimp a good-sized dead. No a thousand times. How many times does he win? He loses a thousand times It's not even competitive. It's not even remotely compared. Do you think he will disagree? No, do you think anyone will disagree anyone? Yeah moron? Okay, somebody that I think you might know There's a famous actor Tom Hardy, but he's also doing quite a bit of jiu-jitsu The reason this makes sense to bring up now is he's also I saw narrating a new sky original series called predators Hmm coming out in December where they follow five different predators and tell their full story about All the fighting and the killing and all that kind of stuff and he's doing that. He's like, you know, it's like what Morgan's It's like Morgan Freeman for March of the penguins, it's Tom Hardy for the predators So I don't I saw a bear and a lion in the it's in the trailer But they also had something I didn't watch it too careful, but they had something like a hyena So they think that we're talking about I don't know if it's a hyena But something like that like pack animals, yeah that attacking hyenas of formidable formidable animals [/INST] So it's not all about size. It's about like strategy. Yeah. Yeah formidable animals Yeah, it's most important thing in nature as numbers like you know </s><s>[INST] A packa of animals will always destroy a single animal and I think that show in particular is not 100% about who wins or so on it's about the fascinating stories of how these these predators sort of dominate that particular environment because it's not about these like artificial match-ups, it's about giving your environment, [/INST] how do you succeed and all that kind of stuff. Maybe we could do Gordon Ryan versus a house cat. Gordon might have a small chance against a house cat maybe. </s><s>[INST] Maybe. See now I know you're just trolling me. I think Gordon has a chance against, well, definitely against the smaller apes. But I have no way of proving it and the internet will say I'm an idiot, so there you go. The internet is correct every still watching. So there's a, oh, that's funny enough. I'm looking at Tom's Instagram, he has a picture with Hanzo. He's competed recently, which is very cool in Jiu-Jitsu. That's awesome. That's tough to do for a celebrity to step up. [/INST] Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. He used to consult with me a little bit on moves when he was starting out. He's a very, very nice person. Oh, about Jiu-Jitsu? Yeah, yeah, he asked questions about Jiu-Jitsu. He struck me as being a very, very nice person. </s><s>[INST] Oh, so you'd love to be a fly in that wall, but he made a post on Instagram, which I'd love to get your opinion on. It has very much like a John Donohue style of digging into the philosophy of the impact of Jiu-Jitsu on one's life. [/INST] Is his Instagram post 18 pages long? Yes. </s><s>[INST] He's got potential then. Yes, with a profound, deep picture of somebody practicing the art of Jiu-Jitsu, I think. I think he's at least a trainee in this art of the Donohue style of communication. If Miyamoto Musashi would be alive today, he would probably be doing these five page Instagram posts like you do. Addiction, writes Tom Hardy, addiction is difficult and complex stuff to navigate as is mental health. Subjects which are both deeply personal for me and extremely close to my heart. It is an honor to be able to represent the charity of my team, Reorg, and the great work they do supporting the mental health and wellbeing of veterans of service, military and first responders through the therapeutic benefits of Jiu-Jitsu and fitness training. He represented them in this competition that he competed in. Simple training for me as a hobby and a private love has been fundamentally key to further develop a deeper sense of inner resilience, calm and wellbeing. I can't stress the importance it has had and the impact of my life and my fellow teammates. And he goes on to talk about this organization Reorg that uses Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu to form a therapy to overcome physical and mental challenges, strengthen social connections and improve overall health and wellbeing. This is for veterans, for people going through PTSD. They have saved lives around the world by not only providing an effective and positive means for navigating and managing the challenging psychological aspects of military and first responder careers, but also has allowed many to find a renewed sense of purpose, identity and community that's often lost when transitioning to civilian life. Do you have thoughts about that, sort of the effects of Jiu-Jitsu on folks who've gone through some really difficult [/INST] things in their life? First of all, I think this is a beautiful statement by Mr. Hardy, I must give him a phone call after this and talk to him, that was beautiful to read. One thing that's always struck me when I train people who either have a military background or on more than a few occasions, we have special forces soldiers come in and train with us for a week or two. And when you talk to them, the overwhelming sentiment I get when the conversation's over and we go our separate ways is I'm always asking myself, the transition from military life, especially the more extreme military lives of special forces soldiers back to civilian life, it must be the craziest experience of all. You've got people who are fighting and dying alongside their comrades in the most extreme circumstances that any human being can go through. And then they're pulled back into a life where people are arguing with them over parking spots. Just like the average person's day-to-day life is so mundane that imagine what must be going through a man's head who a few weeks or months ago was literally fighting for his life and his comrades lives, watching people that he loved die or get mutilated in front of him. Things that in a matter of seconds, people's lives can be torn apart and changed forever. And then suddenly you get thrown into a life where people are arguing over who's cut who off, </s><s>[INST] who in line to buy a coffee. The intensity of camaraderie and love that you have for each other. [/INST] And then you go from incredible intensity in war to just mundane, boring life. And going from one to the other where people are yelling at you or nagging you over issues that just seem so inconsequential compared to what you've been through. And you're supposed to take these people seriously and listen to them. </s><s>[INST] But not only that, you do have trauma visions of dead brothers and sisters. And you feel like you can't really talk to these civilians about it. [/INST] There's nothing in their experience that would enable you to have a conversation with them. Like they don't even, how do you talk to your new girlfriend about watching one of your friend's legs get taken off? Like there's no conversation you could have with them. So I find that typically they do best when they hang out with each other because they have shared experience and they can talk about these things. But I do find that most judicious schools have something like a kind of military barracks demeanor to them of like camaraderie, hard work, shared hard work, teamwork, building towards a goal over time, the acquisition of skills, usually along with that, a kind of want of a better word or rustic and primitive sense of humor and a kind of soldierly way of talking to each other and disparaging self-deprecating sense of humor. And it's something that most people with military service kind of naturally come into because it's part of what they were in. And so it's like a toned down version of it, which enables them to form a stepping stone between the military life that they were in all the way down to civilian life. </s><s>[INST] And Juditzu was kind of like a bridge between those two. And also the honesty, so you said like the skill acquisition, the honesty of really testing that skill, there is a deep honesty to war. In a distant way, but in a way there is an honesty to Juditzu, technique, working or not. And there's a final, there is simulated death. It's not real death, it's simulated death on the mat [/INST] and there's a similar kind of honesty there. And there's also a similar kind of esteem towards skill, just as regular soldiers look up to Special Forces soldiers because they see them as people have greater skills in themselves, something to aspire to. so too, and the thing that we esteem most on a Judaism matter skill. No one gives a damn what you look like or what you think that you judge mostly by your skill level. And so they tend to identify with that. I do think that most people from a military background find a natural gravitation towards the atmosphere of Judaism learning. And if it proves to be a positive way for them to rehabilitate and come back into civilian lives, then that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. I know we're linked with We Defy, which is an organization which caters to former soldiers who were badly injured in combat, many of whom lost limbs and always suffered mental trauma. And they come in and train, and they often speak very, very highly of their degree to which Judaism has helped them come back into civilian life. And for them, it's even worse because they come back not only mentally, but physically disadvantaged after war. And I've always been proud to be associated with We Defy, and I'm very happy to see Tom working with this organization. Is this an organization based in England for English veterans, or is it international? </s><s>[INST] That's a good question. I'd have to look into it. It certainly is based in England, but it could be international. But it's just nice to see somebody use that large platform and also to step on the mat and show the kind of jujitsu you would probably be proud of chasing submissions. He got an arm lock, he got a straight foot lock. We're not going to analyze the techniques [/INST] because there could be different perspectives. It finishes the finish. That's impressive. He's </s><s>[INST] actually quite an athlete. He's in great shape and strong and flexible, and I'm glad he's doing well with his jujitsu. And it's good to see Henzel's smiling face next to him. I can only imagine the conversations. I have to ask you a deep and important question. You often, when we text back and forth, send me two hugging emojis. Can we psychoanalyze the reason why that's your favorite emoji of the hugging face? It's kind of like sending a heart, but a little bit more gender neutral. [/INST] When jujitsu players meet each other, they often shake hands and then give a quick hug. So I thought it was the most appropriate emoji for jujitsu players. I see. It's a pretty simple </s><s>[INST] explanation. Nothing too fraudy in there. Are you sure? Quite sure. Okay. Have you really asked yourself deeply? Because you really lean on an emoji. Is there something behind it? [/INST] Tomorrow, I'm never going to use that emoji again. Why is there two of them? Walk away. I'll shock </s><s>[INST] you tomorrow and meet you with three. Three. There's almost always two. I think maybe you're [/INST] a creature of habit in communication. I'm a creature of habit in almost every aspect of my </s><s>[INST] life, so even emojis. Yeah. You fall into these little pockets of how you communicate, how you show affection towards others. I say love a lot. I send hearts and don't give a fuck if it's too like me sending a message to a CEO I'm about to interview. I'll send a heart. I don't give a damn. They'll probably just like, look, what is this? But I think people are too afraid of simple communication of affection. It could be in any form, but there's a hesitance to that because I think underneath it, in order to show affection, you're taking a risk and you're showing vulnerability. Because if you show affection and the other person rejects that affection, you've now placed yourself in a hierarchy going back to lions of like, oh, this person, you're just like the silly weak person and they're the strong person. I think that's how you might see it, I guess, but I don't. To me, the display of vulnerability is a display of strength, not weakness, at least in human society, at least at this time. I don't know. Let me ask you about love. I must ask John and I about love. What do you think is the role of love in the human condition at the highest philosophical level? Let me first ask. Like romantic love, love? Romantic love, let's say [/INST] romantic love. I have one or two areas of apparent expertise in my life. Romantic love, </s><s>[INST] definitely not one of them. So like lions versus bears. I'm good. Animal combat. I'm good. Pretty good at. And then different grappling arts. Judo, Sambo, jujitsu, wrestling, MMA, so fighting and so on. Romantic love. You don't see them as similar. It's a kind of fight. It's a kind of [/INST] dance. There's a sense in which I'm kind of glad I'm not an expert on that. Imagine what it would be to be an expert on romantic love. You would take the one thing in life that's actually interesting and make it boring because once you develop an expertise about something, you can start to predict how things are going to unfold. You get answers before events even occur. You can read into the future of everything. I think there are certain parts of human life where you want to be </s><s>[INST] a beginner at all times and you don't want to gain expertise. So excellence and systematizing [/INST] something in order to achieve excellence might destroy the very magic of the things. And I think that the magic of romantic love is the fact that we're all beginners at it. And the minute you try to gain expertise in it, what does that even mean? What would it mean? And would it be good? I don't think it would. I think you're better off just having fun with it and plowing through and making dumb mistakes and looking like a fool. And then whatever success comes in a kind of lighthearted, frivolous kind of way. And that I think is over the course of a lifetime far more desirable than having expertise and affairs of love. So I don't think it's even a good thing to study too much. And I think if you did, you would actually take something good out of your life. </s><s>[INST] Yeah, there's communities of people called pickup artists that try to optimize this particular aspect, which is of dating, of guys picking up girls and turning that into a system and seeing [/INST] what's the most successful. I think that would be, I mean, maybe the first few months would be good. And then after that, I think it would be a disaster. I mean, given that humans are fairly easy to study from the standpoint of psychology, I'm sure it's not that difficult to gain expertise in things like picking people up the same way advertisers can pick up your attention to sell a product. You can do the same thing, presumably, with romance and sex. But I don't know, I feel like if you became very good at it, you would end up being very disappointed by the results. And so, as I said, I think there's some things in life where it's better to be a beginner. </s><s>[INST] And this is one of those, enjoy the chaos, the push and pull of being a beginner, and make that a lifelong journey. That's really inspiring to hear you say that. And there's a deep truth to that. [/INST] That also justifies the fact that being a beginner. But I still get it. </s><s>[INST] I think it also justifies, and it would sell very well, that John Donner should write a book on dating. And that would be chapter one. Embrace being a beginner. Chapter two will be Bear versus Lion. [/INST] Pivot quickly to violence. By the way, we totally skipped over Anaconda. </s><s>[INST] I assumed the implied- [/INST] I'll put it to you this way. On video, you can watch Puma and similar-sized cats, jaguar, destroy anacondas, even in water, which is Anaconda's preferred domain. So, given that Puma and jaguar are at several orders below Lion, you have to go with the idea that Lion would utterly decimate Anaconda. So, it's probably good that we did skip over it. </s><s>[INST] And I think going back to the original thought that you had about this, it says, don't trust your first instinct. [/INST] Also, think about the other elements. Anaconda has no ability to disengage from the fight. Once the fight's on, it's got to go until the end. It has no ability to disengage and get away. Its only hope would be ambush, and it's got a tiny, tiny chance against a truly formidable animal. And the fact that if we look at actual concrete real-world results, when Puma and jaguar are kicking your ass, Lion and Bear, it's going to be a lot worse. </s><s>[INST] Science is not to be found on YouTube, or rather, YouTube is not science. I bet you there's a bear somewhere in Canada that has seen some shit. I'm just going to leave it at that. You're a fan of knives. There's guys like Miyamoto Musashi who, instead of doing who's number one type of tournaments, when both competitors walk away, only one competitor walks away. Miyamoto Musashi is known for somebody having a John Donner-like philosophical skills, but also is known for having fought 61 duels to the death and won them, obviously. What do you think made [/INST] him so good and won them? I don't feel qualified to talk about him because I haven't made an in-depth study of his life and times. And we also don't know how much truth there is to his recollections, and there's a lot of controversy over this. So I don't feel like you can give a definitive statement of his prowess, but his writings are fascinating and deeply insightful as to what actually happened out there in his duels. It's unclear. </s><s>[INST] With guys like that, you almost certainly know that they war people like the character he projects that have existed, whether it's 61, whether it's 20, but people really put their life on the line in a different time in human history. Is there [/INST] something compelling to you about fighting to the death? I think it's not just compelling to me, but to anyone. There's nothing we value more than our lives. And to be able to say, I'm prepared to die for a sense of honor, things that are so foreign to our modern society. Imagine we criticize people for something as simple as road rage, and yet you can imagine someone who has a sufficiently developed sense of honor. If you took them out of the 17th century and put them in a modern car, they might be killing people on the side of the road on a regular basis, just over smaller stacks of honor, to say that your sense of self overwhelms your sense of self-preservation. It's a very unusual thing in the modern age, and yet it appears to </s><s>[INST] have been quite common back then. You often wear a fanny pack. I'm not going to ask you what's inside the fanny pack, but if you were to design a perfect killing machine that also wore a fanny pack, what would you put in that fanny pack? Would it be something mundane and practical, or would it be something surprising and hilarious? Would it be something of philosophical significance, or maybe sentimental significance, or would it be empty as a troll on human civilization? [/INST] But if it was a perfect killing machine, it would have to be some kind of weapon. Put in a fanny pack. Is it? It has to be a very compact weapon. </s><s>[INST] We mentioned offline that there's also things in the chess world, or there is a different kind of vibrating devices that could be used to communicate information in communication with AI systems that can help you in your particular pursuit. I don't think in jiu-jitsu you need, it's possible for a machine to give you information that gives you advantage. You can in chess and in poker, so you could put one of those vibrating devices in your fanny pack, but in jiu-jitsu it would not help you. Any idea what kind of weapon? [/INST] To fit in a fanny pack. </s><s>[INST] To your fan of knives. Where's the interest in knives come from, by the way? [/INST] That's more metaphorical. The truth is that in the modern world a knife is not an efficient weapon, and easily be overwhelmed by firearms. My fascination with knives comes more in the sense that they convey a spirit to my students, where a knife is made of steel, and steel begins as ore in the ground. It's an ugly, unfinished product, which through the enactment of knowledge, time, and discipline can be transformed into beautiful, shining steel. It can have something which it begins as something which has no real function and becomes one of the most functional and important tools in all of human history, without which human civilization could never have even begun. It's what separated humans and took us from the bottom of the food chain and began our gradual rise towards the top of the food chain. It has immense historical and cultural value, but it has this metaphorical value insofar as the martial artist begins as a white belt like iron ore, but over time transforms into some beautiful, shining steel, which can have immense value. In addition, there's a sense of maintenance. As remarkable as steel is, it is in need of constant maintenance. It will fall apart through rust, and neglect will destroy a blade both in terms of rust and the edge falling apart. Just as the martial artist is not good enough just to learn the techniques, you need to maintain them over time. Just as steel is perishable, so too are the skills of martial arts. When I give a gift of a knife to a student, these metaphorical elements start to emerge. They say, okay, I began as iron ore and I want to become the finished blade. There's another sense in which a knife is morally neutral. A knife can be used to save a life. It can be used to cook a meal, but it can also be used for murder for the worst possible purposes. Jiu-jitsu is the same way. Jiu-jitsu can make you a better person. It can make you a worse person. Jiu-jitsu is just a power. It's not a particularly great power, but it is a power. Like all power, it can be used for both good and bad. It's morally neutral in itself. It's up to us to make sure that just as the knife gets used for good purposes rather than bad, the Jiu-jitsu can be used for good purposes rather than bad. There's also an element where the basis of the knife is steel. Historically, there's always been a riddle of steel, which is that steel has the property of both hardness and suppleness. The harder you make steel, the better its edge retention becomes. The longer that edge will stay sharp. This is good, but it comes at a price. The harder you make steel, the more brittle it becomes. Now that edge can be damaged easily. The solution is to make the steel softer, and more malleable. That will prevent breakage of the blade and chipping of the edge. But when you make the steel softer, that comes at a price. That price is now the edge loses its sharpness very easily. The riddle of steel is how to work with these two to the greatest degree possible and create an edge which is hard enough to stay sharp for long periods of time, but without making the steel so brittle that the blade overall is compromised. So too in Jiu-jitsu, your task and training is to make the training competitive enough that you actually get used to the rigors of real combat. But on the other hand, it can't be so brutal that the athletes get broken down in the gym to a point where they're no longer effective. And so this duality of hardness and softness, which we see in the case of blades, is there in the training of the Jiu-jitsu athlete. So I often give a gift of a knife to a student when they've done something significant because it demonstrates in a </s><s>[INST] metaphorical way these key themes of the sport. Well, I've been honored to be a student of yours. I've been plagued by injury, but I hope to one day earn one such knife, and I think that's a really powerful metaphor. I'm really honored that you would spend any time with me in any context, but especially on the mat and especially today in conversation. John, you're an incredible person. Thank you for everything you do. Congratulations for historic accomplishment. It's always beautiful and inspiring to see greatness. And what I saw, what we saw at ADCC was greatness, rare greatness. And it's beautiful to see that humans can achieve that kind of thing. So thank you for making that happen. And thank you for talking today. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Donner. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Miyamoto Musashi. The only reason a warrior is alive is to fight. And the only reason a warrior fights is to win. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. [/INST] </s>

<s>[INST] in a couple of his tweets, which I think just is very distracting. That was one of them. It's like the Bitcoin maximalist, but generally, the crypto community, what you call the crypto entrepreneurs, they're using it for investment, for speculation, and therefore get very passionate about people's celebrities, including you, famous people, saying positive stuff about any one particular crypto thing you can buy in Coinbase. They might be unhappy with Elon Musk that he's promoting Bitcoin and then not, and then promoting Dogecoin, then not. There's so much emotion tied [/INST] up in the communication on this topic. I don't have a criticism of Elon Musk. He's free to do whatever he wishes to do. In fact, Elon Musk is the second largest supporter of Bitcoin in the world. I think that the Bitcoin community tends to eat its own quite a bit. It tends to be very self-critical. Instead of saying, Elon is more supportive of Bitcoin than the other 10,000 people in the world with serious amounts of money, they focus upon- </s><s>[INST] Yeah, this is strange. Eating your own is just- [/INST] I think he's free to do what he wants to do. I think he's done a lot of good for Bitcoin and putting it on the balance sheet of Tesla and holding it. I think that sent a very powerful </s><s>[INST] message. Do you have advice for young people? You've had a heck of a life. You've done quite a lot of things before MIT, but starting with MIT. Is there advice for young people in high school and college how to have a career they can be proud of, how to have a life they can be proud of? [/INST] I was asked by somebody for quick advice for his young children. He had twins when they enter adulthood. He said, give me your advice for them in a letter. I'm going to give it to them when they turn 21 or something. I was at a party and then he handed me this sheet of paper. I thought, oh, he wants me to write it down right now. I sat down, I started writing, and I figured, what would you want to tell someone at age 21? You wrote it down. I wrote it down. I tweeted it and it's sitting on Twitter, but I tell you what I said. I said, my advice if you're entering adulthood, focus your energy, guard your time, train your mind, train your body, think for yourself, curate your friends, curate your environment, keep your promises, stay cheerful and constructive, and upgrade the world. That was the 10. Upgrade the world. That's an interesting choice of words. </s><s>[INST] Upgrade the world. Upgrade the world. It's like an engineer's strategy. Yeah, it's a very engineering themed. It's like an engineer's strategy. Keep your promises too. That's an interesting one. [/INST] I think most people suffer because they don't focus. I think the big risk in this world is there's too much of everything. You can sit and watch chess videos 100 hours a week and you'll never get through all the chess videos. There's too much of every possible thing, too much of every good thing. Figuring out what you want to do and then everything will suck up your time. There's 100 streaming channels to binge watch on. You got to guard your time and then train your body, train your mind and control who's around you, control what surrounds you. Ultimately, in a world where there's too much of everything, then you're successful. </s><s>[INST] It's like those laser eyes. You have to focus on just a few of those things. [/INST] I got a thousand opinions we could talk about and I could pursue a thousand things, but I don't expect to be successful. I'm not sure that my opinion in any of the 999 is any more valid than the leader of thought in that area. How about if I just focus upon one thing and then deliver the best I can in the one thing? That's the laser eye message. </s><s>[INST] The rest get you distracted. How do you achieve that? Do you find yourself, given where you are in life, having to say no a lot or just focus comes naturally when you just ignore everything [/INST] around you? How do you achieve that focus? I think it helps if people know what you're focused on. </s><s>[INST] Everything about you just radiates that people know. [/INST] If they know what you're focused on, then you won't get so many other things coming your way. If you dally or if you flirt with 27 different things, then you're going to get approached by </s><s>[INST] people in each of the 27 communities, right? You mentioned beginning a PhD and giving your roots at MIT. Do you think there's all kinds of journeys you can take to educate yourself? Do you think a PhD or school is still worth it or is there other paths through life? [/INST] Is it worth it if you have to pay for it? Is it worth it to spend the time on it? </s><s>[INST] The time and the money is a big cost. Time probably the bigger one, right? [/INST] It seems clear to me that the world wants more specialists. It wants you to be an expert to focus on in one area. It's punishing generalist, jack of all trades, especially people that are generalists in the physical realm. Because if you're a specialist in the digital realm, you might very well, you're the person with 700,000 followers on Twitter and you show them how to tie knots, or you're the banjo player with 1.8 million followers, and whenever he types banjo, it's you, right? The world wants people that do something well, and then it wants to stamp out 18 million copies of them. That argues in favor of focus. The definition of a PhD is someone with enough of an education that they're capable of or have made. I guess to get a PhD, technically, you have to have done a dissertation where you made a seminal contribution to the body of human knowledge. If you haven't done that, technically, you have a master's degree, but you're not a doctor. If you're interested in any of the academic disciplines that a PhD would be granted for, then I can see that being a reasonable pursuit. But there are many people that are specialists. The agimator on YouTube, he's the world's greatest chess commentator. I've watched his career and </s>

<s>[INST] there's no free lunches. Yeah right. That's what do you think, what's your intuition uh how can we slow the growth event to infinity and supervisor? Uh end to infinity and supervised learning. So for example mobile I has very successfully, I mean, essentially annotated large amounts of data to be able to drive a car. Now one thought is so we're trying to teach machines school of AI and we're trying to So how can we become better teachers? Maybe that's 11 way. [/INST] Yeah. You know what? I like that because one again, one caricature of the history of computer sides you could say is it begins with programmers expensive. Yeah, continuous labelers cheap and the future will be schools like we have for kids. </s><s>[INST] Yeah. Currently the labeling methods, we're not selective about which examples we we teach networks with. So so I think the focus of making one networks that learn much faster is often on the architecture side. But how can we pick better examples of wish to learn? Uh Do you have intuitions about that? Well, that's part [/INST] of the part of the problem, but the other one is, you know, if we look at um biology, reasonable assumption, I think is um in the same spirit that I said, evolution is opportunistic and has weak criers, you know the way I think the intelligence of a child, the baby may develop is um by bootstrapping week criers from evolution for instance. Um Yeah. In you can assume that you have a most organisms, including human babies built in some basic machinery to detect motion and relative motion. And in fact there is, you know, we know, all insects from fruit flies to other animals. They have this even in the readiness of the very peripheral part of its very conserved across species. Something that evolution discovered early maybe the reason why babies tend to look the first few days to moving objects and not to not moving out moving objects means, okay, they're attracted by motion, but motion also means that motion gives automatic segmentation from the background. So because of motion boundaries, you know, either the object is moving or the eye of the baby is tracking the moving object and the background is moving. Right? </s><s>[INST] So just purely on the visual characteristics of the scene that seems to be the most useful. [/INST] Right? So it's like looking at an object without background background, it's ideal for learning the object. Otherwise it's really difficult because you have so much stuff. So suppose you do this at the beginning, first weeks, Then after that you can recognize object. Now they're imprinted the number one even in the background, even without motion. </s><s>[INST] So that's at the by the way, I just want to ask on the object recognition problem. So there is this being responsive to movement and edge detection essentially. What's the gap between being effectively effectively visually recognizing stuff detecting where it is and understanding the scene. Is this a huge gap in many layers or is it are we is it close? [/INST] No, I think that's a huge gap. I think present algorithm with all the success that we have and the fact that there are a lot of very useful. I think we're in a golden age for applications of low level vision and low level speech recognition and so on, you know, Alexa and so on. Um there are many more things of similar level to be done, including medical diagnosis and so on. But we are far from what we call understanding of a scene of language of actions of people that is despite the claims, that's I think very far </s><s>[INST] we're a little bit off so in popular culture and among many researchers, some of which I've spoken with the Stuart russell and you know, musk uh in and out of the AI field, there's a concern about the existential threat of AI. And how do you think about this concern in uh and is it valuable to think about large scale long term unintended consequences of intelligence systems we try to build. [/INST] I always think it's better to worry first, you know, early rather than late. So don't worry is good. Yeah, I'm not against worrying at all uh personally, I think that uh you know, it will take a long time before there is a real reason to be worried, but as I said, I think it's good to put in place and think about possible safety against what I find a bit misleading are things like that have been said by people I know like Elon musk and uh what is both strong and particularly notice first name, nick nick poster. Right. You know, in a couple of other people that for instance, ai is more dangerous than nuclear weapons? I think that's really wrong. And that can be is misleading because in terms of priority we should still be more worried about nuclear weapons. And uh you know, people are doing about it and so on than uh </s><s>[INST] and you've spoken about Dennis Hassabis and yourself saying uh you think it would be about 100 years out Before we have general intelligence system? That's on par with the human being. Do you have any updates for those predictions? Well, I think he said he said 20, I think [/INST] It said 20. Right, this was a couple of years ago. I have not asked him again. So </s><s>[INST] should have your own prediction. What's your prediction about when you'll be truly surprised and what's the confidence interval on that? [/INST] Uh You know, it's so difficult to predict the future and even the presence of it's pretty hard to predict. But I would be as I said, this is completely it would be more like uh Rod brooks. I think he's about 200 </s>

<s>[INST] term applications that obviously make a lot of money is not necessarily a curiosity driver for you at the moment. [/INST] Absolutely not. If you're interested in short term making money go a deep learning use silicon microelectronic. If you want to understand things like the physics of a fascinating system or if you want to understand something more along the lines of the physical limits of what can be achieved then I think single photon communications, superconducting electronics extremely exciting. </s><s>[INST] What if I wanna use superconducting hardware at four Kelvin to mine. Bitcoin. That's my main interest. That's that's the reason I wanted to talk to you today. I want, it's not, I don't know [/INST] what's Bitcoin </s><s>[INST] that's a uh look it up on the internet. Somebody as somebody told me about it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. Uh So but let me ask nevertheless about applications to machine learning. Okay, so What, like if you look at the scale of 5, 10, 20 years, is is it possible to before we understand the nature of human intelligence and general intelligence? Do you think we'll start falling out of this exploration of no more fix systems, ability to solve some of the problems that the machine learning systems of today can't solve. [/INST] I'm really hesitant to over promise. So I really don't know. I also I don't really understand machine learning in a lot of sense is I mean machine learning from my perspective appears to require that, you know precisely what your input is and also what your goal is. Usually have some objective function or something like that. And that's just that's very limiting. I mean, of course a lot of times that that's the case. You know, there's a there's a picture and there's a horse in it, so you're done. But that that's not a very interesting problem. I think when I when I think about intelligence, it's it's almost defined by the ability to handle problems where you don't know what your inputs are going to be and you don't even necessarily know what you're trying to accomplish. I mean, I'm not sure what I'm trying to accomplish in this world, </s><s>[INST] but at all scales. [/INST] Yeah, at all. Scales. Right. I mean, so and sometimes so I'm more drawn to the underlying phenomena, the, the critical dynamics of this, of this system, trying to understand how elements that you build into your hardware result in emergent fascinating activity. That was very difficult to predict things like that. So, but but I got to be really careful because I think a lot of other people who if they found themselves working on this project in my shoes, they would say all right, what are what are all the different ways we can use this for machine learning? Actually, let me, let me just definitely mention colleague at Nus Mike Schneider, he's also very much interested, particularly in the superconducting side of things using the incredible speed, power efficiency also ken Segall at Colgate other people working on specifically the superconducting side of this for machine learning and deep feed forward neural networks there, the advantages are obvious, it's extremely fast. </s><s>[INST] So that's less on the nature of intelligence is and more on various characteristics of this hardware [/INST] you can use </s><s>[INST] for the basic computations we know today [/INST] communication. One of the things that Mike Schneider is working on right now is an image classifier at a relatively small scale. I think he's targeting that nine pixel problem where you can have three different characters and um, you just, you put in a nine pixel image and you classified as one of these 33 categories and that's going to be really interesting to see what happens there because if you can show that even at that scale, you just put these images in and you get it out and you can, he thinks he can do it. I forgot if it's a nanosecond or some extremely fast classification time. It's probably the last, it's probably 100 PICO seconds or something there. You have challenges though because the Josephson junctions themselves, the electronic circuit is extremely power efficient some orders of magnitude for something more than a transistor doing the same thing. But when you have to cool it down to four kelvin, you pay a huge overhead just for keeping it cold even if it's not doing anything. So it's you, it has to work at big at large scale in order to overcome that power penalty. But that's possible. It's just, it's going to have to get that performance. And this is sort of what you're asking about before is like how much better than silicon would it need to be. And the answer is, I don't know. I think if it's, if it's just overall better than silicon at a problem that a lot of people care about, maybe it's image classification, maybe it's face recognition, Maybe it's monitoring credit transactions, I don't know, then I think it will have a place, it's not going to be in your cell phone, but it could be in your data center. </s><s>[INST] Uh, so what about in terms of the data center? I don't know if you're paying attention to the various systems like uh, tested recently and now announced Dojo, which is a large scale machine learning training system. That again, the bottom like there is probably going to be communication between those systems. Um, is there something from your work on everything we've been talking about in terms of super conductive hardware that could be useful there? [/INST] Oh, I mean, okay, tomorrow. No, in the long term it could be the whole thing. It could be nothing. I don't know. But definitely, definitely. Um, when you look at the, so I don't know that much about dojo. My understanding is that, that's new, right? That's just just coming </s>

<s>[INST] The values come in part from the tradition carried through the generations. Let me ask you to put on you're wise hat and give advice to young folks. So high school and college, thinking about, you know what to do with their life career. There's so many options out there. Um how can they have a career they can be proud of or even just the life they can be proud of. [/INST] I think I say find something you're good at because that's from God, it's a gift that God has given you and then dedicated to love what I'm saying. So you're you're good at science or math or sports or whatever. Okay, I'm going to use that now for my aggrandizement, for my wealth, for my privileges and to become famous. No, no, no, don't find what you're good at, but now dedicated to willing the good of the other, so use your science and use your mathematics and use your sports and use your musicianship to benefit the world, you know? Um that's right to them. So find what you're good at. That's that's from </s><s>[INST] finding what you're good at what, because it's not just raw skill, it's also what you connect with. And it's also um like this iterative process of, if you want to add love to the world, you have to see how can you be effective at doing that. So it's not just the things you're good at, there's like there's you know, I'm good at building bridges out of toothpicks, I'm not exactly sure that's going to be useful for the world then again to push back on that. The joy brings me maybe somehow the joy radiates out. [/INST] Yeah, well you're good at what you're doing right now, and you've dedicated that to bringing more light and illumination and joy to the world. That </s><s>[INST] was that was a searching that's the process of trying stuff and figuring it out. And ultimately, yes, asking the question, how is this making the world at all better and every step of the way as opposed to enriching yourself and all those kinds of things, [/INST] Right? I think that's the name of the game, you know, But it's it's tricky. And if we don't have moral mentors and intellectual mentors, it becomes hard. And if you tell a kid that's deadly to me, just decide for yourself, just, you know, just off you go and and you make your own choices. Your your choice has to be disciplined. Your desire has got to be directed. You know, then you're you'll find your creative path. Everyone does it in his own way. But it's it's a guided choice. Your freedom is not sovereign. It's a it's a guided freedom. </s><s>[INST] So, in the in the struggle and the suffering you've seen in the world, let me ask you the question of death. Have you? How often do you think about your own mortality [/INST] every day? </s><s>[INST] And one are you afraid of it, the uncertainty of it? And what do you think happens after you die? [/INST] Sure, I'm afraid of it because it's I don't I don't know what's next. I mean, I I can't know what the way I know you. So of course I'm afraid of it. And I think of it every day. Uh that's true. Uh my prayer life compels me, you know, we have this the the hail mary prayer, you prayed the rosary now and at the hour of our death amen now and at the hour of our death. Amen Now, at the hour of our death, Amen you pray the whole rosary 50 times. You reminded yourself of your own death. But I do, I think about it because it's the ultimate limit. That's why it's, it's beguiled every artist and writer and philosopher. It's the ultimate limit, you know, Question. But yeah, sure I'm afraid of because it's the unknown. What do I think happens? I think I'm drawn into the deeper embrace of God's love, you know, and that's stating it kind of in a, in a more poetic way. Um do you know john Polkinghorne is work, you know that name, John polk was a very interesting, it just died recently. He was a Cambridge university particle physicist. Right? High high level scientist who at midlife became an anglican priest. He left his job at Cambridge and went to the seminary became an anglican priest, right? And then wrote, I think some of the best stuff on science and religion because he really knew the science from the inside here's poking horns account, but I've always found persuasive, he said what, what survives after we die. So this body clearly dies and goes into the ground or it's burned up and it goes away, right? But what's preserved? And he says, what Aristotle would have called the form, poking, recalls it. The pattern. So the pattern that's organized the matter that's made me up over all these years, that's obviously not the same as it was. Even, you would know how often it all changed all your atoms and cells and you know, it was the little, you know, bobby baron who was growing up in Birmingham michigan there, I could have a picture of him and then there's me and I said, oh, this is the same person. Well, clearly not materially speaking. Not at all, it's completely different, but there's there's a unity to whatever that pattern is by which all of that material, it has been kind of organized. So poker and says, I think that pattern is remembered by God and remember is the wrong word as though it's like derivative, it's known by God. And so God can therefore re embody me according to that pattern at a higher pitch. What we call the resurrected body. Uh, so paul talks about a spiritual body body for sure, because he believes in the resurrection of jesus. Um but it's not a body like ours from this world. It's a, it's a body at a higher pitch. So </s>