Ten Talks 17: February 2021
#160: Mozilla founder Brandon Eich
Brandon Eich, creator of the JavaScript programming language, co-founder of Mozilla, which created the Firefox browser; and now co-founder and CEO of Brave Software, which has created the Brave browser. Each of these are revolutionary technologies. JavaScript, a widely-used and impactful programming language. Firefox pioneered many browser ideas that we love … or take for granted today; and Brave is looking to revolutionize not only the browser, but content creation online … to make it fundamentally respect content creator’s control over their data.
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History of early programming languages
Physics needs more experiments and less theory
B: … there are big questions about how, whether Quantum computing will scale up. … I’m not using this kind of CS in practice; almost everything now is engineering, and finding ways to get computers to be more useful to people. Design problems, which are really kind of an art … we can have ML compose music … but it would be lacking that “special something.” … User interface still requires human art.
JavaScript origin story
B: … in graduate school. A friend went to one of the last super-startups, and Micro Unity was the company I went to, following my friend Jeff Weinstein. Micro Unity was doing everything. It was doing a new fab; new semiconductor process … new analog and digital circuits on the same … Trying to do all the things we see now in modern architectures, with short-vector instructions … Doing a lot of the stuff in software … avoiding the costs to the cable company of replacing your … cable box with a less garbage-y one … The cable companies thought they could save a lot of money …
L: Was this assembly?
B: We were writing GCC and C. … very smart guy, he did his own hardware design as well as software. .. .general bit shufflers and permuters … so we could do things like, crypto algorithms … you could do de-modulation of the cable complex … amplitude modulated signal. … All the framing … error correction. It was great learning experience but it wasn’t going to work; it was doing too many risky things at once. I hopped to Netscape … Netscape was already a rocket. I knew the founders …
L: When was the launch of Netscape?
B: ‘94
L: I went there early ‘95 … I was there for the IPO
L: How obvious was it Netscape was world-changing?
B: I was in Micro Unity in ‘93 … we saw something called Mosaic … we’d used all these old protocols. .. at Silicon Graphics we brought up the whole stack … how to find EtherNet addresses … find IP addresses for them. Nobody knew in the 80s what was going to win … It was Berkeley Unix … and the TCP/IP stack that dated back to ARPA Net … That was the Internet; it was email and text-y … then … I don’t think I was paying attention … when he wrote the famous email was pushed back to ‘89 … I noticed Mosaic in ‘93. One of the things Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina did at APSA … they innovated on the HTML standard. In particular, Marc sent an email saying, “we think we should be able to put an image in a page,” and when he sent that, Eric Bina had already written the code. This convinced me … the Internet met, there was a huge first-mover advantage. Being on first mattered a lot. … Richard Gabriel’s scheme, and poetry fame … he’s a poet … he’s the founder of Lucid, where Jamie Salinsky worked before Netscape … Richard Gabriel, brainy computer guy, also a poet, wrote a nice essay that gets abused all the time, called “Worse is Better.” About survival advantage of software in a network world. It’s about Unix, and Lisp. Good news, bad news. All the Lisp people, the MIT people: “Oh! The crow jewel!” Of course we’re going to win; this is civilization. Those hicks down at Bell Lab; there’s nothing sound there; it’s all hacking! Well guess what won?
L: So fundamental principal of the Internet: moving fast wins …
B: … … heterozygous advantage. Both parents give you the gene variant … and you get sickle cell anemia. If one of them does you’re resistant to malaria. .. People still struggle with this. JavaScript was done in such a hurry; … standards process injected new mistakes, as it will … … You have to resign yourself to the reality of worse is better being enshrined in actual design points you might not like. That happened with JavaScript. I’m way over it. It was a huge advantage of why JS has swept programming domains. It’s not because of merit; but we have improved it. You don’t get that choice. I’m not saying it was the best language; rather, it was the best time to do it. I could have told Netscape, “I can’t do this; it’s too rushed,” and it would have been Virtual Basic script.
L: You wrote it in how many days?
JavaScript was created in 10 days
B: When it was known that they were founding Netscape, that browser took over from Mosiac. That’s why Mozilla is called that; it kills Mosaic … It’s not that you’re doing advanced scientific research that’s changing the world … You’re more like taking down the last iteration of the browser Marc did, which had images … and you’re making Netscape, that has images, plug-ins (the way to do video back in the day) … it had frames and frame sets; HTML tables, that was new. When I got there, they were headed toward IPO, and that kicked off the whole dot-com era. There was a recession in ‘91; after that, Greenspan goosed things at the federal Reserve, and technology had been fermenting. Netscape made it possible to do Pats.com, to do eBay, to recognize a URL on a billboard … that was huge! That so fast-moving a rocket that Marc and the engineering team thought, we need to make this a programmable browser, not just a document viewer. … not just a video ..
L: It was all HTML … There was no dynamic element at all.
B: … The most dyanmism was from a plug-in
L: Java Applets?
B: That’s the thing; We did the deal with Sun … I was gonna do it in the browser. … Friends were like, hey we like scheme, you like scheme. Okay, I’ll come do scheme in the browser. I have a ___ from my 2017 talk, where I have Bruce Willis walking through ducts (from Die Hard) .. when I arrived there was no Scheme in the browser, because they’d started a deal with Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy … he got the idea of making the browser programmable … it was to put the Java GM into Netscape … Including the Netscape version of Windows; the 16-bit Windows 3.1 … Microsoft was coming out from Windows 95; everyone was afraid they were going to come out with Explorer 2 … they had invested in Spyglass … In fact Microsoft had tried to buy Netscape in late ‘94 … they offered too little money; so Barksdale and Clark said “get out of here.” Then they realized, “they’re going to copy us.” It didn’t happen right away. I’m not sure when Gates’ Internet tidal wave was written … he realized they were going down this copy-AOL path … Gates realized this; he turned the company on a dime. … So everyone inside Netscape felt more urgency .. more frenetic mood. There was still a chance to do a companion language to Java. … Java was for advanced programmers who cost a certain salary. Marc and I observed that on a mature staff like Microsoft, it benefitted to have a scripting language like Virtual Basic. So two languages; one for hot shots who were more expert; the others for scripters, CPAs, amateurs … an easier approach for gluing components together. We saw Bill Joy, Marc and I, the need for this language. Marketing was going to call it JavaScript. Marc called it Mocha which I like. … Finally we got the TM license … the work I did to prove it could be done was important. I came in in April; even then Netscape was growing so fast … they hired me into the server team; on what became HP 1.1 … I had done with with Greg .. he thought CPUs wouldn’t scale up; he was wrong, Moore’s Law. I worked on protocols at SGI (with Greg); I came in to Netscape to work on server-side for a month; the whole time I was thinking about this companion language. … I thought, well I’d like to do it; but management is saying, “Make it look like Java.”
L: What does that mean? Braces? Visually?
B: Marketing didn’t know; but management did. We had a plan, even. If you had this companion language, you’ll glue things together with Java and JavaScript. You’ll want some of the data types reflect …
Marc Andreessen
L: It sounds like he had an impact on you … can you talk about what roll he had.
B: Yeah, we would meat at the Peninsula Creamery in downtown Palo Alto. Marc was fresh out of grad school; he was a big dude, he got fitter later. He would order giant milkshakes and burgers. It was very direct … The implication was, Microsoft was coming afterwards. Marc was saying stuff like, boldly, pre-IPO, like Netscape + Java kills Windows … Meta OS, replacement OS
L: He still saw value in Java Script
B: He even thought … What if we had … my friend Kip Hikman, a hacker at SGI; he started writing his own JVM before we consumated the Sun deal … The Java compiler was all written in Java; it was self-hosted … we could use it as soon as Kip’s … could run the bike code. Then we wouldn’t need Sun. Marc was like, maybe we could ditch Sun … we need graphics. He was thinking hard again …
L: Dynamic graphics?
M: Yeah! … The graphics card on your PC; Doom was big and Quake. We were all playing Quake. Why not put that graphics capability on the Web. It finally happened … But OpenGELS … is a standard based on SGI-GL … a lineage of graphics languages for what became the GPU … Somebody I knew … Andrew Meyers … he’s at Cornell; I think he’s a full professor. Marc said let’s get him! … But they did the Sun deal … so we put aside the Kip JVM and used the Sun JVM. He was working to keep Netscape in control of the ball.
Internet Explorer
L: This dance between Netscape and Internet Explorer … From a big, philosophical principal perspective. Can you comment on the approach Microsoft took with IE, from IE1 to Edge today? Anything of value? Or is the world worse off?
B: I’ll segment this into historical eras. Back then, Gates … aggressive character, not really original in my view. Steve Jobs famously said, “He doesn’t have any taste—and I don’t mean this in a small way.” Apple had beautiful typography … good-looking fonts; Windows had ugly systems fonts.
L: Why was IE winning?
B: Distribution … matters more than anything. This is why, even now, Edge is doing better today … We have Windows 10 boxes at home; we have some Windows 7 boxes in our laptops we keep running .. … but once you have that OS toehold, you can force Edge. Apple did it with Safari too. Distribution matters. That’s why IE was going to win; why everyone at Netscape felt, “we’re doomed.” For a while, we had a chance; we innovated with Netscape 2. …Big platform push; Java & Java Script … Plug-ins, HTML table features … started making a preamble stack out of what were pretty static web languages … even in the Beta … using JS to build what you’d call single-page applications, like Gmail. Using JS locally to compute things. Prefiguring what became HX … dynamic …
L: From my perspective; that seems brilliant; it seems innovative you’d have code run in the browser.
B: It impressed me with something: user innovation networks leave user effects. Throwing out JS … getting early developer feedback—absolutely critical. I loved it; it came to the fore in Netscape; culminated in Mozilla … dealing with early adopters all the time …
Evolution of JavaScript
L: A big, sweeping progress of JS—how has it changed over the years? … Fixes of garbage collection … now it’s taken over the world!
B: The standards body got shut down
L: Can you speak to that?
B: Netscape had taken the lead with the web; HTML innovations like frames, tables. The W3C was off in SGML land, heading toward XML la-la land. SGML was the precursor markup language to HTML. … pointy brackets, but all sorts of elaborate syntax for different semantics … … They had this strange idea they could replace the web with XML. It couldn’t be done. The web was very forgiving of HTML, including minor syntax errors that could be error-corrected. Error-correction isn’t done in programming languages.
L: That’s an amazing thing about HTML; it’s more like biology than programming
B: Exactly. …
Javascript standardization
TypeScript
JavaScript ecosystem
HTML5
Making JavaScript fast
JavaScript is the most popular language in the world
Advice for programmers
Browser wars
L: I’ve been reading about military history. One way to tell the history of browsers is … various wars. We’ve talked about Netscape and IE; can you tell the stories of different wars.
B: I mentioned Microsoft abused its monopoly; they had a pretty good team by the time they did IE 4. … That team was fairly burnt out; having gone public, the upper management wanted to buy a bunch of companies to try to go head-to-head with Microsoft. Buying a bunch of companies usually doesn’t work. Modern approach, Mark Zuckerberg … keep them at arm’s length; let them do their thing. … For a while, keeping it separate does work. You bought it for its value … Netscape, when they bought a bunch of companies, they had newcomers that wanted their turn to do the browser. … So Netscape 4 … it was so late; it was supposed to be 3 … It was only on Windows at first. And Microsoft had started doing better.
L: Plus, there’s the benefit, it comes as a default browser.
B: IE 4 was good; they did dynamic HTML innovations. Scott Isaacs, an old buddy, a former accountant; he became what Microsoft calls a program manager, sort of an elevated position. You lead a lot of design and standards efforts. … Scott Furman and I got invited to a preview of IE 4 in San Jose in 1997 … “Here’s the new graphics stuff we’re doing, .. .VML, vector-markup language.” So we had that reaction—we’re doomed. Microsoft was starting to fire on all cylinders. They had the resources to hire talented people. What’s really was bad; that phase of the browser wars ended with monopoly. Perhaps because Microsoft didn’t like dealing with standardization—they let it rot. They abandoned IE 5; these were not well maintained.
L: Closed and outdated, too.
B: Mozilla and Firefox and Opera were adding tabs. They didn’t have tabs! Pop-up blocking .. I should’ve done that from the start. You can inspect the stack … If you’re opening a script and it opens a new window
Firefox
L: Tabs were a brilliant innovation. That made me switch to Firefox. I remember not liking it for the first few minutes. … but then, wait a minute. What year was this? As an aspiring web designer … we didn’t mention CSS much .. the frames were going away. There’s a change in the way websites looked …
B: CSS became a better standard over time for doing table layout … relieved the need for doing spacer … The typographic power of the web has gotten better. You still can’t do advanced typography. … If you were using Firefox, that would’ve been 2004; before that it was called Firebird. … In Mozilla, it was Phoenix in 2002. Then we changed the name to Firebird … Then another group said we couldn’t use Firebird. An Australian company … We renamed it to Firefox. It was a clever name; we wanted to think of something distinctive. Turns out there’s a red panda.
L: This was the second browser war. How was Mozilla born?
B: Netscape got acquired by AOL—a reasonably happy ending for a lot of people. Because Microsoft was killing its market. … But, the Netscape executives said, let’s do an Open Source escape pod. … We did Mozilla in 1998; it looked like it was going to initially give the world an Open Source browser. It’s hard to get people to work on something like that—this hair ball that had been hacked up … … … … what became Open SSL. Tim and Eric took their Open SSL outside the purview of the Dept. of Commerce and stuck it within Mozilla’s code. We had other problems; the politics within Netscape were riven by these acquisitions. … they held it back for Open Source; we didn’t have a mail program, just a browser. Netscape wasn’t the best steward of Mozilla. … Initially, the first engineering manager, Tom Paquin, was the Mozilla founding manager. He left pretty quickly; left me as the acting manager. My first management stint. Mitchell Baker, a lawyer at Netscape … she was involved in the license … she came back from maternity leave and said, I’ll be the manager. Jamie and I said sure; then Jamie quit. He acted like it was a total failure since Mozilla didn’t restart the browser market. But there was no way it could’ve. Mozilla was trying to re-architect code … one of my big goals, a social goal. People wanted more of a standard-space browser. We said, we’ll make a modular code base; use an OS version … We’re going to use JS; we’ll have a bridge between those two. We’ll make a portable front end, with a markup … for the user interface. That was called Zool … Some real talent at the Netscape side delivered that; … Joe Hewitt, Blake Ross; Blake was a high-school aged intern at Netscape. At some point, we were innovating rapidly in the Mozilla world; Netscape was still caught up in management mess … There was this thought, you should take Netscape browser engine and put it in the AOL client. Never happened. It wasn’t clear why AOL bought Netscape; they mostly left it alone. But Netscape didn’t leave Mozilla alone. … Mitchell got laid off! We had an OS project, a lot of the engineers on staff on our side; people we hired from … Mozilla community … The executive that thought they’d gotten rid of Mitchell; but they hadn’t. It showed you could transcend your boundaries of corporate open source … … …
Brave
L: If there’s something compelling, you can beat out the default. It feels like now we’re in a third stage, where there’s Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave—these all seem like exciting, innovative browsing. They’re all copying off each other.
B: There’s evolution again. Privacy is a global wave that’s rising. It’s a large and somewhat chaotic structure. It’s not a unitary good. You can’t buy privacy for $3. Some people think a VPN does this and are disappointed. Privacy is complex; people are understanding it only over time. There’s a genie not going back in the bottle; people are fed up. Apple was making Safari a privacy-branded browser from the beginning. They had private tabs before Firefox did … The canonical model is no local traces after you close the private window …
L: But there’s still some level of tracking
B: There’s network tracking … … Safari had that early on. They also had a cookie-blocking policy … A cookie is a little bit of storage in the browser indexed by the name of the site. Only the main name of the site, like bofa.com or npr.org. Every site can store some info in that cookie; every time it’s contacted by that … the cookie is constantly updated. It can store an encrypted version of your login credentials, so you can stay logged in … which is how it would be if you didn’t have cookies … You go to your bank, you log in, you go to your account view. If you didn’t have a cookie, you’d have to log in again.
Basic Attention Token
California
L: I myself decided to journey out from the world of being a researcher at MIT, and .. I wanted to come to the Silicon Valley to do a start-up myself. A lot of my friends have been successful entrepreneurs—they’ve told me, “Do not come to Silicon Valley!” I wondered if you could comment on why a lot of people are leaving California … Would you consider somewhere else like Austin if you were starting a business? Or is this just a little lull.
B: I think even Austin’s getting overheated. I’ve had relatives and friends move to Texas in the last few months. People are moving to Florida, Miami … the mayor’s been very business-friendly. America’s fundamentally a commercial republic. For a long time, CA was the golden state. It’s in crushing debt due to the lockdowns. It’s got the highest taxes; that’s got to matter. Fires every year because of the dead fall; because the forests weren’t managed. I would say corruption at all levels, up to the governor, famously eating at the French Laundry. “Do what I say, not what I do.” When you see that in leadership; people either run, or they get rid of the leadership. In the old days, people get their guns; you don’t put up with this junk.
L: What made the SV special; it gave freedom to young minds to think bold, try different stuff. Even if taxes are high …
B: Housing’s super-expensive. … They didn’t plan the roads. They got rid of public transportation in L.A. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The rights of way are gone; Elon’s going to go underground …
L: But can SV still be a place where magic happens?
B: All good things come to an end. The government, ARPA-net was a government project. That was Cold War stuff. Out of academia, you had Shockley. But now, what’s the last fab that was built in the valley. MicroUnion? Now the fabs are overseas. One thing the oligarchs have intentionally done in both parties … labor-environmental protection arbitrage … it’s polluted the hell out of parts of China, but you can make cheaper junk. What is SV for now? The network effect, the brain … who you know. The Stanford network. That’s fragile too, over time. Stanford, lot of good professors I like. But it’s kind of a ___ school. Friend hired out of Harvard … There’s professors who grade on the curve! … The precious deers can’t take C’s and D’s at Stanford, so they get A’s and B’s. Say what you will about China; they have a lot of math-science training. I’m an American; I’m born on the fourth of July. America’s essentially a commercial republic. You can … mystify it … But that’s been eroded over time. A lot of the offshore-ing has heart. What happened with Coronavirus? A lot of WFH. Before, people had to come into the office. … “what a relief, I can work from home!” The other shoe dropped; people started asking Zuckerberg, can I move to my family home in the Midwest. Okay, sure. “Can I keep my pay as it is?” No! Got to adjust it to lesser cost-of-living …
L: I’m a red-blooded American at this point. We’ve figured it out somehow; if SV burns, something else will come up in its place. … Many other SV’s throughout the place. We’ve somehow figured it out.
B: I think that’s true; there will be more mobility. … I don’t know if SV has passed some sell-by date. The Coronavirus did hurt. Part of what keeps things going is social. Before CV a lot of people moved to San Francisco. SF was grungier. By the 90s, … you had wealthy tech people moving in, SOMA … it continued … it’s like the movie with Jodie Foster and Matt Damon—it’s about the stratification, the inequality. That sort of happened while I was here; you saw a lot of money drive prices up along the peninsula. Even Google friends who are socially responsible are saying, we should have YIMBY .. It’s not happening. That has to drive people away. I appreciate that people come here; wait for the prices to moderate. People are going to go where the prices are lower.
Mortality
Legacy
#161: Angel investor Jason Calacanis
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Jason Calacanis is an angel investor, entrepreneur, and co-host of All-In Podcast and This Week in Startups.
WallStreetBets and Robinhood
L: … We happen to be living through .. .a historic event, in terms of its impact. Almost philosophically, the role of people and how they can fight power, with this whole Wall Street Bets situation. Your All-In podcast, you’ve had great battles over it. What are some interesting insights you have about this?
J: Full disclosure, I was an angel investor in Robin Hood before they lunched. Founder Vlad and his co-founder pitched me … I gave a talk nearby; we went to Antonio’s Nut House. Elon met us for a drink there. It’s the divest of dive bars. Dirt on the floor; it’s the worst bar in the peninsula; just garbage on the floor. Cheap, warm beer. Your glass has lipstick on it. Not your lapstick! Vlad walks up … He said, “I’m a quant.” So you’re gonna pitch me on a start-up. If it’s so good, why not use it yourself? No, he said, we’re going to build an app, to get millenials to trade stocks. We said, you realize, there’s no retail investors anymore. Because of 2008. Anyway, he said we’re going to get these millenials to trade. The ones that live in their mom’s basements? He said, that’s the opportunity. How are you going to make money? He said that’s the best part, it’s gonna be free. I said, I’m in. Because, in almost all cases, the crazy outlandish ideas that nobody believes in, are the ones that work.
How does the WallStreetBets saga end?
J: … talks about AirBNB and Uber … People replaced their cars. Uber was not competing ultimately with taxis. … AirBNB … those people would not be taking that trip if it weren’t for that business. It inspires people and manifests a market because the product is so transcendent. That’s what Robin Hood did. … It’s too hard to learn unless you actually do it. Just like poker. … It’s going to be painful; you’re going to lose a lot of money … Even in trading; people doing crazy trading in GameStop. The people throwing in their money last are going to lose it. It’s a momentum play. I think it’s good for people to learn … always understand the risk of ruin. The good news for a young person; the risk of ruin might be, they lose $5K … Fear is that some people … lose control. But the system can’t limit the average person’s behavior …
L: How does this whole thing end?
J: Probably in tears.
L: For whom?
J: The hedge funds initially. Then some of the Wall Street people who came in last.
Capitalism
Ideas vs Execution
J: The average American watches 4-5 hours of TV a day. Often I meet people who say, I need a technical co-founder. What is your skill? They don’t have a skill! “Well I have an idea.” As my friend says, everybody has a million ideas an hour! When you’re asleep you’re spewing ideas. It’s all about execution. …
L: You could talk about structural racism …
B: Very valid
Learning to learn
B: I tell young people—the skill you need to refine, is the ability to learn new skills. … Every skill in the world now; you watch people … I tell people, did you watch Game of Thrones? Breaking Bad? That’s about 400 hours. Why don’t you not watch the next one; and pick up some skills?! … Look at yourself; you learned how to set up an entire podcast. You set up this team around you.
L: See now I could hire a team, and they couldn’t bullshit me. The process of learning how to learn is essential there. I do MMA. It’s funny to watch. Some people do an activity for years … You said something about hours. It’s not always the amount of hours; it’s the quality that you put in.
B: … chess.com. This is capitalism. They’ve created the ability to play for 24 hours a day; to play against opponents perfectly matched against you. Think about how much value is being provided to society because of capitalism and competition. If you want things to get better; just make it slightly competitive. Did you see the Michael Jordan documentary, The Last Dance? He’s so petty, he’s so competitive. There’s a running meme of him saying, “I took that personally.” He literally takes everything personally! That’s capitalism. When people are competing … look at what Elon did to the space of cars.
Risk-aversion
J: This virus, this pandemic, so many bad things occurred. Great thing came out of it—this human spirit with the mRNA vaccines. If we took out some of the regulation and people were super-motivated, we might be able to eliminate all pandemics from ever happening again. Bill Gates was pounding his fist, saying we need to be prepared; everybody said, “Yeah, whatever, YOLO!” … You know more about science; mRNA has been around forever. I don’t know if you know about challenge trials. They’re introducing Covid to healthy young patients, and then giving them the vaccine. Against regulations of "Do No Harm.” But we celebrate people jumping out of planes … We celebrate people surfing with sharks, doing deep welding .. . People do dangerous stuff all day long. But we won’t let peoople get paid to do a challenge trial. … We could have said—these thousand people, young people—it’s less risky than running a motorcycle. We’re printing trillions to deal with this. If we had paid a thousand people a million dollars each, we could’ve been done with this back in the summer. I think the Great Pause … it let everybody challenge thinking. “Why did we have that rule?” Maybe there’s a level of risk in a global pandemic. We took on the Nazis; we had to kill that evil. This is another evil which we must .. fight. We could’ve gotten it done earlier, if we’d had intelligent discussions. This is why podcasting is so important. We can have these discussions ….
Robinhood
Parler and AWS
Social networks
L: With Clubhouse, do you see competitors? Do you think it’s possible another, more decentralized social media that will take on and/or replace Twitter and Facebook? IF you look at the whole landscape …
J: They’ll be 10 versions of Clubhouse. We thought Friendster was it. Then MySpace. Then Facebook, LinkedIn, SnapChat, FriendFeed. There’s usually 20 people that will win in a category.
L: Will those players change?
J: Oh sure. If Facebook hadn’t bought Instagram, they would have already been heading down … that was unique that Facebook was able to consolidate that much power. Instagram never should have sold to them; that was a big mistake. They should’ve kept going; they could’ve taken on Facebook … Zuckerberg has no moral ethics; he’ll copy Clubhouse. Part of the reason WhatsApp and IG founders left is they found Zuckerberg distasteful.
L: What makes a great leader?
J: He’s a great executer …
L: I was bull-ish on Facebook in the very early days. Stuff started going wrong; maybe it’s our human nature; I attribute a lot of it to leadership.
B: He started it because he couldn’t ask women whether they were single so he could ask them on a date. He was so obsessed with engagement in winning; one of those friends you have who’s really good at playing a videogame, but doesn’t quite get real life. A reason everybody who worked for him hates him. These are people he made billionaires; they really don’t like him. He doesn’t breed loyalty. But … he’s a marauder. Growth .. he’s good at … taking friction out of products and processes—the playbook of SV for the last decade or two.
L: That’s poetry! You’re saying FAcebook is good at this.
J: He was the best at it. Uber said, we’re going to take out tipping; take out the need to do tipping. I said, we should have tipping. They said that adds a step! We want less steps.
L: I guess Amazon was incredible at that as well.
J: Clubhouse does that too. One click you’re listening; one click you’re speaking. The only way they could make it work faster is if as you opened the app, your microphone was turned on. What happens when you go that fast is you get unintended consequences. Facebook has accrued a lot of fines for doing stuff so fast. You used to be able to add people to groups without their permission. … NAMBLA created a group; they added Zuckerberg, myself … Zuckerberg’s response was, if your friends put you in that group, you should get new friends. … They inadvertently outed a bunch of 18, 19-year-old young men to their families. This is where Silicon Valley needs to check itself, and do better. Think it through!
Leadership
L: This is where vision is required … it seems like MZ is not very good at that. You’ve talked to so many great leaders in this world … what makes a great leader? Is Elon a great leader? … He’s also controversial. I know a lot of people that have worked with him, for him, and there’s a love-hate relationship. They’re pushed extremely hard. … There’s a vision that’s underlying it. Back to our Michael Jordan discusssion …
J: If you want to do great things, there will be some suffering, some pain. It’s not easy, if you want to change the world. Some people expect it to be easy. What you find, for any great leader, trying to do something super-ambitious. If you start a restaraunt … But if you want to change the world, there’s got to be sacrifice involved. Trouble is, people are looking at something that’s an Olympic caliber sport, or a Navy Seal type effort. We wouldn’t look at somebody who wins a gold medal … and say, “Oh my gosh! He suffered; he was tortured!” No, he wanted to be the greatest; and he knew the sacrifice that entailed. In work, in business, people conflate—I went to work to make a living and pay my bills, versus Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps … They used to say Amazon was the worst place you could ever work. A culture of brutality … Then you see these people who worked for Bezos for 24 years. They are ride-or-die forever! A mismatch of people going to work in an extreme endeavor who should not do that. They should go out into the rice fields and pick rice. Another group of people are samurai; they wield a sword; they take on missions that are dangerous … Picking rice is valid work. But you cannot conflate it with being a samurai. Whenever you see stories about, this person at this company is a tyrant. … If you’re in the field, and you have to take a hill, or wack a guy … this is serious shit! Don’t do it if you’re not. serious. If you’re not serious about changing the world, why go work for Bezos or Elon Musk? Don’t go work there!
Work-life balance
Great leaders lead by example
Advice for startup founders
Clubhouse
When will we fully re-open the economy
J: When do you think deaths will be under $200 a day, and we’ll have 200 million people on the other side of this.
L: I stopped thinking deeply about this, becasue I’ve been frustrated for so long. Psychologically it allows me to carry on. I thought for many months, testing needs to be done at scale. We gave up on testing. All sitting here waiting for vaccine to come along. The distribution is struggling from the same kind of things. … If everything goes great, meaning there’s not a second strand of the virus, I’m cynical enough to think it won’t be till midsummer when we start opening back up.
J: I think May/June. I’m a little more optimistic ….
L: The crucial piece I’ve been focusing on is the social media aspect … it’s not just about the reality of deaths; it’s about the state of the collective intelligence of the species, determined by our communication on social media. … Fear could spread; YOLO could spread … The politics influence our perception of what’s true or not. Having clear, nuanced conversation is hte way out. Social media drives division … it feels, honestly, like a technology problem.
J: We talked earlier about the magic of SV and maybe going too far, with the Facebook Groups example. We used to have reverse-chronological order; that’s how you consumed a feed … Go from the newest thing up top, and working your way backwards … They started putting the most-engaged stuff up top …Thus, this addiction to the outrageous, the outlandish, the inspiring—occurred. It got dark. People started to realize, if I want to show up on the top of my friends’ feeds … That’s when outrage culture came in. Then cancel culture. That stuff gets us to the top of the feed. We all started playing a very weird video game. Donald Trump did it. He copied it from Howard Stern. Howard Stern took over all the dialogue in the 80s and 90s because he was outrageous. That became the actual device of social media. That’s got to be undone. The only way it can be undone is … these things can’t be billions of people where the most outrageous thing from the world is now right in front of you. The human mind wasn’t meant to process this much pain or anger … Watching other poeple pose their private jets, and YOLO adventures—young people are now thinking, put on private jets, creating crazy FOMO around IG. If you think everybody’s on a private jet, going to the Grammy’s or Coachella … “You’re like—oh, but I’m home.”
L: You’re getting inadequate. This whole system is creating the wrong incentives.s
Augmented reality
When should a startup raise money?
David Goggins
Disagreement with Chamath Palihapitiya
L: Chamath is a friend of yours … He’s a co-host. You guys went heated against each other on Robin hood. First, on the actual discussion, can you steal-man his argument; the nature of the disagreement. …
J; Chamath basically thought what Dave Portnoy thought about what Vlad was doing with Robin hood; that he cut off trading to save the hedge funds. This guy implies it’s not true … We don’t know He compares it to Russia Trump allegations. No conspiracy here; Robin Hood needed to raise billions to stay solvent, and they weren’t allowed to talk about it. They had to come up with that money, or shut down. We had a talk afterwards; we had to air it out. We had a private discussion. Listen, we love each other, we’re besties. What happened here? What happened—I’m fiercely loyal to my folks, including Travis from Uber. I always went on CNBC or my podcast and owned up to any mistakes. I was hated for it with Uber. I was hated for it last week with Robin hood. I like to be loyal to my investments, to my partners. I feel if you invest, you have three choices. You could fight for your team, go silent, or throw your team under the bus. The last one is not acceptable to me; and neither is the middle one!
Story about Elon Musk's darkest moments
L: Can I ask you about love?
J: I’m feeling it! We could become besties! I don’t know if it’s Eric Weinstein level, but I feel like it’s close!
L: Music to my ears; your rant on the Olympic nature of a startup. What role does love, family, friendship play in that … brutal pursuit of excellence? Building a startup, or anything new in this world?
J: Great question; I’m totally unprepared for it. Nobody would ever ask me that; that’s why you’ve got quite a following. I try not to talk about relationship with Elon … that often … he’s so famous now! … Funny moment; a moment in time when Tesla almost went out of business. It was during the financial crisis. They were running out of money. I said, “let’s go get a steak. He had his P1, P2 … We drove to the valet; we’re sitting there. I said, I read the story in gawker; you only got like five weeks of money left. He said that’s not true; we have two weeks! I said, what’s going on with the rocket ship company? You did the one last month. … If we blow up the last rocket, SpaceX was done. … I could loan you a couple million dollars! He said that’s okay; a friend of ours was funding him. He was figuring out whether or not to go on vacation for Christmas. He’s on the phone trying to save both companies. I said, certainly there must be some good news. He takes out his Blackberry and starts swiping; and he shows me the Model S. Nobody knew about the Model S. It was the clay models. Human beings standing by the clay version … I’m scrolling through it, saying this is fucking great! What’s the range? 250 miles. What is it going to cost? He said, eventually $50-$60K. I said if you make that car, you’ll change the goddamn world. every single person in the U.S. will want this car. … It’s gorgeous. I got home; my wife .. gave me the checkbook. I said, don’t tell anybody .. I wrote two checks for $50K … with a piece of paper, saying: “Love the new car; I’ll take two. I FedExed it to him.” I told him that money would be gone in 48 hours … The checks don’t cash. But I read a story … he saved the company. Three years later, I get an email from Tesla; your reservation number is 000000001. .. I forward it to Elon and I said; I can’t take number one. That’s yours! He said, ahh I’ve got five of them; and besides, you’re the first person that ordered one.
Friendship
#162: The Return of Jim Keller, chip-man!
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Jim Keller is a legendary microprocessor engineer, previously at AMD, Apple, Tesla, Intel, and now Tenstorrent.
Good design is both science and engineering
Javascript
RISC vs CISC
What makes a great processor?
Intel vs ARM
Steve Jobs and Apple
L: Was it possible for Intel to pivot hard and win the mobile … That’s a difficult thing for a huge company to do, right? ‘‘Cause we’ll talk about your current work. It’s clear PC’s were dominating for several decades.
J: It’s a leadership question. Under Steve Jobs, Apple pivoted several times. Who knew computers should be made out of aluminum? Nobody knew that? … The old Intel, they did that multiple times …
L: What was it like working with SJ?
J: I said hi to to him twice in the cafeteria. He said “Hey fellas.” He was friendly. He was wandering around; couldn’t find a table, because the cafeteria was packed. … My cohort, Mike worked for Steve for 25 years. He talked to Steve multiple times a day. He was one of the people who could put up with Steve’s … let’s say brilliance and intensity. Steve trusted Mike. I’d be sitting with Mike and the phone would ring. Steve would be yelling about something or other. Mike would translate it into engineering. Steve was a great idea guy and a really great selector for talent. He was a really good first principles guy. Somebody would say something couldn’t be done; he’d say that’s obviously wrong. Maybe it’s hard, or expensive … maybe we need different people. Saying it can’t be done is stupid …
Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
L: Seems like Musk is more engineering centric. SJ seems much more idea space, design space. Just make it happen. The world should be this way.
J: But he used computers; he had computer people talk to him all the time. Hardware, software, all the pieces. He would have an idea of what could be done with it next—that was grounded in reality. He had this interesting connection … he wasn’t a computer architect or a designer, but he had an intuition from the computers we had to what could happen.
L: Interesting you say intuition; it seems like he was pissing off a lot of engineers in his intuitions. … All these stories about floppy disks …
J: Steve the first round; he’d go into a lab, see what was going on, and hate it. Or fire people. When he came back, my impression was, he surrounded himself with a relatively small group of people, and didn’t interact outside that group as much. … People moving a prototype around the quad with a black blanket over it; they didn’t want Steve to see it …
L: Yeah the dynamic with Jony Ive and Steve. .. is interesting. It’s like you don’t want to—he ruins as many ideas as he generates. A dangerous line to walk.
J: But if you have a lot of ideas. Gordon Bell was famous for ideas. His percentage wasn’t that good. He had so many ideas; and he was good at talking to people about it. Whereas Elon is, I want to build rockets. Steve would hire a bunch of rocket guys; Elon would go and read rocket manuals.
L: So Elon had a love and passion for the manuals. And the details! … What do you make of the anger and the passion, the firing and the mood swings? Being emotional and all of that? That’s Steve, and I guess Elon too. Is that a bug or a feature?
J: Feature. Y-axis productivity; X-axis is chaos. As you go from the origin, as you improve order, you improve productivity. At some point productivity peaks, and goes back down again. Too much order, nothing can happen. Once you start moving in the direction of order, the force vector driving you towards order is unstoppable. Every organization moves to where productivity is stymied by order. .. The organization orients toward .. hiring more people. Then inevitably, the organization is captured by the bureaucracy that manages all the processes. Humans like that. Walk into a room, and say, “Guys, I like what you’re doing—but I need you to have less order.” Without force behind that, it won’t happen. … The funny thing is to get stuff done, you need people that can manage stuff and manage people. Humans are complicated; they need lots of care and feeding … I had a friend who started managing a group. “I figured it out! You have to praise people before they do anything.” But you get stuck in that trap; if they’re not doing anything, how do you confront them. … Engineering companies are full of adults that had all kinds of a range of childhoods. Lots of people only work for praise.
Father
L: You’re probably looking for somebody’s approval!
J: I used to call up my dad and tell him what I was doing; he was excited about it.
L: You got his approval.
J: Yeah, a lot. I was lucky. I did poorly in school, I was dyslexic. My parents didn’t care; “Oh he’ll be fine.”
L: Is he still with us?
J: He had Parkinson’s and then cancer. His last ten years were tough.
L: The mind?
J: Pretty good. Parkinson’s causes slow dementia. It was hallucinogenic dementia …
L: Do you remember conversations from that time? Fond memories?
J: Oh yeah. A friend told me I could draw a computer on the whiteboard faster than anybody I’d ever met. I said, ‘you should have met my dad.’ He would come home and tell a story about a bridge; and he would draw the whole bridge! He had this idea you could understand and conceive anything. When I interview people (now) I ask them to draw a picture …
Perfection
Modular design
Moore's law
Hardware for deep learning
Making neural networks fast at scale
Andrej Karpathy and Chris Lattner
How GPUs work
Tesla Autopilot, NVIDIA, and Mobileye
Andrej Karpathy and Software 2.0
Tesla Dojo
Neural networks will understand physics better than humans
Re-engineering the human brain
Infinite fun and the Culture Series by Iain Banks
L: There’s no reason we can’t have multiple consciousnesses in one brain.
J: And maybe there’s some way to make it faster so the area of computation could still have unified feel to it … could definitely be improved.
L: It’s pretty good right now, actually … The fact that the ride ends, seems to give a nice spark of beauty to the whole experience. I don’t know. I don’t know if it could be improved easily. … The fact that I can imagine ways in which it could be
J: Do you know Iain Banks? His stories? The super-smart AIs there mostly live in a world they call infinite fun; because they can create arbitrary worlds. They interact in the normal world … A given mind can interact with hundreds of humans at once, because we’re very slow … They mostly live in these other minds of thinking.
L: My inclination of this infinite fun would not be that fun.
J: That’s sad. It must be fun … being able to make a star. …
L: The sadness is what makes it fun. …
J: It could be the fun makes it fun, and the sadness makes it bittersweet.
Neuralink
Dreams
Ideas
Aliens
Jordan Peterson
L: As a small little quirk of history, it seems like you’re related to Jordan Peterson. He’s going through some rough stuff now. Is there some comment you can make on the roughness of the human journey?
J: Well, I became an expert in benzo withdrawal? They interact with gabba circuits to reduce anxiety, and 100 other things. There’s no known list of everything they do; once you’re on ‘em, you habituate to them. .. It’s a metabolic dependency. If you discontinue them, there’s a funny thing called kindling. Which is, if you stop them, you’ll have horrible withdrawal symptoms. If you go back on them, you won’t be stable. It literally changes the size and numbers of neurotransmitter sites in your brain. … unbelievable hell. … What Jordan went through seemed to be worse. … He seems to be quite a bit better intellectually. .. I’ve never seen anybody suffer so much.
L: His brain is also this powerhouse. Does a brian that’s able to think deeply suffer more?
J: They all seem to suffer unbelievably. My heart goes out to everybody. There’s funny math about this … Some doctors … prescribe them endlessly. Something like 75% of people, when they taper off … 75% get off okay. 10% have severe difficulty and 5% have life-threatening difficulty.
L: So you put some of the fault at the doctors …
j: Who knows? It’s hard to say. One doctor said .. if you’re prescribed them for a reason … you’re crazy, or dependent. You get pushed into a different treatment regime. … One doctor said ‘I prescribed them for 10 years; thought I was helping; realized I was hurting.’ The fact they’re casually prescribed is horrible … It’s bloody scary. Long range, benzos have impact on your personality. You get disassociated from reality and your friends a little bit.
L: The mind is terrible. We were talking about infinite fun, but there’s also possibly infinite suffering. Of all the experiences an intelligent computer could have, is it mostly fun or mostly suffering? If you brute-force expand the number of possibilities, … maybe our human brain is just protecting us from human suffering. …
J: Yeah, the world’s in a balance. The material on religion: the struggle between good and evil is …
Viruses
L: We’re living through important moment in human history with this pandemic. .. Pandemics have the potential to kill off most of the human population. There’s so many viruses in this world. Viruses essentially run the world. .. At the same time they’re not intelligent; not even living. Do you have thoughts about this virus?
J: So, I believe in frameworks. One of ‘em is evolution. We’re evolved creatures. One of the things about evolution is, it’s hyper competitive. Not out of a sense of evil … Multicellular life partly exists because of the competition between different kinds of life forms. We know sex partly exists to scramble our genes to have genetic variation as protection against invasion of viruses ….
WallStreetBets and Robinhood
Advice for young people
Human condition
Fear is a cage
L: I’ve competed a lot in my life; if I introspect, the thing I’m most afraid of is being humiliated.
J: Nobody cares about that. You’re the only person on the planet that cares about that. It’s a really useless thought! … I know, too. I’ve been really embarrassed about shit that nobody cared about myself. But that’s a cage, and then you have to get out of it. Here’s the thing: once you find something like that, you have to be determined to break it. Otherwise, you accumulate that kind of junk, and then you die, a mess.
L: I guess the thing is to die in the biggest possible cage.
J: Or no cage at all. People do get enlightened. … … You’ve never met somebody who you thought … they just kill me. Mental clarity. Humor.
L: But I just think they’re in a bigger cage.
J: (Laughs!)
Love
Regrets
Eric Weinstein once more! #163 … 4th
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Aliens and physics
Breaking the frame of conversation
E: My purpose, when I re-frame the questions, is not to challenge you … I think we’ve been on an incredible role. I’m trying to honor you by being as disagreeable about frame-breaking as possible. .. I think you can play outside of some of the frames. These are sort of offerings to get the conversation started. I think what’s going on here is that we’re not thinking about this in very deep terms. When I say we’ve got to get off this planet; a lot of people assume I’m talking about faster-than-light travel .. assuming some Einsteinian paradigm that’s broken with some slight adjustment. … It’s fascinating to me that we’ve lost the ability to just realize, we don’t know the framework. What does it even mean? … Worlds with more than one temporal dimension …
L: That’s a strong mental exercise … the differential geometry that Riemann came up with in the 1800s; we don’t usually talk about … metrics. If it weren’t for relativity, this would be the most …. subject out there.
Time travel across multiple dimensions
Is the government in possession of alien spacecraft?
Freedom of speech
L: It’d be funny if there was a freedom-of-speech switch.
E: They figured out that if we don’t have public options through communication, then everything we say to each other goes through a private company; private companies can do whatever they want. Electronic and digital speech makes every other kind of speech irrelevant …. whose stuff is weighted .. it’s an absolute nightmare. The Silicon Valley intellectual elite; they’re so busy making money, they’re not holding up any of the values. It has this kind of libertarian progressive sheen to it when it goes to Burning Man. Then it quickly imposes rules on the rest of us; what we can say to each other
L: What’s the ideal of the free speech?
E: People who have no idea how much power the Supreme Court has … The letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The letter of the law says that speech is free … on the level of ideas. I’m not talking about slander or … What I am saying is that the freedom of speech for ideas, is essential that the court abstract it, and shove it down the throat of Google, Amazon, whomever these infrastructure companies are. … The case I like is search and seizure. If I have data inside my house, but the server is outside my house. Does my password extend the perimeter of my house to the data outside my house? These are choices for the court; the court is supposed to say they understand the intent of the framers. These douches on the Internet say, ‘it’s a private company, they can do whatever they want!’ No … Somebody needs to come up with the abstraction, right now, that Jack cannot do whatever he wants.
L: You say the courts, but it’s also us people who think about the world.
E: No, it’s the courts. If the courts don’t do this, we’re toast.
L: But we can still think about it.
E: I’m trying to say something very simple; it’s just not going to be popular for a while. Tech dwarfs previous forms of communication. Print, or shouting in a public park. Even there, we came up with free speech zones; you can’t protest at a convention; you can go to a park 23 hours out. No! Speech is dangerous. Ideas are dangerous. … Yes, I agree targeted speech (doxing) is very different. But free speech for ideas is meant to be dangerous! People will die as the result of free speech … The idea that one life, one people dying, because of free speech, is too much … is preposterous! Why go to the beaches of Normandie, if we can’t afford to lose one life.
L: I was really bothered by Amazon banning Parlor from AWS. My assumption was the infrastructure on which competing platforms could be created was different from the actual platforms. The standard, the ideal of freedom of speech, I in my mind, shallowly … it felt that we’ve created a more dangerous world; that freedoms were violated by banning Parlor.
E: The Internet Hyena answer—’I don’t understand, dude—just build your own Amazon!’ … One of the great things about person-to-person conversation … as opposed to having 30 of our closest friends. … Every person says something interesting; as a result it’s always muddled …
L: One of my techniques is childlike naivete and curiosity
E: Real or …
L: Real
E: 80% real … using the infrastructure to shut down sex workers. We had operation Chokepoint under the Obama administration. … You have legal companies that are harassed by our financial system … Riley Reid couldn’t get a Mail Chimp account. This idea you charge these people higher rates … because of charge-backs on credit cards. It’s an unofficial policy of harassment. Everyone who shows up at Davos … they coordinate … things like Build Back Better. I don’t really know what it is, but I think it’s something like, how do we shut down Extremism in America? … I think the Republican party did get extreme; but that was a response to how extreme the Democrats got … Well, our extremism is fine! But your extremism, my God, it’s disgusting! This is the ridiculous place we’re in. Our friends, in part, are coked up on tech money. They don’t keep their principles …
Elon Musk
E: I do think partially what’s happened is, your (generation) hasn’t seen functional institutions. You’ve probably never seen an adult. Sometimes I think Elon looks like an adult. I know he has a wild lifestyle … Somebody who weighs things, thinks about the future beyond their own lifespan… Isn’t caught up in punitive action … I had a positive; I was so jazzed when he ended up as the world’s richest person. He said “Oh, that’s interesting; back to work.” .. He made a LeGrange joke; the world’s richest person knows about LeGrange. The Internet hyenas will descend … shut up.
L: You’re saying, people who are running tech companies; they are not adults.
E: A lot of them are Silicon Valley utopian businessmen, where you talk a utopian line … The idealism of every era is the cover story of its greatest thefts.
Idealism of every era
E: It’s really about the software eating the world, by simply being a bad tech version of something that previously existed, like a newspaper … you can dwarf that, by aggregating newspapers … in their digital versions. So we have lots of man-children wandering around … once the Bay Area, and now Austin and Miami and some other places. These are friends of ours; they’re brilliant with respect to certain stuff, and none of them can get off the drift.
L: I think the argument used by Jack Dorsey was that there was an incitement of violence. This word ‘violence’ was used without much reason behind it. You think it’s impossible for Jack to be a grownup.
E: Jack’s pretty close to being a grown up.
L: It seems like he is. I don’t know where the JD that I meant … went. I’m worried about it being something behind the scenes that I can’t see.
Non-locality of free speech in the Internet age
L: Does a human being have the capacity to be transparent about the reason behind the banning. (Of Trump) … Do you think all such banning is destructive?
E: Let’s see what the problem is. I’m going to take my phone and take a picture of LF. I’m going to Tweet that out. .. In so doing, I have just sent a picture of you and a tiny piece of text, all over the planet. If statistics tell the truth, it’s arrived at just under a half million different accounts …. We don’t really know how many places it met. But the key issue with that Tweet—is it’s a non-local phenomenon. I just broadcast to an entire planet. There is no known solution to having so many people with the ability to communicate non-locally. .. Locality used to be an aspect of speech. Those aspects got unbundled. We naturally counted on some of those aspects (like locality) to deter certain types of speech. (Dumb speech.). That issue is not something we’re facing up to. We seem to constantly look backwards. No one imagines we’ll be able to wisely amend the Constitution. Nobody knows where this program lives …
L: It feels really wrong to ban Donald Trump. This particular human for being divisive. But then, when there is an incitement of violence—that’s an overused claim, but perhaps there was … actual brewing of local violence happening. One of the things I know was happening on Parler; people were scheduling meetings in physical space. You’re going back from this large-scale … thing being able to communicate ..
E: If the violence were digital; if ransom-ware was unleashed … the key is the abstractions. What was free speech as a bundle? How do we express the bundle in the … I’ve never seen you in mainstream media. We exist in an alternate universe. The MSM is trying to have a narrative … they plug their fingers in their ears, and try to act like nothing exists except MSNBC, the WaPo … It’s like professional wrestling.
Glenn Beck
L: On GB’s program, you talked about being able to have this conversation … that reaches across different worldviews … having it grounded in mutual
E: But we can’t have it; the main model is in the process of stealing all the wealth we’ve built up. They’ve organized the extremes into two LARPing teams … MAGAstan and Woke-istan… Then you have people who have avoided these two teams … I’ve never met Mark Zuckerberg; I’ve met Sergey Brin once briefly … We’re not having any kind of smart conversation at a national level. It’s almost as if we’ve destroyed every sandbox where we could play together. The only thing is long-form podcasting. Have you seen what’s happening with Alex Stamos …
Joe Rogan
E: If they can’t control Joe by bringing him in-house … he could become like Howard Stern, and become less relevant. Joe has F-You money and he has actually said F-You. I don’t have F-You money
L: Could we
…
E: We have a war going on; the war is on academic freedom. … We now have an anti-elite. We’re going to defer tenure forever; then we tell people their tenure’s only good for their tiny micro-subject. We lost academic freedom, and we ushered in peer review, which was a disaster. Then we lost funding, when people were confident they’d have the ability to do research. A world in which there’s no ability to even say, no I refuse to sign your DEI loyalty oath. My point is … academic freedom, the idea was to have the freedom of a billionaire on a smaller salary. I wanted to go into academics … the great prize was freedom. Ralph Gomery pointed it out: if you lose freedom, you lose the only thing we had to offer top minds. Top minds value that at a different level than do other human beings.
Freedom and fear
Jeffrey Epstein
Aaron Swartz
Jeffrey Epstein and Geometric Unity
Cancel culture
E: Kevin Spacey; I had a long conversation with him. But we talked very specifically about him being cancelled. I don’t think the world has heard that story, because there’s a strong sense that he has to be out-grouped. As a result—do we want to disavow the space program? … At what point do we recognize that we are the problem! Humans are humans! There is no perfect group of people …. Even the oppressed people, that we’ve now fettish-ized; those people aren’t necessarily great people. None of us! We can’t do this, in this fashion.
L: So when we sit to have a conversation; you shouldn’t have NPR in your mind; you should be willing to take the full risk, to see the good in the person, with limited information.
E: Everyone’s entitled to a hypocrisy budget; to a certain amount of screwing up in life. To some mendacity, aggression. The idea of getting rid of everybody …
L: I think about Alex Jones
E: Instead, let’s talk about the National Enquirer. Is everything the NE says false? Do you remember the John Edwards stofy? He had a childhood from an extramarital affair. I believe the NE broke the story. What did the NYT do? They report that the NE is making a claim … So why is the NYT talking to Mike Cernoivch or using the NE as a source. … Why are certain people entitled to talk to everybody? And others get to talk to no one? It’s an indulgence system
L: It’s hard to talk to Alex Jones
E: I used to talk to NPR … that has gone away. They’ve circled the wagons closer and closer; more and more of us are unacceptable. They’re looking at people with platforms and saying, what do we have against that person?. … It doesn’t matter how many times Joe said the N-word. … With math theorems, if the worst person in the world comes up with a theorem, we can’t un-prove the theorem! Charles Manson made a great song. I don’t know how Hitler was as an artist.
L: Actually not bad.
E: We’ve got to get past; past this idea we’re going to purge ourselves of our badness. All we’re doing is destroying ourselves in search of perfection. We’re not perfect. We’re not going to silence everyone .. If we do that, kiss the whole thing goodbye. We might as well—let’s learn Chinese.
Alex Jones
E: There’s stuff Alex does that’s nauseating. There’s other stuff he does that’s funny. Sometimes he’s on truth; sometimes on conspiracy theory. The right way to approach anything you don’t like is, ‘Great! Go long-short.’ … Which part of Alex Jones do you short? You should be able to answer that for everybody. Trump! … This idea that we can say a person is entirely evil because of one thing they did/do, this shows a simplicity of mind we cannot afford.
L: Of course it’s a grey area, but there’s a threshold .. where your intent when you come to a meaning, where your intent is not grounded in respect for common humanity.
E: If someone’s doing really bad stuff; I expect you to try to stop them. But keep in mind, as a younger man, I saw an amazing anti-porn documentary called Rate It X. The conceit was, we’ll get some pornographers in front of a camera … we’ll get them to justify and rationalize, with no commentary. Okay. If you really think Alex Jones is the worst, you could decide to just let him talk. Now, I have decided not to do that with particular people. Stefan Molyneaux, … I don’t agree with him but I don’t want him banned from social media.
Curtis Yarvin
E: There’s a tremendous amount of interest in Curtis Yarvin. Very provocative. I haven’t invited him onto The Portal. But I haven’t ruled it out. We’re all in a difficult position.
L: I think it’s a much more difficult task … CY is a good example. How much work do i need to put in reading Curtis’ work.
E: Why somebody who’s said such stupid things is talked about by so many people. My belief is, he’s made some very interesting, provocative points; they treat the asinine, super-dangerous stuff he says as, ‘Well, that’s Curtis.’
L: He’s a First Principles Deep Thinker in some ways.
E: We don’t actually know why he’s knocking around …
L: I’ve got the sense he’s said some stupid stuff …. he seems to be careless.
E: No, no: it’s like Jim Watson. He wants to say provocative things to prove that he’s free. He enjoys the freedom to say these things. Key thing is, I expect something more from Curtis. I make this point repeatedly that vaccines aren’t 100% safe. Most people with the idea that all anti-vaxxers should be silenced. You keep finding that … similar to “believe all women.” Vapid claims … like Defund the Police … We’ve come up with an incredibly disingenuous society. I might talk to CY; but I have little interest in talking to someone giddy about discussing who makes good slaves, and who makes bad slaves. Why would I want to do that?
L: Well, that’s not his main thing; he’s very thoughtful on how this world works. And he’s important historically in the development of the Alt-Right. It makes sense to talk to him; the question is, how much work do you put in.
E: This is the issue of FUGU. You have a puffer fish; you can eat it … get a tingly sensation on your tongue. My point is, I don’t know how to serve him …
Michael Malice
E: I’m not happy about his—it’s been so long since I’ve seen good trolls.
L: Yes. He needs a higher quality of trolling … he aspires to that. Disagree or not, I really enjoy how much care he puts into the work he does. On North Korea, the study of the world. And how much, privately but also in public, love he has, especially for those who are powerless.
E: I think Curtis actually … I don’t know. The first time I met him, he said, “I’m the most right-wing person you’ve ever met.”
L: It’s theatrical.
E: It turned me off. Do you need to be the most right-wing person? Okay, why are we doing this … but what I’m trying to get at is … Michael Malice is a friend of yours; if you found out something terrible; you should continue to be his friend. Curtis is an acquaintance of mine … I’ve started to understand why some people in my life are CY friends. My feeling is, too much poison organ, not enough fish.
Intellectual Dark Web
L: You coined the term IDW … I like it; it represents a certain group of people … struggling with—challenged the norms of social and political discourse from all different angles. What is the future of the IDW ..
E: Is it a protocol? A collection of people featured in an article? There’s a tremendous desire to pin people down. … You want to play the demarcation game … I resisted saying who was in it, what it was … that Bari Weiss’ article was the definitive thing. … Key is, nothing can grow in this environment. We haven’t found a way to grow anything decent we need right now; those of us who’d like to have a future for our great-grandchildren.
L: But do you think it’s useful to have a term like the IDW to capture some set of people; some set of ideas, or maybe principles. You can say it doesn’t exist. But to me, it represented something. It represented … I think I’ve siad this to you (laughs). I said that you’re the set of people who say, the emperor has no clothes.
E: There’s lots of elephants in the room. In large measures, we didnt’ represent an institutional base … We were sold a bill of goods …
Innovation
Economics
Cryptocurrency
Geometric Unity paper
David Goggins challenge
Father and son
Andrew Huberman returns #164
Why do humans need sleep?
L: … let’s go with a big first question.
A: The answer I’ll start with is the one that I always default to when there’s a ‘why’ question. I wasn’t consulted at the design phase. I’ll wriggle my way out of giving an absolute answer. One mechanism that’s super-important: the longer we’re awake, the more adenosine accumulates in our brain. … … How sleepy we get with a given amount of adenosine depends on this circadian cycle …. Typically if you’re awake during day and asleep at night, your lowest temperature point will be 3 a.m …. it will peak in the late afternoon. That oscillation in temperature takes 24 hours, plus or minus an hour. … I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s aligned to the 24-hour spin of the earth on its axis.
Temperature
Optimal temperature for sleep
L: Is there one? I think your latest episode … HelixSleep.com/Huberman …
A: Thanks for the plug.
L: And yes, you have a new podcast; that’s amazing. You did a whole series on sleep that people should definitely check out. … The quality of it makes me want to be a better human being. ThreeBlueOneBrown is another great one. …
Sleep anxiety
A: … I think it’s important that people have highlighted the importance of sleep and getting enough rest; I do think it’s gone too far. I’m editorializing … we’ve created this anxiety about sleep … if we don’t sleep enough, we’re going to get dementia. There’s a lot of evidence to the contrary … Sure, it may be a solid eight hours could be great benefit … You don’t want to create meta-stress about sleep. Being happy is one of the most powerful things you could do; not allowing yourself to go toward the rabbit hole of stress. … Effort is related to epinephrine … We get stressed mentally and physically and we want to give up. The epinephrine signal accumulates and there’s a quit-point. Dopamine, the molecule of reward and feeling good re-sets our ability to be in effort. Dopamine is what epinephrine is made from; if you look at the bio-chemical cascade … It starts with tyrosine … and that’s eventually converted into dopamine. Dopamine is made into epinephrine. Happiness, joy … in what you’re doing … produces a chemical milieu that … allows for effort. They don’t talk about the happiness part. I think that limiting your stress; at least recognizing, if you’re pulling an all-nighter; there’ll be a point in that 24-hours …. where your brain … … the brain is hobbling along. Anything you feel or think at that time should not be given too much value. If you can trick yourself into thinking that’s the pleasure point, you afford yourself a huge advantage. Positive anticipation about next-day events … is a way to get powerful sleep. …
8 hours of sleep
L: … consistent habit versus total amount. For me, the entire picture of sleep is similar to nutrition. It feels as if there’s so many variables involved; it’s so person-specific. Science has to look in aggregate at effects on sleep … The question isn’t … it’s a very important question … what kind of diet fights obesity? Reduces obsesity? What diet allows David Goggins to be the best version of himself? … People that tell me they actually get eight hours of sleep … I get it. They may be right; but they be very wrong.
A: There’s no rule that eight is better than six. There’s other things that turn out to be strong parameters for success … your entire life is divided into 90-minute cycles. Performance tends to ramp up slowly in a 90-minute cycle. … In sleep, we go through REM … these ultra-idian … cycles …. Winding up sleep at the end of one of those cycles; waking up at the end of those cycles is good … You can make your alarm go off at the end of one of those cycles. … I do better on six hours than I do on seven. I happen to like an eight hour sleep … I haven’t done an entire eight in forever … I function well during the day. That’s an important parameter—how do you feel during the day? Almost everyone feels a dip in the afternoon. That’s a good time to either get a nap, or if you’re not a napper … feet-elevated … clears the glymphatic system … One thing I’m a big proponent of is NSDR (non-sleep, deep-rest). …
Nap
Goggins Challenge
A: I know you have this interesting challenge coming up. The frequency of running every four hours will keep you from sleeping more than a couple hours in between.
L: On March 5, I’m running 48 miles with Mr. David Goggins; so four miles every four hours; and people should join us. That mad man is going to be live on Instagram starting at 8 p.m. Pacific on March 5.
A: You’re going to join him in person. Undisclosed location.
L: … It’s very difficult to be with David alone, in a room.
A: I’ve done some work with David; his energy is infectious. … The periodicity of those runs .. means you’re not going to have an extended block of sleep.
L: It takes time to fall asleep; there’s an intensity to the whole thing. … The optimal thing is probably, from the sound of it … is getting a few 90-minute naps.
A: I thought about this a bit. There are two general approaches that could work. One would be to hammer through the whole thing, to get your level of alertness and adrenaline ramped up so you don’t expect yourself to sleep. .. If you do fall asleep, it’s a bonus. … That’s one approach. A couple friends who were in Seal teams; they did an infamous hell week. There’s some stretches of several days with no sleep. Some will say it’s worse to go down for that nap and be woken 20 minutes later … than just stay up. The other one would be to anchor in these ultraidian cycles … coming back from a run … it’s hard to immediately fall asleep, but getting as much sleep as you can in the intervening periods. There’s also the question of whether you want to nourish. Any time we put food in our gut, you’re drawing blood into the gut, so you’re going to divert some energy to digestion, and it’s going to make you sleepy. There’s a reason for ‘rest and digest,’ the parasympathetic system, is called that.
L: I did this last year … one of the biggest mistakes I did was to overeat during that time. I have been considering eating almost nothing throughout the day.
A: Being fasted will increase your alertness. …
Breathing while running
Anger
L: I’ll probably get pissed off at (DG) at some point, I’m guessing. Do you have thoughts … about the role of anger in all of this? In managing alertness, performance …
A: There’s so much out there about how important it is to do this from a place of love. And love is powerful. Alertness … physiologically looks identical for love and excitement as it does for anger and frustration. Except the love component does tend to be associated with the release of chemicals like seratonin and dopamine that … replenish. … Portions of my career where my best work has come from … not wanting to get out-competed, or wanting to prove something. These days, I’m not oriented from that place quite as often. But we should be honest—anger is powerful, provided it’s channeled, and it can give you a ton of fuel and gas.
L: Yeah, Joe Rogan has been an inspiration to … having a loving view on the world; I’ve wanted to approach the world that way. In the same way, Dave Goggins has been an inspiration to, yeah, be angry at stuff. He almost conjures up artificial demons in his mind, just so he can fight them. I did a challenge in the summer, where for 30 days I was doing a lot of push-ups. Over time, it was counterproductive for me … The roller-coaster that being angry at stuff takes you, can also be exhausting. The ups of it are good, but the downs are bad. …
Testosterone
Fasting
L: You also mentioned fasting through this two-day thing. Your thoughts on fasting in general, on a personal level, and at a higher level of studies that you’re aware of; what do you think about intermittent fasting; not eating for 16 hours … Or something I’ve been doing; eating only once a day. That’s 24-hour fasting I guess. One meal a day. Something I’ve been thinking about doing: 72 hours … other people do five-day fasts. What do you think about that for performance …
A: Some anecdotes … I think none of this is about the actual long-term nutritional benefits. Science on intermittent fasting … pretty remarkable. One of my colleagues was Satchin Panda … wrote a book called The Circadian Code, kind of popularized intermittent fasting … Ori Hoffechler talked about the “warrior diet.” Sachin has published papers in very good journals showing that limiting the consumption of calories to 4, 6, or 8 of every 24-hour cycle, and keeping that more or less correlated with when the sun is out … leads to less liver disease … In the mice studies, it didn’t matter what the mice ate … When the mice didn’t take that break, they got fat and sick. So pretty remarkable data. How much translates to humans isn’t clear. .. Adherance … what people do in a laboratory is hard to do in the real world. … Low-carb diets; they tend to focus on foods with high amino-acid content, like meats … people are less hungry on those than on calorie-matched diets of fruits and vegetables because when the insulin goes up, you get hungry and you want to eat more. … There are a lot of factors. (What the hell is he talking about) … When you’re fasted, your alertness is going to go up. Fasting increases your alertness and epinephrine … for the purpose of increasing your ability to go find food. If you want to be alert, fasting is very valuable. If you want to be sleepy, ingesting food that has lots of triptophan; those things induce a sense of sleepiness. One problem with the once a day meal … any time you have a lot of food in the gut, you’re going to increase sleepiness. I’ve done the once a day eating thing; the problem is I eat so much in that meal, I’m exhausted. It doesn’t always lend itself well to the schedule … I do eat carbohydrates …
L: I didn’t know people ate carbs any more; that’s weird! Where do you even find them? … For me, being alert makes my life better in a lot of ways, in addition to the alertness itself. When I was training twice a day in jiu jitsu, I performed way better .. at things you traditionally need carbs for, like explosive moves and stuff like that. I’m not sure I actually performed better in terms of the force of the explosions. … But the alertness caused me to do the technique more precisely.
Keto
Meat
Nutrition
Dreams
REM sleep
Psychedelics
DMT
Creativity
Pushing the limits of the human mind
Neuroplasticity
euroscience and AI
Eye tracking
New podcast on neuroscience
Clubhouse
Elon Musk
L: I brought up the Clubhouse thing and Elon, because I just wanted to get your thoughts about something he said a few times to me, and in general—he’s under a huge amount of stress. I’m thinking of doing a start-up, now, and thinking about all of this. I enjoy podcasts, I enjoy science. He says that his life is basically hell.
A: He looks happy.
L: He’s fulfilled; but the stress levels, the constant fires that he has to put out. He says most people wouldn’t want to be me. The reason he does what he does is, there’s probably something wrong with him. He can’t help it but do that.
A: It’s kind of beautiful. In a Russian, massochistic. way.
L: You can imagine the kind of stress he’s under. Running three-plus companies. He says, every single meeting is not about, should we install a coffee maker in the kitchen. Instead it’s, this rocket is going to blow up. We’re all fucked; I don’t know what to do. How do you deal with that? What do you think about that kind of life? Is there a way to walk through that fire …
A: I’ve never met him … we have common friends. It’s fair to say he accomplishes more before 9 a.m. than most people do in a decade. What he does would dissolve most people into a puddle of tears. Mostly because of this thing; the brain working hard equates to thinking about duration, path, and outcome, and anticipating outcomes given a, b, c, or d. A lot of linear thinking; it’s hard, stressful, requires intense neurochemical output. Presumably he’s buffered himself from the little tiny issues. But he’s walking around in a biological system. … And, I don’t want to reveal too much here, but I have a common … co-worker and colleague, what I can tell you is, he’s accessing the best resources in terms of how to optimize his biology. And he’s thinking about that not just for himself, but for all of Neuralink. There’s the scale of the individual, but then there’s the companies he’s creating. You can imagine, if they can focus at 10% better for 20% of the day, you’re looking at tremendous increase in productivity … It’s certainly not healthy for most people … I’m also struck by the fact that he has a family. How old is Elon?
L: Pushing 50, I think 48.
A: Even more impressive; many who have been high-output for a decade or more don’t do well.
L: Well this is what he was saying. I don’t listen to all of his interviews, but on the Clubhouse, he mentioned that he was kind of worried. He was worried that sometimes … ‘I’m worried that at some point my brain is just going to fail, because of the amount of load it’s under. Like how much I have to think through, throughout the day.’
A: I would be concerned about taking someone in that regime, and suddenly putting them in a regime where they don’t have enough to bite down into …
#165: Josh Barnett, wrestler, pugilist
Josh Barnett is an MMA fighter, catch wrestler, and a scholar of violence.
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Nietzsche
Good and Evil
Joe Rogan library
Catch wrestling
Anarchy
Hitler and Stalin
Karl Gotch
Mike Tyson
Violent victory
Fedor Emelionenko
Greatest MMA fighters of all time
Early UFCs
Advice for young people
The value of competition
Blade Runner
Meaning of life
#166: Productivity guru Cal Newport
Cal Newport is a computer scientist who also writes about productivity.
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Deep work
C: … focus was the Tier 1 skill … working on some graph theory problem. Go to lunch, go to gym, come back, they’re still staring at the same white board.
L: This is the difference between the different disciplines. Mathematicians, physicists, it feels like they’re doing the legit work. … The experimental machine learning, the engineering version of it, it feels like you’re gone so far away from what’s required … it feels like you’re cheating your way into some kind of trick. That’s how it feels. I’d be interested … in what you think about that. …
C: For sure code does (feel that way) … if you’re coming up with original algorithmic designs. The hard-core theoreticians push it to an extreme. … For the grad students like me, we’re not anywhere near that level; but the faculty in this group, they’re … the Olympic athletes. .. I’ve got all of these tools; want to combine them on the fly. .. In 2012, as I began as a professor, I publish this book. … You have to get really good at something .. use these skills at leverage. … The follow-up question is, how do you get really good at things? … That evolved to the deep work hypothesis.
Focus
L: So focus is the requirement for any kind of learning in this world.
C: YEah, a key aspect of focus is being without distraction. Context-shifting kills the human capacity to think. If I change what I’m paying attention to to something different, that causes a cognitive pile-up; makes it very hard to think clearly. … That initiates a context shift in your brain … a neurological cascade happens … You rip yourself away from that halfway through … As a result, your ability to think goes really down. It’s fatiguing, too. “I can’t think anymore.” You’ve exhausted yourself.
L: Is there some perfect number of minutes. Possible to context switch while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so? If you think about programming … focus on a particular function, or large scale on a system … is there a library that can achieve this little task? You have to look it up. This is the danger zone—you go to the Internet! .. .It is a kind of context switch. … Consuming and integrating knowledge that’s out there that can plug into your solution; it definitely feels like a context switch. Is that a really bad thing to do? Should you be setting it aside always, and trying to go deep and stay there?
C: I think looking up a library … that’s probably okay … Semantic networks involved are similar enough for it not to be a context switch. Where you’re going to get hit is look at an email in-box, where there’s unresolved obligations. They’re completely different; a grant-funding issue … leaving it unresolved … The second-worst would be something that’s emotionally arousing. Twitter!
Time blocking
L: How do you integrate deep work into your life?
C: I’m a big fan of time-blocking. If you’re facing your workday … don’t allow your in-box or to-do list to drive you. Here’s the time available; let me make a plan for it. I have a meeting here, an appointment here … During this 90-minute block, I’ll work on this … Blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available … Then it’s much more easy to … deep work. Prioritize … get a lot more done …
L: Schedule every single day
C: I do quarterly, weekly, daily planning. At the semester, I have a big picture vision of what I want to get done. A deadline for academic papers at the end of the season; that’s the big-picture vision. Weekly, you look at that, you look at your week. What’s my week gonna look like? What will I need to do? An hour every morning? Monday’s my only empty day … then every day, you look at weekly plan, and you block off the actual hours …
L: We’re talking about actual times of day. … Alternative, what I end up doing … scheduling the duration of time … when you don’t have any meetings, this is the luxury. No Zoom meetings! I find those are, one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic, is both the … the positive thing is to have more time with your family, reconnect in many ways. Be able to remotely not waste time on travel … The negative (laughs) … people have multiplied the number of meetings because they’re so easy to schedule. My spirit is destroyed by even a 10-minute zoom meeting. Every zoom meeting, I have an existential crisis.
C: Kirkegaard, with an Internet connection. … … big keys of time-blocking … my planner, it has many columns. … There’s no bonus for, “I made a schedule and I stuck with it.” It’s not like you get a prize … the prize is, I have an intentional plan for my time. At any time of the day, I’ve thought about what time remains … I basically prioritize the deep work, and then get yelled at a lot. Just be okay being yelled at a lot. With writing, it’s hard—you don’t really get on a role, in some sense. Working on proofs: very hard to pull yourself away .. if you get some traction. It’s really hard to pull away—I’m willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.
L: Of course there’s a positive effect of pulling yourself out when things are going great; because it’s fun to resume. There’s an extra force of procrastination if you stop on a dead end …
C: Or a cold start … It’s very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time. In the very early stages … I don’t know; I’m going to read hard papers .. it’s going to be hard to understand them—it’s not motivating.
Deadlines
L: It seems like … I only get stuff done that has deadlines. Time-blocking gives us that artificial sense of urgency. Why do deadlines work so well?
C: The effect you get in time-blocking … is you don’t have the debate with yourself every three minutes of, should I take a break now? Your mind knows, obviously we’re going to take some breaks—why not right now? How about now? If you’re on a time block schedule … I have a break scheduled. I don’t have to fight with myself. …
L: In your email book, you talk about creating a process and giving yourself over to it. But then you have to be strict with yourself.
C: What type of deadline work do you … have trouble with?
L: Could be papers. Publications—this podcast. I have to publish this podcast early next week, one, because your book is coming out. I also have to fly to Vegas next Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins. I want this podcast to be out of my life; I don’t want to be at a hotel in Vegas, editing while David Goggins is yelling … It’s possible that I still will be doing that, because that is a softer deadline. Life imposes these kinds of deadlines. … The pressure that people put on you …
C: I don’t like that pressure. We can agree, having David Goggins yell at you is a top productivity technique. I don’t like (being yelled at) so I will try to get things done early. … The night before, I get in my head about, what if I get sick. So I like to have the flex. That book, Deep Work … there’s something human and deep about wrangling with the world of ideas. Aristotle’s trying to understand the meaning of life; the human ability to contemplate deeply. Ultimately, that’s where he found his meaning. I try to build my life around regularly thinking hard about stuff that’s interesting. Just like you have a fitness habit; I try to get that cognitive habit. … I’m working on this new proof—you train yourself to appreciate things …
L: Let’s talk about some demons. You talk about deep work, the world without email—to me that symbolizes the life I want to live. But then there’s—I’m an adult, and there’s the life I actually life. I’m in constant chaos. You say you don’t like that—neither do I … Whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, but I’ll ad stuff on top of it. I don’t want to. I keep doing it. Who am I? Is this fundamental to who I am?
C: I’ve seen your video about your routine? What’s the chaos that’s not in that video?
L: … too many things on the to-do list. Not saying ‘no.’ It’s not that I have trouble saying ‘no.’ It’s that there’s so much cool shit in my life! Nothing I love more than the Boston Dynamics robots. I’m not going to say ‘no’ to them. …
C: Then you go to Texas for a while
L: Then there’s surprises, power outages, you sleep less, there’s personal stuff, just people in your life, sources of stress, all those kinds of things. It does feel, that I bring it onto myself. … I do this kind of thing. .. People flourish under pressure. I wonder if that’s just a hack I develop as a habit early on in life …
C: But it’s all interesting things. These are all interesting things!
L: You talk about in the book, having an end to the day. Putting it down. I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
C: I started doing that early, because I got married at all. I should do my work when she’s at work. … Really early on, I got in that habit of, this is where you end work. When I was a postdoc, I put artificial … I want to train. When I’m a professor, I’ll be busier. So as a postdoc, I added large things in the middle of my day, productive meditation, stuff like this, still maintaining the 9-to-5. I want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on … didn’t want to get flabby when my job was easy. Now that’s paying off because I have a ton of kids. That keeps me away from cool things—I just don’t have time to do ‘em.
L: That’s how you have a successful life; it’s too easy to go into the full Hunter S. Thompson, where nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity. You attract people who have the same behavior pattern as you. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m not bothered by it; I guess it’s … one of the big hacks is to have kids! To get married! It’s the ultimate timetable-enforcer.
C: Here’s the complicated thing, though. … You can think about starting the podcast as one of these cool opportunities you put on yourself … The direction the podcast is taking you is, a couple years from now, it’ll lead to something really monumental. It feels like your life is going somewhere really cool! How do you balance those two things? What I try is this motto—
Do less, do better, know why
C: It used to be the motto of my website. Do a few things, but an interesting array. I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing. Have a couple bets placed on a couple numbers on the roulette table. … Writing, I want to be a better writer; I wrote student books when I was a student. I would use New Yorker articles … Today I get to write for the New Yorker; it took a decade. … The Know Why, is have a connection to some sort of value. ..
L: And so the choice of the few things is grounded in … a little flame of passion. You say you wanted to get good at writing; you had this introspective moment of thinking, this actually gives me a lot of … …
Clubhouse
L: I was on a social network last night—on Clubhouse
C: I have to ask you about this; I’m invited to do a Clubhouse. A tech reporter invited me to do one about my new book.
L: … I was in a Clubhouse … I kept plugging what you said on passion. It was a room that was focused on Burnout. Clubhouse is kind of fascinating … We talk about email, social networks, but Clubhouse is very different. Other places, Discord — it’s voice-only communication. Bunch of people in a room, eyes closed. You only encounter their voices. Technically you’re not allowed to record. The point is, it’s there live. On Discord, it was fascinating: I had this server that would have hundreds of people; we’re all little icons that can mute and unmute our mics. You’re able, with hundreds, to not interrupt each other. As a dynamic system … Everyone’s muted; they unmute, and it starts flashing.
C: It’s the digital equivalent of, in a faculty meeting… you sort of make some noises as the other person’s finishing.
L: But in a faculty meeting, the visual element seems to increase the likelihood of interruption. If you create a culture. There’s always assholes .. but everyone adjusts to the culture, or the beat, of the room. … The Zoom call … you think video adds, but actually, it seems like it subtracts. Second thing that’s fascinating … there’s an intimacy … With strangers, you connect in a much more real way. …
Burnout
Boredom
Quit social media for 30 days
L: … I’ve been torn with social media … I probably should (quit social media) … trying to find what approach to Twitter works for me. … I really enjoy posting once or twice a day, and at that time checking … the previous post. Even when it’s negative comments, they go right past me. … I feel love and connection with people. It makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people. … When you increase that to checking 5-6 times a day, it starts going to anxiety world, where negative comments will actually stick; and positive comments will feel more shallow. It’s kind of fascinating. There’s been long stretches of time … where I did just post and check, post and check. … Most of 2020 I did that. It made me happy … You go right back in like a drug addict.
C: Not good; you don’t come out happy. Nobody comes out of a day full of Twitter … celebrating humanity. …
L: There’s just a general anxiety. I wouldn’t even say … it’s probably the thing you’re talking about with context switching … it’s just an exhaustion; I’m not creating anything beautiful …
C: Like an existential exhaustion.
L: Do you think it’s possible to use social media with moderation.
C: Yeah. When people do this exercise, you get lots of configuration. People with a public presence … What your’e doing is not that unusual. Posting one thing a day … your audience likes it. “It supports something I value.” A connection with my audience. Being exposed to … some positive random-ness …. I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, he writes about the stoics a lot. He posts one quote, usually from a famous stoic. His readers really love it. … He’s not interacting with anyone. That’s an example of … figuring out what’s important; and using your social media to amplify it. … Now do you think social media as a medium … changed the cultural standards? Have you read Neil Postman at all? He wrote about … technological determinism. A really influential idea to a lot of my work—the ways the properties and presence of technology changed things about humans in ways that’s not intended or planned by the humans themselves. … Changed the way the human brain understands and operates. … TV versus the print word—that was pre-social media. On my show, I get into how Twitter in particular … changed the way people conceptualized “debate.” It introduced a rhetorical dump culture. It’s more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. There’s different places and times, when that type of discussion was thought of differently.
L: Yes. I tend to believe there’s technological solutions. There’s features in Twitter that could reverse that. … It could still be engaging and have different effects. Perhaps more negative; hopefully more positive.
C: There’s two ways social media could change the experience of reading a newspaper. One could be economic .. the paywall model. Which then means you want to make the tribe, within the paywall, very happy. But then the determinist point of view—the properties of Twitter, which are arbitrary … influenced the way people think about the world.
Social media
L: I have this idea of a startup, having to do with artificial intelligence. More and more, it seems like … there’s some trajectory through creating social media-type of technologies … It’s a kind of challenge to the way Twitter is done. … It’s not obvious what the best mechanisms are to make an engaging platform … without the negative effects. There are Chrome extensions which allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes on Twitter. To me, that’s not compelling. I still need … I would argue I need the likes to know what’s a Tweet worth reading. … It’s like rating Yelp reviews on Tweets. But I’ve turned off, on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chromebook extension that turns off all likes and dislikes … I don’t know how many views a video gets …
C: Distraction-free YouTube is a big one.
L: I’m not worried about the distraction
C: You don’t rabbit-hole?
L: No I don’t. … You have to know your own demons … The negative feelings come from seeing the views on stuff you created. I’m speaking to things that are helpful and unhelpful to myself, emotionally …. Tools … Not me with JavaScript, but anyone’s able to control the experience that they have.
C: I’m very bear-ish on the big platforms having a big future. I think the moment of 3-4 major platforms is not gonna last. You could start shorting these stocks. The mistake the big platforms made was, they took out the network effect advantage. The people you know are on here. … You get a head start where no one else can catchup. When Facebook shifted to a news feed model. In the moment, they got more data and got more likes. But they went away from connections … So people took people-connection to other places: WhatsApp. Once it’s just a feed that’s kind of interesting, now you’re just competing with all the interesting content everywhere. So you’re competing with podcasts. The Twitter feed is interesting right now. .. but it might not always be. My sense is we’ll see fragmentation into long-tail social media. I can get into a 1,000-person social media for myself. I’m thinking about comedians on Twitter. It’s not the best format for them to express themselves and be interesting. … If there was a long-tail social media … where the comedians are. There’s really no strong advantage to having one large platforms that everyone is on. … That whole thing could fragment. The glue that was holding it together was networked-effects. … Is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting … than all these other … options?
L: The thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work … you’re right. The news feed … why not have other, better feeds? There is a dopamine … thing they figured out. .. Gamification. .. It doesn’t have to do with scale of social networks. I guess you’re implying that you should be able to design that mechanism in other forms.
C: Yeah. Or people are turning on (against) that gamification.
L: Like sugar—people realize sugar’s bad for you!
C: Yeah. Long-tail social networks .. you have a deeper sense of connection. I wrote about the indy social media movement for the New Yorker. Mastodon, or discord. Let’s forget the protocols right now; it’s the idea. These long-tail social media groups; what people are getting out of it is strong connection or motivation. You’re in a group with other guys that are all trying to be better dads. That’s a powerful thing too.
L: One thing about the scale of Twitter; you have the viral spread of information. Twitter has become a news maker in itself. I wonder what replaces that.
C: Reporting?
L: The problem with them is they’re intermediary. They have control. This is the problem in Russia, currently. It creates a shield between the people and the news. With Twitter, the news is created by the actual newsmakers. Trump, Elon Musk. People announcing stuff without talking to a journalist. That feels more genuine; it feels very powerful. But come to realize it; it doesn’t need a social network.
C: This is my point around that. I mean, yes, the democratizing power of the Internet is fantastic. I’m a huge Internet booster. But when you put everything on Twitter; you’ve homogenized everything. … … You don’t have distributed curation. A little bit with likes, and the algorithms. But if you look at pre-Web 2.0 … when you ha blogs. There was distributed curation, where in order for your blog to get on people’s radar, and it had nothing to do with gatekeepers. … People respected you … If you think the 2004 presidential election. Info people was getting from the Internet was from the Daily Kos, and Drudge. There were blogs out there. Ezra Klein was running a blog out of his dorm room. In a distributed fashion, you would gain credibility. … Now people are noticing it; now you have … curation. Solves problems we have in a low-friction environment; like Twitter, any random conspiracy can shoot through and spread. Whereas, if you’re starting a blog to try to push Qanon, it’s not going to show up on people’s radar.
L: I agree with everything up until the very last statement. … Forget Q-anon; I don’t know, I should know more. .. The power and the down side … Hitler could have a blog today, and would have, potentially, a very large following. If he’s charismatic. If he’s able to channel frustration people have … The fundamental problem … not the problem … Your thesis is there’s nothing special about large-scale social networks that will guarantee they’ll keep existing …
C: In the early days … people were flabbergasted that these things came into existence. We already had the Internet. It’s the most democratic communication systems. .. These companies came along and said … we’re going to build a private Internet. It went against the motivation of the Internet. … The Internet was, anyone’s server can talk to anyone else’s server. The Old Guard of pro-internet people never understood this move of, let’s build a private version of the Internet.
L: Jack Dorsey, also, is a proponent, and is helping to fund … fully open-source (?) versions of Twitter. That seems another alternative. The ultimate long-tail, fully distributed.
C: When I’m thinking about long-tail social media, the tech isn’t so important. There’s groups out there. They might use Slack, or some combination of Zoom. In the tech world, we want to build beautiful protocol … I’m a nerd like this—every standard has to fit with everything else … You have a group of bike enthusiasts—for them, the tech doesn’t matter. … It’s their own social ecosystem; that generates a lot of value. … Look how quickly Americans left Facebook. FB was savvy to buy other properties … Everyone under the age of __ was using it, and no one is now …
L: I believe people can leave FB overnight. FB hasn’t messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively, and there’s no good alternative for them to leave.
C: This stuff is … fragile. Twitter’s having a moment … Its moment could go, too, as well. Short little things; it’s arbitrary. I read a Wired article saying … it’s crazy, we’re using this to communicate information about the pandemic. People are sending screen shots of article. We have the technology to deliver long-form information. It’s because of the gamified dopamine hits. What a weird medium. Why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?
L: We’re evolving as a species … It’s interesting that that, as opposed to Twitter. Jack complained Twitter wasn’t innovating fast enough. People are innovating .. and thinking about their productive life faster than the .. tech .. can catch up …
C: Substack … they’ll pull out of Twitter. … Twitter had people talking about this … Andrew Sullivan … I’ll have a few substacks I can subscribe to; I’m a knowledge worker. … So that group … siphoned off. That’s a lot of energy. Once Trump’s gone, that drove a lot of Trump people off Twitter.
L: Fascinating to me; I’ve hung out on Parler … the interface matters. It’s not just about ideas. It’s about … Substack too. Creating a … an addicting experience.
C: One of the conclusions from that social media article … the ugliness, the clunkiness matters. Social media companies have spent money on this, and to some degree its survivor-ship bias. Jack is as surprised as anyone else the way Twiter’s being used. They had it this way years ago. Statuses …
L: There’s also the JavaScript motto … he implemented the crappy version of JS in 10 days, through it out there, and changed it really quickly. And now it’s the most popular programming language in the world … That’s an argument for the kind of thing you’re talking about … where the bike-club people could literally create the thing that would run most of the Internet 10 years from now. There’s something to that. Just solve a particular problem …
C: Do stuff. Keep tinkering till you love it.
L: Timing and luck matter …
C: You can’t go back to 2007 …
L: What you have to think about … is what’s the new thing … that 10 years from now would seem obvious. Some people think Clubhouse is that. … Similar to Tesla, actually—what Clubhouse did was get relatively famous people on there quickly. Another effect—it’s invite-only. So there’s FOMO … those social effects. Once you actually show up—I’m a huge fan of this, the JavaScript model. Clubhouse is so dumb, so simple in its interface. … There’s a mute button and a “leave quietly” button, and that’s it. … There’s no “like,” … it’s just … trivial! Twitter kind of started like that; Facebook started like that. But they’ve evolved quickly to add all these features. I do hope Clubhouse stays that way.
C: One of the issues with a lot of these platforms: bits are cheap enough, that we don’t need a unicorn investor model. There’s not really an imperative … of we need something that can scale to $100 million plus a year revenue … You’re not going to get the angel investment … unless … If you don’t need to satisfy that investor model, because bits are so cheap. Even with Clubhouse, that’s investor backed. The bike club doesn’t necessarily need a major platform. There’s so much money; that’s what bets against me. You can concentrate a lot of capital, if you do these things right. Facebook incredibly concentrated a lot of capital … That’s incredibly powerful. When there’s a possibility to consolidate … capital; that’s hard for the bike club to go up against.
L: But there’s power in the bike club, as seen with the Wall Street bets thing …
How email destroyed our productivity at work
L: Let’s talk about email. Another amazing book, a world without email. What is the hyperactive hive mind? That you open the book with.
C: Yeah. And the devil. It’s the scourge of hundreds of millions. … The real title should be the world without the hyperactive hive mind work flow. I was trying to answer the question, after Deep work … why is it hard to do this? My initial interviews were done in 2016. It took five years to pull the threads together. Why is it so hard for most people to find any time … I hadn’t heard this report anywhere else. Email arrives on the scene; it picks up speed in the early 1990s—for very pragmatic reasons. IT was replacing the fax machine, voice mail, and memos. It was a killer app because it was useful. In its wake came a new way of collaborating: the hyperactive hive mind. … The hyperactive hive mind work flow says, here’s the way we’re going to collaborate. We’ll work it out on the fly, with back-and-forth messages. It completely took over office work. The need to keep up with asynchronous back-and-forth messages …. Requires us to check (email) more and more and more …. The office worker of today has to check email every six minutes. You have to service the conversations. It spiraled out of control. In the office, all people do is constantly tend communication channels.
L: No one ever paused to create a system that actually works. Huge fan of cellular automata. Like those, it grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business, and also personal life. Not intentional at all
C: Yes … I got into technological determinism … it affects how people act. I document this example in IBM, 1987, maybe ‘85. At their headquarters, they put in internal email. They ran a whole study; I talked to the engineer that ran it. The study determined how much they communicated. … We figured out how many memos, how many calls … So we got a mainframe that could handle that. But people communicated six times more … In three days they melted down that mainframe. The creation of the technology drastically changed how people communicate. It’s emergent.
L: Isn’t that amazing to you? Isn’t email amazing? Friction-less communication! Email is awesome. There’s a lot of problems … just as there is with Twitter.
C: It was a miracle! Originally there was a New Yorker piece, Was Email a Mistake? It solved a huge problem—fast, asynchronous communication. It didn’t exist until we had large offices. … Let me send you a memo … took too long. One of the things I talked about—when they built CIA headquarters. .. They built a pneumatic powered email system … penumatic tubes with electromagnetic routers. It would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes. … The fact they spent so much money to make it work showed how important fast asynchronous …
L: It probably improved productivity of the world; but there’s a hump … it kind of plateaued. .
C: My contention; I think it brought it down. I have a recent Wired article that puts newer numbers to this. The hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. The rise in communication amounts. The hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email; it pulls down nonindustrial productivity … We added extra shifts off the books to keep nonindustrial growth non-declining. … We built $100 million wireless Internet infrastructure—why did productivity not shift off the charts? Because our brain can’t context-switch every six minutes …
L: Why is context-switching poison?
C: We’ve seen this through a personal will or failure lens, recently. “Oh, I’m addictive.” No, it’s the underlying work flow. The tool I exonerate. The issue is the work flow. If I’m collaborating with 20 or 30 people, I have to tend those conversations. It’s like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables. … It’s not the tool; it’s … that we use that to manage collaborations …. My whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind work flow. The tool is fine … This is one of the biggest productivity revolutions of the 21st century. An anonymous CEO said it will be the moon shot of the 21st century. .. As we figure that out, it’s going to be hundreds of billions of dollars.
L: You’re so absolutely right.
How we fix email
C: What happens in my vision—there’s different processes that make up my workday. These are things I do … Most of these processes are implicitly implemented with the hyperactive hive mind …. We’ll figure it out on the fly. My argument is we do it like we did in the industrial sector … a way that minimizes back-and-forth messaging. .. We have to do process engineering in non-industrial work. … Let’s automate this to a degree where I don’t have to send you a message on the fly. Let’s not coordinate or collaborate over email. Nor Slack. … Better processes. That should …
L: You and I share some emails. My case; I schedule podcasts. There’s a bunch of tasks I do which could be converted into processes. Is it up to me to build that process? Or do we need to create tools?
C: Ultimately, the whole organization, the whole team, has to be involved. Silicon Valley has figured this out in the last couple of years. .. Talking to people after Deep Work . … this scent is in the air. Different groups use things like Base Camp, or Flow… There’s a lot of tools out there. Don’t look for a tool to replace email. Think about … what you want … .. Writing a letter to someone is a high-value activity … but the problem is the back-and-forth. Most interviews I was scheduling for this … we have a shared document; I check it twice a week … Scheduling options … but it means we have no back-and-forth messaging … for my UK publicist … the back-and-forth is killer. …
L: Knowledge workers have to carry the responsibility of creating processes. That’s the first principles question; how do I convert this into a process.
C: If you try to do it at the organizational scale, you’ll create bureaucracy. If we’re a team of six working together, working on PowerTrain software, we can figure it out.
L: So creating a culture where sending an email just for the hell of it should be taboo. You’re being destructive to the productivity of the team by sending this email …
C: That’s why I’m trying to spread this message about the context switch … rinse away our context looking at messaging and come back. … It’s a huge thing to ask of someone … every message creating five checks of the in-box … you’ve done a great damage to someone’s day … … older generation is more comfortable just calling people … most of my friends; we have regular phone calls.
L: Do you ever have processes around friends? I feel like I should.
C: Well you have a lot of interesting friend possibilities … really interesting people you can talk to.
L: Well that’s one thing; but then there’s the introversion, where I’m afraid of people and stressed … It has to do with time tables thing and deep work. .. Nice thing about process; it not only automates away the context-switching … Also with email, because everything’s done over email .. You can be lazy in a way with social networks, and do the easy things first. The process enforces that you do the important things. For me the important thing is social connection.
C: No, that IS important! The more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection, the more essential that connection feels .. Which is why social media had paradoxical effect feeling less social … It’s not hard enough … The perceived strength of that social connection diminishes … I have this thing with some of my friends where we take a couple minutes to schedule the next. If we don’t schedule it, it won’t happen.
L: I just don’t call friends. Every 10 years I do something dramatic for them. I murder someone they really don’t like … or ..
Over-optimization
When to use email and when not to
Podcasting
L: My friend Andrew Huberman is into podcasting now. You are. It feels like you could have free spirit of comedians implemented by people who are academically trained. That results … who knows what the experiment looks like. It allows me to … discuss with Joey Diaz. … I’ve seen a shift with colleagues and friends at MIT …
C: I don’t know how they think about it at Georgetown …
L: I think what happens is, the popularity of it, combined with good conversations with people they respect. .. Wait, this is a thing. It’s more fun to listen to than a shitty Zoom lecture. Nobody knows exactly … Is this a legitimate medium of education?
C: That’s your innovation—we can bring on … professors. You bring on all these MIT guys …
L: Big challenge for me; I feel, I would ask big philosophical questions … For example, you have a lot of excellent papers, that has a lot of theory in it. There’s temptation to just go through papers … I think it’s possible to do that; I can probably only do that much preparation when I’m in the field … There’s a dance that I try to hit right; actually getting to the core of interesting ideas instead of just talking about philosophy. At the same time, there’s a lot of people who want to be inpsired by fields where they don’t necessarily know the details. …
C: Just the idea, you can have big ideas and push ‘em through, and fight for it.
L: There’s Computerphile and Numberphile, these channels … channels on Chess … I don’t understand 80% of the time what they’re talking about. But I love the passion and the genius of those people, just overhearing it.
C: Do you look at Scott Aaronson’s blog. .. Or Terry Tao’s blog
L: Terry Tao has a blog?
C: Yeah (at least) he used to.
L: Scott Aaronson turns on inner troll or comedian. We’re exploring these different ways of communicating about science.
Alan Turing proving the impossible
L: A lot of your work inspired deep thinking about productivity … some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work … The Scott Aaronson question would be, is there something that stands out in particular that’s beautiful or inspiring about CS or mathematics.
C: I like theory; particularly the notion of impossibilities. That’s my specialty. In the context of … algorithms. You can argue, nothing exists that solves this. I think that’s really interesting. That goes back to Turing. His paper on computable numbers. .. .The German name that Hilbert called the Decision Problem. This paper lays the foundation for theoretical CS. … He says well, if we think about an algorithm, all effective procedures are Turing machines. … Treat each file like a number … one way to think about a problem … you have a language; an infinite number of strings … A problem is represented as an infinite binary string. Then he applied Kantor from the 19th century; said the natural numbers are countable. … Infinite strings are uncountable (by diagonalization) … … that kicked off the whole enterprise of … things that can’t be solved by computers. That was the 30s he wrote that.
L: Like proving bounds on the performance of certain algorithms.
C: … Possibility proofs say no algorithm ever could solve this problem.
L: It’s problem-centric …. Making a conclusive statement about the problem.
C: It’s philosophically interesting. Going back to Plato, it’s all reductio ad absurdum. …. Our original assumption that this solution exists can’t be true. I specialize in … time-bound impossibility resuls. …
L: So you have … on many papers; the one that caught my eye … smooth analysis of dynamic networks. …
C: Is the bound robust, or is it fragile? … Depends on adversarial changes …
Fragility of math in the face of randomness
Neural networks
What will the P=NP proof look like?
Is math discovered or invented?
Book publishing
Love
Death
Meaning of life
#167: Saagar Enjeti .. Turning Point
Saagar Enjeti is a DC-based political correspondent and podcaster.
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Hitler
Evil
Donald Trump
Teddy Roosevelt
Nazi Germany
The balance of power in US government
Bureaucracy
Money
UFOs
Jeffrey Epstein
Left and Right
How to fix politics
Political predictions
Journalism
Joe Rogan
Lyndon Johnson
World War I
Dan Carlin
How Stalin came to power
Putin
Lenin and Stalin
Book recommendations
Antarctica and Mars
Born to Run
Texas
#168: Italian CS guy Silvio Micali
Silvio Micali is a computer scientist at MIT, Turing award winner, and founder of Algorand.
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Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Money
Scarcity
Scalability, Security, and Decentralization
Algorand
Bitcoin
Ethereum
NFTs
Decentralization of power
Intelligent adaptation
Leaders
Freedom
Privacy
Bitcoin maximalism
Satoshi Nakamoto
One-way function
Pseudorandomness
Free will
Will quantum computers break cryptography?
Interactive proofs
Mechanism design
Favorite meal
Book recommendations
Advice for young people
Fear of death
Meaning of life
#169: Ryan Hall again!
Ryan Hall is a martial artist, BJJ black belt, and MMA fighter undefeated in the UFC.
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Illusion of choice
Game theory
First fight
Defense
Waiting for a fight
Free will
Freedom and compassion
Social media
Leadership
How to get good at jiu jitsu
Learning how to learn
Questioning the foundations of jiu jitsu
Humans cannot fully comprehend reality
Artificial intelligence
Deadlines
Tie choke
Hardship
Love
#170: Ronald Sullivan, lawyer, professor
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Harvey Weinstein
Harvard succumbs to pressure
Safe spaces
Cancel culture
Evil
Hitler
Criminal justice system
Innocence
Racism in the judicial system
George Floyd
The trial of Derek Chauvin
O. J. Simpson
Aaron Hernandez
Book recommendations
Advice for young people
Death
Meaning of life