Lex #401 John Mearsheimer
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title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>M: … the best way to protect yourself is to be powerful … as much as powerful as you can gain against the other states in the system. … power maximizes chances for survival … Power is largely a function of material factors. Two key building blocks are population size and wealth. You want … both. This is why the U.S. is so powerful. It has lots of people, and it has lots of wealth. China wasn’t considered a great power until recently … it didn’t have wealth. Without both … you’re usually not considered a great power. I think power matters. But, when we talk about power it’s important to understand it’s population size and wealth underpinning it.
F: You said nations, in relation to each other, … essentially in a state of anarchism.
M: Anarchy basically means the opposite of hierarchy …. not murder and mayhem. It simply means you don’t have hierarchy. There’s no higher authority that sits above states. States are like pool balls on a table. In an anarchic world, there’s no higher authority you can turn to if you get into trouble. … this is Hobbes. Hobbes talked about life in the State of Nature. In the SoN, you had indvidiauls … who compete with each other for power … because you had no higher authority. Hobbes’ way out of this terrible situation, is to create a state—what he calls the Leviathan. The idea is, to escape anarchy, you create a state. You go … to hierarchy. Problem in international politics is there is no hierarchy. .. if you’re in an anarchic system, no choice but to try to maximize your relative power. … Make sure you are the biggest and baddest dude on the block. Not because you want to beat up on other kids and other states, but because it’s the best way to survive. Best example of what happens if you’re weak, is what the Chinese call the century of national humiliation: the 1840s to the 1940s. The Chinese were remarkably weak … and preyed-upon! That sends a message … don’t be weak!
L: Humiliation can lead to … Nazi Germany in the 1930s .. We’ll talk about it. But staying to the psychology and philosophy picture. What’s connection between Will to Power in individual .. .and in a nation.
M: … (the former) has to do with individual psychology. When I describe pursuit of power … when in a system with specific architecture which is anarchy, the states have no choice but to compete for power. … Structure is driving the story here. Will to Power has more to do with an individual … in the Nietzhean story where that comes from. I’m not arguing states are inherently aggressive. … But as long as they’re in anarchy, they have no choice. If you went to a hierarchic state, there’s no reason for those states to worry about the balance of power …
L: What is the role of military might? In this Will to Power on the international level …
M: I mentioned the two factors: large population and wealth. Those two things allow you to build a large military … Survival is the principal goal of every state. So they’re going to care about having a powerful military that can protect them.
L: … (what about) superpower status?
M: I’m arguing it is obvious. If you’re a state … do you want to be weak? If you live nextdoor to Nazi Germany? Or even the U.S.? The U.S. is a ruthless great power. If you’re Putin, you want to make sure you’re as powerful as possible. Same is true with China. States understand that, and they go to great lengths. … When the U.S. started in 1783, it was 13 measly colonies … over time, various leaders of the U.S. … turned that country into the dominant power in the W.H. … Once that was achieved in 1900, we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure there was no (big) competitor in the system. We want to make sure we’re number one. My argument is, this is not peculiar to us! If I were China, … I would want to dominate Asia! Similarly, if I were Imperial Germany, I’d want to dominate all of Europe … then no other state in the area can threaten you! Because you’re so powerful … What I’m saying here is the structure … really matters
…
M: the first big divide between realists … Hans Morgenthau … influenced by Nietzsche, had Will to Power thinking … he was a Human Nature realist. I’m a structural realist. I believe, it’s not human nature, or some will to power that drives competition and war. What drives competition and war is the structure of the system. It’s anarchy. There’s a world of difference between the two …
L: So within that, there’s a subdivision between offensive and defensive.
M: Yes. A handful of realists believe the structure of the system fosters competition for sure, but it really rules out Great Power war almost all the time. It makes sense to care about the balance of power, but … to care about maintaining how much power you have. The argument the defensive realists make—if you try to gain more power, the system will punish you; the structure will punish you. I’m not a defensive realist; I’m an offensive realist. .. states look for opportunity to gain more power. Each time they see an opportunity, and they think the likelihood of success is high and the cost will not be great, they’ll jump at that opportunity.
Hitler
L: From human nature perspective, how do you explain Hitler and Nazi Germany? … in the framework of offensive realism?
M: I think it was driven … by structural considerations. If you look at Imperial Germany … largely responsible for starting World War I; that tells you you didn’t need Hitler to start World War I. There’s a good chance you would have had World War II in the absence of Hitler. Germany was very powerful, and had strong incentives to behave aggressively in late 30s and early 40s. I believe structure mattered. I want to qualify that in the case of Hitler; I do think he had what you would call a Will to Power. My point that I often make—there have been two leaders in modern history who are congenital aggressors. One was Napoleon. The other was Hitler. If you want to call that a Will to Power, you can. I prefer the term congenital aggressor. Hitler was probably more murderous than Napoleon (or than any other leader in recorded history). Both were driven by what you would call a WTP. That has to be married to the structural argument in Hitler’s case—and in Napoleon’s case.
L: … resentment, because of what happened after World War I … led to Hitler wielding so much power. The human side. Perhaps, the reason I ask … you mention the century of humiliation on the China side. To which degree did humiliation lead to Hitler and World War II.
M: The question of what led to Hitler is different from what led to World War II. Hitler came to power in 1933 … and then the question is of what’s driving him. Is there resentment over the Versaille Treaty? Yes. Did that matter? Yes. But my argument is that structure was the principal factor when I’m driving the train … There are other factors …
… he played on that resentment. Having studied the case, it was even more important once he took over. One of the principal reasons he was so popular … is he was the only leader of an industrialized country who pulled his country out of the depression. That really mattered. … He was a remarkably charismatic individual. .. Hard to believe; he does not appear to be charismatic. But I’ve talked to people who were experts on this subject who assure me he was … If you look at … opinion polls in Germany in the late 1940s, after the Third Reich was destroyed—he is still remarkably popular in the polls.
L: Stalin is still popular in many parts of Eastern Europe.
M: And in many quarters inside Russia. And Stalin murdered more of his own people than he did … others.
L: And still to you, the tide of history turns not on individuals but on structural considerations. … So Hitler affected how Germany started the war. …
M: Well history is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Realism is a theory about how states react to each other. There are other dimensions to international politics. Why did Hitler start World War II is a different question than why did he start the Holocaust? That’s a different question. Realism doesn’t answer that question. I want to be very clear, that I’m not someone that argues realism answers every question about international politics. … But one of the biggest questions—what causes security competition, and what causes Great Power war?
L: … why Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. From military strategy perspective, there are pros and cons to that decision.
M: He thought he could win a quick and decisive victory … so did his generals … Looking at German decision making. The decision to invade Poland, the decision to invade France … the decision to invade the Soviet Union. There was quite a lot of resistance to Hitler in 1938 when he invaded Czechoslovakia. …
L: Internally?
M: Internally, for sure. People had doubts. World War I had just ended 20 years before; the thought of starting another world war … The came France in 1940 … in the run up to May 10, 1940, there was huge resistance in the German army to attacking France. But that was eventually eliminated because they came up with a clever plan, the Manshtein Plan. If you look at the decision to invade the USSR on June 22, in 1941, which is the only case where they fail. There’s hardly any resistance at all.
L: And to say that they fail … There was a lot of successes early on. There’s poor military strategic decisions along the way. But it caught Stalin off guard. Maybe I”m wrong. But terrifyingly, they could have been successful.
M: I’ve always had the sense, they came terrifyingly close to winning. You could make the opposite argument, that they were doomed. I’m not comfortable making that argument … The Wehrmarcht was a finely-tuned instrument for war. The Red Army was in terrible shape; Stalin had purged the officer corps. There were all sorts of reasons to think they were no match. … In the initial stages of the conflict, that proved to be the case. They won a lot of tactical victories early on.
L: If they had only focused on Moscow at the very beginning.
M: That’s possible. Fortunately we’re not going to run the experiment again. One could argue that … Hitler wanted to go into the Ukraine. There were three axes. The main one went toward Leningrad; the central one to Moscow; the Souther one went into Ukraine and deep into the Caucasus. Hitler thought that Southern one should’ve been the main axis. The Germans go back on the offensive in 1942, in Operation Blue—and the main axis is deep into the Ukraine, and that fails. But one could argue, had they done that in ‘41 … they could’ve knocked the Soviets out that way. I’m not sure that in the end I believe that. I think in the end, the Soviets would’ve won no matter what. But I’m not 100% sure.
L: Maybe you can educate me; sometimes they say, like with Napoleon, winter defeated Hitler in Russia. I think not often enough people tell the story of the soldiers, the motivation, and how hard they fight. It turns out Ukranians and Russians are not easy to conquer. There seems to be a difference in certain people, and how they see war; how proud they are to fight and die for their country. The Battle of Stalingrad is a story of extremely brave fighting. So that’s a component of war, too. It’s not just strategy. But maybe that’s a romantic notion …
M: There’s truth to it. Let’s unpack it a bit. The counterargument to that is that in World War I, the Russian army dissintegrated! If you look at what happened when Napoleon invaded in 1812; and you look at what happened in 1917, and you lolok at what happened between ‘41 and ‘45. The Napoleon case fits neatly with your argument, but the 1917 case does not fit—because the Russians lost, and surrendered. The Soviet Union surrendered large amounts of territory because it had suffered humiliating defeat. My theory about why they fought like wild dogs in World War Ii, because they were up against a genocidal adversary. The Germans murdered huge numbers of Soviet POWs … a total of 3.7 million. By 1941, they’d murdered 2 million. At that point in time, they’d murdered more than POWs than they had murdered Jews. They were on a murderous rampage, when it came to Soviet citizens and Soviet soldiers. Those soldiers … knew they were fighting for their lives.
L: The story of the Holocaust … If Hitler had conquered the Soviet Union, it’s scary to think what would have happened to the Slavic people, the Soviet people.
M: Yeah, if you read the Hunger Plan. The Generalplan … Grand Plan East … They would have murdered all the Poles and all the Roma, the gypsies. I just explained to you how many POWs they had killed … they would have murdered huge numbers of Soviet citizens as well. People quickly figured out this was happening. That gave them powerful incentives to fight hard against the Germans, and make sure that they did not win.
Russia and Ukraine
L: Why did Russia invade on Feb. 4, 2022. Which explanation is most convincing?
M: The conventional wisdom is Putin is responsible; he’s an expansionist … he’s bent on creating a greater Russia. More so, he’s interested in dominating Eastern Europe, if not all of Europe, and Ukraine was the first stop on the train line. He wanted to conquer all of Ukraine, incorporate it into a greater Russia. This is the conventional wisdom. My view is that there is zero evidence to support that argument.
…There’s no evidence he was interested in conquering Ukraine. There’s no way an army of the size the Russians had … they could have conquered all of Ukraine. … When the Germans went into Poland in 1939 … they were only interested in the Western half of Poland, an area much smaller than Ukraine. They went in with 1.5 million troops. Putin would have needed 2-3 million troops. He had 190,000! That’s not a serious argument. He was not interested in conquering all of Ukraine. In March 2022 he was negotiating with Zelensky to end the war; serious negotiations in Turkey … The Isreali prime minister, Naftali Bennett, was conducting those negotiations. If Putin was interested in conquering all of Ukraine, why would he be in those negotiations? … People in the West don’t like to hear that the main thing was about NATO admission. Then they have to accept that the West is principally responsible for the bllod bath. So we’ve invented this out of whole cloth that he’s the second coming of Hitler … We stopped him. There’s no evidence to support this.
L: What is NATO expansion? What is the threat of it; why is it such a concern for Russia?
M: NATO was a mortal enemy of the USSR during the Cold War. … It has at its heart the USA. It is understandable that Russia is not going to want that military alliance on its doorstep. … Here we have the Monroe Doctrine …
…
.. Michael McFaul told me he told Putin, he didn’t need to worry about NATO expansion, since the U.S. was a benign hegemon. Mike said that Putin didn’t believe it. But Mike thought Putin should believe it. But the fact is, that’s not what Putin saw. He saw us as a malign hegemon. What Mike thinks isn’t what matters. What matters is what Putin thinks.
L: But … the drums of war have been beating … you’ve talked about NATO expansion being dead; it doesn’t make sense on the Europe side to expand NATO. Nevertheless, it’s happening—why? Why is it being pushed?
M: Two reasons. One is, we thought it was a wonderful thing to bring more and more country into it. We thought it facilitated peace and prosperity … all for the good. We also thought countries like Ukraine had a “right” to join .. they’re sovereign countries that could decide for themselves. Finally, a point I emphasized before; we were very powerful and thought we could shove it down their throat. … A combination of those factors led us to pursue what was ultimately a foolish policy.
L: How do you hope the war ends? What are the ways to end it; to end the, I would say, senseless death of young men?
M: I’m sad to say I don’t have a good answer … I don’t think there’s any real prospect of a meaningful peace agreement. The best you can hope for at this point, at some point … you have ceasefire, and then you have a frozen conflict. And that … will not be highly stable. Ukranians in the West will do everything they can to weaken Russia’s position. And the Russians will go to great lengths to … damage that … dysfunctional … state that Ukraine becomes …. and to cause problems in the alliance. You’ll have this continuing security competition … even when you get a frozen peace. And the potential for escalation there will be great. I think this is a disaster.
L: That’s a very realist perspective … Sort of the human side of it. Do you think there’s some power to leaders sitting down, having a conversation, leader to leader, about this? There is just a lot of death happening. It seems, from an economic perspective, … both nations are losing. Is it possible for Selensky and Putin to sit down, talk, and figure out a way that security concerns are addressed?
M: I think the answer is no. If the U.S. is involved, the answer is definitely no. You have to get the Americans out. If you have Selensky and Putin talking, you have a sliver of a chance. The Americans are a real problem. … Right after the war starts …
Israel and Palestine
L: Why did Hamas attack? As you understand … what was the reason that attack happened?
M: I think the main reason was you had this suffocating occupation. I think as long as the occupation persists, the Palestinians are going to resist. As you know, this is not the first Palestinian uprising. … The First and Second Intifadas were before this.And there were others. A lot of people hypothesized that this attack was due to the fact that the Isrealis, Saudis, and Americans were working on another Abraham Accord, in which the Palestinians would be sold down the river. Given the fact this was in the planning stages for about two years … I don’t think that’s the main driving force. I think the main driving force is that the Palestinians feel oppressed, as they should, and this was a resistance move.
L: So, that resistance, the attack involved killing a large number of Isreali civilians. Do you think Hamas fully understood what the retaliation would involve?
M: They had to. You had Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009, it started after Christmas 2008, and ended the next month. The Isrealis periodically do what they call “mowing the lawn” … going into Gaza and pounding the Palestinians to remind them they’re not supposed to rise up and cause any problem. There’s no question in my mind, the Hamas forces understood full well the Isrealis would retaliate.
L: The metaphor of mowing the lawn is disturbing to me in many ways. I saw Norman Finkelstein say, if you use that metaphor, you can say Hamas was also mowing the lawn … the result on either side is the death of civilians. Let me ask you about that. 1,400 Isrealis killed; 240 taken hostage. Isreali’s response has killed over 10,000 in Gaza, and given the nature of the demographics, over 40% are under 18, of those killed. That’s according to the Ministry of Health of the Palestinian authority. What do you think the long-term effect is on the prospect of peace?
M: I think it’s disastrous. The only way you’re gonna get peace here is if you have a two-state solution, where the Palestinians have a sovereign state of their own, side-by-side with a sovereign Jewish state. American presidents since Carter have understood this. Many American Jews and many Isrealis have pushed for a two-state solution. What’s happened is that in recent years, Isrealis have lost all interest in a two-state solution. The center of gravity has steadily moved to the right. The center of gravity was much further to the left years before. It’s in a position now, where there’s hardly any support for a two-state solution. Netenyahu, and his government, are in favor of a Greater Israel. There’s no question about that. On top of that, you’ve now had a war, where as you describe, huge numbers have been killed. You already had bad blood. You can imagine how people on each side now feel. Even if you didn’t have this opposition inside Israel to a two-state solution, how could you possibly get the Israelis now to agree? For a foreseeable future, the animosity is so great, it’s impossible to move the Israelis in that direction. And they’re the key players. You also ultimately have to confront the fact that Hamas is not committed to a two-state solution. Arafat and the PLO once were opposed to a two-state solution, but Arafat came around, and became a proponent. That’s true of the guy who runs the PA in the West Bank. It’s not true of Hamas. … They want a Palestinian state.
L: Cynical perspective is, those in power … need conflict to continue.
M: No … What you want is a Palestinian population that submits to Israeli domination of Greater Israel. You don’t want resistance! You don’t want what happened on October 7. One of the principal reasons the Israelis are pounding Gaza and punishing the civilian population, is because they want the Palestinians to understand, they are not allowed to rise up and resist the occupation. … I think they would prefer the Palestinians roll over and accept submission …
China
Life and mortality
Lex #402 Michael Malice
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title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>M: … was talking about a period when people were being oppressed but being told, “Don’t worry; you’ll have riches in heaven.” It doesn’t apply nowadays. … I remember this guy, … I went to college with him …
L: (makes jokes)
M: … I was reading all this criticism of the Bible. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Michael, there’s nothing you’re going to tell me that is going to make me lose my faith.” … It reminds me of when people sneer at addicts in recovery. … Wait a minute, you don’t know what it’s like to have your … whole life ruined by drugs and alcohol. … I don’t see the harm at all. I think this activist atheism is cheap; I don’t agree with it whatsoever; and I do not like that quote at all.
L: But otherwise, big fan of Marx?
M: Friend of mine, he goes, ‘The games people play to feel smarter than others is depressing and annoying.” This fedora. … atheism … If you’ve proved someone else is stupid … doesn’t make you smart! … I block people … You’re not going to sneer at me in my space …
L: Jokes
M: Jokes
L: Like Pavlov’s dog … wait 10 minutes waiting for an image of a lady load, one line at a time. … I recently talked to John Mearsheimer. He has this idea of offensive realism; a way to analyze the world. I’ll run it by you … that states, nations want to survive, and they try to do so by maximizing military power. He talks about anarchy quite a bit. One of the underlying assumptions … is that states are anarchic towards each other. They operate under a lot of uncertainty … they can’t be sure others won’t use military power against them. …
M: I disagree in that regard .. I see on your bookshelf; the world is closer to Brave New World than it is to 1984. Look at China’s influence of America; it’s through soft power, not military power. One of the reasons we have American hegemony; it’s not just a function of American military. Much more through American pop culture … it makes people in other countries feel closer to you … it’s a great way to spread propaganda.
L: It’s interesting, what has more power. The viral spread of ideas, or the reach of the military … America has both.
M: Let’s look at Europe; American stuff is very popular there. .. I don’t think it’s a function of … We’re exporting TV shows and our movies … Brave New World is so much cheaper. It’s cheaper to use influence than it is to use threats. Covid is an example of this. The fact that everyone bought into it; the vast majority of the population was behind it. That was through persuasion. People are begging for it to come back.
L: So who’s funding you?
M: Assad.
L: What’s that, Mr. Parrot?
M: I think Mr. Parrot is threatened by the better wings on (the other sculpture) …
L: Yeah, this thing’s beautiful. You have a lot of really cool stuff at your place. What stands out?
M: I went to the Dallas Museum of Art last year for my birthday. … Painting I liked; Googled it, and there was an auction for that painting, and it was $3K. I went to Houston with some friends; (the lady that made that cake of you).
L: Terrifying my mom.
M: Really?
L: Not the cake; you cutting the face off.
M: Well the woman is cool, and we looked at this ancient statue together. I thought, I’ve always loved Ancient Egypt. It would be cool to have that statue in my house. It turned out that the Egyptians also killed and mummified … Ibis … And I now have that mummy in my house, overlooking my desk. We all know it’s going to come to life …. Another thing I have, in terms of ‘Holy Crap I’ve made it.’ It’s an original Patrick Nagle painting … he’s a bigtime artist from the 1980s. He only drew women predominantly but I have one where he drew a male. …
L: … how many fascinating beautiful people there are out there.
M: … how many people have fought so I could do what I do.
L: That’s another thing I’m grateful before us. Like the hundreds of millions of people who have come before us. And also the trillions of life forms that came before that.
M: (I collect fossils of trilobytes)
L: But thinking about all that history … (shows picture of ‘The Cosmic Calendar’) …
M: I think that’s fair to say. I think this also is like, live life to the fullest; Camus talked about living to the point of tears; especially for those who didn’t have that privilege. When I die. … I’m not here; live for me, because I no longer can.
L: Camus as a writer?
M: I don’t like his novels at all.
L: The Plague?
M: Meh. All you have to do is read the synopsis …
L: I don’t agree at all. Catcher in the Rye … Animal Farm
M: No Animal Farm is good
L: The Plague is good … it could symbolize a lot; it’s similar to Animal Farm
M: I think Animal Farm has a narrative. I’m gonna spoil The Plague. It descends; people struggle to deal with it, and then it goes away. The End.
L: Yeah but there’s these individual stories … I mean I could spoil Animal Farm. There’s abusive humans; the pigs overthrow … The lessons kids, is that power corrupts no matter what.
M: I thought the lesson was that pigs are the most human-like animal on the farm.
L: You’ve interviewed a lot of people. What have you learned about that?
M: I’m not interviewing random people; I’m interviewing people who are accomplished. I think that people love to — and this is understandable — love to feel seen. To have someone interested in your work … I remember, every book I’ve written. At a certain point it takes over your brain. If you have an interest or a hobby, to some extent your friends and family are sick of talking about it … I try to, and this comes from my co-authoring background, ask people questions they haven’t heard before. There’s a possibility this actor I’m a huge fan of is going to be on my show. He’s got a specific role he’s known for; I know it’s going to be annoying for you to talk about this one role, but .. my goal is to ask questions I know you haven’t been asked. …
L: What do you know about breeding guinea pigs?
M: I always use this as an example: you meet someone at a party who breeds guinea pigs. There’s two approaches. You’re weird. Or, sit down and tell me everything. Everyone I like is the second group … That to me is the mother load.
L: Me too! The thing I enjoy the most. Good people that are passionate about a thing.
M: Who do you guys hate? The hamster people?
L: Hierarchies emerge. There’s no anarchy in the guinea pig world.
M: No it’s a different kind of anarchy …
L: Are you an anarcho-capitalist?
M: No I’m an anarchist without adjectives …
L: Beautiful line in the book …
M: I think the anarcho-capitalists don’t give the left anarchists enough credit for their courage. I try to talk about people like Emma Goldman whenever possible …
L: The litmus test: Are some people better than others? For you the answer is yes.
M: I never answer.
L: What little habits in your life make you happy? Now that you’re in Austin.
M: I knew (you were gonna ask this) … You know how sometimes when someone tells a story; at first it’s amusing, then it’s amusing-concerned … then it’s ‘holy shit, where’s the exit.’
L: I’m getting nervous already.
M: This is something I’ve only told a couple of people. This is my off-the-charts autistic approach to shaving. I have this insane system. I used to hate shaving. There’s something called wet shaving … You paint your face with the brush … The thing is there are dozens of these shaving-soap companies. I tried a couple of hundred of these soaps; you’re testing for scent, the lather thickness, and how smooth of a shave it gives you. I have it down … to a cycle of 67 soaps. When I use up one soap, that is a slot that I will have to try new ones; and I will try new ones in that slot until I get one that I like, and … Right now I have 67 I use and 86 candidates in the que.
L: Do you label them?
M: They all have beautiful labels! Artisans … I will give a shout-out to the best: the best in my opinion, they just changed the name; they were originally called Grooming Department (giggles). He changed the name to Ion Skin Care; the most sophisticated, the most diverse .. Another good one is Barrister & Man; he comes up with new ones every month or so. Another great one is Chiseled Face.
L: What makes for a good smell? …
M: Some are Citrus-y; some are industrial … Some are fun ‘cause there’s smells that come from other things … Another is Phoenix Shaving … Those are some … Katie’s Bubbles is great; they’re vegan out of New Jersey … I think are the biggest names off the top of my head. ..
L: My sad brain wondered; I wonder how many soaps are left in Michael Malice’s life.
M: That is dark. There’s a term called ‘touching pan.’ When you use it and you can see the bottom, that’s a big moment. It is such a fun. … there’s a lot of us online who are into this space.
L: When did you discover this?
M: Fuck you Cole Striker! I was staying at his house in L.A. … He is one of the biggest hipsters I know; shirts with pearl snaps. He goes, ‘Have you heard of this What’s Shaving thing?’ I went down this rabbit hole; I spent all this money … it’s all because of him.
L: Oh I get it, it’s a happy fuck you. A good idea for a tattoo … Do you have advice on how to be happy? There’s a lot of loneliness and sadness in the world.
M: A very easy piece of advice that worked for me. Instead of telling yourself that you have these ridiculous standards, tell yourself “I can be better.” I don’t have to be a great writer; I can be a better writer. … Especially if you have metrics you can go by … miles a day, when you have this chart and the data tells you you’re improving, you have this sense of accomplishment. If something is not working in your life—there’s the Internet! How do people do this? What’s the worst that can happen? Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. When I was a kid, I was so scared … having things under control, so that I don’t have to get hit in the face. But then I learned, everyone important gets hit in the face, so you want to get strong enough to get hit in the face.
L: Bukowski quote: Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside … remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
M: Yeah!
L: There’s a part of me that’s like that. Some days I feel like, this is the worst day of my life. And then later I chuckle at that. Knowing the ups and downs … You ever been depressed?
M: Yeah, of course. More anxiety than depression. I distinguish depression from low points … I think it’s when you feel bad when things aren’t bad. It’s by definition irrational.
L: There’s different types. Exhausted type … where you don’t want to do anything. You don’t want to live; what’s the point! An extreme self-critical negativity … which I’m also scared of.
M: Because you don’t take enough Magnesium.
L: Do you take it rectally or in the mouth?
M: You take it rectally.
L: What are you most afraid of?
M: (Long pause) I’m trying to think of anything I’m afraid of …
L: You know in 1984 … if I wanted to torture you, hypothetically.
M: Mission accomplished! Well I’m afraid of increasing authoritarianism, but that’s not personal.
L: Are you scared of death?
M: No.
L: Do you think Camus was?
M: I honestly feel, if I die tomorrow, I did pretty good with what I had. I did things that matter to me; I moved the needle on things that matter to me. I’ve been a good friend to people I care about … I think it’s a low bar to be able to go to their grave and think, I’ve left the world better than when I found it.
L; You ever been betrayed.
M: Yeah, haven’t you?
L: Not as often as I’ve expected … Do you value loyalty?
M: Yes … I’ve made it a point to not let betrayal color my future … decisions. … I feel bad for the person who betrayed me … They didn’t need to do this … and at some point they’ll have that minute—they know. They know, “I’m not a good person.” That’s a hard pill to swallow.
L: I still think good thoughts and empathize with people who’ve done me wrong.
M: I don’t empathize with them but I sympathize with them.
L: I don’t know the difference.
M: It’s hard for me to empathize with someone that betrays … I feel guilt very strongly … if I did that, it would fuck up my head for a long time.
L: Yeah, but maybe they were in pain; maybe they were desperate.
M: That’s sympathy, not empathy.
L: Loyalty’s fascinating. I value trust a lot. …
M: Of course; you’re a public person …
L: It sucks. It’s hard; I usually just trust everybody.
M: That’s crazy. The alternative is to have a filter.
L: Well I have a filter in terms of whom I’m interact with. I see the good in people; in very rare instances that my turn; it just sucks. It breaks my heart.
M: Yeah; I completely agree.
L: … I’m just relaxed and happy. This is making me really happy.
M: It’s beautiful on eight different levels.
L: That’s one I’m most grateful for; how beautiful people are.
M: I really sometimes feel like the guy in American Beauty looking at the plastic bag dancing in the wind … A lot of people feel the need to sneer at that scene. I think he’s got it exactly right.
L: I think he does too. In the end, you and I will be both laughing.
M: And seing beauty where other people see garbage. …
L: Yup … Well when I look at you I see beauty, when most people see garbage. And it’s unfair Mr. Parrot that you keep saying that. … Very grateful for your friendship … all these years; thank you for being who you are.
M: You are welcome!
Closing words: Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose site of the shore. —Andre Gide
#403 Lisa Randall
Dark matter
F: What is dark matter?
R: The fact that we can deduce the existence of something we can’t … see, is a tribute to people … You can’t overly rely on your direct senses … if you did you would miss so much of what’s happening in the world … To focus on dark matter … we know it’s there. In my book Dark Matter and the Dinosoars … many different ways we deduce its existence. … Gravitational force. Individually, a particle doesn’t have a big gravitational force … But there’s a lot of dark matter out there, and it carries a lot of energy. … It’s just another form of matter, that doesn’t interact with light, as far as we know. It clumps, it forms galaxies, but it doesn’t interact with light. … So we just don’t see it. We only saw things because of their interactions with light, in some sense.
F: So
R: So when we say it interacts like other forms of matter, we have to be careful. It doesn’t experience electromagnetism … it has a different distribution … It’s roughly spherical. Ordinary matter can radiate and clumps into a disc. That’s why we see the Milky Way disc … Dark matter can collapse more readily than ordinary matter, because (the latter) has radiative forces that makes it hard to collapse on small scales. Dark matter … drives galaxy formation …
Extinction events
Particle physics
Physics vs mathematics
Lex #405: Jeff Bezos
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title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Texas ranch and childhood
L: You spent a lot of your childhood with your father at a ranch here … what was the coolest, most interesting job you remember doing here?
J: It was a real working ranch … in the early summers, he (my grandmother) was allowing me to pretend to help … (I was 4) .. My mom had me when she was 17; he was sort of giving her a break. They would take me for these summers. As I got older, I actually was helpful on the ranch …. My grandfather was a huge influence on me. .. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch … all the things any rancher would do … But we had; my grandfather, after my grandmother died (when I was about 12); he was completely addicted to the soap opera The Days of Our Lives … we would watch it every day.
Space exploration and rocket engineering
(Discussion about Gagarin and )
J: I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system … we can easily support a civilization that large with all the resources in the solar system. .. The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. The planetary … are way too small. We will take materials from the moon and near-earth objects and the asteroid belt and so on, and we’ll build giant O’Neil-style colonies … people won’t want to give up earth altogether
L: They go to Earth for vacation
J: Yeah… people will get to choose whether they live on earth or in space; they’ll be able to use much more material/energy in space.
L: You had idea of moving heavy industry away from earth … some people say we should focus on preservation of earth; but your contention is that space exploration is a way of preserving earth
J: We’ve sent robotic probes to other planets; we know this planet, Earth, is the good one. It’s really extraordinary. Of course we evolved on this planet. … It’s perfect for us, and for all the other life forms. This is a gem; we do need to take care of it. … by almost every metric we’re moving forward … the only exception is with the natural world; we’ve traded the pristine beauty. …
L: Tell me about Blue Ring … infrastructure project
J: It’s a spacecraft designed … it has two kinds of propulsion. You could use it to slowly move up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion, in 100-150 days. Then reserve chemical propulsion for changing orbits. You could alternately use the two propulsions for opposite purposes. The Blue Ring provides a lot of services to these payloads … It provides thermal management, electric power, compute, communications …. So when you design a payload for Blue Ring … You don’t have to figure out all those things on your own. Radiation-tolerant compute is difficult to do. We have a lot of that on-board; your payload can just use that when it needs to. It’s like a set of APIs … it’s a bit like Amazon Web Services, but for space payloads ….
L: So Compute in space … you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit; then these admins show up … that manage various things like compute.
J: Yes; it can also provide transportation
L: Including humans?
J: No. We’re also building a lunar lander which is of course designed to land humans on the surface of the moon
L: In the old days, you were at Princeton with an aspiration to be a theoretical physicist. Why aren’t you a theoretical physicist?
J: I loved physics … and computer science. I was proceeding along the physics path … The CS was something I was doing for fun. I was good at the programming, and enjoyed all my CS classes immensely. But I was really determined to be a physicist. And then I realized I was going to be mediocre at it. There were a few people in my classes, in quantum computing … they could effortlessly do things that were difficult to me. There are a thousand ways to be smart … physics is not a field where only the top 2% move the state of the art forward. … There was a guy, one of these people that convinced me … that I shouldn’t try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yosanta; from Sri Lanka, he was brilliant. My friend Joe and I were working on a partial differential equations problem set; worked on the same problem for three hours … totally stuck. We went to Yosanta’s dorm room, and we said ‘We’re having trouble solving this; would you mind having a look?’ He was a humble kind person. He stared at it for 10 seconds and he said “cosine.” I said what do you mean? He said that’s the answer! He took out paper and pencil and wrote three pages of equations. I said did you do that in your head? He said no, that would be impossible. He said he’d done a similar problem years before. … But you have an experience like that, you decide, maybe being a theoretical physicist isn’t what the world wants me to be …. I think the mathematical skill required is so high. You have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist. You probably need other skills too. Intuition, lateral thinking … Without top notch math skills, you’re unlikely to be successful. ..
L: .. Walter Isaacson writes about you; puts you on the same level of Einstein.
J: I’m an inventor. (That’s very kind) … I look at things and can come up with atypical solutions. I can come up with 100 atypical solutions; 99 of them may not surive scrutiny, but one of them … That kind of lateral thinking, in a high-dimensionality space where the search space is very large … I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else.
L: Isaacson mentions creativity plus childlike wonder that you’ve maintained to this day. What’s your thinking process like? We’ll talk (later) about the writing process … When you think through this hi-dimensional space, looking for creative paths …
J: Such a good question. I honestly don’t know how it works. I know it involves lots of wandering. When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don’t know where I’m going. To go in a straight line, to be efficient … efficiency and invention are sort of at odds. Incremental improvement … is so important. But real invention, real lateral thinking, that requires wandering. You have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is … inefficient, and … when I sit down at a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take. If I did (know) … the reality is, we may have to wander for a long time. Group invention—there’s nothing more fun. Sitting at a whiteboard with a bunch of smart people; coming up with ideas, objections to those ideas … Sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night. Sometime you sit with a group
Physics
New Glenn rocket
J: Most decisions are two-day doors
L: Can you explain that?
J: … you pick a door, you walk out; you just come back, you pick another door … But other times; you go in that door, you’re not coming back. Those decisions, we make very deliberately, very carefully. … Re-analyze the decision. … When I’m the CEO of Amazon … I found myself the Chief Slow-Down officer …
Lunar program
J: … using lunar resources. … to manufacture commodities and solar cells on the surface of the moon. … We’ve built a solar cell completely built from lunar regolith …
Amazon
J: … optimism … you’re holding that contradiction in your head. .. It was so exciting. .. From 1994 when the company was founded, to 1995 when we opened our doors; all the way until today … I find Amazon so exciting. Full of pain, full of problems. So many things need to be resolved … and made better. .. .On balance, so fun, such a privilege, such a joy. I feel so grateful .. it’s just been incredible.
L: In some sense, you don’t want a single day of comfort. I’ll talk about your writing; letters to shareholders. … the idea of Day One thinking; you wrote about in a 1997 letter to shareholders. You also wrote, sad to say, your last letter to shareholders … Day Two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. That is why it’s always Day One. Can you explain?
J: It’s … a very simple and age-old idea, about renewal, and rebirth … every day is Day One. Every day, you are deciding, what you’re gonna do. You are not trapped by what you were or who you were … or any self-consistency. Self-consistency … can be a trap. So Day One thinking is kind of … we start fresh every day. We get to make new decisions every day. About invention, customers, about how we’re going to operate; even—even as deeply about what our principles are. Turns out we don’t change those very often … occasionally. When we work on programs; we often make a list of tenets. These aren’t principles; they’re more tactical than principles. The main idea … we want the program to embody. We put the tenets; in parentheses, we put “unless you know a better way.” That last idea is so important. You never want to get trapped by dogma … (or) history. There’s so much value (in history) but you can’t be blindly following what you’ve done.
L: To fend off Day Two, you said “such a question can’t have a simple answer … I don’t have the whole answer; but I may know bits of it … For Day One: defense. Customer obsession, … a skeptical view of proxies …” … Eager adoption of external trends … How do you fight off Day Two?
J: I’ll talk about the principle that’s the hardest to understand—the skeptical view of proxies. One of the things that happens in business, and probably anything where you have an ongoing program; something underway for a number of years … for example a metric. The metric’s not the real thing! Maybe it’s an efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold. If you sell a million units, how many contacts is that? A bit of inertia sets in, where somebody a long time ago invented that metric. They invented that metric, said “we need to watch for customer returns per unit sold” as an important metric. The person who invented that metric had a reason for it. Fast forward five years; the metric is the proxy.
L: The proxy for truth, I guess.
J: (Yes) in this case a metric for customer happiness. But the metric isn’t really customer happiness. The inventor of the metric understood that. Inertia sets in; you forget the truth of why you invented that metric in the first place. … You have to be on alert for that; you’re not really caring about the metric; you care about customer happiness. The metric is valuable only insomuch as it really … customer happiness. This is a very nuanced problem. It’s very common in large companies that they’re managing to metrics they don’t really understand. The world may have shifted out from under them a little. …
L: That is a nuance … but that’s a big problem, right? Something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.
J: Yes, and you do need metrics! You just want to be constantly on guard. A way to slip into Day Two thinking is to manage your business to metrics you don’t really understand.
L: What does it take to be the guy or gal who brings up … that this proxy might be updated. How do you have a culture that enables that in a meeting?
J: You have just asked a million-dollar question. To generalize what you’re asking, you’re talking about … truth-telling. We humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals. … Take you back 10,000 years, you’re in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death … Truths often don’t want to be heard. Important truths can be awkward, exhausting, challenging … they can make people defensive. But any high-performing organization … has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is to talk about that. Talk about how it takes energy to do that. Literally tell people … it’s okay that it’s uncomfortable. .. It’s kind of a side-effect that we do that. It’s not how we survive. We survive by being social animals. Science is all about truth-telling; it’s a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth. And even in science, you find that it’s hard to tell the truth. …
L: Somehow seniority matters in the scientific profess, which it should not.
J: You want to set up your culture where the most junior person can overrule the most senior person. Little things you can do. In every meeting I attend, I always speak last. I know from experience that … if I speak first … even very strong-willed highly intelligent, high-judgement participants will wonder: If Jeff thinks that … I came in that meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right. So if you’re the most senior person in the room, go last! Let everybody else go first. … Let the most junior person go first … try to go in order of seniority. So you can hear everyone’s opinion. … If someone who you really respect says something, try to change your mind a little. … Give permission for people to have a strong opinion, as long as it’s backed by data.
L:
J: A lot of our most powerful intuitions … might not be based on data. You may know a person well enough to trust their judgement. It might resonate with a set of anecdotes you have. … Let’s go and collect some data. … Let’s not disregard it, because it feels right. … inherent bias. … There’s an optimism bias. .. Compensate for the human bias of trying to find silver lining … ‘That might be good; I’m gonna go with ‘it’s bad’ for now until we’re sure!’
L: Speaking of happiness bias (how’s that for a transition), you have to tell me the story of the customer-service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times.
J: Very early in the history of Amazon; we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents … When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right … Go examine the data. It’s not that the data is miscollected; it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing. If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something … Metrics look like, they shouldn’t be complaining—you should doubt the metrics. Early example was, we had metrics showing that our customers were waiting less than 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get customer service over the phone. But we had a lot of complaints … so the metrics seemed wrong. One day at a meeting, going through the WBR (Weekly Business Review) … the guy was defending the metric. So I said, “okay—let’s call!” I picked up the phone, called the 1-800 number … and we waited in a silence … Oh it was really long! More than 10 minutes, I think. It dramatically made the point that … we weren’t measuring the right thing. That’s an example of truth-telling. It’s uncomfortable to do … but you have to do it. …
Principles
L: … seeing the world through the eyes of the customer. The subtle little things that make up their experience … how do you optimize those.
J: There are big things that are really important to manage; and then there are small things … internally to Amazon, we call them papercuts. We’re always working on the big things; most of the energy goes into the big things. You can identify the big things …
L: … for example, booking airline tickets. Buying a thing with one click, making that experience, friction-less. … in terms of
J: Cognitive load
L: Yeah … inner peace, happiness. Buying a thing is a pleasant expeirence. Having pain around that (is a shame) … Is that a solution to a paper cut?
J: That’s probably a solution to a number of paper cuts . … You’re absolutely right … when you come up with something like one-click shopping …
L: Every time I click the button … just a surge of happiness.
J: In the perfect invention, there is a real beauty. It feels good; it’s emotional … for the inventor, for the team that builds it, for the customer.
L: But to keep coming up with those kinds of ideas, is the Day One effort.
J: Yeah, creating that kind of beauty.
L: Books about you … also The Founders podcast covers you a lot. I bring all that up because I saw that … you said that books are an antidote for short attention psans. I forget how it was phrased, but when you were thinking about the Kindal .. how technology changes us.
J: We co-evolve with our tools
L: Fascinating … There’s some aspect, even inside business, where you don’t just make the customer happy … but also, where’s this going to take humanity.
J: 1000%. You can feel your brain getting reprogramed … Brains are plastic. … When Tetris first came on the scene; you close your eyes to lay down and go to sleep, and you see all the little blocks moving. You can tell as you walk around the world that you have re-wired your brain to play Tetris. But that happens with everything! One of the, I think … we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this … largely because of social media, we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super-short-term content. Your podcast flies in the face of this … Reading books is a long-format thing. .. We all do more of—if something is convenient, we do more of it. … We carry around in our pocket, a phone. It is an attention-shortening device. Most of the things we do on our phone … shorten our attention spans. I think it’s important to spend some of your time doing long-attention-span things.
L: You’ve spoken of the value in your own life of focus … Another piece of technology: A.I. How do you think that will change us.
J: Generative AI, ChatGPT, its soon successors; these are incredibly powerful technologies; to believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand. It’s interesting to me that … LLMs in their current form are not inventions; they’re discoveries. The telescope was an invention; but looking through it at Jupiter and its moons, was a discovery. That’s what Galileo did. This is closer on that spectrum. We know what happens with a 787; it’s an engineered object. LLMs … we’re constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. … This debate about whether they’re going to be good for humanity. Specialized AI could be very bad for humanity. Regular Machine Learning models .. could make certain weapons of war incredibly destructive. Could just be very smart weapons. We have to think about all of those things. I’m very optimistic about this. Even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that … these powerful tools, are much more likely to help us and save us, even, than they are to, on balance, hurt us and destroy us. We humans … we could make ourselves go extinct. The people who are overly concerned … it’s a valid debate. I think that they may be missing part of the equation. I don’t know if you saw Oppenheimer. The best part … is this bureaucrat, played by Robert Downey Jr. Some people thought that part was boring; I thought it was fascinating. We have invented … nuclear weapons; they are managed … we humans, are — we’re not really capable of weilding (them). “That’s what he represented in that movie. Here’s this guy who … wrongly thinks, he’s being so petty … He spent his career trying to be vengeful and petty. That’s the problem; we as a species are … not really sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies. And by the way, before you get to general AI, and … there’s so much benefits that will come from this technology in the meantime. I think it’s an incredible moment to be alive, and to witness the transformations that are gonna happen. How quickly, no one knows. I think over the next 10, 20 years.
L: Really interesting to say that it’s discoveries. It’s true we don’t know the limits of what’s possible. It could be a few tricks and hacks …
J: We know that humans are doing something different from these models; in part because we’re so power-efficient. … We work on about 20 watts of power (our brains). Our AI techniques need many kilowatts of power. Also, we don’t need as much data. Self-driving cars need to drive billions of miles to learn how to drive. The average teenager figures it out. There are many tricks left to learn; I don’t think it’s just a question of scaling things up. It’s actually hard to scale things up …
L: More nuanced aspects about human beings. … being truly original and novel. LLMs being able to come up with truly new ideas. The other one is truth. It seems LLMs are good at sounding like they’re saying a true thing. But they don’t necessarily have a grounding in mathematical truth. They’re basically a very good bullshitter. … It will concoct accurate-sounding narratives, which is a fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get them to introspect
J: They need to be taught to say ‘I don’t know’ more often. I know several humans who could be taught that as well.
L: The other open question is, what kind of products are created from this?
J: So many. We have Alexa and Echo. Alexa has hundreds and millions of … inputs. Guess what? Alexa is about to get a lot smarter. That’s really, from a product POV, really exciting. … AWS, we’re building Titan, our foundational model. We’re also building Bedrock, our corporate clients at AWS want to be able to use these models with their own corporate data without accidentally contributing that data to that model.
L: Yeah … fascinating … A fascinating technical problem … keeping that data secure.
J: We’re dedicated to solving that.
L: Do you foresee romantic relationships like in Her.
J: If you look at the spectrum of variety in what people like, sexually. So I think the answer has to be ‘yes,’ but I don’t know when.
L: I was just asking for a friend. …
Productivity
What’s a perfectly productive day in your life?
J: I get up in the morning and I putter. I slowly move around; I’m not as productive as you might think. I do believe in wandering; I read my phone for a while; I read newspapers, I chat with Lauren and I drink my first coffee. I get up early, just naturally … Then, you know, I exercise most days. Most days it’s not hard; some days it’s really hard. .. I don’t want to do it. ‘Why am I here at the gym?’
L: What’s your motivation in those moments/
J: I know I’ll feel better later. I can tell the days when I skip it; I’m not quite as alert; I don’t feel as good. … You want, you want to be healthy and moving around when you’re 80 years old. But that kind of motivation is so far in the future. … I’ll feel better in four hours if I do it now.
L: What’s your exercise routine? How much do you curl?
J: On a good day, I do 30 min of cardio, 45 min of weights, resistance training. I have a trainer who I love, who pushes me. He’ll say, ‘Jeff, can we go up on that weight a little bit.’ I’ll go, ‘No I don’t think so.’ He’ll go, “Yeah, I think you can.” Of course he’s right. …
L: But almost every day?
J: Almost every day. I rotate; I do a pulling day, a pushing day, a leg day.
J: So puttering, coffee,
J: Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work. Work … since leaving as the CEO of Amazon, and I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I’m mostly enjoying it. Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin. In the big, I love it. In the small, there’s all the frustrations. We’re trying to get to rate manufacturing. We just hired a new CEO; Dave Lipp … I love him, he’s amazing. My day of work, reading documents; having meetings .. some in person, some over zoom. It’s all about the tech, the organization … I’m very … I have architecture and tech meetings on various subsystems inside the vehicle. It’s fun; my favorite part is the technology. My least favorite part is building organizations. It’s still important. They call it work because you don’t always get to do what you want.
L: How do you get time to focus
J: I do thinking retreats. I don’t keep to a strict schedule. My meetings often go long, because I believe in wandering. A perfect meeting starts with a crisp document … With such clarity it’s like, angels singing from on high. Then I like a messy meeting; with quesitons that no one knows the answer to. When that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It has a beauty to it … You get real breakthroughs …
L: Tell me about the crisp document; this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazin; the six-page memo
J: Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. New executives are taken aback. Because of the six-page narratively structured memo. We do study hall. We sit there and we read. Then we discuss. The reason we do this instead of “homework” is then, you have to deal with people not having done it … It’s just good to carve out the time for people … Then we can have an elevated discussion. This is better than having a power point … Power Point is designed to persuade. The last thing you want to be doing is selling. You’re truth-seeking. You’re trying to find truth. A PowerPoint is easy for the author, and hard for the audience … A six-page memo is the opposite. …
L: Is there art or science to the writing of that memo?
J: It has topic sentences … verbs and nouns. You can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points. When you have to write with narrative structure, it forces the author to be at their best. Then you don’t have to spend a lot of time teasing that thinking out of the person.
L: So that’s crisp and the rest is messy …
J: Most meetings you’re trying to find a really hard problem. You don’t want to pretend it’s easy. The business review meetings for incremental problems … those meetings can be efficient …
Future of humanity
L: The 10,000-year clock.
J: It’s a physical clock … in a mountain in West Texas … It’s an idea conceived by Danny Hillis back in the 80s … the idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. You can think of it, conceptually … It ticks once a year. It chimes once every 100 years. The cuckoo comes out once every 1000 years. It’s completely mechanical. It’s designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. It’s in a remote location to protect it, and so visitors have to make a pilgrimmage. Over time, this will take hundreds of years, it will take on the patina of age. Then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking … As we as a species become more powerful … The problems we create can be so large. The unintended consequences of some of our actions … climate change is a perfect example. We need to train ourselves to think longer-term. It’s a giant lever. We aren’t really good at thinking long-term. Five years is a tough time frame for most institutions. We probably need to stretch that … We do a better job to our children and grandchildren if we can stretch those horizons. In a way it’s an art project, a symbol.
L: Do you think humans will be there when the clock runs out in 10,000y ears?
J: I think so. But not America. Civilizations are born and die. How will he have changed ourselves? I don’t know.
L: On that grand scale, a human life feels tiny. Do you ponder your own mortality?
J: No. I used to be! As a young person, I was very scared of mortality. As I’ve gotten older, I’m 59 now, as I’ve gotten older that fear has somehow gone away. … I’m more focused on health-span. I want to be healthy—I don’t want the long decay. I’m curious, I want to see how things turn out. I love my family and close friends … I have a lot of reasons to stay around. .. Mortality, doesn’t have that effect on me that it did when I was in my 20s.
L: Well thank you for creating Amazon … and for trying to help make us a multi-planetary species.
J: Thanks for doing your part to lengthen our attention spans!
L: “Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.” —Jeff Bezos
Lex #407: Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation & AGI
L: The man behind the previously anonymous account based Beff Jezos on X. (Doxed on Forbes by an article) … Let me describe these two identities. Identity #1, Guillaume, is a physicist … receiving his PhD in quantum machine learning … launching his own company Extropic … to build hardware for generative AI. … Identity #2 is the creator of the effective accelerationism movement, known as e/acc … promoting rapid technological progress as the ethically optimial course of action for humanity. … They believe progress in AI is a great social equalizer that should be pushed forward. A counterweight to the view that AI is unpredictable and needs to be regulated. They call their opponents doomers or de-cels. … As Beff himself put it, e/acc is a mimetic optomism virus … There is an intellectual foundation that we explore … Speaking of the meme … I too am an aspiring conoisseur of the absurd. It’s no accident that I spoke to Jeff and Beff back-to-back. … And now, dear friends. .. here we go
L: Let’s get facts of identity down first. You’re behind the anonymous account … first Guillaume Verdon, you’re a quantum computing guy, mathematician. And Based Beff Jezos is basically a meme account. Can you linger on how these two people are?
G: With my main identity … ever since I was a kid, I wanted to figure out a theory of everything. that path led me to theoretical physics eventually, trying to answer bigg questions of why are we here? Led me to study information theory, and try to understand physics from that lens, the universe as one big computation. Essentially, after reaching a certain level studying black hole physics, I realized I wanted to not only understand how the universe computes … but understand how to understand and create computers that were inspired by nature. That brought me to quantum computing, as a field of study, to simulate nature, and learn representations of nature that can run on such computers … Led me to be an early player in the field of quantum machine learning. And really sort of extend notions of intelligence to the quantum realm. So how do you capture and understand … learn quantum mechanical representations of our world. .. How do you train such representations. The questions I was looking to answer … I had a sort of crisis of faith. I wanted to figure out, as every physicist does at the beginning of their career, a few equations that describe the whole universe. Ultimately I realized, augmenting ourselves with machines … is the path forward. … That got me to go into quantum physics and ML. I thought there was a piece missing … if you look at the physical scales; at the very small scales, things are very quantum-mechanical. At very large scales, things are deterministic, they have averaged out. At very small scales, things are in superposition; they can exhibit interference effects. But in the meso-scales; in scales of protein, biology, …. things are actually thermodynamical; they’re fluctuating. After 6-8 years in quantum machine learning, I realized, I was looking for answers about our universe by studying the very big and the very small. Big: black hole physics … where energy density is sufficient for both quantum mechanics and ___ are relevant. So, black holes … You study the interface between quantum mechanics and relativity. Really I was studying these extremes to understand how the universe works, and where is it going? But i was missing a lot of the meat in the middle, if you will. ..
Thermodynamics
G: Day-to-day, quantum mechanics is relevant … but not that relevant, actually. We’re on medium space and time scales. There, the theory of physics that’s most relevant is thermodynamics, … ‘Cause life is a process that’s out-of-equilibrium thermodynamical. … We’re not just a soup of particles; we’re a sort of coherent state trying to maintain itself by acquiring free energy and consuming it. That’s sort of another shift in my faith in the universe happened towards the end of my time at Alphabet; I knew I wanted to build, first of all, a computer paradigm based on this type of physics. Ultimately, just. Trying to experiment with these ideas applied to society and economies … I started anonymous account just to relieve the pressure that comes with having an account that you’re accountable for everything you say on. I started it to experiment with ideas, originally. I didn’t realize how much I was restricting my space of thoughts until I sort of had the opportunity to let go, in a sense. Restricting your speech back-propagates to restricting your thoughts. By creating an anonymous account … I’d un-clamped some variables on my brain …
L: Isn’t that interesting? … that pressure and constraints on speech … somehow creates these walls around thought …
G: That’s the basis of our movement; we see a tendency toward constraint … repression of variants in every aspect of life. Thought, how to run a company, how to organize humans, how to do AI research. In general, we believe maintaining variance ensures that the system is adaptive. … Maintaining healthy competition in … marketplaces of ideas … Of currencies, of governments … is the way forward. The system always adapts to assign resources to configurations that lead to its growth. the fundamental basis to the movement is this sort of realization that life is a sort of fire that seeks out free energy, and seeks to grow. That growth is fundamental to life. You see this in equations about equilibrium, thermodynamics … you see … The universe is biased toward certain futures. There’s a natural direction (where) the whole system wants to go
L: You’ve said … offload entropy … Why is it intuitive to you that it’s natural?
G: We’re far more efficient at producing heat than … a rock with a similar mass. We use all this electricity for our operation. the universe wants to produce more entropy. By having life
Doxxing
Anonymous bots
Power
AI dangers
Building AGI
Merging with AI
p(doom)
Quantum machine learning
Quantum computer
Aliens
Quantum gravity
Kardashev scale
Effective accelerationism (e/acc)
Humor and memes
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Extropic
Singularity and AGI
AI doomers
Effective altruism
Day in the life
Identity
Advice for young people
Mortality
Meaning of life
Lex #408: Tal Wilkenfeld … Lex is a groupie
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L: Tal Wilkenfeld is a singer-songwriter, bassist, and guitarist. She has performed with legendary artists including Jeff Beck, Prince, Incubus, Eric Clapton, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Hans Zimmer, Pharrell Williams, and many more.
L: There’s a legendary video of you playing with Jeff Beck. If people who don’t know, he’s one of the greatest guitarists ever.
T: I wasn’t nervous. You can get an adrenaline rush before stage which is natural … As soon as you bring fear to a bandstand, you’re limiting yourself off; you’re walling yourself off from everyone else. You must be afraid of making a mistake; you can’t come at music that way, or it won’t be as expansive or … true. No, I was excited and passionate … Also, the fact that he gave me this solo … The context of this performance; this was a guitar festival, one of the biggest … it’s Eric Clapton’s. There’s 400 guitarists playing solos all night. We were towards the end of the night. Jeff got a kick out of—I’m not going to solo off one of my most well-known songs. .. I’m gonna give it to my base player!
Jeff Beck
Confidence on stage
Leonard Cohen
Taxi Driver
Songwriting
How to learn and practice
Slap vs Fingerstyle
Davie504
Prince
Jimi Hendrix
Mentorship
Sad songs
Tal performs Under The Sun (live)
Tal performs Killing Me (live)
FBI most wanted con man: #409 … a SIX-HOUR talk!
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Mortgage fraud
Cox’s first crime was his first mortage …
C: There’s so many safeguards set up … ‘We want your W-2s, we want your pay stubs.’ It’s like your whole plan fell apart; the average guy can’t do that. ‘I’m gonna put down this much money.’ Then they start asking for bank statements … you can’t have money put in for a day; it has to have been there for 90 days. The average guy that works at Wal-Mart and makes $60K a year … that’s the guy that those transactions are set up for, to borrow a mortgage from Bank of America.
L: So you have to misrepresent …
M: You have to be able to lie to the bank. When I was doing it; I’d say ‘it’s in the grey area,’ but there’s no grey area. For instance, the first loan I did, I whited out my borrower; my borrower had been 30 days late on her rent. They’re looking at the last two years … How long have you been at your residency; they’re looking for two years. As long as you consistently paid. Well she had been 30 days late. She caught it up. The bank doesn’t want to lend you money if you’ve been 30 days late. I was a broker, and I whited out the 30-day late. My manager told me to do it.
L: So that was the first fraudulent action you committed. What did it feel like?
M: I was worried … for 4-5 days. I was concerned. Not that I had broken the law. I was behind on my truck payment, on my mortgage; I had banked on being a mortgage broker, and had gone deep, deep behind on all my bills. If this isn’t gonna close, and I have to commit fraud to make it happen … my fear was maybe I’d get fired. My manager assured me I wasn’t going to jail. My concern was getting fired, and I wouldn’t get paid! I needed that money so bad.
L: Where were you working? Who was the manager?
M: Her name was Gretchen Zayes. She eventually ended up going to jail for fraud. A company called Eagle Lending, in Tampa. This was like, my first month. Three-4 weeks into that first month … I put the file in front of my manager; she looks through everything … she put this one piece of paper … sat there … When she was done … She said “Perfect, files perfect. Except your borrower’s 30 days late on her rent.” She pulled out a thing of white-out. She goes, ‘If I was you; I’d white it out, stick it back in the file.’ I was like, ‘That’s fraud! I could go to jail!’ She said, they’re never gonna catch it. Nobody’s calling the FBI.
Creating fake people
Arrested by FBI
Omerta: Code of silence
Fake ID's
Getting caught
Going on the run from FBI
Identity theft
More scams
FBI Most Wanted
Close calls
Break up with Becky
Calling parents
Calling FBI
Running from cops
Getting arrested
Snitching
Prison
War dogs
Frank Amodeo
Freedom
Family
Regret