#120: Francois Chollet, 2nd visit
His second time on the podcast. He’s both a world-class engineer, and a philosopher in the realm of Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence. … This time we talk a lot about his paper titled, On The Measure of Intelligence, that discusses how we might define and measure general intelligence in our computing machinery.
As a side note, let me say that rigorous scientific study of AGI is a rare thing. The mainstream ML community works on very narrow AI, with very narrow benchmarks. .. OTOH, outside the mainstream, renegade AGI community works on approaches that verge on the philosophical, even the literary—big, public benchmarks. Walking the line between the two worlds … is a rare breed. I ran the AGI series at MIT as an attempt to inspire more people to walk this line. Deep Mind and Open AI … on occasion, walk this line. Francois Chollet does as well. It’s a beautiful dream … to make real.
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L: What philosophers, thinkers, or ideas had a big impact on you …
F: One author that had a big impact on me when I read his books as a teenager … Jean Piaget .. A Swiss psychologist considered to be the father of developmental psychology … He has a large body of work about how intelligence develops in children … and so, it’s sort of old work, most of it from the 1930s, 1940s; it’s actually superseded by many new developments. But to me it was very interesting, very striking; it really shaped … the ways I started to think about the mind
L: His ideas?
F: He is the author that introduced me to the notion that intelligence and the mind is something that you construct throughout your life; htat children construct it in stages. It was a very inteersting idea, relevant to AI; to building artificial minds. Another book that arrived at about the same itme, that had a big impact on me, is Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence, which is a classic. He has this vision of the mind as a multi-scale hierarchy of temporal prediction modules. This resonated with me; the notion of … hierarchy of potentially … compression functions or prediction functions; I thought was really interesting. It really shaped the way I started thinking about how to build minds.
L: The hierarchical nature? Which aspect. Also, he’s a neuroscientist; so he was talking about how our mind works
F: The notion that cognition was prediction was an idea that… was new to me at the time. … And yeah, the notion that … multiple scales of processing, in the brain.
L: The hierarchy …This was before Deep Learning ..
F: These ideas of hierarchies, In AI .. .had been around for a long time. Since the 1980s. And yeah, that was before DL … I think these ideas really found their practical implementation in DL.
L: What about the memory side of things? Do you think of memory a lot; you can think of NNs as a kind of memory; you’re memorizing things. But it doesn’t seem to be the kind of memory that’s in our brains. It doesn’t have the rich. complexity …
F: The brain is more for sparse access memory … so you can retrieve.
L: can ask your self questions
F: You can program your own memory; language is the tool you use to do that; it’s the OS of the mind … one use of it, you can use words as a query over your own memory. Language is a way you store thoughts; not only in the physical world but also in your mind. Imagine if you didn’t have language. Then you would have to, you wouldn’t really have a self-internally triggered way of retrieving past thoughts. You’d have to rely on … experiences. You see a specific site, smell a specific smell, and it brings up memories. You wouldn’t be able to deliberately access them without memories …
L: A Chomsky question: Do you think language is fundamental? There’s turtles; what’s at the bottom of the turtles … Is langaugae at the bottom of cognition of everything? Is language the fundamental aspect of what it maeans to be a thinking thing?
F: No, I don’t think so.
L: You disagree with Noaam Chomsky
F: Yes. Language is a layer on top of cognition. IT is fundamental to cognition … to use a computing metahpor; I see language as the OS of the brain, of the human mind. You’re creating a system is layered on top of the ocmputer. The computer exists befoer the OS, but the OS is how you make it truly useful
L: And that’s most likely Windows, not Linux. Because language is messy.
F: Yes … and i’ts dificult to inspect
L: Thinking about language. We use human-interpretable language. Is there antying ddeper; … logical type of statemetns .. What is the nature of language, do you think? Is there something that doesn’t require utterances, or writing, or so on …
F: Are you asking the possibility there coudl exist languages for thinking that are not made of words. (“Yeah …” —Lex), Yeah, I think so. Language is the outermost layer. But before we think in terms of words, we think in terms of emotion in space; we think in terms of physical actions. I think babies … probably express its thoughts in terms of the actions that they’ve seen, or that they can perform. In terms of motions of objects in theri environment. …
L: It’s amazing to think about that as the building blocks of language … The kind of actions; the way babies see the world; as more fundamental than the beautiful Shakesperean language we construct on top of it … We probably don’t have any idea what that looks like. Cause it’s important … trying to engineer it into AI systems.
D: I think visual analogies, and motions is a fundamental building lock … of the mind. You actually see it reflected in language; language is filled with spatial metaphors. When you think about things; I consider myself as a visual thinker. … I often express thoughts by using things like, visualizing concepts in 2D space; or like you search problems by imagining yourself and navigating a concept space.
L: You said visualizing concept space; I certainly think about … I certainly visualize mathematical concepts. … But … in concept space? Visually you’re embedding ideas into 3D space you can explore with your mind?
D: More like 2D, actually.
L: (laughs) You’re a flat-lander. No. Before I jump from concept-to-concept; I have to put it back down … it has to be on paper. I can only travel on 2D paper; not inside my mind. You’re able to move inside your mind.
D: If you’re writing a paper, for instance, don’t you have a spatial representation of your paper? … You realize where ideas lie topologically related to other ideas …
L: Yeah, that’s true. Paper is; idk about you, but it feels like there’s a destination. There’s a key idea you want to arrive it, and a lot of it is in the fog. It’s almost like, what’s that called when you do a path-planning serve from both directions, from the start and the end. You do Shortest Path, but like, in game-playing, you do this, for like A=star from both sides. First of all, just exploring from the start. First princples, what do I do knwl If I want to show certain sets of ideas, what would I do to show them?
D: Do you use mind maps to organize your ideas? I like mind maps.
L: Let’s get into this; I’ve been jealous of people who seem to … they get like this fire of passion in their eyes, cause everything starts making sense. Tom Cruise in the movie, when he’s moving stuff around. Brilliant people I know use mind maps. WTH are they?
D: Kind of a way to make the mess inside your mind—put it on paper, to get more control over it. A way to organize things on paper. As a consequence of organizing things on paper, yo ustart being more organized
L: Can you give an example?
D: Typically, you draw one to organize the way you think about topics. You would start by writing the key concept about a topic; then you would start adding associative connections. So if the topic is intelligence. Then key elements might be language, and then emotion. Then thoughts related to each subtopic. So like a tree. … It’s more of a graph than a tree. It’s not limited to writing down words. You could also draw things. and it’s not supposed to be purely hierarchical. And as you go, you can start reorganizing it so that it makes more sense.
L: I’m so OCD … you just mentioned intelligence, language, and motion; I’d become paranoid that the categorization isn’t perfect; …. Even though you’re just doing associative connections, there’s an implied hierarchy that’s emerging. I’d become paranoid I hadn’t “done it right.” Is this the right hierarchy?
D: Sure, but it’s your mind map; you can write it any way you want.
L: I suppose there’s a fear of being wrong
D: If you want to organize your ideas, by writing down what you think … I think it’s very effective; how do you know what you think about something if you don’t write it down. … It does not impose syntactic structure. … Once you’ve drawn it, then you can start voicing your thoughts in terms of paragraphs.
L: 2-D aspect of layout, too, right? It kind of flowers …
D: Typically, it ends up more like a subway map; a topological graph.
L: Without a root node
D: Yeah, there are some nodes that ar enot connected with others; and some are more important than others …
L: … BTW, I just kind of remembered, obvious thing, that I probably have thousands of documents in Google Doc that are bullet-point lists. You can probably map a mind to a bullet-point list. It’s the same … no it’s not, it’s a tree. But also, they don’t have the visual element. I guess I’m comfortable with the structure. …
D: If you have thousands of documents … why don’t you write, some kind of search engine? Maybe a piece of mind-mapping software. You write doewn a concept, and it gives you sentences that match this concept.
L: PRoblem is, unlike mind mpas, it’s so deeply rooted in natural language. It’s not semantically searchable, I would say. The cateogry’s are very … It feeels like the mind mpa forces you to be semantically clear and speicfic. The lists I have are sparse, disparate, thoughts, that poetically represent a category, like moiton—as opposed to saying, “motin.’ That’s the same problem with the Internet. That’s why the idea of semantic web … Most language on the Internet is a giant mess that’s hard to interpret. Do you think there’s something to mind maps that … You brought it up as we talked about cognition and language. Do you think there’s something to them pointing to how our brain reasons with things.
D: It’s possible … There is some level of topology called processing in the brain. … I also believe that a topology called space is a better medium, to encode thoughts, than a geometric space.
L: Explain that
D: If you’re talking about topologies, points are either connected or not. Geometry is when you’re interested in the distance between things. In the subway map, you don’t really have the concept of distance. What we do in DL, we’re dealing with concept vectors, word vectors, that have a distance between them. Wer’e not really building topological models
L: You’re right. Distance is of fundamental importance in DL; it’s the continuous aspect of it.
D: Because of everything is a vector; has to be a vector, because it has to be differentiable. … You couldn’t do DL in it if it were discrete. So if you do topology in the context of DL … you have to do it, you have to build topology in your geometry.
Definition of Intelligence
L: Let’s talk about your concept of intelligence. You put it out in 2019. Remember 2019? It was a different time; it was a different world.
D: You could travel; go outside, see frineds.
L: Let me ask the most absurd question. Non-zero possibility there will be a textbook 20 years from now about AI. It’ll be your picture with a quote: “One of the early biological systems considered the nature of intelligence; there’ll be a defitinion of how they thought about intelligence.” That’s something you cofer in your paper. Is there a spiffy quote about what is tyour definition of intelligence?
D: You htink superintelligent AIs of the future will want to remember us? The way we remember humans from the past. You don’t think they’ll be ashamed of having a biological origin?
L: … … … context on social media; there’ll be hashtags about the atrocity committed to human beings when the robots finally got rid of them. It’ll be seen as a giant mistake, but ultimately in the name of progress, because humans were overconsuming the resources, weren’t very rational, and were destructive in the end. … Within that context, there’ll be a passion about these biological …
D: You should write a sci-fi novel
L: I’m working on it.
D: Definition of intelligence—the efficiency with which you acquire new skills or tasks you did not previously know about or prepare for. It’s not skill itself, what you know or what you can do. It’s how well or efficiently you can learn new things.
L: The idea of newness is important
D: You would see intelligence on display, whenever you see a human being or an AI creature … adapt to a new environment, that it hasn’t seen before, that its creators did not anticipate .. when you see adaptaiton, that’s intelligence. In reverse, when you have a system, and you put it in a new environment, and it cannot improvise, or deviate from what it’s been hard-coded to do, then that is a system that’s not intelligence. Einstein: “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
L: Might be interesting difference between your definition and Einstein’s. I mean, he’s just being Einstein, and clever. But, acquisition of new ability to deal with new things, versus the ability to just change … What’s the difference between those two things? Change in itself; you think there’s something to that.
D: Yes … Not change, but certainly change of direction. Being able to adapt yourself to your environment. That’s a ___ of intelligence. Intelligence is more precisely how efficiently you’re able to adapt. … You can acquire new skills. There’s a big distinction to be drawn between the process of intelligence, and the output of that process, which is skill. If you have a very smart human programmer considering the game of chess, and writes down a steady program that can play chess, then the intelligence is the process of developing that program. The program itself is just outputting the output artifact of that process. The program itself is not intellgient; if you ask it to play a different game, it won’t perform well. The source of the intelligence is the human programmer. We should be able to tell the difference between the process and its output. The same as, do not confuse a road-building company adn one specific rfoad. The latter takes you from A to B.
L: To play devil’s advcoate; It’s possible there’s something more fundamental than us humans. You said the programmer creates the difference between the choir, the skill, and the “You itself.” That could be something; you could argue the universe is more intelligent. The base intelligence that we should be trying to measure is something that created humans. We should be measuring God, or the source, as opposed to …
D: You can say that, but that doesn’t take away from the truth that humans are intelligent. … Humans are capable of handling situations and tasks that are quite different from anything that any of our evolutionary ancestors has encountered. Generalizing very much out of distribution …
L: Evolutionary biologists would argue, we’re not going too far out of the distribution. We’re like, mapping the skills we learned previously. Trying to jam them into these new situations.
D: There’s a little bit of that. Pretty clear to me … most of the things we do any given day in our modern civilization.. .are things that are very different … from what ancestors a million years ago would have been doing in a given day. I agree that everything we do we do with cognitive building blocks we acquired … And that anchors, the cognition to certain context, which is the human condition. But still, our mind is capable of … a remarkable degree of generality … Far beyond anything we can create in AI systems today. Degree in which the mind can generalize away from its evolutionary history, is greater than the degree to which a DL system can generalize away from its training data.
L: Key point you’re making, quite beautiful: we shouldn’t measure the skill, we should measure the ability to create that new skill. It’s weird because the skill is a little bit of a small window into the system. Whenever you have a lot of skills, kit’s tempting to measure them. …
D: The skill is the only thing you can objecively measure … You have a strong signal that human is intelligent. You see a very strong chess player; you’re a very strong player youreslf.
L: You’re saying that because I’m Russian, and you’re prejudcied. You assume all Russians are great at chess.
D: I’m baised. So if you see a very strong chess player …you know they weren’t born knowing how to play chess; they had to acquire that skill, with their limited resources, with their limited lifetime. You know they did that because they are generally intelligent; they may as well have acquired any other sklil; you know they have this potential. OTOH, if you see a computer playing chess, you cannot make the same assumptions. You cannot assume the computer’s generallyintelligent. .. It may have been programmed by a human
L: What is the goal on the measure-of-intelligence paper?
D: The goal of the paper is to clear up some longstanding, misunderstandings, about how we’ve been conceptualizing intelligence in the AI community. the way we’vebeen avoiding progres in AI. There’s been a lot of progress in ML; people are extrapolating from that progress that we’re about to … general intelligence. If you want to be able to ever ___ this statement, you need to precisely define what you’re talking about … when you’re talking about GI. You need a formal way, a reliable way, to measure how much general intelligenc a system possesses … … … Ideally this measure of intelligence should be actual. Not just a yes or no as shown by a robot. It should be actionable; it should have explanatory power, so you could use the game as a feedback signal; it would show you the way
L: At the first level, you draw a distinction between two divergent views of intelligence, as we just talked about ,it’s a collection of task-speicfic skills, nand a general learning ability. .. We’ve talked about this a little bit; the first part of the paper is … ___ the different ways we’ve bene
GPT-3
F: I believe GPT-N is going to improve on the strength of GPT-2 and 3 … ever more plausible text. If you train a bigger model on more data; your text will be increasingly more context-aware, and more plausible; in the same way GPT-3 … compares to GPT-2. But I don’t think just (making it bigger) is going to address the flaws. The text is more plausible, but the text is not constrained by anything else other than plausibility. That’s why it’s very easy to get GPT-3 to generate text that is factually untrue. … It’s only (function) is plausibility. Interesting with GPT-3; you can improve on answer it will give you by asking the question in a specific way. … No understanding of the content of the question. … If you have the same question in two different ways that are adversarily … You will get two different answers.
L: It’s susceptible to …
F: They’re very good at generating plausible text. That’s just not enough. I think one avenue that would be interesting … is to make it possible to write programs over the latent space. … That you would rely on these unsupervised models to generate … pool of knowledge and contexts and common sense. Then you’d be able to write explicit reasoning programs over it. … It can be quite difficult to get it to do what you want to do. If you want to turn it into products, you need to put constraints on it. … You need to foce it
L: If you look at its ability to do program synthesis; it generates something plausible
F: It will perform well for any program that needs training data. But because program space is not interpretive, it won’t be able to generalie to problems it hasn’t seen before. ..
L: An absurd, but I think useful, intuition-builder is … GPt-3 has 175 billion parameters. “The human brain has about a thousand times that, or more, in terms of number of synapses. … Obviously, very different kinds of things. But there is some degree of similarity. What do you think GPT will look like when it has 100 trillion parameters? Do you think … our conversation might be in nature different. You’ve criticized it very effectively now …
F: No, I don’t think so. .. To begin with .. bottleneck, is not going to be the size of the model, or how long it takes to train it. The bottleneck is going to be the trained data. … It’s already being trained on … the entire web; … you can imagine more data, but only incrementally more … I don’t remember how much more data was in 3 than 2, but it was 100x or even 1000x. You won’t be able to do that again.
L: Brilliant. It’s easy to think of Compute as a bottleneck
F: We can remove the Compute bottleneck. IF you look at the pace at which we’ve improved efficiencies of DL models …. The bottleneck in generative transformer models is absolutely the trained data
L: What about data quality?
F: If you’re going to want to use these models … you’ll want data to be as high-quality, as factual, as unbiased as possible. There’s actually no such thing as unbiased data. … But you probably don’t want to train it on REedit, for instance. … From my experience working with DL models; I was working with a model at Google that trained on 50 million labeled images. That’s a lot of images; that’s probably most of available images on the web at the time. It was a noisy data set, because the images weren’t originally labeled by hand, by humans. It was picked up using tags, etc. It turned out you could easily get a better model … if you trained on more of the noisy data; it was incrementally better, but you very quickly get diminishing returns. OTOH, on smaller data set, with higher-quality data, you get better model. And it takes less time to train.
L: Fascinating. Self-supervised learning … the automated labeling.
Semantic web
L: the idea of the semantic web. … converting the INternet into something that’s interpretable by machines. .. Kind of a dream; the semantic web papers in the 90s; the Internet is full of rich, exciting information. Wikipedia is filled with information.
F: No, I don’t think it will ever work … it will be enough work to provide that information in structured form; there is not really any incentive for anyone to provide that work. The way forward, to make knowledge on the web available to machines, is something closer to Unsupervised DL. GPT-3 is a bigger step toward making the knowledge available than semantic web waas.
L: It feels like GPT-3 hasn’t learned anything that could be used to reason. But that could be just the early days.
F: Correct. Reasoning … is just patterns … Of course if you train on the entire web, you can produce an illusion of reasoning … but it will break down, if presented with a novel situation. … The power to adapt to something that is genuinely new. Imagine, you could train on every bit of data ever generated … It remains … That model would be capable of anticipating many different possible situations. But the future is going to be something different. … If you train GPT-3 on data from 2002, it will be missing many common-sense facts about the world.
L: Interesting, GPT-3 … doesn’t have any information about the coronavirus.
F: Yes. Which is … You tell when a system is intelligent when it’s able to adapt. Intelligence is going to require continuous learning … and improvisation. It’s not enough to assuem that what you’ll be asked to do is something you’ve seen before, or interpolation of things you’ve seen before. In fact, that model breaks down for even .. takss that look relatively simple from a distance … Like … driving. Google had a paper a couple years back showing that 30 millino different road situations were completely insufficient to train a driving model; it wasn’t even L2 … That’s a lot more data than the 20-30 hours a human needs to learn to drive.
Autonomous driving
L: Elon Musk, Tesla AutoPilot, pushing for a learning based approach. You’re skeptical it can achieve L4?
F: L4 is achievable … L5 is probably not … L5 is basically human-level
L: Let’s be careful saying human-level
F: Yeah, there’s lots of human drivers.
L: Yeah, cars will be safer than humans in many situations where humans fail … it’s the vice versa …
F: I’ll tell you; the amount of training data you would need to anticipate for every possible situation … it’s not entirely unrealistic … that we’ll develop … enough data … We’ll simulate a lot of that data. But it’s a massive effort; and it turns out you can create a system that can geeneralie much better if you just add explicit models of the surroundings of the car. And if you use DL for what it’s good at, which is to provide perceptive information. In general, DL is a way to encode perception and intuition. But not a good medium for any sort of explicit reasoning … In AI systems today, strong generalization .. comes from … abstractions in the human mind encoded in program form by human engineers. …
L: Yeah, and the question is, how much reasoning, how much strong abstractions are required to solve particular tasks like driving. Or human life existence. How much strong abstractions does existence require? More specifricaly on driving …
Tests of intelligence
L: Like, how do you build an intelligent system. The coupled problem: how hard is this problem? We get to cheat, right? We get to look at the rpoblem. IT’s not like we close our eyes, and are compltely new to driving. As human beings, before we learn to drive, we get to watch while other people drive, we get to be in cars, we get to see movies … That’s what NNs are doing; they’re getting a lot of data. The question is, how many leaps of reasoning genius is required to be effectively drive. …
F: sure, you’ve seen a lot of cars in your life before you've learned to drive … Let’s say you go to Tokyo; everyone’s driving on the other side of the road. IT’s a very very different environment … An average human should be able to zero-short it; to be operational in this very-different environment right away. Despite the novel complexity … the novel complexity’s not just interpolation of situations you’ve encountered previously
L: The reason I ask is, one of the most interesting tests of intelligence we have today, which iss driving, in terms of having an impact on the owrld—when do you think we’ll pass that
F: I don’t think it’s much of a test of intelligence … It doesn’t demonstrate intelligence, unless it’s a meta-task, acquiring … knowledge. I think you can actually solve driving without having any real amount of intelligence. If you have infinite trained data … you could literally train … The only problem with the whole idea is … collecting a data set that is sufficiently comprehensive … It’s really just a skinny problme. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this plan, with this idea. It’s just, it strikes me as a fairly inefficient thing to do. You run into this scanning issue with … simulation returns. Instead, if you have a manual engineering approach, with DL modules in combination with engineering an explicit model, and you bridge the two in a clever way, your model will start generalizing … more quickly. Why ont go with that approach? .. I don’t think achieving L5 would demonstrate intelligence. The only possible test of generality in AI would be a test that looks at skill acquisition of unkonwn tasks … If you took a driver, and asked it to learn to fly an airplane, for exmaple … that gives you a mesaure of how intelligent taht system really is.
F: … they stole it from a different set of priors … So I think if you want to compare the intelligence of different systems, the intelligence of an AI, and the intelligence for human. You have to control for priors. You have to start fro mthe same set of knowledgge priors about the task. You have to control for experience; that is to say, for training data.
L: what’s priors?
F: Whatever information you have about a given task, before you start learning this task.
L: How different from experience?
F: Well, experience is acquired … With the game “Go” … all your experience playing it is experience; your priors are … well, Go is a game on a grid.
L: So, rules about the game, the idea of waht winning is …
F: Yes, exactly. Other board games … may be soemthing like Go … related games would be part of your priors
L: Interesting to think about how many priors are brought to the table with the game Go. It seems like the number of priors would be pretty low. But you should be clear on making those priors explicit.
F: If your goal is a huma-level of intelligence, you should make sure the AI you’re testing should start with the same priors as a human.
Tests of human intelligence
L: What do you think is a good test of human intelligence?
F: That’s the question psychometrics is interested in; an entire subfield of psychology; the subfield that tries to measure, quantify, aspects of the human mind … Personality traits s well.
L: What are the first prinicples of psychometrics? What are the priors it brings to the table (laughs)
F: It’s a field with a fairly long history. Psychology sometimes gets bad reputation for not having reproducible results. Psychometry actually has solidly reproducible results. Ideal goals of the field: tests should be reliable … it should be valid, meaning that it should actually measure what you say it measures; for instance … …. It should be standardized … it should be free from bias, meaning that, if your test involves the English language, tehn you have to be awware this creates a bias against people who have English as their second language, or people who can’t speak English. … Very much an ideal; I don’t think every psychometric test is either reliable or free from bias, but at least the field is aware of these weaknesses, and is trying to lose them.
L: Ultimately, you’re only able to measure the skill; but you’re trying to measure skills that correlate with general concept of cognitive ability. So what’s the G-factor?
F: There are many different tests of intelligence; each is interested in different aspects. There’s language, spatial vision, mental rotations, numbers, and so on. When you run these many tests at scales, you start seeing clusters of correlations among test results. If you get homework at school, you’ll see people who do well at math are statistically likely to do well at physics. What’s more, people who do well at math and physics are likely to do well at something unrelated, like correcting an English essay. When you see these correlations; you would explain them with a leading variable … The G-factor is the latent variable that explains … why these tests always end up being correlated. Some single variable. It’s a statistical construct. It’s not something that you can measure in a person.
L: But it’s there!
F: Tahat’s actually something I want to mention about psychometrics. People get a little bit worried about measuring intelligence in humans—it could be discriminatory. I’m not interested in psychometrics as a way to characterize one individual person. .. If I get your psychometry assessment or your IQ … I think psychometrics is most useful as a statistical tool; it’s most useful at scale. When you start getting test results for a large number of people. You start cross-correlating with these test results; you start getting information about the structure of the human mind. At scale, psychometrics paints a certain picture of the human mind …
L: It gives you an insight. When I learned about G-factor, it seemed like it would be impossible for it to be real, even as a statistical variable. It felt like astrololgy, like wishful thinking. I’m not sure waht to make about human beings, the fact that G-factor is a thing. That across human species, there’s a strong correlation between cognitive abilities …
F: The most mainstream theory is called CHG theory: Cattell-Home-Garol … psychiatrist who contributed key pieces about it. He describes them as a hierarchy with three factors. At the top you have G-factor, and then you have broad cognitive abiliteis, for instance, 3-D intelligence … that encompass broad sets of possible kinds of tasks that are all related. Then you have narrow cognitive abilities at the next level, which are closer to … skill. There are different theories about … these things. They all describe a hierarchy with a kind of G-factor at the top. You’re right that the G-factor is not quite real in the sense that it’s something you can observe and measure. It’s real in the sense that you sit with statistical analysis with data … … One popular analogy is the sports analogy. If you consider the concept of physical fitness; it’s similar to intelligence. It’s useful; you can intuitively understand it. Some people are more fit, like you; some are less fit, like me.
L: But none of us can fly.
F: True; being fit doesn’t mean you can do anything at all in any environment. If you were a scientist and you wanted to preicsely measure physical fitness in humans, you’d come up with a battery of tests. Ping pong, track, soccer, etc. If you ran the tests aover many people, you’d start seeing correlations in test results. You’d explain these correlations with physical abilities that are analogous to cognitive abilities; you’d start observing correlations between biology characteristics; maybe lung volume is correlative with being a fast runner. At the top of these correlates would be … physical fitness. This doesn’t mean human .. morphology … is universal. .. We can only do the things we’re evolved to do. You could not exist on Venus or Mars, or on the bottom of the ocean. That said, what’s striking and remarkable is that, our morphology generalizes far beyond the environment that we evolved for. Like, you could say we evolved to run after pray in the savannah; that’s where our morphology comes from. That said, we can do a lot of things that are unrelated to that. We can climb mountains; we can swim across lakes; we can play table tennis. So our morphology … are of the degree … that is remarkable. I think cognition is very similar to that. Our cognitive abilities have a degree of generality which is far beyond what the mind was originally supposed to do. But it’s not universal … The human mind is not appropriate for most problem space. We have very strong cognitive biases, actually; there are certain types of problems we handle very well … Others not … That’s how I would interpret the G-factor. Not as a sign of strong generality. It’s really just the broadest cognitive ability …. They distill, they remain specialized in the human condition.
L: Within the constraints of human cognition, they’re general. But the constraints, as you say, are very limiting …
It’s fun listening to this guy; sorry to stop halfway through …
IQ tests
ARC challenge
Generalization
Turing test
Hutter prize
Meaning of life
#121: Eugenia Kuyda, robotics startup
Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of Replika, which is an app that allows you to make friends with an AI system, a chat-bot, which learns to connect with you on an emotional level … by being a friend. … Replika, and her line of work, is near and dear to my heart. The origin story of Replika is grounded in a personal tragedy, of Eugenia losing her close friend. He was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver, in 2015. He was 34. The app started as the way to grieve the loss of a friend, by training a ChatBot neural net on text messages between Eugenia and Roman. The rest is a beautiful human story.
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Loneliness
Can AI alleviate loneliness?
Love
Russia in the 1990s
L: Was it love poems?
E: What other poems could you write when you’re 17. Influenced by all sorts of poets that every 17-year-old is looking at and reading. These were my teenage years; I never had a person that I thought would accept me the way I am. I thought working, doing my things, being angry at the world, being an investigative reporter working undercover—was my way to connect with others. I was deeply curious with everyone else. If I go out there and write these stories …
L: this is what my podcast is about, by the way. I’m desperately seeking connection. Just kidding. Maybe not. A reporter? How did that make you feel more connected.
E: You’re always with other people. Thinking about … what other .. phenomenon can I explore. You’re sort of like a trickster; a mythological creature jumping from all sorts of different worlds. That was my dream job … I would have been doing that if Russia was a different place.
L: You said … What kind of things did you enjoy writing about?
E: I’d go work at a strip club or … (laughs) work at a restaurant, or go write about phenomenas with people and the city.
L: Sorry to keep interrupting; I’m the worst conversationalist. What stage of Russia is this? Is this pre-Putin? What was Russia like?
E: This is Putin Era, beginning of 2000s, 2010.
L: What were strip clubs,, and restaurants like in Russia in that time?
E: There was still a lot of hope; tons of hope that, you know, we’re becoming this Westernized society, the restaurants opening were looking, trying to copy a lot of things from the U.S., from Europe, bringing all these things in. There was a lot of stuff going on; a lot of hope and dream for this new Moscow, that would be like, I guess, New York. The year 2000 was hwen we had two movie theaters in Moscow. By 2010 there were all sorts of things everywhere … . … I remember we were writing about the opening of Starbucks in I think 2007; that was one of the biggest things that happened; that was worthy of the magazine cover; the biggest talk of the town.
L: Yeah. I was still in Russia when McDonalds opened; that was in the 1990s.
E; Those were long lines. I think 1993 or ‘94. … That was a luxurious outing … The line was at least 3 hours. IT is not fast food. And then no one is trying to eat fast after that. … it was insane. Extremely positive. Small strawberry milkshake, hamburger, small fries. My mom’s there …
L: For a lot of people, a lot of those experiences might seem not very fulfilling; it’s on the verge of poverty, I suppose. Do you remember all that time fondly? ‘Cause I do; the first time I drank Coke, all that stuff, right? And just, the connection with other human beings in Russia. I reember really positively. How do you remember the 90s and the Russia you were covering? Teh human connections you had with people.
E: My parents were both physicits. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, and profesor at the university. My dad worked at Chernobyl when I was born, analyzing … everything after the explosion. … They were making sort of enough money in the USSR; they weren’t too poor. IT was sort of prestigious to be a professor. I remember my grandfather started making $100 a month. And then so our main thing would be to go to our country house, get a lot of apples from apple trees; and bring them back to the city and sell them on the street. Granddad did it with me, because that would make him more money than teaching at the university. He would try to teach me; I’m not smart at all so I couldn’t understand anything. .. I’m happy .. that I was somewhat spared; too young to remember the traumatic stuff. One traumatic thing: In 1993, there was nothing to eat, even if you had money, I don’t know if you remember that. Our friend had a restaurant, a government-owned thing. They always had supplies. He exchanged a big bag of weed for this Nintendo (laughs). That I remember very fondly because I was 9. We got it, I was playing it; there was this Dandy TV show … Then they took it away and gave me a bag of weed instead; I cried for days and days … My ddad said we were going to get it back … told me, you keep the little gun. But then they traded away the gun as well for some sugar or something … So that was extremely traumatic. But I was happy that was my only traumatic experience. my dad actually had to go to Chernobyl with a bunch of 20-year-olds; they were all 20, he was as well; in the aftermath of the explosion. The rest of those he worked with are dead now. He somehow also got back earlier than everyone else. How did they send you? You were just born. That’s who they took; because they didn’t know if you’d be able to have kids when you got back. … He already had kids. … When I was 20 … And my dad; he’d work at the reactor; sleep three hours a day and work the rest.
Chernobyl
L: Chernobyl, because of that HBO show, the world’s attention turned to it once again. What are your thoughts about it—did Russia screw that one up? These days there’s a lot of misinformation; a lot of people trying to hide whether they screwed something up or not. Obviously Russia would try to hide … that.
E: I was born when the explosion happened; actually a few months after; of course I don’t remember anything. Except my dad would bring tiny plastic things that would go haywire when you put the … thing to it. (Radioactive wave sensor?)
L: She was nuclear (laughs)
E: But the TV show was just phenomenal. Incredible that was made not by the Russians, but it’s capturing so well, everything about our country. It felt a lot more genuine than most film and TV made in Russia. We were in awe, most of my friends. The set design; Russians can’t do that. You see everything, and it’s, “Wow, that’s exactly how it was.”
L: I don’t know what to think about … British accents, British actors. I remember reading about the creator; there’s no Russia in his history.
E: He did like Superbad …
L: But … it made me feel really sad, for some reason. If a person, obviously a genius, could go in and just study, have extreme attention to detail, and do a good job—it made me feel, why don’t other people do a good job. There’s so few good films about Russia. About the Russian side of World War II. There’s so much evil and beautiful moments in the history of the 20th century of Russia. You would expect (some good films) from the Russsians.
E: Well they keep making all this propaganda …
Communism
Losing a friend
E: We went back for our Visas. …
L: What happened? How did he die?
E: He was crossing the street, and the car was going really fast, way over the speed limit, and didn’t stop on the pedestrian cross. Just ran over him. It was in 2015, on the 28th of November. Long ago now. At the time, I was 29. It was the first kind of meaningful death in my life. I had both sets of grandparents at the time; I didn’t see anyone so close die. Death sort of existed as a concept. … It wasn’t going to happen to us any time soon. It still felt like all of life … you could still dream about ridiculous things. So that was just really abrupt, I’d say.
L: What did it feel like to lose him? That feeling of loss.
E: In Buddhism, there’s this concept of samaya; where something huge happens and then you can see really clearly. Something changed me so much in such a short period of tim;e I just could see really clearly what mattered and what not. I could see that what I was doing at work didn’t matter at all. It was this big realization, this very clear vision of what life’s about.
L: You still miss him today?
E: yeah, for sure. For sure. He was just this constant—he was really important for me and our friends for many different reasons. We didn’t just say goodbye to him; we said goodbye to our youth, in a way. It was the end of Moscow as we knew it, the end of us living through our twenties, and kind of dreaming about the future.
L: Do you remember the last several conversations? When you think about him? Moments that stick out?
E: His last year here in San Francisco, he was pretty depressed; his startup wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted to do something else. He played with a bunch of ideas. His last one had to do with building a startup around death. It was about disrupting death; things that could be better biologically for humans. At the same time having, they’re still avatars, that would store all the memory about a person. A couple months before he died, he recorded that video. …
L: Does it have the digital avatar idea?
E: Yeah. It’s in his head. He said he wanted to help people grieve, how they talk about death. Maybe someone who’s depressed is naturally inclined to thinking about death. I was going through a hard time; he was going through a hard time. I was trying to make him happy somehow. I felt like I was taking care of him a lot. He almost started to feel better; and then that happened. I just felt lonely again, I guess. Coming back to San Francisco in December, trying to help organize the funeral; help his parents. Christmas time; I remember I had a board meeting with my investors; had to pretend everything’s okay, working on this company. Definitely a very tough time.
Mortality
Replika origin story
Bringing people back to life with AI
Relationship with Replika
Can you form a connection with text alone?
Does an AI companion need a body?
Her
GPT-3 for Conversation
We should be nice to AI
Book recommendations
Russian language
Meaning of life
#122: David Fravor, UFO witness
Commander David Fravor, who was a Navy pilot for 18 years, and commander of the strike hter Squadron 41, also known as the Black Aces, a squadron of 12 airplanes consisting of several hundred people.. He’s also, famously, one of the people who with his own eyes saw and chased a UFO, an unidentified flying object in 2004, that is referred to as the Tic-tac, and the incident more-formally referred to as the U.S.S. Nimitz UFO incident. His story, corroborated by several other pilots, from my perspective, is the most credible siting of a UFO in history … He’s a fun human being to talk to.
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L: I’m often disheartened by the close-mindedness of the scientific community. And, in equal part, by the lack of rigot … by the conspiracy theorists. … I think we humans know very little about our world … The path to understanding can only be walked humbly. The very idea there’s a possibility David witnessed a piece of technology … that moved the way it did, should be inspiring to every scientist and engineer on this earth. … Pardigm shifts in science and leaps in understanding can only happen if we allow ourselves to dream …
L: You’re a graduate of the Navy fighter-weapons school … better known as Top Gun. How realistic is the movie Top Gun?
D: We used to joke; a friend of mine was a TG instructor. There’s two things in the original that are true. One is, there is a place called TG. Two, they do fly airplanes there. Otherwise … I went through in 1997. There’s actually a log of everyone who was there. Just to get a TG patch, you have to have gone there. A lot of the patches you see running around are not real. The real ones are controlled. When you go in, they look up your name, and they’ll sell ‘em to you. …. For me, probably one of the best experiences of flying; because everyone there is extremely competent. IT’s what we all signed up to do. The entire group, when you want to be that level … everyone really cares.
L: Is it competitive … like in the movie?
D: No … There’s the students, and then there’s the instructor side. It’s guys that you know; and it’s extremely difficult job, because they have a very small tolerance for not being good. So they’re briefed, when they give a lecture; let’s say there’s a fighter employment lecture. The guy … goes through multiple, they call them mortar boards. By the time they go in front of a class … they repeat the same thing over. It’s standardized, extremely so. The reason for that: You become an SFTI … your job is to go to one of the weapons schools on the East or West Coast … There’s a reason they’re extremely particular. It’s not a rank-based thing. You can come in as an ‘04 Lt. Comm.. The hierarchy used to be; I imagine it’s now the same, based on the seniority at the school. … The top X number of folks that have been there seniority wise, I mean time-wise. When the door opens and everyone comes out, from the staff, they all speak the same language. It has to be that way, which is why the school has been so effective since it was founded.
L: So there’s a bar of excellence that the instructors demand.
D: Yes, and they’re held to it. Every moment of every day … IF they go from Fallon … and come to Lemoore, CA … and they start flying sorties with the fleet squadrons to pass on some of that knowledge; that same standard … They wear light-blue shirts, so it’s pretty easy to identify them when they’re out there.
Top gun
Navy pilot career
L: So you were a navy pilot for 18 years. Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a pilot?
D: I got to go to the Naval academy. I had that dream to fly, so whwen I was selected
L: You always dreamed to fly?
D: Yeah, since I watched the video of Neil Armstrong on the moon in 1969. If you knew me growing up, I was a bit of a delinqent. They thought, not a chance. I was at my cousin’s wedding; we all grew up in the same neighborhood; that Italian side of the family. .. The guy two doors down from my house; I went to my cousin’s wedding, Mr. Ace looks at me and says, “David Fravor. You fly jets; top gun and all that. Man, I figured you’d be in jail by now.” (Lex laughs) To me, it was a badge of honor; I overcame that.
L: What do you attribute that to? You talk modestly about just being lucky, but if you were to describe your trajectory, maybe in a way of advice—how did you pull it off?
D: Never take no. Don’t let anyone put you down and say you can’t do it. I knew what I was capable of, inside. If you want something, you can achieve it. If I love basketball, and I really want to be in the NBA … If I’m really good at basketball, it’s probably not going to happen. I’m not fast; I’m not that big. Physically, I’m not capable of doing that. But there’s things not tied to a true physical ability in terms of size and strength. You don’t need to be …
AI is the third brain of a jetfighter
Sully
D: … you gotta remember, when Sully flew; that co-pilot, it was the first time they’d met. This happens all the time in the commercial world. … whereas in the Navy, we were crewed.
L: Like, for months? That builds trust and all of those things.
d: It increases the capaability of the airplane … We’re in the air actually supporting ground assets. If you’re in a high-threat area, you have to be ___ in when you do that. You have to train to do that job, or else you’ll be ineffective. When you get to the commercial world, there’s a standardization. Everyone, they know their roles. Captain’s gonna do this, first officer’s gonna do this. .. If you listen to the cockpit recordings of the two fo them talking. They’re taling to each other, but also to the traffic controllers in the New York area … We’ve got a bird strike … his decision-making process; they’re trying to get to New Jersey; he realized it wasn’t going to happen. He decided soon enough to tell everyone on the airplane that he was going to have to land in the Hudson River.
D: What is it about those decisions? …. We have emergency procedures that we have to know. The airline, same type; they pull the book out, the airplanes are built to have some time. But there’s a point where you have to make a decision, and you can’t second-guess it. When he decided, I’m putting this in the Hudson River; he can’t decide halfway through that, “Maybe I can make that airport.” … He had to make really fast decisions; and then once they go, that 80% solution … The closer he gets to the water, the more he’s going, “I am ditching the airplane.” The original decision to, this is my best option right now;; and you start eliminating anything that could possibly change the events. They change the plan … he does that basically flawless landing on the Hudson. You’ve got to remember, every six months for commercial, they go back and do research in the simulator. They go through this extensive training. We used ot refer to it as the Pain Cave. You know, in your check ride, the airplane is going to break. … Well if I’ve got an issue with the left motor hydraulic system … do I want to shut the right motor down? They’re challenging problems you have to think through, in real time. The weather’s always bad, it’s always dark. It’s intended to increase the level of stress, because when things happen, we like to joke, it’s going to stem power. The brain shuts down; you’re going on instinct, like an animal. Well if you’ve trained enough, that instinct is ingrained in you that you kow exactly what to do.
L: So there’s no fear of death? Was he at all thinking about the fact that a lot of people were going to die if his decision was wrong?
D: I can’t speak for him. But his mindset was probably, I can do this, I’m trained. I’m gonna do the procedures. … I never thought about, if things were really bad, I’m goign to abort and fly it into the ground. Maybe it’s an ego thing …
Landing a jet fighter on a carrier
L: do you ever experience fear? Mike Tyson, when he’s approaching hte ring, he starts out basically in fear. But as he gets closer and clsoer to the ring, the confidence grows and grows until the ego basically takes over, so it’s like, there’s no way anyone could defeat me. That’s his way of overcoming fear. Anything like that?
D: I wouldn’t say I was never afraid … for most of us, especially Navy Carrier Pilots … the decks moving, it … the highest heart rates is coming back to land on an aircraft carrier
L: How do you do that?
D: The problem with night is; especially with a new moon. Everyone can associate with, you’re driving in your car, on a country road with no sidelights. Most have a tendency to slow down, because it is so dark. You get outsisde the city up into New Hampshire, where the roads are curving and the lines aren’t that good. Now take that and multiply it by a million. You have no depth perception. What you think is fixed, the runway, is actually moving. When it’s really bad, you can actually see it move. We have two systems …
What’s it like to fly a jet fighter?
They’re discussing female fighter-pilots …
D: The other one teaches leadership. All four of the women that were direct … I don’t think I’m forgetting someone. Incredibly talented. Anyone who says, “women can’t do it,” that’s all total horsecrap.
L: so women can fly as good as the guys?
D: Yeah! IF you pass another airplane; you can’t tell if there’s a man or a woman in it. It comes down to stick and throttle … You have to be able to think fast. Anyone who has those characteristics can do that. … There ahs to be a desire. We used to track …
Greatest plane ever made
L: The SR-71 still holds the speed record of any plane, as far as I can understand.
D: Remember fast is relative. If you’re going 3K miles an hour, 100 feet above the ground; that’s how fast you’re going. When you get up to altitude, there’s an indicator speed and your ground speed. The air is so thin up there; you may be showing 300 knots, but at 300 knots, you’re really doing 2500 miles an hour over the ground. When you’re doing 300 knots, that’s actually slow for the airplane …
The Tic Tac UFO story
L: One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you … one of the most incredible witnesses in history … you not only saw it, but chased it. … Maybe I’ll try to tell the story as I understand it, and you can correct me. So on November 10, 2004, the USS Princeton, one of the carriers
D: No, it was a cruiser
L: Okay, so you can’t land a plane on it, only a helicopter. So they started noticing on November 10 that there’s a few objects flying around on the coast of California, at 28,000 feet, at 120 mph. They’re noticing this for about a week. Then, your part of the story: on November 14, I guess from the USS Nimitz, you flew and witnessed a 40-foot-long white tic-tac shaped object, with no wings, flyingg in ways you never thought possible. In interviews, you said, “I think it was not from this world.” So mysterious … There’s videos involved; videos of a flare-forward infrared receiver … There’s a TV mode and an IR mode. Chad Underwood recorded that video; it was released by the Pentagon later. The two other videos were recorded in 2014 and 2015, on the East Coast of the United States; they had different kinds of objects but were … similar in the degree of weirdness. The differences is actually, on the East Coast, the 2014 case, very few people have spoken about it. Even in your situation, very few people have spoken about it. So there’s a mystery to it. … In some ways it’s quite simple, with very little resolution to the mystery. It’s fascinating. There’s a lot of opinions, division of opinoins. It truly is a UFO. UAP: Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. Can you correct me on anything I’ve gotten wrong; elaborate on some key things …
D: We went out on our mission to go train, and they canceled the mission … There’s all kinds of rumors. Originally it was four of us; two jets, two people in each jet, F-18F. There’s no video from our event. When we came back and told it; when Chad and his pilot took off, that’s when they got the video of it. … So as we’re flying out, we get vectored; they tell us they’re going to cancel training. We’re talking to one controller. He’s like, “Hey sir,” he asked what ordinance we have on board … … … They said hey, we have real-world tasking. As we’re going out, my wing man, the other pilot, she maneuvers … to the LHS of me. They’re telling us, it’s at 50 miles, 40 miles, 30 miles. … We had to mechanically scan radar at the time. AP-273.
L: They’re telling you the location of a thing that you should look at?
D: Yep. So we’ve been tracking these things for about two weeks. This is the first time we’ve had planes airborne so, we want you to check it out. As we get down to 20 miles, 15 miles, 10 miles … now we’re inside the resolution ___ of the radar. Think of a little cube. The whole sky is made of these little cubes … if you’re both inside the same little cube, then the radar can only see one hting. They call “merge plot" that means, something’s around you, stop looking at your display, look out the window, try to find it. So we look out. The ship is 60 miles away; it can’t see the surface … So where’s it at. As we’re looking around, it’s a clear day. There’s no clouds, and there’s no white caps. If you owned a sailboat, it was that 5-10 knots of wind; it was the perfect day to own a sailboat.
L:
D: It’s unrestricted visibility. If you look at a map, we’re in between San Diego-Ensenada-Mexico … pretty far off the coast. From 20K feet, you’ll see land 50 miles away. When you’re looking at a continent, it’s easy to see you’re not looking at an island.
L: And you can see whitecaps on the water
D: Oh yeah. … … It’s easier to land actually when there’s a little bit of white caps …. To land on a calm day like this requires something something. There’s no waves, there’s no white caps. We look down and we see white water. If you put a piece of land, a sea mount, below the surface. As the waves come in, that’s what happens on the shore. It hits and it starts to collapse and it pushes the wave height up. So, at sea, when you get a sea mount, the wave crashes, and you get white water.
…
D: I got a letter from the government saying … we’re going to investigate your Tic Tac thing … He does the report, he sent me the report. He told me—please don’t distribute this report. … It’s out now because … Harry Reid got a hold of it. I’m very protective of it … The pilot of his airplane; she has come out … I am very protected of her. I’ve told Jeremy and George; if I ever hear the names came from you, I will never talk to you about this. … The pilot of the ___ who took the video Chad was in; they were just out flying that day and it wasn’t a big deal. I don’t want people knocking on my door: There’s rumors, oh, you’ve talked to everyone. You’re about the 23rd person I’ve talked to about it, total. I turned down Russian TV. She called my wife, my daughter … They’re persistent. I’m very particular. The reason I’m talking to you .. I knew we could go in depth about science …. When you talk to Lou Elizondo … the group at TTSA (To the stars Academy) … I think Tom ahs caught a lot of crap for this. He’s very smart. ‘How’d you get into this?’ ‘You read a lot when you spend a lot of time in a van riding to your next gig.’ If you talk to Chris Melon, from the Melon dynasty—very very smart, he knows how the govenrment works ‘cause he worked there …
Intelligent extraterrestrial life
Why aren’t UFOs investigated more seriously
Tic Tac UFO details
What do you think the Tic Tac was?
SpaceX
Response to Mick West debunking
Was the Tic Tac a secret military test?
Is the government in possession of alien spacecraft?
Interesting UFO sightings in history
Advice for young people
Meaning of life
Manolis Kellis returns, reads poetry
Manolis Kellis. He’s a professor at MIT, and head of the computational biology group. One of the most brilliant, productive and kind people I know. A lot of people wrote to me after our first conversation with some version of, “Manollis is awesome, isn’t he?”
Note: This is the second of what will be four conversations between Lex and Manollis over the next few months. Interesting they’re going to be talking so much! Lex hints here in his intro at his plans to have Manollis come on the show multiple times. He talks about his own fifth visit to the Joe Rogan podcast, and Joe’s enjoyment of certain guests. He notes Joe recently had a five-hour interview with Duncan Trussell. He mentions that Manollis could be his Duncan Trussell—somebody that he really enjoys having on repeatedly. I don’t know, though. He has Manollis basically every ten episosdes so, four times in six-eight months here in late 2020. But did they drop each other after that? I think maybe they did. We’ll see.
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L: What is beautiful about the human epigenome?
M: Don’t get me started. First of all, as an engineering feet; it manages the most compact, incredible compaction. Every single one of yoru cells contains 2 m worth of DNA, compacted in a radius that’s 1/1000th of a millimeter. It’s analagous to a string 1 km tall compacted into a millimeter-sized ball. If you put it all together; if you stretch the 30 trillion cells that we have … all the DNA of those cells could reach all the way to Jupiter 100 times.
L: Yeah, it’s all curled up in there, 30 trillion cells! The human body …
M:
Evolution
Neanderthals
Origin of life on Earth
M: … the code was in fact one thing; it was conflated with the acutators; the actuators were separated from the code only later on. … You kind of have a functionalization … of the proteins, which are now gonna be the workhorse of life, but they’re not self-replicating … The most beautiful self-replicating machine known to man is the ribosome … able to translate RNA into protein. If you want divine intervention, the ribosome is it.
L: A great invention in the history of life.
M: But … they’re the culmination of many software infrastructures for life preservation. When the ribosome was so efficient at making proteins, the other ones basically died out. … Now those proteins are much more versatile. RNA has only four bases. Proteins eventually have 20 amino acids; can form in much more complex shapes; create additional machines. One of which is reverse transcriptors. … RNA preceded DNA, so reverse transcription actually came before transcriptors themselves … RNA and proteins invented DNA … Now you have two helixes sinstead of one. RNA basically says, “I’m tired. I’m gonna delegate all information storage to DNA.” And most actuation is delegated to proteins.
L: But to you that’s just an efficiency thing.
M: Correct …. Any kind of self-preservation … it didn’t need to be RNA-based or self-replicated initially. Just needed enough RNA arising and reinforcing each other, leading to the closing of that loop and the ignition of the evolutionary process.
L: If you were to bet on where exactly life started … How hard is the first step? Or what can you say about that first leap, from not-life, to life.
M: I think it’s inevitable. … If you look at Europa, the moon of Jupiter … has basically all the ingredients. It has the core that can emit energies; it has shieding through the ice sheet … even has a layer of oxygen. My guess is that there’s probably independently, a recent, life form teeming in Europa, today.
L: Is that exciting or terrifying to you?
M: As a scientist, I can’t wait to see non-DNA-based life forms. Because, we are so … narrow-minded in our thinking for what life should look like. …
L: Let me bring you into another sci-fi … If we discover life on Europa, and you were brought in; you seem very excited, but how would you start looking at that life in a way that’s useful to you as a scientist but also is not going to kill all of us (laughs). To me, it’s a little bit scary. Not because it’s malevolent life. But just, the way life is; it seems to be very good at conqureing other life.
M: There’s a lot of sci-fi based on that principle, which causes the public to be so scared. But would Europa life be scared of human life coming over and taking over. Even of earth’s bacteria? … Not necessarily. The levels of acidity may just kill us all off. Basically argues that each side would have an incredible home-court advantage so that the sides wouldn’t really be competitive. … drill through layers of ice to sample and see what life is like there. Detecting it … will basically be trivial. It’ll be some other kind of combination of chemicals that will look nonrandom.
L: If I took some of that life and put it on a sandwich that you’reeating, and then eat that sandwich
M: It’ll taste just fine. The question is, do we have taste receptors for this. We only have receptors for things we’re used to. We won’t be able to know this chemical tastes funny.
L: It’s likely not to be dangerous. Do you think our immune system will even detect something weird …
M: Probably. .. But it won’t be able to sort of attack. The scene from Independence Day … where they hack their way in … network computers have trouble communicating!
Life is a fight against physics
L: What would you look for, in terms of signs of life?
M: Life is unmistakable. The way it transforms a planet surrounding it. Not the sort of thing you’d expect from physical laws alone. As soon as life arises, it creates this compartmentalization, it starts pushing things away … it starts … There’s a whole signature you can see from that. When I was orgaizing my meaning-of-life symposium … discussing themes. Biology, physics. She said, “Come on. Biology’s just a small part of physics.” … my answer was, “Life challenges physics; it supersedes physics, it fights against physics.” That’s what I would look for in Europa …. this fight against physics.
Life as a set of transformations
M: … There’s layers … I sort of … meaning of life. Life can be construed at many levels … when Alexander the Great was asked, to whom do you owe your life? To your teachers or to your parents? He answered, “I owe to my parents the zine, the life itself; and I owed to my teachers the f-zine, the good, human, proper life.” That transformation has taken several additional leaps. Life on Europa has, I’m pretty sure gotten to the stage of A makes B makes C makes A again. … the next level requires cooperation. Altruism. Specialization. Remember we were talking about the RNA … If you look at prokaryotic life, there’s no nucleus; just one soup of things intermingling. If you look at eukaryotic life … a eukaryote has a nucleus; there you compartmentalize further … IF you look at a human body plan or any animal … You have one lienage that will be saved for the future generation. … If you think about it, the rest of your body, all it does is ensure that …. will preserve to the future generation. … Ditero-stome … have evolved a second layer of eating … They have a second mouth. …. .. .that specialization sort of has this massive new innovation above the second mouth, which is this massive brain. This massive brain is something that arises much, much later on. LIke the first spinal cord, it’s a concept that … now you have a coordinating agent that’s starting to make decisions. Remember when we were talking about free will? As a worm looking for food—it has plenty of free will! Maybe that’s free will, becasue it’s unpredictable, beyond a certain level. You basically now have more and more decision-making and coordination of all of these different body parts and organs, which will now control all these other parts of the body. I also love discussing the different time scales at which these things happen. … To be able to transfer all that data through a long string of searching … all of that is happening under a time scale of minutes. Three minutes to a half an hour. Our ordinary life happens on the order of milliseconds. You don’t have time to do that. So you have a layer of control built on hardware that supports it; but that hardware lives in a different time scale than the controlling machine on top of it. …
Time scales
L: Is .. that a feature? The daily life of the organism is on a time scale similar to the way our internals work?
M: You look at trees; they look boring and stupid. But if you speeed up the movie, you think, “Oh my god, it’s intelligent!” It moves to where it will best survive—it’s all a matter of time scale. .. We talked about neotony, the last time around—how our young are pretty useless until a few months of age, and then we basically hold them, enabling their brain to continue being malleable and infusing it with knowledge and thoughts as that period of neotony increases and expands. If you fast forward another million years. Humans have only been around about that long. .. What could happen from an evolutionary time scale? Expansion of human lifespan has been happening already. … Intergenerational distance has grown from 16 years to 40 years.
L: You’re saying that’s in the genetics.
M: No. It’s an environmental tendency that’s happening. …. As we start thinking about intergalactic travel … Continuing along with this topic of transitions, what does the future hold in the next million years. The thought of us going to another planet, and that taking three human lifetimes, that will change if the human lifetime changes to 400 years. … You asked me offline if I would like to live forever, and my answer is, “Absolutely!” One possibility is, would you live today forever. ..
L: So you’re saying, life is more interesting if, of all the life forms on earth, you’re the slowest ones. Like treest have it best …
M: Yes … … …. paper published a couple years ago by one of my friends. … looked at the genetic makeup of the ____ and the ____ in ancient Greek, and how they relate to modern Greeks. Indeed, there was little gene flow from the outside. It’s fantastic to think about these amazing civilizations that transformed the way human thoughts happened; they looked for rules, looked for principles, not human beauty but beauty in the natural world. This whole con ept that the world must be elegant … That’s a massive transformation of our species, simillar to the earlier transformation we were talking about—learning how to communicate, language. Or the evolution of eyesight. We’re talking about worms crawlling around … Eventually, they grow a nose; eventually … they have ways of sensing chemicals. If you look at hearing, that’s a much later sense. Eyesight; that’s an intermediate sense. That’s probably something life didn’t need until it got to the surface. There’s a lot of milestones; the latest milestone … being able to detect gravitational waves; have a sense that people haven’t had before.
Transformations of ideas in human civilization
M: If you go back to this history of ancient Greece; … they had incredible civilziation for thousands of years. They thought, let’s break things down and understand the natural world. … Break down architecture, and statues, and tragedy! Another question you asked me in passing … embraicng the good and the bad, the whole range of human emotions. If you look at Greek tragedy, it’s the definition of that. “Drama” is a Greek word. … Some problems are so vast and large, that dying is the easy way out! (Lex laughs) … I want to touch a little bit on that point. Talk about that concept that life supersedes physics, and that the brain supersedes life. That basically, we have a brain that can decide to not follow evolution’s path. We can decide to not have children. We can decide to suicide. We can decide to abolish communication with the outside world. All the things that make us human; we can decide not to do that. … the brain itself is basically superseding what evolution programmed us for.
L: My mind was already blown at the beautiful formulation … the idea that life is a system that resists physics. And our brain, or perhaps the content of it, however it may be.. .. is a thing that resists life. (Sigh) You’re so brilliant (laughs)
M: I want you to see a ll of that as a continuum. You’re talking about indiivdual transformations, but it’s a path. A path of transformation; I want us to think about what it truly means to become human; the f-zine. You asked about what motivated my “Meaning of Life” Symposium. What motivated in part was actually a mid-life crissi. .. The joke I always like to say … there’ sthis brilliant person … who likes to say when you’re an undergra,d you look like a rat to get into grad school; as a postdoc, you work like a rat to get your assistant professorship … When you’re finally a full professor. By then, you’re basically a rat.
Life is more than a rat race
M: What happened to me is i arrived at the end of the rat race. As I was turnign 42, I looked back and I was like, “Wow that was an awesome rat race.” But, I’m not a rat, it turns out.
L: Is that the first moment you saw you were in a rat race.
M: NO, I’d known it for a long time. We’re all smart people; … everyting (problem sets) was made as a test. You have … that are well-defined. You have an advisor who’s guiding you. Tenure is a well-defined set. of tasks. I had bought a house, three kids, beautiful wife, tenure, awesome students, tons of grants; life was basically laid out for me. That’s when I had my midlife crisis. That’s whne a lot of people by a Harley Davidson. That was my realization that, it’s not a rat race. There’s no race; it’s over. .. How do I fully instantiate myself; complete my transformation into an actual human being. … It’s easy to think of the next task, and the next task, the number of talks, the number of grants—it’s easy to quantify everything. But … This is real life; it’s not a test anymore. Our life is not going to be, we’ll put the kids through college. ….
L: Is there light at the end of the tunnel in a midlife crisis?
M: Watch that symposium; the answers were transformative to me and many others.
Life sucks sometimes and that’s okay
M: Answers so meaningful … You’ve got to constantly maintain unattainable goals. That’s a little bit playing into the rat race thing … that’s one possibility
L: First of all, is it available?
M: It’s on YouTube; just google “Meaning of Life” Sympoisum
L: What?! …. Saying “rat race,” if we look at Ratatouille, that’s a beautiful thing; challeges and overcoming challenges. That could be the meaning of life—to see it as a set of challenges, and fully engage in overcoming them.
M: That’s embracing the rat race view … We (my wife and I) basically imagine we’re at an all-inclusive resort, and we’ve paid all these others to play games with us … and then what are we gonn ado today? “Oh, I’ve signed up for professor activities.” … She signed up for a bunch of consulting activities. In the evening, we’ll get back together … That’s another view of life. If I was a bazillino-aire, what would I choose to do. I’d probably pay an awesome university to give me an office there; and pay other brilliant people to work with me. In fact, I’d have the same life that I have now. .. It’s so freaking fulfilling.
L: It’s almost a videogame view of life. … Do you or do you not like the rat race view of life? Because it is fulfilling in some …
M: That view of life is about the goal; my view of life is about the path. Again, quoting Greece … ____ wrote beautiful poem about going through life saying, “As you go through your journey, impersonating Ulysses,” he says, “Wish that the path is long and arduous. Because when you get to Ithica, you might realize that it was all about the path, not the destination.” The rat race view of life makes it all about the destination—how do I get through the maze to get there. The allin-clusive resort view is about the path. “Today—I couldn’t imagine a better set of activities all programmed for me.” The life that I have …
Getting older
The best of MIT
Poem 1: The Show
L: I convinced you to share, somehow, some of the poetry you’ve written
M: Again, being Greek, a lot of my poems have been pretty miserable. It’s very hard for me ot write a poem when I’m happy; I have to be in a state of deep despair; the first poem I ever wrote was in English class; at a French High School, taking English as a foreign language. This is basically what I’m gonna embarrass myself and read, from my 16-year-old self.
L: More context?
M: In terms of growing up, how do we grow up? It’s difficult to grow up, if you’re in the same school, and all your friends know you inside-out. They have a certain set of expectations for who you are, and how you’re gonna behave. We get set in our ways, and don’t change very much. When I was 11, I was a kid in Greece, in primary school … Same with 12. In 13, I moved to France, moved countries and schools. The next year, I moved schools again. The year after that, my family moved to New York. Between 11 and 19, every single year, I had the opportunity to grow. I was not held by people who knew me; I could reinvent or reshape myself, my personality, my emotions—especially in such a transformative time of a kid’s life
L: It’s powerful that you think of it that way. IT’s kind of suffering—you’re being torn away from the thing you know into a thing you don’t know.
M: When we moved from France to New York … I was pissed! I was taking long bike rides in the country, jmping in friends’ swimming pools. … NYC, a city of cement, ugliness, snow everywhere—I’d never seen snow in my life. I was pissed! Did I see it as an opporutnity for growth, I don’t think so. I wasn’t that self-reflective. … During those transitions I was just a kid, being a kid. The time I started seeing it that way, was the time I started … to see MIT; I saw the struggle of getting professors to not see you as a kid, when they’re your peers. I was very flattered when one of my friends said, … It’s an interesting place; what I like to say about MIT is that people treat you as equal, no matter what stage. They respect you for what you say, not who you are when you’re saying it. If I’m wrong, my students will tell me.
L: The beautiful thing about you, sorry to put it this way; maybe people who weren’t familiar with your work before you might not realize you’re a world-class scientist, because there’s a youthful nature to you, because you talk like an undergrad, with excitement, and fresh eyes. That’s super-contagious, and beautiful; it’s easy to fall into behaving seriously, because people start putting you on a pedestal more. You want to sort of act like you’re in a psoitiong of power. .. The curiosity, childish view of the world …
M: That was hte transition I was describing; I decided to go back to … roller blades. … When I interviewed my first postdoc; my friend Julia introduced me to Alex Stark; who was interviewing at the time with massive names in the field. I was just a first-year faculty person with zero credibility. .. She said, there’s this guy Alex, he’s visiting. I showed up to chat; arrived in my RollerBlades; we’re having this awesome conversation about science, gene regulation, our perspectives, passing ideas for 30 minutes, and I just dash off to my next meeting. He emails me later; saying I would love to become a post-doc in your group!
… we’re asked in class to write an assignment, so pardon me
L: That’s beautiful, that’s beautiful. And the rhyming, the musicality; there’s both a simplicity .. and a musicality to it. I really enjoy Robert Frost poems; I don’t mean simplicity in a bad or negative way at all.
Love
Poem 2: The Tide Waters
L: I’m going to force you to stay two minutes longer; can I force you to read this other poem about good-byes as well
M: Twist my arm! The next poem was written for high school yearbook; another poem written on demand. IT was basically saying goodbye, as is appropriate right now, to my friends. Reflecting on journey and transformation through life. Also showing introspection; we had it easier. in high school, and we are headed into rougher waters.
L: Thank you! You are one of the most special people at MIT; one of the most special people in Boston. Whatever mental forcefield that you’re applying in saying Boston is the best city in the world … you’re actually making it happen.
#124: Stephen Wolfram, 4-hour visit
Stephen Wolfram is a computer scientist, mathematician, theoretical physicist, and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. He’s written several books, including a new book, A Project to Find the Fundamental Theorem of Physics. This second book is what Lex and Stephen are going to talk about this time.
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L: You’ve said there are moment in history of physics where breakthroughs happen, and then a flurry of progress follows. What moments stand out to you as important breakthroughs?
S: Famous one was 1920s, the invention of quantum mechanics. Five or ten years, a bunch of things got figured out. That was Schrodinger, Heisenberg, eventually Plank and Dirac … That was before my time. IN my time, in the 1970s, there was this realization that quantum field theory was actually going to be useful in physics. I happened to be a teenager that time, and really involved in physics.
L: Who were the key fiugres?
S; David Gross, Frank Wilcheck, David Politzer. Dick Fineman, Murray Gelman, Steve Weinberg—the slightly-older generation. … These are all characters who are involved. It’s funny, those are all people who, in my time and I know them, they don’t seem like historical iconic figures; they seem more like everyday characters. When you look at history from long afterwards, it seems like everything happened instantly. Usually some methodological thing happens, and then there’s some low-hanging fruit to be picked. We see it today with Deep Learning. Things actually started working in 2010, 2011, and there’s been this rapid picking of low-hanging fruit.
L: What was the key moment of the DL revolution?
S: Probalby the AlexNet.
L: DL learning networks have been around for a long time. A bunch of pieces came together, and all of a sudden, eyes lit up. Looking at your own work; … the idea that simple rules can create complexity. Was there an instant where your eyes lit up?
Philosophy of science
Science and computational reducibility
S: The heroism of it may not be there. :What’s happened is, for 300 years, people said, if you want to make a model of things in the world, mathematical equations is the way to go. NOt anymore. MOdels are made with programs, not with equations. Was that oging to happen anyway? Was that a consequence of my particular book? It’s hard to know for sure. People tell me, “Oh I started doing this whole line of research because of bla bla bla.”
L: One of the interesting side effects of publishing this tomb in the way you did, is it serves as an educational tool for thousands or millions of people. But because it doesn’t have spiffy titles, it doesn’t createe a ton of citations
S: It’s had plenty of citations … I think the thing which I am disappointed by, which will eventually happen, is this kind of study, of pure computationalism … the abstract behaior of the computational universe … should be a thing lots of people do.
L: It’s a new kind of mathematics.
S: That’s why the book is called that.
L: It’s interesting that I haven’t seen really rigorous investigation. … Rule 30, that’s fascinating. Is there some aspect of this thing that could be predicted? That’s a fundamental question of science.
S: {That’s some people’s view of what science about. As we live through this pandemic ...
Predicting the pandemic
L: You think in science, clean predictio might not even be possible.
S:df
L: Humans might not be smart enough yet.
S: The big discovery of this principle of computational equivalence of mine … Turing’s work on the Holting problem .. there is this fundamental limitation built into science, the idea of computational . Even if you know the rules under which something operates, you can’t be smart enough to broadcast ahead and know how the thing will operate i the future.
… That’s where we live is in pockets of reducibility … It could very well be that everything about the world is computationally reducible … There is some amount of prediction we can make. … We’ve kind of chosen a slice of how to think about the universe … It may not be the whole story of how the universe is, but it’s the part of the universe we care about and sort of operate in. Science has chosen to talk a lot about places where there is this reudcibility that we can find: the otion of the planets can be more or less predicted. Things like the weather are much harder to predict. Science has concentrated itself in places hwere its methods hasve produced successful prediction.
L: Can we talk about this pandemic then? there’s economic pain people are feeling; medical pain. There’s a huge incentive to figure this out; to walk along the trajectory of reducibility. There’s a lot of disparate data. People understand generally how virus is psread, but … a lot of uncertainty. There could be a lot of variability. An infinite number of variables that represent human interaction. From the perspective of that … Why aren’t w—you kind of said that we’re clearly failing
S: When this pandemic started up, I was about to release this whole physics project thing. … I thought, I should do the public service thing of trying to understand what I could about the pandemic; we’d been curating dtaa about it. I decicded, it’s just really hard. You need to know a lot of stuff we don’t know about human interactions … I think what will come out in the end is, there’s a certain amount of . … …. .. As we worked on this project … directly relevant to contact tracing.
L: Feels like we should be able to get some beautiful core insight
S: I tried. I didn’t manage to figure it out … The main model, this SIR model; invented by the grandfather of a good friend of mine from high school. Question is, so you know on this graph of how humans are connected; you know something about if this happens and that happens. This graph is made in complicated ways. We don’t have enough data to make that graph. One of my kids did a study of what happens on different kinds of graphs … There are few kinds of results that you can get that are quite robust. When you ask more detailed questions, it just depends. It depends on details. The irreducibility matters. There’s not one master theorem, saying, and therefore this is how things are gonna work.
L: From a graph perspective, large groups and small groups, I think it matters who the groups are. You can imagine groups of 30 people; as long as they are cliques or whatever, as long as the outgoing degree of that graph is small, you can imagine some beautiful underlying rule of interaction where we can still be happy … not going to a Miley Cyrus concert or something like that …
S: What you’re descibing is … many situations where you’d like to get away from computational irreducibility. The Law of Thermodynamics; things that start orderly tend to get disordered … heat … it’s hard to turn heat into systematic mechanical work. … … … That’s the same problem of, how do you go from computational irreducible mess of things happening, and get something you want out of it. .. Actually, the story of thermodynamics is precisely a story of computational irreducibility. … What you’re asking to do there, is to go from the mess of all these human interactions, adn say, I want to achieve this particular thing out of it; kind of extract this useful piece of mechanical work.
L: Do you have a hope for the pandemic? Can that be extracted/
S: The good news is, for reasons we don’t understand, the curves, clearly measurable, for the Northern Hemisphere, have gone down.
L: But the bad news, is it could be a lot worse for future viruses. And this pandemic revealed that we are unprepared.
S: My guess is the specific risk of viral pandmeics, the pure virology and immunology of the thing; this will cause that to advance to the point where this particular risk is severely mitigated. Is the structure of modern society robust to all kinds of risks? The answer is clearly no. It’s surpising to me the extent to which people—it’s scary how much people believe in science. “Because the science says this, that, and the other, we’ll do this, and this.” Even though it’s a little bit crazy. Sometimes, we don’t know how the science works. And people say, well tell us what to do!
l: It’s difficult ot meditate on computational irreducibility.
s: This is what political leaders do for a living; you’ve got to tell us what to do
L: Tell a narrative, that gives people hope that we know waht we’re doing.
S: Get people through the issue. This idea, we’re going to get the definitive answer from science; telling us what to do. .. If that were possible, if science could always tell us what to do, that woudl be a big downer for our lives. It’s kind of fun to live one’s life and find out what’s going to happen. If .. we already know the answer … IT’s good news in a sense that irreducibility doesn’t allow you to jump through the answer and know, this is the answer. That’s good news!
L: It’s scary. Do you think we’re going to be okay?
S: Absolutely!
L: Do you think we’ll propser, or destroy ourselves?
S: I’m an optimist! It’ll be interesting to see. With this pandemic, to me, when you look at organizations for example. Having some kind of perturbation, some kik to the system, the result of that is usulaly quite good. My impression, it’s a little weird for me, because I’ve been ar emote tech CEO for years. This, bizarrely … coming to see you here, this is the first time in six months I’ve been in a building other than my house. I’m kind of a ridiculous outlier …
L: Generally, your belief is when you shake up the system … we humans emerge better
S: My impression is, people note what is actually improtant, what’s really worth caring about, is emergent in this situation.
L: It’s fascinating that on the individual level, we’ve got complex cognition; that creates this graph … …. I like you am optimistic. You said the computational irreducibility; there’s always a fear of the darkness of the uncertainty
S: But if you knew everything, it would be boring. Worse than boring. It would reveal pointlessness, so to speak. The fact that there is computational irerducibility; soemthing is being achieved …
L: It gives meaning to life; it gives meaning to life.
S: IT’s what causes it to not be something that allows us to say, …
Sunburn moment with Wolfram Alpha
Computational irreducibility
S: IF you think about things that happen as being computations, you think about some process in physics, something that you compute in math; it’s a computation in that it has definite rules. You follow those rules so many steps, you get some result. If you look at all the different computations that can happen—in the natural world, in our brains, in our math—how do they compare? Are there dumb and smart computations, or are they all somehow all equivalent? The concept of computational equivalence, that I discovered in the 1990s … when one of these things doesn’t feel like it’s doing something obviously simple, then it’s reached the equivalent level of computational sophistication of everything. What that means is, you might say, I’m studying this tiny little program on my computer; some tiny thing in nature—my brain is surely smarter than that thing; I’ll be able to out-sophisticate the little thing. But that doesn’t work. Our brains are doing computationally equivalent things. We can’t systematically out-run systems. The systems are irreducibile, so there’s no shortcut we can make that will out-run the answer. Science has used little pockets of computational reducibility … a natural byproduct of general irreducibility … Science has found those particular cases, where you can jump ahead. In ancient Babylon, they tried to predict three things; where the planets would be, what the weather would be like, and who would win a certain battle. It turns out we cracked the first one 300 years ago. The last one, we didn’t crack.
L: Not yet. Game theorissts are trying. And then the weather …
S: it’s been kind of halfway. Long-term climate, different story.
L: Do you think eventually we’ll figure out the weather; you think we’ll find local pockets in everything.
S: NO. There’s an infinite collection of local pockets; we’ll never run out of them. They’re where we build engineering. If we want to have a predictable life, we have to build in these pockets. If we were existing in this irreducible world … I have to say, one of the feautres of today; looking back from the future, we’ll probably focus on stuff like the following: If we describe something like heat, for instance, we say, “Oh the air in here is this pressure.” People will say, I can’t believe they didn’t realize all the detail in how these molecules are bouncing around, and they could’ve made use of that. .. One possible scenario for our long-term history is, heat-death of the universe. Everything becomes thermo-dynamically boring. But it’s not that bad, because there’s all this computation going on, all these individual gas molecules are doing a lot of interesting things, but we haven’t found ways to understand it in our brains, our math, and our science. So it just looks boring to us.
L: So you’re saying ther'e’s a hoepful view of the heat death in the universe where therer’s actually beautiful complexity going on. … Those little molecules interacting in complex ways, there could be complexity in that.
S: This is what you learn from this concept. It’s a message of hope; it’s alsso, you’re not as special as you think you are, so to speak. … All that we’ve constructed in science, we leearn at first we’re very special. But then, no we’re not. We’re doing computations just like things in nature are doing computations. The only thing special about our computations is that we understand what they are. They’re connected to our purposees, our ways of thinking about things and so on.
Theory of Everything
S: So the question is, can we kin of reduce what has been physics, something we have to pick away and say, can we roughly know how the world works? A complete formal theory, where we say, if we were to run this program for long enough, we would be able to reproduce everything. …. Because of computational irreducibility, that’s not something where. … based on having a TOE, you can find out whether lions are going to eat tigers. You’d have to run the thing 10^500 steps … This is a rule, run this rule enough times, and you will get the whole universe. That’s what it means to have a fundamental rule of physics. …
… turn out to be precisely the stuff you can say.. A lot you can’t say, it’s at this irreducible level … But the thing is, there are things you can say, and the things you can say, turn out to be … exactly the structure that you found in twentieth century: general relativity and quantum mechanics.
L: And those are these pockets of reducibility. IT is kind of surprising that any kind of model that’s generative, from simple rules, would have such pockets
S: We didn’t know where those things came from. Gen. rel, wbhy is it true? Why are they true? What we realized is, these theories are generic to a huge class of systems that have unstructured, underlying rules. To me, that’s really beautiful. Even more beautiful is that, it turns out people have been struggling to see how the two theories relate. They seem incompatible. At some level, it turns out: they are the same theory!
General relativity
L: Not from the hypergraph perspective, but from the traditional perspective, what are these things. What is gen. rel.?
S: Very quick history of physics. Ancient Greeks thought, we’ll figure out how the world works—We’re gonna construct this idea of how the world works. They … That was an early tradition for thinking about models of the world. Then, by the time of 1600s, galileo and Newton, the big idea there was, the titel of Newton’s book, Mathematical Prinicples of Philosophy; we can use math to understand things about the way the world works. We can write down a math. equation and have it represent how the world works. Newton’s universal, inverse-square law of gravity … allowed him to compute features of the planets .. although some of them he got wrong; it was edited over the following 100 years. These math. equations, we don’t really know where they come from, but then they might agree with what we actually observe in astronomy … Let’s say, there were two: quantum mechanics … was the early stuff done by Plank. But lets take gen. rel., first. Special relativity, invented by Einstein in 1905; it was oddly logically invented. It wasn’t a thing that followed from some axiomatic ideas … Different from methodological structure of other recent theories, where we write down an equation and find out that it works. the basic idea was, the speed of light appears to be constant, even if you’re traveling very fast; if you shine a flashlight, the light doesn’t change how it comes out of itse.f. … For that to work, you need to change your view of how space and time work. … To be able to account for the fact that when you’re going faster, it appears that length is foreshortened, and time is dilated!
L: That’s special relativity.
S: Yes. Then, Einstein went out with vaguely similar kinds of thinking, in 1915 invented general relativity; a theory of graivty. The basic poknt of it is, it says that when there is mass in space, space is curved. What doees that mean? Usually you think of the shortest distance betwen two points. On a plane in space, it’s a straight line. Photons, light goes in straight lines. If you have a curved surface, a straight line is no longer straight. On the surface of the earth, the shortest distance betwen two points is a great circle; it’s a circle. Einstein’s observation was, maybe the physical structure of space is such that space is curved, so that the shortest distance between two poitns, the “straight line” won’t be straight anymore. IF a photon is traveling near the sun, maybe the shortest path willl be one that is something that looks curved to us, because space has been deformed by the presence of that massive object. Think of the structure of space as bing a dynamical changing kind of thing. Einstein then wrote down these differential equations that represented the curvature of space and its response to the presence of masss and energy.
l: That’s ultimately connected to the force of gravity; one of the forces that seems to operatee on a different scale than theo ther forces.
S: This curvature of space which causes the powers of objects to be deflected; that’s what tgravity does. IT’s an explanation for graivty, so to speak. The surpirse is, from 1915 until today, everything we’ve measured about gravity, precisely agrees with gen. rel. That', black holes.. .we didn’t know about. The expansion of the universe was an early potential prediction, although Einstein tried to patch up his equations to avoid showing expansion … You should trust your theory and not try and patch it—it turned out the universe was expanding.
L: Even if the theory says something crazy is happening.
S: it took until the 1960s that people realized black holes were a consequence of gen. rel. .. So far, this theory of gravity, has perfectly agreed with collisions of black holes seen by gravitational waves; it all just works. That’s been one pillar of theory of physics. It’s mathematically complicated to work out all parts of it, but … And some things are kind of squiggly and complicated. People believ energy is consered; that doesn’t work in gen. rel., the way it usually does. It’s a big math. story … to nail it down. But fundamentally gen. rel. is a straight shot. You have this theory; you work out its consequences.
L: Useful in basic sciences, the way creation of galaxies work, goign back to the Big Bang.
S” Features of the expansion of the universe. There are lots of details; we don’t know how it’s working. Where’s the dark matter … the test-able features of gen. rel., it all works very beautifully.
L: So that’s general relativity. What’s its friendly neighbor?
S: Quantum mechanics.
L: One question, is it continuous or discrete? PEople have been debating it. Is light made of particles or waves? What became clear in 1800s was that atoms, materials are made of discrete atoms. Water is not a continuous fluid, even though it seems like it, but if you zoom in enough, you get down to molecules and then atoms, discrete things. But how important is the discrete-ness? Is energy discrete? What’s not discrete?
Quantum mechanics
L: Does it have mass?
S: Is mass discrete? We can now address that … what happened … in the coming up of the 1920s, there was a math. theory developed that could explain discreteness in arrangements of atoms. What developed was math. theory, theory of quantum mechanics … math. theory of wave functions, Shrodinger’s equation, math. theory that allows you to calculate lots of features of the microscopic world. About how atoms work. Calculations all work great. Question, what does it really mean, is complicated. Historically, early calculations of things like atoms … worked great, 1920s-1930s. There was always a problem, quantum field thoery, theory of …. In quantum mechanics you’re dealing with a cerrtain number of atoms, and you fix the number of electrons … you say, a 2-electron thing. in QFT, you allow for particles to be created and destroyed … admit a photon, lose a photon. It’s more math. complicated, had all kinds of infinities that cropped up; we figured out how to get rid of them, if we did the calculations in certain ways—but those didn’t work for atomic nucleii. That led to alternative ideas through the 1960s. End result, the most-obvious math. structure of QFT seems to work, tho math. difficult. You can calculate a dozen decimal points a bunc hof things
L: The underlying fabric, of that particular theory is fields.
S: Those are quantum fields, different from classical fields. A field—you say the temperature field in this room. There’s a value of temp. at every point around the room. OR the wind field, a bunch of vector directions. Those are classical fields. Quantum fileds are more mathematiccally elaborate. I should explain that one picture of quantum mech., really important—in classical physics, one believes that definite things happen in the world, with definite trajectories, parabolas, etc. In quantum mechanics, the picture is, definite things don’t happen. Insteadd, this whole structure of many different paths being followed; we can calculate whole structure of many different paths being followed … we can calculate probabilities. You say, what really happened? What’s the underlying story? How do we turn this math. theory we can calculate things with … into something we can understand and have a narrative about. That’s been really hard. Dick Fineman, who made his whole career quantum mechanics, said nobody can really understand it.
L: Nevertheless, what the QFT is accurate at predicting a lot of physical phenomena. So it works.
S: There’s things about it, when we apply the standard modle of particle physics; it has certain parameters—a whole bunch—why does the Nuron particle exist? We don’t know!
Unifying the laws of physics
L: So particle physics looks at the world of the very small. Then the neighbor of gravity. In the context of a T.O.E. … What’s the task of the unification of these theories.
S: You try to use rules of particle physics to talk about gravity, and it doesn’t work. Just like there are photons of light; there are gravitons, which are particles of gravity. If you try to compute properties of particles of gravity; the math. tricks used in QFT don’t work. So that’s been a fundamental issue; when you think about black holes, a place where the structure of space has rapid variation, and you get quantum effects mixed in with gen. rel. effects; things get complicated, paradoxes …
Wolfram Physics Project
Emergence of time
Causal invariance
S: It turns out that even if the underlying either doesn’t have this property of causal invariance; it can turn out that every observation made by observers of the rule … they can impose it …. …. this idea of completions … comes up … Let’s ignore that for a second.
L: Is it useful to talk about observation?
S: Not yet.
L: So great; there is some concept of causal invariance … as you apply these rules in an asynchronous ways … There are hypographs that represent …. the graph grows is interesting complicated ways. Eventually the froth arises … as we experience as human existence.
S: Yes! (laughter) One achievement of 20th-century physics was bringing space and time together. They talk about space-time; there’s a nice mathematical formalism in which space and time appear as part of the s-t continuum … four vectors and things like this; we talk about time as the fourth dimension. It seems like the theory of relativity… says space and time are fundamentally the same kind of thing. It took a while for me to understand, in my approach, space and time are not the same kind of thing. Space is the extension of this hypograph; time is the (order) in which the rules are applied to the hypograph. How can this be right? It turns out that, when you have causal invariance … (backing up) … the basic point is, even though space and time sort of come from very different places, it turns out the rules of space-time that special relativity talks about, come out of this model when you’re looking at large enough systems. A way to talk about it, is, part of that story is, when you look at a fluid like water, there are equations that govern the flow of water. They apply on a large scale (the equations), they don’t apply to individual molecules. It’s the same kind of thing happening in our models.
L: We’ve been talking about space and time at the lowest level of the model—Space, the hypograph; time, the evolution of this hypograph. There’s also space-time as we think of it in special relativity. How do you go from the lowest source code of space and time to more traditional terminology?
S: The key thing is what we call the causal graph … causal relationships between events. event has causal relationships to other events. If an event needs as its input the output of a previous event, then we say there is a causal connection. We can make this graph of causal relationships. Causal invariance implies that graph is unique. It doesn’t matter that you think that you did this particular transposition of characters … That network is the same. If you were to draw that … if you were to put that network on a picture, the places where you put the nodes of the network would be different, but the way the nodes are connected will always be the same.
L: the graph is emergent
S: It’s—an event can’t happen until its input is ready. That creates the causal graph. The next thing to realize is, when we’re going to observe what happens in the universe, we have to make sense of this causal graph. You are an observer who is part of this causal graph. Imagine we have weird theory of physics of the world where, this updating process, there will only be one update at each moment in time. “I have a theory of physics that says there’s just one little place where things get updated.” You say that’s crazy. But the fact is, the thing is, that if I’m talking to you, and you are being updated and I’m being updated; if there’s a little head running around updating things, I won’t know if you’ve been updated unless I’ve been updated. So … the causal graph is the same …
L: Is that clear? Or is that a hypothesis? That theres’ a unique casual graph?
S: If there’s causal invariance, then there’s a unique causal graph.
L: So it’s okay for us to (think of it this way)?
S: Yes I think so. I’m pausing, wondering, when you say “running around,” it depends how far it jumps between updates.
L: It’s easier for the human brain to think of it that way
S: That’s not how we experience the world. Everything seems to be happening at successive moments in time, everywhere in space. The speed of light is very fast. We look away; I can see 100 feet right now. My brain does not process very much, in the time it takes light to move 100 feet. … Light goes a billion feet in a second.
L; At moments in this conversation, I imagine the absurdity of the fact that there’s two descendants of apes, modeled by a hypograph, that are communicating with each other … as a real-time simultaneous update. There is something much deeper going on here. It’s paralyzing to remember that (laughs) As a small little tangent, I just remembered … we’re talking about the fabric of reality!
S: Right. So we’ve got this causal graph representing all causal relationships. It’s a representation of space-time. Our experience of it requires that we pick reference frames. We have to say, what are we going to pick what we define as simultaneous moments of time. We can say, how do we set our clocks? If we’ve got a spacecraft landing on Mars. What time is it landing at? There’s a 20-minute speed-of-light delay. How do we set up time coordinates for the world? There’s arbitrariness that … what do we count as simultaneous? … The basic bottom line is … it’s always the same causal graph. Independent of how you slice it with these reference frames … that’s why special relativity works.
L: So … everything around space and time, fits this idea of the causal graph.
R: Right. Given that you’ve got a basic structure that just involves updating things in these connected updates, that’s enough—when you unravel the consequences of that, together with the fact that there’s lots of these things and you can take a continuum limit—that implies special relativity … It was non-obvious … And yet, you get that.
Deriving physics from simple rules on hypergraphs
Einstein equations
Simulating the physics of the universe
Hardware specs of the simulation
Quantum mechanics in Wolfram physics model
Double-slit experiment
Quantum computers
Getting started with Wolfram physics project
The rules that created our universe
Alien intelligence
Meta-mathematics
Why is math hard?
Sabine Hossenfelder and how beauty leads physics astray
Eric Weinstein and geometric unity
Travel faster than speed of light
Why does the universe exist at all
#125: Ryan Hall, MMA badass
Ryan Hall, one of the most insightful minds and systems thinkers in the martial arts world. He’s a black belt in jiu-jitsu, accomplished competitor, an MMA fighter undefeated in the UFC, and truly, a philosopher who weeks to understand the underlying principles of the martial arts. Jiu-jitsu is such an important part of who I am, and I was hoping to share that with folks who might know me only as a researcher. … Ryan … is remarkably, a friend … and a modern-day warrior-philosopher … of especially dangerous, and brilliant humans. Also his amazing wife Jen Hall was there as well. (You might hear her in the background.)
As a sidenote; renaming this podcast with just my name, gave me intellectual freedom … so empowering. … find my voice. I hope you’ll allow me … to step outside of AI. And talk to athletes, musicians, writers … I think if I allow myself to expand the range of these conversations … when I do return to science and engineering, I’ll bring more perspective … more fun, more listeners. All that said—please skip the episodes that don’t interest you! You don’t have to listen to all of them!
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Greatest warrior in history
Ghengis Khan
Nature is metal
Cancel culture
L: … Hitler did exactly everything I said except for the word “positive.” He did give a dream to the German people … a great people … of a better future. It’s just that, a certain point .. the better future turned into … it requires the expansion of more land. It started with, “Well, if we need to build a great Germany, we need a little bit more land. We need to kinda get Austria; we need to kinda get France.”
R: And look what they did to us in Versailles anyway
L: The Jewish—the Holocaust is a separate thing. I don’t know what to think of it. Me being Jewish and having a lot of … the echoes of the suffering is in my family, the people that are lost. I don’t know; Hitler wrote all about it in Mein Kempf; the evil … was there all along. Hitler’s such a difficult person to talk about. … Cancel culture—who is deserving of forgiveness, and who is not. … … Idk if we as a society are ready to contemplate the idea of forgiveness for Hitler. It’s an interesting idea, though. .. an interesting thought exercise at the very least. All these people being cancelled .. for doing … of different degrees.
R: What’s a good person? If that’s a sliding scale; we could all find ourselves looking at the uncomfortable end of a gun on … at some point. Who’s doing the cancelling? Who’s being canceled? … It’s certainly understandable … I couldn’t help but notice; you mentioned, as a society, being able to apply forgiveness to someone who’s done so much horror … a survivor of the Holocaust being able to let go on that. .. I’m nowhere near a big enough person. Being a person who was physically there; being able, somehow, to let go. … This isn’t, obviously, in regards to the Holocaust. Why I’m holding onto various things. What is it doing for me? What is it doing to me? … When I was on Ultimate Fighter, … wasn’t allowed to have any books except for religious texts. The Bible and the Koran. The Bible’s a little drier … most merciful … I don’t think any of us want justice. We think we want justice. … Justice is dangerous, dangerous. Maybe this person’s wronged me deeply … On a societal level, I think it’s fine; there’s crime and punishment … I think what many of us want is mercy. Justice is very very very dangerous. It’s valuable and important; but who gets to decide what’s just. … what happens when it’s pointed back at me. … The idea that one day I will have to live in the world which I created … People love the idea—they’re a judge for your crimes and a lawyer for theirs.
L: Yeah, justice is a kind of drug. If you look at history—I’ve also been reading about Stalin. I don’t know what was inside Hitler’s head—legitimately insane. Stalin was not. He literally thought he was doing a good thing … for the entirety of the time, that communism—he was going to create a happy world. In his mind, were ideas of justice. Of fairness, of happiness, of … yeah, human flourishing. That’s a drug. It somehow sadly pollutes the mind. If you start thinking like that … like you know what’s good for society. That’s intoxicating, especially if others around you are feeling the same way. …You forget, you’re barely recently evolved from an ape.
R: Well, sometimes a witch has to go!
L: (laughs)
R: … shoulda sunk
L: We can agree, witches have to go.
Sci-fi books and movies
L: I haven’t really read any of the sci-fi classics. My whole journey through reading was through, like, the literary philosophers, like Camus, Hesse, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, like that place. That’s a kind of sci-fi world in itself. It creates a world in which the deepest questions about human nature can be explored. I didn’t realize this but the sci-fi world is the same; it removes it from any kind of historical context … you can explore those ideas in space … different time, different space. More freedom to construct artificial things to do human experiments. The books on my list are the foundation series by Isaac Asimov, Dune, Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, and Ender’s Game, like you mentioned. I posted that, and of course Elon Musk, and … Carmac, they all pitched in, these nerds, these ultra-nerds, going, “You need to read this, that, and the other.” It seems like the list I mentioned holds up, somewhat. Is there sci-fi books, series, or authors, that you find are just amazing? What’s the greatest sci-fi book of all time?
R: I haven’t read anything other than Orson Scott Card, Tolkien, Frank Herbert … I am aware, through Wikipedia … of a book called Republic.
L: So you’re a prolific reader of Wikipedia articles.
R: Well, occasional; between whatever else it is that I waste my time on.
L: I posted on Reedit, questions for Ryan Hall. … Half of them have to do with Dune! Did you mention Dune before?
R: … A Dune-themed gie … to your point, this is an Orson Scott Card quote … “Fiction always has the possibility of being about oneself.” I think that’s a neat thing. … Every once in a while, people dig their heels in and say they only like nonfiction—I disagree with that. We have a hard enough time figuring out what happened at 7-11 three hours ago. So when you tell me something that happened 600 years ago—this is a story, too! There’s factual components, but … … Dune would be … it has political components, relationship components. I think Dune is neat because it’s a sci-fi novel but only in the loosest sense. It’s about human potential, belief, politics, learning, governance, ecology … it’s … the best stories remind me of history; just the way history is hopefully not a list of factoids that I try to recall, but a story I can understand, and see how the threads of time came together and created certain things … What’s going on right now—we can look back far enough … if we had accurate knowledge, we would see an unbroken chain of events that led us to where we are … and where we’re going … I guess I really enjoy, a book like Dune …
Essence of jiu-jitsu
Jiu-jitsu is a language
R: … going through that iterative process … that allows you to find self-expression, find your voice. You fight the way you talk, in a way that is uniquely you. That allows you to understand other people as uniquely them. … Am I objectively right? Well, maybe about a couple things. I have to be open to the possibility that I may not be. That allows me some compassion for other people, in their martial-arts journey, and their journey .. as human beings. Having trouble, where we see tribalism. Racism’s an expression of that; political affiliation … people are looking for, where can I plant my feet? We see that in martial arts; “Well I do this style.” I understand why you feel the way you do. But we’re all just trying to understand … acquire enough knowledge. It’s an interesting trap; a very human trap to fall into. Sometimes it’s a joke in the jiu jitsu world. ..
How to get started in jiu-jitsu
L: I think Elon Musk’s kids are now doing jiu jitsu. The world is curious. It seems a nice methodology by which to humble your ego. … How would you recommend curious people get started? What should the first day, month, year look like? Ease into it? Make sure it’s a positive experience?
R: Ask yourself why. Why you want to be involved. … I first walked into ___ Athletics in NYC to train under Christian Montes. I didn’t know what I was getting into; I’d played baseball in high school. It had always been interesting to me. I didn’t know it was accessible. In Northern Virginia, where I grew up … I didn’t know if people were gonna be nice … I began with expectation management. I think that’s something, that would be the first thing that I would start: “What is it I’m getting myself into.” Martial arts has given me everything in life. The people I’ve met; the places I’ve gone; I could never, ever imagine. I’m unbelievably thankful. The thing that helped me most of all—my mom said something to me, there’s two types of people. There’s Why, and there’s Why Not? It’s easier, when you’re younger, to just trust people. You wanna climb that rock—sure, Why Not? Whereas if I have to be talked into everything—this is the thinker’s disease. You wanna figure out what’s gonna happen, before you get involved. Rather than using the Bruce Lee saying—no amount of thinking on this side of the river … will get you to the other side, unless you jump in. …
The value of a good coach
R: We’re not McDonald’s. This is my house, my gym, my dojo.
L: There’s something beautiful about martial arts. The coach—it’s like, there’s a dictatorship aspect .. that’s very important to have. This ridiculous nature of master, and bowing, all these traditions. It seems ridiculous from the outside, perhaps, but there’s something really powerful … Requires you to believe the coach has your best interest in mind; just give yourself over to their ideas of how you should grow. That’s an interesting thing; I’ve never been able to really see coaches I’ve had as human. It’s like a father figure; you always put them in this position of power. At least for me, it’s been a very useful way to see the coach. And emotionally deal with all the beatings!
R: They’ll push you past where you would have stopped yourself. Further than you would have gone; but not so far that it’s not facilitative. … My head coach for MMA, … they’ve both been phenomenal influences. … brilliant instructor, they’ve all been able to do that. They’re very sharp; they’re very intuitive as well…. something John Wooden said … a simple philosophical idea: “Some people’s life is a bowl of shit—it needs some whipped cream in it. Some people’s life is a bowl of whipped cream; it needs a little bit of shit in it.” Just to balance it out. Coaching everyone the same way—doesn’t work. The difference between a coach and an instructor. … Tell me what to do, not how to do it. … people get mixed up between coach and instructor. A coach is so much more than an instructor. … I think about this a lot. Me giving you $150 a month, which is not nothing. That pays for instructor, really. Coach is a relationship that gets developed … Imagine the amount of investment … that’s serious. That’s the difference, oftentimes, getting over the hump in various situations. It’s an interesting bargain being made. Commitment being made by the instructor, by the student. … Sometimes we’ve butted heads. There was always the trust. With the exception of one time that I feel trust was greatly betrayed. Mistakes will be made; but everyone’s attempting to do the right thing. Versus, “I might have burnt your house down, but you can be sure it wasn’t on purpose.” Great things can happen. I look at all the athletes that I know; that have become fantastic. Almost invariably, it never happened alone.
L: Have you seen the movie Whiplash. People should watch it. It’s a movie about a drummer (in a jazz band), and the instructor. From the outsider’s perspective, it’s a toxic relationship. But the coach pushes the drummer to his limits. To where he just feels like shit, emotionally. … ultimately it’s very productive for the improvement of the musician. I had the same—I got a chance to train at a couple places regularly. One of my coaches, who is a great human being, a lot of people love him. When I was a blue belt, he was pushing me a lot for competition. Every time I would step on the mat, I was anxious, and almost afraid of training—because of the places I’m gonna have to go. I don’t know what’s good or bad; because I think I’ve become a better person because of that experience. On the flip side, the place I got my black belt from—I remember the coach sitting down. He saw something in me, where he said, you know, good luck, but win or lose, we always love you. I remember that, because I really needed that, at that time. I’m not an actual professional competitor. I just competed; I’m a PhD student. It was clearly having a psychological effect on me …. That’s what a great coach does … You use jiu jitsu when you need it, to grow as a person. But … you sometimes have to pull that person out. I don’t know what to make of it; I wouldn’t have it any other way.
R: Really interesting thing you’re describing … makes me think of the reciprocal nature of everything. No pressure? That’s great. … The Matrix … of course was amazing; each subsequent one made it worse. Basically, our first initial world, Agent smith says to Neo, was a utopia. Where everyone’s happy … your primitive cerebrum rejected it …. (self-deprecates) … Great things are fantastic; a kind gentle place is fantastic. This is why I love Dune—he does a great job of expressing this. Look at Sparta, for instance. … It’s a hard, brutal place. Was there benefit to that? Absolutely. Was there drawback? Absolutely. Was it sustainable? Probably not. That type of a thing, it burns too hot, almost. That type of unforgiving nature. Entirely permissive has its own issue. .. Describing a toxic relationship is a dangerous and tricky thing. Bird’s-eye view. … You see a husband and a wife arguing … short of somebody hitting somebody, I need to keep myself out of this … Short of going to a place (out-of-bounds), I don’t know who’s right here … If I want to put my finger on the scale … I’m not sure. I think back to all of the times—you mentioned your coach pushing you, very very hard. I think that’s an interesting thing for society now. “Coaches shouldn’t be allowed to do this,” people are saying. Well, go to a boxing gym! You’re going to see what things are like. Go to wrestling rings. There are limits, and abuse should never be tolerated. But it’s not a commercial entity. I don’t need to be sweet to you if you’re screwing up; I’m not doing you or the team a favor by being permissive of that sort of behavior …
Lex training with Ryan
Toxicity on the Internet
L: Moods … meditate … I tend to visualize … How is this going to make my life better? If I say something mean to somebody else, I have just started a conflict that will just escalate, will continue, will add more conflict to my life. I dont’ like the feeling you will create. It’s like with street-fighting. I would get into a lot of fights when I was younger. You realize, it’ll escalate. It might come back at you. More importantly, the anxiety of it, of having created little enemies in this world, distorts the way you see the world. I’ve noticed that if I’m shitty to people on the Internet; it somehow brings the shittiness to you more and more. The more love you put out there … the people
R: You mentioned forgiveness as well … I’ve never experienced one-billionth the pain and horror of Holocaust survivors.
L: The Internet’s hard. You’ve had a level of celebrity for a while; I’ve recently had some level of celebrity. People come out, calling me a fraud …
R: Have you ever seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back? They go around and beat the shit out of all the people that talk bad about ‘em?
Joe Rogan
L: I’m having trouble with it. There’s posts and forums and heated discussions, like, “Is Lex Fridman a fraud?” I’m … if you increase the level of celebrity … One of the things that hurts my heart a little bit is, some level of toxicity around Joe Rogan. There’s like communities of people that talk about him selling out, for example. I’ve talked to Joe about it; it’s amazing; he says, don’t read the comments. His heart and his soul doesn’t give a damn about the comments. All he gives a damn about is his friends. … I’ve had conversations with him about Spotify
R: What’s Spotify?
L: …. I had a discussion with him; and a video I took down because of the toxicity. He will give away the $100 million in a second if he ever has to compromise who he is. He already said; he made fuck-you money a long time ago. He doesn’t need any more money; he doesn’t care.
R: It’s neat to see someone that’s … authentic in their own way. He was above that nonsense from the jump. (He had fuck-you money even when he had no money.) When I say something annoying … I appreciate the talk. I’ll treat you with respect; you treat me with respect. It’s a lesson; you don’t have to kowtow to these weird powers that be. Talk shit with your friends, hang out, be happy. That resonates with people. … This person wants to hang out with his buddies. Happens to be brilliant; to be able to do these other things. … Same thing with Robin Williams character (Good Will Hunting?). … many interactions now become … what does this say when it goes public? How can I couch what I say, use the right buzz words, use the wrong buzz words. It’s nice to flip the bird to that.
Alex Jones
L: Me hosting this podcast, I sometimes think about who should I talk to and not; in terms of, like the old Hitler question. Hitler I would definitely talk to post-World War II, because everyone knows he’s evil. But early … people who really understand what’s going on know he’s a very dangerous human being. But many just think, he’s a person who cares for Germany. The question really deals with Alex Jones, who lives in Texas. I just listened to one episode of his show, on Infowars. It kind of reminds me of a time in college when I drank too much tequila. There’s no turning back. You don’t know when you’re gonna wake up; you don’t know who you’re gonna kill, or steal, or rob. It felt like I was getting pulled into a dark place, where pretty much everyone is a pedophile who’s trying to control the world. Bill Gates … there’s a deep skepticism about power; everything is dark forces in all corners; the way you feel when you’re a kid, there’s a monster hiding in the closet. He says you’re being weak; you need to look under the bed. There’s monsters, they’re growing, they’re multiplying.
R: They’re touching children.
L: Exactly. When I listen to him, thinking about whether I want to talk to him on this podcast. On Joe Rogan; it was somehow entertaining; it’s fun to listen to a mad man go on for four hours; it’s almost like theater. I talked to Joe about it; he says, the people who try to censor him don’t give enough credit to the intelligence of human beings to understand: What a person says on a large platform is not the truth. You can be a mad man and say crazy things. … It hurts my heart … the way people now think Bill Gates is a pedophile … a mob of people … Would you talk to someone like Alex Jones? Or not?
R: Yes, I would; I feel very strongly about it. I can understand very clearly why people would take issue with the idea of amplifying this man’s voice and reach—as a demonstrable negative. I think when you take a step back further, the cure is more damaging than the disease, and significantly so. You mentioned Alex Jones being … skeptical of power and people with it. The conspiracy theories that stick are the ones that seem quasi-credible in some aspect. … tarring people with words like “pedophile,” “rapist,” “rapist.”
L: And that changes year by year. It used to be “communist” or “Marxist.”
R: Cleveland Browns fan. The move is to find a group of people nobody likes. That’s a creepy thing, though; people are always looking for … who’s the guy we can all get away with treating like dirt? Who can I be a dick to, and nobody’s gonna say anything. Whether with literal Nazis, or someone I called a Nazi? What’s the bigger issue; what the person did before, or the way I’m being? Was Hitler a problem because he had crazy ideas, or because he did things? I’d say because he did things. If we’re going to start punishing thought crimes …. it’s a sliding … standard … If you mentioned Alex Jones putting out ridiculous ideas and theories. There’s plenty of things that are quasi-mainstream on this side or that side, that are maybe not comparably ridiculous … The idea of getting a group of people together to decide what we’re not going to tolerate is a tricky thing. It reminds me of law or religion—What are the things we don’t like? How do we feel about rape? No, not an acceptable behavior. Murder? Not acceptable. Killing? Well, was it war? Were you acting in self-defense? …. We draw the line at murder. Then we go, theft? People say, hey, I murdered that guy; do you understand where I’m coming from. … I can conceptualize someone doing that. You still need to face criminal justice as we have it in our system …
l: If you look at the history of discourse in our country; it’s changed since 9/11. It used to be impossible to criticize a soldier. It was easier to criticize war; it was harder to criticize soldiers for allowing themselves to be the tools of war. …
Donald Trump
R: … the real antidote to all of this is education. Critical thinking … Recognize the techniques are the beginning, not the end. It’s the artistry we’re searching for … People’s ability to think critically … Majority rule, or whoever’s loudest, does not mean that they’re right. Critical thinking will help inoculate them … People that support our current president might feel a certain way … about what constitutes toxic.
L: My hope with DJT was, he would shake up the people that wear suits usually … I didn’t wear what I usually wear in DC, because like everybody was wearing a suit and tie.
R: Except for Mudge; who wears T-shirts
L: Mudge doesn’t give a damn; Mudge is a forever renegade. My hope with Trump … the way it turned out was different. It turned out .. you might want an Andrew Yang type character, who .. can inject new energy into the system with youthful new ideas; versus through the troll that’s very good at mocking, and playing outside the rules of the game. But Trump did reveal, powerfully—I don’t know what to think of it—that it’s just a game, and you don’t have to play it by the rules. That’s both inspiring and dark. And I don’t know what to do with it. I’m not drawing parallels between our president and Adolph Hitler …. When charismatic leaders realize they don’t have to play by the rules … That Kevin spacey show, House of Cards
R: One wonders if that’s always been done in private. We had Bush, then we had Clinton, then we had more Bush; then we had Obama, then we were about to have another Clinton. That’s fairly creepy! Even on its own …
The American ideal
L: I’m sure we’ll have a generation of Trumps, now. … I’m Russian; I think we humans like kings still, and queens. There’s something; we’re attracted to it … something in us longs toward that authoritarian control. One of the … things about America … for me it’s the beacon of hope. Somehow, the fire of freedom burns … the Eff-You energy, that revolts against power; as we discussed, power corrupts and ultimately leads to degradation of whomever’s ruling
R: I don’t know if I’m reading this properly; it seems to me, when flip the bird, I’m gonna do me, within reason, is an idea that defines the American ideal, or part of the consciousness of the U.S. But that’s under attack to a certain extent. The generation behind us; it’s becoming more collectivist. For all the good and also not-good of that. Not in terms of policy, but just in terms of group consciousness. I wonder if that’s an Internet thing; people are more in touch with one another … The rest of the world seems much closer than it did. Living in Virginia, California seems far away. But on the Internet, it’s much closer. I remember being in Tennessee, one time, and reading about events taking place in the Middle East. It seemed an unbelievably far distance ….
What does it take to be a jiu-jitsu black belt?
Interesting moments in podcast where Jen Hall, Ryan’s wife, talks from off camera. The photo he shows there must be of her.
J: (talking about recovering from a head injury) That’s just hard; I think that you can experience so many things; I’ve had all these injuries. We lost a baby when I was 15 weeks. We’ve had all these experiences. The hardest point for me …. life goes on; you have to keep working at it; you have to keep going. … You asked me earlier, did I feel depressed …
Lex invites her to get on camera; she agrees.
J: In terms of all the rooms I’ve been in; I traveled for my job, in Germany, in Florida, in places where I don’t know anyone; they don’t know me. I’ve never had anyone be anything other than kind and solicitous, when I was a white belt, a blue belt. It’s so cool that no matter where you go in the world … a gym in Prague where only two people spoke English
R: Like a cult, right?
L: A positive cult
R: That’s what we would say, as cultists.
L: If you look at different kinds of games, there’s a skepticism. … With jiu jitsu, you can roll into most places. Even with judo, you can see the contrast. It’s more like tribal. You walk in, and who is this? There’s that kind of feeling. With jiu jitsu, less so. There is a little bit like with the competitors, feeling each other out.
J: As a woman, you think you’re walking into these rooms of big, strong tough guys; they’re more solicitous; they’re not just hitting on you all the time. Making sure you have a good experience. That’s an experience I hope people have coming in to our gym. .. It can be a little uncomfortable; when you walk into a male-dominated environment; there’s a different style of comraderie and joking that a lot of men will do that maybe some women are more uncomfortable with….
L: Okay, we just took a little break; now we’re back. (I assume she’s gone now. Good grief.) Thoughts on leg locks?
R: John and the students there … you mentioned innovators in that section of jiu jitsu; I’d like to bring up Dean Lister, Mazakari ___, there was some crazy gnarly stuff, it’s on grainy VHS tape. Stuff that people are doing now people think is brand new …
Elon Musk
Fighting BJ Penn
L: To look at the fighting world; you mentioned BJ Penn; you are undefeated in the UFC, and one of the fights you had was against BJ Penn, kind of an incredible fight. What did it feel like to face him, and to beat him as definitively as you did.
R: I didn’t know if I ever was going to be able to fight again after 2016. I was about to join the Army … before Jen sent me over to Ultimate Fighter … this isn’t a great idea. She said go out there and see what happens. I fought three times on the show; I fought for the finale, so that’s four times in five or six months. It took me a year to get another opponent; that was Gray Mainard. Then it took two years to fight BJ Penn. Training .. that was deeply frustrating; as an athlete, you die twice. You have an athletic peak, then you go on for the rest of your life. It’s a microcosm for the rest of your life. The years between 31, 32, 33—I’m at my best physically. At a certain point, you reach diminishing returns. …
L: Why did it take two years for BJ? That’s the question people ask a lot. … You’re a really tough opponent, is the bottom line.
R: They perceive the threat is greater than the reward. Now that I’m ranked No. 12 .. maybe that’ll change. One more win, and I’m in the top 10. What I find is, randoms want to fight …
Conor McGregor
How to beat Khabib Nurmagomedov
Top MMA fighters of all time
R: First off Fador is number one. Talk about people completely underappreciated. … The UFC came along after him. At the time he was at his height, the UFC was not where it’s at for heavyweight fighting. He was unbelievable … I remember watching 2004; Nogara fought … That had a 10-minute first round and a five-minute second. It’s a borderline different sport. …
L: They would disagree. But … it’s totally true.
R: Don’t drown me, swimmers. I don’t swim very well. (He was using an analogy to swimming competitions that change the rules of swimming.) It’s like asking, how would a great grappler from day do against someone from 1995. That’s not fair. Like comparing Spartans with modern-day Army guys. In my mind, the people I think about for great fighters—their quality of opposition, their level of lasting innovation; the courage they have to demonstrate. Being a big fish in a small pond doesn’t take much courage. BJ Penn; he fought ___ ___; that’s insane! The Gracie family, they never … that was definitely a different sport.
L: You have to say that Hoyce is up there
R: I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for them. Hoyce would tell you himself that Hixon would have handled business back then. … Hoice up there for sure.
L: Nobody seems to agree with me on this: It seems people value how long you’ve been a champion, how many defenses of the champion that you’ve had. To me, I highly value singular moments of genius. If you look at Conor McGregor
R: He didn’t defend either title.
L: Same with Messi, in soccer. If you look at Lionel Messi, there’s just moments of brilliants, unlike any in history, for both Conor and Messi. Why is it about this arbitrary championship thing.
R: I think it’s easier for people to wrap their head around … If I pick Tom Brady in the first round of the NFL draft, and it works out, I do great. I’m insulating myself from criticism, if I go by the numbers. How many times are the best stat-getters at the NFL Combine the greatest players in the NFL? So … if we want to define greatest fighter ever, moments, I agree. I don’t blame Argentina not winning the World Cup on Messi. That’s not fair! I remember when Trent Dilfer was the quarterback for the Baltimore Ravens. They had such a strong defense … they won the Super Bowl. I don’t think anybody’s going to put Trent Dilfer in the same category as Dan Marino. Let’s use March Madness; that guy always makes the finals, but he never gets it done. …
L: It’s interesting; we’re obsessed with these numbers.
R: Because we can’t assess their method, right? Look at that guy do X-Y swimming. I can’t look at Michael Phelps’ technique and say anything! So .. I need a concrete identifier.
L: Most people won’t put Ronda Rousey in the top 20 or anything, but she changed, more than almost anybody else, she changed martial arts history. I don’t think I’m over-exaggerating that. She made it okay for women to be fighters. And changed the way we see … she’s one of the great feminists of our time. (Laughs) In a weird kind of way. I don’t know. She’s not in the conversation; you start converting into numbers
R: Is she among the greatest fighters? Or did she do the greatest things. …
Mike Tyson
L: On Reedit, you said you don’t experience much fear … There’s this clip of Tyson talking about how he feels leading up to a fight; he’s kind of overtaken with fear, but as it gets closer to the ring, his confidence grows. Have you seen the clip?
R: I’m aware of it.
L: Let me play it for you. … he’s cognizant of his demons, and .. .about violence. Does that resonate with you? Or do you hold to this idea, that you’re really not afraid.
R: I can appreciate what he’s saying. I can speak to feeling concerned … if you feel a certain way. People are a lot more like computers than we like to admit. Just because I can’t parse what’s going on and why doesn’t mean it doesn’t make sense. If I’m concerned … I don’t need to push it down and bury it. Why am I feeling this way? What am I missing? Is there an angle I haven’t considered. When it comes to competing, I do an alright job. If I feel this way, there’s a reason. Am I thinking about this the wrong way? Maybe I’ll be up for four hours that night; watching sparring, what have I not addressed? When I am thinking about things more accurately, I feel any of that concern kind of dissipate. If I honestly thought—I know I’m gonna die at a certain point, I’m gonna get hurt. The pain of loss would be nothing to the pain of running away. If I think about, where’s my value? I’m a winner, every time I step into that ring. I can’t promise that I’ll win. I know, for certain, I’ve competed with enough people, I know where I stand. I know I’m not perfect, and the better fighter … the man who fights better wins on the night. If I give credence to “Only the person that’s won, has value.” Versus, what’s your process; how are you behaving? If I can focus on the process … I’ll respect my opponent. Winning and losing don’t make you a bad or good person. That can be the truth socially, academically.
L: Is there a primal fear, though? Of getting hurt? What about the violence? Tyson was on Rogan; he was trying to psychoanalyze himself, about why he enjoys violence so much. He called it orgasmic … Trump retweeted this clip. I don’t know how to contextualize that. … He’s like the Kubrick of our time.
R: I’d say Mike is uncommonly honest. People, athletes, make a habit of lying. … Why should he not? Did he run up and hit somebody who didn’t sign up for this? NO. They signed up to be there.
L: With Tyson, there’s this weird, non-standard behavior. Who else has that? In jiu jitsu, Paul Aris, has this kind of weirdness. Like, what’s in there? There’s a fear, most opponents would have. It takes you out of the realm of, it’s a game. It takes you … it strips away several layers of Ryan Hall the podcast guest, the jiu jitsu competitor, it gets down to the point of Ryan Hall, the murderer of all things that get in his way. In this society we put that aside. Now the society’s being tested in many ways.
R: Do we want the answer to that. In Pulp Fiction: “If my answers scare you, you should cease asking scary questions.” … Is that appropriate for situation X, Y, or Z? Humanity is at a different place now than we were 5,000 years ago. All of us are descended from people that have killed things with their teeth and their fingernails. Think about it—the chances of dying by violence now are so slim! … It was very common before. And if you were not able to kill, you were constantly subject to people that could … Normally, we don’t expect this to get serious; I’ll yell at you, you’ll yell at me. But it can change … somebody says, that’s not okay.
L: There’s motivations and forces that don’t play by the rules. Nature’s metal is under the surface.
R: I take out my phone to say, you’re going to get caught. But really, I’m further antagonizing you. We should all realize, that’s one step away at all times. People say, “I don’t feel safe.” You’re not safe! Can you imagine how many guns there are in this country? But that’s a heartening thought. … Gun violence is not really a serious issue, because it means that, with the amount of guns and bullets that are out there and in circulation. Can you imagine if 1 of every thousand was used in anger each day. It would mean this is a terrifying place. So it actually means, people are much more reasonable and sane than we’re saying. … I walked to 7-11 and didn’t get stabbed. Not because I was using my karate. We’re fortunate to live in a society … But it is funny, when we get into the ring; we peel back, we say now it’s okay. …
Fear of death
#126: James Gosling, Founder of Java
James Gosling, the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language, which in many indices is the most popular programming language in the world, but is always in the top two or three. (Lex apologizes that this podcast is short—only 111 minutes. He’s really settling into these long conversations.)
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L: I’ve read somewhere that the square root of two is your favorite irrational number
J: I have no idea where that got started
L: Anything in math or numbers that you find beautiful?
J: There’s lots of things … I used to consider myself really good at math; these days really bad. I never really had a thing for the square root of two; but when I was a teenager, there was this dictionary for curious and interesting numbers, which for some reason I read through and damn near memorized the whole thing. I started this weird habit, of when I was like filling out checks, or paying for things, I would want to make the receipt add up to an interesting number.
L: Is there some number that stuck with you?
J: Fortunately I’ve mostly forgotten all of them. … (Lex suggests 42.) I mean yeah, 42 is pretty magical.
L: Square root of two story?
J: It’s the only number that’s destroyed a religion. The Pythagoreans …. believed you could represent anything as a rational number. In that time period, this proof came out that there was no rational fraction whose value was equal to the square root of two.
L: That means nothing in this world is perfect, not even mathematics.
J: It means your definition of perfect was imperfect.
L: Then there’s the Goedel Incompleteness Theorems …
J: Although, Goerdel’s Theorem, the lesson I take from it is not that there are things you can’t know, which is fundamentally what it says. But, people want black-and-white answers; they want true or false. But if you allow a three-state logic that is true, false, or maybe—then, life is good!
L: I feel there’s a parallel to modern political discourse in there somewhere.
Math and programming
L: Do you see a parallel between math and the world of programming?
J: You know, programming is all about logical structure; understanding the patterns that come out of computation; understanding, sort of, the path through the graph of possibilities, to find a short route.
L: Meaning, find a short program that gets the job done, kind of thing? So on the topic of irrational numbers, do you see programming—you just painted it so cleanly; the littlest trajectory to find a nice little program. But is it fundamentally messy?
J: No … You watch somebody who’s good at math do math, and often it’s fairly messy. Sometimes it’s kind of magical. When I was a grad student … one of the students, his name was Jim Sachs, was, he had this reputation of being sort of a walking, talking, human theorem-proving machine. If you were having a hard problem, you could accost him in the hall and say, “Jim, ____.” He would do this funny thing; his eyes would sort of de-focus; like something in today’s movies. He’d straighten up and say, “n-log-n,” and walk away. You’d say, okay that’s the answer; how did he get there? By which time, he’s down the hallway somewhere. You’d have to figure out the path from the question to the answer.
Coding style
L: I think in one of the videos I watched, you mentioned Don Knuth, at least recommending his book. In terms of theoretical computer science, do you see something beautiful, that has been inspiring to you, speaking of n-log-n, in your work on programming languages. In that whole world of algorithms and … formal mathematical things.
J: It did stick pretty clearly for me, because one of the things that I care about is being able to … sort of look at a piece of code, and be able to prove to myself that it works. So, for example, I find that I’m at odds with many of the people around me, over issues about like, how you lay out a piece of software. Software engineers get really cranky about how they format documents that are their programs. Where they put new lines. … I tend to go for a style that’s very dense.
L: To minimize the white space
J: To maximize the amount I can see at once. I like to be able to see a whole function and understand what it does. Without having to scroll, scroll, scroll.
L: And people don’t like that?
J: I‘ve had multiple times where engineering teams staged what was effectively an intervention; they invite me to a meeting, everybody’s arrived before me. They look at me sand say, “James: About your coding style.” I’m an odd person to be coding, because I don’t think very well verbally; I’m naturally a slow reader. What most people would call a visual thinker.
L: What do you see when you think about a program.
J: I see pictures. … Code for me quickly gets translated into a picture. It’s almost like a piece of machinery, with this connected to that. I see them more like that, than I see the sort of verbal or lexical structure of letters
L: So that’s why you want to see it all in the same place.
J: Yeah; it leaps off the page at me.
L: What inputs? What outputs? …
First computer
L: What’s the first program you’ve ever written?
J: I have no idea. I know the first machine I learned to program on, was a PDP-8, at the University of Calgary.
L: Do you remember the specs?
J: Oh yeah; it had 4K of RAM, 12-bit words. The clock rate was, about a third of a megaherz.
L: So you didn’t even get to the “M”
J: Yeah. We’re like 10,000 times faster these days.
L: Was this like a serious computer.
J: No, the PDP8-I was the first thing people were calling, “mini-computer.” They were inexpensive enough that a university lab could maybe afford to buy one.
L: Time-sharing?
J: There was a time-sharing OS for that, but it wasn’t used really widely. The machine that I learned on … was kind of hidden in a back corner of the computer center. It was bought as part of a … project to do computer networking … But, they didn’t actually use it very much; it was kind of sitting there. I noticed it was kind of sitting there, so I started fooling around with it, and nobody seemed to mind.
L: It had a keyboard and a monitor?
J: This was way before monitors were common. It was a model 33 Teletype, with a paper-tape reader.
L: (laughs) so the user-interface wasn’t very good
J: It was the first computer ever built with integrated circuits. But, by that I mean, they would have like 10 or 12 transistors on one piece of silicon. Not the 10 or 12 billion that machines have today.
L: What did that feel like? Did you have inklings of the magic of exponential improvement, of Mohr’s Law, of the potential, the future was at your fingertips.
J: It was just a toy. I had always liked building stuff. But for building stuff, you would need to have parts. And those all cost money. Here you could build arbitrarily complicated things, and you didn’t need any physical materials. …
L: That’s such a good way to describe programming. … it’s completely accessible. Anyone from anywhere can build something really cool.
J: Yeah … all kinds of crazy stuff. When you were somebody like me, who had really no money, and … I remember just lusting after being able to buy, like, a transistor. (Lex laughs) When I would do electronics kind of projects, they were mostly done by dumpster-diving for trash. One of my big hauls was, discarded relay racks from the back of the phone company’s switching center.
L: Nice. That was the big memorable treasure. What did you use it for?
J: I built a machine that played tic-tac-toe …. What was hard was all the relays required a specific voltage. Getting a power supply that would do that voltage was pretty hard. I had a bunch of trashed television sets. I had to cobble something together that was wrong, but worked. I was running these relays at 300 volts; and none of the electrical connections were properly sealed off.
Lisp
Lex loves Lips; wants JG to say it’s his favorite language; but it’s only his top five or so.
J: Up the food chain for me, is Simula, which many have never used.
L: But for a lot of people, it had a huge influence. Is that one of the first functional languages?
J: No, it was the first object-oriented programming language. It was also the language where co-routines first showed up as part of the language. So, you could have a programming style that was multi-threaded, with a lot of parallelism.
L: Really?
J: Yeah, that was back, the first Simula was in 1967….. It had co-routines which are almost threads. The thing about them is they don’t have true concurrency; you can get away without really complex locking … You can’t do them on a multi-core machine, or if you try, you don’t actually get to use the multiple cores.
Write an Emacs implementation in C
J: I had been using Unix for a few years; mostly editing was this tool called Edie, sort of an ancestor of VI.
L: Is it a good editor? Not good.
J: If your input device is a Teletype, it’s pretty good; it’s certainly more humane than TECO, which was the common thing in a lot of the deck universe at that time. The original EMACS came out—
J: No, no. The first was a bunch of macros for the TECO Text Editor. …. The sort of Emacs style got popular originally at MIT, and then people did a few other implementations of EMACS; the code base was entirely different; it was the philosophical style of the original
L: What was the philosophy of Emacs. Were all implementations of it in C?
J: The macro language for TECO was … ridiculously obscure. You’d think it was just random characters; it looks like line noise.
L: Like LATEX or something
J: Way, way worse. But if you used TECO a lot; which I did; it was optimized for touch-typing at high speed. So there were no two-character commands, or only a few. Mostly they were just one character; every character on the keyboard was a separate command, or two or three commands using shift, or control. Just a way of tightly encoding it. Mostly what EMACS did was it made that visual. One way to think of TECO was, use EMACS with your eyes closed. … Where you have to maintain a mental model of your document. You have to go, okay, the cursor is between the “a” and the “e”; I want to exchange those so I do these things. It’s almost exactly the EMACS command set; but with your eyes closed. … So, what EMACS added to the whole thing was being able to visually see what you were editing, in a form that matched your document. And … a lot of things changed in the command set …
Early days of the Internet
J: Some of it is remarkably unchanged … One of the things I noticed really early on, when I was at Carnegie Melon, was that a lot of social life became centered around the Arpa-net. Between email and text messaging. Because text messaging was a part of it really early on; there were no cell phones, but you’re sitting at a terminal and you’re typing stuff. Like, a one-line message
L: So like chat?
J: Like chat. So pretty much everything, from arranging lunch to going out on dates, was driven by social media (Lex laughsA). In the 80s.
L: Easier than phone calls, yeah.
J: My life had gotten to where, I was living on social media from like the early mid-80s. And so when it transformed into the Internet, and social media explodes, I was kind of like, what’s the big deal! …
L: It’s just a scale thing. …
J: right … The fundamentals have hardly changed. The technologies behind the networking have changed significantly; the watershed moment of, you know, going from Arpa-net to the Internet, and then people starting to just scale and scale and scale. The scaling that happened in the early ‘90s, and the way that so many vested interests fought the Internet.
L: Interesting; because you can’t really control it? Who fought the Internet?
J: Fundamentally, the cable TV companies and broadcasters and phone companies, at the deepest fibers of their being, hated the Internet. It was actually kind of a funny thing; think of a cable company. Most of the employees; their job is getting TV shows, movies, whatever, out to their customers. They view their business as serving their customers. But as you climb up the hierarchy in the cable companies, that view shifts, because really, the business of the cable companies had always been selling eyeballs to advertisers. That view of a cable company didn’t really dawn on most people who worked at the cable companies, but … I had various dust-ups with various cable companies where you could see, in the stratified layers of the corporation, that this view of the reason that you have cable TV, is to capture eyeballs.
L: They didn’t see it that way!
J: Most of the people who worked at the cable companies; their view was that their job was getting delightful content out to their customers, and their customers would pay for that. Higher up, they viewed this as a way of attracting eyeballs to them. And then what they were really doing was selling the eyeballs, that were glued to their content, to the advertisers.
L: And so the Internet was a competition in that sense. They were right! (Laughs)
J: Well, yeah! There was one proposal that we sent, one detailed proposal that we wrote up back at Sun in the early ‘90s, that was essentially like, anybody with Internet technologies can become a provider of content. You could be distributing home movies to your parents, or your cousins, or anywhere else. Anybody could become a publisher! That was like in the early ‘90s. We thought, this would be great! The kind of content we were thinking about at the time were like, home movies, kids’ essays, stuff from grocery stores or a restaurant; that they could actually start sending information out about.
L: That’s brilliant
J: The reaction of the cable companies is like, fuck no! Because then we’re out of business!
L: What is it about companies? They could have been the head of that wave.
J: They didn’t see a path to revenue
L: Somewhere in there there’s a lesson for big companies; to try to anticipate the renegade, out-there, out-of-the-box people like yourself in the early days, writing proposals …
J: It wasn’t; if you’re in a position where you’re making truck-loads of money off a particular business model, the whole thought of leaping the chasm—You can see, Oh! New models that are more effective are emerging. Digital cameras versus film cameras.
L: Why take the leap?
J: Right, because you’re making so much money off of film! In my past at sun, one of our big customers was Kodak. I interacted with them quite a lot. They actually had a big digital camera R&D group. They knew, that, you just look at the trend lines, and you look at the emerging quality of these digital cameras, and you can just plot it on a graph! Sure, film is better today, but you know, digital is improving like this; the lines are gonna cross, and the point at which the lines cross is gonna be a collapse in their business. They could see that; they absolutely knew that. The problem is, up to the point where they hit the wall, they were making truck-loads of money! When they did the math, it never started to make sense for them to kind of lead the charge. Part of the issues for a lot of companies, for this kind of stuff: If you’re going to leap over a chasm like that, like Kodak going from film to digital; that’s a transition that’s going to take a while …
L: That’s where visionary leadership comes in …
J: Partly to take the hit. You can draw all the graphs you want that show, if we leap from here, on our present trajectory … there’s a cliff. If we force ourselves into a transition, we proactively do that, we can be on the next wave. But there will be a period when we’re in a trough. Pretty much always there ends up being a trough as you leap the chasm. The way that public companies work, on this planet, they’re reporting every quarter. The one thing that a CEO must never do is take a big hit. Over some quarter. And many of these transitions involve a big hit, for a period of time. You know, one, two, three quarters. So you get some companies, like Tesla and Amazon, are really good examples, are companies that take huge hits. They have the luxury of being able to ignore the stock market for a little while. Not so true today. But in the early days of both of those companies; they both did this thing about, I don’t care about the quarterly reports; I care about how many happy customers we have. That can often be an enemy of the bottom line.
Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos
L: How do they make that work? Amazon operated in the negative for a long time.
J: A lot of those had what amounted to patient money, because there’s a charismatic central figure who has a really-large block of stock, and they can just make it so.
L: You’ve gotten the chance to work for some pretty big leaders. What are your thoughts on Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos? They’re founders, or early-on folks. Amazon has taken a lot of leaps. That probably at the time, people had criticized. What is this bookstore thing?
J: Yeah! And Bezos had a vision. And he had the ability to just follow it. Lots of people have visions; you know, the average vision is completely idiotic and you crash and burn. These Silicon valley crash-and-burn rate is pretty high. Not necessarily because they’re bad ideas, but just timing. Timing and luck. You take companies like Tesla. Really, the original Tesla sort of pre-Elon, was kind of doing sort of okay. But he just drove them! And because he had a really strong vision, he would make calls that were always, mostly pretty good. The Model X was kind of a goofball thing to do
L: But he did it boldly anyway! There were so many that opposed him on the Falcon doors; from an engineering perspective, they’re ridiculous. But they’re the symbol of what great leadership is; you have a vision, go all in!
J: If you’re going to do something stupid, make it really stupid! To Musk’s credit, he’s a really sharp guy … Steve Jobs, similar … He wasn’t smart about technology; he was really sharp about the human relationship between humans and objects. He was a jerk! (laughs)
L: Can we linger on that. People say he’s a jerk; is that a feature or a bug?
J: That’s the question, right. You take people like Steve, who was really hard on people. The question is, was he really needlessly hard on people? Or was he just making people reach to meet his vision? And, you could kind of spin it either way.
L: Well the results tell a story. Whatever jerk ways he had; he made people often do the best work of their life.
J: Yeah. Absolutely true. I interviewed with him several times. I did various negotiations with him. Even though, personally I liked him; I could never work for him!
L: Why do you think? Can you put into words the kind of tension that you feel would be destructive as opposed to constructive?
J: Oh, he’d yell at people, he’d call ‘em names.
L: And you don’t like that?
J: No. I don’t think you need to do that. I think, there’s pushing people to excel. And then, there’s too far, and I think he was on the wrong side of the line. I’ve never worked for Musk. I know a number of people who have. It shows up in the press a lot, that Musk is kind of that way. One of the things I loathe about Silicon Valley these days, is that a lot of the high-flying successes are run by people that are complete jerks. There’s this mythology that has come out of Steve Jobs is that the reason that he succeeded is because he was super-hard on people. And, in a number of corners, people started going, “If I want to succeed, I need to be a real jerk.” That, for me, just does not compute. I know a lot of successful people who are not jerks!
L: The general public somehow lifts the jerks up into the hero status.
J: Because they do things that get the in the press. The people who, don’t … do the kind of things that spill into the press …
Work hard and smart
L: Yeah, just talked to Chris Lattner for the second time … he also talked about this … One thing … I would describe a resistance to working hard in the Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs and Elon push people to work really hard. There’s a question of whether it’s possible to do that nicely. One thing that bothers me; maybe I’m romanticizing suffering, but working hard is required for accomplishing anything interesting. This idea that you should work smart, not hard—sounds to me, like you should be lazy. Of course you want to be maximally efficient, but in order to discover the efficient path …
J: The smart-hard thing isn’t an either-or, it’s an and. The people who say, you should work smart, not hard—they pretty much always fail.
L: Yeah, thank you.
J: I mean there are counter-examples. But they’re more, people who benefitted from luck.
L: Yeah, exactly. Luck, and timing, like you said, is often essential. But you can push people to work hard and do incredible work
J: Without being nasty.
Open source
L: You’ve done some incredible work … What are your thoughts about Open Source, now, and in retrospect? About licensing, about open sourcing? Do you think open source is a good thing? A bad thing? Do you have wisdom from that experience?
J: In general, I’m a big fan of Open Source. The way that it can be used to build communities, and promote the development of things, and promote collaboration—is really pretty grand. When Open Source turns into a religion that says all things must be Open Source, I get kind of weird about that, because it’s sort of like saying—some versions of that end up saying that all software engineers must take a vow of poverty. As though ..
L: It’s unethical to have money. To build a company …
J: And there’s a slice of me that actually buys into that. Because, people who make billions of dollars off of a patent, and the patent came from, literally, a stroke of lightning that hit you as you lie half-awake in bed. Yeah, that’s lucky; good for you. The way that explodes into something that looks to me a lot like exploitation. You see a lot of that in the drug industry. When you’ve got medications that cost, you know, $100 a day. It’s like, no.
L: Yeah, so the interesting thing about Open Source; what bothers me is when something is not Open Source, and because of that, it’s a worse product. If I look at just your implementation of Emacs … I use Emacs; I apologize to the world, but I still love it. I could have been using your implementation, but why aren’t I?
J: So are you using the GNU Emacs?
L: I guess the default on Linux; is that GNU?
J: And that through a strange passage started out as the one that I wrote. And part of that was because, in the last couple of years of grad school, it became really clear to me, that I was either going to be Mr. Emacs forever, or I was going to graduate. I couldn’t actually do both. ….. .. Maybe I could be fabulously wealthy today if I had become Mr. Emacs; Emacs had mushroomed into a series of text-processing applications and all kinds of stuff. But, I have a long history of financially sub-optimal decisions, because I didn’t want that life. Right? I went to grad school because I wanted to graduate. Being Mr. Emacs for a while was kind of fun, and then it kind of became not fun. When it was not fun, and I was, there was no way I could pay my rent, right? I was like, do I carry on as a grad student? I had a research assistant-ship and was living off of that. I was doing all my RA work. And being Mr. Emacs all at the same time. …
Java
L: You have created one of the most popular programming languages in the world; it’s a language that I first learned object-oriented programming with. I think it’s used on millions of devices today, Java. So the absurd question: can you tell the origin story of Java?
J: A long time ago at Sun, in about 1990, there was a group of us that were kind of worried that there was stuff going on that the computer industry was missing out on. A few of us started this project at Sun; we started talking about it; it really got going in ‘91. It was all about, what was happening in terms of computing hardware processors and networking and all of that, that was outside of the computer industry The sort of early glimmers of cell phones that were happening then. … The Internet of things. They all had processors in them … There was something going on there we needed to understand.
L: C and C++ were in the air already.
J: Everything was written in those at that time.
L: So why the need for revolution.
J: It wasn’t about a language. It was as simple and vague as, there are things happening out there … and
L: we need to understand them!
J: A few of us went on some somewhat epic road trips. … Get on an airplane, go to Japan, visit Toshiba and Sharp and Mitsubishi and Sony, and all of these folks. Because we worked for Sun, we had folks who were willing to give us introductions. We visited Samsung, and a bunch of Korean companies; we went all over Europe; to places like Phillips and siemens and Thomson.
L: What did you see there?
J: One of the things that leapt out; they were doing all the usual computer things people had been doing 20 years before. They were reinventing computer networking. They were making all the mistakes people in the computer industry had made. Since I had done a lot of work in the networking area; you’d go and visit Company X; they’d describe networking thing they were doing. Without any thought, I could tell them the 25 things that were going to be complete disasters with that thing they were doing. I don’t know if that had impact on any of them … That particular story of repeating the disasters of the computer science industry … Thought was, maybe we could do something useful, bringing them forward somewhat. Also, at the same time, we learned a bunch of things from these, mostly computer electronics companies. High on the list was that, they viewed their relationship with the customer as sacred. They were never, ever willing to make trade-offs for safety. One of the things that had always made me nervous, in the computer industry, was that people were willing to make tradeoffs in reliability to get performance. They want faster, faster—it breaks a little more often, maybe you run it a little hotter than you should. It always blew my mind how the folks at Kray Supercomputers got their division to be really fast was by doing Newton-ratson approximations. The bottom several bits of A over B were essentially random numbers.
L: What could possibly go wrong?
J: … Figuring out how to nail the bottom bit; to make sure, if you put a piece of toast in a toaster, it’s not going to kill the customer; it’s not going to burst into flames and burn the house down.
L: Those are principles that were inspiring. … But … Java is called Oak, from a tree outside the window … how did it become this powerful language?
J: A bunch of things. The way we decided we could understand things better was by building a demo, a prototype of something. Because it was easy and fun, we decided to build a control system for some home electronics. As we were building it, we sort of discovered there were some things about standard practice in C programming that were really getting in the way. It wasn’t exactly because were writing all this C and C++ code; we could write it to do the right thing, but, one of the things that was weird in the group was that we had, a guy whose top-level job was, he was a business-guy. An MBA kind of person. (sighs) There were a bunch of things that were kind of going wrong. As we reflected, the requirements for security and safety, low-level details in C like naked pointers. Back in the early ‘90s, it was well-understood that the number one source of security vulnerabilities was just pointers, was just bugs! It was like 50-70% of all vulnerabilities were just bugs, the vast majority of them were buffer overflows. We had to make sure this could not happen; this cannot continue. One of the things I find really entertaining this year; I forget which rag published it. There was this article that came out; an examination of all the security vulnerabilities in Chrome. Chrome is like a giant piece of C++ code. Sixty to 70 percent of all of them were stupid pointer tricks. I thought—it’s 30 years later, and we’re still there! That’s one of those, slap your forehead and just wanna cry moments.
L: Would you attribute the creation of Java to C pointers (laughs). An obvious problem!
J: That was one of the trigger points.
L: Concurrency you’ve mentioned.
Java virtual machine
Android
Advice
#127: Joe Rogan (Experience)
Joe Rogan, that we recorded after my recent experience on his podcast, JRE. Joe has been an inspiration to me, and to millions of people, for just being somebody who puts love out there in the world, and being genuinely curious about wild ideas, from chimps on psychedelics to quantum mechanics and AI. Like many of you, I’ve been a fan of his podcast for over a decade. And now, somehow, miraculously, am humbled to be able to call him a friend.
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L: Do you ponder your mortality? Are you afraid of death?
J: I do think about it sometimes. I mean I’m 53; if everything goes great, I have less than 50 years left. If everything goes great!
L: It could happen today … That’s kind of a stoic thing to meditate on death. Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon; they believe death is at the core of everything.
J: I think having a sense of urgency is very beneficial. Understanding your time is limited can aid you greatly.
Chaos of 2020 and beyond
Are we going to be okay?
Violence, competition, and Sober October
J: (My dad) was violent; it made me feel very scared to be around him. Who he was as a human is transferred into my DNA. To be prejudiced against myself, I look like a violent person. Just the size of my hands; the width of my shoulders, there’s most likely a lot of violence in my ancestry. I think we minimize that with people. So much of your behavior; when I see my daughter. I have one daughter that’s obsessive; she wants to get really good at things; she’ll practice things all day long. That’s like me. But without the anger, the fear. Intense obsession with doing things really well. We’ll have to tell her to stop. Stop doing handsprings in the house! Sit down, have dinner. She says one more, one more. She’s psycho! I think there’s a lot of behavior and personality that is passed down through genetics. We don’t really know, how much of who you are is learned behavior, or something that’s intrinsically a part of you because of who your parents were.
L: You channeled it. Your life is a productive explanation of how to channel that.
J: Yes. Get that monkey to sit down, and calm down. There’s another person in there; a calm, rational, kind, friendly person. … Then there’s that dude who comes out when I did Sober October; that dude wants to get up in the morning and go! I didn’t really remember what I used to be like, until that. When I’m working on seven hours a day; and so obsessed; all I was thinking about was winning. … I kept telling them, ‘You’re gonna die!”
L: You weren’t joking … This was the scary thing when I interact with Goggins. And you, also. This is why I’ve been avoiding David Goggins, recently. He wants to talk on this podcast, but he also wants to run an ultra-marathon with me. If I spend any time in this realm, with the Joe Rogan of Sober October; I might have to die to get out!
J: ;There’s a competitive aspect that’s super-unhealthy. … Goggins draining his knee. That would stop me from running. But he is perpetually in this push-it mindset, what he calls, the dog in him. The dog is in him, and he feeds that dog. That’s who he is. He’s fuel for millions and millions of people. He motivates in a a way that is so powerful, but can be very destructive. I know, now, that that thing is still in me. It came out in me. when I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes. That was many months of training! I was just thinking, all day long. But it fucks with all other aspects of your life. Because that mindset isn’t the mindset of an artist … it’s the mindset of a conqueror
Mike Tyson
L: Yeah, a destroyer. It’s so interesting to see Mike Tyson make the switch. However that fight goes; he stepped into a different dimension
j: Roy Jones Jr. is coming on my podcast soon. Before the fight. I’m curious to see how it goes down, but genuinely concerned. Because Tyson’s a heavyweight …
L: I don’t know if Jones has that room in his mental house to be ready for Tyson
J; I don’t know; Mike doesn’t have a room; he has an empire on there. He’s in that firmly. When he got out of the weed and started training again … Physically, in person, he looks spectacular.
Managing obsession
L: I watched videos of him. … Have you ever considered competing in jiu jitsu?
J: No, I had to quit; I can’t get obsessed. … I get obsessed with things …. competitive things. Exciting competitive things. Theyr’re very dangeöous for me …. The ultimate competitive video game would be jiu-jitsu … My concern would be I’d become a professional
Jiu jitsu game
Best martial art for self-defense
Second amendment
Memorable JRE moments
L: Been a fan of your podcast for a long time. .. if you look at your old studio you just left; … some epic moments that stand out to you?
J: Elon Musk blowing that flame-thrower in the middle of the hallway. I have a video of that … he’s a madman! Having Bernie Sanders in there; all the fun fight companions we did; all the crazy ones with Joey Diaz, and Duncan Trussell … Podcasts is a weird art form, and it almost sounds silly; it seems like something that chose me, rather than I chose it. I’m showing up like an antenna; I plug in and twist on … I put the thing together; I’m a passenger of this weird ride.
L: … I like this idea that human beings are carriers of these ideas … the idea found you … to spread itself through the podcasting medium. … I think about Joey Diaz; you’ve had him on … 50 times? He is over-the-top offensive; that’s just who he is to the core. Is there some sense where you wondered, whether it’s right to have Spotify episode #1 with Duncan Trussell.
J: We want that; we wore NASA suits; we got high as fuck
L: That’s rare … you’re not supposed to talk to Duncan Trussell, with the huge platform that you have, for five hours.
J: Why not?
L: Because Donald Trump apparently listens to your podcast. (Joe laughs) … I was nervous to have David Fravor; because CEOs had told me they listen to me …. Just the way DF sees the world; he opened himself to the possibility of unconventional ideas. Most people in the scientific community don’t want to … So there comes this fear; should I talk to this person or not? You’re an inspiration
J: You have to! First of all, I have fuck-you money. What’s the point of having that, if you don’t say fuck you? … If I was a kid, I would think a rich guy ought to have a bunch of sports cars. … So you’re supposed to do that … Muscle cars, particularly ones for the 1960s and early 70s; they speak to me.
Ideas breed in brains of humans
L: What’s your favorite muscle car?
J: Probably that ‘65 Corvette.
L: I think I’ve driven the ‘69 Corvette
J: Generation 2 … vs. Generation 3 (Corvettes). The point is, I like what I like; and so if I can do what I want to do; I should do what I want to do. I would do the Duncan podcast if no one was listening. “Maybe ideas are living life forms!”
L: (laughs) Man!
J: The idea-life-form idea is mine
L: I think about that on the technical side.
J: They might be alive. When someone has an idea for an invention, a toaster, and they think about it—all I’d need is these heating elements and a spring, and then they build this thing—all of a sudden, it’s alive. You’ve manifested it in a physical form. You’re thinking about a thing … you could say, oh that’s creativity, it’s part of being a person. All those things are true. I’m not saying there’s magic to what I’m saying. But it’s also possible we’re simplifying something by just saying, it’s creativity. … Is it possible, that ideas—we’re the only animal … bees make beehives; they’re very uniform. Chips will use sticks to get termites and stuff. There’s something about what we do … look at this room; these electronics; so many things human beings did. These all came out of ideas! The idea germinates in someone’s head … they change the world!
J: … I’m always talking about the Steven Pressfield book The War of Art … … even if that’s not real, that’s how it works. If you treat it like a muse …
L: I never thought about what he’s doing as sitting there waiting for the idea to find him.
J: If you show up and put in the time; the ideas, they will arrive. It’s the same with writing comedy. Sometimes, I come home from the comedy store; I’m writing, it’s all bad, nothing there, nothing there, and all of a sudden, BAM! There’s the idea … The next night … BOOM, it gets this big laugh. I know that came out of the discipline to sit down and call the muse.
L: That’s cool, the ideas have found you (Lex laughs)
Advise for Lex
J: …. I hear exactly what the audience hears
L: One of the interesting things about your point; you almost never have done, and generally don’t do, remote. You don’t go to another person’s location. … Sapolksy, he needs to get his ass back in the studio.
J: I was a fan of his … I reached out to him a long time ago. I caught him in downtown LA; I greedily snatched up an hour of his time
L: He doesn’t get how much magic can happen in this studio. … The discovery of new ideas that can happen as a result of conversation. Someone as brilliant as him, if he gives himself over to the conversation for hours at a time.
Long-form conversation
L: I’m getting more confidence—you’ve been an inspiration. They’ll say, “He has 30 minutes on his schedule.” So I say, “No … three hours.” They’re starting to get it. You’re a beacon of hope in that respect. They think nobody wants to listen for longer than 30 minutes. Reality is, if you give yourself over to the three hours … you can learn … what you didn’t even know you think.
J: You just have to be confident you can do it … I’ve always been a curious person. Interested in how people think about; talking to people about their mindset, expanding on my own ideas, just talking shit. We would have these podcasts; they would go on forever. My friend Ari … I never let him forget this. He goes, ‘You have to edit your podcast.’ He said they’re not gonna listen to it. He goes, ‘Just do it. Forty-five minutes, that’s all you need. No one has that kind of time.’ Now he does it! His are two-and-a-half hours long now!
L: I’ve mentioned this to you before; I’m going to talk to Putin
J: Putin’s a dangerous character … You ever see the thing with Jerry Kraft, where they stole his Super Bowl ring
L: I think that was a little bit of a misunderstanding
J: He asks to see the ring …
L: He’s a big believer in displays of power. It’s possible he did that. I think he sees himself as a tool with which to demonstrate that Russia still belongs on the stage with the big players. … In terms of a human being, outside of any of the evils that he may or may not have done; he is a really thoughtful, intelligent, fun human being. Like, the wit, and the depth, from the JRE perspective—I’m like his manager, now, selling. He’s a judo
J: He’s a really good at judo. He’s a legit black belt.
L: Not only that; he loves it. MMA as well. But you wouldn’t travel to him.
J: (shakes head silently)
L: Hold to your principles …
J: There’s not a person that I have to have on the show. I’m as happy to talk to you as I am to talk to Trump, as I am to talk to Joey Diaz. I like talking to people. I try not to get too many right-wing people in a row, or too many progressive people in a row. Not too many fighters in the row. Comedians are the one group, I can have, three, four, five in a row. Because that’s my tribe. We can talk about anything. The conversations, they’re a strange dance. You want to not step on your own feet; do it in a way that’s entertaining for people. Conversations, learning to talk to people, it’s a weird skill! I didn’t know it was a skill until I started doing it. Along the way, I realized; when you talk to people that are bad at it, you realize it’s a skill. My people (comedians), they want to talk, but don’t necessarily want to listen. They’re waiting for their opportunity; they talk over you. I try real hard not to do that; sometimes I fail.
L: Ultimately, the skill of conversation is really listening. Listening and thinking.
J: Being genuinely curious, really having a take on what they’re saying, maybe a follow-up question. It’s got to be real, it’s got to be authentic. … I’m locked in to the conversation when I’m listening … A thing that happens during conversations—you’re there. A good podcast … I feel like I’m in the room! Oh yeah, that’s a great conversation …. I love listening to them; I love putting them together. The fact that this podcast has gotten so fucking big; it’s stunning to me. I never anticipated it! That stupid thing I used to do in my couch, in my office, was the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life, by far! … My friend Tom Segura, when I first started doing this, he would ask Brian Redban, he asked him, “What the fuck is he doing? Why is he doing this?!”
L: They form a friendship with you. When people come up to me; the love in their eyes is kind of beautiful. It’s also heartbreaking; because you realize you’ll never get to know them back. It’s sad to see someone who’s clearly brilliant and interesting, and friends with you—and you’ll never get to now them.
J: I run into people; my kids are starting to get used to it. Somebody comes up to me; the kid says, “Do you know him? … How does he know you?” One of my daughters is 12; one of her friends, a boy, is 13—he’s obsessed with me. She says to him, “I don’t think you like me. You’re just into my dad, you fucking weirdo.” … Men .. I’m masculine; I don’t go through a corporate filter. … I just do it. so I have a whole podcast where I just talk about cars. … if you don’t like that one; I have 1500 other episodes. It’s authentically, what I’m interested in. Whether David Fraver and his experience with UFOs, David Sinclair about life extension, you about AI. It’s because I like to talk to people. I like when people are into shit.
Meaning of life
L: Last question. I ask this to make legitimate scientists roll their eyes. What is the meaning of life?
J: I think there’s many, many meanings. A way to navigate life that’s enjoyable. It requires many things. It requires love. Loved ones. Family. People that care about you, and vice versa. Then, interests. Things that stimulate you. It could just be a subsistence lifestyle. Many practice that, and they seem incredibly happy. That is an interest. There’s direct connection between their actions and sustenance. If you don’t have that, I think you need something you’re passionate about. Too many people living a life, just doing a job. Don’t have a passion for what they’re doing. That’s a recipe for a boring and unfulfilling life.
L: You mentioned love; if we could backtrack. There’s demons and what-not in there somewhere.
J: I’m so interested in helping people. I like when people feel good. I want people to feel good; my family, friends, guests … I’m a big believer in as much as I kind, to spread positive energy, joy, and happiness—and relay all the good advice I’ve ever gotten. I find those things benefit people … The way we interact with each other is so important …
#128: Michael Malice!! (first visit)
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Putin and the Russian soul
Love and trolling
Problem with government
Anarchism
Politics
Are most people capable of thinking deeply?
Willy Wonka and Albert Camus view of life
Trolling
Conspiracy theories
Donald Trump and the Election
Trump Biden presidential debates
Journalism is broken
Communism
Presidential candidates
Libertarian party
Objectivism
Trolling
L: You really don’t think people are deep-down capable of being intelligent?
M: No, not at all!
L: You’re being so clear about it …
M: Here’s evidence for my position; not proof. A lot of times when you have an audience as big as mine, and people come at you. A lot of times, people don’t only come at me saying the same thing but they say it in the same way. That’s not a mind.
L: I’m saying if challenged, it can rise to the challenge of deep thinking.
The New Right
L: If I ask you, what’s the book New Right about?
M: It’s about a group of people, united solely by their opposition to progressivism … little in common; but all frequently caricatured and dismissed by the large, establishment media. To me, we’re talking about trolls …
L: How does it connect to the right.
M: Alt-right is portion of the New Right that feels that not race but racism is the most important … By definition they would not be part of the mainstream. … I would say it is of use to be familiar with their arguments, because to dismiss any school of thought, especially one that has historically gained leverage … just to say “oh they’re racist, I don’t need to think about them”—it doesn’t behoove you.
L: What do we draw from the 4Chan side of things?
M: Tits or get the fuck out.
L: What’s that mean?
M: Sometimes a woman appears; and they’ll reply, tits or get the fuck out …
L: Oh! I’m very slow. So that’s very disrespectful toward female members of the community. There’s rules to this community, and one of them is, we’re not very good with women.
M: It’s a principle, not a rule. (laughs)
L: We’re not going to get laid.
M: But we are sometimes going to get pics.
L: Are there other actual principles? From my maybe-naive perspective, they have the darkest aspects of trolling.
M: That’s not 4chan per se. If you have an idiosyncratic or unique worldview; you’ll be able to find like-minded people …
L: That’s an ideal
M: It’s not an ideal; it’s something that happens a lot … The people there are much more erudite than you’d think … I’ll give you an example; there was a video someone posted of a girl who put kittens in a bag and threw it in a river. They found out who she was in a day and got her arrested.
L: That’s good! That’s heartwarming … that feels like … 8chan.
M: 8chan is twice as good as 4chan.
L: It feels like they’re the kind of community that would take that kitten situation and make a mockery of it … I’m already overwhelmed clearly by 4chan lingo. I literally wrote down in my notes, in doing research for this conversation, I learned the word “pleb.”
M: You know what pleb means!
L: No.
M: Like a plebiscite! Or a plebeian! It’s a very unsophisticated mechanism of being dismissive.
L: Okay, back to 4chan, alt-right.
M: Those are very different concepts; don’t conflate them. The alt-right was more born of blogs … scientific racism, racial realism, breaking down issues from a racialist perspective. 4chan is more dynamic; it doesn’t lend itself to these …
L: It’s not an essential mechanism of the alt-right. (No!) … What do you make of the psychology of this … culture
M: When you have a little knowledge of something that nobody’s talking about; and one group is talking about it, you’re going to be drawn to that group. Because issues of race, anti-semitism … is so taboo in our culture … understandably.
L: Where does the alt-right stand now? I hear that term used.
M: The term has been weaponized by the corporate press for people they want to read out of society. … Milo … Trump. It’s become a slur, much like incel or bot … removed from its original meaning. .
L: Is there a movement that calls themselves alt-right.
M: There’s the dissident right. There’s a huge overlap; it’s very much the same people … I’m not tracking it much anymore; I don’t find it particularly as, now that the book’s done, I’m looking more into history for my next book. I’m going to talk a lot about the Cold War. This stuff has fallen away from my radar, to some extent. It’s been an effective movement to have them marginalized.
Cancel culture
M: I think it’s Mao-ism. Corporate America has implemented that better than the Communist Party ever could. There was this meeting at Northwestern U. Law School where everyone on the call got up and said they were racist. This concept of getting up and confessing your sins before the collective. … My name’s John, I’m a racist. This is loony tunes.
L: You took a step further; it’s not just cancel-culture .. .
M: It’s a systemic organized movement being used for very nefarious purposes, to dominate an entire nation.
L: I used to defend academia more, because … I still do. It’s a nuanced discussion, because folks like Jordan Peterson that attack academia; they’re really talking about Gender Studies. Me from MIT, it’s a university of science and engineering; the faculty there really don’t think about these issues, or haven’t traditionally. It is beginning to even infiltrate there. … Outside of biology. Let’s put biology with the gender studies. It’s starting to infiltrate. It worries me. I don’t know what the negative effect there would be; it feels like it’s anti-intellectual. On the surface, it feels like a path towards progress, when I’m zoomed-out, squinting my eyes. But when I actually join the conversation on diversity, to listen in. It quickly makes me realize, there’s no interest in making a better world. It’s about …
M: It’s about domination. If you’re a lowest-status white person, using anti-racism is the only mechanism you will have to feel superior to another human being. In terms of fighting it, I suggest seizing all university endowments, and distributing that money as reparations. Diminishing the universities’ intellectual hegemony. They are the real villains in the picture; they are least prepared to aggressed upon. After the government and the corporate press, they are the last leg of the school. They don’t know what’s coming, and I cannot wait.
L: We disagree; you want to dismantle, broken institutions.
M: I don’t think they’re broken; I think they’re working like by design. … They’ve been talking about this 100 years ago—talking about bringing the next generation of American leaders, which is code for promulgating an ideology based on egalitarian principles and world domination.
L: My experience at MIT is there’s a bunch of administrators; they are the bureaucracy. They’re pretty useless; they get in the way. But there’s faculty, there’s professors, that are incredible. All they do all day, they’re too busy, but what they do is continually pursue different little trajectories of curiosity in various avenues of science. As a side effect, they mentor a group of students, and teach courses. They’re constantly sharing their passion with others. There’s never this feeling of MIT being broken right now. Talking to you, there’s a feeling as if stuff is on fire. But in the system, especially before Covid, there was no discussion of—even diversity, that toxic stuff, none of that was happening. It was just cool ideas, curious and learning. This is where kids in their 20s, 30s, and 40s can continue the playground of science. If you destroy academia, you’re … you take away the playground from these kids.
M: It’s gonna be hard for you to tell me I’m anti-playground.
L: You’re anti-certain kinds of playgrounds.
M: Yeah, the ones that have the broken glass on the floor.
L: I would say you’re being the watchful mother; the one kid who hurt themselves on the glass.
M: Not one kid; it’s generation after generation …
L: You’re using the one kid who was always weird, the gender studies department, as opposed to the people who are obviously having fun in the playground, and not playing by the glass. To me, some of the best innovations in science happen in universities. You can’t forget that universities don’t have this liberal agenda. Politics in every conversation, until this year—this year, there’s something happening. Every conversation I had had nothing to do with politics. That’s in the humanities.
M: But yeah, do you think MIT might be a little bit of an outlier?
L: Yeah, it probably is. I honestly don’t think, when people are criticizing academia, they’re also picking outliers. The strongest gender studies departments …
M: This is nonsensical. When I was at Bucknell, a college student, we had a bunch of electives. I wanted to take “American individualism.” One of the texts we had to read was Birth of a Nation, about the Klan. There’s no department where these people are not thorough-going, hard-core, ideologues. This is not just gender-studies.
L: That’s humanities.
M: It’s all humanities. History. English. All of them. Every university, as you know, has it mandatory in the curriculum; they have to take a bunch of these propaganda classes.
L: You’re being more eloquent; I’m being my usual slow self. … … I’d like to draw a line between (STEM) or science minus biology, and humanities and biology on the other hand. Because if you look at the percentage of universities, it’s still a minority percentage. I think they serve very different purposes. That’s actually a broken part about universities. Why is some of the best research in the world done at universities. It feels weird that a faculty
M: Yeah, we do research and we teach; these are conceptually different things.
L: I’m not deluded; where I’m not seeing the house on fire. I am seeing the house; I also lived in Harvard Square.
M: And do you see the tanks coming? They’re coming, Lex. It’ll be so beautiful.
L: The engineering departments; I believe the Elon Musks of the world, the innovation that will make a better world, is happening. …
M: My Soviet brother … if you’re calling for mercy, that’s not how I’m wired, but I’m not closing the door.
L: I’m even slower than usual; I didn’t sleep last night. I’m realizing how slow I am, and how much preparation I need to do, if I’d like to defend aspects of academia, I’d better come prepared.
M: You just defeated your own argument. It does not have to be that a phenomenal research institute like MIT has to also be an educational establishment. These two things are not at all necessarily interconnected. … What’s the opposite of a mentor—protege? Not an intern, but basically, working there instead of going to college there.
L: It’s possible; it’s going against tradition. You’d have to build new institutions …
M: You can’t have all these brilliant engineers building things!
L: You’re a fan of freedom. There really is true intellectual freedom within universities on topics of science and engineering.
M: I agree with you, but I’ll give you an example. When that scientist engineered that probe to land on that comet, and articles written, because this Hawaiian shirt he was wearing had pin-up girls on it, and he had to apologize … this is what Rand was talking about: the great accomplishments of men have to say I’m sorry to the lowest, most disgusting people.
L: There’s a guy named Richard Stalman, he’s the founder of the free software foundation; one of the key people in the history of CS, one of those Open Source people. Who thought, “All software should be free.” He also kind of speaks his mind; on a certain chain of conversations at MIT, that was leaked to the NYT, and then was published, and led him to be fired and pushed out of MIT … It always sat weird with me. What happened was there was a few undergrad students who called Marvin Minsky, one of the seminal people in AI. They called him a rapist, because he met with Jeffrey Einstein, and Jeffrey Einstein solicited a 17-or-18-year-old girl to come up to MM and ask him to have sex with her. So she came up to him, and his wife was there too. He said no, awkwardly, no thanks. And that was stated in the email thread, as Marvin participating in sexual assault and, it was called rape, of this person, this woman, that propositioned him. Then Richard Stalman, he’s kind of known for this; he’s a debugger. He said, “What you said is not correct.” Basically made it seem like use of the word “rape” is not correct; and then he was attacked for saying, now you’re playing with definitions of rape. It was reported as him defending rape. That’s the way it was reported, and he was pushed out. And he didn’t really give a damn. He doesn’t seem to make a big deal out of it.
M: But they made an example of him.
L: And everybody was afraid to defend him!
M: You’re from the Soviet Union; doesn’t this hit close to home?
L: … It was 18, 19-year-old kids, with this kind of fire in them. They’re the ones that raised all this kind of fuss. The entirety of the administration, all the faculty are afraid to stand up to them. I don’t know if I should be afraid of that …
M: You don’t think you should be afraid?!!
L: There’s more context to Richard Stalman … He’s had a history, through his life, of every once in a while, wearing the Hawaiian shirt … He’s a fat, unattractive—what Trump referred to … in the basement … that’s Richard. He is what he is. He would eat his own … he would pick skin from his own feet, and eat it.
M: No joke, he must really be high on the spectrum.
L: His office, on the door, he wrote something like “Hacker + Lover of Ladies.”
M: Unprofessional.
L: And a little creepy. So they were looking for an excuse to get rid of him.
M: Who’s they?
L: Administration. This would be my defense of cancel culture. A lot of times when people get fired over something like this, this isn’t why. It’s really just giving them cover to get rid of them without getting a lawsuit. … …
M: Betsy DeVos, a lot of people, are aware this completely contradicts due process. Once the word “rape” is around a male, it can ruin his entire life.
L: That’s the sticky thing. I think about this a lot; how would I defend it. I can honestly say I’ve never done anything close to creepy in my life, with women.
M: But you wouldn’t know it if you had, right?
L: But the point that I am aware of, is someone could just completely make something up.
M: “He denied the charges.” There’s an article around everything you did; and it says, “Mr. Fridman denied the charges.” … Author of Their Eyes Were Watching God … can’t recommend her enough. During the 30s or 40s, she was out of the country; she was accused of molesting a teenage boy. She was out of the country; she had an alibi. She was indicted. She wanted to kill herself. You can understand why she’d be suicidal over this. … I do agree, it’s important—I know a lot of women that have been sexually assaulted. It’s a good idea, that they feel seen; that they don’t feel wounded or damaged. Man, it sucks this happened to you! I don’t think you’re a slut. I also think it’s important though, that if things get in a frenzy … very quickly, the line between he grabbed my boob, and he violently raped me … I don’t think there are similar scenarios. I had Juanita Broderick on my show …
L: Zooming out, empowering women to speak about sexual experiences … it makes society better.
M: When people are given a weapon to exercise power over others, some are going to use it.
L: I mentioned somebody making up something about me. I feel because I wear my heart on my sleeve; I’m not good with these attacks. Being called a fraud and stuff like that. It hurt!
M: I’ll help you; I’m a New Yorker. In New York, you’ll be walking with your friend; and a homeless person starts yelling things at you. Your reaction isn’t, “Let me hear this out!” No, think about physical safety … It’s possible they’re saying the truth! .. I don’t know that I have any advice. I think you need to be better in terms of boundaries. Perceive it not as a fellow human, but as a crazy homeless person. .. If I thought you were a fraud … I would say, “Is this person in a position to make this judgement?” Whenever someone uses a word to entirely dismiss your life … you do not have to take that seriously.
L: I appreciate that. But some things aren’t about data. I see myself as a fraud often … My worry is the same as the worry of teenage girls that get bullied online. When I am being open and fragile on the Internet …
M: You don’t block people enough.
L: I block. It’s helped a lot.
M: I also think time is going to help. You didn’t grow up wanting to be a podcaster. … When they call you a fake; there’s a sense of yeah you’re kind of right …
L: They’re attacking, more, they call Elon Musk a fraud too. That’s the way I rationalize it. If they’re calling him a fraud … If you successfully have rockets landing back on Earth; you’re still being called a fraud, then, it’s okay.
M: Not necessarily; it could be he’s not a fraud, but you really are.
Book recommendations
Fear of mortality
Meaning of life
#129: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 1st visit
Lisa Feldman Barrett. A professor of psychology at Northeastern Univeristy, and one of the most brilliant and bold thinkers and scientists I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with. She’s the author of a book that revolutionized our understanding of emotion in the brain called How Emotions Are Made. And she’s coming out with a new book called 7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain that you can, and should, preorder now. … It’s one of the best short, whirlwind introductions to the human brain I’ve ever read. It comes out on November 17 … Lisa and I agreed to speak once again around the time of the book release; especially we felt this first conversation is good to release now, since we talk about the divisive time we’re living through in the United States, leading up to the election.
Lex recalls the first time he had Lisa as a guest at his MIT class before he started this podcast; I believe that conversation is on YouTube as well.
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Are we alone in the universe?
F: Do you think there’s other intelligent life out there?
B: I hope that’s true; I know scientists aren’t supposed to have hopes and dreasm … would be profoundly sad if we were alone
F: So it’s exciting to you; not scary?
B: I take a lot of comfort in curiosity; it’s a great resource in dealing with stress. I’m learning all about mushrooms, and octopuses and all kinds of stuff. For me this counts in the realm of awe. I’m also someone who cultivates awe on purpose, to feel like a spec … To feel small in an interesting universe.
Life on Earth
F: Do you think it’s difficult for intelligent life to arise? … the odds it takes
B: Magic is just … Don’t get me wrong; I like a magic show as much as the next person. Magic is just a bunch of stuff we don’t understand how it works yet. From what I understand, there are some major steps in the course of evolution … The step from single-cell to multicellular organisms … which are really not known. … What’s the likelihood that it would happen again? As much as, what are the steps, and how long would it take. If it were to happen again on earth, would we end up with the same menu of life forms that we currently have now … Answer is probably “no.” There’s just so much about evolution that is stochastic, and driven by chance.
F: The question is whether that menu would be equally delicious … would we get dolphins or humans … anybody else falling in that category of weirdly intelligent.
B: If you just look at the range of creatures who’ve gone extinct. If you look at the range of creatures on the earth now. … It’s trite to say that, but it is incredible. There are animals that seem really ordinary until you watch them closely, and then they seem miraculous. .. birds that build bowers, and do dances … hard to explain with a standard evolutionary story.
F: Birds are weird … for mating purposes .They have a concept of beauty … doesn’t seem to fit evolutionary arguments …
B: You talking about the Evolution of Beauty book written, I think, by Richard Fromm. He makes an argument; the question about birds … is why they engage in metabolically costly displays when it doesn’t improve their fitness at all. He gives the answer that Darwin gave: sexual selection. … Other kinds of selection—artificial, when we breed animals. Sexual selection … the argument that, I think his name is Fromm, makes, is it’s the pleasure of female birds. Which, as a woman, and someone who studies affect; I think that’s a great answer. I think there is an aspect of natural selection of it …
F: …
B: Yeah so peak into the ocean, look into the sky; there are miraculous creatures. Creatures that have gone extinct; you can’t dream up something as interesting. Intelligent life evolves in many different ways, even on this planet. There are lots of different brain structures that can give you intelligence. My guess is the menagerie … might be different, but as interesting.
Collective intelligence of human brain
Triune brain
The predicting brain
B: Animals execute actions in a very context-sensitive way …. When they hit your patella tendon on your knee and you kick, the force with which you kick is influenced by all kinds of things. … not a robotic response. I think a better way, to think about how brains work, is the way that matches our best scientific understanding—which I think is really cool! … it’s really counterintuitive. How I came to this view … I was reading work on neuro-anatomy; the view I’m about to tell you was suggested by that. I read work in signal processing, electrical engineering; the research suggested the brain worked this way. All the multiple literatures … were pointing in this direction. .. some of the details still up for grabs; the general gist, I’ve not come across anything yet, that really violates. And I’m looking! The way to describe it is to say, your brain doesn’t react to things in the world. To us it feels like, our eyes are our windows on the world. In psychology we call this stimulus response. Your voice is a stimulus to me; I receive input … automatically … system one. I might exercise control where I stop myself from saying something, doing something. … Execute a different action; that’s system two. The brain is predicting all the time; constantly talking to itself, talking to the body; constantly predicting, what’s going on in the body, what’s going on in the world. The information … corrects those predictions.
F: fundamentally, what the brain does most of the time; talking to itself and making predictions about the world.
B: Your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box—which is your skull. The only information it receives, is through the sense organs … You have sensory data that comes from your body, that you’re largely unaware of … to your brain; which we call interroceptive, as opposed to exterroceptive. Your brain is receiving sense data, continuously, which are the effect of some set of causes. Your brain doesn’t know the cause; it’s only receiving the effects of those causes. The brain has to solve what philosophers call an inverse inference problem … When there’s a flash of light, or a change in air pressure, or a tug somewhere in your body, how does your brain know what caused those events, so it knows what to do next to keep you alive? It has one other source of information available to it, which is your past experience. It can re-constititute, in its wiring, past experiences, and combine them in novel ways. In psychology we call it memory, simulation, perceptual inference, concepts, conceptual knowledge, or prediction! Basically, if we were to stop the world, stop time, your brain is in a state; and it’s representing what it believes is going on in your body, and in the world—and it’s predicting what will happen next. Probabilistically, what’s most likely to happen. It begins to prepare .. your action. And it begins to … prepare your experience. It’s anticipating the sense data it’s going to receive. Then when those data come in …
How the brain evolved
Free will
B; … one thing we know … our. brain creates experiences for us … in a way that seems to reveal the way it works … but it doesn’t
F: You don’t trust your own intuition about free will?
B: Not really. The philosopher Dan Dennit wrote … people obviously have free will; they are obviously making choices. We can do things more sophisticated … What I would say—Your predictions, your internal model that’s running right now, your ability to understand the sounds I”m making and attach them to ideas is based on … you have years of experience knowing what these sounds mean in a certain statistical pattern. … … Your brain is using past experience; it’s re-implementing prior experiences; it can do something called conceptual combination; it can take bits and pieces of the past and combine it in new ways. You can make sense of things you’ve never encountered before … based on similarities to things you have encountered. A brain in a sense doesn’t just contain information, but it is information-gaining; it creates new information by this generative process. Perhaps that’s a source of free will. The kind of free will I think is worth conversing about … cultivating experiences for yourself that change your internal model. When you were born and raised in a particular context, your brain wired itself to its surroundings, both physical and social. You were handed an internal model. When you grow up, the more control you have over where you are, and what you do. You can cultivate new experiences; those new experiences can change your internal model; you can actually practice those experiences in a way that makes them automatic. It makes it easier for the brain; I think that that is something like what you would call free will. You aren’t responsible for the model you were handed; your care givers cultivated a model in your brain, You’re not responsible for that model; you’re responsible for the one you have now (because) you choose what you expose yourself to. Not everyone has choice over everything; but everybody has a little bit of choice. That is something that is arguably called free will.
F: The ripple effects of the billions of decisions you make early on in life are so great … even if it’s all deterministic; just the amount of possibilities that are created and the focusing of those possiblilities into a single trajectory; somewhere within that, that’s free will … even if it’s all deterministic. Just the number of choices that are possible; and the fact you just make one trajectory through that set of choices. Kind of sad; there doesn’t seem to be a place where there’s magic in there …
B: Well there’s lots of magic. Because we don’t really understand how this is played out … Scientists are working hard and disagree about some of the details under the hood of what I just described. There’s also stochastic firing of neurons … They’re not purely digital …
Is anything real?
Dreams
Emotions are human-constructed concepts
Are women more emotional than men?
Empathy
Love
Mortality
Meaning of life