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The following is a conversation with Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform with 98 million users in 100 countries, listing Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, and over 100 popular cryptocurrencies. I recorded this conversation with Brian before this week's SEC probe into whether some of the crypto listings are securities and thus need to be regulated as such. As always, with conversations that involve cryptocurrency, I try to make it timeless so that the price soaring high or crashing down low doesn't distract from the fundamental technological, economic, social, and philosophical ideas underlying this new form of money, energy, and information. Our world runs on money, the exchange and store of value, and cryptocurrency seeks to build the next chapter of how money works and what it can do. Coinbase and Brian are trying to do this by working together with regulators and governments, which is a long and difficult road. Bureaucracies resist change, for better and for worse. The latest SEC probe is a good representation of this. It is a serious attempt to limit fraud, but one that also runs the risk of limiting innovation and limiting financial freedom of individuals. This is a complicated mess, and I applaud everyone involved for trying to work through it. I hope in the end, the interest of the individual wins. Decentralization, after all, is a hedge against the corrupting nature of centralized power. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Brian Armstrong. Let's start with the fact that you're a programmer. What was the first program you've ever written? Or the first one that you remember? The first memory I have of programming was probably in middle school. And I remember it was recess, and they had this time period where you could read books, and the other kids were reading comic books and stuff. And for some reason, I had gotten into this idea that I wanted to get into computers, and I was playing with computers at home. And so I got this book, I think from the library, it was called How to Learn Java in 30 Days. So I was reading this book at the recess, and I didn't understand anything. And I remember I went home, and I tried to get this thing working. And if you've ever written a Java program, the first lines are public static void main string args or whatever. And it's so foreign, and it's so difficult to get started. And so I was kind of frustrated. I was like, I don't understand anything that's happening in this book. So the first thing I wrote was probably just a Hello World app in Java. But I felt like I was so confused about what was actually happening that I later learned a bit of PHP. And PHP was like more fun for me because it was like, oh, just print out what you want. It didn't have all this complexity around it. So then I got more into PHP, I started building like some simple websites, I think learned some HTML. So I think that was my introduction to programming, at least the very beginning part. Yeah, you know, Java has a lot of, out of all the Hello Worlds it could possibly write, Java is the one where I think it's the longest. Yeah. Which is quite interesting because Java is often at least for a long time was used as the primary programming language to teach people how to program, or at least about object oriented programming. I think most universities have now switched and high school switched to Python. I'm not sure if that's the case. Probably better. It's easier to learn. It lowers the, it makes it less scary. It was like less of a hurdle. And certainly none of them use PHP. I love PHP and I feel like it's a dirty secret. I have to keep private to myself. Like it's somebody I'm seeing on the side or something like that, because it's just not a respected programming language because I think there's so many ways you can write poor code with PHP, which is why it's not respected. Yeah, it's a scripting language more so, although of course Facebook built like a huge stack on top of an invaluable company, but I still love Ruby to this day. Ruby is probably my favorite language. Python's great too, but I just love the idea behind Ruby that it's like, let's make it easier for the human, harder for the computer, and make it a joy to be expressive and all these things. So I was never the best computer scientist, but I was a good hacker. I could rapidly prototype products and using languages like Ruby. Do a lot of computer science programs still use like Lisp and Scheme and things like that? No, they do for, that's like, that's if you're hardcore. If you're legit, you're gonna do some of the functional languages. I think there's a few others that popped up, but Lisp is a distant memory for a lot of people. That's like somebody has to like, you go to library, you dust off the book, but Scheme a little bit. I think if you're starting, I mean, there's courses about languages themselves, like programming languages. Lisp might be one of those, you know how there's languages that nobody uses anymore, like ancient languages? You might have to go to school in that same way for programming languages. Back in the day, we used to use parentheses. I of course still use Emacs as the editor for most things that I do. And Emacs is, a lot of the customization you can do is in Lisp and that's the language probably when I first really fell in love with programming is Lisp. Because for a long time throughout the earlier history of artificial intelligence, Lisp was the primary language, but it still had a life in the 90s and the aughts where some people would use it. It's such a beautiful functional language, but it just somehow didn't pick up. That said, I should say sort of push back, PHP, I feel like it's still true that most of the web runs on PHP. Most of the backend is still PHP. So if you look at, you know, it's like the stuff that people don't talk about. It's like what runs most systems in the world? What runs the most backend? What runs most front end? JavaScript, you know, HTML. The Stack Exchange surveys show JavaScript is the most popular language in the world, I think, right? Oh yeah, in terms of programmers and numbers of, I wonder. By survey of number of programmers on Stack Overflow. Oh yeah, but that's also the cutting edge, right? Those are the people that are just like excitedly writing code. I wonder if there's people that are just like maintaining gigantic code bases. Yeah, I feel like the amount of Java out there just running industrial systems has gotta be enormous. And then of course in the banking industry, finance, it's like even older stuff, Cobalt and whatnot, but. I've been actually looking for somebody to interview who represents Cobalt and Fortran. Like who's the figure still there that holds the flag? I did, you know, with Java, founder of Java, creator of Java, creator of Python, creator of C++, but nobody wants to hold the flag for Cobalt and Fortran, even though some of the most important systems in the world still run on those. Like power systems and infrastructure systems, which is fascinating, and ATMs and stuff like that. Like a lot of stuff that we rely on, it just works, and the reason we don't change it is because it works well. It was written in languages that people don't use anymore. Yeah, that'd be a cool series of interviews. Get the stuff that's like tech that was invented 40, 50 years ago, but still is being used widely. I mean Emacs is an example of that. Let me ask the big question of what are cryptocurrency exchanges and what's Coinbase? How does it work? Before, I'll ask even bigger questions, but it's just a nice kind of palate cleansing question of what is Coinbase? Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange brokerage custodian. Basically, we're the primary financial account for people in the crypto economy, how they buy crypto, how they store it, how they use it increasingly in different ways. We can talk about that. So yeah, we want to be the way that a billion people hopefully access the open financial system globally. How does it work? What's cryptocurrency? There's Bitcoin, there's Ethereum. What does it mean to be an exchange? What does it mean to store? What does it mean to transact? How does it, what does Coinbase actually do? Okay, so basically in any given market, there's some people who want to buy, some people who want to sell, and you keep an order book of all those prices. And then if someone's willing to buy for more than the lowest price someone's willing to sell, then you get a trade to execute. That's kind of how an exchange works underneath. And a brokerage is kind of simpler than that even. You don't have to know, look at the whole order book and everything, but you just go in there and you say, I want to buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency. You get a quote, and if you like it, you can hit accept. And the core things that we do to make all that kind of just work, make it seamless, it sounds simple on the surface, is we have to do payment integrations in a variety of places around the world to make it easy for people to get fiat currency into this ecosystem. We have to do work on cybersecurity a lot. There's lots of hackers out there trying to break into our systems and steal crypto or to put stolen credit cards and bank accounts and things like that into these systems. We have to integrate with the blockchains themselves, which are periodically getting updated and having various airdrops and all kinds of things. So we're integrated with lots of different blockchains. And then we have to store the crypto that people buy securely as well. So crypto is kind of like storing, you store the private keys essentially. And we've invented a lot of cool technology about how to do that securely that helps me sleep at night as one of the largest crypto custodians out there. So those are some of the pieces that had to come together to get that early simple buy sell experience to work. And yeah, I mean, Coinbase actually has a lot of different products now. So we have like an institutional product. We have Coinbase Commerce, which is like merchant payments, like Stripe for crypto. We've got a self custodial wallet, which we can talk about. There's all kinds of cool applications people are building with web3 and they can access it through that. We just launched an NFT product. I can go on down the list. So we're sort of like a portfolio of crypto products now. We're big enough where we can do multiple things. But yeah, the core thing we got started with and still the majority of our revenue today is people just wanna come in and buy and sell some crypto. And we help them do that and make it simple and easy to use. And I'll ask you about wallet, NFT is about, what is it called? The Stripe type? Coinbase Commerce. Coinbase Commerce. I'll ask you about all that. But order books in exchange, what's the difference between that and stocks, for example, which there's also order books. Yes, I mean, stocks trade through order books too. So do commodities. There's all similar type of situation. So when I wanna buy one Bitcoin and I see Coinbase, say the price of that Bitcoin is say $40,000 and I press buy, what happens? Yeah, okay. So you've gotten a lot, when you press the button on your keyboard, like an electrical signal goes up the wire on your keyboard. No, we won't cut out the level. That's also important, the timing, right? Cause it's not price fixed. Yeah, that's true. It's giving you a quote, right? There's a whole concept of like slippage. And like by the time the quote is executed, if the price has moved too much, like we may reject it. And there's various things like that. But how do, I mean, what's the simple version I can give you? So we'll basically check the order book, give you a quote. It's good for some period of time or for some amount of slippage. And then what's happening is we're initiating a debit to your payment method, whether that's a credit card or a bank account, or you're storing dollars or euros or something on our platform, there's various payment methods. So we're basically debiting that. And then we're crediting you the crypto and we're taking a fee for it too. So that's fundamentally what's happening underneath. And then there's just some interesting slippage. How do you calculate how much slippage is allowed? Like how do you know these things? Cause order books are fascinating. The dynamics of that is pretty interesting. The little I know about it. Yeah, so there's a lot of people like traders who get super into this and like high frequency traders and arbitrage and all kinds of interesting topics. Flash Boys was like an interesting book on this whole thing. You want like access to information the fastest, sometimes even putting your thing in the data center right next to the thing. We don't allow that colo stuff cause we want it to be more democratized. But basically you give a, let's say we wanted to just keep it math simple. We want to charge a 1% fee. So if you're buying $100 of Bitcoin and we'll charge you $101, we've presented you the amount of Bitcoin you're going to get for the $100. Now let's say 10 seconds later you hit accept. We go to fill the order. So it's going to be some error bound around that 1% fee, right? And if we think we're actually losing money on the trade, I think we'll often reject it. So some part of the fee, the slippage is incorporated into that, averaged over a large number of people. Just, it's fascinating. Cause like even just like that little detail probably requires a lot of experimentation. Yeah. And it's kind of like a giant bug bounty out there because if you get it wrong, there's people who are going to arbitrage that. And we've had people sort of pen test our systems in a really creative ways where like, they'll just fire like programmatically with APIs, they'll fire off like a million different quotes and look for one of them that's out of bounds and then actually take that money right there. And we get people doing all kinds of crazy stuff. So how do you protect against that? How do you protect? So we'll talk about cybersecurity in interesting ways, but there's a lot of clever people trying to do clever things to earn, not even just to break into the system, but to earn an edge of some kind in the system. How do you stay one step ahead? There's no silver bullet, it's a bunch of lead bullets, right? So it's like, you know, one thing we do is we just have good test suites, right? So you're testing every piece of code that goes out, that's like just common good best practice, but it's particularly important in financial services. Another thing we do is we hire third party firms to try to audit this stuff and break in. Another one we do is we have a bug bounty program. So we basically pay white hat hackers to find this stuff before the black hats do. And we've paid out lots of good bug bounties. So, you know, try all the above. And occasionally you don't get it right and you lose some money and then you fix it and you keep going, so yeah. Let's talk about cybersecurity a little bit more. You mentioned using stolen bank accounts. So that's another one, that's another interesting one. How do you protect against that? Okay, so fraud prevention, yeah, is a big topic. So one of the, there's a lot of things people do, but one of the things they do is that you use machine learning, right? So you look at hundreds. To protect or to attack? To protect against it. So what you want to do is kind of build up a labeled data set of all the different people who have turned out to be fraudulent and good actors, and hopefully collect as much data as you can. And then, you know, you might feed hundreds or thousands of these factors into your machine learning model and it'll come back with a risk score. So, you know, an example of like the kinds of factors people create or put in there, you know, obviously I don't want to disclose too many of them because it's a cat and mouse game, but just kind of, I don't know, relatively well known stuff might be. You know, you have device fingerprints, right? So like, what kind of device are you on and what fonts do you have installed? A lot of people who are farming lots of these accounts, they're using emulators and like virtual machines and stuff. They're not like, you know, an average person on that device. And then you'll see sometimes like, one of my favorite metrics we track for this was called like improbable travel velocity. So we would, we're tracking people's IPS, right? And you might see someone who was one day in Austin, Texas and then like an hour later they were in London or something. It's like, well, that's very improbable. I mean, sometimes people are using VPNs. So you gotta be careful with that because like there's legitimate people who use VPNs too. But if it's not possible for them to have gotten on a plane and gotten there that quickly, then that's usually they're like spoofing a device or IP. Sometimes those are interesting factors. But yeah, if you feed enough of these in, you will, oh, another fun one is like, you know, real users will type their credit card like one number at a time. Scammers have a list of them and they'll just paste in a whole number. So you can look at like the number of milliseconds between keystrokes. Like there's all kinds of stuff people have come up with. And even for travel velocity, you could probably incorporate VPNs too because there's probably a travel velocity for VPN switching too that's human like. Like if you're using legitimately VPN for something else, that might be, there's like legitimate uses too. Actually, you know, I feel embarrassed that I don't know this, probably should. But the, I'm not a robot. Capture thing. Capture thing. Yeah. So that probably works in the same way. Like how do you move your mouse maybe or how the dynamics of the clicking. Totally. But how does that even work that well then? And why can't it be fake? I need to look into this. Cause it's such a trivial capture. It feels like it should be very crackable. And yet a lot of high security places use that. Yeah. It's really interesting. It's another cat and mouse game. So I think they've, yeah, but it's using a lot of similar signals like mouse movements, keystrokes. And then obviously all the stuff that comes over the wire with your browser. So like what operating system, what fonts, what headers are being sent over. And there's actually, there's an old website. I can't remember what it's called. It was kind of like Panoptik Click or Panopticon or something. But it basically was like a proof of concept site that they would just show you all the data that was kind of getting sent over with your request. And like say that there's only one person in the world who has this exact set of data. It's you. And so it's almost like a workaround, a clever workaround to track somebody, make identify a unique person, even if like there wasn't a cookie involved or something. Yeah, this is a fascinating world where you can't see anybody here in the dark and yet you have a lot of signal and you have to figure out who's a real person, who's not. Who's a robot, who's not. Let me step back. We're gonna jump around all over the place. Let me step back. That's why I like your interviews. You get into like technical topics. So just let's use Bitcoin as a measure of time. You started Coinbase when Bitcoin was $10. And you just mentioned an incredible system with security, with transactions. Everything is thought through. There's a lot going on. But what was version one back in those early days, the first prototype of Coinbase? What did that look like? Like what did it take to write it, to think through it and make it work enough to at least make you believe that it's gonna work? Well, I definitely didn't know if it was gonna work. I mean, it was kind of, I felt like I was just following my gut. So, I mean, I was working at Airbnb. I was a software engineer there, project manager. I was working on some fraud prevention stuff, for instance. And I read the Bitcoin white paper in kind of December of 2010. I started going to some Bitcoin meetups in the Bay Area, met lots of interesting people there, like crazy people, anarchists, really brilliant people, all the above. And so I started nights and weekends trying to put together a prototype. And my initial thought was, well, SMTP is a protocol that runs email. And Git is a protocol for version control that people made like Gmail and GitHub. Most people don't wanna run their own email server or even their own Git server. They just wanna like use a hosted thing that will do all the security and backups for them. So the thought in my head at that time was Bitcoin's this new protocol. There's probably gonna be somebody who makes a hosted service that does all the security and backups for you, makes Bitcoin as a protocol easy to use. So maybe I should make like a hosted Bitcoin wallet or something, that was my, it was gonna make Gmail for Bitcoin or something. And a bunch of people told me that was a bad idea. Like most of my smart friends who I told about it, they were like, well, first of all, I don't really get what you're doing at all. Like Bitcoin sounds like a scam or something you've gotten involved in. But then other people who understood what Bitcoin was told me they thought it was a dumb idea because they're like, dude, if you store all this Bitcoin, you're just gonna get hacked. Like nobody, you know, why would you do that? And so I kind of had this thought like, you know what? I'm not gonna go all in and like make a store everyone's Bitcoin, that would be too much right now. I have a job, I have a day job, you know? But let me just make a prototype and I'll tell people this is like a beta thing. Like don't put any real money in it and just see if there's interest. And if I feel like I'm onto something, maybe I'll go do this as a company. Cause I did, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur at that time. I was like, I was 29, I was almost turning 30. And I was, I always wanted to like start a company, but I was, you know, I wasn't yet. I was an employee at a company that was great. But so anyway, I had this prototype. I was hacking together nights and weekends. I actually wrote a whole Bitcoin node in Ruby, which turned out to be a, maybe a weird decision in hindsight, cause Ruby wasn't the most performant language. We've subsequently had to rebuild that many times. But yeah, I had this hosted Bitcoin wallet and the thing that I didn't have any users for it, by the way, I applied to Y Combinator cause I was like, maybe if somebody there writes me a check, this will like make it feel like a real company. And I was trying to find a co founder at that time unsuccessfully. So I was basically just wandering in the desert. I had a lot of self doubt about this cause I was like, I don't know, all my friends don't think this is kind of dumb and maybe Bitcoin is just gonna get shut down and like, this is all be some stupid thing. So there was definitely a feeling of just wandering lost in the desert, lots of self doubt. Paul Graham and the Y Combinator group kind of wrote me the first check after I went and interviewed and stuff. And they wrote me a check for like 150K. And that was the first time somebody who I really looked up to kind of said, this is worth pursuing. Like maybe you're onto something, maybe you're not, but like, let's at least try it. And so that was kind of what gave me the confidence to quit my job and try it. And I'll wrap the story here by saying that like we, I found the right co founder after Y Combinator. We still didn't have any customers. The thing that, I basically launched the hosted Bitcoin wallet. There were people signing up. I just posted on Reddit and places like that. And maybe like a hundred people would sign up and then nobody would come back. And so I was like, I just in Y Combinator, they often tell you like, talk to your customers and improve your product. Talk to your customers, improve your product. That's all you're supposed to be doing. Try to find product market fit. So I emailed like five of the users that had signed up and I was like, hey, I worked on this app. I saw you signed up. Can I get on the phone with you? I get on the phone with like five of these folks. And I was like, why didn't you come back? And the guy was like, well, the app was okay for a beta, but like, I don't have any Bitcoins. So I didn't really know what to do with it. And I remember this light bulb kind of went off in my head. I was like, well, if I put a buy Bitcoin button in there, would you have used it? And he was like, yeah, maybe. So then I had this, we went about the process. My co founder at that time, we like got basically had to get like a bank partnership, payment rails, you know, an exchange, basic exchange functionality, all that stuff I was mentioning earlier in place. And the minute we launched that feature where you could just click buy, put in your bank counter credit card, buy Bitcoin, it showed up in your account. From that day forward, like the number of users started to go up like this. And so we finally had found product market fit after two years of wandering in the desert. So you weren't even thinking about to buy the on ramps. You would think it would be just the wallet, a place to store Bitcoin that you've already gotten. Yeah. Okay. This is, I mean, cause that's such a pain to do, to have to work with others to convert dollars and fiat currency into Bitcoin. Yeah. So did you, I mean, were you overwhelmed by the immensity of the task here or were you just sort of not allowing yourself to think too deeply through this whole thing and just letting the optimism take over here? You know, I was really looking forward to like doing something crazy and like a big challenge. And I wanted to, I love kind of crisis moments like that where, you know, I'm very determined, right? And especially when I get like very set on something and I'm just like, you know what? I'm gonna figure out a way to make this fucking thing work, like no matter what. And so I reveled in that. I was sort of, I had read all these books about startups and like every startup has these like, you know, major setbacks and just like nothing works. And so that was a sign that you're doing something right. I had no idea if I was doing anything right at all, but I was like, I was kind of loving the experience of it in a weird way. It felt, it felt stressful at the time. Like, you know, nothing was working and, but I was just, I felt like I was on the right path somehow. And so I just kept going, I don't know. What was the darkest moment that you've gone to in your mind during that time? What was, what were some of the tougher moments? You said self doubt. Yeah. Have you, yeah, where'd you go? Where'd you go in your mind? Is there a moment where you're just like laying there? This is, this is hopeless. Well, there's a couple of moments I'm remembering. I mean, so for whatever reason, I had this like big chip on my shoulder at that time. And I was like, I really want to do something important in the world. Like, you know, I could have a good life and like work for some good companies and write some software. And I'm, for some reason, I never wanted that for myself. That probably would have been healthier, honestly, just to like, as an expected value outcome, that's probably a better thing in life. But I was like, I was like, man, I really want to do something important and have a bigger impact. And I was like, I was willing to sacrifice a lot for that. I was like sleep and not going out with friends and stuff. I remember one of the, just for like years working on this stuff, I remember one of the darker moments was, we probably had like maybe five employees at that time. And I remember like a bunch of bad things happened like all at once. And it was, so first of all, you have to remember at this time, we were all very sleep deprived, which kind of exacerbates everything. If you look at like the Exxon Valdez spill and all these like natural disasters, like sleep deprivation is often involved. So, because the reason why we were so sleep deprived is not just because we were working so much, but like the site would go offline in the middle of the night and we'd get, I'd get paged. I was like on pager duty. So I'd get woken up sometimes like two or three times a night, like have to try to fix something, go back to sleep. So in that environment, you can kind of get, you can get discouraged. So one bad thing that happened was, we had a bug on the website and there was thousands of people on Reddit and Twitter who were all like pissed at Coinbase because like the balances were showing wrong. And they were just like, fuck this company, it's over. Like, I hate these guys. And so that was, I'd never had this feeling of a thousand people mad at me at the same time. You know, I feel like I'm a pretty chill guy. Like most of the time people don't get mad at me. So that was one. Another one was that. Can we pause on that? That's so interesting. So you were saying like, here's a dream. I'm trying to create something. And now forever, the reputation of this dream is ruined. It will never, it's irrecoverable. It's over, that kind of feeling. Yeah, well, I didn't, you're right. I didn't know at that time. I was like, is this, is this the end? Like everybody, we're so, we're so tiny. Now everybody hates us. So is it over? Yeah. Nobody told me this before starting a company that like, you're a bunch of people will hate you for this, which is like a very counterintuitive thing. Cause you know, most companies I think are doing good things in the world, at least you're trying, right? And so even if someone's like trying, but they're not, they're failing, I'm generally rooting for them. At least you're trying, right? But that's not the case at all. And most founders I've known have gone through this too, where they're very surprised at the amount of hate that they get. And if it's, I think it's actually like a muscle you can build your tolerance to it. Like, because you know, you go talk to somebody who's like, for you, it feels terrible cause you're at the center of this storm and like, but if you go, then you go talk to like, you know, your family or some other person like, dude, I didn't even hear about that. Like my, they're just busy in their own life. And so they, they have no idea that you had all this negative press or like whatever it was. Can I put once again, put a link on that? Yeah. There's an interesting person I'd like to bring up just as an example, Bill Gates. Yeah. So he gets a very large amount of hate on the internet. Yeah. And there's something about him, this is me talking that you, that he seems out of touch about that hate. I believe at least in my understanding that with the resources he has, he's trying and is actually doing a lot of good. And yet there's a gigantic amount of hate, conspiracy theories and stuff like that. Right. And it feels like that's the case because he's somehow out of touch with people. So I wonder how you stay in touch with the voice of the people without being destroyed by the outrage. Is there any wisdom you have to that or? I don't know about wisdom, but I've thought about this too, because yeah, you wanna always be open to feedback, especially from people who have like your best interests at heart, right? And if you can become isolated from it and just like, you know, surrounded by yes people. And I mean, who knows, maybe like she and Putin and people like that are in situations I have no idea. But if you listen to too much of it and you just try to please everyone, you'll never get anything done. And I mean, most of the best leaders are people who they can act when they believe that they're doing something net positive for the world and humanity. And they actually don't really care if they piss off some portion of the people. Almost anything you're gonna do of significance in the world today is gonna piss off 5% of people, maybe 49% of people or whatever, maybe 60%, I don't know. So you never wanna become so surrounded by people who just work for you and will say yes. And then you think like, well, I'm a genius and I'm like, that's how you become a dictator or whatever. But you also can't care so much about what people think because then you'll never do anything that's truly authentic to yourself. One other thought on that, by the way, I think it's a really good question. So I've thought about this a lot. Like why, you know, people generally kind of hate on Zuck and they hate on Bill Gates and they hate on, they don't really hate on Elon. Well, actually Elon has a lot of haters too, but it's a different thing. This is measured, this is measured, I was looking at some surveys, so I think Zuck is the most, so loved and hated, right? Zuckerberg is the most, both loved and hated. He's the most hated. And then I think it's Bill Gates and Elon is down there. I think it's like 40% hate Zuck, people asked. And then Elon is in the double digits, but low double digits. And so it's interesting, you just look at this data, ask yourself why. Right, so I ask myself this sometimes too, because I don't claim to know any of these people well, but like I've met them briefly. And my impression is that they're actually all smart people trying to do good things in the world. So there's not too much difference there, despite public perception. So why is it that some are really hated and some aren't? I mean, it's a complicated question. Obviously Zuck in his Facebook got blamed for the whole election thing and all that didn't help. Social media has gotten a lot of pressure just from like, hey, why aren't you solving all of society's tough problems? It's like, well, they're just one company. But one thing I've noticed is that a lot of these people, they have like Asperger's, right, a little bit. And sometimes people with Asperger's don't really emote in the same way. And so I think it's almost a form of like bias against their cognitive type or something, which is like that person doesn't emote right. I don't trust their intentions. And the other thing I've thought about too is that sometimes I think some leaders, like maybe Zuck or Bill Gates, they can come across as like a little bit PR rehearsed. Like they're basically, they're giving the PR approved answers where Elon just says whatever he thinks like to a fault. So even if people hate what he says or like, at least I believe it's authentic. So I've always thought about that too for myself. I'm like, how do I, cause you can fuck it up on both sides, right? Like if you just come out and you're like saying whatever stream of consciousness, you'll often end up like pissing off people on your team or like saying tripping over some like regulation that you've, there's all kinds of things about running a public company, you can't say certain stuff. But if you're too PR approved and your answer is like, nobody trusts you what you're saying. And so anyway, this is something I think about a lot. I don't think I have the right answer, but I'm trying to find that balance. And more and more with the internet, there's a premium on authenticity, just like you're saying. People really, really appreciate that. So for leaders, it's a challenge to be, how do I make sure I'm authentic, but also don't say stupid shit. And so that's an interesting thing. I've noticed that just having interacted with a bunch of leaders that you have to be careful how much you surround yourself with PR folks. Because the best, I would say, let me just say a nice thing about marketing and PR folks, the best marketing folks are extremely good. So they understand exactly what great marketing is and great PR, it's authenticity. It's showing, revealing the beauty. As opposed to PR and marketing out of fear. Oh, don't say that, don't say this, don't that. Because then you start living in this kind of, that pushes you towards a bubble where you can't express the, your beautiful quirks and weirdness and all that kind of stuff. And also the cool, the beautiful things about what you're doing. I find like, especially with tech things, like even like Coinbase, the way to reveal the beauty of it is not only by showing all the things you could do with it, but showing that there's great engineering going on underneath. So letting the nerds shine too. It doesn't have to be like these kind of commercials where it's like a happy family using Coinbase to send a transaction about flowers for mom or something like that. Like it could be also like gritty stuff and real stuff. So that's a general just observation I made. But you said you were talking about dark moments and that there's people on the internet that were pissed off that the site was down. And you said there might be something else. Yeah, so sleep deprived, like a bunch of people on the internet were pissed at me. The balances were fucked up. Like people were tweeting the company's over, just give the money back, whatever. And then, oh yeah, somebody posted. So we had all this, we didn't, we started to get all these customer support inquiries and like, we only had like a few people at the company. And so we were backed up maybe like 20,000 support requests. So people couldn't get ahold of us. So somebody posted my cell phone number on Reddit and they were like, they were like, if you need to get ahold of the CEO, whatever, cause everyone's upset about where their money is. So I remember we're in the office, it's like late at night. We've been working like 12 hours, we're all sleep deprived. I'm trying to hack and like get this bug fixed. And we all need like food at the office. And so my phone has been blowing up all day cause someone posted my phone number on the internet. And there's like a guy, there was a guy like trying to deliver food and I needed to answer my phone to like get the food from downstairs. So I was like, shit, I gotta just see who, if that's him. So I started answering the call and it's like, is this Brian? I'm like, nope, wrong number, click. And I pick up the next call. It's like every, when I finished the call, another call is like coming in. So I was like, I'm a reporter from Japan, like asking about a security, nope, wrong number, click. And then I like, finally I get the delivery guy downstairs, bring the food up. We were all like surviving to like fix this bug. I remember there was just basically a point that night where I was like, fuck, I need to just, I basically just curled up on like a ball on the floor. And I just like cried for a little bit. I think I let myself just kind of wallow in self pity, kind of took a nap for about five minutes. And I was like, let's fucking solve this. And I like, you know, stop being like a little whatever and like got back up. Sleep deprivation combined with just the stress and the pressure of the site going down and everybody wants the site to be up. Just the pressure from people and the number of users is growing and growing and growing. So that pressure is just mentally, mentally tough. What was your source of strength during that time? Like what, like somebody that patted you on the back and said, we got this. Yeah, well, it definitely helped to have a co founder. So, you know, there's like that old saying about it's better to be in a great relationship than to be single, but it's better to be single than in a bad relationship. So co founders actually blow up a lot of companies too. But when you find the right co founder, which I was lucky to find with, with Fred or some, that was very important. There was definitely moments where, you know, I was like kind of, you know, at the width end or whatever. And he was like, it's like, dude, let's rally. Like, and he basically carried the team, you know, a couple of times, like in really key moments. What advice would you give to startup founders about this particular stage about surviving it to the five and through the five employees stage where you were? Yeah, well, if your pre product market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is action produces information. So just like keep doing stuff, you know, I remember like Paul Graham, Paul Graham had this great line like that. I think that's his line. And he was like, startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming, they die. You know, so even if you're like, not sure what to do, like just do anything because when you do it, it'll like, it'll produce some information. Like people liked it. They didn't, this was very true for me. There was times where I just did something instead of debating it endlessly and like, just try it. You know, like, all right. So we shipped it. And like, there was a couple of times where like the minute I shipped it and I was like, I knew, I know we built this wrong, but now I have an idea of what to do next. And it wasn't, I only would have had the idea if we'd actually gone through the exercise of going to build it. It's like my other favorite analogy for this is that you're like at the base of a mountain that's shrouded in fog and you're looking up at the mountain and you're trying to think like, okay, how do I get up there? But you can only see like three or four steps ahead cause the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into the unknown. And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you'll end up on some local maximum. You'll have to retrace your steps or whatever, but, or come up to a cliff, you know, but most people in life don't take the steps into the fog, into the unknown because it's scary. Or they're like, I don't know, what if I fail? Or like, I don't know how that's going to work or I might run out of money or I won't be able to get a job after, or I don't know, whatever reason. But that is like one of the things that separates, I think entrepreneurial people with that kind of inclination is that they have sort of a comfort with this risk tolerance but it's actually not really risky if you think about it. It's not like, you know, at least in most places, like, you know, if you go to a startup and it fails, like you're going to, you're even more valuable to your next employer, right? Or you can go raise a seed round, pay yourself a salary, try it for like two years or three years. If it doesn't work, go get another job. It's not like you're, you weren't paying yourself a salary during that time. So I think, I think people overestimate the risk of doing a startup and they just never, they never start because it seems crazy and all your friends think it's silly. Like that's sort of the default nature of every big startup idea. It's just basic fear. It's the same kind of fear that if you see a, if you're a guy, see a cute girl at a bar, it's the fear associated with coming up to her, you like her, asking her. It's like, what's the actual risk exactly? Right. She'll say, no thanks, I'm not interested. No thanks. I guess the risk is like, that's going to be mentally difficult to deal with rejection. So just like it's mentally difficult to deal with failure. If you had a bunch of ideas and you were excited about them and you implement them and you realize they're not good, that could be difficult to keep pushing through that. But I suppose that's life. You're supposed to, you know, perseverance through the failures and then the risk is low. So that's, and then the whole time through the fog up the mountain, you're looking for product market fit. Yeah, that's right. So you know, you have it when the usage of your product keeps growing without any marketing dollars or anything like that. It's just like more people keep coming back every week or month. So you're kind of keep, you're basically watching your stats. Nothing is working. You see these little wiggles of false hope in your metrics and you basically just keep talking to customers, fixing the, improving the product, talk to customers, improve the product, talk to customers, improve product, you know, and try not to run out of money. So be really scrappy. And then if you're lucky, you hit some kind of threshold where like, okay, the thing is good enough now, or we hit on some use case and then it'll organically start to grow a bit. And then you have a whole different set of problems once you hit product market fit, which is how do we scale this thing? How do we hire people? How do we, you know, hire an executive team or raise more money? And like, so the problems totally change, but yeah. Well, you were there through the whole thing. So that's the other question that's fascinating. Again, back to the girl at the bar, how do you hire people? It's like, how do you find good friends? How do you find good relationships? And in this specific case, how do you hire good people? Engineers, executive, all of it. One thing is I've done a lot of reps on hiring at this point. So Coinbase has about 5,000 people, probably the first 500 people or something, maybe in that range. You know, I interviewed every single one of those, but you have to remember there's probably like, I don't know, on average, maybe 10 people that we went in the process for every one we hired or something. So it was like, by the time that we had 500 employees, I had done like 5,000 interviews or something. I was like very burned out on interviews. I had been doing, some days I did like seven interviews in a day or maybe, you know, you've been doing lots of interviews, maybe you wouldn't get burned out, but different kind of interviews. Very different, very different, very different, because you're, so first of all, most of your interviews lead to rejection. Yeah. Which is also exhausting. Yeah, and there's a whole part of the interview which is about candidate experience, right? Sometimes you know it's not the right person, but you wanna make sure they have a good experience. Yes. Like, if you're just exhausted and you're on your sixth interview and you're like, well, thanks for coming in and you wrap and you just, and then like, you're gonna create a detractor. Someone who's out there like, fuck that company or Brian was rude to me or whatever. So I had to, honestly, I had to work on that a little bit in the early days because I was doing so many interviews. Like I needed to make sure that when people came in, I was like, you know, made them feel comfortable, asked them a couple of like warmup questions, just like, oh, how was it getting in the office? Like, did you find it okay? And like, what have you been up to this week? And not just like, you know, like a factory assembly line like boom, boom, boom, like, yeah. But also there's a moment, cause I've interviewed a bunch of people for like teams and stuff. There's also a moment when you, early on, know it's not gonna be a good fit and you still have to land that plane and all that kind of stuff. And that could get really, really, really exhausting. So yeah, anyway, sorry. So. Yeah, so basically we tried all, we've tried so many things over the years to make interviews more efficient cause it's a huge time sink for the team. So, you know, we basically, we'll usually get them down to like 25 minutes. I've seen, if you're trying to hire like a big team, let's say, you know, of people who are like contractors or something, not necessarily full time employees. I've seen people actually do 10 minute interviews. You can even interview like a thousand people almost like in a week or something. I'm not sure if that quite works out, but let me a little less than that. But you can basically get six and six done in an hour. If you're just, I need to get a team of 30 contractors for whatever purpose. But if you're talking about full time employees, I usually do like 25 minute. You know, you're oftentimes like, one thing we've done is we'll put like a Google form online and it's like, put some basic hurdles in there. Like, you know, ask them to put in an answer, which you can check in a spreadsheet if it was correct or not. And like, there was some funny examples in the early days of Coinbase where we'd put in like brain teasers and stuff, but we don't do that anymore. We do like normal interviews, we do references. The kinds of things I ask in interviews, you know, it's usually like, I like to think about what do we need this person to accomplish in this role, right? And get really specific about that. It's like usually something pretty hard. And then I'll ask them a question. It's like, tell me about a time you did X and, or tell me about the hardest, the hardest kind of problem you've had to solve in Y and what did you do specifically to overcome it, right? So I'm asking to see if they can actually do the stuff we need to get done. But then I'm also kind of asking like culture questions if I'm interviewing for that. And so I'm trying to see like, are they concise communicators? Can they just give me a clear answer and stop talking? Some people like ramble on for like five, 10 minutes if you ask the first question. Some people are, you know, they're interrupters like church of interruption. So like they won't stop talking until you interrupt them, which for me, I'm always patient and I wait. So that's weird. I'm looking to see for humility too. Like, you know, I'll tell us people, I'll tell you about a time something went really wrong. Like you had conflict with someone on a team or what I'm kind of looking for is, were they part of the solution or are they still holding onto like blame and criticism about that and be like, well, I told them they shouldn't do that way, but they didn't listen to me. And you know, these are all like bad signs. So I'm looking for, yeah, can they get the job done? Will they work together on a team? Can they communicate effectively? Do they fit into our cultural values and you know, those kinds of things. Yeah, I mean, there's a, cause I've even for help with this podcast here, but also at MIT and so on, I've done a bunch of hiring and I was always looking for, you said, brain teasers, all kinds of simple questions that can, they can reveal a lot of information and it's always been challenging. I used to, I still ask this question, but do you think it's better to work hard or work smart? And you know, I had this idea that I've, that I think I've matured about, which is I kind of believe that people who say work smart on that question don't actually work smart. So the right textbook answer is it's better to work smart. But the reality is it's people that haven't actually ever done anything that say work smart. They're like, they haven't really struggled because my general belief at the time was in order to discover what it means to work smart, to be efficient, to, you have to work your ass off. So you have to really fail a lot and failure feels like hard work. And so I was always suspicious of people that would say work smart. I would want to interrogate that question. But then I also, you know, have learned that there is people that are just exceptionally, exceptionally efficient. They really do know what it means to work smart, even at a young age. And so like, you can't just disqualify based on that. You have to dig in deeper. But some of the most interesting people I've ever worked with would say work hard unapologetically. And they're usually the ones that know how to be efficient, which is, it's just an interesting thing like that. And I've always searched for questions of that nature to see can I get a person to reveal something profound about them in as brief of a question as possible? And I, you know, and then of course, there's basic attention to detail and brain teasers and stuff like that, depending on the role, programming and so on to see can they solve a tricky puzzle and do so, like one that doesn't require a lot of effort, but requires a certain nonlinear way of thinking. Is there some, I mean, maybe you don't want to reveal, but is there some questions that you sometimes find yourself leaning on? You said like, how did you solve a hard problem in your past and have them talk through it? That's one. You know, we started with brain teasers periodically at Coinbase and we got away from that relatively quickly. And I think one, it's a tough one because I actually think it does show how somebody kind of performs under pressure, but it's, I don't think it's a super reliable indicator because there's some people who are really good in the typical work situation, but that's not a typical work situation where somebody puts you on the spot, like in a live interview and sometimes people get nervous and they can't think clearly and like they don't have their computer in front of them or whatever they normally use. So yeah, I'm a little skeptical now of the brain teaser thing. There is a whole, yeah, there is a whole question about, like a lot of universities are getting rid of, you know, entrance exams. So if you're hiring right out of universities, sometimes it's becoming a less reliable indicator of like, are they in that university? And I've heard some companies, we haven't done this yet, but I've heard some companies are actually creating their own like for college grads, like their own basically exams, like standardized testing almost to get people in the door because the degree almost like doesn't mean what it used to, which is the whole topic, but. Yeah, that's fascinating because it's fascinating both for that, because it's not just about you trying to hire a great team, it's also to help them find the right place to work at. Yeah. It's like a two way street. All right, so once you found the product market fit, how did Coinbase become what it is today? Ooh. So let me ask an engineering question actually. Sort of from the Ruby wallet days, what are some of the interesting challenges there? Or are they not engineering? Just the things that had to be solved, what were they? Engineering, regulation, financial hiring, lawyers, what was it? So post product market fit, yeah, a lot of it's scaling and you got to build out an actual company. So I remember I was still writing a lot of code there for a while and we were hiring in, we had like maybe 25 people or something. I remember one of our investors came by one day and he was like, Brian, how much of your time are you spending writing code? And I was like, maybe 50% or something. And he was like, how much time are you spending hiring people? I was like, probably 20%. And he was like, I think you need to flip those numbers. Like this company is not going to scale. You're the CEO, you don't need to be writing code every day. You're going to have to transition that stuff. Like even if people can't, all that stuff's locked in your head. So maybe they're not going to do it as well as you for the first six months or something. But like, if you don't start to transition it, you're never going to build a real company. It's just going to be, you're going to be the bottleneck. So, you know, like a lot of founders that took me a while to like really internalize that lesson. I'd always heard people say that and, you know, but I still was holding on too much to decision making. And I probably still am, by the way, like even to this day at Coinbase, where we continually have to push down decision making in the org, like even with 5,000 people, like who are the owners of each of these things? And so the temptation is people to push it up and you become a bottleneck. And anyway, so yeah, you basically need to make sure you have enough money where you don't die if there's some kind of a downturn or hit break even profitability. We were in a position where we were periodically profitable during up periods, but then crypto would go down and we were unprofitable. And so we had to kind of manage our own psychology and the balance sheet to make sure we didn't like die in the downturn, which a lot of crypto companies did. We had to basically professionalize a whole bunch of services that had been just very quickly thrown together by like 20 year olds, right? Whether that was cybersecurity, it's like, okay, how do you get like a really senior experienced cybersecurity person, but not someone who's so senior that they can't get their hands dirty and they can come into a company with 25, 50 people. How do you get a finance person to come in and do that? Our finances were a mess. Like we didn't even really know how much money we had at certain times and stuff. I mean, this was, it's embarrassing to say, but it was true. Like I remember there was a point where we had raised, I think like our series C or something like that. And I think we had our bank accounts. I just put like $25 million, like in a different bank account that none of this stuff was touched to the actual operations of business. Cause I was like, our operations were so messy and we needed to hire a new finance person. And I was like, I'd heard horror stories of actually startups where they thought they had X amount of money. And then it turned out they had way less. And then the whole thing was insolvent in like three weeks. So you wanted to have some padding to at least like, all right, I can at least count on this to save us if we go to like super negative. Right, I mean, it was like a cheap hack, but that was like the only I could come up with. And until we could hire like a real CFO and finance team who like, okay, now we got our arms around how much cash we have. It sounds silly, but we had such high volume of money coming in and out. Anyway. What was the ordering of hiring by the way? Like how many engineers was it early on? You said CFO was not, you didn't even have a CFO for a bit. Like what was the landscape of hiring as you building up this company? Was it engineering focused? Well, let's see. I mean, so the first person we hired was just like, we need to solve customer support. So we brought someone to do that because we were all staying up till midnight every night trying to do customer support. And then we got more engineers. And then I think maybe the sixth hire or something like that was a recruiter. Cause that turned out to be, you need to build, hire the person who can hire more people. That turned out to be a great force multiplier. And then you're going down the list. Eventually you want to hire some more senior people. We needed legal and compliance. We needed that really badly. Cause we, it was all kinds of questions about what the legality of it was. Was it hard to find legal people that work with crypto, like serious adults? Cause it's such a cutting edge new world. Yeah, I mean, there was nobody who had like more than, nobody had three years of experience with it cause it had only been around a few years. So yeah, we were finding people from adjacent fields. There's a certain personality type of people who are willing to join early companies because they have no structure. You can't really commit to them about you're going to have this team or this boss or whatever. Like everything's in chaos and flux. So it takes, yeah, hiring is one of the hardest things in the early stage for sure. You got to find people crazy enough to join you on this journey. So one of the interesting things about Coinbase and you've written, we've talked, we'll talk about it a bit. You're very focused on the mission. Yeah. You're very kind of, I think that simplifies things that makes hiring easier, that makes working at Coinbase easier, that makes, I mean, it's similar. So Elon has the same thing. It's pretty clear. It's pretty clear what we're here to do. So I suppose what's the mission of Coinbase? Well, it's to increase economic freedom in the world. And what is economic freedom? Yeah, so economic freedom is this term kind of like GDP that economists use. And it's basically a measure of different countries around the world. It looks at things like, are there property rights enforced? Is there free trade? Is the currency stable? Can you start companies that you wanna start? And can you join the ones you wanna join? And is there corruption and bribery prevalent or is it relatively free of that? And so there's several different organizations that basically score countries by economic freedom. And the really cool thing about economic freedom is that basically it positively correlates with things that we all want in society, like not only higher growth of the economy, but also things like higher self reported happiness of citizens, better treatment of the environment, better income for the poorest 10% of people. And it negatively correlates with things we don't want in society, like corruption and bribery and war, even in things like that. And so it's this pretty crazy provocative idea, which is that if you give people good property rights and rule of law and allow them to trade, it basically encourages them to do more good stuff and the whole society benefits. Like one of the things, you may have noticed this growing up in various places you did, or I spent a year living in Buenos Aires, Argentina that went through hyperinflation. And there's a certain like pessimism that can creep into countries when they don't have economic freedom, which it's basically like everyone has this bit of this vibe, which is like, don't stick your head up, don't try too hard because it could all be gone tomorrow. Like the things that really are valuable in life are just family and friends and the past was better than the future will be. And so you don't really, people don't try as many, they don't try hard because you're not really sure you can actually keep the upside of your labor if you try hard, so you just don't try as hard. Whereas in America, historically, or high economic freedom countries, people basically like they just try more stuff because they're like, if I do good for other people, I'll get to keep part of it for myself and I can improve my lot in life and for my children and my community, whatever. So I realized when I read the Bitcoin white paper a long time ago, that at least I had a hunch. At the time I was like, this might be a really powerful piece of technology that can inject good financial infrastructure into all these countries around the world that don't have it. Basically good economic freedom principles in like property rights and things like that into these countries all over the world, which just as long as you had a smartphone and now crypto got invented, everybody could have economic freedom. And it's crypto is kind of really well suited for economic freedom, because if you want property rights, it's based like crypto is, if you can remember a 12 word phrase or have an app on your phone, you can store as much wealth as you want. And it can't be taken away from you. You can even, there's like refugees who need to flee and they wanna take their wealth with them and they can't do it often in the traditional financial system. And so crypto lets them do that, right? Crypto is inherently global. So it allows free trade and cross border payments. It makes it easy to accept payments from people globally. It provides a stable currency to everyone, not only with Bitcoin, which is kind of like this new reserve currency, but also with stable coins, right? Which are new inventions there. So yeah, I basically feel like crypto is this secret hiding in plain sight that can create economic freedom for people all over the world and a more fair and free and global economy. Well, so the limit, and by the way, I didn't know about Argentina. Why'd you end up in Argentina? Okay, so I was basically, I was living in Houston, Texas after college where I went to school. And I had never studied abroad. I kind of like, I don't know, I felt like I needed some adventure or something in my life. And I was like, I was running this other startup that I was trying at the time, a tutoring company, and I could work from anywhere. So my plan was, you know what, I'm just gonna go do like a month in every city around South America, just like almost like to force myself out of my comfort zone because I had never traveled by myself to a foreign country or whatever, and where I didn't really speak the language. And anyway, I landed in Buenos Aires thinking I'd go all around South America where I had never been there. But I basically, once I was set up in Buenos Aires with an apartment and a cell phone and stuff, then I was like, I don't wanna do that all again next month. So I just stayed there for most of the time and took some day trips. But yeah, it was kind of a formative experience in that regard. You got a chance sort of unexpectedly to experience the social effects of hyperinflation, which is interesting. But I also, I've never been, I really, really wanna go as a person who likes tangos, a person who likes the Argentinian national team and soccer and steak. All right, and all the other things that Argentina is known for. Okay, so economic freedom. One of the limits on economic freedom comes from government and government regulations and all those kinds of things throughout the world. So how does cryptocurrency help resist that? So can you sort of elaborate a little bit further? What are the things that limit economic freedom and how does crypto help ease that? Today the world, like the traditional financial system is basically every country of the world for the most part has their own currency. And so there's a group of people or institutions in each of those countries that's controlling that economic policy or that money supply. And it can be manipulated, right? So it's not like many of these currencies are not linked to gold standard. The U.S. kind of famously came off that in 1970s, for instance, but if you read Ray Dalio and all this stuff like he talks about, there's thousands of fiat currencies that have been in existence over time. And basically all of them eventually get disconnected from backing of like hard commodities and then they get overinflated and printed. And so in times of stress, with Nixon, I guess it was like in the U.S. it was the Vietnam War or something like that. It kind of drove government spending. And so under times of stress, they say, hey, it's a temporary measure. We need to break the peg. Temporary was like famous words that he used and they go print. And so the bad thing about that, of course, is that it sort of erodes people's like wealth if they can only hold their assets in cash, which basically like poor people tend to do that. If you're wealthy, you can hold stocks or like real estate and things like that. But it's really a tax on the poorest people in society, inflation. So anyway, crypto in a way is a little bit of like a return to the gold standard in this digital era, right? Bitcoin, there's guaranteed scarcity of it. It's deflationary. There's never gonna be more than 21 million Bitcoin. And so that's a really important principle. I also think not just Bitcoin, but like cryptocurrency generally, it's really important in terms of this, you asked about regulation, right? So think about like, if you wanted to make a global borrowing and lending marketplace or a global exchange, you would have to go to all 200 countries in the world, sometimes like maybe 50 states in the US and get lending licenses or an operating exchange or whatever. And that's just an incredible amount of work. And you can't even do business in many of these countries because like you have to bribe somebody or it's corrupt or whatever. And so, but with DeFi, with decentralized finance, people have published like Uniswap as a decentralized exchange. Everybody in the world, no matter what country you're in, what jurisdiction can interface with that decentralized exchange and there's no central company operating it. It's a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, which is globally decentralized. So there's no throat to choke. There's no one person or a company you can go to to like, hey, shut this thing down. Even if everybody who's working on Uniswap today stopped, the Uniswap smart contract would continue to operate on the Ethereum blockchain. Similarly for like a borrowing and lending marketplace, like somebody in India wants to borrow from somebody in the US or whatever, there's very difficult to do that in the traditional financial world, but in a smart contract that's decentralized, you can enable anybody to access it. So it's really kind of this great democratizing force that is creating a new financial system that is more fair and more free. Yeah, and in some ways it's a clever way that's enabling people to do that in a novel way. So is Uniswap in some sense a competitive Coinbase? In which way is it and which way is it not? So because for people who don't know, Coinbase is centralized. So let me ask, doesn't that go against the spirit of crypto since crypto is decentralized? What are the pros and cons of being centralized as an exchange? So I don't think Coinbase is fully centralized. We have many different products. And the way that I think about it is that our exchange or our brokerage is a centralized, regulated financial service business. And it's actually important for the crypto ecosystem to have that because you wanna allow a lot of the fiat money in the world to flow into the crypto economy. So we're very proud of that. And I think we've helped a lot of that money flow in. Now, once people have money in crypto, they can choose to hold it in a variety of ways. And they can choose to hold it in a self custodial wallet, which is more decentralized. They can choose to use decentralized exchanges, which we love and Uniswap is not really, I don't think of them as like a direct competitor to us. We basically have integrated Uniswap into a number of our products. We love DeFi, decentralized exchanges, the whole thing. So Coinbase wallet, which is a self custodial wallet, is more decentralized and it allows people to hold their own crypto. They don't have to trust us. Can you explain what a self custodial wallet is? What is a wallet and what is a self custodial wallet? Yeah, so it's confusing. So a custodial wallet means you're trusting Coinbase to store your crypto, the private keys themselves. And for some people and institutions and everything, just meeting them where they are today, that's nice because it's simpler. They're not afraid of losing their crypto if they make some accidental mistake. Or so custodial crypto products are important to help get a bunch of people into the ecosystem. But I'm very supportive of self custodial wallets. And I think in some ways they are the future because more and more people are gonna want to store their own crypto, not trust a third party institution to do it. And in some ways that is much more authentic to the ethos of crypto. So Coinbase will help you convert the fiat into crypto. And frankly, that's a more centralized thing. But once you have crypto, you can then go to the self custodial world, store it yourself. And to get into the technical details just for a second, it's basically saying you're gonna store the keys on your own device. And so even if Coinbase gets some court order to seize it, we actually can't. From an architecture point of view, we can't do it. Or if Coinbase gets hacked or something, we can't lose your funds. Now the thing is you have to take the responsibility because we're not taking it. So the individual person could get hacked. And there's a whole bunch of really cool research happening to make self custodial wallets more resilient to accidental loss, hacks, and just user error. I don't know how much you've looked at various cryptography things, but basically, you can have multiple signatures from different keys on different devices where you need two of the three or three of the five. There's a whole technology called multi party computation or threshold signing signatures, which is really cool. But those are the things you would run locally? These are all security measures, cryptography measures to protect you without a centralized component? Right. So a simple example would be, let's say you had a two of three key signature. And one key might be stored at Coinbase, but that's not a quorum. So we couldn't unilaterally move your funds. But another key is on your device, on your phone, let's say. Oh, cool. So in a normal situation, you have a key on your phone. We have one. And so two out of three, it can all get signed very quickly for day to day use. But let's say you lose your phone or something. Now, there has to be a third key. And that's where you could store it in a backup somewhere, like in Google Drive or iCloud. You could trust a third party that's not Coinbase to also have that one key. And they can't do anything unilaterally with that one key. So that's a simple example. You can get way more complicated. Yeah, that's an awesome idea. So if your funds get seized, Coinbase can't do anything. But you better not lose your phone, maybe, in that case. Yeah, yeah. But it provides a, there is, so even if you lose your phone, then there is a recovery mechanism. Because you can get the one key from Coinbase, the one from your backup provider, and recover a new one back on your phone. I know, yeah. But what if Coinbase is no longer, but because of government, because of, say, it's in North Korea, government says you're no longer, like Coinbase is shut down in that country or something like that. Then you can get it, even if you have access to those two. So again, perhaps a silly question, but isn't a self custodial wallet a competitor as a notion to Coinbase? No, I mean, so we offer a self custodial wallet. We've built one, and it's like one. But doesn't it bleed the, like I guess I'm asking a sort of a financial question, is like how does Coinbase make money on transactions? So does this not, it does not decrease the number, or does not significantly negatively affect transactions? Or are you more focused on growing the number of the pie of the number of people that are using cryptocurrency? Yeah, like a traditional financial service firm would probably say, well, we should be storing, let's keep more of the custody with us, because that's how we prove to the world that we're valuable or whatever. I don't really believe that. Like I think that actually we kind of want to encourage our users to move to self custody over time for those who are ready and willing. And that technology needs to mature. I'm not trying to like force anybody to do it who doesn't want to do it. But to me, that's like the future of how we get billions of people using crypto. But doesn't that mean they can go somewhere else easier? Yeah, that's sort of the point is like, we're all using the same protocol. So there's low switching costs, which keeps all the companies accountable, right? Like if you want to access the visa network, there's only one company in the world you can go through to do that, like visa. But if you want to access the Bitcoin network, there's dozens or hundreds of companies out there who can do that. So it's arguably, you could argue it's worse for us as a company, but I think it's better for, it's what makes Bitcoin interesting and cryptocurrency interesting is that nobody controls it. There is low switching costs for customers. It's better for customers. And that means that all the companies in the space are going to be held to a high standard because the minute you lose someone's trust, they're just going to move their Bitcoin to some other service and that's good for the world. Do you think of Coinbase as, so there's these ideas of layer one, layer two, layer three technologies. Do you think of Coinbase as layer one, layer two, layer three? Now that said, there's so many products that are under the Coinbase umbrella that it's hard to answer that question, but what do you think? Do you acknowledge the existence of layer three? So, you know, usually when people are using those terms, layer one, layer two, so they're referring to like, layer one would be the blockchain, layer one blockchain itself, like a Bitcoin or Ethereum or something, not like a centralized service like Coinbase or even our decentralized self custodial wallet. So yeah, I wouldn't consider us to be like a layer one. These are the decentralized protocols that we're integrating, but Coinbase itself is not those. Yes, but layer two is the thing that was basically doing transactions without the settlement on the blockchain. And so you get to have some of the benefits of faster transactions without the security associated with the blockchain. And layer three is, I suppose, sort of apps built on top of that. So, you know, at least I think talking to Michael Saylor, he considers Coinbase a layer three technology. Interesting, okay. I'm not really particularly familiar with this kind of distinction of layer three and two. I don't see them as fundamentally different. But some of the, okay, I mean, one way of asking that, is there some layer two like of magic happening in order to make transactions associated with the blockchain happen instant, so that they're quick? So that. On Coinbase? On Coinbase, yeah. Is there some magic going on? Because you're, okay, we should say, how many cryptocurrencies are currently on Coinbase? So it's more than two. Yeah. It's a lot more than two. Yeah. So you have to understand, they have to incorporate all these technologies. Yeah. So how do you make that magic of sort of universal transactions happen across all of these different cryptocurrencies? There's our centralized products and decentralized products, right? The centralized products, we are storing that crypto for you. And so if you're moving from one of your accounts to another account, like an ETH1 account to ETH2 account, or from my ETH Coinbase centralized account to your ETH centralized. So we can do that transaction off chain to make it faster. And it saves the customer fees and it just confirms instantly. But it's not truly using the decentralized blockchain, right? So you can also send any Bitcoin address or Ethereum address, for instance. And that is putting the transaction on chain. Now our decentralized products like Coinbase wallet, the self custodial wallet, every transaction is happening on chain with that. And so basically it just shows a little bit of the evolution of Coinbase and the blockchains themselves. Like in the early days, these networks were not scalable. And so there were no L2 solutions, for instance. And so we had to do sort of these hacks, like moving the crypto off chain, if you were moving between your own accounts and stuff like that. Otherwise the minor fees would have just eaten us alive as a company, right? Yeah. But now the blockchains are starting to scale. There's a whole bunch of more work that needs to be done on that. And we're getting L2 solutions. So I think more and more of the transactions are going on chain, whether it's L2, L1. And ideally we shouldn't be doing that many transactions off chain, just internal Coinbase ledger or something. That's not really in the spirit of crypto. So when you say on chain, that includes layer two technology that the blockchain proposes. Yeah. I guess I was asking how much fun magic is happening off chain within Coinbase. And you're saying in the early days you had to, but you're trying to do less and less. So look, there's a bunch of high frequency traders that use the centralized products and even just regular retail people, they don't want to pay the gas fees and stuff. And they're trying to, it actually, we back at the envelope, calculated this out at one point and just like, it would be completely infeasible for like high frequency traders to put everything on chain at this point. That's basically what DEXs are doing. And so both are important. I think more and more is going to move decentralized over time, which is great. And we're, and we're basically. DEXs are decentralized exchanges by the way. Yeah. So anyway, we want to encourage more and more of it to move decentralized over time, but I don't, the centralized things aren't going away for like a long time. It's a decade from now, there's going to be some big institution or pension fund or central bank. That's like, all right, we got to hold crypto. Let's set up the account in a centralized way. So that's, that's fine. Both, both are important. Do you know the number of cryptocurrencies currently on Coinbase? Do you know that number? It's over a hundred, but it depends. It depends what jurisdiction you're in. And, you know, are you in institution versus retail? There's like, there's so many different categories now. But over a hundred. Yeah. So what does it take to become, to, to, to become an asset, to become a cryptocurrency on Coinbase, to add your technology to Coinbase? Okay. Well, so we're trying to get away from this idea of being listed on Coinbase as being seen as like an endorsement or something, because I actually think it's very important that we are not considered judge and jury about, you know, like imagine it was the early days of the internet and you were like, what's a good webpage and what's a bad webpage. Like you would have been totally wrong or anytime big tech companies try to make these review, review boards of like, you know, Apple famously gets in trouble for this a lot with their app store review process. Right. And so something that you think like a committee of people somewhere thinks looks silly may turn out to be the next big thing. Right. And so it's very difficult. So what do we do? We basically have a test of legality, right? We check, you know, do we believe this is a security? If so, it can't be listed on Coinbase and there's a very rigorous process we go through for that. Just currently the way the laws are in the US, you can't do that. And we've been, we acquired a broker duo license from the SEC. We're trying to work with them to get that operational and hopefully someday we can trade real crypto securities. But today that's not possible in the US at least. Then we look at sort of the cybersecurity of the crypto asset. Does it, do we see that there's some flaw in the smart contract or, you know, a way that somebody could manipulate it without the customer's permission? We look at some compliance pieces to it as well, like the actors behind it and like, you know, there any kind of criminal history, anything like that. But if we believe it meets our listing standards, basically this test of legality and everything for customer protection, then we want to list it because we want the market to at that point decide. And it's kind of like Amazon or something like that where, you know, a product might have three stars or it might have five stars, but if it starts to get one star consistently, like it's probably a fraudulent or it's defective or something like maybe Amazon will remove it. But otherwise you want to let the market decide what these things are. So that's generally how we do it. And by the way, more and more of these assets, I think especially like low market cap assets are going to be traded on DEXs through Coinbase. It's not that we, we don't need to list every asset on a centralized exchange. I think DEXs are really good for the long tail. And then it becomes an even, it's even more clear to people, like this is not some endorsement by a Coinbase of like, this asset's good and this one's bad. Like, you know, my belief is there's going to be millions of these assets over time. And so I hope it doesn't like make news every time we add one in the future, basically. Yeah, I wonder how you get there because I, even I look to Coinbase for, for example, you know, people, as you can imagine, sort of tag me on Twitter or something like that and all that, like you should interview our sort of this, the founder of this particular coin, right? Yeah. And I, it's so hard for me to know what's, first of all, what's interesting technology? What's, who's a scammer or not? Who's actually legitimately representing an ambitious new thing versus a scam? And I, you know, there's very few sources of like a verification signal. And unfortunately Coinbase in part has become a little bit of that too. And you're trying to get away from that because you're trying to get as many, sort of let the people decide. So you're thinking of like Amazon star type system where the people could rate. Yeah, so I think we'll actually probably add like user ratings and reviews. So, and we'll be very cautious about like, you know, these are real people. There's a bunch of stuff we have to do for that already. So I think wisdom of the crowds is good in terms of getting feedback on items, but we also, we're gonna do our own review, which I mentioned earlier, right? Which is like, okay, it meets this minimum bar to be listed on our site. Yeah. I think, yeah, both are important. How do you know if a coin is a scam or not? Well, you can see a few things. So, you know, I hate to use the word scam because a lot of these are judgment calls. You gotta, I kind of, a court may or a jury may land either way, but things that would be red flags to look at would be, you know, is a bunch of the asset owned by an insider or insiders with short vesting periods. You know, does the background of the founders, like they may have criminal records or if they've perpetrated other frauds in the past, right? There's a difference between something which is just a me too product. It's like, it doesn't have anything interesting about it and something that's an actual fraud or outright scam. And you have to, a lot of this data, what's cool about it is that it's now available on chain. You can look at like the tokenomics behind it and see who owns it. And are they selling it, you know, in like inappropriately or are they pumping it on like YouTube and Twitter and making promises about, hey, the value of this thing may be a higher in the future. And like, all those are just big, big no, no's that we would, you know, we just don't wanna go there. So our whole thing is like, we want to enable innovation in this space, but not allow anybody to curtail the advancement of this industry by like doing some kind of fraudulent thing or get rich quick thing. So. It's a tricky industry because I'm trying to figure out who to, you know, what's interesting to understand, to research. And it's hard to know. Let me ask you about a tricky one to add to a centralized exchange, which is privacy preserving cryptocurrency. So like Monero. Yeah. Is that technically difficult or is that why, why is like Monero, for example, forget that specific one, but like privacy preserving cryptocurrency blockchains, why is that, is that ever possible to add? So that's a great question. So the answer is maybe. So here's the reason why. So because we're a regulated financial service business, we have various licenses to do that. We are regulated by various regulators. Part of those licenses requires us to have a quote, reasonable program to monitor for suspicious activity, you know, an AML program, anti money laundering, right? And so if it, if a coin is a hundred percent anonymous and we can't really do blockchain analytics to track source of funds and where these things might be going, it makes it harder to have a reasonable program around that that's defensible. Now there are privacy preserving coins like Zcash, which have something called a view key. And a view key is basically another key which allows you to deanonymize the transactions in specific situations where you want that. So for instance, you know, we do support Zcash. And one of the ways we got comfortable with that is that when you're buying it on Coinbase, you know, you can basically have a view key. The transactions are not anonymous while you're buying it. And we can see where it goes afterwards and do our whole standard program. Now, if it gets a few hops away down the road, I mean, people could eventually turn on privacy preserving aspects. So, you know, these are tough judgment calls, but at least in terms of our interaction with the customer and everything, we feel comfortable at that. I think there's a broader point here, which is that I actually think privacy coins are a good thing for the world and they should be allowed. And more like, you know, despite, we've made this judgment call to operate in a regulated and safe and compliant way, but just taking my Coinbase hat off for a minute, I think the world would be a better place if there were more privacy coins, because it's kind of like the internet when it first came online, like there was no HTTPS, everything was HTTP and there was, you know, so people were afraid to put their credit cards on the internet and your messages could be intercepted and all this stuff. And now the whole internet has basically moved to HTTPS with a little lock icon in your browser, which is better. Like, and financial information is like the most important information to keep private, right? So there's times where like, let's say you're running a charity or something and you want to have total auditability, transparency for the whole world, who donated and where did the money go? That's great, you want it to be public. But if it's like your personal money or something like that, you don't want to be broadcasting that to the whole world. And in some ways that's what blockchains are doing, you know, pseudonymously, because like, but it is a public ledger. And so if you can know who owns each address, you can basically deanonymize it. I, you know, I think basically people should fight for privacy and freedoms of all kinds, but privacy of money is a good thing. So I would like to see more of that in the future. You chosen with Coinbase to have a seat at the table with the regulators. So what kind of conversations are there at that table? What are the regulations like? What is the level of understanding with regulators? What are they worried about? What are they thinking about? What are the positive and what are the negative regulations that you're facing? That you're educating, struggling with, pushing back on, supporting, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Oh man, there's so many. Cause we're, I mean, we're live in like, you know, maybe a hundred countries or more at this point. So the conversations are all over the map. I'm trying to think what broad strokes I could paint for you. So I'd say one trend that's positive is that basically regulators around the world are more and more, over the last five years, I would say, it's more and more common to find a regulator today asking, how can we preserve the innovation potential of this technology while keeping the bad actors out than it was five years ago, where they were saying, this is all bad activity. How do we prevent it? And so maybe this is. When you say more and more, what fraction? I'll give you like a US specific example, although we operate in many countries. So when I go to DC now, I would say, you know, 50, 60% of the people who I meet with are basically, you know, they're in the camp of crypto, has a lot of potential. We should regulate it to make sure the bad people don't do something bad with it. But this is here to stay and it has a lot of upside. We should basically create the awful regulation and celebrate it and actually encourage this innovation to happen in the US. That's a huge change from just three years ago where it was probably 30% of people saying that. Now it's like 60, it's like almost double. It's getting harder to find like true crypto skeptics in DC. I'd say that, you know, maybe only like 20 or 30% of people are like willing to say something negative. Like they actually think it's net negative. It's like, it's really hard to defend that position at this point, because almost like one in five Americans have used or tried crypto at this point. So you're kind of condemning 20% of your fellow citizens if you say that at this point, you know, especially with NFTs and all these things, like a huge segment of people who don't even care about investing or whatever came into the space. So, and then basically that's that same conversation is happening, but, you know, delayed by a few years in like India and Europe and in some Asian countries. And some countries have really embraced crypto and they're like trying to really, they're ahead of where the US is because they're trying to actually attract the best startups and entrepreneurs like, you know, like Dubai and UK and Australia and all are kind of pushing good regulation, El Salvador actually, I guess, adopted it as like Bitcoin as a legal tender. There was another country, Central African Republic, I think that is supposedly did that as well. But, you know, there's countries like China that are more autocratic that are saying, hey, this is a threat to our power and like, we're gonna try to really curtail it. So what kind of regulations are there that you feel the most that are limiting or that are empowering? Like, is there specific examples? Yeah, okay. So, I mean, basically I think the securities laws in the US need to be clarified about what, crypto is many different things. That's what people don't realize. So like some crypto, like Bitcoin, Ethereum and many others are probably more like commodities. They're not controlled by any one person, you know, like anyway, there's people who wanna raise money for a company that's sounds more like a security that should be regulated by the SEC. Commodities are regulated by the CFTC. Then there's some cryptocurrencies which are more like currencies, like stable coins and central bank digital currencies. And those are probably, you know, should be regulated by the treasury or someone like that. And then there's a whole another category of cryptocurrencies, which are none of those things. They're NFTs like artwork or they're metaverse items or decentralized identity and voting. And so I think that there's a very unhelpful point of view out there by some folks, which is, hey, this is all, most of this is like bad activity. We need to shut it down. So we're just gonna pursue enforcement actions or something like that. Most people in DC don't feel that way anymore. And I think the people of the US don't feel that way anymore because a lot of them are using this stuff. And their general view is, there's a lot of upside potential here. We can all agree, let's get rid of the fraud and the scams. We all wanna get rid of that. So let's create a relatively simple test, which says, if it's like nobody controls more than 20% of it or some threshold, it probably is more like a commodity. If someone's raising money for, they're selling this thing for a business, then it's probably a security. And then if it's more like a medium of exchange, it's a currency. And if it's none of those things, maybe it's artwork or whatever, a legal test like that would help clarify who, which regulator is regulating what. And then we also wanna have probably like a sandbox for innovation where if you're a startup and you're doing less than, I don't know, some number, less than some amount of payment volume or customer funds you're storing, it's like just let those things get off the ground without a soul crushing amount of legal bills and uncertainty. So if the US can get there, that would be great. I think a bunch of other countries now are rushing around the world to sort of create that regulation that does attract innovation. And so in the international bodies like IMF and G20 and stuff, they're starting to look at proposed regulation. I hope that Coinbase and a bunch of other crypto companies can help in that conversation too. We have a whole policy effort. I think actually crypto policy efforts are like probably one of the biggest things in DC right now. So it moves slow at the speed of government, but yeah, and in the meantime, we're just trying to help more and more people use crypto because ultimately that's what, in the democracies, that's what they care about. Like they'll do what the people of the country want. So you want governments to start understanding differences between, in the crypto space, commodities, securities, currencies, NFTs. I still don't understand. What are they supposed to make sense of NFTs? What is NFTs exactly from a perspective of a regulator? Yeah, so. Is it the other categories? Yeah, most NFTs you could think of as like artwork, although it's, who knows where it's gonna go. It could be. You mentioned Metaverse, right? You mentioned some kind of unique identity of a thing. Yeah, like there's people selling virtual land in NFTs. I actually, I bought this NFT that's like, it's like citizenship in this like city, Dow in Wyoming. Like I've never been there, but it's almost like a badge or an attestation like to get access to this location. There's like people doing like tickets to events. Like, you know, they're called a POAPs. Like proof of attendance and things like that. So it'll be very interesting to see where NFTs go over time. It could get, and that's the danger. You don't wanna try to like define the regulation if you don't even know where this thing's gonna go, so. And so your efforts in the policy arm is education? Yeah, education, advocacy. We're just trying to be like a helpful educational resource essentially, and then if they give us feedback and they're like, hey, don't do this or don't, or do this, like we're more than happy to do anything that's requested. We generally go get licenses and we've just tried to do the right thing in the absence of clarity, because if it's not clear what the law says, then you should just basically do good things that you think may be required in the future to show good faith effort towards the right thing. And that's part of like innovating in a regulated field, which is, you know, a whole topic in itself. So if you are at the table, let me, this is less the case in the United States, but can government agencies seize a person's cryptocurrency by forcing Coinbase to hand it over? So when you're centralized, they have a phone number to call. Okay, so this is a complicated topic. Like if you really wanna be sure that, this is why people wanna store their own crypto, right? Like with self custodial wallets, like with Coinbase wallet embracing decentralization, they wanna avoid that. Now in the US, there is rule of law, right? So we have reasonable protections in place around like search and seizure and things like that. You know, Coinbase does, we publish transparency reports on this. We get subpoenas, court orders, things like that from various countries around the world. And there are situations where we have been ordered to freeze accounts, things like that. You know, we have to follow the law, is another way to put it. We're a regulated financial service business and so. If the money is used as part of breaking the law, that's what that, in a particular jurisdiction, in a particular. Right, and then the other thing, sometimes we will actually get court orders or subpoenas that are overly broad. We've seen, so they need to follow due process, right? And so we've seen some in the past that were like, well, we need you to freeze this huge number of accounts. And it's like, well, we'll actually have gone to court and like pushed back on some of these and said like, what is your probable cause? And has the threshold been met? And like, we've won some of those cases on behalf of our customers. So yeah, it's actually really, it's kind of unfortunate and frustrating. As a large business, you spend a lot of resources basically interacting with inbound requests by all kinds of lawyers and people and requesting things. And some of them are silly and ridiculous and you have to push back and say no. And so it's kind of a tax on every company at a certain size which ultimately gets passed on to the customer in higher fees. So you have to employ armies of lawyers to deal with this stuff. Can you educate me on something? How much innovation is there in the legal space? So for lawyers working with Coinbase because it's such a new cutting edge thing. So you're, there's a lot of gray area you're supposed to be operating under. Like how hard is it being a lawyer at Coinbase? Like how much precedence is there? I guess is what I'm asking. I mean, just like you said, three years. It's kind of a new space. Yeah, well, it's probably very hard to be a lawyer at Coinbase and very fun because whenever you're in a new field that's growing fast, there isn't a lot of case law and just precedent set. So that's also an opportunity for you to go create that stuff. And that's what a lot of legal careers are made out of is like take a complex situation where you have to balance difficult things. Like how do we prevent bad activity but still enable an innovation? That's a hard question. And there's, you can go draft legislation and circulate it to policymakers or come up with these policies and how do you operate a business in an environment where the law is just unclear, right? It's like try to do the right thing, but like strike the right balance. So yeah, a lot of our lawyers have to come up with that. Very creative stuff. You mentioned one of the things you're focused on is expanding the number of people, maybe a billion people on Coinbase or using cryptocurrency. Where are we at now? How do we get to a billion? As of Q4 last year, we had 89 million verified accounts on Coinbase, but in any given quarter, only maybe like 10 or a little more million of those are like really active. So, and then if you look at globally, I think some of the estimates I've seen is maybe there's like 200 million people or something like that who have ever used or tried crypto. So we're a long, you know, we're ways from a billion, but it's not like that far off. How do you get there? How do you get to a billion? So a few things. One is the blockchains have got to become way more scalable. It's kind of like we're all running dial up modems and we need broadband. And so it's just like too expensive, too slow to do all these transactions. And I think if we just get L2s working and scalability, you know, we'll see another order of magnitude kind of come out just from that. I think the second one would be more clear regulation. That would help a lot. I do talk to, you know, pension funds and you know, various asset managers, sovereign wealth funds and stuff. And a lot of them tell me, we've got 1% of our portfolio in crypto today, but we really would rather have like 20% in there. But what we're waiting for is more clear regulation coming out and saying that clear test that I was saying, these assets are commodities regulated by SCPC, these are by SCC, these are by treasury, whatever. So that would be a big unlock. Do transactions. So one of the things that you mentioned, payments, sorry. Yeah. Well, does that unlock a lot of users? Yeah, it does. I mean, remittance is like a huge thing. People sending money home to their families in other countries where the fees are super high. So yeah, if we get blockchains to be more scalable and there's more global adoption, like I think we'll see remittance quarters move over to crypto a lot. There's also just, the other thing that's driving a lot of crypto adoption is basically the creation of more and more third party apps. So, or dApps they're sometimes called decentralized dApps. So a lot of startups now, you know, how like you used to use in the early 2000s, they called them.com startups, but now you don't need to say.com cause everybody's using the internet. And so now there's like hundreds or thousands of these crypto startups, but I think in the future, you won't need to call them crypto startups cause they'll just be called startups cause everyone's using the internet and crypto and whatever. So anyway, the use cases, the utility of crypto is getting better and better with like all these third party apps getting funded and created. And do you think there's going to be a killer or a set of killer dApps, like a thing where nobody can live without? Are we still waiting for that? There's going to be a bunch of them. It's just like, it's like the internet, like what were the killer web companies, you know, like Uber and Wikipedia and Airbnb and Google. And like, so there's going to be some big winners, but there'll be thousands of, this is basically the new, it's like what happened with the.com startups in the early 2000s. It's like a lot of the best entrepreneurs are building crypto startups now. So tons of venture money flowing into the space. A lot of smart young people, so. Do you think Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency will become the reserve currency of the world at some point? Cause this is kind of a controversial idea, but I actually think yes. I do think Bitcoin could end up becoming a reserve currency of the world. So I've been reading Ray Dalio recently with his new book, like The Changing World Order. And I thought it was a really well researched book. He talks in there, he looks back at history, right? He looks at like empires and going back to various Chinese empires, the Dutch and Ottomans and everybody, and how did they rise? And they were able to have the reserve currency as they rose and what produced that? Like it came from good education and innovation and better trade and anyway. So the US by some measures is kind of looks like it's, maybe it's had a really good run and it's coming down a little bit and China is kind of coming up. Who knows how that'll play out, by the way, like the world is very complicated. It could, that could switch. But I guess if the US dollar is gonna be seeing more inflation in the future, the Chinese Yuan is not like necessarily better, right? I mean, they have a ton of debt as well. And it's not like you could really, that the Yuan could be inflated as well, right? It probably will be. And so I do think that there's this group of people today which probably most traditional, I don't know, like the people who run big banks and like governments and stuff that they're not, this is not really on their radar today. But I think there's basically a group of younger people in that kind of 25, 35 year old range who are tech savvy. They're starting to think of crypto as like the primary thing in their financial life. It's like, I basically hold my wealth in crypto and I use dollars or euros or whatever. If I happen to need something, I convert it to that at the last minute. It's like, if I'm traveling, I might convert some local currency in the moment, but that's not where I hold most of my wealth. So this segment of the population is not like massive yet from a GDP point of view, but I think it's a leading indicator of where things could be going. And this is actually good for the world. It's kind of like, especially if China does continue to rise and it has a more authoritarian view, it'll be kind of this very centralized East versus a decentralized West where people are in the West, in the free world, really kind of embracing crypto and a more open, fair, free global financial system, which I think will be enormously beneficial for humanity. And I do think basically Bitcoin is the reserve currency, the gold standard of the crypto economy. So that's pretty crazy. Yeah, the gold standard. I mean, it's also like with Ray Dalio, I feel like China will drive a lot of this, either in response or directly. I mean, I think the ruble, I'm not paying as close attention to the financial systems, but I think they're trying to tie it to gold once again. So that's an interesting, maybe it'll be one of the more authoritarian regime that will switch to Bitcoin standard first. And then it's the West that will, out of that pressure will catch up versus the other way around. It's fascinating to think of what is the forcing function, what kind of perturbation is required to switch, to change anything, honestly, about the financial system. But it could be, as you're saying, just waiting for the people that are young now that are embracing crypto to enter the positions of power, essentially. But I hope that's not the case, because if for any innovation we have to wait, sorry to say, for the older folk to pass away, that's not an efficient way to make change. Yeah, that's a super interesting topic of how people's minds become less plastic as they age. I guess it's a feature. It's called wisdom, but then we also need the wild ones to explore, exploration versus exploitation. You wrote a blog post that's really interesting in September 2020 titled Coinbase is a Mission Focused Company, like what we're talking about. So one interesting thing you said in that blog post is that we're not going to be distracted by activism within the company that's not related to the mission of the company. Now, that's a rare thing for a company to state, for a company CEO to state, especially in this climate. Can you, first of all, describe in a little more detail what you meant? Did you receive blowback for this? I definitely received some blowback, but yeah, I'll describe what I meant. And if you want to talk about how it came to that too, we can talk about that. But what I meant is that there's a lot of companies right now, including tech companies, but not exclusively, where I think like great companies, they have an important mission. They're trying to do something really good for the world. And unfortunately, they're getting a little distracted from that at times because of employee activism that is causing the company to basically jump into whatever the current thing is and try to help is like the positive interpretation. The negative interpretation would be to virtue signal. And my view is that this is actually kind of destructive to, this is largely an American company phenomenon, by the way. I do worry that this is making America less competitive, even though I think of myself as kind of internationally minded, but I am a US citizen, had my whole life here. So when we put out this statement, we had employees that were not in the US who were confused by it. They were like, why did Brian need to say that? It was just saying you're going to focus on work at work. That's what we were doing already. And there was certain pockets of the US, certain cities, in particular where we had employees that a very peculiar cultural phenomenon had evolved where I think people really wanted the company they worked at to be almost acting like the government or something and like trying to solve the hardest societal issues and at least have an opinion on it, if not contribute to the solution on almost everything. And for me, it was a very uncomfortable situation for me as a CEO. I'd never quite been in this situation where most of the time when employees in the past were kind of asking me questions, they would be asking about like, how do we make this product better? Like, what do we do with this competitor? What about this regulator? And it got to a place around that time where most of the questions we were receiving were I think even about things not related to the company they were about broader societal issues. Like Brian, what's your stance on XYZ controversial thing? And it was, I often like didn't have an opinion on these really hard questions, right? And I didn't really, I felt like it was distracting the company. People internally were getting into fights a lot too, like disagreeing with each other. There was a thing where like the social slack internally was turning into a social media almost with people putting in flame wars. So, and this culminated by the way with a walkout that happened in the company. We had received like some demands from employee groups about various things. And there was like basically an antagonistic thing with management and employee. And I was like, we're all on the same team here. If you wanna be antagonistic, let's do it with somebody else outside the company, that we're trying to improve the world in that dimension. So yeah, eventually I was like, okay, the company is not aligned on this. I just don't feel, I don't like the job as CEO, frankly. Like if the job is to come in here every day and like have to squirm in front of like the most difficult societal questions, I don't think I wanna do that job. So like either they're gonna have to go or I'm gonna have to go. And I founded this company and I really believe in the mission. So they're gonna have to go. And what I realized was that, so I basically, I made an exit package available to anybody who wasn't on board with this direction. 5% of employees took it. I got the company realigned towards this mission. We're all here to do work. By the way, people can, they can go do anything like political or social activism outside of work. It's totally fine. Like we all, everybody has stuff like that in their personal life. But while at work, we can also disagree at work, by the way, on the work. You know, this is not like a no disagreement culture. Like we should, let's try to get the truth. But don't bring stuff into work that's just gonna create division. Make the workplace a refuge from division about all these crazy things. And like, we're all aligned here to work on the mission. Let's do that. Yeah, that was really, really, really refreshing to hear. So this is me speaking, but there's a sense when companies take on these issues publicly from a CEO position or anywhere else, that it does seem to optimize for virtue signaling versus solving a particular problem. Because to solve a particular problem, you really have to really put in a huge, you have to hire a huge number of, you basically have to create a company with a company to take on a particular thing. But if you allow yourself to internally care about a particular issue, you're basically pacifying some number of employee, like making sure Slack doesn't get out of hand. And then you're doing this kind of, from my perspective, especially on issues that care about fake virtue signaling, basically trying to understand what will make me look the best, what would make the company look the best in this particular aspect. And it just seems very shallow. And it's optimizing for the wrong thing, not for the solving of the problems, but for the making yourself look like the good guy and trying to then leverage that to say, I'm the good guy in all situations. And it just, it's the wrong thing. And perhaps from your perspective as a CEO, as a leader, it's also creating division, unnecessary division within people. Like they get, yeah, there's something about us who gets extremely argumentative about certain topics. They really bring out the emotion. And I think that probably, as you were saying, that emotion is even probably okay, maybe productive when that emotion has to do with the mission of the company. Like you really care about those disagreements versus like something that has nothing to do with increasing economic freedom using crypto. Yeah, it's fascinating. But it was so refreshing because it's rare. Why do you think that's a rare? So the city you're mentioning, I mean, there's a bunch of cities, but San Francisco is one such city when that culture. And it's sad because San Francisco is also, the Bay Area is also the hub historically of some of the greatest innovation in human history. So there's that tension. How did that culture emerge there? Where like the innovation was done by people that are very mission driven. You get a bunch of smart people together to solve a difficult problem. They get maybe sometimes too much blinders on, but they try to balance that. Because it requires that focus to solve an actual problem. And yet that's also the place where this culture emerged. It's a fascinating human dynamic. I don't know. Somebody will one day tell the history of Silicon Valley, not just the innovation, but the social dynamics that occurred there. Anyway, why do you think that's so rare? Well, because people don't wanna get attacked. It's like super, you don't wanna get canceled, right? It's super uncomfortable. Nobody wants to be called a racist or whatever people wanna say on Twitter. Did you get attacked? Yeah, yeah, I definitely got attacked. I mean, and I knew it would be controversial. The only reason I did it, frankly, was that I was kind of at my wit's end. I was like, well, like I said earlier, like the job, the CEO job sucks. Like either I don't wanna do it or they have to go and I'm gonna make the company into something that I want. And I'd spent eight or 90 years of my life at that point kind of building this thing. I was like, well, I could go start another company, but it takes a long time to get momentum with these things. And Coinbase is a very rare thing that happened in the world. I feel very passionate about it. So yeah, I'm not gonna go. Like I need to make this the company that I wanna work at. And what was really interesting was that there was such a huge outpouring of support. So I knew that it would be controversial and I would get attacked. And predictably, there was some journalists and New York Times and all these people who kind of like went and started writing hit pieces on the company shortly thereafter. And they basically just call people who've left the company and can get quotes on whatever they want and then they'll write a story. So mainstream media, I lost a lot of trust in mainstream media, frankly, after that. And of course, it's kind of become obvious since then that most mainstream media is like hyper politicized at this point. It's basically either super left or super right. And it's not really that focused on truth. So that's kind of unfortunate because I think journalism is actually like really important in society. So that whole thing got eroded in the US. Luckily, there's sort of new media, people like you and a whole bunch of people. Did that blog post help that statement, the 95 people that remained, is this still something you struggle with? Because it's also a culture of the broader tech space. Okay, so that was an interesting thing, which was that, so the 95% of people stayed. I got a huge outpouring of support from people who said, thank God you finally spoke up and said something because frankly, it was making it not a very fun place to work either. And I realized that there is, I think there was, I think Nassim Taleb has this blog post about the tyranny of the 1% or something like that. But there's basically a relatively small group, one in 5% or something like that, that is really upset about something. It's not the majority of the company, it's like 5%. There's another 15% or something that are sympathetic to the cause. They're actually somewhat suggestible. They will go along with whatever, because it sounds reasonable. These are like real issues they're talking about. It's not to say that it's not real. And they'll kind of get swept up in it. But there's an 80% of the company that basically doesn't agree or just wants to get their work done without all this drama or distraction. And they're afraid to speak up because if they speak up, they're afraid of being, again, called a racist, like fired, ostracized amongst their peers. And so it did require it to get to a bad enough place for me to finally say, you know what? I just, I feel like I have to do this. Live through the short term attacks of the press, which ultimately was very freeing for me because now I don't really care. And now I can actually just build the company that I want to build without caring about that. And then what was cool was a lot of really great people reached out to the Coinbase too after that. And were like, I'm an early engineer at Google or wherever. And this culture has gotten kind of messed up and I want to work at a company that's willing to stand for that. And so we've gotten a lot of good people come over. Basically what I realized, and by the way, our diversity numbers and all that stuff, people told me when I was drafting this poster, don't post this, people, underrepresented groups will never want to work at this company again. And I was like, I don't think that's true. I talked to our ERG groups and they're not telling me they care about this stuff that much. They're telling me they just want to be respected at work and do good work and contribute. So my gut was telling me that that advice was wrong. And I can tell you a year after doing it, our diversity numbers are basically either the same or better in every category. So that turned out to be false. Look, I hate to be polarizing on either dimension here. I just want to get good work done and build good stuff with technology. So I think companies should just have reasonable policies. You want to get rid of bias in hiring. You want to attract great people from all different backgrounds. We have pledge 1%. We put 1% of the company equity into a foundation. I hope we're able to do good stuff with that. Let's give back in some way. But the main message I guess for me is the core mission, the core work that we're doing on economic freedom and just all of our products, that is the main value that we're contributing in the world. Let's just do that more. And hopefully we can get from 89 million verified users to a billion or whatever. And then I just think that's how we'll have the biggest impact. It's tempting though. It's so interesting how companies get tempted to help. And you step in and it's almost like a drug and then you can't, you forget. I mean, like all of us in life just have to be companies. You get distracted and maintaining focus. You're absolutely right. The way for Coinbase to add value to the world is to maximize the mission that it's on, not other stuff. And when you get wealthier and more successful, it becomes more and more tempting to just help out in some other shallow ways. It's fascinating. And you just kind of brought that to light. So it was very refreshing. And it shouldn't be controversial to sort of focus on just getting stuff done. Well, let me ask you, I mean, do you think that this, it's all these things tie together. There's like a general trend of like more censorship. There's like more cancel culture. There's some of these like freedom values are kind of, even like freezing people's accounts, like the trucker thing that happened. And this seems like there's a general trend of more authoritarian policies there. But do you feel like the tide is turning on that? Like there's counter examples to it we've seen recently. I think it's the last gasp of old way of doing things. And so there's desperation and so on. Because to be fair, it's kind of the internet, which is where's the source of a lot of this, where people have a voice, is making the power centers of the world really nervous. And so that's where that's coming from, I think. And the internet is tricky. It's weird. It's full of bots. It's full of like misinformation of all kinds, full of large groups with conspiracy theories and so on. And I mean misinformation broadly. People are misusing the word misinformation. They're just, governments are just labeling random things with misinformation just to censor them. But I just think it's just like a new world where the internet is really finally taking hold, where there's billions of devices and everybody has a voice. It's almost, basically governments and powerful people are slightly losing hold of power. And they're starting to freak out a little bit. That's it. And once you have young people that are coming up now, gain power, I think we'll rebalance everything. And then there's, like you said, promising signs that it's obvious that the majority of people want freedom. And that means a lot of things. That means economic freedom. That means freedom to have a voice, freedom to move around, freedom to act in the way they, without reasonable sort of limitations by people that don't have their best interests. And I gain more hope from just regular people that are fighting and like demanding being able to have freedom of speech, or more specifically sort of resisting crude overreach of government in the acts of censorship, at least in the United States. And hopefully that percolates out to the rest of the world that's struggling on a much more basic level where people are being put in prison for the words they say, not just banned from Twitter. Right, it could be worse. What are some lessons from your failures and your successes about what it takes to run a company? I think one of the things that I learned about leadership is that I never really thought of myself as a very natural leader, to be honest. I don't think I was a natural leader. But so I always envisioned good leaders as like these military generals, like they seem so confident and they're just like bark orders, charge that hill and do this. And I was actually like more introverted and kind of, I wasn't really confident in the way I communicated. And so what I realized is that there's lots of different kinds of leaders. You can be any kind of CEO you want, right? I was kind of more of like a product, technical focus CEO. And I preferred to sort of hear everyone's opinion. And it wasn't just gonna like render a decision in the room in some like kind of heated moment and like piss off half the people. I would do like, all right, I'm gonna go think about it and I'll send you my decision later today or tomorrow or whatever. And so I found ways to kind of make it work for me where I could basically, I always tried to avoid like, when people getting like super emotional about something and like, I think they're thinking, their judgment goes down, right? And just like never make a decision when you're angry, right? And so I would always sort of try to get a sense of, are these people like trying to be right or are they trying to seek the truth? And you can do these little tricks like, okay, you argue that person's position and you argue the other one and like see if you can genuinely represent it. Now I know you're listening and these kinds of things. But I guess, sorry, getting back to your question about leadership, I think I basically just kept doing things that were a little outside my comfort zone. And then my comfort zone kept getting bigger and bigger. You know? And so I think that's how you build confidence is you do the thing that's scary and it's like a little outside. And like when I first started Coinbase, I had never managed anybody. I would have been scared to death to have put out like a very controversial opinion like that and sort of, all right, 5% of people will go, we didn't know what percent it was gonna be by the way. It could have been 1%, it could have been 50%. Like, but we went into it scary because it was a scary thing. I was like, I don't know, I think this is right. I'm just gonna do it. So if you do enough scary things, like you'll build the confidence. And I feel like I'm still on that journey. Every year or two at Coinbase, there's some big thing that comes out as like, oh my God, like I didn't sleep well for a week and like, this is the next level, right? But that's how you learn and grow. So you're still going up that mountain through the fog one step at a time. Yeah. Can I just quickly ask you about a couple of other efforts that are super interesting that you're involved with? So first of all, a little bit more old school, fascinating effort of research hub. So what's that about the GitHub for open science? Yeah, okay, so basically I've had a chance to try to help a couple other companies get off the ground too, cause I wanna see various efforts out there succeed. And one of them I've always thought about like why is scientific research not more like open source software or why couldn't it be much faster, right? And there's, you've probably have seen this like in an academic setting, right? But there's all kinds of things that feel very antiquated to me about scientific research, everything from the funding process and grants to how peer review works, to how you submit to journals, all the costs associated with journals, you know, that the people, you'd think like you'd get paid for this or something and it would then be available to all the taxpayers for free but no, they're like, they're all pay walled and there's like these big companies that have sort of, in my view, kind of held back innovation here. So, and the preprint servers like bioarchive and archive.org have really helped this but those websites are, they look like they're kind of from like 15 years ago or something. Yeah, it's like Craigslist or something. Yeah, so anyway, one of the things I, once Coinbase went public last year, I had a little bit of liquidity and I was like, all right, let me fund a small team and let's see if we can, if they can like go off and make something better here. So we have a prototype out there, it's at researchhub.com, people can check it out. And it's basically, you know, the first version is kind of like Reddit for science. There's like various hubs, which are like journals, but you know, you can publish papers there, you can use an electronic lab notebook to sort of have a modern day paper, which is not just a PDF that's static, but it's a living document. Ideally in the future, you know, you can get comments and feedback from people in there, you can update it over time. We want people to be able to share the code and the data sets associated with their paper, research paper is not just a PDF. And in the future, we want to make it even where like, you know, people can get funding for science through that site and even license out innovations that they've made. Because the other thing I've noticed in life is that there's kind of like, there's a bunch of people working on science and there's a bunch of people building companies and they very rarely intersect, but when they do, you get the best things like SpaceX and Genentech and even Google and like even Coinbase was based on a research paper, the Bitcoin white paper. And so most business people are like creating companies that don't have any scientific innovation, they're just like marketing based on, you know, whatever. And then a lot of scientists are making things which never actually benefit humanity because they're not commercialized and turned into products. And so if we can somehow create a translation layer between those two groups and help them, you know, helps align the market forces, align scientific research to market forces so that they're more incentivized. Like if you discover CRISPR or something like that, like you should be a billionaire, you know, and like all the downstream implications of that, not going through some antiquated tech transfer office or whatever. And if you're an entrepreneur, you should be looking to commercialize the latest scientific innovations. And so that's kind of like the longterm vision for that site. I think it's just an early step today, but we've got like a really passionate community on there that are jumping into like, you know, computer science or longevity or various bio hubs or whatever and like beginning to source the best innovations, but also discuss them, improve them and publish through the site. So I have a question about incentives, but first let me say for people listening who are outside of academia might not be familiar with an absurd situation. So there's journals, like you mentioned, and scientists publishing those journals and the journals provide very little value except matching you with reviewers that are unpaid. And so in the digital world, they're providing basically almost no value except hosting your paper. And they put up a paywall and charge people to access that. And that charge is not like even Netflix fees, you're talking about a lot of money. So they're basically blocking your research that should be wide open from the world and creating a paywall. It's a fascinating like scam that's actually holding back. I don't, it's a shitty scam because you're not making that much money. I feel like a definition of a scam, you should at least be making money. So like significant amount of money, you're basically making shady money and holding back all of human knowledge, okay. So that put aside and people get a little confused because the journals aren't the ones paying the scientists. People think like the journals are somehow funding the scientists, therefore they have the right to put up a paywall. No, no, no, the funding is coming from elsewhere. Journals are the middleman that nobody asks for, especially in the digital world. Anyway, that said, there is a interesting kind of incentives for scientists, which is prestige and so on. So there's a thing with journals, if there's a prestigious journal and you pass the review process, you get into that journal or a prestigious conference in computer science, then that's seen as a good thing in your resume. And, oh, not just your resume, within your community, that's a respected thing. Is there some way to achieve that same kind of incentive in the open setting of research hub? So like where I could say, I got X, Y and Z, like, look, I'm impressive because this happened on research hub. I think you're right. Like the whole academia, like progress track is about like where you got published and how many citations. And it's kind of like a false economy of reputation because like, there's not real money backing it. And so I think we've thought about this a little bit. And I think the research hub team has an opportunity to do something here that basically says like, okay, I had the top paper for 2022 in biology on in here. And you basically publish a list, a leaderboards of these like top for the month, the year in all these different categories. Then actually, we should probably give out grants and awards in addition to that, fund those people almost like fellows or even give out like, you know how like the Nobel prize, there should be like a research hub prize or something and like ship people, maybe even ship like a print version of a journal that is the top papers in each category in each month or whatever. And then like people want to put that in their wall and in the lab. And like, so I do think we need to sort of change, I don't know, like the traditional folks in academia or science would probably think this is like crazy idea. But I think we need to change the culture to not celebrate getting published in paywall journals, almost like friends don't let friends publish in like paywall journals. Like, cause that's, it's just not helping humanity. So like, you know, it should be more prestigious to publish in an open science way and get the top spot. That should be celebrated above being published in whatever, I don't even want to name one of them, you know? Well, there's currently, the culture has already shifted to where almost everybody publishes on archive and by archive and so on. Yeah. But, so that the culture is there on that scene, friends don't let friends not publish open, but then the prestige thing is missing, which is like anyone can publish an archive. So how do you know it's actually a strong paper? Now, funny enough, even with the crappy systems we have now, word of mouth is powerful. Like you have a, like citation system is pretty powerful. So like you say, okay, this is a strong paper. We don't need reviewers, our human eyes are the reviewers, like the community is the reviewers. So it's already, like that part is there, but it would be nice to have like, you know, nature level, like this is respect, this is a respectful accomplishment. Yeah. And something like a leaderboard, but a stable kind of system. Yeah. And I should mention too, so there's a crypto angle to this too, which is, so research hub has a coin associated with research coin. And it's basically, if people, you know, upvote your paper or like support it, you'll accumulate more research coin, which is basically like rep or like a reward token. And so that is a way to, I guess, measure the community's collective view of that paper, a form of peer review. And it can even be weighted by like the reputation of the people voting on it and that sort of thing over time. Yeah, I think the last thing I'll just say is that, so I think from a rep, like a prestige point of view, it won't start off that way. It'll probably start off like being a little more quirky, like, you know, like remember when YouTube first started, it was like people posting weird cat videos and stuff. And, but now like, you know, if you have a million subscribers on YouTube, that's probably better than getting like a TV show on NBC or whoever the traditional gatekeeper was. So my hope, it might take 10 years, 20 years, whatever, but I'm hoping that this can sort of be the new prestigious way that young people publish in science and it'll come to be viewed as more prestigious. The journals, the traditional journals will be viewed as old fashioned. Well, it's definitely a system that could do a lot better. And there's a lot of incredible, brilliant people doing science, they deserve better, the better platforms. So another thing you're taking on and helping out with is this new limit, which is looking at longevity. What's the idea there? Yeah, okay, so as you can see, I'm excited about science. Like I think, you know, science is sort of the, basically if you get scientific innovation, then you get better products and you get better economic growth and then you get all kinds of like surplus in society that can go to arts and philosophy and like all kinds of stuff. But with new limits, so yeah, I kind of got, I started hosting some dinners with scientists last year and I was learning about all kinds of the latest stuff happening in bio and there's a lot of really cool stuff happening with like CAR T cells and CRISPR and all these things. And anyway, one of the topics I started to learn more about was something called cell reprogramming. And, you know, people maybe have heard of this induced pluripotent stem cells where you could take like a skin cell and turn it back into a stem cell. And Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel prize for this work that was done in 2006. And, you know, it's kind of a crazy thing. You can turn one cell into another type of cell. Well, people recently have been experimenting with different types of transcription factors that would either not, you don't want the cell to go all the way back to being a stem cell. You can end up getting like cancerous cells and things like that. But you want it basically the cell to revert a little bit earlier in its, you know, it would call it the Waddington landscape, but it's basically like go, become act, start to act like a bit of a younger cell, but not to de differentiate and become more like a stem cell. And so I decided this might be an interesting area to go fund. I think that that team has come together. There's like some really talented people who've come together to help get that off the ground. And they're basically building a platform that can test a lot of different transcription factors on different cell types and hopefully find ways to rejuvenate different types of cells and tissues to extend human health span. I mean, the moonshot goal here, you know, the get to Mars is that there could be some therapy here that in, I don't know, 10 or 20 years that you take and from a whole body point of view is sort of rejuvenating tissue, not just one type of tissue like your immune system, but eventually your whole body, maybe even your brain so that, you know, we don't have that issue where people who are older have trouble learning or they're more ossified in their thinking. To me, this is just, I always think about, you know, it's actually a little inspired by Elon, right? Is like, what are some of the biggest things in the world like that are probably high technology risk, but if they did work, maybe they're kind of low chance of working, but if they did work would have enormous impact. I like the idea of trying hard tech problems, especially for people like founders like me who've made some money in software, which I think we're in kind of like a golden age of software so there's like fortunes to be made, but if you do make some money in that, my hope is people will like do atoms, not bits, you know, and try some of the harder things like in biotech or, you know, I guess he's doing cars and rockets and stuff, but anyway, I think we should try hard tech or, you know, physical science problems as well and see if that can advance for team human. Yeah, so he's also doing bio with Neuralink and I feel like bio is tough because it's messy. We don't understand it as well. We don't understand it. The risk is higher in terms of, not the risk is higher, but like you have to deal with the actual sort of, to get to human, to get to stuff where it could be therapies for actual human bodies is tricky because you have to prove that it's safe, it's effective, all those kinds of things with FDA. I mean, it's just, it's tricky. It's very difficult. It's a long journey. I mean. If I can give a quick plug. So yeah, I'm on the board at New Limit. We're hiring talented scientists that are interested in the cellular programming space. They don't necessarily have to be coming from like an aging background or anything like that. There's sort of a small group of people doing even. So this is a new thing? This is a, is New Limit relatively new? Yeah, it's very new. There's a small team today, just a handful of people. And so we're hiring more there. If people are excited about that space, reach out. And same thing for Research Hub. There's a small team there that's really awesome. That's doing more like software engineering, design, product, that kind of stuff. What advice would you give? If you put on your old, wise, sage hat, what advice would you give to young people today? High school, maybe undergrad and college about life. So like career, having a career they can be proud of, or maybe a life they can be proud of. So people can do whatever they want to be happy, right? So there's not one way to do it. I do think that some people, a particular type of people out there, a lot of people actually, they want to have an impact on the world. That's how they get a sense of fulfillment, right? So I mean, you need to have like health, physical health. You need to have good relationships, like there's lots of things. But most people want to do something important. They want to have fulfilling work, a way that they can feel like they're contributing. I think a lot of people, young people today are thinking like I should be an activist or something like that. And there's people in the world who have power and a lot of people who don't, I don't have power. And so the way to change the world is to speak truth to power or like criticize power and try to pressure them to change. To me, I don't think that's the right way to actually have an impact on the world because everybody has probably, I think people have more power than they realize. And by the way, it's easy to be a critic. It's hard to actually change these things and fix it. And so you'll get a lot of accolades from friends and things like that if you kind of go around criticizing, it's easy to do. Like everything is broken and could be better, including stuff I'm working on. I find like so frustrating. There's a million things I want to be better about like what we're doing in Coinbase. So be the person in the arena, like that Theodore Roosevelt quote, I think he said it right. Like go chew glass and stare into the abyss. Like if you really want to have an impact, either join a company that has a mission that is trying to fix the thing you're passionate about or start that company if it doesn't exist or start a charity if it's not suitable to be a company or whatever it is, but go try to be a part of the solution. Don't just criticize or be a part of the problem. My hope is that more people can realize that they actually can have a meaningful impact that way. And I think that to me, technology is actually one of the most important ways to improve the world. Like if you look at climate change, like a lot of the best ideas like carbon sequestration, all these things, it's a technology thing, right? If you want to try to fix education, it's like look at like Khan Academy and all this stuff going online, right? If you want to fix, you know, whatever transportation and like the financial system and global freedom and like equality of all these things, like there's typically the way to get something changed in the world today is with technology. And so I do think people, it's very bizarre to me that there's this kind of like anti tech thing going on. Look, nothing is perfect. Like if you create something new and like tens of millions of people use it or billions of people use it, it's like there's going to be some bad people who use it too, okay? And there's, you know, society is complicated, but like I think most of these things have been net positive because most people in the world are good is at least my view. So yes, we can mitigate like the 1% of bad people trying to abuse something, but 99% of people in the world are good. And the way you can improve the world is with technology, joining companies, starting companies that are working on the right stuff. So I hope more young people do that. And just, if you're not sure what to do, like just get started with anything. That's how you learn. And basically have the optimism that you have the power to do the change. So it's easy to distract yourself by being the critic. That's almost like acknowledging to yourself that that's all you can be, but basically everybody has the power to be the fixer. I like, chew glass and look into the abyss. That's much more fun than it sounds. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here? Life. Yep, what's the meaning of life? What's this existence we got? You're trying to increase the amount of economic freedom on this planet or trying to alleviate some of the suffering. Yeah. But why? I don't really think there is any point to life. You know, somebody once told me, you know, if you go into these like, kind of really big existential questions, it can get a little scary because like you stare off the cliff and there's like, there's nothing there. You know, this one person told me one time they were like, you know, Brian, you should probably snorkel, don't scuba. I guess, and I think they were trying to say like, I, some of my friends have done this, right? They'll go to like, you know, epic meditation retreats and like, they'll kind of come back with all this existential dread of like, what's the meaning of it all. And then like, as far as I can tell, we are just some organic molecules in the ocean started like dividing and replicating and the selfish gene and all this stuff, like basically ended up here. And our only, it's some kind of like really naive algorithm that's just kind of trying to get us to survive and replicate. And we have DNA just like every other animal. And so we happened to develop these like really cool neocortexes. And so now we're sort of self aware and we have all these big questions and maybe we'll create another, you know, as computers get better, we'll create the simulation inside our thing. And I think it's cool. Like we should basically, I just want to keep watching the movie, you know, unfold. That's part of why I want to work on, like New Limit is really cool. Cause it's helped, if people can live longer, whether that's uploading their brain to the cloud or, you know, basically through we get biology to work or the strong AI to work or whatever. One of those two hopefully works out. And then we get to keep watching the movie and see how it all unfolds. I think that's fun. And so I don't know if that's like an answer, but I guess I don't think there's any real purpose. So just try to have fun. Well, the cool thing is that we get to write the movie as we watch it. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, that's like the Steve Jobs quote and all that, where he's like, everything around you was invented by somebody who just was like, this was a crazy idea they thought up. So once you realize you can kind of do anything you want, then that's what you start to go, you start to go try crazier stuff. I mean, this is another one of those areas where, not to get too out there, but like, you know, when you're, I think you can build your comfort zone around like people being upset with you. You can also build your range of what you think is possible, right? Like when I was in my 20s, I was like reading all these books about like self improvement and goal, how to write down your goals and stuff. And my goals were like, someday I wanna make $100,000 a year or something like, and that was, and you know, and it seemed like a little outlandish or what, I wrote down these goals, like I wanna own rental property or something anyway. And then I slowly started to get some of these things done over a couple of years. And so I started to think a little bigger. I remember one time I wrote down this goal where I was like, what's the craziest thing I could think of? And I was like, what if I, I wanna write, I wanna start a billion dollar tech company. That's crazy. And I had never started like a million dollar tech company or any tech company really. So what business did I have writing that goal down? I remember I wrote that on a piece of paper like, like probably every day for a year or something almost, right? I don't know if it was every day, but like I wrote it down a lot. And so little things started to happen. I was like, all right, well, maybe I should move back to the Bay area from Buenos Aires. Maybe I should try to apply to Y Combinator or whatever. Like, and I started thinking about these ideas. And so whatever it gets you fired up, it doesn't have to be like some company goal or startup thing. It could be anything, right? Maybe you wanna publish a book or like do something creatively or whatever. Anyway, I think like within seven years, no, it's probably more like 10 years of me writing that goal down. Coinbase had a valuation over a billion dollars. So it was out of my realm of what was even possible. And then within 10 years, you can accomplish more in 10 years than you think, less in a year than you think. So now I'm like, okay, what's the next goal? What's the, okay, maybe I wanna get a billion people accessing the open financial system through our products every day. That would be cool for humanity. And that's a pretty crazy goal. Like there's only 8 billion people or something, right? So there's one out of eight. Or maybe I can radically, like if I make some like the right investments or whatever, I can like help radically extend human health span or whatever, right? So try crazier stuff. I don't know, even if it doesn't work, like hopefully you'll advance the state of affairs, like something interesting will happen. And so most people today, they look at people trying this stuff and they're like, oh my God, they're so, they're a genius or whatever. And it's like, or they're an idiot. Like one of the two, neither one are true. It's just like anybody can start by thinking about what they want and then like go for it. And then once you get that, like go for something a little bigger and like you just have fun with it. And the universe is a way of smiling and helping you out if you just write it down and you dream big. There's something about just karma, about the energy you put into this world. Other people will help you out, doors will open. You'll notice that the doors opened and you actually have a shot at making it happen. It's a funny world. Yeah, I mean, I don't really subscribe to all like the woo woo interpretations of this, but my very rational brain interpretation of it is that if you just wake up every day and write down like what you want to get done and towards your longer goals, your larger goals, it's just on your mind that day. So you start to notice opportunities and you think about it more. So Brian, thank you for dreaming big. Thank you for doing what you're doing, doing incredible engineering at scale, trying to help people from all over the world and actually helping me personally get more into crypto just cause it's so easy. So thank you so much. And thank you so much for giving your extremely valuable time today to this awesome conversation. Thanks for your awesome podcast. I love it and I listen to it often. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Brian Armstrong. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Benjamin Franklin. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation | Lex Fridman Podcast #307

How are these interacting with our fighters if they are? How are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm? Especially off the East Coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects. The following is a conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves, former Navy fighter pilot, including roles as a combat lead, landing signals officer and rescue mission commander. He and people in his squadron detected UFOs on multiple occasions. And he has been one of the few people willing to speak publicly about these experiences and about the importance of investigating these sightings, especially for national security reasons. Ryan has a degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from WPI and an interest in career roles in advanced technology development, including multiagent collaborative autonomy, machine learning assisted air to air combat, manned and unmanned teaming technologies, and most recently, development of materials through quantum simulation. This is a Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ryan Graves. What did you think of the new Top Gun movie? How accurate was it? Let's start there. I thought the flying was really accurate. I thought the type of flying they did and how they approached the actual mission, of course, had a lot of liberties. But one thing that seems to be hard to capture on these types of things are the chess game that's going on while that type of flying is happening. The chess game between, like in a dog fight, between the pilots and the enemy, or between the different pilots? I'll even speak to just that particular mission. They flew there. And for that particular mission, it's kind of a chess game with yourself to get everything in place. So what kind of flight they flew is called a high threat scenario, which means they have to ingress low due to the surface to air threats, the integrated air defense systems that are nearby. And they have to ingress low and pop up like we see in the movie. And in that particular movie, that was a preplanned strike. They knew exactly where they were going. But there's a scenario where we have to operate in that type of environment, and we don't know exactly where we're going to strike or we're going to be adapting to real time targets. And so in that scenario, you would have one of those fighters down low like that operating as a mission commander, as a forward air controller. And he's out there calling shots, joining on those other players in order to ensure they're pointed at the right target. So that's a bit of the chess game that he'll be playing. Can you actually describe for people who haven't seen the movie what the mission actually is? Yeah. What's involved in the mission? So in this particular mission, it's kind of what we would call a preplanned strike. So there's a known location that's in a heavily defended area. And the air crew, in this case, I believe it was four F18s on the initial package, their job was to ingress very low down a canyon to stay out of the radar window of the surface to air threats. What does ingress mean? Ingress means that they're going to be pushing from a start location towards the target or the objective. So there's an ingress portion of the mission and an egress portion of the mission. Oh, okay. Like the entrance and the exit type of thing. Got it. But it changes our mindset tactically quite a bit, right? Cause when we're entering someplace, we have the option to enter. But when we go drop a bomb on location, we're exiting. We don't have that luxury. We don't have that option. So it actually changes our tactics and our aggression level. Got it. And so they were flying low to the ground and then there's a surface to air missiles that forced them to have to fly low. Is that a realistic thing? It is realistic. So driving those aircraft in the clutter, you know, all radar systems or most I should say are essentially line of sight. And so they're going to be limited by the horizon or any clutter out there. And even a number of radars, if they are located up high and looking down towards that aircraft, the clutter or all the objects such as trees and canyons can have effect on radar systems. And so it can be a type of camouflage. So that's a camouflage for the radar, but what about the surface to air missile? Is that a legitimate way to avoid missiles flies so low, like fly I guess below their level? As far as I know, you know, you can fly under any radar right now. We don't have necessarily radars that can look through anything. So there is always going to be the ability to mask yourself, but with a larger number of assets and distributed communication networks, where those radars are looking, it makes all the difference. And I said, they're ingressing past an IAS and that's an integrated air defense system. And that linking of air defense systems is what makes it so hard, so complicated is that the sensors and the weapons are disassociated from each other. So that if you took out the target that was shooting at you, it still has ability to intercept you from another radar location. So it's distributed and it's stronger that way. You mean the surface to air missiles, like it's a distributed system in that if you take out one, they're still able to sort of integrate information about your location and strike at you. Correct. And there's a lot of complication that can go, you know, once we start thinking about distributed systems like that and the ability to self heal and repair and adapt to losses, it's an interesting area. Are you responsible for thinking about that when you're flying an airplane? To some degree, when we ingress to an area like that, we're presented with information about targets, air to air or air to surface, or surface to air, I should say. And we can essentially see where essentially the danger zone, if you will, is located. And so essentially we would stay out of that. And so having a full picture of the environment is extremely important because, you know, at the end of the day, if we go in that circle, we can die pretty quickly. So it's absolutely crucial. So there's regions that have higher and lower danger based on your understanding of the actual, whatever the surface to air missiles systems are. So you can kind of know. That's interesting. I wonder how automated that could be too, especially when you don't know. It seems like in the movie they knew the location of everything. I imagine that's less known in most cases. And also, a lot of those systems might be a little bit more ghetto if I can use that technical term. Like I've gotten, ad hoc maybe is the, I don't know. But having just recently visited Ukraine and seen a lot of aspects of the way that war is fought, there's a lot of improvised type of systems. So you take high tech, like advanced technology, but the way you deploy it and the way you organize it is very improvised and ad hoc and is responding to the uncertainty and the dynamic environment. And so from an enemy perspective or whoever's trying to deal with that kind of system, it's hard to figure it out. Because it's like me, I played tennis for a long time and it's always easier to play, this is true for all sports, play tennis against a good tennis player versus a crappy tennis player. Because the crappy tennis player is full of uncertainty. And that's really difficult to deal with. It seemed like in the movie the systems were really well organized. And so you could plan. And there's a very nice ravine that went right down the middle of them. That's how movies work, isn't it? Yeah. But no, I absolutely agree. So what you say is a very good point. And if we were to take a chunk of airspace and break it up into little bits, there'd be places that are better to fly or less good to fly. And we are seeing that now with what they call manned unmanned teaming. We see tactical aircraft or some type of aircraft or platform that's being automated. And it's not being automated in traditional sense where people think aircrew are flying them around to conduct missions. But it's very high level objective orientated mission planning that allows the aircrew to act more as a mission planner, mission commander versus having to just pick the right assets or fly them around or manipulate them somewhat physically. So actually going back to the chess thing, can you elaborate on what you mean by playing a game of chess with yourself? What's, when you're flying that mission, what exactly do you mean by that? Well, there's a few people you're usually fighting against in the air, you know, there's the bad guys and then there's physics and mother nature, right? So when we're down at about 100 feet, it's a chess game to stay alive for the pilot and it's a chess game for the whizzo to process the information he needs and then communicate it to all those other aircraft that were flying around to ensure that they're putting their weapons on the right target. What's the whizzo? Wizzo is a weapons systems officer. He's a backseater who is not a pilot, but they're responsible for radar manipulation and communications and weapons appointments of certain natures. So the chess game is against physics, against the enemy. Time. Time, what about your own psychology, fear, uncertainty? No. No, there's no time for that type of self reflection while we're flying. I want to get to that, but I don't want to forget the point that you made about increased randomness being a tactical advantage. You know, as we, as you mentioned, you know, you can introduce autonomy into there and when you bring autonomy in there and my expectation would be as we bring different abilities and machine learning, as we gather more data, we're going to be able to bring the tactical environment around that jet, the war space that it goes into will almost be at a stochastic level from the enemy's perspective, where it'll almost seem like every tactical environment they go in will be random and yet very deadly because the system is providing a new tactical solution essentially for that particular scenario. Instead of just training to particular tactics that have to be repeatable and trainable and lethal, right? But not necessarily the most lethal because they have to be trainable. But if we can introduce AI into that and to have a level of randomness or at least appearance of randomness due to complexity, you know, I would consider it like a stochastic tactical advantage because even our own blue fighters won't be able to engage in that fight because it would be unsafe essentially for anything else. And I think that's where we have to drive to because otherwise it's always this chicken and mouse cat game about who's tactics and who knows what. But if knowledge is no longer a factor, it's going to make things a lot different. That's really interesting. So out of the many things that are part of your expertise, your journey, you're also working on autonomous and semi autonomous systems, the use of AI and machine learning and manned on man team and all that kind of stuff. We'll talk about it. But you're saying sort of when people think about the use of AI in war, in military systems, they think about like computer vision for perception or processing of sensor information in order to extract from it actionable knowledge kind of thing. But you're saying you could also use it to generate randomness that's difficult to work with in like a game theoretic way. Like it's difficult for human operators to respond to. Exactly. That's really interesting. Okay, so back to Tom Cruise and Tom Gunn. What about the dog fighting? What aspects of that were accurate? So dog fighting is kind of an interesting conversation because it's not the most tactically relevant skill set nowadays by traditional standards because the ranges with which we engage and play weapons are very significant. And so if we're in a scenario where we're in a dog fight like that, a lot of things have probably gone wrong, right? And that's kind of how this mission was set up, right? It was a no win type scenario, most likely. And so for a dog fight, the aircraft size and the ranges and the turn radiuses make it so it's not very theatrical, right? The aircraft looks small. And while it's intense with the systems I have and the sensors and what I'm feeling and all that, if I, you know, we've done it and we've done it, right? We take video of that and it's just like a blue sky and you see a little dot out there. So not very interesting. And so anytime it really looks interesting in dog fight arena, that's most likely a fiction because we really only get close for a millisecond as we're dipping past each other at the merge. You're breaking my heart, right? I know, I'm sorry. You're breaking my heart. No, I understand. In a dog fight, you can go and have fun, but you know, in a dog fight specifically. Maybe that was more common in the earlier wars, the World War II and before that, where the, is it due to the sort of the range and the effectiveness of the weapon systems involved? Correct. And the accuracy of the targeting systems at range. But there's also a train of thought that hasn't actually been tested out yet, which is with the advent of advanced electronic warfare, EW and or unmanned assets, the battle space may get so complex and missiles may essentially just get dropped out of the sky or wasted such that you're gonna be in close with either IR missiles or guns, if it's a no kidding, you know, must defend type scenario. First of all, what's electronic warfare? You know, it's basically trying to get control of electromagnetic spectrum for the interest of whatever operation is going on. So in the tactical environment, a lot of that is trying to deceive the radar or can we deceive the missiles or just, you know, stop their guide and things of that nature. Man, it's a battle in the space of information, of digital information. Yeah, well F22 and F35, right? F22 is a big expensive aircraft and it was made to be a great fighter. But the F35 is not as great of a fighter, but it's an electronic warfare and mission commander platform of the future where information is what's gonna win the war instead of the best dog fighter. And so it's interesting dichotomy there. What's the best airplane ever made, fighter jet ever made? I know the aviators in the audience are gonna hate my answer because they're gonna want that sexy, you know, muscly F14 Tomcat type fighter or maybe P51 type aircraft. But the F35 is maybe not the best dog fighter, but it doesn't have to get in a dog fight, right? It's like how you'd be the best knife fighters, not getting a knife fight sometimes. Lockheed Martin F35 Lightning II, it looks pretty sexy. There's two real strengths you can have as a fighter. You can have the ability to kind of out muscle your fighter, your opponent and beat them on Gs and power and raid around on them. And then there's the other side of that, which is you can be overly maneuverable. You can bleed energy quickly. And that's what the F18 was good at because it had to be heavier to land on aircraft carrier. We had to give it extra bulk, but it also needs a special mechanism to slow down enough to land on aircraft carrier. And so it made it very maneuverable. And what that leads to a lot of times is the ability to get maybe the first shot in a fight, which is very good, but if you do make that sharp turn, you're gonna bleed a lot of your energy away and be more susceptible for follow on shots if that one's less susceptible. And so there's just kind of aggression, nonaggression game you can play depending on the type of aircraft you're fighting. Where does the F35 land on that spectrum? The F35 lands somewhere behind the F22s. So there'll probably be a row of F22s or F18s and F35 will be out back, but it'll be enabling a lot of the warfare that's happening in front of you. Is it one of the more expensive planes because of all the stuff on it? It certainly is, yeah. In the movie, they have Tom Cruise fly it over Mach 10. So maybe can you say what are the different speeds, accelerations feel like, Mach 1, 2, 3, or hypersonic? Have you ever flown hypersonic? No. How tough does it get? I'm just gonna call out the BS of ejecting at Mach 10 just for the record, because in the movie, there's been I think at least one ejection that was supersonic, and I'll just say it was not pretty, but he survived. So there would have to be some interesting mechanisms to eject successfully at Mach 10, but I'll digress on that for the moment. Yeah, that seemed very strange. And he just walked away from it, but anyway, so. He seemed disheveled. Okay, it's Tom Cruise. It's like Chuck Norris or something. Indestructible, yeah. Indestructible. He also doesn't age. But anyway, so what's interesting to say about the experience as you go up? Does it get more and more difficult? In the end of the day, crossing the sound barrier is much like crossing the speed limit on the highway. You don't really notice anything. To cross that, at least in F18, because we have a lot more weight than most fighters, typically we'll do that in a descent. We'll do that full afterburner, just dumping gas into the engine. And so that'll get us over the fastest I think I've gone with about 1.28. But what's interesting, people realize, is that if I take that throttle in an afterburner and I just bring it back, just bring it back to mil, which is full power, just not afterburner, the deacceleration is so strong due to the air friction that it'll throw you forward in your straps. Almost, I would say, maybe like 70% as strong almost as trapping on the boat, it's pretty strong. So it's almost like a reverse car crash just for the deacceleration. So the acceleration is usually kind of slow and you don't feel anything, of course, when you're crossing through it, but the deacceleration's pretty violent. The deacceleration's violent, huh, okay. But is there a fundamental difference between mach one and hypersonic, mach five and so on? Does it require super special training? And is that something that's used often in warfare or is it not really that necessary? No, so hypersonic human flight, if it exists, is not something that's employed tactically in any sense right now that I'm aware of. So I think of hypersonic technology, I think of missiles and weapons systems and delivery platform, I don't think of fighter aircraft necessarily, I can think of bomber or reconnaissance aircraft perhaps, but those would be more efficient, very long range. So I imagine acceleration would be kind of gentle, honestly. The thing you experience is the acceleration, not the actual speed. There's been just a small tangent, a lot of discussion about hypersonic nuclear weapons, like missiles from Russia bragging about that. Is this something that's a significant concern or is it just a way to flex about different kinds of weapons systems? Hypersonics, I do think pose a challenge for our detection systems because there are, you know, there are design considerations in these sensor systems as always, right? And when you build them and the technology progresses to a point where maybe it's not feasible to use that technology, you know, there's a problem. But with the all domain and kind of cross domain data linking capabilities we have, it's less of, you know, it's more of an integrated picture, I'll say. And so the hypersonics are really, what it is is how fast can we detect and destroy a problem? You're just shortening the time available to do that. We call something like that the kill chain, right? It's from locating a target and identifying it and, you know, essentially authorizing its destruction by whatever means, employing, and then actually following up to ensure that you did what you said you were going to do in some sense, right? Does it need another reattacks, something of that nature. And so there's an old dog fighting framework you could call it, it's called the OODA loop that kind of made its way in the engineering of business now but the old observe, orientate, decide act was initially a fighter mechanism in order to get inside that kill chain of your opponent and break it up so that he can't process his kill chain on you. And so hypersonics are a way of shortening those windows of opportunity to react to them. I wanted to, like, how much do you have to shorten it in order for the defense systems not to work anymore? It seems like it's very, you know, I'm both often horrified by the thought of nuclear war, but at the same time, wonder what that looks like. When I dream of extreme competence in defense systems, I imagine that not a single nuclear weapon can reach the United States by missile with the defense systems, but then again, I also understand that these are extremely complicated systems, the amount of integration required, and because you're not using them, I mean, there could be, you know, there's like an intern somewhere that like forgot to update the code, the Fortran code that like is going to make the different, because you don't have the opportunity to really thoroughly test, which is really scary. Of course, the systems are probably incredible if they could be tested, but because they can't be really thoroughly tested in an actual attack, I wonder. I guess one assumption there would be that these hypersonic missiles would only be launched in the case of an attack. It'd be interesting if there were other hypersonic objects that we could use to flex those systems. Another thing that actually happened, and I just have a million questions I want to ask you, it's fascinating to me, is there's a bird strike on the plane, does that happen often? Yeah, it's a serious issue. And it damaged the engine, and they made it seem like it's a serious, exactly a serious issue. I've hit birds, I know someone that took a turkey vulture to the face, through the cockpit, right, shattered the cockpit, knocked him out. I think that, actually, I don't know him personally, but it was a story I know from the command I was at, and I believe the backseater had to punch out and punch them both out because he was unconscious in the front seat from the bird. It can kill you from hitting you, it's like a bowling ball going 250 miles an hour. It can take out an engine very easily. Every airport I've flown at in the Navy, I've had to check the bird condition, if you will, to see how many birds, and we've had to cancel flights because there's too many of them around the airport. Some airports even have bird radars, military airports. Is there systems that monitor the bird condition? There is, yeah, there's actual radar systems, and you can go in the, certain bases you have to call up, and they'll tell you what it is for the day or for that hour, and other ones have it in their weather report that goes out over the radio. What are some technological solutions to this, or is this just, because it's a low probability event, there's no real solution for it? I would say it's not a low probability event. This is happening a lot. Although the hits themselves aren't necessarily that common, or I'll say a catastrophic hit, either a near miss or a hit or the pilot having to actively maneuver to avoid it is pretty common, and in fact, it seems stressful. It is, it's so common in fact that we know that you never want to try to go over, or you never want to go under a bird if you see it in front of you. You always want to try to go over it because what they'll do immediately if they see you is, and you startle them, is they'll bring their wings in and just drop straight down to try to get out of the path. It's interesting, I didn't know they did that, but so if you immediately, if you try to go under them, they're gonna be dropping into you, so you typically want to try to go above them. Is this something you can train for, or no? Is this one of those things you have to really experience? It's a skill set that you somewhat train for in the duties of being a fighter pilot in a sense, right? Being able to react to your environment very quickly and make decisions quickly, so. Is that one of the more absurd things, challenges you have to deal with in flying? Is there other things, sort of maybe weather conditions, like harsh weather conditions? Is there something that we maybe don't often think about in terms of the challenges of flying? Birds, in a way, aren't a ridiculous threat for us. It's a safety threat that anything physical in the air is something that we really have to be careful about, whether we're flying formation off of the aircraft right next to us or whether it's a turkey vulture at 2,000 feet or a flock of 5,000 birds, like at the runway, we have to wave off, you know? And although they're low probability, a lot of bases will have actual Environmental Protection Agency employees that are responsible for safely removing migratory birds or different animals that may be in the runways or flying about. Wow, I didn't know what a turkey vulture is, and it really does look like a mix between a vulture and a turkey. Turkey. And look kind of dumb, no offense to turkey vultures. In that movie, who was the enemy nation? Was it, I mean, I guess they were implying it's Iran. Or was it Russia? I didn't think they were implying any particular nation state, frankly. I think they did a somewhat decent job of having some ambiguous fifth generation fighters. The location and the stockpile, I get how the story kind of insinuates certain things, but they seem to do a good job of not having anything directly pointing to another nation, which I thought was the good move. I enjoy these type of movies as an aviator and as an American, right? Because it's a feel good movie, but we shouldn't be celebrating going to war with any particular country, China, Russia, whoever may have these weapons. It's fun to watch, but it would be an incredibly serious event to be implying these weapons. Yeah, and we'll talk about war in general, because yeah, the movie's kind of celebrating the human side of things and also the incredible technology involved, but there's also the cost of war and the seriousness of war and the suffering involved with war, not just in the fighting, but in the death of civilians and all those kinds of things. Well, you were a Navy pilot. Let's talk a little bit more seriously about this, and you were twice deployed in the Middle East flying the FAA 18F Super Hornet. Can you briefly tell the story of your career as a Navy pilot? Sure. So I joined the Navy in 2009, right after college. I went to, essentially, officer boot camp, officer of Canada school. I applied as a pilot, and I got in as a pilot. That was the advantage of going that way is that I could essentially choose what I wanted, and if I got in, great. If not, I didn't get stuck doing something else. So you knew you wanted to be a pilot. I did. I joined. I went through my initial training. I went through primary flight training that all aviators go through, and I did well enough that, one of the first lessons they teach you in the Navy is that you can have a great career in the Navy and you can see the world and do what you want, but at the end of the day, it's all about the needs of the Navy and what they need, so they may not have the platform you like or you may not necessarily get to choose your own adventure here, but I was lucky enough that there was one jet slot in my class, and I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to get it, so. It was a jet slot. So yeah, what that means is that I was assigned actually a tail hook at that point, which meant I would go train to fly aircraft that land on aircraft carriers, and there's essentially three aircraft that do that at the time. There's the F18 and the E2 and the C2. C2 is kind of like the mail truck for the boat. E2 is one of the big radar dish on top, and then there's all the F18s. So E2 is comms, is C2 mail truck? Yeah. C2 basically brings all the mail. They pack on the shore, and they're the ones that bring supplies to the ship via air and people. Sorry if I missed it. Is it a plane or is it a helicopter? It's a plane. Okay. All right, and the F18 is a fighter jet. Correct. Okay. So I selected tail hook, which meant I could get one of those other ones, but 80% of them or so are jets, so I was in a good spot at that point, and that's when I went to Merde, Mississippi to fly my first jet, which was the T45 Gauss Hawk. Cool, so what kind of plane is that? Is that what you were doing your training on? That's the jet aircraft you get in before you actually go to the F18. It is a carrier capable, so go to the boat for the first time in it during the day, drop fake bombs, do dog fighting, low levels, formation flying, day and night. Oh, it's a pretty plane. Yeah, and it looks like a cone so that no one hits it. Okay, so it's usually not used for fighting, it's used for training? It's used for training how to fight. Got it. So what was that like? Was that the first time you were sort of really getting into it? Yeah, that was really interesting, because before that it was a 600 horsepower prop plane. Going from that to the T45 is one of the biggest jumps in power and like Navy machine operation. How much horsepower does the T45 have approximately? Maybe like 15,000 or so. So it's a huge jump from 600 you said horsepower about? Cool, so it's a big, big leap. But it's a jet, so it performs differently, it's faster. What that means, not just because it's faster, your whole mind needs to be faster. Everything happens faster in the air now, right? Those comms happen faster, your landing gear has to come up faster, everything just happens faster in a jet. So it's a big jump. And I'll never forget going on my first flight in that aircraft, it was a formation flight for someone else. And I was just in the back watching and there was an instructor in the flight. And so what that means is the instructor is in a single aircraft and then there's three or four other aircraft and they're learning how to do joins and they're learning how to fly in formation. And as a new student in the back, it's amazing, right? Cause you know, photo op time and all this, like I'm seeing aircraft up close for the first time, it's awesome, and on the way back, we couldn't get our landing gear down, ironically. So to make a long story short, cause it's overall not that exciting, we couldn't get the gear down, we actually went to go do a control ejection to the target area where that is, about 15, 20 miles to the north of the base. Wait, did you just say that's not that exciting? Well. Cause that to me is pretty exciting. That, I mean, how, first of all, I mean, that must be terrifying, like early on in your careers, I haven't seen those things that, yeah, like how often does that kind of thing happen? Decent, more than you would think. More than you would think. There was no significant panic? This is like, this understood? This is what has to be done in this case? I think I was probably just too dumb to realize the significance of it, cause as a new student, you know, not really appreciating, you know, just what is ahead of me if we are ejecting. But at the time it was more, it was just like rote, right? Cause I was back there, and then I went from a observer mode to a, I'm gonna provide you the help that I can provide you as a member of this crew, you know, mode. And so it was less about, you know, on this 20 mile trip and thinking about my, how vulnerable I am, you know, we're going through checklists, we're talking to people, we're getting ready. So no, it wasn't fearful. And the whole time we were doing one of these to try to get the gear down. So we're unloading the jet and then loading it back to try to get the gear out with the stick. And it came down, it came down halfway there, just on its own. So it came back around and we did like a safety trap in case there was a problem with the gear. And that was my first flight, you know, a little bit of serendipity, but I'm gonna fast forward a bit. And I went back to that squad as an instructor about five or six years later, and I was an aviation safety officer at this point, which meant I was responsible for investigating mishaps. And a student went in and he went in the back seat of a form flight, just like the one I went on. And he went out and he ended up ejecting on that flight. Exact same type of flight. They went out and they had a runaway trim scenario. And it caused the aircraft essentially just inverted itself almost 180 degrees at about 600 feet over the ground. And they punched out just slightly outside the ejection window at about 300, 400 feet or so, but they were completely fine. So, you know, and then about two months later, we had another ejection. About three months after that, we had another ejection. So unfortunately, you know, it can be more common than people think. What does it feel like to get ejected? Thankfully, I don't know. I can describe it to you. I can tell you what it's like from what I've heard, but I truly think it's one of those things that you just don't understand until it happens. It's like instantaneous about 250 Gs, which is only possible because of inertia in our blood. All right, so you can actually get like 250, 300 Gs for like a few milliseconds, and then it backs off to like 40 or 50 Gs to get you away from the vehicle itself. And so, you know, you may lose consciousness. If you do, you know, who knows where you wake up. You know, you could be in a tree, you could still be falling, you could be in the water, so. The physics of that is fascinating, how to eject safely. Do you know the story about how that was tested at all? I don't know the full story, but there was an airport. I'm guessing nobody knows the full story. It's probably a lot of shady stuff going on. But anyway, you mean like in the early, early days, or? They took a flight dock up to a rocket sled and just see how much their body could take it. And he turned a lot of his body in the mush in the process of getting that science done, but he saved a lot of lives. People used to be tougher back in the day. Yeah, that's how science used to be done. So how did your training continue? So how, take me farther through your career as you worked towards graduating towards the F18s. So in VT9, where I was a student, there's two phases. There's an intermediate and an advanced. Intermediate is getting very comfortable with the aircraft. And at that point, you truly hear, all right, you're going jets now, or you're gonna go one of the other aircraft that land on the aircraft carrier. I was told I was going jets at that point. And then we go into same squadron, same aircraft, same instructors, but it's called advanced now. And now we're learning how to dog fight for the first time. We're doing what we call tactical formation, which is just like aggressive position keeping. We are doing dog fighting in low levels and all sorts of great stuff. So it's really that first introduction to that tactical environment and really putting Gs on the jet and on your body and maneuvering. Is there like tactical formation, is collaborating with other fighter jets a part of that? It is. So flying in a, that's what you mean by formation. So literally having an awareness. Is this done for you or are you as a human supposed to understand like where you are in the formation, how to maintain formation, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, there's a. Is it done autonomously or manually? There's a great autonomy point on the end of this I've thought about. So, but what we do, it's all manual. And so I'm looking at his wing and I'm looking at different visual checkpoints that form like a triangle, right? Like an equal out triangle essentially. And then as that triangle is no longer equal, I can tell my relative position against that aircraft. That's really cool. And so that's what I'm staring at first, sometimes hours on end, several feet away, doing one of these if I'm in the weather, that's all it is. So you get, it's almost like, is it peripheral vision or is it your? No, we're staring directly at it. The peripheral is going on my, on my. That's interesting. Stuff, right? My sensors and all my instruments. And so he is my gyroscope at that point, right? While you're flying, not looking straight. Correct, I'm flying like this for hours. It can hurt your neck. We don't like doing this as much. And I don't think it's just me, right? It's a weird thing where when you're like this, it's actually harder to fly formation slightly than here because being in line of your hand movements and of the aircraft somehow has an effect on our ability to be more precise and comfortable. It's strange. But so there's a symmetry to the formation usually. So one of the people on the other side really don't like being on that side. Is it, does it, who gets like the short straw? How do you decide which side of the formation you are? It's a good question too because there's kind of rank in some sense. So if it's a four person formation, right? You have the vision lead who's qualified to lead a whole division, but maybe the other ones aren't. And he has a dash two and that's his wingman essentially. And then in a division, there's two other aircraft. And then you have another senior flight leader. That's the dash three position. And then you have dash four, the last one. And if you were all lined up on one side, like fingertip, one, two, three, four, that dash four guy is gonna be at the end of that whip. So if you're flying formation, each one's making movements relative to the lead. Dash four is kind of at the end of that error. And so his movements are kind of like a whip. It's very difficult to fly in that position in close. Can you elaborate? Is it because of the error, the aerodynamics? So what's a whip? If this is a flight lead and this is dash two, flight lead is rock steady and just doing his thing. And flight two is gonna be working that triangle moving a little bit, right? And he has this small error bubble that he's doing his best to stay. And then, but dash three is flying off dash two. And so his error bubble is dash twos plus his own. And dash four. So it gets more and more stressful as you get farther out. Okay, what's the experience of that staring for long periods of time and trying to maintain formation? How stressful is that? Because we're doing that when we drive, staying in lane. And that becomes, after you get pretty good at it, it becomes somewhat, it's still stressful. Which actually is surprisingly stressful. When you look at lane keeping systems, they actually relieve that stress somehow. And it actually creates a much more pleasant experience while you're still able to maintain situational awareness and stay awake, which is really interesting. I don't think people realize how stressful it is to lane keep when they drive. So this is even more stressful. So are you, do you think about that? Or is this, yeah, I guess how stressful is it from a psychology perspective? It's very stressful. So I taught students how to do this as well. And so at our feet, we have two rudders. And if I'm flying off a flight lead over here, what you'll find a lot of times is you'll be flying, or like if I'm the instructor and the student's flying, I'll start to notice that he's having a harder and harder time keeping position. What I'll notice typically is he's locked out his leg. They'll lock out the leg that's closest to the aircraft they're flying against and push on the rudder subconsciously, because their whole body's trying to get away from the aircraft because they're so uncomfortable being close to it. And so I'll tell them, I can fix their form with just a couple of words. I'll say, wiggle your toes. And they'll wiggle their toes and they'll realize, and they'll loosen all the muscles in their legs because they realize they've been locked up and their formation flying will get a lot better. And so, there's a lot of stress associated with that. There's some interesting psychological or visual issues such as vertigo as you're flying. So if you're flying with him and then you fly right into a cloud, right? That's when it's very stressful because you have to be very close in order to maintain visual and you might be on a thunderstorm, right? And so you have to be very tight. You might start raining and then he's turning, but you might not even know that. You might not even be able to see that turn. And so all of a sudden you might look while you're in a turn thinking you were straight and level and you look just maybe back at your instruments very quick and you realize you're like in a 30 degree turn and your whole concept of where you are in the world starts getting very confused. And you immediately get this sense of, it's weird. Like I look at the HUD and it feels, all my senses are telling me it's spinning, but it's not. And so I have to trust my instruments even though it feels like it's spinning. And the same thing can happen when you're flying formation off of someone and it can be very dangerous and disorientating. But the point is to try to regain awareness by trusting the instruments, like distrust all your human senses and just use the instruments to rebuild situational awareness. Not in this particular case because our situational awareness is based, it's predicated off of our flight lead. So in a sense, I'm just trusting his movements. And so he's my gyroscope, but you're absolutely right. And if I was by myself, I would trust my instruments, but I can't just stop flying form and trust my instruments because now I'm gonna hit him. Oh yeah, you have to pay attention to him. So he's my reference. So the instruments are not helping you significantly with his positioning. Not, it's all completely manual. So is there a future where some of that is autonomous? Yeah, and I've thought about automating that flight regime. But when I started thinking about it, I realized that all the formation keeping that we do is designed to enhance the aviators ability to maintain sight, right? So we fly very tight formation so that we can go in weather and to reduce groups of traffic coming into the boat. We fly in one particular position so that all of the flight crew can look down the line and see the flight lead. So everything has based, everything has to do with the two air crew visually maintaining sight of each other and defending each other, right? In a combat spread, I might be looking, I may be three miles away from him flying formation directly beam and looking around to make sure nothing's there. So as I'm looking into automating this process, I thought, well, sure it's easy to get a bunch of aircraft to fly in formation off each other, right? It's trivial, but why? What is the best formation? Why are they doing that? And that opened up a much more interesting regime of operations and flight mechanics. And that's when we get back to that kind of stochastic mindset where we can bring in aircraft close to do some type of normal flying or reduce congestion around airports. But when we consider flying or formation in a tactical environment, we can be much more effective with nontraditional formation keeping or perhaps no formation keeping perhaps. So autonomy used for formation keeping, not for convenience, but for the introduction of randomness. Like to a real time mission planner, yeah. And then that's where you also have some human modification. So it's like unmanned teaming enters that picture. So you use some of the human intuition and adjustment of this formation. The formation itself has some uncertainty. I mean, it's such an interesting dance. I think that is the most fascinating application of artificial intelligence is when it's human AI collaboration, that semi autonomous dance that you see in these semi autonomous vehicle systems in terms of cars being driving, but also in the safety critical situation of a airplane, of a fighter jet, especially when you're flying fast. I mean, in a split second, you have to make all these kinds of decisions and it feels like an AI system can do as much harm as it can help. And so to get that right is a really fascinating challenge. One of the challenges too, isn't just the algorithms of the autonomy itself, but how it senses the environment. That of course is gonna be what all these decisions are based off of. And that's a challenge in this type of environment. Well, I gotta ask. So F18, what's it like to fly a fighter jet as best? I mean, what to you is beautiful, powerful? What do you love about the experience of flying? For me, and I think I'm an outlier a bit. It wasn't necessarily the flying itself, right? It wasn't necessarily the soaring over the clouds and looking down at the earth from upside down. I came to love that, but it wasn't necessarily the passion that drove me there. I just had no exposure to that. The only exposure I had was reading and going in the woods and science fiction and all that. And so, what seemed to kind of drive me towards that was just a desire to really be operating as close to what I thought was the edge of technology or science. And that's the path that I chose to try to get close to that. I thought that being in a fighter jet and all the tools and the technology and the knowledge and the challenges and the failures and victories that would come with that just seemed like something that I wanted to be a part of. And it wasn't necessarily about the flying, but it was about the challenge. And like I said, as a person from a small town, small high school, being able to get my hands or even just near something of such technological significance was kind of empowering for me. And that's kind of what bore the love of flight from there. Becoming, having some level of mastery in the aircraft, it really feels like an extension of your body. And once I got there, then kind of the love of flying kind of followed. So you sort of, one, is the man mastery over the machine. And second is the machine is like the greatest thing that humans have ever created arguably. The things that Lockheed Martin and others have built. I mean, the engineering in that. However you feel about war, which is one of the sad things about human civilization is war inspires the engineering of tools that are incredible. And it's like, maybe without war, if we look at human history, we would not build some of the incredible things we built. So in order to win wars, to stop wars, we build these incredible systems that perhaps propagate war. And that's another discussion I'll ask you about. But this, to you, this is like, this is a chance to experience the greatest engineering humans have ever been able to do. Like similar, I suppose, that astronauts feel like when they're flying. And I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to take that route. I was gonna apply to test pilot school. It just didn't work out for me. I ended up having a broken foot during my window. But long story short, I ended up after my time in my fleet squadron, and we can get back to the rest of the timeline if you want, but I went to be an instructor pilot instead, right? And then, I was talking about this with a squadron mate earlier today about how, I certainly wouldn't be talking with Lex today if I ended up going to test pilot school. I never would have, I never would have had the, I wouldn't, maybe recklessness, I don't know, but the willingness to have a conversation about UAP while I was, that led me to the decision to get out once I went there. And it kind of enabled me to talk about UAP more publicly. And if I stayed in the Navy, then I don't think that would have happened. I wouldn't have been able to if I went that route. Well, as a small tangent, do you hope to travel to Mars one day? Do you think you'll step foot on Mars one day? If you asked me that five years ago, I would have said, yes, I want to. In fact, I would like to die on Mars. Now, today, now I have some hesitations and I have some hesitations because I'm hopeful and optimistic. And I think that, you know, I think that we are truly like on the brink of a very wide technological revolution that's going to kind of move us how we used to move information and data in this last century. We're going to be manipulating and managing matter in that next century. And so I think that, I think our reach as humans are going to get a lot wider, a lot faster than people may realize, or at least. Wait, are you getting like super ambitious beyond Mars? Is that what you're saying? Well, I mean. Like Mars seems kind of boring, I want to go beyond that. Is that what, do you mean the reach of humanity across all kinds of technologies? Or do you mean literally across space? Across space, you know? So, you know, we're going to be, I think that as artificial intelligence and machine learning start broaching further into the topic of science, the area of science, and we start working through new physics, we start working through, or I should say pass the Einsteinian frameworks as we kind of get a better idea of what space time is or isn't, we may have, we may find, you know, answers that we didn't know that we were looking for. And we may have more opportunity. And I'm not saying this is something I'm, you know, betting the farm on, of course, but maybe that's a road I want to explore on Earth instead of on Mars. Maybe there's technology that can be brought to bear with new science and harder engineering that is a road that doesn't go past Mars to get outside the solar system. So there are different ways to explore the universe than the traditional rocket systems. If we can continue sort of your journey, you said that you were attracted to the incredibly advanced technologies of the F18s and just the fighter jets in general. Let me ask another question, which seems incredibly difficult to do, which is landing on a carrier or taking off from a carrier and landing on a carrier. So what's that like? What are the challenges of that? Taking off's pretty easy. It's procedurally somewhat complex where there's a lot of moving parts, almost like a clock, you know. You're almost in a pocket watch. So then you're a part of the machinery. And so long as you press the right buttons and do the right things, you're gonna go shooting off the front. So there's like a checklist to follow and there's several people involved in that checklist and you just gotta follow the checklist correctly. Essentially, yep. Lots of ways to screw it up, but you'll know how to screw it up. But landing on the back of the boat is a whole different animal. There's a lot more variables. There's essentially one or two people responsible for the success of that. The landing signal officer who actually represents a team of specially trained aviators who are responsible for helping that aviator land on the boat. And the pilot himself. And it is a hard task to actually fly precisely enough to be good at it. So to fly quote unquote the perfect pass, you essentially have to fly your head through a one foot by one foot box. That's essentially the target you're shooting for. Plus or minus probably about five knots on airspeed, although we don't really judge it by airspeed. It's something called angle of attack. But generally pretty tight parameters there. And you can do everything perfect and still fail. So when we go to touchdown, we immediately bring the power up and we rotate as if we were doing, as if we were bouncing off the deck. And if we catch it, then we slow down. And then someone tells us to bring the power back, which we do, we don't do it on our own. Cause it's such a violent experience. Think you're trapped or not, or something breaks and you bring your throttle back. And that's a very serious thing. It happened to best of us, I'll admit I've done it once. When I first got to the squadron, it's called ease guns land. And so I came in the boat and I brought the power. I cracked the power back a little bit before I've been told to her that my aircraft had finished settling in. And that was a big faux pas, right? So, especially as a new guy. So it's a very serious business. There's a lot of eyes on you and there's a lot of ways to screw it up. But the physical rush of like having a great pass and then like the crash of into the boat and all that, the physical sensation from it, when everything's going great, it's top of the world, it's a great feeling. How much of it is feel? How much of it is instruments? How much is other people just doing the work for you, catching you, as long as you do everything right? There's a few systems we use. One is called the BAL. And the BAL is external to our aircraft. And it's B A L L, BAL, like BAL, okay. It's a iFloss landing system, which stands for something very long convoluted. But essentially it's a mirror with lights on it. And you see the light at a different cell based on your position relative to an ideal glide slope. So if you're right on it, you're right in the middle. And if you're below, you're low. And as I add power and maneuver the aircraft, that BAL, I see that BAL rise, I see that BAL low. It's a lagging indicator though, right? And your jet is a lagging engine too, right? It takes time to spool up the engine. So that adds to the complexity. You have to think ahead a bit. So you don't want to, you can't just bring the power up and leave it there. You have to bring the power up, touch it, bring it back. And oh, by the way, your landing area is moving, not just away from you, but also on an angle, right? Cause we have an angled deck. And so you're constantly doing one of these to correct yourself as you go. That seems so stressful. And every time you do one of those, maybe it's a 30 degree angle bank, right? I'm losing lift, right? And so I have to compensate with power each time I do that. So I'm doing another one. Cause you have to maintain the same level you're always lowering. It's a constant rate of descent that's increasing from about 200 feet per minute to about 650. And every time you do this, that's messing with that. Okay. So you have to compensate. And you're doing that manually. Do that manually. All right. And then of course, as you come down that glide slope, it becomes more and more narrow. And you have to, of course, modulate your inputs such that they're smaller and smaller cause they have a bigger and bigger effect as you get closer in. And what happens too, when you get in close is that right before you cross over, if this is the boat right here, your table, right before you kind of get your wings over the boat itself, this big wind from the main tower of the boat is where it dips down. So the wind actually goes down and it's called the burble. And it'll actually pull the aircraft down, increase your rate of descent. So at that particular point, you need to increase your speed. You know, increase your power and try to compensate against that. And so that's kind of a third variable that's trying to screw you up on your way down. What's the most difficult conditions in which you had to land or you've seen somebody had to land? Because I think you were also a signal officer as well. I was, yeah. I was the head landing signal officer for my squadron. So you've probably seen some tough landings. I have. I've seen a ramp strike, which is when a part of the aircraft hits before the landing area, which is basically the round out of the boat. That is before the landing area. So they basically struck the back of the boat coming in. It was just their hook. So it wasn't their craft. And they were fine. That one was kind of ugly. But it like rips that part of the aircraft. Absolutely. And then you land on your bellies, that kind of thing. In this particular case, it hit and then it gave and essentially dragged the hook on the surface after that. And so he was able to grab a wire at that point. When does that kind of thing happen? Is it just a miscalculation by the pilot or is it weather conditions? I wouldn't even call it a miscalculation. I mean, I'm going to put the blame on the pilot because he's the only one in the cockpit. But then the day he's reacting to the situations he's dealing with. And so it may be errors or he may be doing the best with the conditions that he's been given. On that particular one, you just got too high rate of send. It's very common. And that's what you see it with new pilots. You see it with older pilots, right? New ones and complacent ones. What you see is they'll try to make the ball go right where they want it in close. They think they can beat the game a little bit. And they try to, and so we have sayings, we teach pilots as a landing signal officer, we tell them like, don't recenter the high ball in close. It's one of the rules to live by. And so when the ball's up high, don't try to bring it back in close to like the center point when you're in close. Cause what you're doing is you bring the power off and you're going to crash right down. And that's what happens, right? Cause you got the burble pulling you down. You might be correcting, which is decreasing your lift. And then you have that type of maneuvers. How are you supposed to do all of this in harsh weather conditions? And so that's the one I wanted to tell you about. That's the hardest one. And what you hear is if you hear 99 taxi lights on, that's a really shitty day. 99 taxi lights on, what's that mean? Everyone put your taxi lights on because you're about to land on the boat. And you don't see the boat? Weather is so bad that the landing signal officer on the boat can't see you either. And you can't see the boat. And you won't be able to see it when you touch down. So we call that a zero, zero landing. And you turn on the taxi lights so that the LSO who has a radio in his hand that looks like a phone from 1980 is talking directly to the pilot. And he's looking at that little light in the rain and he's telling them you're high, you're low, power, things like that. Come right, back to left. And literally talking him down to land on the boat right there. And the pilot, usually it comes as a surprise to the pilot, the landing, because he's just listening to the voice, can't see the ball, can't see the boat. And all of a sudden you just hit the boat. You crash, I mean you crash. We're going about 1,600 feet per minute descent at that point. So you're going super fast. So all of this is happening fast. You don't know the moment it's gonna hit. So you're just going into the darkness and just waiting for it to hit. Maybe not dark though, a lot of times it's white. Into the light. You're just going into the light. And then there's a voice from an 80s phone. I got it. This is terrible. But so you still have to, so this kind of thing happens. You still have to land. Sometimes you just don't have a place to divert. But in a sense we're trained for that because we do the night landings as well. And I think you'll find this interesting, but I always found that the night landings where in these particular cases, you're usually lined up behind the boat, maybe 10, 15 miles, whereas the other ones, it's like a tight circle, the landing pattern. And so we can potentially see the boat way out there if the lights were on, which they're not. But we can maybe see like the string of aircraft in front of us. But what's interesting is that it can take a while. You might be 15 miles out and your lights are turned down as dim as possible. You have a cloud deck maybe at six or 7,000 feet so that the starlight, there's no moon, but let's say the starlight's blocked out because just the starlight alone, no moon, you can see the boat, you can see the water. But when that goes away, it's like closing your eyes. You can't tell anything. It could be upside down. It could be in any position. And for me, it was almost a meditative process that I had to snap myself back out of when I was on like a long straightaway. And then I would see the light pop up in the sea of darkness. No lights anywhere. Can't even see the horizon. And I just see a light out there. My instruments were telling me, and they're turned down as far as they can go, right? So I can barely see them. So my eyes can adjust. And I'm just staring at this light in the distance. And it's just very meditative and it's the hum behind you. And then at like four miles, you know, almost like, oh, the light is a little bit bigger. And you almost kind of have to snap back to it and be like, oh, I need to like kind of like look around a little bit and engage my brain, link it back to my body and like do this thing. Because you're going to have to actually land. Well, is there just, you said you don't necessarily feel the romantic notion of the whole thing, but is there some aspects of flying where you look up and maybe you see the stars or yeah, that kind of thing that you just like, holy crap, how did humans accomplish all of this? Like, am I actually flying right now? I used to have those moments on the boat when I was catching planes land. I would, they would trap and it'd be nighttime. And it's just all this chaos in the middle of the ocean and nothing. And I would have these moments where I'd be like, how the hell did I end up here? You know, there's one moment in time next to an aircraft landing on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you know, where did my life, you know, how did my life go to end up here? How interesting. But what I did start to enjoy was the night vision goggles and putting those on and looking up at the stars flying around, especially over the ocean. What do they look like? And there's just so many, there's just so many stars that, you know, you normally can't see. They're shooting stars all the time. Almost every flight you'd see them with the goggles on. And so it was a great pleasure to take advantage of the lack of light pollution in some cases, especially on deployment to go grab some goggles at night, go out some quiet spot in the ship that no one can see me and just kind of look around, you know. Yeah, it's humbling. Quick break, bathroom break? Yeah, wouldn't mind a quick stretch of legs. You got a few cool patches. I do, so this is a VFA 11 Red Rippers patch. Typically going actually on our arm. So this is actually what we call the Boar's Head or Arnold. So this is actually the Boar's Head from the Gordon's Gin bottle. In 1918, we were in London or the UK somewhere and we apparently partied with the owner and founder of Gordon's Gin and we had a great time and there's a signed letter in our ready room that says we can use the logo in perpetuity. Oh, nice. And yeah, so I'd like to give you that patch. I drank quite a bit of gourd, so this is good. And I'd like to give you that coin from our squadron. The Red Rippers, that's a badass name. Thank you, brother. You're welcome. So let's jump around a little bit, but let me ask you about this one set of experiences that you had and people in your squadron had. So you and a few people in the squadron either detected UFOs on your instruments or saw them directly. Tell me the full story of these UFO sightings and to the smallest technical details, because I love those. I'll do my best. So we returned from, and when I say we, I mean, not my squadron, but VFA 11, the Red Rippers. I was a somewhat junior pilot at the time. I joined them on deployment in 2012, where they had been already out there for about six months or so, operating in the vicinity of Afghanistan. I joined them and then we flew back and still as a relatively new guy, we came back and we entered what's considered a maintenance phase where we slow down the tactical flying a bit, kind of recuperate, do some maintenance on the aircraft. And our particular model of the F18, the lot number, was plumbed for the particular things that were needed to upgrade the radar from what's known as the ABG 73 to the ABG 79. And the ABG 73 is a mechanically scanned array radar. It's a perfectly fine radar, but the AESA radar is kind of a magnitude jump in capability, kind of an analog digital kind of mindset. So it's a leap to digital. ABG 73, so I mean, are these things on a carrier? Like what are we talking about here? How big is the radar? So this is actually the radars in the F18 itself. Okay, so when you say they were chosen, this is to test the upgrade to the new, the 79, ABG 79. Less of a test and more of just, hey, it's your turn to get the upgrade. Like we're all going to these better radars. They were building ones off the line with the new radar, but we were this weird transitionary squadron in the middle that transitioned from the older ones to the new ones. But it's not particularly rare to fly with different types of radar because in the, and we call the fleet replacement squadron, essentially the training ground for the F18, you have all sorts of F18s with different radar. So you are used to having multiple ones, but in the actual deployable combat squadron, we upgraded. And when we upgraded, we saw that there were objects on the radar that we were seeing the next day with this new radar that weren't there with the old radar. And these were sometimes the same day. You might go on two flights. The one in the morning might be with the older radar, the one in the evening with the new radar. And you'd see the objects with the new radar. And that's not overly surprising in some sense. They are more sensitive. Perhaps they're not filtering out everything they should be yet, or perhaps there's some other type of error. Maybe it needs to be calibrated, whatever. It was relatively new and we were somewhat used to there being software problems with these types of things occasionally, just like anything else. And so, okay, maybe this is a radar software malfunction. We're getting some false tracks, as we call them. What were you seeing? And so what we would see are representations of the objects. So this is off of our radar. We're not seeing a visual image here. This is kind of like what's being displayed to us almost like in a gaming fashion, right? Like the icon, right? So the icon is showing us, hey, something is there. And here's the parameters I can understand about it. So this is in the cockpit. There's a display that's showing some visualization with the radars detecting. Correct. And there's two different ways to do that. The first one is like the actual data, like the radar where I am, it's showing me the data kind of as if it's in front of me and I'm selecting those contacts. And there's another screen called the situational awareness page. And that's kind of a God's eye view that brings all that data into one spot. And so I'm gonna talk about this from the SA page, from the situational awareness page versus the individual radar ones, because it's easier, but. Can you, sorry to linger on that. So the individual displays are like first person and then SA is, when you say God's eye view, it's like from the top, the integration of all that information as if it's looking down onto the earth. Yes. Is that a good way to summarize it? It is, but for the aviator, it's slightly different because those two radar displays I talked about are at the bottom of that display is kind of representative of where I am. And so I see what's in front of me. Whereas the situational awareness page, the aircraft is located in the center of that. And then all around me, based off of the data link and wherever I'm getting information from, I can see that whole awareness page. I can see all the situation. So I'm gonna kind of talk about this from the situational awareness page, which is a top down view, just to kind of frame our minds instead of jumping around. And so what we would see out there is we'd see these indications that something would be there and they would have a track file. That track file, that thing that represents the object has a line coming out of it. And that represents, it's called the target aspect indicator. So there's some tracking from the radar. Correct, so it's showing you where the object's going. This is all pretty cool that the radar can do all this. So radar locks in on different objects and it tracks them over time. Correct. That's coming from the radar. That's like a built in feature. Okay, cool. So out there we're seeing it. We don't have to necessarily pull things into our tracker in some sense, right? It's all out there and then we can kind of choose to highlight on stuff or to kind of focus in on it more so. But the information should all be out there. And so we'd see that that target aspect indicator, that line on a typical aircraft, it would kind of look like this. It would be coming out and it would go steady and if they turned, it would be like boop, boop, boop, and you see them turn, right? It's not magic. But this object, the target aspect would kind of be like all over the place, like kind of randomly in the 360 degrees from that top down view, that line would be in any place. So kind of, is it unable to determine the target aspect? Is it stationary? And that's just how it puts it out and it's not used to seeing it. So I'm not saying that's necessarily super weird, but it was different than what we were used to seeing because we weren't used to seeing stationary objects out there very much. And what was also interesting is that these weren't just stationary on a zero wind day, right? These are stationary at 20,000 feet, 15,000 feet, 500 feet with the wind blowing, you know? And so much like the sea, when we're up there fighting, it affects everything. We consider the wind when we're shooting missiles, when we're flying or fuel considerations, it's like operating in that volume of air, like the ocean, everything's going with the current. And so anything that doesn't go with the current is immediately kind of identifiable and strange and that's why these were initially strangers because they would be stationary against the wind. So if you had something like a good drone in a windy conditions, what would that look like? Would it not come off as stationary? Would it sort of float about kind of thing? No, I think with the drone technology we have today, they could stay within a pretty tight location. Well, I meant like DJI drone, I'm saying like generically speaking, not a military drone. No, I have a DJI drone myself even, and you know, maybe not a hundred knots, but if that thing's in 30 or 40 and not winds, the amount of distance it's going to be kind of doing one of these, like that change is not something I'm gonna detect from maybe many miles away. Interesting. So it could look very stationary, but that wasn't necessarily, and what's interesting about this story is that there's not like the one smoking gun, right? You have to kind of look at everything. And that's what I don't like about the Department of Defense and just generally people's take on this is that everything is kind of based around a single image, you know, or that one case, but a lot of the interestingness comes from the duration or the time it's been out there, how they're interacting relative to other objects out there. And you don't get that information when you just look at a frame for a second, you know? Everyone kind of bites off on the shiny object, but. So you yourself, from your particular slice of things you've experienced and seen directly or indirectly, you've kind of built up an intuition about what are the things that were being seen. I wouldn't go that far. I've just been able to eliminate some variables because of how long I've observed it. So like you said, yes, can a drone stay in a particular position against the wind like that? Certainly, but I don't think it can do that and then go 0.8 Mach for four hours after that, you know? And so when you look at outside of that one, that moment in time, then it eliminates a lot of the potential things it could be, at least from my perspective. So what kind of stuff did you see in the instruments? We'd see them flying in patterns, kind of racetrack patterns or circular patterns or just going kind of straight east. Occasionally see them supersonic, 1.1, 1.2 Mach, but typically 0.6 to 0.8 Mach, just for extremely extended periods of time, essentially all the time. And this is airspace where there's not supposed to be anything else at all. And it's pretty far out there. It starts 10 miles off the coast, goes like 300 miles. Can you say the location that we're talking about? Off the coast of Virginia Beach. Got it, and so nobody's supposed to be out there? It's possible for people to be there. It's not necessarily restricted, but it's well monitored and we're out there every day, all day. And so people know to stay clear. If a Cessna goes bumbling in there, everyone's gonna know about it. FAA is gonna call them out, gonna tell us about it. So incursions happen, not a big deal, but they're pretty rare, honestly, because everyone knows the area and we've been operating there for decades. And what are the trajectories at 0.6 to 0.8 Mach that these objects were taking? Typically, they would be in some type of circular pattern or kind of racetrack pattern when they were at those speeds, or I just see them kind of, and it wasn't always like a mechanical flight description. And when I say that, I mean like an autopilot is gonna be just very precise, right? It's gonna be locked on straight. Whereas I could see an airplane, I could tell if the pilot's flying it, right? Because it's not gonna be perfect. The computer's not controlling it. And these seemed more like that. Not that they were imprecise, but that they were even much more erratic than that. So like, it wasn't like a straight line in a turn. It was just kind of like a weird drift like that in that direction. So it wasn't controlled by a dumb computer, or not disrespect to computers. So it wasn't controlled by autopilot kind of technology. That's not the sense that I got. So how many people have seen them in the squadron? Sort of how many times were they seen? How many were there times when there's multiple objects? Once we started seeing them on the radar enough, and we would get close enough, we'd actually see them on our FLIR as well. So our advanced targeting pod. It's essentially a infrared camera that we use for targeting, mostly in the air to surface environment. We don't use it in the air to air arena. It's just not that good of a tool, frankly. But we would see IR energy emitting from that location where the radar was dropping us off. So the radar, we'd lock onto the object and our sensors would all look there. And so then we could see that it's looking at that right piece of sky, but there's energy actually coming from there. So now we started thinking that, okay, maybe not radar malfunctions, maybe more, maybe something is physically here, of course. And then people started to try to fly by it and see it. And at this point, I would say maybe 80 to 90% of our squadron had probably seen one of these on the radar at this point. Everyone was aware of it. There was small communication, I think, between squadrons of the same area that had the same radar. So I knew it wasn't just our squadron for whatever strange reason, because other squadrons would be out there and we would talk to them, like, hey, careful, there's an object. Are you aware of that? So they would be aware of it. And then, of course, people would want to go see what they look like, right? So people would try to fly by it. I try to fly by it. I like how that's an of course. Of course. Of course you don't want to fly by it. There's an argument against that kind of perspective that maybe the thing is dangerous, so maybe we don't. But perhaps that's part of the reason you want to fly by it, is to understand better what it is if it's a threat. We have a lot of context now that we didn't back then. So it was still, hey, is this a balloon? Is this a drone at a certain point? And we're also aware of potential intelligence gathering operations that could be going on. We're up there flying our tactics. We're emitting. We're practicing our EW. We're turning at particular times. There's stuff that can be learned. It's not a secret. And countries keep different fishing vessels and whatnot in international waters off there. So it's not exactly a secret that we're being observed out there. So to think that a foreign nation would want to somehow intercept information, whether that's our radar signals or jamming capabilities to try to break that down or understand it better, be ready for that next fight, I mean, that's what scares me about this scenario because we didn't jump right to aliens or UFOs. We thought, this is a radar malfunction we need to be aware of. It's a safety issue. And then this could be a tactical problem right here because everything we do is based off a crypto and locations, everything's classified we do out there. And so over time, if you gather enough data about those fights and just monitor them forever, just like some nations do with other piece of technology or software, they could probably learn a lot. So we have to be cognizant of the fact and defend against it. So what can you say about the other characteristics of these objects like shape, size, texture, luminosity, how else do you describe object? Is there something that could be said? So you said like this is a tech town radar step one. Now you have FLIR images that can give you a sense that that's actually a physical object. What else can be said about those physical objects? So eventually someone did see one with their own eyeballs, multiple people and they saw it in a somewhat interesting way. The object presented itself at the exact altitude and geographic location of the entry points into our working areas. So we enter at a very specific point at a certain altitude and people leave the areas at the same point at a lower altitude. Probably one of the busiest pieces of sky on the eastern seaboard. So two jets from my squadron went out and they went flying and they entered the area and one of these objects went right between the aircraft. So they're flying in formation and the object went between the aircraft. They went between the object I think. I don't think that the object was moving. I don't think it aggressively went at them. I think it was located still there and then they flew through it. But they didn't have it on their radar. And I think the radar might have been malfunctioning. I don't know that for sure. I would like to look into it but my supposition is that if their radar was malfunctioning it would make sense that they wouldn't avoid the object that was there because they knew these were physical at that point. And we would go up to these objects all the time and try to see them and couldn't see them. And we didn't know what it was. Was it, were they just not there or being fooled? Was something happening? Were they moving, dropping altitude at the last minute? We're going by pretty quick so it's difficult to tell. But perhaps if his radar wasn't working it wasn't receiving energy from the jet. And the jet of course didn't know that it was there. And so whatever the case was, they flew right by and they described it just as a dark gray or black cube inside a clear translucent sphere. And the kind of the apex of the cube or touching the inside of that sphere. That's an image that's haunting. So what do they think it is? What did they think at that moment? That they, is it just this kind of cloud of uncertainty that they're just describing a geometric object? It's not on radar so it's unclear what it is. Yeah, what was the, any kind of other description they've had of it in terms of the intuition from a pilot's perspective? You have to kind of identify what a thing is. To answer the first part, they actually canceled the flight and came back because they were, it's like if there's one of these out here and we're almost hitting them and it's right there, then perhaps we need to get a different jet with better radar. So they came back and they're in their gear and they're talking to the front desk and talking to Skipper and like, hey, we almost hit one of those damn things out there. And this kind of was one of those kind of slight watershed moments where we all were kind of like, all right, like this is a serious deal now. Maybe it was a, maybe we thought they were balloons or drones or malfunctions, or maybe we thought it was fine. But at the end of the day, if we're gonna hit one of these things, then we need to take care of the situation. And that's actually when we started submitting hazard reports or hazard reps to the Naval Aviation Safety kind of communication network. And it's not like a big proactive thing where people are gonna go investigate. It's more of a data collection mechanism so that you can kind of share that aggregate data and make sure that things are progressing. So it wasn't a mechanism that would result in action being taken, but we were hoping to at least get the message out to whomever was maybe running a classified program that we were not aware of or something like that, that hey, like you could kill somebody here. Like you've grown too big for your bridges here. Take a step back. So that was our concern at that point. That's kind of where we were thinking this was going. What's the protocol for shooting at a thing? Was there a concern that it's a direct threat, not just surveillance, but a thing that could be a threat? At least from my perspective, like that never really crossed into my mind. I thought it was potentially an intelligence failure that could be being watched and information gathered. But I didn't think that it was something that would proactively engage me in a hostile manner. It wouldn't really make sense either too. It would be shocking to like have one of these objects take out an F18, but there's no real tactical advantage other than fear perhaps. Psychological, yeah. I've learned a lot about the psychological warfare in Ukraine as a big part of the war in terms of when you talk about siege warfare, about wars that last for many years, for many months, and then perhaps could extend to years. But yes, it didn't seem, it didn't fit your conception of a threatening entity. Correct. So looking back now from all the pieces of data you've integrated, you've personally added, what do you think it could be? I don't know. I don't know what it could be. I think we've been able to categorize it successfully into a few buckets. We've been able to say that this could be US technology that someone put in the wrong piece of sky or perhaps was developed and tested in an inappropriate spot by someone that wasn't being best practices. Is there, sorry to interrupt, is there a sort of modularity to the way the military operates, the way it's possible for one branch not to know about the tests of another? Yeah, I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that that could occur, right? And so if we just make that assumption, we can integrate that into our analysis here and just say, okay, but at the point we're at now, we have to assume that that's not the case, right? With everything that's been going on and the statements have been made and the hearings, I think that if it was a noncommunication issue, we're in big trouble at this point. What about it being an object from another nation, from China, from Russia? Or even one of our allies, perhaps, right? Maybe that's, you know, I don't think it's controversial to say that our allies could be gathering information about us or anything of that nature, but that would be an extreme case, but I think it's just important to say, right? To not just say Russia or China and just call them the bad guys and assume that if they don't have it, no one can do it. And so from my perspective, you know, anyone else, anyone else, and it doesn't necessarily need to be a foreign power. It could be a non government entity, perhaps, although I think that's very unlikely. But again, these are things you must consider if you kind of throw everything, everything other than the US under scrutiny. But you know, from what has been reported and the behaviors that have been seen, it would be, I would expect to see remnants of that technology elsewhere in the economy. There seems to be too many things that require advanced technology that would be beneficial commercially, as well as in other military applications for it to be completely locked away by one of our competitors. Now I could see us perhaps locking something away if we're already in the lead and having it to pull out as needed. But for someone that's perhaps in a power struggle and they're in second place, they might be more aggressive with the development of different types of technology willing to accept bigger risks. Do you think it could be natural phenomena that we don't yet understand? I think that there are a number of things that this is going to be, right? I don't think there's one thing at the end of the day, but I certainly think that that is part of what some of this could be. I don't think it's what we were seeing on the East Coast, and I don't think it is related to the Roosevelt incident, or I'll even go out and say the Nimitz incident, but. What's the Roosevelt incident? The Roosevelt incident, typically referred to as the gimbal and or the go fast video. And then the Nimitz is from what the David Fravor has witnessed directly and spoken about. We'll talk about that as well. I'd just love to get your sort of interpretation of those incidents. But yeah, so in this particular case, natural phenomena could be a part of the picture, but you're saying not the whole picture. Yes, yes, and we can't discount it. Oh, the other thing is what about the failure of pilot eyesight? Like sort of some deep mixture of actual direct vision, human vision system failure, and like psychology. Like seeing something weird and then filling in the gaps. Because in order to make sense of the weird. I've tried to expose myself to scenarios like that that I don't necessarily think are right, but I've explored them to see if they could have some truth. And one example is let's imagine a scenario where if we're seeing these objects every day off the East Coast, I can imagine a technology or an operation where you had some type of traditional propulsion system operating drones in order to gather data like we had discussed. And I could envision a clever enough adversary that could perhaps destroy or somehow remove these objects and replace them with new objects essentially when we're not looking, right? And that accounts for the large airborne time. And so I explore options like that and I try to see what evidence and assumptions need to be made in order to prove or disprove that. And you would need so much infrastructure. You'd need so many assets. And so I try to explore some of those fallacies and some of those concerns. And as aviators, we're trained into many like actual physical, like eyesight and kind of illusion training. So like at nighttime flying, there's so many things that can happen flying with false horizons. And so we receive hours of training on that type of stuff, but this just falls outside the category from my perspective. What was the visibility conditions in the times when people were able to see it? And we just earlier discussed complete nighttime, darkness. In this case, was it during the day? It was a perfectly clear day that particular incident, yep. In a world that's full of mystery, I have to ask what do you think is the possibility that it's not of this earth origin? I like the term nonhuman intelligence in a sense, because again, there's a lot of assumptions in there that may cause us to go down the wrong roads. It could, you know, these could be something that are weather phenomena of earth, right? Or something else that is just something we don't understand and can't imagine right now that's still of this earth. If we consider extraterrestrials or something that came from a physical place far away in space time, you know, that leads us to some detection assumptions that we would need to make. And so I just try to not categorize it under anything and just say, hey, is this demonstrating intelligence? And start from there as a single object. What can we learn about it kinematically? How it's performing? What does that mean for its energy source? What does that mean for the G forces inside? And then step it out a level and say, okay, how are these interacting with our fighters? If they are, how are they interacting with the weather and their environment? How are they interacting with each other? So can we look at these and how they're interacting perhaps as a swarm, especially off the East coast where this is happening all the time with multiple objects. Right? And so we might be able to determine some things about their maybe, you know, sensor capabilities or the areas of focus, you know, if we can determine how they're working in conjunction with each other. But, you know, seeing one little flash of an object doesn't provide that type of insight. But we have the systems for it, and it's kind of, you know, an irony, but it's a fact of life, the reality that many of these well deployed, highly capable systems are held under the military umbrella, which makes it difficult to provide that data for scientific analysis. So there's probably a lot more data on these objects that's not being, that's not made available, probably even within the military for analysis. I think so. Yeah, I think there's a lot of data that could be made available. And, you know, that's one of the reasons why, you know, I've been engaged with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics to build, you know, a large resources of cross domain expertise so that if or when that data is available or that there's additional analysis needed, you know, we can spin up those teams and make that analysis. So there was a recently a house intelligence subcommittee hearing on UFOs that you were a part of. What was the goal of that hearing? And can you maybe summarize what you heard? The hearings, from my perspective, seemed a bit disingenuous, kind of top level. I think... Who was it run by, sorry to interrupt, like who were the people involved and what was the goal, the stated goal? Congressman Andre Carson did chair the committee and he was, I think, ultimately responsible for bringing it all together. You know, I think the intent from Congress was to try to bring light to what has been happening with the Navy and to help show the American people that Congress is taking this serious because something serious is happening. But, you know, the sense I got seemed a bit disingenuous. They talked around it a lot. They, you know, advertised their love of science fiction, but they, you know, they didn't treat this, I would say, in the manner it deserved as a potential tactical threat if it's coming from a foreign power. And I get it though, at the same day, they have very specific objectives within the DOD, right? They have a very important job. Their job isn't necessarily to do exploratory science for no reason. So I applaud and I encourage their efforts on the intelligence side to help understand this, but my concern is that they play a role they're not well suited for, which is doing science. And the Pentagon has opened a new office to investigate UFOs called All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What do you think about this office? Do you think it can help alleviate in a way which this hearing perhaps has failed to improve more the scientific rigor and the seriousness of investigating UFOs? I think that remains to be seen. I think it's a step in the right direction, but it's a step that was taken because the previous step didn't happen, right? So the AOI MSG was the progeny, essentially, of the AARO or AERO. And the name was changed because nothing was happening and it was essentially just a confusing mess of words that were created to make this topic unpalatable. The Airborne Objects Identification Synchronization Management Group. Quite the mouthful. I practice that. But the new All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, from my perspective at least, at least the perspective that they're putting out, they seem to want to be open. They put out a Twitter handle, they're going out on Twitter and communicating, saying they want to keep this open. But that's gonna run into a classification wall. Well, so Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick seems like an interesting guy. He does, yes. So he's got a, Evan looked in too deeply, but he seems to have sort of, he's coming from like a science research perspective, like a background. So he might be, at least in the right mindset, the right background to kind of lead a serious investigation. I think so. I'll just say generally, the office has been receptive to AIAA reaching out in order to collaborate, which has been a positive sign. Also pass the same kudos to Dr. Spergel and NASA's effort as well. I see these organizations that are standing up, I do see them as good faith efforts that are coming about through a lot of difficulty and negotiation most likely, right? And I see these as a small door opening that if we can take advantage of, can lead to a much more productive relationship between these organizations. How do you put pressure on this kind of thing? Does it come from the civilian leadership? Does it come from sort of Congress and presidents? Does it come from the public? Does the public have any power to put pressure on this? Or is the giant wall of bureaucracy going to protect it against any public pressure? What do you think? I think we've been in that latter state for a while, but society seems to be a bit different nowadays. We have the ability to communicate and to group and to form relationships in a way that hasn't been able to be present in the past. We've been able to do research for better or worse on our own in a way that hasn't been able to happen before. And so I sense that people are a bit less willing to kind of buy the bottom line statement from those in power as they used to be back when they didn't have access to those tools. And so I do think there is a massive role for the general society, general populace to play to show that they are interested in this. Because it's not that I don't think the politicians or the leaders in the Pentagon, it's not that they don't like this topic necessarily or think it's toxic per se, but they exist in a culture where this has been toxic and they don't feel comfortable talking about it. And these are people that have spent their entire careers working towards a goal and getting to very high positions within government. And so this is very against their nature to take a stance on a topic like this. And so the fact that these are standing up, even if they do have a small budget or if they struggled a bit at first, I still think it's a massive change and it's a big step away from that stigma that has been pervading this topic for so long. And you're actually part of alleviating the stigma for somebody that's as credible, as intelligent, as varied in background, able to speak about these things. That's a big risk that you took, but it's extremely valuable because it's alleviating the stigma. I thank you for saying that, but it didn't feel like much of a risk for me. I didn't come out about aliens or whatever. I had a safety problem that I started asking questions about. And I went down a road as a Navy trained aviation safety officer, right? That sent me to school for six weeks and Pensacola would be a safety officer. We're almost hitting these objects and it's not something that happened in the past and we want to understand it, it's happening right now. Like these occurrences are still happening. Aviators are flying right now, are still flying by these things. And in fact, I mentioned I was an instructor pilot. And I had a student call me about eight months ago or so. And he's like, hey, sir, I made it to the fleet finally. I had trained him how to fly. And then he goes to F18, he goes another year of training. And then he gets out to his squadron on the East Coast and he's flying with a senior member of the base, NAS Oceana, where the fighters fly out of Senior 0506. And it was kind of a bad weather day. And so they said, hey, if the weather's not good enough for us to do this dog fighting set, we'll go out and do a UAP hunt, and see if we can't find any things or take a look at them. I don't know if it was ingest or not, but I actually would say it's not ingest because there were notices that were being briefed about this being a safety hazard at this point. And so now that I think about it, it likely wasn't ingest. Long story short, they went flying. The weather was too bad. They did go on a UFO hunt and they physically saw one. And he called me up and said, hey, sir, I saw a Cuban sphere. They're still out here years later. And so it's almost like a generational issue for these fighter pilots, at least on East Coast. But that's great that they can talk about it, right? Exactly, exactly. They feel at least comfortable. They have a reporting mechanism. And so that was one of the problems that I noticed that we have a lot of reporting mechanisms to take care of safety issues and even tactical issues when the time's right in order to keep track of what's going on, but there's no way to communicate about this. Sure, we could submit a hazard report, but nothing's actually being investigated and if this is a tactical vulnerability or something more, it deserves attention. If I could ask your sort of take your opinion of the different UFO sightings that the DOD has released videos on. So what do you think about the Tic Tac UFO that David Fravor and others have sighted? That's a truly anomalous experience. I can't do like mental models in my head to find potential solutions to discredit that, right? Like as much as I try, right? Just as a logical process, as a practice, I can't pick it apart in the way that we were just talking about a moment ago about thousands of drones being like sent up in very tricky manners, right? I can't really bring myself to a clever solution that other than just saying the pilots are lying or it was error, you know? And I believe, you know, I know Dave Fravor, you know, I consider him a friend, we talk a lot. I have zero, zero reason to disbelieve anything he says. Yeah, I agree with you, but in terms of the actual UFO, is there something anomalous and interesting to you about that particular case? Maybe one interesting aspect there is how much do I understand about the water surface and underwater aspects of these UFOs? It seems like a lot of the discussions is about the movement of this particular thing that seems to be weird, anomalous, seems to defy physics, but what about stuff that's happening underwater? That's interesting to me. If I had advanced technology, I would certainly like to operate in part underwater because you can hide a lot of stuff there. You think it would be somewhat as easy as traveling through interstellar space, at least, right? Yeah. You know, I wish I had a great answer for that, but as an aviator, that's kind of a black box for us. We don't have great, what I would call cross domain tracking, right? I can't see something go underwater and then follow it underwater. So it's literally not your domain, like underwater, like leave that for somebody else. Yeah, and you know, I use that terminology because it's kind of important, right? Cross domain tracking is something that we haven't had to necessarily worry about, right? Because airplanes operated in the air and submarines operated underwater and space planes operate in space, right? But you know, there's going to be, you know, that's going to blur, I think, as we move along here, especially in the air and space regime and being able to perhaps transition my radar contact at 40,000 feet to another radar system that can track it up to 200,000 feet, you know, that might be a value. And so we seem to be missing that right now. So what about the go fast and the gimbal videos that you mentioned earlier? There was a, like, what's interesting there to you? So the gimbal, I'll talk about that one first. I was airborne for that one. The person that recorded it was a good friend of mine, but I mean, both air crew, I knew both of them, but the wizard himself, very close friends, went through a lot of her training together. We went to the same fleet squadron. He ended up transitioning to be a pilot and then came to where I was instructing. So I got to instruct him a bit on his transition. And, you know, the way that was, was we went out on a air to air training mission. So simulating a air fight against our own guys, they're acting like the bad guys and kind of go head to head against each other. And when we fly on those missions, we all fly out together, more or less, we set up and then we kind of attrite from the fight as we either, you know, run out of gas or something happens. And so people usually go back onesies or twosies. And so the air crew that recorded the gimbal, they were going back to the boat and we were on what's called a workup training event. And so this is like a month on the boat where we're essentially conducting war time operations, more or less, to stress ourselves out and to kind of do the last training block before we go on deployment, essentially. So it's pretty high stress. They actually do send aircraft from like land bases to kind of try to penetrate and we're expected to go intercept them. And so we're kind of practicing like we play. And so he saw these objects on the radar, the gimbal and a fleet of other aircraft or vehicles. And they initially thought it was part of the training exercise that they were sending something in to try to penetrate the airspace. And so they, you know, they flew over to it and as they got close enough to get on the FLIR, you know, I think everyone has heard their reaction and they realized that it wasn't something they were expecting to see. Can you actually describe what's in the video and what's the reaction in case they haven't seen it? Yeah, a lot of swearing. But so what you see on the FLIR footage is a black or white, depending on when you look at it, object that's somewhat shaped like a gimbal. It appears almost as if someone put two plates together and then there seems to be almost like a small funnel of IR energy that's at the top of the bottom of those plates in a sense. So almost as if, you know, there's a stick going in between two plates, but not that pronounced, right? So there's an energy field that kind of went to a funnel on the top and the bottom, at least that's how it's being portrayed on the FLIR. There's a lot of conversation about that being glare, things of that nature, but it was actually a very tight IR image. It just was nondescript shape, which was interesting. Typically we would see the skin of the aircraft, we can see the flames coming out of the exhaust, especially at those ranges. But... And there was no flames or there's no exhaust here. There was no exhaust, there was no, you know, there was no outgassing of repellent in any manner, right? It was just an object that had nothing emitting from it that was stationary in the sky. Well, not stationary, but it was moving along a path, right? It wasn't falling out of the sky. And it continued along, if we were to consider it from a God's eye view, again, on the SA page, it continued along in a path. And from the perspective, that top down view, it just went in another direction. So no, just an instantaneous direction change from that perspective. You also hear them, you know, very excitedly talking on the tapes about, you know, whatever the heck this thing is and look at the SA, there's a whole formation of them. And so the SA is a situational awareness page. And again, it's a large display that gives that God's eye view of all the radar contacts. So the video is actually showing just one and then they're speaking about many of them on the SA display. Correct. And what they essentially saw was, if we were to consider above the object north, so kind of offset to the north of the object, there was a formation of about somewhere between four and six of these objects in a rough wedge formation, you know, so kind of side by side like this. And again, not in a like autopilot type manner where it was very stiff. It was very kind of non mechanical, the flight mechanics again. And these objects were in that formation and they were going along and then they turned pretty sharply, but they still had a radius of turn and then went back in the opposite direction. And during that turn, they were kind of like all over the place. Like it wasn't tight. They weren't even like super, they weren't flying in a way I would expect them to be flying in relation to a flight lead. They were flying as if they were flying close to each other, but not in formation, which was kind of strange, right? And then when they rolled out, they kind of tightened back up. Like, so when they basically, they started that turn and then 180 degrees out, essentially they start flowing in the opposite direction and kind of got back in that formation. And while that was happening, the gimbal object was proceeding, let's say left to right. And as those, the formation kind of turned up to the north and was just passing back it, the gimbal just kind of went back in the opposite direction. So to follow it back in that direction. And in the FLIR itself, you see the object changes orientation quite a bit. So you see it more or less level, maybe candid about 45 degrees. And then you see it kind of moving around like this, almost as if it was a gimbal. I've come to learn after some, having seen some research online and people really looking into this, that it seemed that the object actually climbed during that maneuver. And so the reason it looked like it turned immediately is because it turned like this. It turned in a vertical fashion like that, which is pretty interesting. That's kind of like another example of a flight mechanics that we don't normally operate because we don't change our directions by maneuvering in the vertical. If we can help it, you're just killing the fuel. And so if you're like a surveillance platform looking to spend as much time around something, you're not gonna climb 500 feet every time you make a turn. Unless you're Tom Cruise. Unless you're Tom Cruise, naturally. Okay, so is that one of the more impressive flight mechanics you've seen in video forms or not the direct eyesight reports, but like in terms of video evidence that we have? I think so. We were seeing a lot of these, but we weren't just going on recording them all day. We just kind of put them in that safety bucket, be like, all right, there's objects over there. We're just not gonna go near it. And so we weren't putting our sensors on them that much. We were gathering the data kind of secondarily, but we weren't primarily focusing on it to see all the details. That's so fascinating because you have a busy day. You have a lot to do. All right, well, there's some weird stuff going on there. We're just not gonna go there. And that says something about human nature, about the way that bureaucracies function, the way the military functions. It fills up your day with busy, important things, and you don't get to, I mean, that is something that I'm in a sort of absurd way worry about, which is like we fill our days with so much busyness than when truly beautiful things happen, whatever they are, truly anomalous things. We just won't pay attention because they don't fit our busy schedule. Beautiful, I think that's right on the nose. And it's on my nose because I didn't give this topic the attention it deserved until I left, right? Until I left and I went to be an instructor pilot where I had more time. I had more downtime to kind of process and think and get out of exactly what you just described. And that's kind of what broke me out of it and got me thinking more about it. Why do you think the DOD released these videos? It's a great question. Did the DOD release it or did they kind of get out on their own in some sense? So I don't know the answer to that question, but my understanding of the situation is that the DOD talked about them so much because they were already out there in a sense. And so they had a choice where they could have just straight up lied and said it wasn't theirs or it was fake. But again, I think our culture now is too open and the information moves too freely to do things like that. And it kind of left them in a pickle that they had to respond to. So what was the role of Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Intelligence Program, AATIP? From your perspective, from what you know, maybe your intuition, is AATIP a real thing that existed? I was in a position as an aviator that never would have exposed me to anything like that. But I was curious about what people knew. And I think in my mind, maybe you hoped or, hope someone was looking into this in some sense. But on the day that Gimbal was recorded, I heard that they caught something extra interesting on the FLIR, and I went to the Intel debrief space to go see the film. And everyone's gathered around watching it, very interesting, and I heard the admiral was coming down. And so I was like, I'm gonna hang out back quietly, mind my own business, and just wanna see his reaction, try to read it to see if this is brand new or if it is something that they've been dealing with. And you know, he came in and he watched a video for like five or six seconds, and he went, mm, and then like turned around and walked out. And you know, I was like, he's definitely seen these before. There's no way that you only watch that for a few seconds and don't have more interest. It was, you know, too bizarre. So kind of going back, does the office exist? Well, you know, I've heard that the admiral essentially reported back to the Pentagon about that case real time, essentially, after he left, right? So he basically went back and I was told he reported that to either ATEP directly or to other, you know, somehow the information got there. So from my perspective and from what I've experienced, it seems like, yes, it was a thing. But you know, as an aviator, I wouldn't know either way, right? That's just my experience from what happened. But it seems like there's somewhere to report to. At the time, it seemed like there was at least someplace to complain to, if not report to. Let me ask you about sort of people that are taking a serious look at the videos and just the different UFO sighting reports. So there's a person named Meg West who is a skeptic and tries to take a skeptical view on every single piece of evidence on these UFO sightings. What do you think about his analysis? He tries to analyze in a way that debunks some of these videos and assign probabilities to their explanations, sort of leaning towards things that give a very low probability to alien extraterrestrial type of explanations for these UFOs. What do you think about his approach to these analysis? Well, two parts to his approach. One, I commend him for all the good work and effort he put into it. I've seen him build some models and things of that nature. And so I think that's something that's absolutely needed in this environment. No one's asking anyone to believe anyone here, right? Trust but verify should certainly be the mantra. But where I have a disagreement with his approach is that he's approaching from a debunker standpoint. And from my perspective, not speaking for everyone, but when I hear that, that tells me that you're driving towards a particular conclusion, which has been a very safe process for the past X years. It's been like a very safe business to be in to tell people that they haven't seen aliens, but times have changed a little bit. And the tactics I've seen to try to retain that view on reality has included things such as completely dismissing what the aircrew are saying. And I think that is a fallacy to think that we have to take the human outside of that analysis. So those are the two things I disagree with. When you put the night vision on and you look at the stars and you look out there in the vast cosmos, only a small fraction of which we can see, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there? Do you think about this kind of stuff? I do. You know, I'm of the theory that we are not the only people out there. I think it would be a statistically silly comment to assume we are, although I get that we are the only data point that we currently have. Although I'm willing to jump over that fence and say that yes, there most likely is intelligent life elsewhere. Although I'll concede that it is a possibility we are early or it could be limited or it could be in a manner that we don't recognize or can really understand. I spend so much time thinking about how we anthropomorphize things on this UFO topic. And we've done it to ourselves with media in a sense. We've trained ourselves what to think about, what we think is true or what this would be like. And by doing so, I think we're closing ourselves off to a lot of what the possibilities could be and the things that we could miss. You beautifully put that the thing that drew you to fighter jets is the technology. So if you were to think, to imagine from an alien perspective, what kind of technologies would we first encounter as human beings if we were to meet another alien civilization in the next few centuries? What kind of thing would we see? So you're now at the cutting edge and you see the quick progress that's happening. That was happening throughout the 20th century, that's happening now with greater degrees of autonomy with robots and that kind of stuff. What do you think we will encounter? I think we're gonna see the ability to manipulate matter like we used to manipulate information. Like I think that's what, whether that means being able to pop something on the table that didn't exist or to influence a chemical reaction somewhere, but being able to manipulate and treat matter as if it was information. And so being able to design specific materials, being able to move past a lot of the barriers that seem to limit our progress with things such as miniaturized fusion or even just fusion in general is a lot of it is matter based, is material based and our ability to not manipulate, we can only discover materials in a sense. And so I think that a complete mastery of physical reality would be one of the key traits of a very intelligent species. Well, you're actually working on some, maybe you can correct me, but sort of quantum mechanical simulation to understand materials. So is that, do you see sort of the early steps that we're doing at quantum computing side to start to simulate, to deeper understand materials, but maybe to engineer and to mess with materials at the very low level that aliens will be able to do and hopefully humans will be able to do soon? Yeah, I think that's, you know, so if we think about how, what materials are made of, it's just a collection of atoms, but each one of those atoms has a lot of data associated with it. So if we wanna kind of calculate how they interact with each other, it requires a massive amount of computational resources, so much so that it can't be done in a lot of cases with classical computers. And that's where quantum computers come in. Although we don't have a perfectly functioning quantum computer at this point, one of the things that we're working at at quantum general materials is to essentially bridge that gap between what a classical computer can do as far as simulating materials. And of course, what a fully functioning quantum computer would mean for being able to design materials. And so, you know, having the ability to study matter at a very fundamental level and unleashing artificial intelligence to machine learning on that problem, I think is, you know, in a sense, you know, alien in a way that we're able to advance our science using, you know, a process that we may not fully understand with perhaps a non human based intelligence in some sense. And so we may find patterns in the processes, right? How does our machine learning output, you know, can we match behaviors with what we're observing with what may be a machine learning algorithm with output, right? Can we try to classify the intelligence in that manner, perhaps? And so, you know, at GenMatt, as we're looking at these materials, we're considering what these algorithms could have used for later on. Could we perhaps reverse the process and determine what a unique or anomalous material, what type of properties it potentially could have? And you said GenMatt, right? Mm hmm. What's, what is GenMatt? GenMatt is a quantum general material. So it's the company I work for. We essentially are working on a couple of verticals. One of them is our quantum chemistry work. We're essentially, we're bridging the gap between essentially physics and chemistry. We're working on those problems and again, implementing artificial intelligence machine learning into that process so that we can design those materials from the ground up. Additionally, we are what we consider a vertically integrated material science company, which means we can generate our own data. And so within the next quarter coming up, we are launching a satellite in the space. They'll have a fairly advanced hyperspectral sensor in there, which is intended to be the first launch that will help us detect different types of materials using our advanced knowledge of quantum chemistry, right? We're gonna be leveraging that experience in order to better analyze that data. Oh, interesting. So materials that are strange or novel out there in space. Not necessarily, but we'll be looking back at Earth to be able to detect mineral deposits on Earth. Got it, got it. Getting the greater perspective from out in space to do analysis of different materials. Interesting. Yeah, I was really impressed by the DeepMind. I got to hang out with DeepMind recently and they really impressed me with the possibility of the application, as you were saying, of machine learning in the context of quantum mechanical simulation for materials, so to understand materials. It's really, really, really interesting. So manipulate matter, huh? I would say the next thing is horses, right? Or maybe fields. So manipulating or managing gravity. Can we maneuver within fields in some manner that allows us to perhaps move propellant less or in other manners, right? And so I think essentially having a deeper understanding of different fields and being able to interact with them, I think would be a potential avenue for travel or advanced travel, right? Propellant less travel. Can we quantum entangle gravity fields together and propel a ship by the gravity field of a planet, the mass of a planet, and a drive on a ship? You know, there's all sorts of interesting things, but. Yeah, people will look back at people like you and say, well, they used to fly, like with this kind of propellant, it seems like to be a very antiquated way of flying, and they were very impressed with themselves, these humans, that they could fly like birds. It's like so much energy is used to fly such short distances from that perspective. We can only throw so many rocks out the back. There needs to be a better way. Exactly. It just seems dumb, like these. It's like Flintstones or something like that. We're good at it, but there's a limit, right? Like we need to be good. I mean, that's an interesting sort of trade off. How much do you invest in getting really good at it? I tend to believe the reason why it would be very important and very powerful to put a human on Mars is not necessarily for the exploration facet, but in all the different technologies that come from that. So there's something about putting humans in extreme conditions where we figure out how to make it less extreme, more comfortable. And for that, we invent things, like the DOD sort of helping invent the internet and all the different technologies we've invented. It's almost like an indirect consequence of solving difficult problems, whether that problem means winning wars or colonizing other planets. And so I don't think Mars will help us figure out propulsion systems or to crack open physics to where you can travel close to the speed of light or faster than the speed of light, but it will help us figure out how to build some cool technology here on Earth, I think. So I'm a big proponent of doing really difficult things, really difficult engineering things to see what kind of technologies emerge from that. But let me ask you this. Do you think US government is hiding some technology like alien spacecraft technology? I have no information either way. And if you did, you probably wouldn't tell me. But my assumptions, like what did my heart tell me? My heart tells me something's going on, but I have no evidence for that. Maybe that's me wanting something to go on. Maybe that's a human feeling to want to know that my government's in control of what some strange unknown thing is. What's your sense if such a thing happened? Would this kind of information leak? Would this kind of information be released by the government? I mean, that's the worry that you have is because when you don't understand a thing and it's novel, you want to hide it so that some kind of enemy doesn't get access to it and use it against you. I wonder if that is the underlying assumption. It's the one people always jump to, that it's for to maintain secrecy of technology. And I assume that's part of it. I wonder if there's any other reasons that we would want to not talk about it. I imagine that such information would have a shock to the social economic system of any country, if not the world. And so I wonder if perhaps that was part of the concern as well, how society can react to it. Maybe we're anti fragile enough now with everything that's going on and with our communication networks that, why not now? I don't know. That's something I think about as well. Yeah, the effect on the mass psyche of something like this, that there's another intelligence out there. We had trouble enough to deal with a pandemic, to have something of this scale, basically having just an inkling of a phenomena that we have no understanding of and could lead to complete destruction of human civilization or a flourishing of it. And what do you do? What does a bureaucracy of government do with that? Especially when they're the ones holding the range of power and such a communication would relinquish that power essentially, to some degree. Since you think there's aliens out there and you're somebody that's thought about war quite a bit, do you think alien civilizations, when we meet them, would want war? Would they be a danger to us? Would they be a friend to us? What's your intuition about intelligences out there? My intuition tells me that when two people like yourself or myself or anyone get together, often the output is greater than the individuals. And when we work together, we can typically do things that are more impressive and better than if a single person works alone. And now I know that war has driven technological progress, but perhaps there's other mechanisms that can do so. But regardless, I wonder if we truly think about an advanced society that has been perhaps thousands or millions of years ahead of us, I would imagine that same truth to be there, that people working together or creatures working together is a good thing for society or its society as a whole. And if we consider that, as we imagine a society growing and expanding, in a sense, the ultimate output of a planet could only be achieved in some senses if everyone was working towards the same goal. And there might be wonders and secrets and things that we can't imagine just simply because of the timeframes that we live under and we think in. But if a planet has a single unit and it almost is as an entity itself at a certain level, if everything's working towards the same output, I could almost imagine an intelligent species that approached us planet to planet instead of person to person, because that's how they've evolved and they've assumed any intelligent species would understand that working together is better than not. And so my heart tells me that at a certain point, love and caring and the desire to work together is much more powerful than the technological progress that war would bring. I hope so as well. Well, let me jump to the AI topic that you've done. So you've done research and development efforts focused on multiagent intelligence for collaborative autonomy, machine learning AI stuff that we've been talking about for combat, for air to air combat, manned, unmanned teaming technologies, all that kind of stuff. What's some interesting ideas in this space that fascinate you? Randomness, being able to not predict what the enemy is doing almost no matter what, because there's a level of randomness that's within the tactical envelope. Even if utility of randomness. The utility of randomness in an increasing. Sounds like a book you should write. That would be a good title. Name my band. Name your band? Yeah. So yeah, can you elaborate that? So like trying to deeper understand how you can integrate randomness through AI in the context of combat. In order to make yourself, in order to take away the enemy's ability to try to predict what you're gonna do to disrupt their technological progress cycles so that they don't have a clear target to aim at. And if you don't have a clear target to aim at, it's hard to hit it. Additionally, more distribution of assets and capability. So imagine being able to digitally model your weapon or your system or your entire tactical engagement or scenario, or allow a machine learning to help you better understand the technology that you need to build in order to defeat a particular scenario. And I'm talking hardware now, not just the tactic itself. And being able to use large amounts of simulation and machine learning to build individual assets that are small boutique using advanced manufacturing techniques for a mission or for a particular battle. Instead of just having these large things against an enemy, you're building systems and technology for individual cases. What about manned and unmanned teaming? So man and machine working together. Is there interesting ideas there? I approach it from the position that the human should be commanding from the highest level possible, right? So mission, objective, base, targeting. And so if, just for an example, if there's a building here and I want that building to go away, that's the message I wanna communicate. I don't wanna tell certain vehicles to be in a certain spot. I don't wanna know how much fuel they have. I don't even wanna know what capabilities they have necessarily. I just wanna know that I have the ability to select from a cloud of capabilities and the right assets are gonna arrive such that they deal with the contingencies around the target such as protection systems or EW and then can prosecute the target to the high enough probability of satisfaction that's needed by the mission commander. And that's the power of the human mind is it's able to do some of these strategic calculations but also ethical calculations, all that kind of stuff. That's what humans are good at. Does it worry you a future where we have increasingly higher autonomy in our weapons systems, in our war? So you said building. What about telling a set of fully autonomous drones to get rid of all the terrorists in the city? So you said multiple buildings, region, that kind of, so greater and greater autonomy. Mm hmm. So that's a fear, right? You're viewing it from a we can cover more perspective which is fair and a lot of, I don't approach it from that topic. At least I don't think of it that way, at least morally. I think that with the advancement of warfare, assuming we have a just and moral leadership, if that's the case, then I am an advocate for increased autonomy and technology because I see it as an ability to be more precise. And if we trust the moral leadership of our government, then we would want to be as precise as possible in order to mitigate effects that we don't want. So I know that's not a satisfying answer and it leaves us maybe with bad feelings but. No, because having experienced sort of directly seen what it looks like when deliberately or carelessly war leads to the death of a large number of civilians as it does currently in Ukraine, the value of precision given ethical leadership becomes apparent. So there's something distinctly unethical about the murder of civilians in a time of war. And I think technology helps lessen that. Of course, all death is terrible but there's something about schools, hospitals being destroyed with everybody inside being killed. It's particularly terrible. It is and you approached it from the angle of more autonomy enables a wider swath of destruction. And that's where we get back into who's making the decisions based off of this. And my hope again would be that we would have the leadership that would use these things when needed in the precise way as possible to minimize that. And I've seen that firsthand, I've seen that in country, I've seen not blue forces but I've seen truck bombs go off on school buses, driving around Afghanistan while escorting convoys and it wasn't easy then and I'm sure it's not any easier now especially after what you've just seen. Do you have thoughts about the current war in Ukraine maybe from a military perspective, maybe from the Air Force perspective? So I can just mention a few things. There's the Barakhtar drones that are being used. They're unmanned. I think they have capability to be autonomous but they're usually remotely controlled. They're used for reconnaissance but they're also used by the Ukraine side for reconnaissance and I think also to destroy different technologies, tanks and so on, different targets like this. So there's also on the Russian side the Orlan 10. There's the fighter jets, MiG 29 on the Ukraine side and the Su 25 on the Russian side. Is there anything kind of stands out to you about this particular aspects of what this war looks like that's unique to what you've experienced? Maybe not unique but it's just been absolutely incredible to see the footage. We're watching war on Twitter essentially and to see these aircraft flying down low, spitting flares out, getting shot down, it's incredible to see this happening live for everyone to see. So that's just kind of a quick meta comment but as far as the actual, I think these small form factor UAVs where they're just like strapping weapon to it and flying over and trying to drop it at the right time or any of these type of commercial applications of technology into this ad hoc warfare area is incredibly interesting because it shows how useful that technology can be outside of the military. Especially like DJI, right? Like there's obviously a lot of technology in there is being leveraged for other capabilities within PLC military or at least we would assume. What happens if that is more widespread, right? Like what if we were creating our own drones and they were being used against us? Would we want to have some type of kill switch or something like that, right? So what I think governments are gonna have to consider like all these tools that are gonna be easily available to just any person could be turned into a tool of war or how do we stop that from being turned against us? Especially as we look at 10 years from now when we have a large number of autonomous UAVs delivering packages and doing everything else over our country and any one of those could be potentially a weapon if we don't have the proper security. Well, we're now in Texas and Texas values its guns and it sees guns as among other things a protector of individual freedom. You could see a future perhaps where, and I've certainly have experienced this in the empowering nature of this in Ukraine where you can put the fight for independence into your own hands by literally strapping explosives to GGI drones that you purchase on your own salary. I mean that one of the interesting things about the voluntary army in Ukraine is that they're basically using their own salary to buy the ammunition to fight for their independence. It's the very kind of ideal that sort of people speak about when they speak about the Second Amendment in this country that it's interesting to see the advanced technology version of that, especially in Ukraine. Sort of using computer vision technology for surveillance and reconnaissance to try to integrate that information to discover the targets and all that kind of stuff. To put that in the hands of civilians is fascinating to see. So to sort of fight for their independence, you could say that to fight against authoritarian regime of your own government, all that kind of stuff. It shows you how complicated the war space in the future is gonna be invading a land like that where people have that many different types of resources. It could absolutely change warfare. I mean hopefully that creates a disincentive to start war. To go to war with a, yeah, sort of it changes the nature of guerrilla warfare. It does, yeah. I don't think Putin was expecting to be in that engagement quite as long as he has, of course, but it can show you how you can get caught up. If land wars turn into an inescapable quagmire each time due to the complications around the society's ability to access interesting tools, it could be a huge demotivator for aggression. Well, let me ask you about this. Do you think there will always be war in the world? Is this just a part of human nature? I think so. I think it is. Until we move past resource limitation, there's always gonna be at least that one particular cause of conflict. And then we can also consider all our psychological lizard brain emotions that cause us to act out, although hopefully we have enough things in place to stop that from rising to the level of war. But we have our own biology, our own psychology and evolution to combat. But there are pragmatic reasons to exert violence sometimes, unfortunately, and one of those cases could be resource limitations. And so your question was, do I think there will always be war in this world? My unfortunate answer is perhaps yes, but once there's more than one world and we're less resource constrained, then perhaps there'll be a valve of sorts for that. I talked to Jacco on this podcast. I told him about a song called Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, and the question I asked him, I'd like to ask you the same question, is like the song goes, do you think we're fools to wage war on our brothers in arms? And Jacco said, our enemy is not our brothers in arms, they're the enemy. And so this kind of notion that we're all human, that's a notion, that's a luxury you can have, but there is good and bad in this world, according to Jacco. I hear that anger and hate when I was in Ukraine amongst some people, where there was a sense where you could be brothers and sisters, you can have family, you can have love from Ukraine to Russia, but now that everything's changed and generational hate for some people have taken over. So I guess the question is, when you think about the enemy, is there hate there? Do you acknowledge that they're human? I had never had any hate or discontent when I was doing my job, I'll say, but I was also never in a true life or death situation where they were gonna kill me if I didn't kill them. But I think that environment isn't one born out of hate, being in that type of scenario, in a sense it's how to be alive, right? I mean, our natural state is to be fighting for our survival in a sense. And so I think there's great power and strength and clarity perhaps in that, and it's not always born out of hate, but out of necessity, and we can't always control that. And I think as we focus on ourselves so much, we only dance on that pinhead when we find ourselves fighting for things that we need, and we're always taking from someone else at this point. And so as someone that's been in combat and very high above it, I'll say, right, where I didn't feel like I was in particular danger, I rationalized it and I made my way through it, knowing that there were people on the other side that were going to die that were on our side than not. So it was always a very human thing. It was never a reaction, emotional reaction of any sense. So you were able to see the basic, it's human versus human. There's some aspect of war that is basically one people fighting each other. Yes, at the end of the day, especially I would say in aviation, tactical aviation, there's almost a kinship with your enemies in a sense, because you know them in a sense, right, you know what they've been through, you know what training they've been through, you know where they failed, and you know what type of person they are, because it's a very unique person that does that job and usually can spot them. I guess it's the kind of respect you have for the craftsmanship of the job that's taken on. Certainly, and that person didn't come out in his $100 million jet because I pissed him off. It's not an emotional response. We're both there, maybe because we chose to be in some sense, but at the behest of someone else and outside of our control and power. And so in a sense for me, it's almost a challenge that we've engaged upon agreeably, but that's such a romantic version that I have the luxury to have being high in my castle in the jet up there, not on the ground. So I understand that it's a bit more romantic than perhaps, you know, someone on the ground experiencing all the horrors down there, because everything looks very small from above. And that's another aspect of war with greater autonomy when you're controlling the mission versus, you know, have a Genghis Khan type of intimacy in terms of the actual experience of war where you directly have, you murder with a sword versus a gun versus a remotely controlled drone versus a strategic mission assignment to an autonomous drone that executes. Abstracted away until it's just a small decision. And my worry is the people without a voice are completely forgotten and silenced in all of these calculations. I spoke to a lot of people, poor people that feel like they've never really had a voice and they're too easily forgotten, even within the country of Ukraine. It's the big city versus the rural divide, you know. It's easy to forget the people that don't have a Twitter account and that their basic existence is just trying to survive, trying to put food on the table and they don't have anything else, anything else. And they are the ones that truly feel the pain of war, of the supply chain going down, of the food supplies going down, of a cold winter without power. You're still young, but you've seen some things. So let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and give advice to young people, whether they're fascinated by technology or fascinated by fighter jets, whether they're fascinated by sort of engineering or the way the stars look at night. What advice would you give them? How to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of? I'd suggest that they don't fear looking foolish. I spent a large portion of my life considering the laughter or the comments at my statements as indication that I shouldn't pursue that. And so I kind of woke up to that fact a bit later, but I would advise that people trust in themselves and trust in the things that they care about. It doesn't matter if they're good at it. All that matters is that they find something that they can apply love and care to and they will grow better at it and then most likely make the world better because of it. And don't be afraid to look stupid. Don't be afraid to look stupid. Yeah, that's one of the things that I think as you get older, you're expected to be, to have it all figured out and so you are afraid to take on new things. But I think as long as you're always, okay, looking stupid and having a beginner's mind, you can get really, really far even later on in life. So this isn't just advice for young people. This is really advice for everybody. Maybe a dark question, but has there been a difficult time in your life, a really dark place you've gone in your mind that stands out that you had to really overcome? I would suggest that I've been pretty firm ground for most of my life. I haven't had too many personal tragedies. I'll say that have really defined me. Certainly none that I would think are outside the norm. So there was no truly low point. Actually, I have one and it's tough for me because I've spent most of my life beating motions and high emotional responses out of my system because that's what flying is, right? It's keeping a steady line and doing what you need to do. In fact, there's been studies that show reduced adrenaline production in fighter pilots for a number of years after they get out. But getting out of the Navy was difficult for me. And I wasn't expecting it to be. A lot of bravado and machoism, of course, in the military, especially in fighter community. And we all have our plans made up to get out and none of it really accounts for any type of mental health or anything like that. It's all very much, where am I gonna get my paycheck from? Where am I gonna move to? And whether it's the Navy or just individuals, truly understanding the difference that makes. And when I got out, it was difficult for me. I think a lot of guys in that job, when they get out, they almost, at least I had anxiety when I got out because I was so used to being highly involved in something that just was I was always involved with that when I got out, I didn't know how to fill that space essentially. And while I wouldn't say it was an overly traumatic experience, I think it's one that's not accounted for enough that people that are getting out, so I would encourage them to take it serious and actually think about it and respect the change because it is a big one. Well, if I may say, you found a place in nature currently, a home, is there, can you speak to that being a source of happiness for you? Absolutely. An escape from the world? Certainly, it very much is. Was it deliberate that you found it there? That's home for me. So, I moved back up to the Boston area and my wife and I had an idea after moving about eight or nine times in the Navy of kind of what we wanted just generally. And it was all really about the land and not about the house, we just wanted privacy and to be nearby. And so we ended up finding a lot of land, a parcel of land, we put a house on it and it provides me with a sense of peace that I think I can only get when I'm in nature. And a sense of clarity that helps me think, helps me relax, maybe it's so relaxing that helps me think, I don't know. But being surrounded by nature and birds and animals for me has always allowed me to, I don't know, feel most in touch with my own thoughts in a sense. It just provides clarity. And so this little sanctuary you could say I've built allows me to interface via a fiber line at my house but also feel like I'm a million miles away sometimes, which is the best of both worlds. A, you can just walk outside to escape at all. Yes. To experience life as hundreds of generations of human species have experienced it. Maybe it's the dichotomy, my desire for the fastness of technology and experience compared with the most basic baseline that we have. Isn't that strange? How do you square that? I don't know. How drawn you are to the cutting edge and still the calm you find in nature. I think it makes sense. Nature is vastly superior to almost all of our technology. From a technology perspective? Yeah, it is. And so in a way, it's being surrounded by perfection in a lot of senses. In the military and in general, have you contemplated your mortality? Have you been afraid of death? What's your relationship like with death? Well, I was willing to accept an oversized amount of risk, I'll say, when I was younger as an aviator. Not in the jet, but just that was my life. I felt like I was gonna live forever. And going out in the war, strangely, didn't really change that because as an aviator, again, we're riding up high on our horse up there. So there were times when I was in situations that could have resulted in death from flying or from emergency in the aircraft. But I'll be honest, I never really kind of sat down to think about the mortality of it afterwards. I feel like I kind of signed a check at the beginning and it was my job to perform as well as I could. And if something happened in that, then I better damn well be sure I would do my best at the time then. So I maybe didn't personally reflect on it as much as I one would think, because once you get in that machine, it doesn't give you a lot of time to sit back and philosophize on your current situation. And the same, just like we weren't seeing these, or when we seen these objects off the coast, we weren't necessarily examining them every day, right? We'd put them into that bucket because it wasn't something that was gonna kill us right away. And thinking about death when you're so close to it all the time would be debilitating. It would probably make you worse at your job. It would. Well, maybe you can think about death when you look out, when you go out into nature and think like the fact that this whole ride ends, it's such a weird thing. And the old makes way to new. And that's all throughout nature. And if you just look at the cruelty of nature or the beauty of nature, however you think about it, the fact that the big thing eats the little thing over and over, and that's just how it progresses. And that's how adaptation happens. Death is a requirement for evolution. And whether evolution allows us to see objective reality or not, it still gives you some interesting thoughts about perspectives of death, and especially considering it's a biological necessity as far as evolution is concerned. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that there's been like 100 billion people that lived before us, and that you and I will be forgotten. This whole thing we're doing now is meaningless in that sense, but at the same time, it feels deeply meaningful somehow. I guess that's the question I wanna ask. When you go out to nature with family, what do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life? Or maybe when you put on the night goggles, the night vision goggles and look up at the stars, why are we here? I can't speak for everyone, but at least the way I interpret it, or at least I feel like I interpret my way here, my job is, I feel like my role is just to be curious about the environment in a manner that allows us to understand as much as possible. I think that the human mind, whether it's just the mass inside our skull, or whether there's some type of quantum interactions going on, our mind has incredible ability to output new information in a universe that is somewhat stale of information, right? Our minds are somewhat unique in that we can imagine and perceive things that could never ever have possibly naturally occurred, and yet we can make it happen. We can instantiate that with enough belief that it's true and it can happen. And so for me, I feel like I just need to encourage that, to encourage interaction with reality such that it leaves us a newer and grander interactions with this universe. And all that starts with a little bit of curiosity. Exactly. Ryan, you're an incredible person. You've done so many things, and there's so much still ahead of you. Thank you for being brave enough to talk about UFOs and doing it so seriously, and thank you for pushing forward on all these fronts in terms of technology. So from just the fighter jets, the engineering of that, to the AIML applications in the combat setting, that's super interesting, and then now quantum. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking today. It was an honor. It was my pleasure. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lieutenant Ryan Graves. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Buzz Aldrin. Bravery comes along as a gradual accumulation of discipline. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Ryan Graves: UFOs, Fighter Jets, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #308

I remember the reaction where he had drawn these characters and he was slowly moving around and like people had no experience with 3D navigation. It was all still keyboard. We didn't even have mice set up at that time, but slowly moving, going up, picked up a key, go to a wall. The wall disappears in a little animation and there's a monster like right there. And he practically fell out of his chair. It was just like, ah, and games just didn't do that. You know, the games were the God's eye view. You were a little invested in your little guy. You can be like, you know, happy or sad when things happen, but you just did not get that kind of startled reaction. You weren't inside the game. Something in the back of your brain, some reptile brain thing is just going, oh shit, something just happened. And that was one of those early points where it's like, yeah, this is going to make a difference. This is going to be powerful and it's going to matter. The following is a conversation with John Carmack, widely considered to be one of the greatest programmers ever. He was the cofounder of id Software and the lead programmer on several games that revolutionized the technology, the experience, and the role of gaming in our society, including Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He spent many years as the CTO of Oculus VR, helping to create portals into virtual worlds and to define the technological path to the metaverse and meta. And now he has been shifting some of his attention to the problem of artificial general intelligence. This was the longest conversation on this podcast at over five hours. And still, I could talk to John many, many more times, and we hope to do just that. This is the Lux Readman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's John Carmack. What was the first program you've ever written? Do you remember? Yeah, I do. So I remember being in a radio shack going up to the TRS 80 computers and learning just enough to be able to do 10 print John Carmack. And it's kind of interesting how, of course, Carnegie and Ritchie kind of standardized Hello World as the first thing that you do in every computer programming language in every computer, but not having any interaction with the cultures of Unix or any other standardized things. It was just like, well, what am I gonna say? I'm gonna say my name. And then you learn how to do go to 10 and have it scroll all off the screen. And that was definitely the first thing that I wound up doing on a computer. Can I ask you a programming advice? I was always told in the beginning that you're not allowed to use go to statements. That's really bad programming. Is this correct or not? Jumping around code, can we look at the philosophy and the technical aspects of the go to statement that seems so convenient, but it's supposed to be bad programming? Well, so certainly back in the day in basic programming languages, you didn't have proper loops. You didn't have four whiles and repeats. That was the land of Pascal for people that kind of generally had access to it back then. So you had no choice but to use go tos. And as you made what were big programs back then, which were a thousand line basic program is a really big program. They did tend to sort of degenerate into madness. You didn't have good editors or code exploration tools. So you would wind up fixing things in one place, add a little patch. And there's reasons why structured programming generally helps understanding, but go tos aren't poisonous. Sometimes they're the right thing to do. Usually it's because there's a language feature missing like nested breaks or something where it can sometimes be better to do a go to cleanup or go to error rather than having multiple flags, multiple if statements littered throughout things. But it is rare. I mean, if you gripped through all of my code right now, I don't think any of my current code bases would actually have a go to, but deep within sort of the technical underpinnings of a major game engine, you're gonna have some go tos in a couple of places probably. Yeah, the infrastructure on top of, like the closer you get to machine code, the more go tos you're gonna see, the more of these like hacks you're going to see because the set of features available to you in low level programming languages is not, is limited. So print John Carmack, when is the first time, if we could talk about love, that you fell in love with programming? You said like, this is really something special. It really was something that was one of those love at first sight things where just really from the time that I understood what a computer was even, I mean, I remember looking through old encyclopedias of the black and white photos of the IBM mainframes at the reel to reel tape decks. And for people nowadays, it can be a little hard to understand what the world was like then from information gathering where I would go to the libraries and there would be a couple books on the shelf about computers and they would be very out of date even at that point, just not a lot of information, but I would grab everything that I could find and devour everything. Whenever Time or Newsweek had some article about computers, I would like cut it out with scissors and put it somewhere. It just, it felt like this magical thing to me, this idea that the computer would just do exactly what you told it to. I mean, and there's a little bit of the genie monkey's paw sort of issues there where you'd better be really, really careful with what you're telling it to do, but it wasn't gonna back talk you. It wasn't gonna have a different point of view. It was gonna carry out what you told it to do. And if you had the right commands, you could make it do these pretty magical things. And so what kind of programs did you write at first? So beyond the print, John Carmack. So I can remember as going through the learning process where you find at the start, you're just learning how to do the most basic possible things. And I can remember stuff like a Superman comic that RadioShack commissioned to have, it's like Superman had lost some of his super brain and kids had to use RadioShack TRS 80 computers to do calculations for it to help him kind of complete his heroics. And I'd find little things like that and then get a few basic books to be able to kind of work my way up. And again, it was so precious back then. I had a couple of books that would teach me important things about it. I had one book that I could start to learn a little bit of assembly language from, and I'd have a few books on basic and some things that I could get from the libraries. But my goals in the early days was almost always making games of various kinds. I loved the arcade games and the early Atari 2600 games. And being able to do some of those things myself on the computers was very much what I aspired to. And it was a whole journey where if you learn normal basic, you can't do any kind of an action game. You can write an adventure game. You can write things where you say, what do you do here? I get sword attack troll, that type of thing. And that can be done in the context of basic. But to do things that had moving graphics, there were only the most limited things you could possibly do. You could maybe do breakout or pong or that sort of thing in low resolution graphics. And in fact, one of my first sort of major technical hacks that I was kind of fond of was on the Apple II computers, they had a mode called low resolution graphics where of course all graphics were low resolution back then, but regular low resolution graphics, it was a grid of 40 by 40 pixels normally, but they could have 16 different colors. And I wanted to make a game kind of like the arcade game Vanguard, just a scrolling game. And I wanted to just kind of have it scroll vertically up. And I could move a little ship around. You could manage to do that in basic, but there's no way you could redraw the whole screen. And I remember at the time just coming up with what felt like a brainstorm to me where I knew enough about the way the hardware was controlled where the text screen and the low resolution graphics screen were basically the same thing. And all those computers could scroll their text screen reasonably. You could do a listing and it would scroll things up. And I figured out that I could kind of tweak just a couple things that I barely understood to put it into a graphics mode and I could draw graphics and then I could just do a line feed at the very bottom of the screen. And then the system would scroll it all up using an assembly language routine that I didn't know how to write back then. So that was like this first great hack that sort of had analogs later on in my career for a lot of different things. So I found out that I could draw a screen. I could do a line feed at the bottom. It would scroll it up once. I could draw a couple more lines of stuff at the bottom. And that was my first way to kind of scroll the screen, which was interesting in that that played a big part later on in the id Software days as well. So do efficient drawing where you don't have to draw the whole screen, but you draw from the bottom using the thing that was designed in the hardware for text output. Yeah. Where so much of, until recently, game design was limited by what you could actually get the computer to do. Where it's easy to say, OK, I want to scroll the screen. You just redraw the entire screen at a slight offset. And nowadays, that works just fine. Computers are ludicrously fast. But up until a decade ago or so, there were all these things everybody wanted to do. But if they knew enough programming to be able to make it happen, it would happen too slow to be a good experience. Either just ridiculously slow or just slow enough that it wasn't fun to experience it like that. So much of the first couple of decades of the programming work that I did was largely figuring out how to do something that everybody knows how they want it to happen. It just has to happen 2 to 10 times faster than the straightforward way of doing things would make it happen. And it's different now because at this point, lots of things you can just do in the most naive possible way, and it still works out. You don't have nearly the creative limitations or the incentives for optimizing on that level. And there's a lot of pros and cons to that. But I do generally, I'm not going to do the angry old man shaking my fist at the clouds bit where back in my day, programmers had to do real programming. It's amazing that you can just pick an idea and go do it right now. And you don't have to be some assembly language wizard or deep GPU arcanist to be able to figure out how to make your wishes happen. Well, there's still, see, that's true. But let me put on my old man with a fist hat and say that probably the thing that will define the future still requires you to operate at the limits of the current system. So we'll probably talk about this. But if you talk about building the metaverse and building a VR experience that's compelling, it probably requires you to not, to go to assembly or maybe not literally, but sort of spiritually to go to the limits of what the system is capable of. And that really was why virtual reality was specifically interesting to me where it had all the ties to, you could say that even back in the early days, I have some old magazine articles that's talking about Doom as a virtual reality experience back when just seeing anything in 3D. So you could say that we've been trying to build those virtual experiences from the very beginning. And in the modern era of virtual reality, especially on the mobile side of things, when it's standalone and you're basically using a cell phone chip to be able to produce these very immersive experiences, it does require work. It's not at the level of what an old school console game programmer would have operated at where you're looking at hardware registers and you're scheduling all the DMA accesses, but it is still definitely a different level than what a web developer or even a PC Steam game developer usually has to work at. And again, it's great. There's opportunities for people that wanna operate at either end of that spectrum there and still provide a lot of value to the world. Let me ask you sort of a big question about preference. What would you say is the best programming language? Your favorite, but also the best. You've seen throughout your career, you're considered by many to be the greatest programmer ever. I mean, it's so difficult to place that label on anyone, but if you put it on anyone, it's you. So let me ask you these kind of ridiculous questions of what's the best band of all time, but in your case, what's the best programming language? Everything has all the caveats about it. But so what I use, so nowadays I do program a reasonable amount of Python for AI, ML sorts of work. I'm not a native Python programmer. It's something I came to very late in my career. I understand what it's good for. But you don't dream in Python. I do not. And it has some of those things where there's some amazing stats when you say, if you just start, if you make a loop, a triply nested loop and start doing operations in Python, you can be thousands to potentially a million times slower than a proper GPU tensor operation. And these are staggering numbers. You can be as much slower as we've almost gotten faster in our pace of progress and all this other miraculous stuff. So your intuitions about inefficiencies within the Python sort of... It keeps hitting me upside the face where it's gotten to the point now I understand. It's like, okay, you just can't do a loop if you care about performance in Python. You have to figure out how you can reformat this into some big vector operation or something that's going to be done completely within a C++ library. But the other hand is it's amazingly convenient and you just see stuff that people are able to cobble together by you just import a few different things and you can do stuff that nobody on earth could do 10 years ago. And you can do it in a little cookbook thing that you copy paste it out of a website. So that is really great. When I'm sitting down to do what I consider kind of serious programming, it's still in C++. And it's really kind of a C flavored C++ at that where I'm not big into the modern template metaprogramming sorts of things. I see a lot of train wrecks coming from some of that over abstraction. I spent a few years really going kind of deep into the kind of the historical Lisp work and Haskell and some of the functional programming sides of things. And there is a lot of value there in the way you think about things. And I changed a lot of the way I write my C and C++ code based on what I learned about the value that comes out of not having this random mutable state that you kind of lose track of. Because something that many people don't really appreciate till they've been at it for a long time is that it's not the writing of the program initially, it's the whole lifespan of the program. And that's when it's not necessarily just how fast you wrote it or how fast it operates, but it's how can it bend and adapt as situations change. And then the thing that I've really been learning in my time at Meta with the Oculus and VR work is it's also how well it hands off between the continuous kind of revolving door of programmers taking over maintenance and different things and how you get people up to speed in different areas. And there's all these other different aspects of it. So C++ is a good language for handover between engineers. Probably not the best. And there's some really interesting aspects to this where in some cases languages that are not generally thought well of for many reasons, like C is derided pretty broadly that yes, obviously all of these security flaws that happen with the memory and unsafeness and buffer overruns and the things that you've got there, but there is this underappreciated aspect to the language is so simple, anyone can go. And if you know C, you can generally jump in someplace and not have to learn what paradigms they're using because there just aren't that many available. I think there's some really, really well written C code. Like I find it great that if I'm messing around with something in open BSD say, I mean, I can be walking around in the kernel and I'm like, I understand everything that's going on here. It's not hard for me to figure out what I need to do to make whatever change that I need to while you can have more significant languages. Like it's a downside of Lisp where I don't regret the time that I spent with Lisp. I think that it did help my thinking about programming in some ways, but the people that are the biggest defenders of Lisp are saying how malleable of a language it is that if you write a huge Lisp program, you've basically invented your own kind of language and structure because it's not the primitives of the language you're using very much. It's all of the things you've built on top of that. And then a language like Racket, kind of one of the more modern Lisp versions, it's essentially touted as a language for building other languages. And I understand the value of that for a tiny little project, but the idea of that for one of these longterm supported by lots of people kind of horrifies me where all of those abstractions that you're like, okay, you can't touch this code till you educate yourself on all of these things that we've built on top of that. And it was interesting to see how when Google made Go, a lot of the criticisms of that are it's like, wow, this is not a state of the art language. This language is just so simple and almost crude. And you could see the programming language people just looking down at it. But it does seem to be quite popular as basically saying, this is the good things about C, everybody can just jump right in and use it. You don't need to restructure your brain to write good code in it. So I wish that I had more opportunity for doing some work in Go. Rust is the other modern language that everybody talks about that I'm not fit to pass judgment on. I've done a little bit beyond Hello World. I wrote some like video decompression work in Rust just as an exercise, but that was a few years ago and I haven't really used it since. The best programming language is the one that works generally that you're currently using. Because that's another trap is in almost every case I've seen when people mixed languages on a project, that's a mistake. I would rather stay just in one language so that everybody can work across the entire thing. And we have, I get meta, we have a lot of projects that use kind of React frameworks. So you've got JavaScript here and then you have C++ for real work. And then you may have Java interfacing with some other part of the Android system. And those are all kind of horrible things. And that was one thing that I remember talking with Boz at Facebook about it where like, man, I wish we could have just said, we're only hiring C++ programmers. And he just thought from the Facebook meta perspective, well, we just wouldn't be able to find enough. With the thousands of programmers they've got there, it is not necessarily a dying breed, but you can sure find a lot more Java or JavaScript programmers. And I kind of mentioned that to Elon one time and he was kind of flabbergasted about that. It's like, well, you just, you go out and you find those programmers and you don't hire the other programmers that don't do the languages that you wanna use. But right now, I guess, yeah, they're using JavaScript on a bunch of the SpaceX work for the UI side of things. When you go find UI programmers, they're JavaScript programmers. I wonder if that's because there's a lot of JavaScript programmers. Because I do think that great programmers are rare. That it's not, you know, if you just look at statistics of how many people are using different programming languages, that doesn't tell you the story of what the great programmers are using. And so you have to really look at what you were speaking to, which is the fundamentals of a language. What does it encourage? How does it encourage you to think? What kind of systems does it encourage you to build? There is something about C++ that has elements of creativity, but forces you to be an adult about your programming. It expects you to be an adult. It does not force you to. And so it brings out people that are willing to be creative in terms of building large systems and coming up with interesting solutions, but at the same time have the sort of the good software engineering practices that amend themselves to real world systems. Let me ask you about this other language, JavaScript. So if we, you know, aliens visit in thousands of years, and humans are long gone, something tells me that most of the systems they find will be run by humans. Will be running JavaScript. I kind of think that if we're living in a simulation, it's written in JavaScript. You know, for the longest time, even still, JavaScript didn't get any respect, and yet it runs so much of the world, and an increasing number of the world. Is it possible that everything will be written in JavaScript one day? So the engineering under JavaScript is really pretty phenomenal. The systems that make JavaScript run as fast as it does right now are kind of miracles of modern engineering in many ways. It does feel like it is not an optimal language for all the things that it's being used for, or an optimal distribution system to build huge apps in something like this without type systems and so on. But I think for a lot of people, it does reasonably the necessary things. It's still a C flavored language. It's still a braces and semicolon language. It's not hard for people to be trained in JavaScript and then understand the roots of where it came from. I think garbage collection is unequivocally a good thing for most programs to be written in. It's funny that I still, just this morning, I was seeing a Twitter thread of a bunch of really senior game dev people arguing about the virtues and costs of garbage collection. You will run into some people that are top notch programmers that just say, no, this is literally not a good thing. Oh, because it makes you lazy? Yes, that it makes you not think about things. And I do disagree. I think that there is so much objective data on the vulnerabilities that have happened in C and C++ programs, sometimes written by the best programmers in the world. It's like nobody is good enough to avoid ever shooting themselves in the foot with that. You write enough C code, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. And garbage collection is a very great thing for the vast majority of programs. It's only when you get into the tightest of real time things that you start saying, it's like, no, the garbage collection has more costs than it has benefits for me there, but that's not 99 plus percent of all the software in the world. So JavaScript is not terrible in those ways. And so much of programming is not the language itself. It's the infrastructure around that surrounds it. All the libraries that you can get and the different stuff that you can, ways you can deploy it, the portability that it gives you. And JavaScript is really strong on a lot of those things where for a long time, and it still does if I look at it, the web stack about everything that has to go when you do something really trivial in JavaScript and it shows up on a web browser to kind of X ray through that and see everything that has to happen for your one little JavaScript statement to turn into something visible in your web browser, it's very, very disquieting, just the depth of that stack and the fact that so few people can even comprehend all of the levels that are going on there. But it's again, I have to caution myself to not be the in the good old days old man about it because clearly there's enormous value here. The world does run on JavaScript to a pretty good approximation there and it's not falling apart. There's a bunch of scary stuff where you look at console logs and you just see all of these bad things that are happening but it's still kind of limping along and nobody really notices. But so much of my systems design and systems analysis goes around. You should understand what the speed of light is, like what would be the best you could possibly do here. And it sounds horrible, but in a lot of cases, you can be a thousand times off your speed of light, velocity for something and it's still be okay. And in fact, it can even sometimes still be the optimal thing in a larger system standpoint where there's a lot of things that you don't wanna have to parachute in someone like me to go in and say, make this webpage run a thousand times faster, make this web app into a hardcore native application that starts up in 37 milliseconds and everything responds in less than one frame latency. That's just not necessary. And if somebody wants to go pay me millions of dollars to do software like that, when they can take somebody right out of a bootcamp and say, spin up an application for this. Often being efficient is not really the best metric. And it's like, that applies in a lot of areas where it's kind of interesting how a lot of our appliances and everything are all built around energy efficiency, sometimes at the expense of robustness in some other ways or higher costs in other ways where there's interesting things where energy or electricity could become much cheaper in a future world. And that could change our engineering trade offs for the way we build certain things where you could throw away efficiency and actually get more benefits that actually matter. I mean, that's one of the directions I was considering swerving into was nuclear energy. When I was kind of like, what do I wanna do next? It was either gonna be cost effective nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And one of my pet ideas there is like, people don't understand how cheap nuclear fuel is. And there would be ways that, you could be a quarter of the efficiency or less, but if it wound up making your plant 10 times cheaper, that could be a radical innovation in something like that. So there's like some of these thoughts around like direct fission energy conversion, fission fragment conversion, that maybe you build something that doesn't require all the steam turbines and everything, even if it winds up being less efficient. So that applies a lot in programming where it's always good to know what you could do. If you really sat down and took it far, because sometimes there's discontinuities like around user reaction times, there are some points where the difference between operating in one second and 750 milliseconds, not that huge. You'll see it in webpage statistics, but most of the usability stuff, not that great. But if you get down to 50 milliseconds, then all of a sudden this just feels amazing. It's just like doing your bidding instantly rather than you're giving it a command, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for it to respond. So sometimes it's important to really crunch hard to get over some threshold, but there are broad basins in the value metric for lots of work where it just doesn't pay to even go that extra mile. And there are craftsmen that just don't wanna buy that and more power to them. If somebody just wants to say, no, I'm going to be, my pride is in my work, I'm never going to do something that's not as good as I could possibly make it, I respect that and sometimes I am that person, but I try to focus more on the larger value picture and you do pick your battles and you deploy your resources in the play that's going to give you the best user value in the end. Well, if you look at the evolution of life on Earth as a kind of programming effort, it seems like efficiency isn't the thing that's being optimized for. Like natural selection is very inefficient, but it kind of adapts and through the process of adaptations building more and more complex systems that are more and more intelligent, the final result is kind of pretty interesting. And so I think of JavaScript the same way. It's like this giant mess that things naturally die off if they don't work and if they become useful to people, they kind of naturally live and then you build this community, large community of people that are generating code and some code is sticky, some is not and nobody knows the inefficiencies or the efficiencies or the breaking points, like how reliable this code is and you kind of just run it, assume it works and then get unpleasantly surprised and then that's very kind of the evolutionary process. So that's a really good analogy and we can go a lot of places with that where in the earliest days of programming, when you had finite, you could count the bytes that you had to work on this, you had all the kind of hackers playing code golf to be one less instruction than the other person's multiply routine to kind of get through and it was so perfectly crafted. It was a crystal piece of artwork when you had a program because there just were not that many, you couldn't afford to be lazy in different ways and in many ways I see that as akin to the symbolic AI work where again, if you did not have the resources to just say, well, we're gonna do billions and billions of programmable weights here, you have to turn it down into something that is symbolic and crafted like that but that's definitely not the way DNA and life and biological evolution and things work. On the one hand, it's almost humbling how little programming code is in our bodies. We've got a couple of billion base pairs and it's like this all fits on a thumb drive for years now and then our brains are even a smaller section of that. You've got maybe 50 megabytes and this is not like Shannon Limit perfectly information dense conveyances here. It's like these are messy codes, they're broken up into amino acids. A lot of them don't do important things or they do things in very awkward ways but it is this process of just accumulation on top of things and you need scale, both you need scale for the population for that to work out and in the early days in the 50s and 60s, the kind of ancient era of computers where you could count when they say like when the internet started even in the 70s, there were like 18 hosts or something on it. It was this small finite number and you were still optimizing everything to be as good as you possibly could be but now it's billions and billions of devices and everything going on and you can have this very much natural evolution going on where lots of things are tried, lots of things are blowing up, venture capitalists lose their money when a startup invested in the wrong tech stack and things completely failed or failed the scale but good things do come out of it and it's interesting to see the mimetic evolution of the way different things happen like mentioning hello world at the beginning. It's funny how some little thing like that where everybody, every programmer knows hello world now and that was a completely arbitrary sort of decision that just came out of the dominance of Unix and C and early examples of things like that. So millions of experiments are going on all the time but some things do kind of rise to the top and win the fitness war for whether it's mind space or programming techniques or anything. Like there's a site on Stack Exchange called CodeGolf where people compete to write the shortest possible program for a particular task in all the different kinds of languages and it's really interesting to see folks kind of, they're masters of their craft, really play with the limits of programming languages. It's really beautiful to see and across all the different programming languages, you get to see some of these weird programming languages and mainstream ones, difference between Python 2 and 3, you get to see the difference between C and C++ and Java and you get to see JavaScript, all of that and it's kind of inspiring to see how much depth of possibility there is within programming languages that CodeGolf kind of tasks reveal. Most of us, if you do any kind of programming, you kind of do boring kind of very vanilla type of code. That's the way to build large systems but it's nice to see that the possibility of creative genius is still within those languages. It's laden within those languages. So given that you are once again, one of the greatest programmers ever, what do you think makes a good programmer? Maybe a good modern programmer. So I just gave a long rant slash lecture at Meta to the TPM organization and my biggest point was everything that we're doing really should flow from user value, all the good things that we're doing. It's like, we're not technical people. It's like, you shouldn't be taking pride just in the specific thing. Like CodeGolf is the sort of thing, it's a fun puzzle game but that really should not be a major motivator for you. It's like, we're solving problems for people or we're providing entertainment to people. We're doing something of value to people that's displacing something else in their life. So we wanna be providing a net value over what they could be doing but instead they're choosing to use our products. And that's where, I mean, it sounds trite or corny but I fundamentally do think that's how you make the world a better place. If you have given more value to people than it took you and your team to create, then the world's a better place. People have, they've gone from something of lesser value, chosen to use your product and their life feels better for that. And if you've produced that economically, that's a really good thing. On the other hand, if you spent ridiculous amounts of money you've just kind of shoveled a lot of cash into a wood chipper there and you should maybe not feel so good about what you're doing. So being proud about like a specific architecture or a specific technology or a specific code sequence that you've done, it's great to get a little smile like a tiny little dopamine hit for that but the top level metrics should be that you're building things of value. Now you can get into the argument about how you, what is user value? How do you actually quantify that? And there can be big arguments about that but it's easy to be able to say, okay, this pissed off user there is not getting value from what you're doing. This user over there with the big smile on their face, the moment of delight when something happened, there's a value that's happened there. I mean, you have to at least accept that there is a concept of user value even if you have trouble exactly quantifying it, you can usually make relative arguments about it. Well, this was better than this, we've improved things. So being a servant to the user is your job when you're a developer, you wanna be producing something that other people are gonna find valuable. And if you are technically inclined then finding the right levers to be able to pull to be able to make a design that's going to produce the most value for the least amount of effort. And it always has to be kind of divided, there's a ratio there where you, it's a problem at the big tech companies, whether it's Meta Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, companies that have almost infinite money. I mean, I know their CFO will complain that it's not infinite money but from most developers standpoints it really does feel like it. And it's almost counterintuitive that if you're working hard as a developer on something, there's always this thought, if only I had more resources, more people, more RAM, more megahertz, then my product will be better. And that sense that at certain points, it's certainly true that if you are really hamstrung by this, removing an obstacle will make a better product, make more value. But if you're not making your core design decisions in this fiercely competitive way where you're saying feature A or feature B, you can't just say, let's do both. Because then you're not making a value judgment about them. You're just saying, well, they both seem good. I don't wanna necessarily have to pick out which one is better or how much better and tell team B that, sorry, we're not gonna do this because A is more important. But that notion of always having to really critically value what you're doing, your time, the resources you expend, even the opportunity cost of doing something else, that's super important. Well, let me ask you about the big debates that you're mentioning of how to measure value. Is it possible to measure it kind of numerically or can you do the sort of Johnny Ive, the designer route of imagining sort of somebody using a thing and imagining a smile on their face, imagining the experience of love and joy that you have when you use the thing. That's from a design perspective or if you're building more like a lower level thing for like Linux, you imagine a developer that might come across this and use it and become happy and better off because of it. So where do you land on those things? Is it measurable? So I imagine like Meta and Google will probably try to measure the thing. They'll try to, it's like you try to optimize engagement or something, let's measure engagement. And then I think there is a kind of, I mean, I admire the designer ethic of like, think of a future that's immeasurable and you try to make somebody in that future that's different from today happy. So I do usually favor, if you can get any kind of a metric that's good, by all means, listen to the data. But you can go too far there where we've had problems where it's like, hey, we had a performance regression because our fancy new telemetry system is doing a bazillion file writes to kind of archive this stuff because we needed to collect information to determine if we were doing, if our plans were good. So when information is available, you should never ignore it. I mean, all of it. For actual users using the thing, human beings using the thing, large number of human beings, and you get to see sort of a lot of large numbers. So there's the zero to one problem of when you're doing something really new, you do kind of have to make a guess. But one of the points that I've been making at Meta is we have more than enough users now that anything somebody wants to try in VR, we have users that will be interested in that. You do not get to make a completely greenfield blue sky pitch and say, I'm going to do this because I think it might be interesting. I challenge everyone. There are going to be people, whether it's working in VR on your, like on your desktop replacement or communicating with people in different ways or playing the games. There are going to be probably millions of people, or at least if you pick some tiny niche that we're not in right now, there's still going to be thousands of people out there that have the headsets that would be your target market. And I tell people, pay attention to them. Don't invent fictional users. Don't make an Alice Bob Charlie that fits whatever matrix of tendencies that you want to break the market down to, because it's a mistake to think about imaginary users when you've got real users that you could be working with. But on the other hand, there is value to having a kind of wholeness of vision for a product. And companies like Meta have, they understand the trade offs where you can have a company like SpaceX or Apple in the Steve Jobs era, where you have a very powerful leading personality that can micromanage at a very low level and can say it's like, no, that handle needs to be different or that icon needs to change the tint there. And they clearly get a lot of value out of it. They also burn through a lot of employees that have horror stories to tell about working there afterwards. My position is that you're at your best when you've got a leader that is at their limit of what they can kind of comprehend of everything below them. And they can have an informed opinion about everything that's going on. And you take somebody, you've got to believe that somebody that has 30, 40 years of experience, you would hope that they've got wisdom that the just out of bootcamp person contributing doesn't have. And that if they're like, well, that's wrong there, you probably shouldn't do it that way or even just don't do it that way, do it another way. So there's value there, but it can't go beyond a certain level. I mean, I have Steve Jobs stories of him saying things that are just wrong right in front of me about technical things because he was not operating at that level. But when it does work and you do get that kind of passionate leader that's thinking about the entire product and just really deeply cares about not letting anything slip through the cracks, I think that's got a lot of value. But the other side of that is the people saying that, well, we wanna have these independent teams that are bubbling up the ideas because it's almost it's anti capitalist or anti free market to say, it's like I want my grand, my great leader to go ahead and dictate all these points there where clearly free markets bring up things that you don't expect. Like in VR, we saw a bunch of things like it didn't turn out at all the way the early people thought were gonna be the key applications and things that would not have been approved by the dark cabal making the decisions about what gets into the store turn out to in some cases be extremely successful. So yeah, I definitely kind of wanted to be, there was a point where I did make a pitch. It's like, hey, make me VR dictator and I'll go in and get shit done. I am, and that's just, it's not in the culture at Meta. You know, and they understand the trade offs they, and that's just not the way, that's not the company that they want, the team that they wanna do. It's fascinating because VR and we'll talk about it more. It's still unclear to me in what way VR will change the world because it does seem clear that VR will somehow fundamentally transform this world and it's unclear to me how yet. Let me know when you wanna get into that. Who will? Well, hold on a second. So in the stick to the you being the best programmer ever. Okay, in the early days when you didn't have, when you didn't have adult responsibilities of leading teams and all that kind of stuff and you can focus on just being a programmer, what did the productive day in the life of John Carmack look like? How many hours is the keyboard? How much sleep? What was the source of calories that fueled the brain? What was it like? What times did you wake up? So I was able to be remarkably consistent about what was good working conditions for me for a very long time. I was never one of the programmers that would do all nighters going through work for 20 hours straight. It's like my brain generally starts turning to mush after 12 hours or so. But the hard work is really important and I would work for decades. I would work 60 hours a week. I would work a 10 hour day, six days a week and try to be productive at that. Now my schedule shifted around a fair amount when I was young without any kids and any other responsibilities. I was on one of those cycling schedules where I'd kind of get in an hour later each day and roll around through the entire time and I'd wind up kind of pulling in at two or three in the afternoon sometimes and then working again past midnight or two in the morning. And that was, when it was just me trying to make things happen and I was usually isolated off in my office, people generally didn't bother me much at in and I could get a lot of programming work done that way. I did settle into a more normal schedule when I was taking kids to school and things like that. So kids were the forcing function that got you to wake up at the same time each day. It's not clear to me that there was much of a difference in the productivity with that where I kind of feel, if I just get up when I feel like it, it's usually a little later each day but I just recently made the focusing decision to try to push my schedule back a little bit earlier to getting up at eight in the morning and trying to shift things around. Like I'm often doing experiments with myself about what should I be doing to be more productive and one of the things that I did realize was happening in recent months where I would go for a walk or a run. I cover like four miles a day and I would usually do that just as the sun's going down here in Texas now and it's still really damn hot but I'd go out at 8.30 or something and cover the time there and then the showering and it was putting a hold in my day where I would have still a couple hours after that and sometimes my best hours were at night when nobody else is around, nobody's bothering me but that hole in the day was a problem so just a couple weeks ago, I made the change to go ahead and say, all right, I'm gonna get up a little earlier, I'm gonna do a walk or get out there first so I can have more uninterrupted time. So I'm still playing with factors like this as I kind of optimize my work efforts but it's always been, it was 60 hours a week for a very long time. To some degree, I had a little thing in the back of my head where I was almost jealous of some of the programmers that would do these marathon sessions and I had like Dave Taylor, one of the guys that he had, he would be one of those people that would fall asleep under his desk sometimes and all the kind of classic hacker tropes about things and a part of me was like always a little bothered that that wasn't me, that I wouldn't go program 20 hours straight because I'm falling apart and not being very effective after 12 hours. I mean, yeah, 12 hour programming, that's fine when you're doing that but it never, you're not doing smart work much after, at least I'm not, but there's a range of people. I mean, that's something that a lot of people don't really get in their gut where there are people that work on four hours of sleep and are smart and can continue to do good work but then there's a lot of people that just fall apart. So I do tell people that I always try to get eight hours of sleep. It's not this, you know, push yourself harder, get up earlier, I just do worse work where, you know, you can work a hundred hours a week and still get eight hours of sleep if you just kind of prioritize things correctly but I do believe in working hard, working a lot. There was a comment that a game dev made that I know there's a backlash against really hard work in a lot of cases and I get into online arguments about this all the time but he was basically saying, yeah, 40 hours a week, that's kind of a part time job and if you were really in it, you're doing what you think is important, what you're passionate about, working more gets more done and it's just really not possible to argue with that if you've been around the people that work with that level of intensity and just say, it's like, no, they should just stop. And we had, I kind of came back around to that a couple of years ago where I was using the fictional example of, all right, some people say, they'll say with a straight face, they think, no, you are less productive if you work more than 40 hours a week. And they're generally misinterpreting things where your marginal productivity for an hour after eight hours is less than in one of your peak hours but you're not literally getting less done. There is a point where you start breaking things and getting worse behavior and everything out of it where you're literally going backwards but it's not at eight or 10 or 12 hours. And the fictional example I would use was, imagine there's an asteroid coming to impact, to crash into Earth, destroy all of human life. Do you want Elon Musk or the people working at SpaceX that are building the interceptor that's going to deflect the asteroid, do you want them to clock out at five because damn it, they're just gonna go do worse work if they work another couple hours. And it seems absurd. And that's a hypothetical though and everyone can dismiss that. But then when coronavirus was hitting and you have all of these medical personnel that are clearly pushing themselves really, really hard and I'd say, it's like, okay, do you want all of these scientists working on treatments and vaccines and caring for all of these people? Are they really screwing everything up by working more than eight hours a day? And of course people say, I'm just an asshole to say something like that, but it's the truth. Working longer gets more done. Well, so that's kind of the layer one. But I'd like to also say that, at least I believe, depending on the person, depending on the task, working more and harder will make you better for the next week in those peak hours. So there's something about a deep dedication to a thing that kind of gets deep in you. So the hard work isn't just about the raw hours of productivity, it's the thing it does to you in the weeks and months after too. You're tempering yourself in some ways. And I think, it's like Jiro dreams of sushi. If you really dedicate yourself completely to making the sushi, to really putting in the long hours, day after day after day, you become a true craftsman of the thing you're doing. Now there's, of course, discussions about are you sacrificing a lot of personal relationships? Are you sacrificing a lot of other possible things you could do with that time? But if you're talking about purely being a master or a craftsman of your art, that more hours isn't just about doing more, it's about becoming better at the thing you're doing. Yeah, and I don't gainsay anybody that wants to work the minimum amount. They've got other priorities in their life. My only argument that I'm making, it's not that everybody should work hard, it's that if you want to accomplish something, working longer and harder is the path to getting it accomplished. Well, let me ask you about this then, the mythical work life balance. For an engineer, it seems like that's one of the professions for a programmer where working hard does lead to greater productivity in it. But it also raises the question of sort of personal relationships and all that kind of stuff, family, and how are you able to find work life balance? Is there advice you can give, maybe even outside of yourself? Have you been able to arrive at any wisdom on this part in your years of life? I do think that there's a wide range of people where different people have different needs. It's not a one size fits all. I am certainly what works for me. I can tell enough that I'm different than a typical average person in the way things impact me, the things that I want to do, my goals are different, and sort of the levers to impact things are different, where I have literally never felt burnout, and I know there's lots of brilliant, smart people that do world leading work that get burned out, and it's never hit me. I've never been at a point where I'm like, I just don't care about this. I don't want to do this anymore. But I've always had the flexibility to work on lots of interesting things. I can always just turn my gaze to something else and have a great time working on that. And so much of the ability to actually work hard is the ability to have multiple things to choose from and to use your time on the most appropriate thing. There are time periods where it's the best time for me to read a new research paper that I need to really be thinking hard about it. Then there's a time that maybe I should just scan and organize my old notes because I'm just not on top of things. Then there's the time that, all right, let's go bang out a few hundred lines of code for something. So switching between them has been real valuable. So you'll always have kind of joy in your heart for all the things you're doing, and that is a kind of work life balance as a first sort of step. Yeah, I do. So you're always happy. I do. Well, happy. Yeah, I mean, that's like a lot of people would say that often I look like kind of a grim person, you know, with just sitting there with a neutral expression or even like knitted brows and a frown on my face as I'm staring at something. That's what happiness looks like for you. Yeah, it's kind of true where that it's like, okay, I'm pushing through this, I'm making progress here. I know that doesn't work for everyone. I know it doesn't work for most people. But what I am always trying to do in those cases is I don't want to let somebody that might be a person like that be told by someone else that no, don't even try that out as an option where work life balance versus kind of your life's work where there's a small subset of the people that can be very happy being obsessive about things. And, you know, obsession can often get things done that just practical, prudent, pedestrian work won't or at least won't for a very long time. There's legends of your nutritional intake in the early days. What can you say about sort of as a, you know, being a programmer as a kind of athlete? So what was the nutrition that fueled? I have never been that great on really paying attention to it where I'm good enough that I don't eat a lot. You know, I've never been like a big heavy guy, but it was interesting where one of the things that I can remember being an unhappy teenager, not having enough money and like, one of the things that bothered me about not having enough money is I couldn't buy pizza whenever I wanted to. So I got rich and then I bought a whole lot of pizza. So that was defining, like, that's what being rich felt like. A lot of the little things, like I could buy all the pizza and comic books and video games that I wanted to. And it really didn't take that much, but the pizza was one of those things that it's absolutely true that for a long time at id Software, I had a pizza delivered every single day. You know, the delivery guy knew me by name and I didn't find out until years later that apparently I was such a good customer that they just never raised the price on me. And I was using this six year old price for the pizzas that they were still kind of sending my way every day. So you were doing eating once a day or were you? It would be spread out. You know, you have a few pieces of pizza, you have some more later on and I'd maybe have something at home. It was one of the nice things that Facebook Meta is they feed you quite well. You get a different, I guess now it's DoorDash sorts of things delivered, but they take care of making sure that everybody does get well fed. And I probably had better food those six years that I was working in the Meta office there than I used to before. But it's worked out okay for me. My health has always been good. I get a pretty good amount of exercise and I don't eat to excess and I avoid a lot of other kind of not so good for you things. So I'm still doing quite well at my age. Did you have a kind of, I don't know, spiritual experience with food or coffee or any of that kind of stuff? I mean, you know, the programming experience, you know, with music or like I listen to brown noise on a program or like creating an environment and the things you take into your body, just everything you construct can become a kind of ritual that empowers the whole process, the programming. Did you have that relationship with pizza or? It would really be with Diet Coke. I mean, there still is that sense of, you know, drop the can down, crack open the can of Diet Coke. All right, now I mean business. We're getting to work here. Still to this day? Yeah. Is Diet Coke still a part of it? Yeah, probably eight or nine a day. Nice. Okay, what about your setup? How many screens? What kind of keyboard? Is there something interesting? What kind of IDE, Emacs Vim or something modern? Linux, what operating system laptop or any interesting thing that brings you joy? So I kind of migrated cultures where early on through all of game dev, there was sort of one culture there, which was really quite distinct from the more the Silicon Valley venture, you know, culture for things. They're different groups and they have pretty different mores and the way they think about things where, and I still do think a lot of the big companies can learn things from the hardcore game development side of things where it still boggles my mind how hostile to debuggers and IDEs that so much of them, the kind of big money, get billions of dollars, Silicon Valley venture backed funds are. Oh, that's interesting. Sorry, so you're saying like big companies like Google and Meta are hostile to? They are not big on debuggers and IDEs. Like so much of it is like Emacs, Vim for things. And we just assume that debuggers don't work most of the time for the systems. And a lot of this comes from a sort of Linux bias on a lot of things where I did come up through the personal computers and then the DOS and then Windows and it was Borland tools and then Visual Studio and. Do you appreciate the buggers? Very much so. I mean, a debugger is how you get a view into a system that's too complicated to understand. I mean, anybody that thinks just read the code and think about it. That's an insane statement in the, you can't even read all the code on a big system. You have to do experiments on the system and doing that by adding log statements, recompiling and rerunning it is an incredibly inefficient way of doing it. I mean, yes, you can always get things done even if you're working with stone knives and bear skins. That is the mark of a good programmer is that given any tools, you will figure out a way to get it done, but it's amazing what you can do with sometimes much, much better tools where instead of just going through this iterative compile run debug cycle, you have the old Lisp direction of like, you've got a REPL and you're working interactively and doing amazing things there. But in many cases, a debugger as a very powerful user interface that can stop, examine all the different things in your program, set all of these different breakpoints. And of course you can do that with GDB or whatever there, but this is one of the user interface fundamental principles where when something is complicated to do, you won't use it very often. There's people that will break out GDB when they're at their wits end and they just have beat their head against a problem for so long. But for somebody that kind of grew up in game dev, it's like they were running into the debugger anyways before they even knew there was a problem. And you would just stop and see what was happening. And sometimes you could fix things even before you did one compile cycle. You could be in the debugger and you would say, well, I'm just going to change this right here. And yep, that did the job and fix it and go on. And for people who don't know, GDB is a sort of popular, I guess, Linux debugger primarily for C++. They handle most of the languages, but it's based on C as the original kind of Unix heritage. And it's kind of like command line. It's not user friendly. It doesn't allow for clean visualizations and you're exactly right. So that you're using this kind of debugger usually when you're at what's end and there's a problem that you can't figure out why by just looking at the codes, you have to find it. That's how I guess normal programmers use it. But you're saying there should be tools that kind of visualize and help you as part of the programming process, just the normal programming process to understand the code deeper. Yeah, when I'm working on like my C, C++ code, I'm always running it from the debugger. Just I type in the code, I run it many times. The first thing I do after writing code is set a break point and step through the function. Now other people will say, it's like, oh, I do that in my head. Well, your head is a faulty interpreter of all those things there. And I've written brand new code. I wanna step in there and I'm gonna single step through that, examine lots of things and see if it's actually doing what I expected it to. It is a kind of companion, the debugger. Like you're now coding in an interactive way with another being. The debugger is a kind of dumb being, but it's a reliable being. That is an interesting question of what role does AI play in that kind of, with codecs and these kind of ability to generate code, that might be, you might start having tools that understand the code in interesting deep ways that can work with you. There's a whole spectrum there from static code analyzers and various kind of dynamic tools there up to AI that can conceivably grok these programs that literally no human can understand. They're too big, too intertwined and too interconnected, but it's not beyond the possibility of understanding. It's just beyond what we can hold in our heads as kind of mutable state while we're working on things. And I'm a big proponent, again, of things like static analyzers and some of that stuff where you'll find some people that don't like being scolded by a program for how they've written something where it's like, oh, I know better. And sometimes you do, but that was something that it was very, very valuable for me when, and not too many people get an opportunity like this to have. This is almost one of those spiritual experiences as a programmer, an awakening to, the id software code bases were a couple of million lines of code. And at one point I had used a few of the different analysis tools, but I made a point to really go through and scrub the code base using every tool that I could find. And it was eyeopening where we had a reputation for having some of the most robust, strongest code, where there were some great things that I remember hearing from Microsoft telling us about crashes on Xbox. And we had this tiny number that they said were probably literally hardware errors. And then you have other significant titles that just have millions of faults that are getting recorded all the time. So I was proud of our code on a lot of levels, but when I took this code analysis squeegee through everything, it was shocking how many errors there were in there. Things that you can say, okay, this was a copy paste, not changing something right here. Lots of things that were, the most common problem was something in a printf format string that was the wrong data type that could cause crashes there. And you really want the warnings for things like that. Then the next most common was missing a check for null that could actually happen, that could blow things up. And those are obviously like top C, C++ things. Everybody has those problems. But the long tail of all of the different little things that could go wrong there, and we had good programmers and my own code, stuff that I'd be looking at, it's like, oh, I wrote that code, that's definitely wrong. We've been using this for a year and it's this submarine, this mine sitting there waiting for us to step on. And it was humbling. It was, and I reached the conclusion that anything that can be syntactically allowed in your language, if it's gonna show up eventually in a large enough code base, you're not gonna, good intentions aren't going to keep it from happening. You need automated tools and guardrails for things. And those start with things like static types and or even type hints in the more dynamic languages. But the people that rebel against that, that basically say that slows me down doing that. There's something to that, I get that. I've written, I've cobbled things together in a notebook. I'm like, wow, this is great that it just happened, but yeah, that's kind of sketchy, but it's working fine, I don't care. It does come back to that value analysis where sometimes it's right to not care. But when you do care, if it's going to be something that's going to live for years and it's gonna have other people working on it, and it's gonna be deployed to millions of people, then you wanna use all of these tools. You wanna be told it's like, no, you've screwed up here, here and here. And that does require kind of an ego check about things where you have to be open to the fact that everything that you're doing is just littered with flaws. It's not that, oh, you occasionally have a bad day. It's just whatever stream of code you output, there is going to be a statistical regularity of things that you just make mistakes on. And I do think there's the whole argument about test driven design and unit testing versus kind of analysis and different things. I am more in favor of the analysis and the stuff that just like you can't run your program until you fix this rather than you can run it and hopefully a unit test will catch it in some way. Yeah, in my private code, I have asserts everywhere. Yeah. There's something pleasant to me, pleasurable to me about sort of the dictatorial rule of like, this should be true at this point. And too many times I've made mistakes that shouldn't have been made. And I would assume I wouldn't be the kind of person that would make that mistake, but I keep making that mistake. Therefore, an assert really catches me, really helps all the time. So my code, I would say like 10 to 20% of my private code just for personal use is probably asserts. And they're active comments. That's one of those things that in theory, they don't make any difference to the program. And if it was all operating the way you expected it would be, then they will never fire. But even if you have it right and you wrote the code right initially, then circumstances change. The world outside your program changes. And in fact, that's one of the things where I'm kind of fond in a lot of cases of static array size declarations, where I went through this period where it's like, okay, now we have general collection classes. We should just make everything variable because I had this history of in the early days, you get doom, which had some fixed limits on it. Then everybody started making crazier and crazier things. And they kept bumping up the different limits, this many lines, this many sectors. And it seemed like a good idea, well, we should just make this completely generic. It can go kind of go up to whatever. And there's cases where that's the right thing to do, but it also, the other aspect of the world changing around you is it's good to be informed when the world has changed more than you thought it would. And if you've got a continuously growing collection, you're never gonna find out. You might have this quadratic slow down on something where you thought, oh, I'm only ever gonna have a handful of these, but something changes and there's a new design style. And all of a sudden you've got 10,000 of them. So I kind of like in many cases, picking a number, some nice brown power of two number and setting it up in there and having an assert saying, it's like, hey, you hit this limit. You should probably think are the choices that you've made around all of this still relevant if somebody's using 10 times more than you thought they would. Yeah, this code was originally written with this kind of worldview, with this kind of set of constraints. You were thinking of the world in this way. If something breaks, that means you gotta rethink the initial stuff. And it's nice for it to do that. Is there any stuff like a keyboard or monitors? I'm a fairly pedestrian on a lot of that where I did move to triple monitors like in the last several years ago. I had been dual monitor for a very long time. And it was one of those things where probably years later than I should have, I'm just like, well, the video cards now generally have three output ports. I should just put the third monitor up there. That's been a pure win. I've been very happy with that. But no, I don't have fancy keyboard or mouse or anything really going on. The key things is an IDE that has helpful debuggers, has helpful tools. So it's not the Emacs Vim route and then Dicode. Yeah, so I did spend, I spent one of my week long retreats where I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make myself use, it was actually classic VI, which I know people will say you should never have done that. You should have just used Vim directly. But I gave it the good try. It's like, okay, I'm being in kind of classic Unix developer mode here. And I worked for a week on it. I used Anki to like teach myself the different little key combinations for things like that. And in the end, it was just like, all right, this was kind of like my civil war reenactment phase. It's like, I'm going out there doing it like they used to in the old days. And it was kind of fun in that regard. So many people right now. They're screaming as they're listening to this. So again, the out is that this was not modern Vim, but still, yes, I was very happy to get back to my visual studio at the end. Yeah, I'm actually, I struggle with this a lot because I use a Kinesis keyboard and I use Emacs primarily. And I feel like I can, exactly as you said, I can understand the code. I can navigate the code. There's a lot of stuff you could build with an Emacs with using Lisp. You can customize a lot of things for yourself to help you introspect the code, like to help you understand the code and visualize different aspects of the code. You can even run debuggers, but it's work and the world moves past you and the better and better ideas are constantly being built. And that puts a kind of, I need to take the same kind of retreat as you're talking about, but now I'm still fighting the civil war. I need to kind of move into the 21st century. And it does seem like the world is, or a large chunk of the world is moving towards visual studio code, which is kind of interesting to me. Again, it's the JavaScript ecosystem on the one hand and IDs are one of those things that you want to be infinitely fast. You want them to just kind of immediately respond. And like, I mean, heck, I've got, there's someone I know, I'm an old school game dev guy that still uses visual studio six. And on a modern computer, everything is just absolutely instant on something like that, because it was made to work on a computer that's 10,000 or a hundred thousand times slower. So just everything happens immediately. And all the modern systems just feel, they feel so crufty when it's like, oh, why is this refreshing the screen and moving around and updating over here? And something blinks down there and you should update this. And there are things that we've lost with that incredible flexibility, but lots of people get tons of value from it. And I am super happy that that seems to be winning over even a lot of the old Vim and Emacs people that they're kind of like, hey, visual studio codes, maybe not so bad. I am, that may be the final peacekeeping solution where everybody is reasonably happy with something like that. So can you explain what a dot plan file is and what role that played in your life? Does it still continue to play a role? Back in the early, early days of id Software, one of our big things that was unique with what we did is I had adopted next stations or kind of next step systems from Steve Jobs's out in the woods away from Apple company. And they were basically, it was kind of interesting because I did not really have a background with the Unix system. So many of the people they get immersed in that in college and that sets a lot of cultural expectations for them. And I didn't have any of that, but I knew that my background was, I was a huge Apple II fan boy. I was always a little suspicious of the Mac. I was not really what kind of I wanted to go with. But when Steve Jobs left Apple and started Next, this computer did just seem like one of those amazing things from the future where it had all of this cool stuff in it. And we were still back in those days working on DOS, everything blew up. You had reset buttons because your computer would just freeze. If you're doing development work, literally dozens of times a day, your computer was just rebooting constantly. And so this idea of, yes, any of the Unix workstations would have given a stable development platform where you don't crash and reboot all the time. But Next also had this really amazing graphical interface and it was great for building tools. And it used Objective C as kind of an interesting dead end for things like that. So Next was Unix based, it said Objective C. So it has a lot of the elements. That became Mac. I mean, the kind of reverse acquisition of Apple by Next where that took over and became what the modern Mac system is. And to find some of the developer, like the tools and the whole community. Yeah, you've still got, if you're programming on Apple stuff now, there's still all these NS somethings, which was originally Next step objects of different kinds of things. But one of the aspects of those Unix systems was they had this notion of a.plan file where a.file is an invisible file. Usually in your home directory or something. And there was a trivial server running on most Unix systems at the time that when somebody ran a trivial little command called finger, you could do finger and then somebody's address, it could be anywhere on the internet if you were connected correctly. Then all that server would do was read the.plan file in that user's home directory and then just spit it out to you. And originally the idea was that could be whether you're on vacation, what your current project was. It's supposed to be like the plan of what you're doing. And people would use it for various purposes, but all it did was dump that file over to the terminal of whoever issued the finger command. And at one point I started just keeping a list of what I was doing in there, which would be what I was working on in the day. And I would have this little syntax. I kind of got to myself about, here's something that I'm working on. I put a star when I finish it. I could have a few other little bits of punctuation. And at the time it was, it started off as being just like my to do list. And it would be these trivial, obscure little things like I fixed something with collision detection code, made Fireball do something different and just little one liners that people that were following the games could kind of decipher. But I did wind up starting to write much more in depth things. I would have little notes of thoughts and insights and then I would eventually start having little essays. I would sometimes dump into the dot plan files interspersed with the work logs of things that I was doing. So in some ways it was like a super early proto blog where I was just kind of dumping out what I was working on. But it was interesting enough that there were a lot of people that were interested in this. So most of the people didn't have Unix workstation. So there were the websites back in the day that would follow the Doom and Quake development that would basically make a little service that would go grab all the changes and then people could just get it with a web browser. And there was a period where like all of the little kind of Dallas gaming diaspora of people that were at all in that orbit, there were a couple dozen plan files going on, which was, and this was some years before blogging really became kind of a thing. And it was kind of a premonition of sort of the way things would go. And there was, it's all been collected. It's available online in different places. And it's kind of fun to go back and look through what I was thinking, what I was doing in the different areas. Have you had a chance to look back? Is there some interesting, very low level specific to do items, maybe things you've never completed, all that kind of stuff and high level philosophical essay type of stuff that stands out? Yeah, there's some good stuff on both where a lot of it was low level nitpicky details about game dev and I've learned enough things where there's no project that I worked on that I couldn't go back and do a better job on now. I mean, you just, you learn things, hopefully if you're doing it right, you learn things as you get older and you should be able to do a better job at all of the early things. And there's stuff in Wolfenstein Doomquake that's like, oh, clearly I could go back and do a better job at this, whether it's something in the rendering engine side or how I implemented the monster behaviors or managed resources or anything like that. Do you see the flaws in your thinking now? Like looking back? Yeah, I do. I mean, sometimes I'll get the, I'll look at it and say, yeah, I had a pretty clear view of I was doing good work there. And I haven't really hit the point where there was another programmer, Graham Devine, who was, he had worked at ID and Seventh Guest and he made some comment one time where he said he looked back at some of his old notes and he was like, wow, I was really smart back then. And I don't hit that so much where, I mean, I look at it and I always know that, yeah, there's all the, you know, with aging, you get certain changes in how you're able to work problems, but all of the problems that I've worked, I'm sure that I could do a better job on all of them. Oh, wow. So you can still step right in. If you could travel back in time and talk to that guy, you would teach him a few things. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome. What about the high level philosophical stuff? Is there some insights that stand out that you remember? There's things that I was understanding about development and, you know, in the industry and so on that were in a more primitive stage where I definitely learned a lot more in the later years about business and organization and team structure. There were, I mean, there were definitely things that I was not the best person or even a very good person about managing, like how a team should operate internally, how people should work together. I was just, you know, just get out of my way and let me work on the code and do this. And more and more, I've learned how, in the larger scheme of things, how sometimes relatively unimportant some of those things are, where it is this user value generation that's the overarching importance for all of that. And I didn't necessarily have my eye on that ball correctly through a lot of my, you know, my earlier years. And there's things that, you know, I could have gotten more out of people handling things in different ways. I am, you know, I could have made, you know, in some ways more successful products by following things in different ways. There's mistakes that we made that we couldn't really have known how things would have worked out, but it was interesting to see in later years companies like Activision showing that, hey, you really can just do the same game, make it better every year. And you can look at that from a negative standpoint and say, it's like, oh, that's just being derivative and all that. But if you step back again and say, it's like, no, are the people buying it still enjoying it? Are they enjoying it more than what they might have bought otherwise? And you can say, no, that's actually a great value creation engine to do that if you're in a position where you can. I, you know, don't be forced into reinventing everything just because you think that you need to. You know, lots of things about business and team stuff that could be done better, but the technical work, the kind of technical visionary type stuff that I laid out, I still feel pretty good about. There are some classic old ones about my defending of OpenGL versus D3D, which turned out to be one of the more probably important momentous things there where it never, it was always a rear guard action on Windows where Microsoft was just not gonna let that win. But when I look back on it now, that fight to keep OpenGL relevant for a number of years there meant that OpenGL was there when mobile started happening and OpenGL ES was the thing that drove all of the acceleration of the mobile industry. And it's really only in the last few years as Apple's moved to Metal and some of the other companies have moved to Vulkan that that's moved away. But really stepping back and looking at it, it's like, yeah, I sold tens of millions of games for different things. But billions and billions of devices wound up with an appropriate capable graphics API due in no small part to me thinking that that was really important that we not just give up and use Microsoft's at that time really terrible API. The thing about Microsoft is the APIs don't stay terrible. They were terrible at the start, but a few versions on, they were actually quite good. And there was a completely fair argument to be made that by the time DX9 was out, it was probably a better programming environment than OpenGL, but it was still a wonderful good thing that we had an open standard that could show up on Linux and Android and iOS and eventually WebGL still to this day. So that was one, that would be on my greatest hits list of things that I kind of pushed with. The impact it had on billions of devices, yes. So let's talk about it. Can you tell the origin story of id Software? Again, one of the greatest game developer companies ever. It created Wolfenstein 3D games that defined my life also in many ways as a thing that made me realize what computers are capable of in terms of graphics, in terms of performance, it just unlocked something deep in me and understanding what these machines are all about as games can do that. So Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and just all the incredible engineering innovation that went into that. So how did it all start? So I'll caveat upfront that I usually don't consider myself the historian of the software side of things. I usually do kind of point people at John Romero for stories about the early days where I've never been, like I've commented that I'm a remarkably unsentimental person in some ways where I don't really spend a lot of time unless I'm explicitly prodded to go back and think about the early days of things. And I didn't necessarily make the effort to archive everything exactly in my brain. And the more that I work on machine learning and AI and the aspects of memory and how when you go back and polish certain things, it's not necessarily exactly the way it happened. But having said all of that, from my view, the way everything happened that led up to that was after I was an adult and kind of taking a few college classes and deciding to drop out, I was doing, I was hardscrabble contract programming work, really struggling to kind of keep groceries and pay my rent and things. And the company that I was doing the most work for was a company called Softdisk Publishing, which had the sounds bizarre now business model of monthly subscription software. Before there was an internet that people could connect to and get software, you would pay a certain amount and every month they would send you a disc that had some random software on it. And people that were into computers thought this was kind of cool. And they had different ones for the Apple II, the 2GS, the PC, the Mac, the Amiga, lots of different things here. So quirky little business, but I was doing a lot of contract programming for them where I'd write tiny little games and sell them for 300, $500. And one of the things that I was doing again to keep my head above water here was I decided that I could make one program and I could port it to multiple systems. So I would write a game like Dark Designs or Catacombs and I would develop it on the Apple II, the 2GS and the IBM PC, which apparently was the thing that really kind of piqued the attention of the people working down there. Like Jay Wilbur was my primary editor and Tom Hall was a secondary editor. And they kept asking me, it's like, hey, you should come down and work for us here. And I pushed it off a couple of times because I was really enjoying my freedom of kind of being off on my own. Even if I was barely getting by, I loved it. I was doing nothing but programming all day, but I did have enough close scrapes with like, damn, I'm just really out of money that maybe I should get an actual job rather than contracting these kind of one at a time things. And Jay Wilbur was great. He was like FedExing me the checks when I would need them. I had to kind of get over whatever hump I was at. So I took the, I finally took them up on their offer to come down to Shreveport, Louisiana. I was in Kansas city at the time, drove down to through the Ozarks and everything down to Louisiana and saw the soft disk offices, went through, talked to a bunch of people, met the people I had been working with remotely at that time. But the most important thing for me was I met two programmers there, John Romero and Lane Roth that for the first time ever, I had met programmers that knew more cool stuff than I did where the world was just different back then. I was in Kansas city. It was one of those smartest kid in the school does all the computer stuff. The teachers don't have anything to teach him. But all I had to learn from was these few books at the library. It was not much at all. And there were some aspects of programming that were kind of black magic to me. Like, it's like, oh, he knows how to format a track on, I am on a low level drive programming interface. And this was, I was still not at all sure I was gonna take the job, but I met these awesome programmers that were doing cool stuff. And Romero had worked at Origin Systems and he had done like, so many different games ahead of time that I did kind of quickly decide, it's like, yeah, I'll go take the job down there. And I settled down there, moved in and started working on more little projects. And the first kind of big change that happened down there was the company wanted to make a gaming focused, a PC gaming focused subscription. Just like all their other, it was the same formula that they used for everything. Pay a monthly fee and you'll get a disc with one or two games just every month and no choice in what you get, but we think it'll be fun. And that was the model they were comfortable with and they said, all right, we're gonna start this gamers edge department. And all of us that were interested in that, like me, Romero, Tom Hall was kind of helping us from his side of things, Jay would peek in and we had a few other programmers working with us at the time. And we were going to just start making games, just the same model. And we dived in and it was fantastic. Do you have to make new games? Every month. Every month. Yeah. And this, in retrospect, looking back at it, that sense that I had done all this contract programming and John Romero had done like far more of this where he had done one of his teaching himself efforts was he made a game for every letter of the alphabet. It's that sense of like, I'm just gonna go make 26 different games, give them a different theme. And you learn so much when you go through and you crank these things out like on a biweekly, monthly basis, something like that. From start to finish. It's not like just an idea. It's not just from the very beginning to the very end. It's done. It has to be done. There's no delaying. It's done. And you've got deadlines. And that kind of rapid iteration pressure cooker environment was super important for all of us developing the skills that brought us to where we eventually went to. I mean, people would say like, like in the history of the Beatles, like it wasn't them being the Beatles. It was them playing all of these other early works that that opportunity to craft all of their skills before they were famous, that was very critical to their later successes. And I think there's a lot of that here where we did these games that nobody remembers, lots of little things that contributed to building up the skillset for the things that eventually did make us famous. Yeah, Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler. I had to write it in a month, just to make money. And nobody remembers that probably because he had to figure out, because it's literally, he didn't have enough time to write it fast enough. So he had to come up with hacks. Literally, it again comes down to that point where pressure and limitation of resources is surprisingly important. And it's counterintuitive in a lot of ways where you just think that if you've got all the time in the world and you've got all the resources in the world, of course, you're gonna get something better. But sometimes it really does work out that the innovations, mother necessity, where you can, or resource constraints, and you have to do things when you don't have a choice. It's surprising what you can do. Is there any good games written in that time? Would you say? Some of them are still fun to go back and play where you get the, they were all about kind of, the more modern term is game feel, about how just the exact feel that things, it's not the grand strategy of the design, but how running and jumping and shooting and those things I feel in the moment. And some of those are still, if you sat down on them, you kind of go, it's a little bit different. It doesn't have the same movement feel, but you move over and you're like, bang, jump, bang. It's like, hey, that's kind of cool still. So you can get lost in the rhythm of the game. Is that what you mean by feel? Just like there's something about it that pulls you in? Nowadays, again, people talk about compulsion loops and things where it's that sense of exactly what you're doing, what your fingers are doing on the keyboard, what your eyes are seeing, and there are gonna be these sequences of things. Grab the loot, shoot the monster, jump over the obstacle, get to the end of the level. These are eternal aspects of game design in a lot of ways, but there are better and worse ways to do all of them. And we did so many of these games that we got a lot of practice with it. So one of the kind of weird things that was happening at this time is John Romero was getting some strange fan mail. And back in the days, this was before email. So we literally got letters sometimes and telling him, it's like, oh, I wanna talk to you about your games. I wanna reach out, different things. And eventually it turned out that these were all coming from Scott Miller at Apogee Software. And he was reaching out through, he didn't think he could contact John directly, that he would get intercepted. So he was trying to get him to contact him through like back channel fan mail, because he basically was saying, hey, I'm making all this money on shareware games. I want you to make shareware games, because he had seen some of the games that Romero had done. And we looked at Scott Miller's games and we didn't think they were very good. We're like, that can't be making the kind of money that he's saying he's making 10 grand or something off of this game. And we really thought that he was full of shit, that it was a lie trying to get him into this. But so that was kind of going on at one level. And it was funny the moment when Romero realized that he had some of these letters pinned up on his wall, like all of his fans. And then we noticed that they all had the same return address with different names on them, which was a little bit of a two edged sword there. Trying to figure out the puzzle laid out before him. Yeah, what happened after I kind of coincident with that was I was working on a lot of the new technologies where I was now full on the IBM PC for the first time, where I was really a long hold out on Apple II forever. And I loved my Apple II. It was the computer I always wished I had when I was growing up. And when I finally did have one, I was kind of clinging on to that well past it sort of good use by day. Is it the best computer ever made you would you say? I wouldn't make judgments like that about it, but it was positioned in such a way, especially in the school systems that it impacted a whole lot of American programmers at least, where there was programs that the Apple IIs got into the schools and they had enough capability that lots of interesting things happened with them. In Europe, it was different. You had your Amigas and Ataris and Acorns in the UK and things that had different things. But in the United States, it was probably the Apple II made the most impact for a lot of programmers of my generation. But so I was really digging into the IBM and this was even more so with the total focus because I had moved to another city where I didn't know anybody that I wasn't working with. I had a little apartment and then at Softdisk, again, the things that drew me to it, I had a couple of programmers that knew more than I did and they had a library. They had a set of books and a set of magazines. They had a couple of years of magazines, the old Dr. Dobbs journal and all of these magazines that had information about things. And so I was just in total immersion mode. It was eat, breathe, sleep, computer programming, particularly the IBM for everything that I was doing. And I was digging into a lot of these low level hardware details that people weren't usually paying attention to, the way the IBM EGA cards worked, which was fun for me. I hadn't had experience with things at that level. And back then you could get hardware documentation just down at the register levels. This is where the CRTC register is. This is how the color registers work and how the different things are applied. And they were designed for a certain reason. They were designed for an application. They had an intended use in mind, but I was starting to look at other ways that they could perhaps be exploited that they weren't initially intended for. Could you comment on like, first of all, what operating system was there? What instruction set was it? Like, what are we talking about? So this was DOS and x86. So 16 bit, 8086. The 286s were there and 386s existed. They were rare. We had a couple for our development systems, but we were still targeting the more broad. It was all DOS 16 bit. None of this was kind of DOS extenders and things. How different is it from the systems of today? Is it kind of a precursor that's similar? Very little. If you open up command.exe or com on Windows, you see some of the remnants of all of that, but it was a different world. It was the 640K is enough world, and nothing was protected. It crashed all the time. You had TSRs or terminate and stay resident hacks on top of things that would cause configuration problems. All the hardware was manually configured in your auto exec. So it was a very different world. But the code is still the same, similar. You could still write it. My earliest code there was written in Pascal. That was what I had learned at an earlier point. So between BASIC and C++, there was Pascal. So when BASIC assembly language, some of my intermediate stuff was, well, you had to for performance. BASIC was just too slow. So most of the work that I was doing as a contract programmer in my teenage years was assembly language. Wait, you wrote games in assembly? Yeah, complete games in assembly language. And it's thousands and thousands of lines of three letter acronyms for the instructions. You don't earn the once again greatest programmer ever label without being able to write a game in assembly. OK. That's good. Everybody serious wrote their games in assembly language. It was kind of a. Everybody serious. See what he said? Everybody serious. It was an outlier to use Pascal a little bit, where there was one famous program called wizardry. It was one of the great early role playing games that was written in Pascal. But it was almost nothing used Pascal there. But I did learn Pascal. And I remember doing all of my. To this day, I sketch in data structures. When I'm thinking about something, I'll open up a file and I'll start writing struct definitions for how data is going to be laid out. And Pascal was kind of formative to that because I remember designing my RPGs in Pascal record structures and things like that. And so I had gotten the Pascal compiler for the Apple 2GS that I could work on. And the first IBM game that I developed, I did in Pascal. And that's actually kind of an interesting story, again, talking about the constraints and resources where I had an Apple 2GS. I didn't have an IBM PC. I wanted to port my applications to IBM because I thought I could make more money on it. So what I wound up doing is I rented a PC for a week and bought a copy of Turbo Pascal. And so I had a hard one week and this was cutting into what minimal profit margin I had there. But I had this computer for a week. I had to get my program ported before I had to return the PC and that was kind of what the first thing that I had done on the IBM PC and what led me to taking the job at Softdisk. And Turbo Pascal, how's that different from regular Pascal? Is it a different compiler or something like that? It was a product of Borland, which before Microsoft kind of killed them, they were the hot stuff developer tools company. You had Borland, Turbo Pascal and Turbo C and Prologue, I mean, all the different things. But what they did was they took a supremely pragmatic approach of making something useful. It was one of these great examples where Pascal was an academic language and you had things like the UCSDP system that Wizardry was actually written in that they did manage to make a game with that, but it was not a super practical system. While Turbo Pascal was, it was called Turbo because it was blazingly fast to compile. I mean, really ridiculously 10 to 20 times faster than most other compilers at the time. But it also had very pragmatic access to look, you can just poke at the hardware in these different ways and we have libraries that let you do things. And it was a pretty good, it was a perfectly good way to write games and this is one of those things where people have talked about different paths that computer development could have taken where C took over the world for reasons that came out of Unix and eventually Linux. And that was not a foregone conclusion at all. And people can make real reasoned rational arguments that the world might've been better if it had gone a Pascal route. I'm somewhat agnostic on that where I do know from experience, it was perfectly good enough to do that. And it had some fundamental improvements like it had range checked arrays as an option there, which could avoid many of C's real hazards that happened in a security space. But C1, they were basically offering it about the same level of abstraction. It was a systems programming language, but. But you said Pascal had a more emphasis on data structures. I actually, in the tree of languages, did Pascal come before C? They were pretty contemporaneous. So Pascal's lineage went to Modula 2 and eventually Oberon, which was another Nicholas word, kind of experimental language. But they were all good enough at that level. Now, some of the classic academic oriented Pascals were just missing fundamental things like, oh, you can't access this core system thing because we're just using it to teach students. But Turbo Pascal showed that only modest changes to it really did make it a completely capable language. And it had some reasons why you could implement it as a single pass compiler so it could be way, way faster, although less scope for optimizations if you do it that way. And it did have some range checking options. It had a little bit better typing capability. You'd have properly typed enums, sorts of things, and other stuff that C lacked. But C was also clearly good enough. And it wound up with a huge inertia from the Unix ecosystem and everything that came with that. Garbage collection? No, it was not garbage collected. It's just the same kind of thing as C. Same manual. So you could still have your use after freeze and all those other problems. But just getting rid of array overruns, at least if you were compiled with that debugging option, certainly would have avoided a lot of problems and could have a lot of benefits. But so anyways, that was the next thing. I had to learn C because C was where it seemed like most of the things were going. So I abandoned Pascal and I started working in C. I started hacking on these hardware things dealing with the graphics controllers and the EGA systems. And what we most wanted to do, so at that time we were sitting in our darkened office playing all the different console video games. And we were figuring out what games do we want to make for our Gamer's Edge product there. And so we had one of the first Super Nintendos sitting there. And we had an older Nintendo looking at all those games. And the core thing that those consoles did that you just didn't get on the PC games was this ability to have a massive scrolling world where most of the games that you would make on the PC and earlier personal computers would be a static screen. You move little things around on it and you interact like that. Maybe you go to additional screens as you move. But arcade games and consoles had this wonderful ability to just have a big world that you're slowly moving your window through. And that was for those types of games, that kind of action exploration adventure games, that was a super, super important thing. And PC games just didn't do that. And what I had come across was a couple of different techniques for implementing that on the PC. And they're not hard, complicated things. When I explain them now, they're pretty straightforward. But just nobody was doing it. You sound like Einstein describing his five papers is pretty straightforward. I understand. But they're nevertheless revolutionary. So side scrolling is a game changer. Yeah, and scrolling is a genius invention. It's either vertical. And some of the consoles had different limitations about you could do one but not the other. And there were similar things going on as advancements, even in the console space, where you'd have the original Mario game was just horizontal scrolling. And then later, Mario games added vertical aspects to it and different things that you were doing to explore, kind of expand the capabilities there. And so much of the early game design for decades was removing limitations, letting you do things that you envisioned as a designer, you wanted the player to experience, but the hardware just couldn't really or you didn't know how to make it happen. It felt impossible. You can imagine that you want to create like this big world through which you can side scroll, like through which you can walk. And then you ask yourself a question, how do I actually build that in a way that's like the latency is low enough, the hardware can actually deliver that in such a way that it's a compelling experience. Yeah, and we knew what we wanted to do because we were playing all of these console games, playing all these Nintendo games and arcade games. Clearly, there was a whole world of awesome things there that we just couldn't do on the PC, at least initially. Because every programmer can tell, it's like if you want to scroll, you can just redraw the whole screen. But then it turns out, well, you're going five frames per second. That's not an interactive fun experience. You want to be going 30 or 60 frames per second or something. And it just didn't feel like that was possible. It felt like the PCs had to get five times faster for you to make a playable game there. And interestingly, I wound up with two completely different solutions for the scrolling problem. And this is a theme that runs through everything, where all of these big technical advancements, it turns out there's always a couple different ways of doing them. And it's not like you found the one true way of doing it. And we'll see this as we go into 3D games and things later. But so the scrolling, the first set of scrolling tricks that I got was the hardware had this ability to, you could shift inside the window of memory. So the EGA cards at the time had 256 kilobytes of memory. And it was awkwardly set up in this planar format, where instead of having 256 or 24 million colors, you had 16 colors, which is four bits. So you had four bit planes, 64k a piece. Of course, 64k is a nice round number for 16 bit addressing. So your graphics card had a 16 bit window that you could look at. And you could tell it to start the video scan out anywhere inside there. So there were a couple games that had taken this approach of you could make a 2 by 2 screen or a 1 by 4 screen. And you could do scrolling really easily like that. You could just lay it all out and just pan around there. But you just couldn't make it any bigger because that's all the memory that was there. The first insight to the scrolling that I had was, well, if we make a screen that's just one tile larger, and we usually had tiles that were 16 pixels by 16 pixels, the little classic Mario block that you run into, lots of art gets drawn that way. And your screen is a certain number of tiles. But if you had one little buffer region outside of that, you could easily pan around inside that 16 pixel region. That could be perfectly smooth. But then what happens if you get to the edge and you want to keep going? The first way we did scrolling was what I called adaptive tile refresh, which was really just a matter of you get to the edge and then you go back to the original point and then only change the tiles that have actually that are different between where it was. In most of the games at the time, if you think about your classic Super Mario Brothers game, you've got big fields of blue sky, long rows of the same brick texture. And there's a lot of commonality. It's like a data compression thing. If you take the screen and you set it down on top of each other, in general, only about 10% of the tiles were actually different there. So this was a way to go ahead and say, well, I'm going to move it back, and then I'm only going to change those 10%, 20%, whatever percent tiles there. And that meant that it was essentially five times faster than if you were redrawing all of the tiles. And that worked well enough for us to do a bunch of these games for Gamer's Edge. We had a lot of these scrolling games like Slurred Axe and Shadow Knights and things like that that we were cranking out at this high rate that had this scrolling effect on it. And it worked well enough. There were design challenges there where if you made the worst case, if you made a checkerboard over the entire screen, you scroll over one and every single tile changes and your frame rate's now five frames per second because it had to redraw everything. So the designers had a little bit that they had to worry about. They had to make these relatively plain looking levels, but it was still pretty magical. It was something that we hadn't seen before. And the first thing that we wound up doing with that was I had just gotten this working, and Tom Hall was sitting there with me, and we were looking over at our Super Nintendo on the side there with Super Mario 3 running. And we had the technology, we had the tools set up there, and we stayed up all night. And we basically cloned the first level of Super Mario Brothers. Performance wise as well? Yeah. And we had our little character running and jumping in there. It was close to pixel accurate as far as all the backgrounds and everything, but the gaming was just stuff that we cobbled together from previous games that I had written. I just really kitbashed the whole thing together to make this demo. And that was one of the rare cases when I said I don't usually do these all night programming things. There's probably only two memorable ones that I can think about. One was the all nighter to go ahead and get our Dangerous Dave and copyright infringement is how we titled it. Because we had a game called Dangerous Dave running around with a shotgun shooting things, and we were just taking our most beloved game at the time there, the Super Mario 3, and sticking Dave inside that with this new scrolling technology that was going perfectly smooth for them as it ran. And Tom and I just blearily the next morning left, and we left a disk on the desk for John Romero and Jay Wilbur to see and just said, run this. And we eventually made it back in later in the day, and it was like they grabbed us and pulled us into the room. And that was the point where they were like, we got to do something with this. We're going to make a company. We're going to go make our own games, where this was something that we were able to just kind of hit them with a hammer of an experience like, wow, this is just like so much cooler than what we thought was possible there. And initially, we tried to get Nintendo to let us make Super Mario 3 on the PC. That's really what we wanted to do. We were like, hey, we can finish this. It's line of sight. This will be great. And we sent something to Nintendo, and we heard that it did get looked at in Japan, and they just weren't interested in that. But that's another one of those life could have gone a very different way, where we could have been like Nintendo's house PC team at that point. And define the direction of Wolfenstein and Doom and Quake could have been a Nintendo creation. Yeah. So at the same time that we were just doing our first scrolling demos, we reached out to Scott Miller at Apogee and said, it's like, hey, we do want to make some games. These things that you think you want, those are nothing. What do you see what we can actually do now? This is going to be amazing. And he just popped right up and sent a check to us, where at that point, we still thought he might be a fraud, that he was just lying about all of this. But he was totally correct on how much money he was making with his shareware titles. And this was his real brainstorm about this, where shareware was this idea that software doesn't have a fixed price. If you use it, you send out of the goodness of your heart some money to the creator. And there were a couple of utilities that did make some significant success like that. But for the most part, it didn't really work. Now, there wasn't much software in a pure shareware model that was successful. The Apogee innovation was to take something, call it shareware, split it into three pieces. You always made a trilogy. And you would put the first piece out, but then you buy the whole trilogy for some shareware amount, which in reality, it meant that the first part was a demo, where you kind of like the demo went everywhere for free and you paid money to get the whole set. But it was still play to shareware. And we were happy to have the first one go everywhere. And it wasn't a crippled demo, where the first episode of all these trilogies, it was a real complete game. And probably 20 times as many people played that part of it, thought they had a great game, had fond memories of it, but never paid us a dime. But enough people were happy with that, where it was really quite successful. And these early games that we didn't think very much of compared to commercial quality games, but they were doing really good business, some fairly crude things. And people, it was good business. People enjoyed it. And it wasn't like you were taking a crapshoot on what you were getting. You just played a third of the experience. And you loved it enough to hand write out a check and put it in an envelope and address it and send it out to Apogee to get the rest of them. So it was a really pretty feel good business prospect there, because everybody was happy. They knew what they were getting when they sent it in. They would send in fan mail. If you're going to the trouble of addressing a letter and filling out an envelope, you write something in it. And there were just the literal bags of fan mail for the shareware games, so people loved them. I should mention that for you, the definition of wealth is being able to have pizza whenever you want. For me, there was a dream that I would play shareware games over and over, the part that's free, over and over. And it was very deeply fulfilling experience. But I dreamed of a time when I could actually afford the full experience. And this is kind of this dreamland beyond the horizon when you could find out what else is there. In some sense, even just playing the shareware was, it's the limitation of that. You know, life is limited, eventually we all die. In that way, shareware was somehow really fulfilling to have this kind of mysterious thing beyond what's free always there. It's kind of, I don't know, maybe it's because a part of my childhood is playing shareware games. That was a really fulfilling experience. It's so interesting how that model still brought joy to so many people. The 20X people that played it. I felt very good about that. I would run into people that would say, oh, I loved that game that you had early on, Commander Keen, whatever. And no, they meant just the first episode that they got to see everywhere. That's me, I played the crap out of Commander Keen. And that was all good. Yeah, yeah. But so we were in this position where Scott Miller was just fronting us cash, saying, yeah, make a game. But we did not properly pull the trigger and say, all right, we're quitting our jobs. We were like, we're gonna do both. We're gonna keep working at Softdisk, working on this. And then we're going to go ahead and make a new game for Apogee at the same time. And this eventually did lead to some legal problems. And we had trouble. It all got worked out in the end, but it was not a good call at the time there. And your legal mind at the time was not stellar. You were not thinking in terms of the illegal terms. No, I definitely wasn't. None of us were. And in hindsight, yeah, it's like, how did we think we were gonna get away with even using our work computers to write software for our breakaway new company? It was not a good plan. How did Commander Keen come to be? So the design process, we would start from, we had some idea of what we wanted to do. We wanted to do a Mario like game. It was gonna be a side scroller. It was gonna use the technology. We had some sense of what it would have to look like because of the limitations of this adaptive tile refresh technology. It had to have fields of relatively constant tiles. You couldn't just paint up a background and then move that around. The early design or all the design for Commander Keen really came from Tom Hall, where he was kind of the main creative mind for the early id software stuff, where we had an interesting division of things where Tom was all creative and design. I was all programming. John Romero was an interesting bridge where he was both a very good programmer and also a very good designer and artist and kind of straddled between the areas. But Commander Keen was very much Tom Hall's baby. And he came up with all the design and backstory for the different things of kind of a mad scientist, little kid with building a rocket ship and a zap gun and visiting alien worlds and doing all of this that the background that we lay the game inside of. And there's not a whole lot to any of these things. Design for us was always just what we needed to do to make the game that was gonna be so much fun to play. And we laid out our first trilogy of games, the shareware formula, it's gonna be three pieces. We make Commander Keen one, two, and three. And we just really started busting on all that work. And it went together really quickly. It was like three months or something that while we were still making games every month for Gamer's Edge, we were sharing technology between that. I'd write a bunch of code for this and we'd just kind of use it for both. Again, not a particularly good idea there that had consequences for us. But in three months, we got our first game out and all of a sudden it was three times as successful as the most successful thing Apogee had had before. And we were making like $30,000 a month immediately from the Commander Keen stuff. And that was again, a surprise to us. It was more than we thought that that was gonna make. And we said, well, we're gonna certainly roll into another set of titles from this. And in that three months, I had come up with a much better way of doing the scrolling technology that was not the adaptive tile refresh, which in some ways was even simpler. And these things, so many of the great ideas of technology are things that are back of the envelope designs. I make this comment about modern machine learning where all the things that are really important practically in the last decade are, each of them fits on the back of an envelope. There are these simple little things. They're not super dense, hard to understand technologies. And so the second scrolling trick was just a matter of like, okay, we know we've got this 64K window. And the question was always like, well, you could make a two by two, but you can't go off the edge. But I finally asked, well, what actually happens if you just go off the edge? If you take your start and you say, it's like, okay, I can move over, I'm scrolling, I can move over, I can move down, I'm scrolling. I get to what should be the bottom of the memory window. It's like, well, what if I just keep going? And I say, I'm gonna start at, what happens if I start at FFFE at the very end of the 64K block? And it turns out it just wraps back around to the top of the block. And I'm like, oh, well, this makes everything easy. You can just scroll the screen everywhere and all you have to draw is just one new line of tiles, which everything you expose, it might be unaligned off various parts of the screen memory, but it just works. That no longer had the problem of you had to have fields of the similar colors because it doesn't matter what you're doing, you could be having a completely unique world and you're just drawing the new strip as it comes on. But it might be, like you said, unaligned, so it can be all over the place. Yes, and it turns out it doesn't matter. I would have two page flipped screens, as long as they didn't overlap, they moved in series through this two dimensional window of graphics. And that was one of those like, well, this is so simple. This just works, it's faster, there it seemed like there was no downside. Funny thing was, it turned out after we shipped titles with this, there were what they called super VGA cards, the cards that would allow higher resolutions and different features that the standard ones didn't. And on some of those cards, this was a weird compatibility quirk again, because nobody thought this was not what it was designed to do. And some of those cards had more memory. They had more than just 256K and four planes. They had 512K or a megabyte. And on some of those cards, I scroll my window down and then it goes into uninitialized memory that actually exists there rather than wrapping back around at the top. And then I was in the tough position of do I have to track every single one of these? And it was a mad house back then with there were 20 different video card vendors with all slightly different implementations of their nonstandard functionality. So either I needed to natively program all of the VGA cards there to map in that memory and keep scrolling down through all of that, or I kind of punted and took the easy solution of when you finally did run to the edge of the screen, I accepted a hitch and just copied the whole screen up there. So on some of those cards, it was a compatibility mode. In the normal ones, when it all worked fine, everything was just beautifully smooth. But if you had one of those cards where it did not wrap the way I wanted it to, you'd be scrolling around, scrolling around, and then eventually you'd have a little hitch where 200 milliseconds or something that was not super smooth as it froze a little bit. And this is the binary thing. Is it one of the standard screens or is it one of the weird ones, the Super VGA ones? Yeah. Okay. And so we would default to, and I think that was one of those that changed over the kind of course of deployment where early on we would have a normal mode and then you would enable the compatibility flag if your screen did this crazy flickery thing when you got to a certain point in the game. And then later, I think it probably got enabled by default as just more and more of the cards kind of did not do exactly the right thing. And that's the two edged sword of doing unconventional things with technology where you can find something that nobody thought about doing that kind of scrolling trick when they set up those cards. But the fact that nobody thought that was the primary reason when I was relying on that, then I wound up being broken on some of the later cards. Let me take a bit of a tangent, but ask you about the hacker ethic. Cause you mentioned shareware. It's an interesting world. The world of people that make money, the business and the people that build systems, the engineers. And what is the hacker ethic? You've been a man of the people and you've embodied at least the part of that ethic. What does it mean? What did it mean to you at the time? What does it mean to you today? So Steven Levy's book, Hackers, was a really formative book for me as a teenager. I mean, I read it several times and there was all of the great lore of the early MIT era of hackers and ending up at the end with, it kind of went through the early MIT hackers and then the Silicon Valley hardware hackers and then the game hackers in part three. And at that time as a teenager, I really was kind of bitter in some ways. I thought I was born too late. I thought I missed the window there. And I really thought I belonged in that third section of that book with the game hackers. And they were talking about the Williams at Sierra and origin systems with Richard Garriott. And it's like, I really wanted to be there. And I knew that was now a few years in the past. It was not to be, but the early days, especially the early MIT hacker days, talking a lot about this sense of the hacker ethic, that there was this sense that it was about sharing information, being good, not keeping it to yourself, and that it's not a zero sum game, that you can share something with another programmer and it doesn't take it away from you. You then have somebody else doing something. And I also think that there's an aspect of it where it's this ability to take joy in other people's accomplishments, where it's not the cutthroat bit of like, I have to be first, I have to be recognized as the one that did this in some way, but being able to see somebody else do something and say, holy shit, that's amazing. And just taking joy in the ability of something amazing that somebody else does. And the big thing that I was able to do through ID Software was this ability to eventually release the source code for most of our, like all of our really seminal game titles. And that was a, it was a stepping stone process where we were kind of surprised early on where people were able to hack the existing games. And of course I had experience with that. I remember hacking my copies of Ultima. So I'd give myself 9999 gold and raise my levels and break out the sector editor. And so I was familiar with all of that. So it was just, it was with a smile when I started to see people doing that to our games, I am making level editors for Commander Keen or hacking up Wolfenstein 3D, but I made the pitch internally that we should actually release our own tools for like what we did, what we use to create the games. And that was a little bit debatable about, well, will this let other, we'll give people leg up. It's always like, what's that gonna mean for the competition? But the really hard pitch was to actually release the full source code for the games. And it was a balancing act with the other people inside the company where it's interesting how the programmers generally did get, certainly the people that I worked closely with, they did kind of get that hacker ethic bit where you wanted to share your code. You were proud of it. You wanted other people to take it, do cool things with it. But interestingly, the broader game industry is a little more hesitant to embrace that than like the group of people that we happen to have at id Software, where it was always a little interesting to me seeing how a lot of people in the game modding community were very possessive of their code. They did not wanna share their code. They wanted it to be theirs. It was their claim to fame. And that was much more like what we tended to see with artists where the artists understand something about credit and wanting it to be known as their work. And a lot of the game programmers felt a little bit more like artists than like hacker programmers, in that it was about building something that maybe felt more like art to them than the more tool based and exploration based kind of hacking culture side of things. Yeah, it's so interesting that this kind of fear that credit will not be sufficiently attributed to you. And that's one of the things that I do bump into a lot because I try not to go... I mean, it's easy for me to say because so much credit is heaped on me for the id Software side of things. But when people come up and they wanna pick a fight and say, no, it's like that wasn't where first person gaming came from and you can point to some of like things on obscure titles that I was never aware of or like the old Playdoh systems or each personal computer had something that was 3Dish and moving around. And I'm happy to say it's like, no, I mean, I saw Battlezone and Star Wars in the arcades. I had seen 3D graphics, I had seen all these things that are standing on the shoulders of lots of other people. But sometimes these examples they pull out, it's like, no, I didn't know that existed. I mean, I had never heard of that before then that didn't contribute to what I made, but there's plenty of stuff that did. And I think there's good cases to be made that obviously Doom and Quake and Wolfenstein were formative examples for what everything that came after that. But I don't feel the need to go fight and say claim primacy or initial invention of anything like that. But a lot of people do want to. I think when you fight for the credit in that way and it does go against the hacker ethic, you destroy something fundamental about the culture, about the community that builds cool stuff. I think credit ultimately, so I had this sort of, there's a famous wrestler and freestyle wrestling called Buvai Sarasateeva. And he always preached that you should just focus on the art of the wrestling and let people write your story however they want. The highest form of the art is just focusing on the art. And that is something about the hacker ethic is just focus on building cool stuff, sharing it with other cool people, and credit will get assigned correctly in the long arc of history. Yeah, and I generally think that's true. And you've got, there's some things, there's a graphics technique that got labeled CarMax Reverse. I am literally named, and it turned out that I wasn't the first person to figure that out. Most scientific things or mathematical things you wind up, it's like, oh, this other person had actually done that somewhat before. And then there's things that get attributed to me like the inverse square root hack that I actually didn't do. I flat out, that wasn't me. And it's like, it's weird how the memetic power of the internet, I cannot convince people of that. You're like the Mark Twain of programming. Yes. Everything just gets attributed to you now, even though you've never sought the credit of things. But part of the fact of the humility behind that is what attracts the attributions. Let's talk about a game. I mean, one of the greatest games ever made. I know you could talk about doing Quake and so on, but to me, Wolfenstein 3D was like, whoa. It blew my mind that a world like this could exist. So how did Wolfenstein 3D come to be in terms of the programming, in terms of the design, in terms of some of the memorable technical challenges? And also, actually just something you haven't mentioned is how did these ideas come to be inside your mind, the adaptive side scrolling, the solutions to these technical challenges? So I usually can introspectively pull back pretty detailed accounts of how technology solutions and design choices on my part came to be, where technically we had done two games, 3D games like that before, where Hover Tank was the first one, which had flat shaded walls, but did have the scaled enemies inside it. And then Catacombs 3D, which had textured walls, scaled enemies, and some more functionality, like the disappearing walls and some other stuff. But what's really interesting from a game development standpoint is those games, Catacombs 3D, Hover Tank, and Wolfenstein, they literally used the same code for a lot of the character behavior that a 2D game that I had made earlier called Catacombs did, where it was an overhead view game, kind of like Gauntlet, you're running around and you can open up doors, pick up items, basic game stuff. And the thought was that this exact same game experience just presented in a different perspective. It could be literally the same game just with a different view into it, would have a dramatically different impact on the players. So it wasn't a true 3D, you're saying that you could kind of fake it, you can like scale enemies, meaning things that are farther away, you can make them smaller. So the game was a 2D map, like all of our games use the same tool for creation. We use the same map editor for creating Keen as Wolfenstein and Hover Tank and Catacombs and all this stuff. So the game was a 2D grid made out of blocks. And you could say, well, these are walls, these are where the enemies start, then they start moving around. And these early games like Catacombs, you played it strictly in a 2D view. It was a scrolling 2D view, and that was kind of using an adaptive tile refresh at the time to be able to do something like that. And then the thought that these early games, all it did was take the same basic enemy logic, but instead of seeing it from the God's eye view on top, you were inside it and turning from side to side, yawing your view and moving forwards and backwards and side to side. And it's a striking thing where you always talk about wanting to isolate and factor changes in values. And this was one of those most pure cases there where the rest of the game changed very little. It was our normal kind of change the colors on something and draw a different picture for it, but it's kind of the same thing. But the perspective changed in a really fundamental way. And it was dramatically different. I can remember the reactions where the artist, Adrian, that had been drawing the pictures for it. We had a cool big troll thing in Catacombs 3D, and we had these walls that you could get a key and you could make the blocks disappear, get really simple stuff. Blocks could either be there or not there. So our idea of a door was being able to make a set of blocks just disappear. And I remember the reaction where he had drawn these characters and he was slowly moving around and like people had no experience with 3D navigation. It was all still keyboard. We didn't even have mice set up at that time, but slowly moving, going up, picked up a key, go to a wall. The wall disappears in a little animation and there's a monster like right there. And he practically fell out of his chair. It was just like, ah! And games just didn't do that. The games were the God's eye view. You were a little invested in your little guy. You can be like happy or sad when things happen, but you just did not get that kind of startle reaction. You weren't inside the game. Something in the back of your brain, some reptile brain thing is just going, oh shit, something just happened. And that was one of those early points where it's like, yeah, this is gonna make a difference. This is going to be powerful and it's gonna matter. Were you able to imagine that in the idea stage or no? So not that exact thing. So again, we had cases like the arcade games, Battle Zone and Star Wars that you could kind of see a 3D world and things coming at you and you get some sense of it, but nothing had done the kind of worlds that we were doing and the sort of action based things. 3D at the time was really largely about the simulation thoughts. And this is something that really might have trended differently if not for the id Software approach in the games where there were flight simulators, there were driving simulators, you had like hard drive in and Microsoft flight simulator. And these were doing 3D and general purpose 3D in ways that were more flexible than what we were doing with our games, but they were looked at as simulations. They weren't trying to necessarily be fast or responsive or letting you do kind of exciting maneuvers because they were trying to simulate reality and they were taking their cues from the big systems, the Evans and Sutherlands and the Silicon Graphics that were doing things. But we were taking our cues from the console and arcade games. We wanted things that were sort of quarter eaters that were doing fast paced things that you could smack you around rather than just smoothly gliding you from place to place. So. Quarter eaters. Yeah. And you know, a funny thing is, so much that that built into us that Wolfenstein still had lives and you had like one of the biggest power ups in all these games like was an extra life because you started off with three lives and you lose your lives and then it's game over and there weren't save games in most of this stuff. It was, it sounds almost crazy to say this, but it was an innovation in Doom to not have lives. You know, you could just play Doom as long as you wanted. You just restart at the start of the level and why not? This is like, we aren't trying to take people's quarters. They've already paid for the entire game. We want them to have a good time and you would have some, you know, some old timer purists that might think that there's something to the epic journey of making it to the end, having to restart all the way from the beginning after a certain number of tries. But now more fun is had when you just let people kind of keep trying when they're stuck rather than having to go all the way back and learn different things. So you've recommended the book, Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D for technical exploration of the game. So looking back 30 years, what are some memorable technical innovations that made this perspective shift into this world that's so immersive that scares you when a monster appears or some things you have to solve? So one of the interesting things that come back to the theme of deadlines and resource constraints, the game Catacombs 3D, we shipped, we were supposed to be shipping this for Gamers Edge on a monthly cadence and I had slipped. I was actually late. It slipped like six weeks because this was texture mapped walls doing stuff that I hadn't done before. And at the six week point, it was still kind of glitchy and buggy. There were things that I knew that if you had a wall that was like almost edge on, you could slide over to it and you could see some things freak out or vanish or not work. And I hated that, but I was up against the wall. We had to ship the game. It was still a lot of fun to play. It was novel, nobody had seen it. It gave you that startle reflex reaction. So it was worth shipping, but it had these things that I knew were kind of flaky and janky and not what I was really proud of. So one of the things that I did very differently in Wolfenstein was I went, Catacombs used almost a conventional thing where you had segments that were one dimensional polygons basically that were clipped and back faced and done kind of like a very crude 3D engine from the professionals, but I wasn't getting it done right. I was not doing a good enough job. I didn't really have line of sight to fix it right. There's stuff that of course I look back, it's like, oh, it's obvious how to do this and do the math right, do your clipping right, check all of this, how you handle the precision. But I did not know how to do that at that time. Was that the first 3D engine you wrote Catacombs 3D? Yeah, Hover Tank had been a little bit before that, but that had the flat shaded walls. So the texture mapping on the walls was what was bringing in some of these challenges that was hard for me and I couldn't solve it right at the time. Can you describe what flat shading is and texture mapping? So the walls were solid color, one of 16 colors in Hover Tank. So that's easy, it's fast, you just draw the solid color for everything. Texture mapping is what we all see today where you have an image that is stretched and distorted onto the walls or the surfaces that you're working with. And it was a long time for me to just figure out how to do that without it distorting in the wrong ways. And I did not get it all exactly right in Catacombs and I had these flaws. So that was important enough to me that rather than continuing to bang my head on that when I wasn't positive I was gonna get it, I went with a completely different approach for drawing for figuring out where the walls were which was a ray casting approach, which I had done in Catacombs 3D I had a bunch of C code trying to make this work right and it wasn't working right. In Wolfenstein I wound up going to a very small amount of assembly code. So in some ways there should be a slower way of doing it but by making it a smaller amount of work that I could more tightly optimize it worked out and Wolfenstein 3D was just absolutely rock solid. It was nothing glitched in there. The game just was pretty much flawless through all of that and I was super proud of that. But eventually like in the later games I went back to the more span based things where I could get more total efficiency once I really did figure out how to do it. So there were two sort of key technical things to Wolfenstein, one was this ray casting approach which you still to this day you see people go and say let's write a ray casting engine because it's an understandable way of doing things that lets you make games very much like that. So you see ray casters in JavaScript, ray casters in Python, people that are basically going and re implementing that approach to taking a tiled world and casting out into it. It works pretty well but it's not the fastest way of doing it. Can you describe what ray casting is? So you start off and you've got your screen which is 320 pixels across at the time if you haven't sized down the window for greater speed and at every pixel there's gonna be an angle from you've got your position in the world and you're going to just run along that angle and keep going until you hit a block. So up to 320 times across there it's gonna throw a cast array out into the world from wherever your origin is until it runs into a wall and then it can figure out exactly where on the wall it hits. The performance challenge of that is as it's going out every block it's crossing it checks is this a solid wall. So that means that in like the early Wolfenstein levels you're in a small jail cell going out into a small hallway it's super efficient for that because you're only stepping across three or four blocks but then if somebody makes a room that covers our maps were limited to 64 by 64 blocks. If you made one room that was nothing but walls at the far space it would go pretty slow because it would be stepping across 80 tile tests or something along the way. By the way the physics of our universe seems to be competing in this very thing. So this maps nicely to the actual physics of our world. Yeah you get like I follow a little bit of something like Steven Wolfram's work on interconnected network information states of that and that's it's beyond what I can have an informed opinion on but it's interesting that people are considering things like that and have things that can back it up. Yeah there's whole different sets of interesting stuff there. So Wolfenstein 3D had ray casting. Ray casting and then the other kind of key aspect was what I called compiled scalers where the idea of you'd saw this in the earlier classic arcade games like Space Harrier and stuff where you would take a picture which is normally drawn directly on the screen and then if you have the ability to make it bigger or smaller big chunky pixels or fizzly small drop sampled pixels. That's the fundamental aspect of what our characters were doing in these 3D games. You would have it's just like you might have drawn a tiny little character but now we can make them really big and make them really small and move it around. That was the limited kind of 3D that we had for characters. To make them turn there were literally eight different views of them. You didn't actually have a 3D model that would rotate. You just had these cardboard cutouts. But that was good enough for that startle fight reaction and it was kind of what we had to deal with there. So a straightforward approach to do that you could just write out your doubly nested loop of you've got your stretch factor and it's like you've got a point, you stretch by a little bit, it might be on the same pixel, it might be on the next pixel, it might have skipped a pixel. You can write that out but it's not gonna be fast enough where especially you get a character for that right in your face monster covering almost the entire screen. Doing that with a general purpose scaling routine would have just been much too slow. It would have worked when they're small characters but then it would get slower and slower as they got closer to you until right at the time when you most care about having a fast reaction time, the game would be chunking down. So the fastest possible way to draw pixels at that time was to, instead of saying I've got a general purpose version that can handle any scale, I used a program to make essentially a hundred or more separate little programs that was optimized for I will take an image and I will draw it 12 pixels tall. I'll take an image, I'll draw it 14 pixels tall up by every two pixels even for that. So you would have the most optimized code so that in the normal case where most of the world is fairly large, like the pixels are big, we did not have a lot of memory. So in most cases that meant that you would load a pixel color and then you would store it multiple times. So that was faster than even copying an image in a normal conventional case because most of the time the image is expanded. So instead of doing one read, one write for a simple copy, you might be doing one read and three or four writes as it got really big. And that had the beneficial aspect of just when you needed the performance most when things are covering the screen, it was giving you the most acceleration for that. By the way, were you able to understand this through thinking about it or were you testing like the right speed and like that? This again comes back to, I can find the antecedents for things like this. So back in the Apple II days, the graphics were essentially single bits at a time. And if you wanted to make your little spaceship, if you wanted to make it smoothly go across the world, if you just took the image and you drew it out at the next location, you would move by seven pixels at a time, so it'd go chunk, chunk, chunk. If you wanted to make it move smoothly, you actually had to make seven versions of the ship that were pre shifted. You could write a program that would shift it dynamically, but on a one megahertz processor, that's not going anywhere fast. So if you wanted to do a smooth moving fast action game, you made separate versions of each of these sprites. Now there were a few more tricks you could pull that if it still wasn't fast enough, you could make a compiled shape where instead of this program that normally copies an image and says like, get this byte from here, stored here, get this byte, store this byte. If you've got the memory space, you could say, I'm going to write the program that does nothing but draw this shape. It's going to be like, I'm going to load the immediate value 25, which is some bit pattern, and then I'm going to store that at this location. Rather than loading something from memory that involved indexing registers and this other slow stuff, you could go ahead and say, no, I'm gonna hard code the exact values of all of the image right into the program. And this was always a horrible trade off there, which you didn't have much memory and you didn't have much speed. But if you had something that you wanted to go really fast, you could turn it into a program. And that was, knowing about that technique is what made me think about some of these unwinding it for the PC where people that didn't come from that background were less likely to think about that. I mean, there's some deep parallels probably to human cognition as well. There's something about optimizing and compressing the processing of a new information that requires you to predict the possible ways in which the game or the world might unroll. And you have something like compiled scaler is always there. So you have like, like you have a prediction of how the world will unroll and you have some kind of optimized data structure for that prediction. And then you can modify if the world turns out to be different, you can modify a slight way. And as far as building out techniques, so much of the brain is about the associative context. You know, they're just, when you learn something, it's in the context of something else and you can have faint, tiny little hints of things. And I do think there are some deep things around like sparse distributed memories and boosting. That's like, if you can just be slightly above the noise floor of having some hint of something, you can have things refined into pulling the memory back up. So having a, being a programmer and having a toolbox of like all of these things that, things that I did in all of these previous lives of programming tasks that still matters to me about how I'm able to pull up some of these things. Like in that case, it was something I did on the Apple 2 then being relevant for the PC. And I have still cases when I would, when I would work on mobile development then be like, okay, I did something like this back in the doom days, but now it's a different environment, but I have still had that tie. I can bring it in and I can transform it into what the world needs right now. And I do think that's actually one of the very core things with human cognition and brain like, you know, brain like functioning is finding these ways about you've got, your brain is kind of everything everywhere all at once. You know, it's, it is just a set of all of this stuff that is just fetched back by these queries that go into it. And they can just be slightly above the noise floor with a random noise in your neurons and synapses that are affecting exactly what gets pulled up. So you're saying some of these very specific solutions for different games, you find that there's a kernel of a deep idea that's generalizable to other, to other things. Yeah, you can't predict what it's going to be, but that idea of like, I called out that compiled shaders in the forward that I wrote for that, the game engine black book, as you know, this is, it's kind of an end point of unrolling code, but that's one of those things that thinking about that and having that in your mind. And I'm sure there are some programmers that, you know, hear about that. Think about it a little bit. It's kind of the mind blown moment. It's like, oh, you can just turn all of that data into code. And nowadays, you know, you have instruction cache issues and that's not necessarily the best idea, but there are different, it's an idea that has power and has probably relevance in some other areas. Maybe it's in a hardware point of view that there's a way you approach building hardware that has that same, you don't even have to think about iterating. You just bake everything all the way into it in one place. What is the story of how you came to program Doom? What are some memorable technical challenges or innovations within that game? So the path that we went after Wolfenstein got out and we were on this crazy arc where Keen one through three, more success than we thought, Keen four through six, even more success, Wolfenstein even more success. So we were on this crazy trajectory for things. So actually our first box commercial project was the Commander Keen game, but then Wolfenstein was going to have a game called Spear of Destiny, which was a commercial version, 60 new levels. So the rest of the team took the game engine pretty much as it was and started working on that. We got new monsters, but it's basically reskins of the things there. And there's a really interesting aspect about that that I didn't appreciate until much, much later about how Wolfenstein clearly did tap out its limit about what you want to play, all the levels and a couple of our license things. There was a hard creative wall that you did not really benefit much by continuing to beat on it. But a game like Doom and other more modern games like Minecraft or something, there's kind of a Turing completeness level of design freedom that you get in games that Wolfenstein clearly sat on one side of. All the creative people in the world could not go and do a masterpiece just with the technology that Wolfenstein had. Wolfenstein could do Wolfenstein, but you really couldn't do something crazy and different. But it didn't take that much more capability to get to Wolfenstein with the freeform lines and a little bit more artistic freedom to get to the point where people still announce new Doom levels today, all these years after without having completely tapped out the creativity. How did you put it? Turing complete? Yeah, Turing complete design space. Design space. Where it's like, you know, we have the kind of computational universality on a lot of things and how different subsurface work. For creativity. But yeah, there's things where a box can be too small, but above a certain point, you kind of are at the point where you really have almost unbounded creative ability there. And Doom was the first time you crossed that line. Yeah, where there were thousands of Doom levels created, and some of them still have something new and interesting to say to the world about it. Is that line, can you introspect what that line was? Is it in the design space? Is it something about the programming capabilities that you were able to add to the game? So the graphics fidelity was a necessary part because the block limitations in Wolfenstein, what we had right there was not enough. The full scale blocks, although Minecraft really did show that perhaps blocks stacked in 3D and at one quarter of the scale of that, or one eighth in volume, is then sufficient to have all of that. But the wall sized blocks that we had in Wolfenstein was too much of a creative limitation. We licensed the technology to a few other teams. None of them made too much of a dent with that. It just wasn't enough creative ability. But a little bit more, whether it was the variable floors and ceilings and arbitrary angles in Doom, or the smaller voxel blocks in Minecraft, is then enough to open it up to just worlds and worlds of new capabilities. What is binary space partitioning? So the. Which is one of the technologies. Yeah, so jump around a little bit on the story path there. So while the team was working on Spirit Destiny for Wolfenstein, we had met another development team, Raven Software, while we were in Wisconsin. And they were doing, they had RPG background and I still kind of loved that. And I offered to do a game engine for them to let them do a 3D rendered RPG instead of the, like most RPG games were kind of hand drawn. They made it look kind of 3D, but it was done just all with artist work rather than a real engine. And after Wolfenstein, this was still a tile based world, but I added floors and ceilings and some lighting and the ability to have some sloped floors in different areas. And that was my intermediate step for a game called Shadowcaster. And it had slowed down enough. It was not fast enough to do our type of action things. So they had the screen crop down a little bit. So you couldn't go the full screen width like we would try to do in Wolfenstein, but I learned a lot. I got the floors and ceilings and lightings and it looked great. They were great artists up there. And it was an inspiration for us to look at some of that stuff. But I had learned enough from that, that I had the plan for, I knew faster ways to do the lighting and shadowing. And I wanted to do this free form geometry. I wanted to break out of this tile based 90 degree world limitations. So we had, that was when we got our next stations and we were working with these higher powered systems. And we built an editor that let us draw kind of arbitrary line segments. And I was working hard to try to make something that could render this fast enough. I was pushing myself pretty hard. And we were at a point where we could see some things that looked amazingly cool, but it wasn't really fast enough for the way I was doing it. For this flexibility, it was no longer, I couldn't just ray cast into it. And I had these very complex sets of lines and simple little worlds were okay. But the cool things that we wanted to do just weren't quite fast enough. And I wound up taking a break at that point. And I did the port. I did two ports of our games, Wolfenstein to the Super Nintendo. It was a crazy difficult thing to do, which was an even slower processors, like a couple of megahertz processor. And it had been this whole thing where we had farmed out the work and it wasn't going well. And I took it back over and trying to make it go fast on there where it really did not have much processing power. The pixels were stretched up hugely and it was pretty ugly when you looked at it. But in the end, it did come out fast enough to play and still be kind of fun from that. But that was where I started using BSP trees or binary space partitioning trees. It was one of those things I had to make it faster there. It was a stepping stone where it was reasonably easy to understand in the grid world of Wolfenstein where it was all still 90 degree angles. BSP trees were, I eased myself into it with that. And it was a big success. Then when I came back to working on Doom, I had this new tool in my toolbox. It was gonna be a lot harder with the arbitrary angles of Doom. This was where I really started grappling with epsilon problems. And just up until that point, I hadn't really had to deal with the fact that I am so many numeric things. This almost felt like a betrayal to me where people had told me that I had mathematicians up on a bit of a pedestal where I was, people think I'm a math wizard and I'm not. I really, everything that I did was really done with a solid high school math understanding. Algebra two trigonometry and that was what got me all the way through Doom and Quake and all of that, of just understanding basics of matrices and knowing it well enough to do something with it. What's the epsilon problems you ran into? So when you wind up taking like a sloped line and you say, I'm going to intersect it with another sloped line, then you wind up with something that's not going to be on these nice grid boundaries. With the Wolfenstein tile maps, all you've got is horizontal and vertical lines looking at it from above. And if you cut one of them, it's just obvious the other one gets cut exactly at that point. But when you have angled lines, you're doing a kind of a slope intercept problem and you wind up with rational numbers there where things that are not going to evenly land on an integer or even on any fixed point value that you've got. So everything winds up having to snap to some fixed point value. So the lines slightly change their angle. You wind up, if you cut something here, this one's going to bend a little this way and it's not going to be completely straight. And then you come down to all these questions of, well, this one is a point on an angled line. You can't answer that in finite precision unless you're doing something with actual rational numbers. And later on, I did waste far too much time chasing things like that. How do you do precise arithmetic with rational numbers? And it always blows up eventually, exponentially as you do it. So these kinds of things are impossible with computers. So they're possible. Again, there are paths to doing it, but you can't fit them conveniently in any of the numbers. You need to start using big nums and different factor trackings of different things. So you have to, if you have any elements of OCD and you want to do something perfectly, you're screwed if you're working with floating point. Yeah. So you had to deal with this for the first time. And there were lots of challenges there about like, okay, they build this cool thing. And the way the BSP trees work is it basically takes the walls and it carves other walls by those walls in this clever way that you can then take all of these fragments. And then you can for sure, from any given point, get an ordering of everything in the world. And you can say, this goes in front of this, goes in front of this, all the way back to the last thing. And that's super valuable for graphics where kind of a classic graphics algorithm would be painter's algorithm. You paint the furthest thing first, and then the next thing, and then the next thing, and then it comes up and it's all perfect for you. That's slow because you don't want to have to have drawn everything like that, but you can also flip it around and draw the closest thing to you. And then if you're clever about it, you can figure out what you need to draw that's visible beyond that. And that's what BSP trees allow you to do. Yeah, so it's combined with a bunch of other things, but it gives you that ordering. It's a clever way of doing things. And I remember I had learned this from one of my graphics Bible at the time, a book called Foley and Van Damme. And again, it was a different world back there. There was a small integer number of books. And this book that was big fat college textbook that I had read through many times. I didn't understand everything in it. Some of it wasn't useful to me, but they had the little thing about finite orderings of you draw a little T shaped thing and you can say you can make a fixed ahead of time order from this and you can generalize this with the BSP trees. And I got a little bit more information about that. And it was kind of fun later while I was working on Quake, I got to meet Bruce Naylor, who is one of the original researchers that developed those technologies for academic literature. And that was kind of fun, but I was very much just finding a tool that can help me solve what I was doing. And I was using it in this very crude way in a two dimensional fashion, rather than the general 3D. The Epsilon problems got much worse in Quake and three dimensionals when things angle in every way. But eventually I did sort out how to do it reliably on Doom. There were still a few edge cases in Doom that were not absolutely perfect where they even got terminologies in the communities. Like when you got to something where it was messed up, it was a hall of mirrors effect because you'd sweep by and it wouldn't draw something there. And you would just wind up with the leftover remnants as you flipped between the two pages. But BSP trees were important for it. But it's again worth noting that after we did Doom, our major competition came from Ken Silverman and his build engine, which was used for Duke Nukem 3D and some of the other games for 3D Realms. And he used a completely different technology, nothing to do with BSP trees. So there's not just a one true way of doing things. There were critical things about to make any of those games fast. You had to separate your drawing into, you drew vertical lines and you drew horizontal lines, just kind of changing exactly what you would draw with them. That was critical for the technologies at that time. And like all the games that were kind of like that wound up doing something similar, but there were still a bunch of other decisions that could be made. And we made good enough decisions on everything on Doom. We brought in multiplayer significantly and it was our first game that was designed to be modified by the user community where we had this whole setup of our WAD files and PWADs and things that people could build with tools that we released to them. And they eventually rewrote to be better than what we released, but they could build things and you could add it to your game without destructively modifying it, which is what you had to do in all the early games. You literally hacked the data files or the executable before while Doom was set up in this flexible way so that you could just say, run the normal game with this added on on top and it would overlay just the things that you wanted to there. Would you say that Doom was kind of the first true 3D game that you created? So no, it's still, Doom would usually be called a two and a half D game where it had three dimensional points on it. And this is another one of these kind of pedantic things that people love to argue about, about what was the first 3D game. I still, like every month probably I hear from somebody about, well, was Doom really a 3D game or something? And I give the point where characters had three coordinates. So you had like an X, Y and Z, the cacodamon could be coming in very high and come down towards you. The walls had three coordinates on them. So on some sense it's a 3D game engine, but it was not a fully general 3D game engine. You could not build a pyramid in Doom because you couldn't make a sloped wall, which was slightly different where in that previous shadow caster game, I could have vertexes and have a sloped floor there, but the changes that I made for Doom to get higher speed and a different set of flexibility traded away that ability, but you literally couldn't make that. You could not, you could make different heights of passages, but you could not make a bridge over another area. You could not go over and above it. So it still had some 2D limitations to it. That's more about the building versus the actual experience. Cause the experience is. It felt like things would come at you, but again, you couldn't look up either. I am, you know, you could only pitch. It was four degrees of freedom rather than six degrees of freedom. You did not have the ability to tilt your head this way or pitch up and down. So that takes us to Quake. What was the leap there? What was some fascinating technical challenges and there were a lot or not challenges, but innovations that you've come up with. So Quake was kind of the first thing where I did have to kind of come face to face with my limitations, where it was the first thing where I really did kind of give it my all and still come up, you know, come up a little bit short in terms of what and when I wanted to get it done. And the company ran, they had some serious stresses through the whole project and we bit off a lot. So the things that we set out to do was it was going to be really a true 3D engine where it could do six degree of freedom. You could have all the viewpoints. You could model anything. It had a really remarkable new lighting model with the surface caching and things. That was one of those where it was starting to do some things that they weren't doing even on the very high end systems. And it was going to be completely programmable in the modding standpoint, where the thing that you couldn't do in Doom, you could replace almost all of the media, but you couldn't really change the game. There were still some people that were doing the hex setting of the executable, the dehacked things where you could change a few things about rules and people made some early capture the flag type things by hacking the executable, but it wasn't really set out to do that. Quake was going to have its own programming language that the game was going to be implemented in it. And that would be able to be overwritten just like any of the media. Code was going to be data for that. And you would be able to have expansion packs that changed fundamental things and mods and so on. And the multiplayer was going to be playable over the internet. It was going to support a client server rather than peer to peer. So we had the possibility of supporting larger numbers of players in disparate locations with this full flexibility of the programming overrides with full six degree of freedom modeling and viewing. And with this fancy new light mapped kind of surface caching side. It was a lot. And this was one of those things that if I could go back and tell younger me to do something differently, it would have been to split those innovations up into two phases in two separate games. It will be phase one and phase two. So it probably would have been taking the Doom rendering engine and bringing in the TCP IP client server. Focusing on the multiplayer. And the Quake C or would have been Doom C programming language there. So I would have split that into programming language and networking with the same Doom engine rather than forcing everybody to go towards the Quake engine, which really meant getting a Pentium. While it ran on a 486, it was not a great experience there. We could have made more people happier and gotten two games done in 50% more time. So speaking of people happier, our mutual friend, Joe Rogan, it seems like the most important moment of his life is centered around Quake. So it was a definitive part of his life. So would he agree with your thinking that they should split? So he is a person who loves Quake and played Quake a lot. Would he agree that you should have done the Doom engine and focus on the multiplayer for phase one? Or in your looking back, is the 3D world that Quake created was also fundamental to the enriching experience? You know, I would say that what would have happened is you would have had a Doom looking but Quake feeling game eight months earlier and then maybe six months after Quake actually shipped, then there would have been the full running on a Pentium, six degree of freedom graphics engine type things there. So it's not that it wouldn't have been there. It would have been something amazingly cool earlier and then something even cooler somewhat later where I would much rather have gone and done two one year development efforts. I've cycled them through. I've been a little more pragmatic about that rather than killing us ourselves on the whole Quake development. But I would say it's obviously things worked out well in the end, but looking back and saying, how would I optimize and do things differently? That did seem to be a clear case where I going ahead and we had enormous momentum on Doom. We did Doom two as the kind of commercial boxed version after our shareware success with the original, but we could have just made another Doom game adding those new features in. It would have been huge. We would have learned all the same lessons, but faster. And it would have given six degree of freedom and Pentium class systems a little bit more time to get mainstream because we did cut out a lot of people with the hardware requirements for Quake. Was there any dark moments for you personally, psychologically in having such harsh deadlines and having to solve so many difficult technical challenges? So I've never really had really dark black places. I mean, I can't necessarily put myself in anyone else's shoes, but I understand a lot of people have significant challenges with kind of their mental health and wellbeing. And I've been super stressed. I've been unhappy as a teenager in various ways, but I've never really gone to a very dark place. I just seem to be largely immune to what really wrecks people. I mean, I've had plenty of time when I'm very unhappy and miserable about something, but it's never hit me like, I believe it winds up hitting some other people. I've borne up well under whatever stresses have kind of fallen on me. And I've always coped best on that when all I need to do is usually just kind of bear down on my work. I pull myself out of whatever hole I might be slipping into by actually making progress. I mean, maybe if I was in a position where I was never able to make that progress, I could have slid down further, but I've always been in a place where, okay, a little bit more work, maybe I'm in a tough spot here, but I always know if I just keep pushing, eventually I break through and I make progress, I feel good about what I'm doing. And that's been enough for me so far in my life. Have you seen it in the distance, like ideas of depression or contemplating suicide? Have you seen those things far? So what was interesting, when I was a teenager, I was probably on some level a troubled youth. I was unhappy most of my teenage years. I really, I wanted to be on my own doing programming all the time. As soon as I was 18, 19, even though I was poor, I was doing exactly what I wanted and I was very happy, but high school was not a great time for me. And I had a conversation with like the school counselor and they're kind of running their script. It's like, okay, it's kind of a weird kid here. Let's carefully probe around. It's like, do you ever think about ending it all? I'm like, no, of course not. Never, not at all. This is temporary, things are going to be better. And that's always been kind of the case for me. And obviously that's not that way for everyone and other people do react differently. What was your escape from the troubled youth, like music, video games, books? How did you escape from a world that's full of cruelty and suffering and that's absurd? Yeah, I mean, I was not a victim of cruelty and suffering. It's like, I was an unhappy, somewhat petulant youth in my point where I'm not putting myself up with anybody else's suffering, but I was unhappy objectively. And the things that I did that very much characterized my childhood were I had books, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons, arcade games, video games. Like some of my fondest childhood memories are the convenience stores, the 711s and Quick Trips, because they had a spinner rack of comic books and they had a little side room with two or three video games, arcade games in it. And that was very much my happy place. If I could, I get my comic books and if I could go to a library and go through those little zero, zero, zero section where computer books were supposed to be. And there were a few sad little books there, but still just being able to sit down and go through that. And I read a ridiculous number of books, both fiction and nonfiction as a teenager. And my rebelling in high school was just sitting there with my nose in a book, ignoring the class through lots of it. And teachers had a range of reactions to that, some more accepting of it than others. I'm with you on that. So let us return to Quake for a bit with the technical challenges. What everything together from the networking to the graphics, what are some things you remember that were innovations you had to come up with in order to make it all happen? Yeah, so there were a bunch of things on Quake where on the one hand, the idea that I built my own programming language to implement the game in. Looking back, and I try to tell people, it's like every high level programmer sometime in their career goes through and they invent their own language. It just seems to be a thing that's pretty broadly done. People will be like, I'm gonna go write a computer programming language. And I don't regret having done it, but after that, I switched from Quake C, my quirky little pseudo object oriented or entity oriented language there. Quake two went back to using DLLs with C and then Quake three, I implemented my own C interpreter or compiler, which was a much smarter thing to do that I should have done originally for Quake. But building my own language was an experience. I learned a lot from that. And then there was a generation of game programmers that learned programming with Quake C, which I feel kind of bad about, because we give JavaScript a lot of crap, but Quake C was nothing to write home about there. But it allowed people to do magical things. You get into programming, not because you love the BNF syntax of a language, it's because the language lets you do something that you cared about. And here's very much, you could do something in a whole beautiful three dimensional world. And the idea and the fact that the code for the game was out there, you could say, I liked the shotgun, but I want it to be more bad ass. You go in there and say, okay, now it does 200 points damage. And then you go around with a big grin on your face, blowing up monsters all over the game. So yeah, it is not what I would do today going back with that language, but that was a big part of it. Learning about the networking stuff, because it's interesting where I learned these things by reading books. So I would get a book on networking and find something, I read all about it and learn, okay, packets, they can be out of order or lost or duplicated. These are all the things that can theoretically happen to packets. So I wind up spending all this time thinking about how do we deal about all of that? And it turns out, of course, in the real world, those are things that yes, theoretically can happen with multiple routes, but they really aren't things that your 99.999% of your packets have to deal with. So there was learning experiences about lots of that. Like why, when TCP is appropriate versus UDP and how if you do things in UDP, you wind up reinventing TCP badly in almost all cases. So there's good arguments for using both for different game technology, different parts of the game process, transitioning from level to level and all. But the graphics were the showcase of what Quake was all about. It was this graphics technology that nobody had seen there. And it was a while before there were competitive things out there. And it went a long time internally really not working where we were even building levels where the game just was not at all shippable with large fractions of the world, like disappearing, not being there, or being really slow in various parts of it. And it was this act of faith. It's like, I think I'm gonna be able to fix this. I think I'm gonna be able to make this work. And lots of stuff changed where the level designers would build something and then have to throw it away as something fundamental and the kind of graphics or level technology changed. And so there were two big things that contributed to making it possible at that timeframe. Two new things. There was certainly hardcore optimized low level assembly language. And this was where I had hired Michael Abrash away from Microsoft. And he had been one of my early inspirations where back in the soft disk days, the library of magazines that they had, some of my most treasured ones were Michael Abrash's articles in Dr. Dobbs journal. And it was amazing after all of our success in Doom, we were able to kind of hit him up and say, hey, we'd like you to come work at id Software. And he was in the senior technical role at Microsoft. And he was on track for, and this was right when Microsoft was starting to take off. And I did eventually convince him that what we were doing was gonna be really amazing with Quake. It was gonna be something nobody had seen before. It had these aspects of what we were talking about. We had metaverse talk back then. We had read Snow Crash and we knew about this. And Michael was big into the science fiction and we would talk about all that and kind of spin this tale. And it was some of the same conversations that we have today about the metaverse, about how you could have different areas linked together by portals and you could have user generated content and changing out all of these things. So you really were creating the metaverse with Quake. And we talked about things like, Duke used to be advertised as a virtual reality experience. That was the first wave of virtual reality was in the late 80s and early 90s, you had like the Lawn Mower Man movie and you had time in Newsweek talking about the early VPL headsets. And of course that cratered so hard that people didn't wanna look at virtual reality for decades afterwards, where it was just, it was smoke and mirrors. It was not real in the sense that you could actually do something real and valuable with it. But still we had that kind of common set of talking points. And we were talking about what these games could become and how you'd like to see people building all of these creative things. Because we were seeing an explosion of work with Doom at that time, where people were doing amazingly cool things. Like we saw cooler levels that we had built coming out of the user community. And then people finding ways to change the characters in different ways. And it was great. And we knew what we were doing in Quake was removing those last things. There was some quirky things with a couple of the data types that didn't work right for overriding. And then the core thing about the programming model. And I was definitely going to hit all of those in Quake. But the graphics side of it was still, I knew what I wanted to do. And it was one of these hubris things where it's like, well, so far I've been able to kind of kick everything that I set out to go do. But Quake was definitely a little bit more than could be comfortably chewed at that point. And, but Michael was one of the strongest programmers and graphics programmers that I knew. And he was one of the people that I trusted to write assembly code better than I could. And there's a few people that I can point to about things like this where I'm a world class optimizer. I mean, I make things go fast, but I recognize there's a number of people that can write tighter assembly code, tighter SIMD code or tighter CUDA code than I can write. My best strengths are a little bit more at the system level. I mean, I'm good at all of that, but the most leverage comes from making the decisions that are a little bit higher up where you figure out how to change your large scale problems so that these lower level problems are easier to do or it makes it possible to do them in a uniquely fast way. So most of my big wins in a lot of ways from all the way from the early games through VR and the aerospace work that I'm doing or did, and hopefully the AI work that I'm working on now is finding an angle on something that means you trade off something that you maybe think you need, but it turns out you don't need. And by making a sacrifice in one place, you can get big advantages in another place. Is it clear at which level of the system those big advantages can be gained? It's not always clear. And that's why the thing that I try to make one of my core values, and I proselytize to a lot of people is trying to know the entire stack, trying to see through everything that happens. And it's almost impossible on like the web browser level of things where there's so many levels to it, but you should at least understand what they all are, even if you can't understand all the performance characteristics at each level, but it goes all the way down to literally the hardware. So what is this chip capable of? And what is this software that you're writing capable of? And then with this architecture you put on top of that, then the ecosystem around it, all the people that are working on it. So there are all these decisions and they're never made in a globally optimal way, but sometimes you can drive a thread of global optimality through it. You can't look at everything, it's too complicated, but sometimes you can step back up and make a different decision. And we kind of went through this on the graphic side on Quake, where in some ways it was kind of bad where Michael would spend his time writing, like I'd rough out the basic routines, like, okay, here's our span rasterizer. And he would spend a month writing this beautiful cycle optimized piece of assembly language that does what I asked it to do. And he did it faster than like my original code would do, or probably what I would be able to do even if I had spent that month on it. But then we'd have some cases when I'd be like, okay, well, I figured out at this higher level instead of drawing these in a painter's order here, I do a span buffer and it cuts out 30% or 40% of all of these pixels, but it means you need to rewrite kind of this interface of all of that. And I could tell that wore on him a little bit, but in the end it was the right thing to do where we wound up changing that rasterization approach and we wound up with a super optimized assembly language core loop and then a good system around it which minimized how much that had to be called. And so in order to be able to do this kind of system level thinking, whether we're talking about game development, aerospace, nuclear energy, AI, VR, you have to be able to understand the hardware, the low level software, the high level software, the design decisions, the whole thing, the full stack of it. Yeah, and that's where a lot of these things become possible. When you're really, when you're bringing the future forward, I mean, there's a pace that everything just kind of glides towards where we have a lot of progress that's happening at such a different, so many different ways you kind of slide towards progress just left to your own, programs just get faster. For a while it wasn't clear if they were gonna get fatter more than they get, quicker than they get faster and it cancels out, but it is clear now in retrospect, no, programs just get faster and have gotten faster for a long time. But if you wanna do something like back at that original talking about scrolling games, say what, this needs to be five times faster. Well, we can wait six years and just it'll naturally get that much faster at that time or you come up with some really clever way of doing it. So there are those opportunities like that in a whole bunch of different areas. Now, most programmers don't need to be thinking about that. There's not that many, there's a lot of opportunities for this, but it's not everyone's work a day type stuff. So everyone doesn't have to know how all these things work. They don't have to know how their compiler works, how the processor chip manages cache eviction and all these low level things. But sometimes there are powerful opportunities that you can look at and say, we can bring the future five years faster. We can do something that, wouldn't it be great if we could do this? Well, we can do it today if we make a certain set of decisions. And it is in some ways smoke and mirrors where you say it's like, Doom was a lot of smoke and mirrors where people thought it was more capable than it actually was, but we picked the right smoke and mirrors to deploy in the game where by doing this, people will think that it's more general. We are gonna amaze them with what they've got here and they won't notice that it doesn't do these other things. So smart decision making at that point, that's where that kind of global holistic top down view can work. And I'm really a strong believer that technology should be sitting at that table having those discussions because you do have cases where you say, well, you wanna be the Jonathan Ivy or whatever, where it's a pure design solution. And that's in some cases now where you truly have almost infinite resources. Like if you're trying to do a scrolling game on the PC now, you don't even have to talk to a technology person. You can just have, any intern can make that go run as fast as it needs to there and it can be completely design based. But if you're trying to do something that's hard, either that can't be done for resources like VR on a mobile chip set, or that we don't even know how to do yet, like artificial general intelligence, it's probably going to be a matter of coming at it from an angle. Like, I mean, for AGI, we have some of like what are some of the hudder principles about how you can AXI or some of the, there are theoretical ways that you can say, this is the optimal learning algorithm that can solve everything, but it's completely impractical. You just can't do that. So clearly you have to make some concessions for general intelligence and nobody knows what the right ones are yet. So people are taking different angles of attack. I hope I've got something clever to come up with in that space. It's been surprising to me. And I think perhaps it is a principle of progress that smoke and mirrors somehow is the way you build the future. You kind of fake it till you make it and you almost always make it. And I think that's going to be the way we achieve AGI. That's going to be the way we build consciousness into our machines. There's philosophers debate about the Turing test is essentially about faking it till you make it. You start by faking it. And I think that always leads to making it because if we look at history. Arguments when, as soon as people start talking about qualia and consciousness and Chinese rooms and things, it's like, I just check out. I just don't think there's any value in those conversations. It's just like, go ahead, tell me it's not going to work. I'm going to do my best to try to make it work anyways. I don't know if you work with legged robots. There's a bunch of these. They sure as heck make me feel like they're cautious in a certain way that's not here today, but is you could see the kernel. It's like the flame, the beginnings of a flame. We don't have line of sight, but there's glimmerings of light in the distance for all of these things. Yeah, I'm hearing murmuring in a distant room. Well, let me ask you a human question here. You've in the game design space, you've done a lot of incredible work throughout, but in terms of game design, you have changed the world. And there's a few people around you that did the same. So famously there's some animosity, there's much love, but there's some animosity between you and John Romero. What is at the core of that animosity and human tension? So there really hasn't been for a long time. And even at the beginning, it's like, yes, I did push Romero out of the company. And this is one of the things that I look back, if I could go back telling my younger self some advice about things, the original founding kind of corporate structure of id Software really led to a bunch of problems. We started off with us as equal partners and we had a buy sell agreement because we didn't want outsiders to be telling us what to do inside the company. And that did lead to a bunch of the problems where I was sitting here going, it's like, all right, I'm working harder than anyone. I'm doing these technologies, nobody's done before, but we're all equal partners. And then I see somebody that's not working as hard. And I mean, I can't say I was the most mature about that. I was 20 something years old and it did bother me when I'm like, everybody, okay, we need to all pull together and we've done it before everybody. We know we can do this if we get together and we grind it all out, but not everybody wanted to do that for all time. And I was the youngest one of the crowd there. I had different sets of kind of backgrounds and motivations and left at that point where it was, all right, either everybody has to be contributing like up to this level or they need to get pushed out was not, that was not a great situation. And I look back on it and know that we pushed people out of the company that could have contributed if there was a different framework for them. And the modern kind of Silicon Valley, like let your stock vest over a time period and maybe it's non voting stock and all those different things. We knew nothing about any of that. I mean, we didn't know what we were doing in terms of corporate structure or anything. So if you think the framework was different, some of the human tension could have been a little bit. It almost certainly would have. I mean, I look back at that and it's like even trying to summon up in my mind, it's like, I know I was really, really angry about, like Romero not working as hard as I wanted him to work or not carrying his load on the design for Quake and coming up with things there. But he was definitely doing things. He made some of the best levels there. He was working with some of our external teams like Raven on the licensing side of things, but there were differences of opinion about it, but he landed right on his feet. He went and he got $20 million from Eidos to go do Ion Storm and he got to do things his way and spun up three teams simultaneously because that was always one of the challenging things in it where we were doing these single string, one project after another. And I think some of them wanted to grow the company more and I didn't because I knew people that were saying that, oh, companies turn to shit when you got 50 employees. It's just a different world there. And I loved our little dozen people working on the projects, but you can look at it and say, well, business realities matter. It's like, you're super successful here and we could take a swing and a miss on something, but you do it a couple of times and you're out of luck. There's a reason companies try to have multiple teams running at one time. And so that was, again, something I didn't really appreciate back then. So if you look past all that, you did create some amazing things together. What did you love about John Romero? What did you respect and appreciate about him? What did you admire about him? What did you learn from him? When I met him, he was the coolest programmer I had ever met. He had done all of this stuff. He had made all of these games. He had worked at one of the companies that I thought was the coolest at Origin Systems. And he knew all this stuff. He made things happen fast. And he was also kind of a polymath about this where he could do, he drew his own art. He made his own levels, as well as we worked on sound design systems on top of actually being a really good programmer. And we went through a little, it was kind of fun where one of the early things that we did where there was kind of the young buck bit going in where I was the new guy. And he was the top man programmer at the soft disk area. And eventually we had sort of a challenge over the weekend that we were gonna like race to implement this game, to port one of our PC games back down to the Apple II. And that was where we finally kind of became clear. It's like, okay, Carmack stands a little bit apart on the programming side of things. But Romero then very gracefully moved into, well, he'll work on the tools, he'll work on the systems, do some of the game design stuff, as well as contributing on, starting to lead the design aspects of a lot of things. So he was enormously valuable in the early stuff. And so much of Doom and even Quake have his stamp on it in a lot of ways. But he wasn't at the same level of focus that I brought to the work that we were doing there. And he really did, we hit such a degree of success that it was all in the press about that. The rockstar game programmers. I mean, it's the Beatles problem. Yeah, I mean, he ate it up and he did personify. There was the whole game developers with Ferraris that we had there. And I thought that led to some challenges there. But so much of the stuff that was great in the games did come from him. And I would certainly not take that away from him. And even after we parted ways and he took his swing with Eidos, in some ways, he was ahead of the curve with mobile gaming as well, where one of his companies after Eidos was working on feature phone game development. And I wound up doing some of that just before the iPhone crossing over into the iPhone phase there. And that was something that clearly did turn out to be a huge thing, although he was too early for what he was working on at that time. We've had pretty cordial relationships where I was happy to talk with him any time I'd run into him at a conference. I have actually had some other people just say, it's like, oh, you shouldn't go over there and give him the time of day. Or felt that Masters of Doom played things up in a way that I shouldn't be too happy with. But I'm OK with all of that. So you've still got love in your heart. Yeah, I mean, I just talked with him like last year, or I guess it was even this year, about mentioning that I'm going off doing this AI stuff. I'm going big into artificial intelligence. And he had a bunch of ideas for how AI is going to play into gaming. And asked if I was interested in collaborating. And it's not in line with what I'm doing. But I do wish almost everyone the best. I mean, I know I may not have partnered on the best of terms with some people. But I was thrilled to see Tom Hall writing VR games now. He wrote, I'm working on a game called Demio, which is really an awesome VR game. It's like Dungeons and Dragons. We all used to play Dungeons and Dragons together. That was one of the things. That was what we did on Sundays in the early days. I would Dungeon Master, and they'd all play. And so it really made me smile seeing Tom involved with an RPG game in virtual reality. You were the CTO of Oculus VR since 2013, and maybe less than a year involved in a bit in 2019. Oculus was acquired by Facebook Now Meta in 2014. You've spoken brilliantly about both the low level details, the experimental design, and the big picture vision of virtual reality. Let me ask you about the metaverse, the big question here, both philosophically and technically. How hard is it to build the metaverse? What is the metaverse in your view? You started with discussing and thinking about Quake as a kind of a metaverse. As you think about it today, what is the metaverse, the thing that could create this compelling user value, this experience that will change the world, and how hard is it to build it? So the term comes from Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash, which many of us had read back in the 90s. It was one of those kind of formative books. And there was this sense that the possibilities and kind of the freedom and unlimited capabilities to build a virtual world that does whatever you want, whatever you ask of it, has been a powerful draw for generations of developers, game developers specifically, and people that are thinking about more general purpose applications. So we were talking about that back in the Doom and Quake days about how do you wind up with an interconnected set of worlds that you kind of visit from one to another. And as web pages were becoming a thing, you start thinking about what is the interactive kind of 3D based equivalent of this. And there were a lot of really bad takes. You had like Vermol and virtual reality markup languages. And there's aspects like that that came from people saying, well, what kind of capabilities should we develop to enable this? And that kind of capability first work has usually not panned out very well. On the other hand, we have successful games that started with things like Doom and Quake and communities that formed around those, whether it was server lists in the early days or literal portaling between different games, and then modern things that are on completely different order of magnitude like Minecraft and Fortnite that have 100 million plus users. I still think that that's the right way to go to build the metaverse is you build something that's amazing that people love and people wind up spending all their time in because it's awesome. And you expand the capabilities of that. So even if it's a very basic experience, if it's awesome. Minecraft is an amazing case study in so many things. That's basic as it gets. What's been able to be done with that is really enlightening. And there are other cases where, like right now, Roblox is basically a game construction kit aimed at kids. And that was a capability first play. And it's achieving scale that's on the same order of those things. So it's not impossible, but my preferred bet would be you make something amazing that people love and you make it better and better. And that's where I could say we could have gone back and followed a path like that in the early days if you just take the same game, whether it's when Activision demonstrated that you could make Call of Duty every year. And not only is it not bad, people love it. And it's very profitable. The idea that you could have taken something like that, take a great game, release a new version every year that lets the capabilities grow and expand to start saying it's like, OK, it's a game about running around and shooting things, but now you can bring your media into it. You can add persistence of social signs of life or whatever you want to add to it. I still think that's quite a good position to take. And I think that while Meta is doing a bottoms up capability approach with Horizon Worlds where it's a fairly general purpose, creators can build whatever they want in their sort of thing, it's hard to compare and compete with something like Fortnite, which also has enormous amounts of creativity even though it was not designed originally as a general purpose sort of thing. So we have examples on both sides. Me personally, I would have bet on trying to do entertainment, valuable destination first, and expanding from there. So can you imagine the thing that will be kind of, if we look back a couple of centuries from now and you think about the experiences that marked the singularity, the transition where most of our world moved into virtual reality, what do you think those experiences will look like? So I do think it's going to be kind of like the way the web slowly took over, where you're the frog in the pot of water that's slowly heating up, where having lived through all of that, I remember when it was shocking to start seeing the first website address on a billboard when you're like, hey, my computer world is infecting the real world. This is spreading out in some way. But when you look back and say, well, what made the web take off? And it wasn't a big bang sort of moment there. It was a bunch of little things that turned out not to even be the things that are relevant now that brought them into it. So I wonder if, I mean, like you said, you're not a historian. So maybe there is a historian out there that could really identify that moment, data driven way. It could be like MySpace or something like that. Maybe the first major social network that really reached into non geek world or something like that. I think that's kind of the fallacy of historians, though, looking for some of those kind of primary dominant causes where so many of these things are like we see an exponential curve. But it's not because like one thing is going exponential. It's because we have hundreds of little sigmoid curves overlapped on top of each other. And they just happen to keep adding up so that you've got something kind of going exponential at any given point. But no single one of them was the critical thing. There were dozens and dozens of things. I mean, seeing the transitions of stuff like as obviously MySpace giving way to other things, but even like blogging giving way to social media and getting resurrected in other guises. And the memes with the dancing baby GIF or whatever the all your base now belong to us. Whatever those early memes that led to the modern memes and the different evolution of humor on the internet that I'm sure the historians will also write books about from the different website that support to create the infrastructure for that humor like Reddit and all that kind of stuff. So people will go back, and they will name firsts and critical moments. But it's probably going to be a poor approximation of what actually happens. And we've already seen in the VR space where it didn't play out the way we thought it would in terms of what was going to be like when the modern era of VR basically started with my E3 demo of Doom 3 on the Rift prototype. So we're like first person shooters in VR, match made in heaven, right? And that didn't work out that way at all. They have the most comfort problems with it. And then the most popular virtual reality app is Beat Saber, which nobody predicted back then. What's that make you like from first principles if you were to reverse engineer that? Why are these silly fun games the most? It actually makes very clear sense when you analyze it from hindsight and look at the engineering reasons where it's not just that it was a magical quirky idea. It was something that played almost perfectly to what turned out to be the real strengths of VR where the one thing that I really underestimated importance in VR was the importance of the controllers. I was still thinking we could do a lot more with the game pad and just the amazingness of taking any existing game, being able to move your head around and look around, that that was really amazing. But the controllers were super important. But the problem is so many things that you do with the controllers just suck. It feels like it breaks the illusion like trying to pick up glasses with the controllers where you're like, oh, use the grip button when you're kind of close and it'll snap into your hand. All of those things are unnatural actions that you do them and it's still part of the VR experience. But Beat Saber winds up playing only to the strengths. It completely hides all the weaknesses of it because you are holding something in your hand. You keep a solid grip on it the whole time. It slices through things without ever bumping into things. You never get into the point where, I'm knocking on this table, but in VR, my hand just goes right through it. So you've got something that slices through. So it's never your brain telling you, oh, I should have hit something. You've got a lightsaber here. It's just, you expect it to slice through everything. Audio and music turned out to be a really powerful aspect of virtual reality where you're blocking the world off and constructing the world around you. And being something that can run efficiently on even this relatively low powered hardware and can have a valuable loop in a small amount of time where a lot of modern games, you're supposed to sit down and play it for an hour just to get anywhere. Sometimes a new game takes an hour to get through the tutorial level. And that's not good for VR for a couple reasons. You do still have the comfort issues if you're moving around at all, but you've also got just discomfort from the headset, battery lifespan on the mobile versions. So having things that do break down into three and four minute windows of play, that turns out to be very valuable from a gameplay standpoint. So it winds up being kind of a perfect storm of all of these things that are really good. It doesn't have any of the comfort problems. You're not navigating around. You're standing still. All the stuff flies at you. It has placed audio strengths. It adds the whole fitness in VR. Nobody was thinking about that back at the beginning. And it turns out that that is an excellent daily fitness thing to be doing. If you go play an hour of Beat Saber or Supernatural or something, that is legit solid exercise. And it's more fun than doing it just about any other way there. So that's kind of the arcade stage of things. If I were to say with my experience with VR, the thing that I think is powerful is the, maybe it's not here yet, but the degree to which it is immersive in the way that Quake is immersive. It takes you to another world. For me, because I'm a fan of role playing games, the Elder Scrolls series, like Skyrim or even Daggerfall, it just takes you to another world. And when you're not in that world, you miss not being there. And then you just, you kind of want to stay there forever because life is shitty. And you just want to go to this place. Is that there was a time when we were kind of asked to come up with like, what's your view about VR? And my pitch was that it should be better inside the headset than outside. It's the world as you want it. And everybody thought that was dystopian. And like, that's like, oh, you're just going to forget about the world outside. And I don't get that mindset where the idea that if you can make the world better inside the headset than outside, you've just improved the person's life that has a headset that can wear it. And there are plenty of things that we just can't do for everyone in the real world. Everybody can't have Richard Branson's Private Island, but everyone can have a private VR Island and it can have the things that they want on it. And there's a lot of these kind of rivalrous goods in the real world that VR can just be better at. We can do a lot of things like that that can be very, very rich. So yeah, I want the, I think it's going to be a positive thing, this world where people want to go back into their headset, where it can be better than somebody that's living in a tiny apartment can have a palatial estate in virtual reality. They can have all their friends from all over the world come over and visit them without everybody getting on a plane and meeting in some place and dealing with all the other logistics hassles. There is real value in the presence that you can get for remote meetings. It's all the little things that we need to sort out, but those are things that we have line of sight on. People that have been in like a good VR meeting using work rooms where you can say, oh, that was better than a Zoom meeting. But of course it's more of a hassle to get into it. Not everyone has the headset. Interoperability is worse. You can't have, you cap out at a certain number. There's all these things that need to be fixed, but that's one of those things you can look at and say, we know there's value there. We just need to really grind hard, file off all the rough edges and make that possible. So you do think we have line of sight because there's a reason like, I do this podcast in person, for example. So doing it remotely, it's not the same. And if somebody were to ask me why it's not the same, I wouldn't be able to write down exactly why. But you're saying that it's possible, whatever the magic is for in person interaction, that immersiveness of the experience, we are almost there. Yes, so the idea of like, I'm doing a VR interview with someone. I'm not saying it's here right now, but you can see glimmers of what it should be. And we largely know what would need to be fixed and improved to, like you say, there's a difference between at remote interview doing a podcast over Zoom or something and face to face. There's that sense of presence, that immediacy, the super low latency responsiveness, being able to see all the subtle things there, just occupying the same field of view. And all of those are things that we absolutely can do in VR. And that simple case of a small meeting with a couple of people, that's the much easier case than everybody thinks the Ready Player One multiverse with a thousand people going across a huge bridge to amazing places, that's harder in a lot of other technical ways. Not to say we can't also do that, but that's further away and has more challenges. But this small thing about being able to have a meeting with one or a few people and have it feel real, feel like you're there, like you have the same interactions and talking with them, you get subtle cues as we start getting eye and face tracking and some of the other things on high end headsets. A lot of that is going to come over and it doesn't have to be as good. This is an important thing that people miss where there was a lot of people that, especially rich people that would look at VR and say, it's like, oh, this just isn't that good. And I'd say, it's like, well, you've already been courtside backstage and on pit row and you've done all of these experiences because you get to do them in real life. But most people don't get to. And even if the experience is only half as good, if it's something that they never would have gotten to do before, it's still a very good thing. And as we can just, we can push that number up over time. It has a minimum viable value level when it does something that is valuable enough to people, as long as it's better inside the headset on any metric than it is outside and people choose to go there, we're on the right path. And we have a value gradient that I'm just always hammering on. We can just follow this value gradient, just keep making things better rather than going for that one, close your eyes, swing for the fences, kind of silver bullet approach. Well, I wonder if there's a value gradient for in person meetings, because if you get that right, I mean, that would change the world. Yeah. That it doesn't need to, I mean, you don't need a ready player one. But I wonder if there's that value gradient you can follow along, because if there is and you follow it, then there'll be a certain like phase shift at a certain point where people will shift from Zoom to this. I wonder, what are the bottlenecks? Is it software, is it hardware? Is it like, is it all about latency? So I have big arguments internally about strategic things like that, where like the next headset that's coming out that we've made various announcements about is gonna be a higher end headset, more expensive, more features. Lots of people wanna make those trade offs. We'll see what the market has to say about the exact trade offs we've made here. But if you wanna replace Zoom, you need to have something that everybody has. So you like cheaper. I like cheaper because also lighter and cheaper wind up being a virtuous cycle there where expensive and more features tends to also lead towards heavier. And it just kind of goes, it's like, let's add more features. The features are not, they have physical presence and weight and draw from batteries and all of those things. So I've always favored a lower end, cheaper, faster approach. That's why I was always behind the mobile side of VR rather than the higher end PC headsets. And I think that's proven out well. But there's, ideally we have a whole range of things, but if you've only got one or two things, it's important that those two things cover the scope that you think is most important. When we're in a world when it's like cell phones and there's 50 of them on the market covering every conceivable ecological niche you want, that's gonna be great, but we're not gonna be there for a while. Where are the bottlenecks? Is it the hardware or the software? Yeah, so right now you can play, you can get work rooms on Quest and you can set up these things and it's a pretty good experience. It's surprisingly good. I haven't tried it. It's surprisingly good. Yeah, the voice latency is better on that than a lot better than a Zoom meeting. So you've got a more, a better sense of immediacy there. The expressions that you get from the current hardware with just kind of your controllers and your head is pretty realistic feeling. You've got a pretty good sense of being there with someone with it. Are these like avatars of people? Yeah. Do you get to see their body? Yeah. And they're sitting around a table? Yeah. And it feels better than Zoom? It feels better than you, yeah, better than you'd expect for that. It is definitely, yeah, I'd say it's quite a bit better than Zoom when everything's working right, but there's still all the rough edges of, the reason Zoom became so successful is because they just nailed the usability of everything. It's high quality with a absolutely first rate experience. And we are not there yet with any of the VR stuff. I'm trying to push hard to get, I keep talking about it's like, it needs to just be one click to make everything happen. And we're getting there in our home environment, not the whole work rooms application, but the main home where you can now kind of go over and click and invite, and it still winds up taking five times longer than it should, but we're getting close to that where you click there, they click on their button and then they're sitting there in this good presence with you, but latencies need to get a lot better. User interface needs to get a lot better. Ubiquity of the headsets needs to get better. We need to have a hundred million of them out there just so that everybody knows somebody that uses this all the time. Well, I think it's a virtuous cycle because I do think the interface is the thing that makes or breaks this kind of revolution. It's so interesting how like you said one click, but it's also like how you achieve that one click. I don't know. What is, can I ask a dark question? Maybe let's keep it outside of meta, but this is about meta, but also Google and big company. Are they able to do this kind of thing? It seems like, let me put on my cranky old man hat, is they seem to not do a good job of creating these user friendly interfaces as they get bigger and bigger as a company. Like Google has created some of the greatest interfaces ever early on in its, I mean, creating Gmail, just so many brilliant interfaces and it just seems to be getting crappier and crappier at that. Same with meta, same with Microsoft. It's just, it seems to get worse and worse at that. I don't know what it is, because you've become more conservative, careful, risk averse. Is that why? Can you speak to that? It's been really eye opening to me working inside a tech titan, where I had my small companies and then we're acquired by a midsize game publisher and then Oculus getting acquired by meta and meta has grown by a factor of many just in the eight years since the acquisition. So I did not have experience with this and it was interesting because I remember like previously my benchmark for kind of use of resources was some of the government programs I interacted with on the aerospace side. And I remember thinking there was, okay, there's an air force program and they spent $50 million and they didn't launch anything. They didn't even build anything. It was just kind of like they made a bunch of papers and had some parts in a warehouse and nothing came of it. It's like $50 million and I've had to radically recalibrate my sense of like how much money can be spent with mediocre resources. Where on the plus side, VR has turned out, we've built pretty much exactly what, we just passed the 10 year mark then from like my first demo of the Rift. And if I could have said what I wanted to have, it would have been a standalone inside out tracked 4K resolution headset that I, that could still plug into a PC for high end rendering. And that's exactly what we've got on Quest 2 right now. Yes, first of all, let's pause on that with me being cranky and everything. It's what Meta achieved with Oculus and so on is incredible. I mean, this is, when I thought about the future of VR, this is what I imagined in terms of hardware, I would say. And maybe in terms of the experience as well, but it's still not there somehow. On the one hand, we did kind of achieve it and win. And we've got, we've sold, we're a success right now, but the amount of resources that have gone into it, it winds up getting cluttered up in accounting where Mark did announce that they spent $10 billion a year, like on Reality Labs. Now Reality Labs covers a lot. It was, VR was not the large part of it. It also had Portal and Spark and the big AR research efforts. And it's been expanding out to include AI and other things there where there's a lot going on there. But $10 billion was just a number that I had trouble processing. It's just, I feel sick to my stomach thinking about that much money being spent. But that's how they demonstrate commitment to this, where it's not more so than like, yeah, Google goes and cancels all of these projects, different things like that, while Meta is really sticking with the funding of VR and AR is still further out with it. So there's something to be said for that. It's not just gonna vanish, the work's going in. I just wish it could be, all those resources could be applied more effectively because I see all these cases. I point out these examples of how a third party that we're kind of competing with in various ways. There's a number of these examples and they do work with a 10th of the people that we do internally and a lot of it comes from, yes, the small company can just go do it while in a big company, you do have to worry about, is there some SDK internally that you should be using because another team's making it, you have to have your cross functional group meetups for different things. You do have more concerns about privacy or diversity and equity and safety of different things, parental issues and things that a small startup company can just kind of cowboy off and do something interesting. And there's a lot more that is a problem that you have to pay attention to in the big companies, but I'm not willing to believe that we are within even a factor of two or four of what the efficiency could be. I am constantly kind of crying out for it's like, we can do better than this. And you wonder what the mechanisms to unlock that efficiency are. I don't, there is some sense in a large company that like an individual engineer might not believe that they can change the world. Maybe you delegate a little bit of the responsibility to be the one who changes the world in a big company, I think, but the reality is like the world will get changed by a single engineer anyway. So if whether inside Google or inside a startup, it doesn't matter, it's just like Google and Meta needs to help those engineers believe they're the ones that are gonna decrease that latency. It'll take one John Carmack, the 20 year old Carmack that's inside Meta right now to change everything. And I try to point that out and push people. It's like, try to go ahead. And when you see some, because there is, you get the silo mentality where you're like, okay, I know something's not right over there, but I'm staying in my lane here. And there's a couple of people that I can think about that are willing to just like hop all over the place and man, I treasure them. The people that are just willing to, they're fearless. They will go over and they will go rebuild the kernel and change this distribution and go in and hack a firmware over here to get something done right. And that is relatively rare. There's thousands of developers and you've got a small handful that are willing to operate at that level. And it's potentially risky for them. The politics are real in a lot of that. And I'm in the very much the privileged position of I'm more or less untouchable there where I've been dinged like twice for it's like you said something insensitive in that post and you should probably not say that. But for the most part, yes, I get away with, every week I'm posting something pretty loud and opinionated internally. And I think that's useful for the company, but yeah, it's rare to have a position like that. And I can't necessarily offer advice for how someone can do that. Well, you could offer advice to a company in general to give a little bit of freedom for the young wild, like the wildest ideas come from the young minds. And so you need to give the young minds freedom to think big and wild and crazy. And for that, they have to be opinionated. They have to think crazy ideas and thoughts and pursue them with a full passion without being slowed down by bureaucracy or managers and all that kind of stuff. Obviously startups really empower that, but big companies could too. And that's a design challenge for big companies to see how can you enable that? How can you empower that? Yeah, because the big company, there are so many resources there. And they do, amazing things do get accomplished, but there's so much more that could come out of that. And I'm always hopeful. I'm an optimist in almost everything. I think things can get better. I think that they can improve things that you go through a path and you're learning kind of what does and doesn't work. And I'm not ready to be fatalistic about the kind of the outcome of any of that. Me neither, I know too many good people inside of those large companies that are incredible. You have a friendship with Elon Musk. Often when I talk to him, he'll bring up how incredible of an engineer and just a big picture thinker you are. His huge amount of respect for you. I just, I've never been a fly in the wall between a discussion between the two of you. I just wonder, is there something you guys debate, argue about, discuss? Is there some interesting problems that the two of you think about? You come from different worlds. Maybe there's some intersection in aerospace. Maybe there's some intersection in your new efforts in artificial intelligence in terms of thinking. Is there something interesting you could say about sort of the debates the two of you have? So I think in some ways, we do have a kind of similar background where we're almost exactly the same age. And we had kind of similar programming backgrounds on the personal computers and even some of the books that we would read and things that would kind of turn us into the people that we are today. And I think there is a degree of sensibility similarities where we kind of call bullshit on the same things and kind of see the same opportunities in different technology. And there's that sense of, I always talk about the speed of light solutions for things. And he's thinking about kind of minimum manufacturing and engineering and operational standpoints for things. And so, I mean, I first met Elon right at the start of the aerospace era where I wasn't familiar with, I was still in my game dev bubble. I really wasn't familiar with all the startups that were going and being successful and what went on with PayPal and all of his different companies. But I met him as I was starting to do armadillo aerospace. And he came down with kind of his right hand propulsion guy. And we talked about rockets. What can we do with this? And it was kind of specific things about like how are our flight computers set up? What are different propellant options? You know, what can happen with different ways of putting things together? And then in some ways, he was certainly the biggest player in the sort of alt space community that was going on in the early 2000s. He was the most well funded, although his funding in the larger scheme of things compared to like a NASA or something like that was really tiny. It was a lot more than I had at the time. But it was interesting. I had a point years later when I realized, okay, my financial resources at this point are basically what Elon's was when he went all in on SpaceX and Tesla. And there's, I think in many corners, he does not get the respect that he should about being a wealthy person that could just retire. And he went all in where he was really going to, he could have gone bust. And there's plenty of people, you'd look at the sad athletes or entertainers that had all the money in the world and blew it. And he could have been the business case example of that. But the things that he was doing, space exploration, electrification of transportation, solar city type things, these are big world level things. And I have a great deal of admiration that he was willing to throw himself so completely into that because in contrast with myself, I was doing armadillo aerospace with this tightly bounded, it was John's crazy money at the time that had a finite limit on it. It was never going to impact me or my family if it completely failed. And I was still hedging my bets, working at id Software at the time when he had been really all in there. And I have a huge amount of respect for that. And people do not, the other thing I get irritated with is people that say, it's like, oh, Elon's just a business guy. He just got like, he was gifted the money and he's just kind of investing in all of this when he was really deeply involved in a lot of the decisions. Not all of them were perfect, but he cared very much about engine material selection, propellant selection. And for years he'd be kind of telling me, it's like, get off that hydrogen peroxide stuff. It's like, liquid oxygen is the only proper oxidizer for this. And the times that I've gone through the factories with him, we're talking very detailed things about like how this weld is made, how this sub assembly goes together, what are like startup shut down behaviors of the different things. So he is really in there at a very detailed level. And I think that he is the best modern example now of someone that tries to, that can effectively micromanage some decisions on things on both Tesla and SpaceX to some degree where he cares enough about it. I worry a lot that he stretched too thin that you get Boring Company and Neuralink and Twitter and all the other possible things there where I know I've got limits on how much I can pay attention to that I have to kind of box off different amounts of time. And I look back at like at my aerospace side of things, it's like, I did not go all in on that. I did not commit myself at a level that it would have taken to be successful there. And I, yeah, and it's kind of a weird thing just like having a discussion with him. He's the richest man in the world right now, but he operates on a level that is still very much in my wheelhouse on a technical side of things. So. That doing that systems level type of thinking where you can go to the low level details and go up high to the big picture. Do you think in aerospace arena in the next five, 10 years, do you think we're gonna put a human on Mars? Like, what do you think is the interesting? No, I do, in fact, I made a bet with someone with a group of people kind of this about whether boots on Mars by 2030. And this was kind of a fun story because I was at an Intel sponsored event and we had a bunch of just world class, brilliant people. And we were talking about computing stuff, but the after dinner conversation was like, what are some other things? How are they gonna go in the future? And one of the ones tossed up on the whiteboard was like boots on Mars by 2030. And most of the people in the room thought, yes, I thought that like, SpaceX is kicking ass. We've got all this possible stuff. Seems likely that it's gonna go that way. And I said, no, I think less than 50% chance that it's going to make it there. And people were kind of like, oh, why the pessimism or whatever? And of course I'm an optimist at almost everything, but for me to be the one kind of outlier saying, no, I don't think so. Then I started saying some of the things I said, well, let's be concrete about it. Let's bet $10,000 that it's not gonna happen. And this was really a startling thing to see that I, again, room full of brilliant people, but as soon as like money came on the line and they were like, do I wanna put 10,000? I was not the richest person in the room. There were people much better off than I was. There's a spectrum, but as soon as they started thinking, it's like, oh, I could lose money by keeping my position right now. And all these engineers, they engaged their brain. They started thinking, it's like, okay, launch windows, launch delays, like how many times would it take to get this right? What historical precedents do we have? And then it mostly came down to, it's like, well, what about in transit by 2030? And then what about different things or would you go for 2032? But one of the people did go ahead and was optimistic enough to make a bet with me. So I have a $10,000 bet that by 2030, I think it's gonna happen shortly thereafter. I think there will probably be infrastructure on Mars by 2030, but I don't think that we'll have humans on Mars on 2030. I think it's possible, but I think it's less than a 50% chance, so I felt safe making that bet. Well, I think you had an interesting point. Correct me if I'm wrong. That's a dark one. That should perhaps help people appreciate Elon Musk, which is, in this particular effort, Elon is critical to the success. SpaceX seems to be critical to, you know, humans on Mars by 2030 or thereabouts. So if something happens to Elon, then all of this collapses. And this is in contrast to the other $10,000 bet I made kind of recently, and that was self driving cars at like a level five running around cities. And people have kind of nitpicked that that we probably don't mean exactly level five, but the guy I'm having the bet with is, we're gonna be, we know what we mean about this. Jeff Atwood. Yeah, coding horror and stack overflow and all. But yeah, I mean, he doesn't think that people are gonna be riding around in robo taxis in 2030 in major cities, just like you take an Uber now. And I think it will. You think it will. And the difference is, everybody looks at this, it's like, oh, but Tesla's been wrong for years. They've been promising it for years and it's not here yet. And the reason this is different than the bet with Mars is Mars really is more than is comfortable a bet on Elon Musk. That is his thing and he is really going to move heaven and earth to try to make that happen. And perhaps not even SpaceX, perhaps just Elon Musk. Yeah, because if Elon went away and SpaceX went public and got a board of directors, there are more profitable things they could be doing than focusing on human presence on Mars. So this really is a sort of personal thing there. And in contrast with that, self driving cars have a dozen credible companies working really hard. And while, yes, it's going slower than most people thought it would, betting against that is a bet against almost the entire world in terms of all of these companies that have all of these incentives. It's not just one guy's passion project. And I do think that it is solvable. Although I recognize it's not 100% chance because it's possible the long tail of self driving problems winds up being an AGI complete problem. I think there's plenty of value to mine out of it with narrow AI. And I think that it's going to happen probably more so than people expect. But it's that whole sigmoid curve where you overestimate the near term progress and you underestimate the long term progress. And I think self driving is going to be like that. And I think 2030 is still a pretty good bet. Yeah, unfortunately, self driving is a problem that is safety critical, meaning that if you don't do it well, people get hurt. But the other side of that is people are terrible drivers. So it is not going to be, that's probably going to be the argument that gets it through is like we can save 10,000 lives a year by taking imperfect self driving cars and letting them take over a lot of driving responsibilities. It's like 30,000 people a year die in auto accidents right now in America. And a lot of those are preventable. And the problem is you'll have people that every time a Tesla crashes into something, you've got a bunch of people that literally have vested interests shorting Tesla to come out and make it the worst thing in the world. And people will be fighting against that. But optimist in me again, I think that we will have systems that are statistically safer than human drivers and we will be saving thousands and thousands of lives every year when we can hand over more of those responsibilities to it. I do still think as a person who studied this problem very deeply from a human side as well, it's still an open problem how good slash bad humans are driving. It's a kind of funny thing we say about each other. Oh, humans suck at driving. Everybody except you, of course. Like we think we're good at driving. But I, after really studying it, I think you start to notice, you know, because I watched hundreds of hours of humans driving with the projects of this kind of thing. You've noticed that even with the distraction, even with everything else, humans are able to do some incredible things with the attention, even when you're just looking at the smartphone, just to get cues from the environment to make last second decisions, to use instinctual type of decisions that actually save your ass time and time and time again. And are able to do that with so much uncertainty around you in such tricky dynamic environments. I don't know. I don't know exactly how hard is it to beat that kind of skill of common sense reasoning. This is one of those interesting things that there have been a lot of studies about how experts in their field usually underestimate the progress that's going to happen because an expert thinks about all the problems they deal with and they're like, damn, I'm going to have a hard time solving all of this. And they filter out the fact that they are one expert in a field of thousands. And you think about, yeah, I can't do all of that. And you sometimes forget about the scope of the ecosystem that you're embedded in. And if you think back eight years, very specifically, the state of AI and machine learning, where was that? We had just gotten Resnets probably at that point. And you look at all the amazing magical things that have happened in eight years, and they do kind of seem to be happening a little faster in recent years also. And you project that eight more years into the future, where, again, I think there's a 50% chance we're going to have signs of life of AGI, which we can put through driver's ed if we need to to actually build self driving cars. And I think that the narrow systems are going to have real value demonstrated well before then. So signs of life in AGI, you've mentioned that, okay, first of all, you're one of the most brilliant people on this earth. You could be solving a number of different problems, as you've mentioned. Your mind was attracted to nuclear energy. Obviously, virtual reality with the metaverse is something you could have a tremendous impact on. So I do want to say a quick thing about nuclear energy, where this is something that so precisely feels like aerospace before SpaceX, where from everything that I know about all of these, the physics of this stuff hasn't changed. And the reasons why things are expensive now are not fundamental. Somebody should be going into a really hard Elon Musk style at fission, economical fission, not fusion, where the fusion is the kind of the darling of people that want to go and do nuclear because it doesn't have the taint that fission has in a lot of people's minds. But it's an almost absurdly complex thing where nuclear fusion, as you look at the tokamaks or any of the things that people are building, and it's doing all of this infrastructure just at the end of the day to make something hot that you can then turn into energy through a conventional power plant. And all of that work, which we think we've got line of sight on, but even if it comes out, then you have to do all of that immensely complex expensive stuff just to make something hot, where nuclear fission is basically you put these two rocks together and they get hot all by themselves. That is just that much simpler. It's just orders of magnitude simpler. And the actual rocks, the refined uranium, is not very expensive. It's a couple percent of the cost of electricity. That's why I made that point where you could have something which was five times less efficient than current systems. And if the rest of the plant was a whole bunch cheaper, you could still be super, super valuable. So how much of the pie do you think could be solved by nuclear energy by fission? So how much could it become the primary source of energy on Earth? It could be most of it. Like the reserves of uranium, as it stands now, could not power the whole Earth. But you get into breeder reactors and thorium and things like that that you do for conventional fission. There is enough for everything. Now, I mean, solar, photovoltaic has been amazing. One of my current projects is working on an off grid system. And it's been fun just kind of, again, putting my hands on all this, stripping the wires and wiring things together and doing all of that. And just having followed that a little bit from the outside over the last couple decades, there's been semiconductor like magical progress in what's going on there. So I'm all for all of that. But it doesn't solve everything. And nuclear really still does seem like the smart money bet for what you should be getting for baseband on a lot of things. And solar may be cheaper for peaking over air conditioning loads during the summer and things that you can push around in different ways. But it's one of those things that's it's just strange how we've had the technology sitting there. But these non technical reasons on the social optics of it has been this major forcing function for something that really should be at the cornerstone of all of the world's concerns with energy. It's interesting how the non technical factors have really dominated something that is so fundamental to the existence of the human race as we know it today. And much of the troubles of the world, including wars in different parts of the world like Ukraine is energy based. And yeah, it's just sitting right there to be solved. That said, I mean, to me personally, I think it's clear that if AGI were to be achieved, that would change the course of human history. So AGI wise, I was making this decision about what do I want to focus on after VR. And I'm still working on VR regularly. I spend a day a week kind of consulting with Meta. And Boz styles me the consulting CTO. It's kind of like the Sherlock Holmes that comes in and consults on some of the specific tough issues. And I'm still pretty passionate about all of that. But I have been figuring out how to compartmentalize and force that into a smaller box to work on some other things. And I did come down to this decision between working on economical nuclear fission or artificial general intelligence. And the fission side of things, I've got a bunch of interesting things going that way. But that would be a fairly big project thing to do. I don't think it needs to be as big as people expect. I do think something original SpaceX sized, you build it, power your building off of it, and then the government, I think, will come around to what you need to. Everybody loves an existence proof. I think it's possible somebody should be doing this. But it's going to involve some politics. It's going to involve decent sized teams and a bunch of this cross functional stuff that I don't love. While the artificial general intelligence side of things, it seems to me like this is the highest leverage moment for potentially a single individual, potentially in the history of the world, where the things that we know about the brain, about what we can do with artificial intelligence, nobody can say absolutely on any of these things. But I am not a madman for saying that it is likely that the code for artificial general intelligence is going to be tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. This is code that conceivably one individual could write, unlike writing a new web browser or operating system. And based on the progress that AI, machine learning, has made in the recent decade, it's likely that the important things that we don't know are relatively simple. There's probably a handful of things. My bet is that I think there's less than six key insights that need to be made. Each one of them can probably be written on the back of an envelope. We don't know what they are. But when they're put together in concert with GPUs at scale and the data that we all have access to, that we can make something that behaves like a human being or like a living creature and that can then be educated in whatever ways that we need to get to the point where we can have universal remote workers where anything that somebody does mediated by a computer and doesn't require physical interaction that an AGI will be able to do. We can already simulate the equivalent of the Zoom meetings with avatars and synthetic deep fakes and whatnot. We can definitely do that. We have superhuman capabilities on any narrow thing that we can formalize and make a loss function for. But there's things we don't know how to do now. But I don't think they are unapproachably hard. Now, that's incredibly hubristic to say that it's like, but I think that what I said a couple years ago is a 50% chance that somewhere there will be signs of life of AGI in 2030. And I've probably increased that slightly. I may be at 55%, 60% now because I do think there's a little sense of acceleration there. So I wonder what the, and by the way, you also written that I bet with hindsight we will find that clear antecedents of all the critical remaining steps for AGI are already buried somewhere in the vast literature of today. So the ideas are already there. I think that's likely the case. One of the things that appeals to so many people, including me, about the promise of AGI is we know that we're only drinking from a straw from the fire hose of all the information out there. I mean, you look at just in a very narrowly bounded field like machine learning, like you can't read all the papers that come out all the time. You can't go back and read all the clever things that people did in the 90s or earlier that people have forgotten about because they didn't pan out at the time when they were trying to do them with 12 neurons. So this idea that, yeah, I think there are gems buried in some of the older literature that was not the path taken by everything. And you can see a herd mentality on the things that happen right now. It's almost funny to see. It's like, oh, Google does something, and OpenAI does something, Meta does something. They're the same people that all talk to each other, and they're all one upping each other, and they're all capable of implementing each other's work given a month or two after somebody has an announcement of that. But there's a whole world of possible approaches to machine learning. And I think that we probably will, in hindsight, go back and see it's like, yeah, that was kind of clearly predicted by this early paper here. And this turns out that if you do this and this and take this result from animal training and this thing from neuroscience over here and put it together and set up this curriculum for them to learn in, that that's kind of what it took. You don't have too many people now that are still saying it's not possible or it's going to take hundreds of years. And 10 years ago, you would get a collection of experts, and you would have a decent chunk on the margin that either say not possible or a couple hundred years, might be centuries. And the median estimate would be like 50, 70 years. And it's been coming down. And I know with me saying eight years for something, that still puts me on the optimistic side, but it's not crazy out in the fringes. And just being able to look at that at a meta level about the trend of the predictions going down there, the idea that something could be happening relatively soon. Now, I do not believe in fast takeoffs. That's one of the safety issues that people say, it's like, oh, it's going to go, boom, and the AI is going to take over the world. There's a lot of reasons I don't think that's a credible position. And I think that we will go from a point where we start seeing things that credibly look like animals behaviors. And I have a human voice box wired into them. It's like I tried to get Elon to say, it's like your pig in Neuralink, give it a human voice box and let it start learning human words. I think animal intelligence is closer to human intelligence than a lot of people like to think. And I think that culture and modalities of IO make the Gulf seem a lot bigger than it actually is. There's just that smooth spectrum of how the brain developed and cortexes and scaling of different things going on there. Culture modalities of IO, yes. Language is sort of lost in translation, conceals a lot of intelligence. So when you think about signs of life for AGI, you're thinking about human interpretable signs. So the example I give, if we get to the point where you've got a learning disabled toddler, some kind of real special needs child that can still interact with their favorite TV show and video game and can be trained and learn in some appreciably human like way. At that point, you can deploy an army of engineers, cognitive scientists, developmental education people. And you've got so many advantages there unlike real education where you can do rollbacks and AB testing and you can find a golden path through a curriculum of different things. If you get to that point, learning disabled toddler, I think that it's gonna be a done deal. But do you think we'll know when we see it? So there's been a lot of really interesting general learning progress from DeepMind, OpenAI a little bit too. I tend to believe that Tesla Autopilot deserves a lot more credit than it's getting for making progress on the general, on doing the multitask learning thing and increasing the number of tasks and automating that process of sort of learning from the edge, discovering the edge cases and learning from the edge cases. That is, it's really approaching from a different angle, the general learning problem of AGI. But the more clear approach comes from DeepMind where you have these kind of game situations and you build systems there. But I don't know, people seem to be quite... Yeah, there will always be people that just won't believe it and I fundamentally don't care. I mean, I don't care if they don't believe it. You know, when it starts doing people's jobs and I don't care about the philosophical zombie argument at all. Absolutely. But will you, do you think you will notice that something special has happened here? Because to me, I've been noticing a lot of special things. I think a lot of credit should go to DeepMind for AlphaZero. That was truly special. The self play mechanisms achieve sort of solve problems that used to be thought unsolvable like the game of Go. Also, I mean, protein folding, starting to get into that space where learning is doing... At first there's not, it wasn't end to end learning and now it's end to end learning of a very difficult previously thought unsolvable problem of protein folding. And so, yeah, where do you think would be a really magical moment for you? There have been incredible things happening in recent years. Like you say, all of the things from DeepMind and OpenAI that have been huge showpiece things. But when you really get down to it and you read the papers and you look at the way the models are going, it's still like a feed forward. You push something in, something comes out on the end. I mean, maybe there's diffusion models or Monte Carlo tree rollouts and different things going on, but it's not a being. It's not close to a being. That's going through a lifelong learning process. Do you want something that kind of gives signs of a being? What's the difference between a neural network, a feed forward neural network and a being? Where's the loop? Fundamentally, the brain is a recurrent neural network generating an action policy. I mean, it's implemented on a biological substrate. And it's interesting thinking about things like that where we know fundamentally the brain is not a convolutional neural network or a transformer. Those are specialized things that are very valuable for what we're doing, but it's not the way the brain's doing. Now, I do think consciousness and AI in general is a substrate independent mechanism where it doesn't have to be implemented the way the brain is, but if you've only got one existence proof, there's certainly some value in caring about what it says and does. And so the idea that anything that can be done with a narrow AI that you can quantify up a loss function for or reward mechanism, you're almost certainly going to be able to produce something that's more resource effective to train and deploy and use in an inference mode. You know, train a whole lot using an inference. But a living being is going to be something that's a continuous, lifelong learned task agnostic thing. So the lifelong learning is really important too. And the long term memory. So memory is a big weird part of that puzzle. And we've got, you know, again, I have all the respect in the world for the amazing things that are being done now, but sometimes they can be taken a little bit out of context with things like there's some smoke and mirrors going on, like the Gato, the recent work, the multitask learning stuff. You know, it's amazing that it's one model that plays all the Atari games as well as doing all of these other things. But of course, it didn't learn to do all of those. It was instructed in doing that by other reinforcement learners going through and doing that. And even in the case of all the games, it's still going with a specific hand coded reward function in each of those Atari games where it's not that, you know, it just wants to spend its summer afternoon playing Atari because that's the most interesting thing for it. So it's, again, not a general, it's not learning the way humans learn. And there's, I believe, a lot of things that are challenging to make a loss function for that you can train through these existing conventional things. We're going to chip away at all the things that people do that we can turn into narrow AI problems and billions of, like trillions of dollars of value are going to be created by that. But there's still going to be a set of things and we've got questionable cases like the self driving car where it's possible, it's not my bet, but it's plausible that the long tail could be problematic enough that that really does require a full on artificial general intelligence. The counter argument is that data solves almost everything. There's an interpolation problem if you have enough data and Tesla may be able to get enough data from all of their deployed stuff to be able to work like that, but maybe not. And there are all the other problems about, like, say you want to have a strategy meeting and you want to go ahead and bring in all of your remote workers and your consultants, and you want a world where some of those could be AIs that are talking and interacting with you in an area that is too murky to have a crisp loss function, but they still have things that on some level, they're rewarded on some internal level for building a valuable to humans kind of life and ability to interact with things. See, I still think that self driving cars, solving that problem will take us very far towards AGI. You might not need AGI, but I am really inspired by what Autopilot is doing. Waymo, so some of the other companies, I think Waymo leads the way there is also really interesting, but they don't have quite as ambitious of an effort in terms of learning based sort of data hungry approach to driving, which I think is very close to the kind of thing that would take us far towards AGI. Yeah, and it's a funny thing because as far as I can tell, Elon is completely serious about all of his concerns about AGI being an existential threat. And I tried to draw him out to talk about AGI and he just didn't want to. And I think that I get that little fatalistic sense from him. It's weird because his company could very well be the leading company leading towards a lot of that where Tesla being a super pragmatic company that's doing things because they really want to solve this actual problem. It's a different vibe than the research oriented companies where it's a great time to be an AI researcher. You've got your pick of trillion dollar companies that will pay you to kind of work on the problems you're interested in, but that's not necessarily driving hard towards the core problem of AGI as something that's going to produce a lot of value by doing things that people currently do or would like to do. I mean, I have a million questions to you about your ideas about AGI, but do you think it needs to be embodied? Do you think it needs to have a body to start to notice the signs of life and to develop the kind of system that's able to reason, perceive the world in the way that an AGI should and act in the world? So should we be thinking about robots or can this be achieved in a purely digital system? So I have a clear opinion on that and that's that no, it does not need to be embodied in the physical world where you could say most of my career is about making simulated virtual worlds in games or virtual reality. And so on a fundamental level, I believe that you can make a simulated environment that provides much of the value of what the real environment does and restricting yourself to operating at real time in the physical world with physical objects, I think is an enormous handicap. I mean, that's one of the real lessons driven home by all my aerospace work is that, you know, reality is a bitch in so many ways there where dealing with all the mechanical components, like everything fails, Murphy's law, even if you've done it right before on your fifth one, it might come out differently. So yeah, I think that anybody that is all in on the embodied aspect of it, they are tying a huge weight to their ankles and I think that I would almost count them out, anybody that's making that a cornerstone of their belief about it, I would almost write them off as being worried about them getting to AGI first. I was very surprised that Elon's big on the humanoid robots. I mean, like the NASA Robonaut stuff was almost a gag line, like what are you doing people? Well, that's very interesting because he has a very pragmatic view of that. That's just a way to solve a particular problem in a factory. Now, I do think that once you have an AGI, robotic bodies, humanoid bodies are going to be enormously valuable. I just don't think they're helpful getting to AGI. Well, he has a very sort of practical view, which I disagree with and argue with him, but it's a practical view that there's, you know, you could transfer the problem of driving to the problem of robotic manipulation because so much of it is perception. It's perception and action and it's just a different context and so you can apply all the same kind of data engine learning processes to a different environment. And so why not apply it to the humanoid robot environment? But I think, I do think that there's a certain magic to the embodied robot. That may be the thing that finally convinces people. But again, I don't really care that much about convincing people. You know, the world that I'm looking towards is, you know, you go to the website and say, I want five Frank 1As to work on my team today and they all spin up and they start showing up in your Zoom meetings. To push back, but also to agree with you. But first to push back, I do think you need to convince people for them to welcome that thing into their life. I think there's enough businesses that operate on an objective kind of profit loss sort of basis that, I mean, if you look at how many things, again, talking about the world as an evolutionary space there, when you do have free markets and you have entrepreneurs, you are going to have people that are going to be willing to go out and try whatever crazy things. And when it proves to be beneficial, you know, there's fast followers in all sorts of places. Yeah, and you're saying that, I mean, you know, Quake and VR is a kind of embodiment, but just in a digital world. And if you're able to demonstrate, if you're able to do something productive in that kind of digital reality, then AGI doesn't need to have a body. Yeah, it's like one of the really practical technical questions that I kind of keep arguing with myself over. If you're doing a training and learning and you've got like, you can watch Sesame Street, you can play Master System games or something, is it enough to have just a video feed that is that video coming in? Or should it literally be on a virtual TV set in a virtual room, even if it's, you know, a simple room, just to have that sense of you're looking at a 2D projection on a screen versus having the screen beam directly into your retinas. And, you know, I think it's possible to maybe get past some of these signs of life of things with the just kind of projected directly into the receptor fields, but eventually for more kind of human emotional connection for things, probably having some VR room with a lot of screens in it for the AI to be learning in is likely helpful. It may be a world of different AIs interacting with each other. That self play I do think is one of the critical things where socialization wise, one of the other limitations I set for myself thinking about these is I need something that is at least potentially real time because I want, it's nice you can always slow down time, you can run on a subscale system and test an algorithm at some lower level. And if you've got extra horsepower, running it faster than real time is a great thing. But I want to be able to have the AIs either socially interact with each other or critically with actual people, your sort of child development psychiatrist that comes in and interacts and does the good boy, bad boy sort of thing as they're going through and exploring different things. And it's nice to, I come back to the value of constraints in a lot of ways. And if I say, well, one of my constraints is real time operation. I mean, it might still be a huge data center full of computers, but it should be able to interact on a Zoom meeting with people. And that's how you also do start convincing people, even if it's not a robot body moving around, which eventually gets to irrefutable levels. But if you can go ahead and not just type back and forth to a GPT bot on something, but you're literally talking to them in an embodied over Zoom form and working through problems with them or exploring situations, having conversations that are fully stateful and learned. I think that that's a valuable thing. So I do keep all of my eyes on things that can be implemented within sort of that 30 frames per second kind of work. And I think that's feasible. Do you think the most compelling experiences that first will be for pleasure or for business as they ask in airports? So meaning is if it's interacting with AI agents, will it be sort of like friends, entertainment, almost like a therapist or whatever, that kind of interaction? Or is it in the business setting, something like you said, brainstorming different ideas, sort of this is all a different formulation of kind of a Turing test or the spirit of the original Turing test. Where do you think the biggest benefit will first come? So it's going to start off hugely expensive. I mean, you're going to if we're still all guessing about what compute is going to be necessary. I fall on the side of I don't think you run the numbers and you're like 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses. I don't think those all need to be weights. I don't think we need models that are quite that big evaluated quite that often. I based that on we've got reasonable estimates of what some parts of the brain do. We don't have the neocortex formula, but we kind of get some of the other sensory processing and it doesn't feel like we need to. We can simulate that in computers for less weights. But still, it's probably going to be thousands of GPUs to be running a human level AGI, depending on how it's implemented. That might give you sort of a clan of 128 kind of run in batch people, depending on whether there's sparsity in the way that the weights are and things are set up. If it is a reasonably dense thing, then just the memory bandwidth tradeoffs means you get 128 of them at the same time. And either it's all feeding together, learning in parallel or kind of all running together, kind of talking to a bunch of people. But still, if you've got thousands of GPUs necessary to run these things, it's going to be kind of expensive where it might start off $1,000 an hour for even post development or something for that, which would be something that you would only use for a business, something where you think they're going to help you make a strategic decision or point out something super important. But I also am completely confident that we will have another factor of 1,000 in cost performance increase in AGI type calculations. Not in general computing necessarily, but there's so much more that we can do with packaging, making those right tradeoffs, all those same types of things that in the next couple of decades, 1,000 X easy. And then you're down to $1 an hour. And then you're kind of like, well, I should have an entourage of AIs that are following me around, helping me out on anything that I want them to do. That's one interesting trajectory. But I'll push back because I have, so in that case, if you want to pay thousands of dollars, it should actually provide some value. I think it's easier for cheaper to provide value via a dumb AI that will take us towards AGI to just have a friend. I think there's an ocean of loneliness in the world. And I think an effective friend that doesn't have to be perfect, that doesn't have to be intelligent, that has to be empathic, having emotional intelligence, having ability to remember things, having ability to listen. Most of us don't listen to each other. One of the things that love and when you care about somebody, when you love somebody is when you listen. And that is something we treasure about each other. And if an AI can do that kind of thing. I think that provides a huge amount of value and very importantly, provides value in its ability to listen and understand versus provide really good advice. I think providing really good advice is another next level step that I think is just easier to do companionship. Yeah, I wouldn't disagree. I mean, I think that there's very few things that I would argue can't be reduced to some kind of a narrow AI. I think we can do a trillion dollars of value easily and all the things that can be done there. And a lot of it can be done with smoke and mirrors without having to go the whole thing. I mean, there's going to be the equivalent of the doom version for the AGI that's not really AGI, it's all smoke and mirrors, but it happens to do enough valuable things that it's enormously useful and valuable to people. But at some point, you do want to get to the point where you have the fully general thing and you stop making bespoke specialized systems for each thing and you wind up start using the higher level language instead of writing everything in assembly language. What about consciousness? The C word, do you think that's fundamental to solving AGI or is it a quirk of human cognition? So I think most of the arguments about consciousness don't have a whole lot of merit. I think that consciousness is kind of the way the brain feels when it's operating. And this idea that, you know, I do generally subscribe to sort of the pandemonium theories of consciousness where there's all these things bubbling around and I think of them as kind of slightly randomized sparse distributed memory bit strings of things that are kind of happening, recalling different associative memories, and eventually you get some level of consensus and it bubbles up to the point of being a conscious thought there. And the little bits of stochasticity that are sitting on in this as it cycles between different things and recalls different memory, that's largely our imagination and creativity. So I don't think there's anything deeply magical about it, certainly not symbolic. I think it is generally the flow of these associations drawn up with stochastic noise overlaid on top of them. And I think so much of that is like it depends on what you happen to have in your field of view as some other thought was occurring to you that overlay and blend into the next key that queries your memory for things. And that kind of determines how your chain of consciousness goes. So that's kind of the qualia, the subjective experience of it is not essential for intelligence. So I don't think there's anything really important there. What about some other human qualities, like fear of mortality and stuff like that? Like the fact that this ride ends, is that important? Like you talked so much about this conversation about the value of deadlines and constraints. Do you think that's important for intelligence? That's actually a super interesting angle that I don't usually take on that about has death being a deadline that forces you to make better decisions. Because I have heard people talk about how if you have immortality, people are going to stop trying and working on things because they've got all the time in the world. But I would say that I don't expect it to be a super critical thing that a sense of mortality and impending death is necessary there because those are things that they do wind up providing reward signals to us and we will be in control of the reward signals. And there will have to be something fundamental that causes, that engenders curiosity and goal setting and all of that. Something is going to play in there at the reward level, whether it's positive or negative or both. I don't have any strong opinions on exactly what it's going to be, but that's that type of thing where I doubt that might be one of those half dozen key things that has to be sorted out on exactly what the master reward, the meta reward over all of the local task specific rewards have to be. That could be that big negative reward of death. Maybe not death, but ability to walk away from an interaction. So it bothers me when people treat AI systems like servants. So it doesn't bother me, but I mean it really is drawing the line between what an AI system could be. It's limiting the possibility of what an AI system could be. It's treating them as justice tools. Now that's, of course, from a narrow AI perspective, there's so many problems that narrow AI could solve, just like you said, in its form of a tool. But it could also be a being, which is much more than a tool. And to become a being, you have to respect that thing for being a being. And for that, it has to be able to make its own decisions, to walk away, to say, I had enough of you. I would like to break up with you now. You've not treated me well, and I would like to move on. So I think that actually that choice to end things. So a couple of things on that. So on the one hand, it is kind of disturbing when you see people being like people that are mean to robots and mean to Alexa or whatever. And that seems to speak badly about humanity. But there's also the exact opposite side of that where you have so many people that imbue humanity in inanimate objects or things that are toys or that are relatively limited. So I think there may even be more danger about people putting more emotional investment into a lot of these proto AIs in different ways. And then the AI would manipulate that. But as far as like the AI ethnic sides of things, I really stay away from any of those discussions or even really thinking about it. It's similar with the safety things where I think it's just premature. And there's a certain class of people that enjoy thinking about impractical things, things that are not in the world and of pragmatic effect around you. And I think that, again, because I don't think there's going to be a fast takeoff, I think we actually will have time to have these debates when we know the shape of what we're debating. And some people do take a principled approach that they think it's going to go too fast, that you really do need to get ahead of it, that you need to be thinking about this because we have slow processes of coming to any kind of consensus or even coming up with ideas about this. And maybe that's true. I wouldn't put any of my money or funding into something like that because I don't think it's a problem yet. And I think that we will have these signs of life when we've got our learning disabled toddler, we should really start talking about some of the safety and ethics issues, but probably not before then. Can you elaborate briefly about why you don't think there'll be a fast takeoff? Is there some deep intuition you have about it? Is it because it's grounded in the physical world or why? Yeah, so it is my belief that we're going to start off with something that requires thousands of GPUs. And I don't know if you've tried to go get a thousand GPU instance on a cloud anytime recently, but these are not things that you can just go spin up hundreds of. There are real challenges to, I mean, these things are going to take data centers and data centers take years to build. The last few years, we've seen a few of them kind of coming up, going in different places. They're big engineering efforts. You can hear people bemoan about the fact that I know that the network was wired all wrong and it took them a month to go unwire it and rewire it the right way. These aren't things that you can just magic into existence. And the ideas of like the old tropes about it's going to escape onto the internet and take over other systems, the fast takeoff ones are clearly nonsense because you just can't open TCP connections above a certain rate, no matter how smart you are, even if you have perfect hacking ability, that take over the world in an instant sort of thing just isn't plausible at all. And even if you had access to all of the resources, these are going to be specialized systems where you're going to wind up with something that is architected around exactly this chip with this interconnect, and it's not just going to be able to be plopped somewhere else. Now, interestingly, it is going to be something that the entire code for all of it will easily fit on a thumb drive. That's total spy movie, thriller sorts of things where you could have, hey, we cracked the secret to AGI and it fits on this thumb drive and anyone could steal it. Now, they're still going to have to build the right data center to deploy it and have the right kind of life experience curriculum to take it up to the point where it's valuable. But the real core of it, the magic that's going to happen there is going to be very small. It's, again, tens of thousands of lines of code, not millions of lines of code. It is possible to imagine a world, as you mentioned in the spy thriller view, if it's just a few lines of code, we can imagine a world where the surface of computation is growing, maybe growing exponentially, meaning the refrigerators start getting a GPU. First of all, the smartphones, the billions of smartphones. But maybe if they become highways through which code can spread across the entirety of the computation surface, then you don't any longer have to book AWS GPUs. There were real fundamental issues there. When you start getting down to taking an actual problem and putting it on an abstract machine like that, that has not worked out well in practice. And the idea that there was always, like it's always been easy to come up with ways to compute faster, say more flops or more giga ops or whatever there. That's usually the easy part. But you then have interconnect and then memory for what goes into it. And when you talk about saying, well, cell phones, well, you're limited to like a 5G connection or something on that. And if you take your calculation and you factor it across a million cell phones instead of a thousand GPUs in a warehouse, you might be able to have some kind of a substrate like that, but it could be operating then at one one thousandth the speed. And so, yes, you could have an AGI working there, but it wouldn't be a real time AGI. It would be something that is operating at really a snail's pace, much, much slower than kind of human level thought for things. I'm not worried about that problem. You're transferring the problem into the interconnect, the communication, the shared memory, the collective intelligence aspect of it, which is extremely difficult as well. I mean, it's back to the very earliest days of supercomputers. You still have the balance between bandwidth, storage and computation. And sometimes they're easier to get one or the other, but it's been remarkably constant across all those years that you still need all three. What do your efforts now, you mentioned to me that you're really committing to AI at this stage. What do you see your life in the next few months, years look like? What do you hope to achieve here? So I literally just this week signed a term sheet to take some investment money for my company where the last two years I had backed off from Meta and I was still doing my consulting CTO role there, but I had styled it as I was going to take the Victorian gentleman scientist route where I was going to be the wealthy person that was going to go pursue science and learn about this and do experiments. And honestly, I'm surprised there aren't more people like that that are like me, technical people that made a bunch of money and are interested in some of these, possibly the biggest leverage point in human history. I mean, I know of, I've heard of a couple organizations that are basically led by one rich techie guy that gets a few people around him to try to work on this, but I'm surprised that there's not more, that there aren't like a dozen of them. I mean, maybe people still think that it's an unapproachable problem, that it's kind of beyond their ability to get a wrench on and have some effect on like whatever startups they've run before. But that was my kind of, like with all the stuff I've learned, whether it's gaming, aerospace, whatever, I go through a larval phase where I'm like, okay, I'm sucking up all of this information trying to see, is this something that I can actually do? Is this something that's practical to devote a large chunk of my life to? And I've gone through that with the AI machine learning space of things. And I think I've got my arms around it. I've got the measure of it where some of the most brilliant people in the world are working on this problem, but nobody knows exactly the path that it's going on. We're throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what sticks. But I have another interesting thing just learning about all of this, the contingency of your path to knowledge and talking about the associations and the context that you have with them where people that learn in the same path will have similar thought processes. And I think it's useful that I come at this from a different background, a different history than the people that have had the largely academic backgrounds for this where I have huge blind spots that they could easily point out, but I have a different set of experiences in history and approaches to problems in systems engineering that might turn out to be useful. And I can afford to take that bet where I'm not going to be destitute. I have enough money to fund myself working on this for the rest of my life. But what I was finding is that I was still not committing where I had a foot firmly in the VR and meta side of things where in theory, I've got a very nice position there. I only have to work one day a week for my consulting role, but I was engaging every day. I'd still be like my computer's there. I'd be going and checking the workplace and notes and testing different things and communicating with people. But I did make the decision recently that I'm going to get serious. I'm still going to keep my ties with meta, but I am seriously going for the AGI side of things. And it's actually a really interesting point because a lot of the machine learning, the AI community is quite large, but really, basically almost everybody has taken the same trajectory through life in that community. And it's so interesting to have somebody like you with a fundamentally different trajectory, and that's where the big solutions can come because there is a kind of silo, and it is a bunch of people kind of following the same kind of set of ideas. And I was really worried that I didn't want to come off as an arrogant outsider for things where I have all the respect in the world for the work. It's been a miracle decade. We're in the midst of a scientific revolution happening now, and everybody doing this is, you know, these are the Einsteins and Boers and whatevers of our modern era. And I was really happy to see that the people that I've sat down and talked with, everybody does seem to really be quite great about, just happy to talk about things, willing to acknowledge that we don't know what we're doing, we're figuring it out as we go along. And I mean, I've got a huge debt on this where this all really started for me because Sam Altman basically tried to recruit me to open AI. And it was at a point when I didn't know anything about what was really going on in machine learning. And in fact, it's funny how the first time you reached out to me, it's like four years ago for your AI podcast. Yeah, for people who are listening to this should know that, first of all, obviously I've been a huge fan of yours for the longest time, but we've agreed to talk like, yeah, like four years ago, back when this was called the artificial intelligence podcast, we wanted to do a thing and you said yes. And I said, it's like, I don't know anything about modern AI. That's right. I said, I could kind of take an angle on machine perception because I'm doing a lot of that with the sensors and the virtual reality, but we could probably find something to talk about. And that's where, when did Sam talk to you about open AI, around the same time? It was a little bit, it was a bit after that. So I had done the most basic work, I had kind of done the neural networks from scratch where I had gone and written it all in C just to make sure I understood backpropagation at the lowest level and my nuts and bolts approach. But after Sam approached me, it was flattering to think that he thought that I could be useful at open AI largely for kind of like systems optimization sorts of things without being an expert. But I asked Ilya Sutskever to give me a reading list and he gave me a binder full of all the papers that like, okay, these are the important things. If you really read and understand all of these, you'll know like 80% of what most of the machine language researchers work on. And I went through and I read all those papers multiple times and highlighted them and went through and kind of figured the things out there and then started branching out into my own sets of research on things and eventually started writing my own experiments and doing kind of figuring out, you know, finding out what I don't know, what the limits of my knowledge are and starting to get some of my angles of attack on things, the things that I think are a little bit different from what people are doing. And I've had a couple of years now, like two years since I kind of left the full time position at Meta and now I've kind of pulled the trigger and said, I'm going to get serious about it but some of my lessons all the way back to Armadillo Aerospace about how I know I need to be more committed to this where there is that, you know, it's both a freedom and a cost in some ways when you know that you're wealthy enough to say it's like this doesn't really mean anything. I can spend, you know, I can spend a million dollars a year for the rest of my life and it doesn't mean anything, it's fine. But that is an opportunity to just kind of meander and I could see that in myself when I'm doing some things. It's like, oh, this is a kind of interesting, curious thing. Let's look at this for a little while, let's look at that. It's not really bearing down on the problem. So there's a few things that I've done that are kind of tactics for myself to make me more effective. Like one thing I noticed I was not doing well is I had a Google Cloud account to get GPUs there and I was finding I was very rarely doing that for no good psychological reasons where I'm like, oh, I can always think of something to do other than to spin up instances and run an experiment. I can keep working on my local Titans or something. But it was really stupid. I mean, it was not a lot of money. I should have been running more experiments there. So I thought to myself, well, I'm going to go buy a quarter million dollar DGX station. I'm going to just like sit it right there and it's going to mock me if I'm not using it. If the fans aren't running on that thing, I'm not properly utilizing it. And that's been helpful. You know, I've done a lot more experiments since then. It's been it's been interesting where I thought I'd be doing all this low level envy link optimized stuff. But 90 percent of what I do is just spin up four instances of an experiment with different hyper parameters on it. You're doing like really sort of building up intuition by doing ML experiments of different kinds. But so the next big thing, though, is I am you know, I decided that I was going to take some take some investor money because I have an overactive sense of responsibility about other people's money. And it's like I I don't want I mean, a lot of my my push and my passionate entreaties for things that matter. It's like I don't want to have wasted his money investing in Oculus. I want it to work out. I want it to change the world. I want it to be worth all of this time, money and effort going into it. And I expect that it's going to be that like that with my with my company where it's a huge forcing function. This investment investors that are going to expect something of me now. We've all had the conversation that this is a low probability long term bet. It's not something that there's a million things I could do that I would have line of sight on the value proposition for. This isn't that I think there are there are unknown unknowns in the way. But it's one of these things that it's, you know, it's hyperbole. But it's potentially one of the most important things humans ever do. And it's something that I think is within our lifetimes, if not within a decade to happen. So, yeah, this is just now happening. Like term sheet, like the ink is barely virtually barely dry. I mean, as I mentioned to you offline, like somebody I admire and somebody you know, Andre Karpathy, I think the two of you different trajectories in life, but approach problems similarly in that he calls stuff from scratch up all the time. And I he's created a bunch of little things outside of even outside the course at Stanford that have been tremendously useful to build up intuition about stuff, but also to help people. And they're all in the realm of A.I. Do you see yourself potentially doing things like this? You know, not necessarily solving a gigantic problem, but on the journey, on the path to that building up intuitions and sharing code or ideas or systems that give inklings of AGI, but also kind of are useful to people in some way. So, yeah, first of all, Andre is awesome. I learned a lot when I was going through my larval phase from his blog posts and his Stanford course and, you know, super valuable. I got to meet him first a couple of years ago when I was first kind of starting off on my gentleman scientist bit. And just just a couple of months ago when he went out on his sabbatical, he stopped by in Dallas and we talked for a while and I had a great time with him. And then when I heard he actually left Tesla, I did, of course, along with a hundred other people say, hey, if you ever want to work with me, it would be an honor. So, he thinks that he's going to be doing this educational work, but I think someone's going to make him an offer he can't refuse before he gets too far along on it. Oh, his current interest is educational. So, yeah, he's a special mind. Is there something you could speak to what makes him so special? So, you know, like he did, he was very much a programmer's programmer that was doing machine learning work rather than, it's a different feel than an academic where you can see it in paper sometimes where somebody that's really a mathematician or a statistician at heart and they're doing something with machine learning. But, you know, Andre is about getting something done. And you could see it in like all of his earliest approaches to it's like, okay, here's how reinforcement learning works. Here's how recurrent neural networks work. Here's how transformers work. Here's how crypto works. And, yeah, it's just, he's a hacker's, you know, one of his old posts was like a hacker's guide to machine learning. And, you know, he deprecated that and said, don't really pay attention to what's in here, but it's that thought that carries through in a lot of it where it is that back again to that hacker mentality and the hacker ethic with what he's doing and sharing all of it. Yeah, and a lot of his approach to a new thing, like you said, larva stage is let me code up the simplest possible thing to build up intuition about it. Yeah, like I say, I sketch with structs and things. When I'm just thinking about a problem, I'm thinking in some degree of code. You are also, among many things, a martial artist, both Judo and Jiu Jitsu. How has this helped make you the person you are? So, I mean, I was a competent club player in Judo and grappling. I mean, I was, you know, by no means any kind of a superstar, but it was, I went through a few phases with it where I did some when I was quite young, a little bit more when I was 17. And then I got into it kind of seriously in my mid 30s. And, you know, I went pretty far with it. And I was pretty good at some of the things that I was doing. And I did appreciate it quite a bit where, I mean, on the one hand, it's always if you're going to do exercise or something, it's a more motivating form of exercise. If someone is crushing you, you are motivated to do something about that, to up your attributes and be better about getting out of that. Up your attributes, yes. But there's also that sense that I was not a sports guy. I did do wrestling in junior high. And I often wish that, I think I would have been good for me if I'd carried that on into high school and had a little bit more of that. I mean, it's like I, you know, filch a little bit of wrestling vibe with always going on about embracing the grind and like that push that I associate with the wrestling team that in hindsight, I wish I had gone through that and pushed myself that way. But even getting back into Judo and Jiu Jitsu in my mid 30s, as usually the old man on the mat with that, there was still the, you know, the sense that, you know, working out with the group and having the guys that you're beating each other up with it, but you just feel good coming out of it. And I can remember those driving home aching in various ways and just thinking, it's like, oh, that was really great. And, you know, it's mixing with a bunch of people that had nothing to do with any of the things that I worked with. You know, every once in a while, someone would be like, oh, you're the Doom guy. But for the most part, it was just different slice of life. You know, a good thing. And I made the call when I was 40. That's like, maybe I'm getting a little old for this. I had separated a rib and tweaked a few things. And I got out of it without any really bad injuries. And it was like, have I dodged enough bullets? Should I, you know, should I hang it up? I went back. I've gone a couple of times in the last decade trying to get my kids into it a little bit. I didn't really stick with any of them, but it was fun to get back on the mats. It really hurts for a while when you haven't gone for a while. But I still debate this pretty constantly. My brother's only a year younger than me, and he's going kind of hard in jiu jitsu right now. You know, he won a few medals at the last tournament he was at. So he's competing, too. Yeah, and I was thinking, yeah, I guess we're in the executive division if you're over 50 or over 45 or something. And it's not out of the question that I go back at some point to do some of this. But again, I'm just reorganizing my life around more focus. Probably not going to happen. I'm pushing my exercise around to give me a longer, uninterrupted intellectual focus time, pushing it to the beginning or the end of the game. Like running and stuff like that, walking. Yeah, I got running and calisthenics and some things like that. It allows you to still think about a problem. But if you're going to a judo club or something, you've got it fixed. It's going to be 7 o clock or whatever, 10 o clock on Saturday. Although, I talked about this a little bit when I was on Rogan. And shortly after that, Carlos Machado did reach out. And I had trained with him for years back in the day. And he was like, hey, we've got kind of a small private club with a bunch of executive type people. And it does tempt me. Yeah, I don't know if you know him, but John Donahart moved here to Austin with Gordon Ryan and a few other folks. He has a very interesting way, very deep systematic way of thinking about jiu jitsu that reveals the chest of it, the science of it. And I do think about that more as kind of an older person considering the martial arts where I can remember the very earliest days getting back into judo and I'm like, teach me submissions right now. It's like, learn the arm bar, learn the choke. But as you get older, you start thinking more about, it's like, okay, I really do want to like learn the entire canon of judo. It's like all the different things there and like all the different approaches for it. Not just the, you know, if you want to compete, there's just a handful of things you learn really, really well. But sometimes there's interest in learning a little bit more of the scope there and figuring some things out from, you know, at one point I had wasn't exactly a spreadsheet, but I did have a big long text file with like, here's the things that I learned and here are like ways you chain this together. And while, when I went back a few years ago, it was good to see that I whipped myself back into reasonable shape about doing the basic grappling. But I know there was a ton of the subtleties that were just, that were gone, but could probably be brought back reasonably quickly. And there's also the benefit. I mean, you're exceptionally successful now. You're brilliant. And the problem, the old problem of the ego. Yeah. I still pushed kind of harder than I should. I mean, that was, I was one of those people that I, you know, I'm on the smaller side for a lot of the people competing and I would, you know, I'd go with all the big guys and I'd go hard and I'd push myself a lot. And that would be one of those where I would, you know, I'd be dangerous to anyone for the first five minutes, but then sometimes after that I'm already dead. And I knew it was terrible for me because it made the, you know, it meant I got less training time with all of that when you go and you just gas out relatively quickly there. And I like to think that I would be better about that where after I gave up judo, I started doing the half marathons and tough butters and things like that. And so when I did go back to the local judokai club, I thought it's like, oh, I should have better cardio for this because I'm a runner now and I do all of this and didn't work out that way. It was the same old thing where just push really hard, strain really hard. And of course, when I worked with good guys like Carlos, it's like just the whole flow like water thing is real and he's just like. That's true with judo too. Some of the best people like I've trained with Olympic gold medalists and for some reason with them, everything's easier. Everything is you actually start to feel the science of it, the music of it, the dance of it. Everything is effortless. You understand that there's an art to it. It's not just an exercise. It was interesting where I did go to the Kodokan in Japan. I kind of the birthplace of judo and everything. And I remember I rolled with one old guy. I didn't didn't start standing, just started on groundwork and it was and it was striking how different it was from Carlos. He was still he was better than me and he got my arm and I had to tap there. But it was a completely different style where I just felt like I could do nothing. He was just enveloping me and just like slowly grounded down with my arm and bent it while with Carlos, you know, he's just loose and free. And you always thought like, oh, you're just going to go grab something. But you never had any chance to do it. But it was very different feeling. That's a good summary of the difference between jiu jitsu and judo and jiu jitsu. There's it is a dance and you feel like there's a freedom and actually anybody like the Gordon Ryan, one of the best the best grappler in the world. Nogi grappler in the world. There's a feeling like you can do anything. But when you actually try to do something, you can't just magically doesn't work. But with the best judo players in the world, it does feel like there's a blanket that weighs a thousand pounds on top of you. And there's not a feeling like you can do anything. You just you're trapped. And that's a that's a style that's a difference in the style of martial arts. But it's also once you start to study, you understand it all has to do with human movement and the physics of it and the leverage and all that kind of stuff. And that's like that's super fascinating. At the end of the day, for me, the biggest benefits and the humbling aspect when another human being kind of tells you that, you know, there's a hierarchy or there's a you're not that special. And in the most extreme case, when you tap to a choke, you are basically living because somebody let you live. And that's that is one of those. If you think about it, that is a closer brush with mortality than than most people consider. And that kind of humbling act is good to take to your work then where it's harder to get humbled. Yeah. Nobody's nobody that does any martial art is coming out thinking I'm the best in the world at anything because everybody loses. Let me ask you for advice. What advice would you give to young people today about life, about career, how they can have a job, how they can have an impact, how they can have a life they could be proud of. So it was kind of fun. I got invited to give the commencement speech back at the I went to college for two semesters and dropped out and went on to do my tech stuff. But they still wanted me to come back and give a commencement speech. And I've got that pinned on my Twitter account. I still feel good about everything that I said there. And my biggest point was that the path for me might not be the path for everyone. And in fact, the advice, the path that I took and even the advice that I would give based on my experience and learnings probably isn't the best advice for everyone. Because what I did was all about this knowledge in depth. It was about not just having this surface level ability to make things do what I want, but to really understand them through and through. To let me do the systems engineering work and to sometimes find these inefficiencies that can be bypassed. And the whole world doesn't need that. Most programmers or engineers of any kind don't necessarily need to do that. They need to do a little job that's been parceled out to them. Be reliable. Let people depend on you. Do quality work with all of that. But people that do have an inclination for wanting to know things deeper and learn things deeper, there are just layers and layers of things out there. And it's amazing. If you're the right person that is excited about that, the world's never been like this before. It's better than ever. I mean, everything that was wonderful for me is still there, and there's whole new worlds to explore on the different things that you can do. And that, you know, it's hard work. Embrace the grind with it. And understand as much as you can. And then be prepared for opportunities to present themselves. Where you can't just say this is my goal in life and just push at that. I mean, you might be able to do that, but you're going to make more total progress if you say I'm preparing myself with this broad set of tools. And then I'm being aware of all the way things are changing as I move through the world and as the whole world changes around me. And then looking for opportunities to deploy the tools that you've built. And there's going to be more and more of those types of things there where an awareness of what's happening, where the inefficiencies are, what things can be done, what's possible versus what's current practice. And then finding those areas where you can go and make an adjustment and make something that may affect millions or billions of people in the world. Make it better. When, maybe from your own example, how were you able to recognize this about yourself that you saw the layers in a particular thing and you were drawn to discovering deeper and deeper truths about it? Is that something that was obvious to you that you couldn't help or is there some actions you had to take to actually allow yourself to dig deep? So in the earliest days of personal computers, I remember the reference manuals and the very early ones even had schematics of computers in the background, in the back of the books, as well as firmware listings and things. And I could look at that. And at that time, when I was a younger teenager, I didn't understand a lot of that stuff, how the different things worked. I was pulling out the information that I could get, but I always wanted to know all of that. There was kind of magical information sitting down there. It's like the elder lore that some gray beard wizard is the keeper of. And so I always felt that pull for wanting to know more, wanting to explore the mysterious areas there. And that followed right in through all the things that got the value, exploring the video cards leading to the scrolling advantages, exploring some of the academic papers and things, learning about BSP trees and the different things that I could do with those systems and just the huge larval phases going through aerospace, just reading bookshelves full of books. Again, that point where I have enough money, I can buy all the books I want. It was so valuable there where I was terrible with my money when I was a kid. My mom thought I would always be broke because I'd buy my comic books and just be out of money. But it was like all the pizza I want, all the Diet Coke I want, video games and then books. And it didn't take that much. As soon as I was making 27K a year, I felt rich and I was just getting all the things that I wanted. But that sense of books have always been magical to me. And that was one of the things that really made me smile is Andre had said when he came over to my house, he said he found my library inspiring. And it was great to see. I used to look at him. He's kind of a younger guy. I sometimes wonder if younger people these days have the same relationship with books that I do where they were such a cornerstone for me in so many ways. But that sense that, yeah, I always wanted to know it all. I know I can't. And that was like one of the last things I said. You can't know everything, but you should convince yourself that you can know anything. Any one particular thing, it was created and discovered by humans. You can learn it. You can find out what you need on there. And you can learn it deeply. Yeah. And you can drive a nail down through whatever layer cake problem space you've got and learn a cross section there. And not only can you have an impact doing that, you can attain happiness doing that. There's something so fulfilling about becoming a craftsman of a thing. Yeah. And I don't want to tell people that, look, this is a good career move. Just grit your teeth and bear it. You want people. And I do think it is possible sometimes to find the joy in something. Like it might not immediately appeal to you. But I had told people early on, like in software times, that a lot of game developers are in it just because they are so passionate about games. But I was always really more flexible in what appealed to me, where I said, I think I could be quite engaged doing operating system work or even database work. I would find the interest in that. Because I think most things that are significant in the world have a lot of layers and complexity to them and a lot of opportunities hidden within them. So that would probably be the most important thing to encourage to people is that you can weaponize curiosity. You can deploy your curiosity to find, to kind of like make things useful and valuable to you, even if they don't immediately appear that way. Deploy your curiosity. Yeah, that's very true. We've mentioned this debate point, whether mortality or fear of mortality is fundamental to creating an AGI. But let's talk about whether it's fundamental to human beings. Do you think about your own mortality? I really don't. And you probably always have to like take with a grain of salt anything somebody says about fundamental things like that. But I don't think about really aging, impending death, having a legacy with my children, things like that. And clearly it seems most of the world does a lot more than I do. So I mean I think I'm an outlier in that where it doesn't wind up being a real part of my thinking and motivation about things. So daily existence is about sort of the people you love and the problems before you. And I'm focused on what I'm working on right now. I do take that back. There's one aspect where the kind of finiteness of the life does impact me, and that is about thinking about the scope of the problems that I'm working on. When I decided to work on it, when I was like nuclear fission or AGI, these are big ticket things that impact large fractions of the world. And I was thinking to myself at some level that, okay, I may have a couple more swings at bat with me at full capability, but yes, my mental abilities will decay with age, mostly inevitably. I don't think it's a 0% chance that we will address some of that before it becomes a problem for me. I think exciting medical stuff in the next couple decades. But I do have this kind of vague plan that when I'm not at the top of my game and I don't feel that I'm in a position to put a dent in the world some way, that I'll probably wind up doing some kind of recreational retro programming or I'll work on something that I would not devote my life to now, but I can while away my time as the old man gardening in the code worlds. And then to step back even bigger, let me ask you about why we're here, we human beings. What's the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life, John Carmack? So very similar with that last question. I know a lot of people fret about this question a lot, and I just really don't. I really don't give a damn. We are biological creatures that happenstance of evolution. We have innate drives that evolution crafted for survival and passing on of genetic codes. I don't find a lot of value in trying to go much deeper than that. I have my motivations, some of which are probably genetically coded and many of which are contingent on my upbringing and the path that I've had through my life. I don't run into like spades of depression or envy or anything that winds up being a challenge and forcing a degree of soul searching with things like that. I seem to be okay kind of without that. As a brilliant ant in the ant colony without looking up to the sky wondering why the hell am I here again. So the why of it, the incredible mystery of the fact that we started, first of all, the origin of life on Earth, and from that, from single cell organisms, the entirety of the evolutionary process took us somehow to this incredibly intelligent thing that is able to build Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and Quake and take a crack at the problem of AGI and things that eventually supersede human beings. That doesn't, the why of it is... It's been my experience that people that focus on, that don't focus on the here and now right in front of them tend to be less effective. I mean, it's not 100%, you know, vision matters to some people, but it doesn't seem to be a necessary motivator for me and I think that the process of getting there is usually done. It's like the magic of gradient descent. People just don't believe that just looking locally gets you to all of these spectacular things. That's been, you know, the decades of looking at really some of the smartest people in the world that would just push back forever against this idea that it's not this grand, sophisticated vision of everything, but little tiny steps, local information winds up leading to all the best answers. So the meaning of life is following locally wherever the gradient descent takes you. This was an incredible conversation, officially the longest conversation I've ever done on the podcast, which means a lot to me because I get to do it with one of my heroes. John, I can't tell you how much it means to me that you would sit down with me. You're an incredible human being. I can't wait what you do next, but you've already changed the world. You're an inspiration to so many people. And again, we haven't covered like most of what I was planning to talk about, so I hope we get a chance to talk someday in the future. I can't wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much again for talking to me. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with John Carmack. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John Carmack himself. Focused hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets | Lex Fridman Podcast #309

Mossad will do anything. Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every Israeli citizen around the world. Most other countries will stop at some point, but Mossad doesn't do that. The following is a conversation with Andrew Bustamante, former CIA covert intelligence officer and US Air Force combat veteran, including the job of operational targeting in cryptic communications and launch operations for 200 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. Andrew's over seven years as a CIA spy have given him a skillset and a perspective on the world that is fascinating to explore. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Andrew Bustamante. The Central Intelligence Agency was formed almost 75 years ago. What is the mission of the CIA? How does it work? The mission of the CIA is to collect intelligence from around the world that supports a national security mission and be the central repository for all other intelligence agencies so that it's one collective source where all intelligence can be synthesized and then passed forward to the decision makers. That doesn't include domestic intelligence. It's primarily looking outward outside the United States. Correct. CIA is the foreign intelligence collection, king spoke, if you will. FBI does domestic, and then Department of Homeland Security does domestic. Law enforcement essentially handles all things domestic. Intelligence is not law enforcement, so we technically cannot work inside the United States. Is there clear lines to be drawn between, like you just said, the FBI, CIA, FBI, and the other U.S. intelligence agencies like the DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, NSA, National Security Agency, and there's a list. There's a list of about 33 different intelligence organizations. Yeah. So like the Army, the Navy has, all the different organizations have their own intelligence groups. So is there clear lines here to be drawn, or is the CIA the giant integrator of all of these? It's a little bit of both, to be honest. So yes, there are absolutely lines, and more so than the lines. There are lines that divide what our primary mission is. Everything's gotta be prioritized. That's one of the benefits and the superpowers of the United States, is we prioritize everything. So different intelligence organizations are prioritized to collect certain types of intelligence. And then within the confines of how they collect, they're also given unique authorities, authorities are a term that's directed by the executive branch. Different agencies have different authorities to execute missions in different ways. FBI can't execute the same way CIA executes, and CIA can't execute the same way NGA executes. But then at the end, excuse me, when it's all collected, then yes, CIA still acts as a final synthesizing repository to create what's known as the president's daily brief, the PDB, the only way CIA can create the PDB is by being the single source of all source intelligence from around the IC, the intelligence community, which are those 30 some odd and always changing organizations that are sponsored for intelligence operations. What is the PDB, the president's daily brief look like? How long is it? What does it contain? So first of all, it looks like the most expensive book report you can ever imagine. It's got its own binder. It's all very high end. It feels important, it looks important. It's not like a cheap trapper keeper. It's somewhere between, I would give it probably between 50 and 125 pages a day. It's produced every day around two o clock in the morning by a dedicated group of analysts. And each page is essentially a short paragraph to a few paragraphs about a priority happening that affects national security from around the world. The president rarely gets to the entire briefing in a day. He relies on a briefer instead to prioritize what inside the briefing needs to be shared with the president. Because some days the PDB will get briefed in 10 minutes and some days it'll be briefed over the course of two hours. It depends on the president's schedule. How much competition is there for the first page? And so how much jockeying there is for attention? I imagine for all the different intelligence agencies and within the CIA there's probably different groups that are modular and they all care about different nations or different cases. Do you understand how much competition there is for the attention, for the limited attention of the president? You're 100% correct in how the agency and how officers and managers at the agency handle the PDB. There's a ton of competition. Everybody wants to be the first on the radar. Everybody wants to be on the first page. The thing that we're not baking into the equation is the president's interests. The president dictates what's on the first page of his PDB and he will tell them usually the day before, I wanna see this on the first page tomorrow. Bring this to me in the beginning. I don't wanna hear about what's happening in Mozambique. I don't really care about what's happening in Saudi Arabia. I wanna see one, two, three. And regardless of whether or not those are the three biggest things in the world, the president's the executive, he's the one. He's the ultimate customer. So we do what the customer says. That has backfired in the past. If you haven't already started seeing how that could go wrong, that has backfired in the past, but that is essentially what happens when you serve in the executive branch. You serve the executive. So what's the role of the director of the CIA versus the president? What's that dance like? So the president really leads the focus of the CIA? The president is the commander in chief for the military, but the president is also the executive for the entirety of the intelligence community. So he's the ultimate customer. If you look at it like a business, the customer, the person spending the money is the president and the director is the CEO. So if the director doesn't create what the president wants, there's gonna be a new director. That's why the director of CIA is a presidential appointed position. Sometimes they're extremely qualified intelligence professionals. Sometimes they're just professional politicians or soldiers that get put into that seat because the president trusts them to do what he wants them to do. Another gaping area that causes problems, but that's still the way it is. So you think this is a problematic configuration of the whole system? Massive flaw in the system. It is a massive flaw in the system because if you're essentially appointing a director to do what you want them to do, then you're assigning a crony. And that's what we define corruption as within the United States. And inside the United States, we say if you pick somebody outside of merit for any other reason other than merit, then it's cronyism or it's nepotism. Here, that's exactly what our structure is built on. All presidential appointees are appointed on something other than merit. So for an intelligence agency to be effective, it has to discover the truth and communicate that truth. And maybe if you're appointing the director of that agency, you're not, they're less likely to communicate the truth to you unless the truth aligns perfectly with your desired worldview. Well, not necessarily perfectly because there are other steps, right? They have to be, they have to go in front of Congress and they have to have the support of multiple legislatures or legislators, but the challenge is that the shortlist of people who even get the opportunity aren't a meritorious list. It's a shortlist based off of who the president is picking or who the would be president is picking. Now, I think we've proven that an intelligence organization can be, an intelligence organization can be extremely effective even within the flawed system. The challenge is how much more effective could we be if we improved? And that's, I think that's the challenge that faces a lot of the US government. I think that's a challenge that has resulted in what we see today when it comes to the decline of American power and American influence, the rise of foreign influence, authoritarian powers, and a shrinking US economy, a growing Chinese economy. And it's just, we have questions, hard questions we need to ask ourselves about how we're gonna handle the future. What aspect of that communication between the president and the CIA could be fixed to help fix the problems that you're referring to in terms of the decline of American power? So when you talk about the president wanting to prioritize what the president cares about, that immediately shows a break between what actually matters to the longterm success of the United States versus what happened, what benefits the short term success of the current president. Because any president is just a human being and has a very narrow focus. And narrow focus is not a longterm calculation. Exactly, what's the maximum amount of years the president can be president? Eight. He has to be, he or she. In the United States. In the United States, according to our current constitution. Yeah. But they're very limited in terms of what they have to prioritize. And then if you look at a four year cycle, two years of that is essentially preparing for the next election cycle. So that's only two years of really quality attention you get from the president, who is the chief executive of all the intelligence community. So the most important thing to them is not always the most important thing to the longterm survival of the United States. What do you make of the hostile relationship that to me at least stands out of the presidents between Donald Trump and the CIA? Was that a very kind of personal bickering? I mean, is there something interesting to you about the dynamics between that particular president and that particular instantiation of the intelligence agency? Man, there were lots of things fascinating to me about that relationship. What's the good and the bad, sorry to interrupt. So let me start with the good first because there's a lot of people who don't think there was any good. So the good thing is we saw that the president who's the chief customer, the executive to the CIA, when the president doesn't want to hear what CIA has to say, he's not gonna listen. I think that's an important lesson for everyone to take home. If the president doesn't care what you have to say, he's gonna take funding away or she will take funding away. They're gonna take attention away. They're going to shut down your operations, your missions. They're gonna kill the careers of the people working there. Think about that, for the four years that President Trump was the president, basically everybody at CIA, their career was put on pause. Some people's careers were ended. Some people voluntarily left their career there because they found themselves working for a single customer that didn't want what they had to produce. So for people who don't know, Donald Trump did not display significant, deep interest in the output. He did not trust it, yeah. He was a disinterested customer. Exactly right. Of the information. And then what do disinterested customers do? They go find someone else to create their product. And that's exactly what Donald Trump did. And he did it through the private intelligence world, funding private intelligence companies to run their own operations that brought him the information he cared about when CIA wouldn't. It also didn't help that CIA stepped outside of their confines, right? CIA is supposed to collect foreign intelligence and not comment on domestic matters. They went way outside of that when they started challenging the president, when they started questioning the results, when they started publicly claiming Russian influence. That's all something the FBI could have handled by itself. The Justice Department could have handled by itself. CIA had no place to contribute to that conversation. And when they did, all they did was undermine the relationship they had with their primary customer. Let me sort of focus in on this relationship between the president or the leader and the intelligence agency and look outside the United States. It seems like authoritarian regimes or regimes throughout history, if you look at Stalin and Hitler, if you look at today with Vladimir Putin, the negative effects of power corrupting the mind of a leader manifest itself is that they start to get bad information from the intelligence agencies. So this kind of thing that you're talking about, over time, they start hearing information they want to hear. The agency starts producing only the kind of information they want to hear, and the leader's worldview starts becoming distorted to where the propaganda they generate is also the thing that the intelligence agencies provide to them, and so they start getting this, they start believing their own propaganda, and they start getting a distorted view of the world. Sorry for the sort of walking through in a weird way, but I guess I want to ask, do you think, let's look at Vladimir Putin specifically. Do you think he's getting accurate information about the world? Do you think he knows the truth of the world, whether that's the war in Ukraine, whether that's the behavior of the other nations, in NATO, the United States in general? What do you think? It's rare that I'll talk about just thinking. I prefer to share my assessment, why I assess things a certain way, rather than just what's my random opinion. In my assessment, Vladimir Putin is winning. Russia is winning. They're winning in Ukraine, but they're also winning the battle of influence against the West. They're winning in the face of economic sanctions. They're winning. Empirically, when you look at the math, they're winning. So when you ask me whether or not Putin is getting good information from his intelligence services, when I look at my overall assessment of multiple data points, he must be getting good information. Do I know how or why? I do not. I don't know how or why it works there. I don't know how such deep cronyism, such deep corruption can possibly yield true real results. And yet, somehow there are real results happening. So it's either excessive waste and an accidental win, or there really is a system and a process there that's functioning. So this winning idea is very interesting. In what way, short term and long term, is Russia winning? Some people say there was a miscalculation of the way the invasion happened. There was an assumption that you would be able to successfully take Kiev. You'd be able to successfully capture the East, the South, and the North of Ukraine. And with what now appears to be significantly insufficient troops spread way too thin across way too large of a front. So that seems to be like an intelligence failure. And that doesn't seem to be like winning. In another way, it doesn't seem like winning if we put aside the human cost of war. It doesn't seem like winning because the hearts and minds of the West were completely on the side of Ukraine. This particular leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, captured the attention of the world and the hearts and minds of Europe, the West, and many other nations throughout the world, both financially, in terms of military equipment, and in terms of sort of social and cultural and emotional support for the independence fight of this nation. That seems to be like a miscalculation. So against that pushback, why do you think there's still kernels of winning in this on the Russian side? What you're laying out isn't incorrect. And the miscalculations are not unexpected. Anybody who's been to a military college, including the Army War College in Pennsylvania, where so many of our military leaders are brought up, when you look at the conflict in Ukraine, it fits the exact mold of what an effective longterm military conflict, protracted military conflict, would and should look like for military dominance. Now, did Zelensky and did the Ukrainians shock the world? Absolutely. But in that, they also shocked American intelligence, which, like you said, miscalculated. The whole world miscalculated how the Ukrainians would respond. Putin did not move in there accidentally. He had an assessment. He had high likelihood of a certain outcome, and that outcome did not happen. Why did he have that calculation? Because in 2014, it worked. He invaded, he took Crimea in 14 days. He basically created an infiltration campaign that turned key leaders over in the first few days of the conflict. So essentially, there was no conflict. It worked in 2008 when he took Georgia. Nobody talks about that. He invaded Georgia the exact same way, and it worked. So in 2008, it worked. In 2014, it worked. There was no reason to believe it wasn't going to work again. So he just carried out the same campaign. But this time, something was different. That was a miscalculation for sure on the part of Putin. And the reason that there was no support from the West, because let's not forget, there is no support. There is nothing other than the Lend Lease Act, which is putting Ukraine in massive debt right now to the West. That's the only form of support they're getting from NATO or the United States. So if somebody believed Ukraine would win, if somebody believed Ukraine had a chance, they would have gotten more material support than just debt. And we can jump into that anytime you want to. But the whole world miscalculated. Everybody thought Russia was going to win in 14 days. I said that they would win in 14 days because that was the predominant calculation. Once the first invasion didn't work, then the military does what professional militaries do, man. They reevaluate, they reorganize leaders, and then they take a new approach. You saw three approaches. The first two did not work. The first two campaigns against Ukraine did not work the way they were supposed to work. The third has worked exactly like it's supposed to work. You don't need Kiev to win Ukraine. You don't need hearts and minds to win Ukraine. What you need is control of natural resources, which they're taking in the East, and you need access to the heartbeat, the blood flow of food and money into the country, which they're taking in the South. The fact that Ukraine had to go to the negotiation table with Russia and Turkey in order to get exports out of the Black Sea approved again demonstrates just how much Ukraine is losing. The aggressor had a seat at the negotiation table to allow Ukraine the ability to even export one of its top exports. If Russia would have said no, then they would not have had that. Russia has, that's like someone holding your throat. It's like somebody holding your jugular vein and saying, if you don't do what I tell you to do, then I'm not gonna let you breathe. I'm not gonna let blood flow to your brain. So do you think it's possible that Russia takes the South of Ukraine? It takes, so starting from Mariupol, the Kherson region. All the way to Odessa. All the way to Odessa. And into Moldova. I believe all of that will happen before the fall. Fall of this year? Fall of this year. Before winter hits Europe, NATO wants Germany needs to be able to have sanctions lifted so they can tap into Russian power. There's no way they can have those sanctions lifted unless Russia wins. And Russia also knows that all of Europe, all of NATO is the true, the true people feeling the pain of the war outside of Ukraine are the NATO countries because they're so heavily reliant on Russia. And as they have supported American sanctions against Russia, their people feel the pain. Economically, their people feel the pain. What are they gonna do in the winter? Because without Russian gas, their people are gonna freeze to death. Ukrainian people. People all over NATO. Ukraine, everybody knows Ukraine's at risk. Everybody knows Ukrainians are dying. The game of war isn't played just, it isn't even played majoritively by the people who are fighting. The game of war is played by everyone else. It's an economic game. It's not a military game. The flow of resources and energy. Attention. And food. Exactly right. I was on the front in the Kherson region, the very area that you're referring to, and I spoke to a lot of people, and the morale is incredibly high. And I don't think the people in that region, soldiers, volunteer soldiers, civilians, are going to give up that land without dying. I agree with you. I mean, in order to take Odessa, would require huge amount of artillery and slaughter of civilians, essentially. They're not gonna use artillery in Odessa because Odessa's too important to Russian culture. It's gonna be even uglier than that. It's going to be clearing of streets, clearing of buildings, person by person, troop by troop. It'll be a lot like what it was in Margol. Just shooting at civilians. Because they can't afford to just do bombing raids because they're gonna destroy cultural, significant architecture that's just too important to the Russian culture, and that's gonna demoralize their own Russian people. I have to do a lot of thinking to try to understand what I even feel. I don't know, but in terms of information, the thing that the soldiers are saying, the Russian soldiers are saying, the thing the Russian soldiers really believe is that they're freeing, they're liberating the Ukrainian people from Nazis. And they believe this. Because I visited Ukraine, I spoke to over 100, probably a couple hundred Ukrainian people from different walks of life. It feels like the Russian soldiers, at least, are under a cloud of propaganda. They're not operating on a clear view of the whole world. And given all that, I just don't see Russia taking the South without committing war crimes. And if Vladimir Putin is aware of what's happening in terms of the treatment of civilians, I don't see him pushing forward all the way to take the South, because that's not going to be effective strategy for him to win the hearts and minds of these people. Autocracies don't need to win hearts and minds. That's a staunchly democratic point of view. Hearts and minds mean very little to people who understand core basic needs and true power. You don't see Xi Jinping worrying about hearts and minds in China. You don't see it in North Korea. You don't see it in Congo. You don't see it in most of the world. Hearts and minds are a luxury. In reality, what people need is food, water, power. They need income to be able to secure a lifestyle. It is absolutely sad. I am not in any way, shape or form saying that my assessment on this is enriching or enlightening or hopeful. It's just fact. It's just calculatable empirical evidence. If Putin loses in Ukraine, the losses, the influential losses, the economic losses, the lives lost, the power lost is too great. So it is better for him to push and push and push through war crimes, through everything else. War crimes are something defined by the international court system. The international court system has Russia as part of its board. And the international court system is largely powerless when it comes to enforcing its own outcomes. So the real risk gain scenario here for Russia is significantly in favor of gain over risk. The other thing that I think is important to talk about is we, everybody is trapped in the middle of a gigantic information war. Yes, there's battlefield bullets and cannons and tanks, but there's also a massive informational war. The same narrative that you see these ground troops in Ukraine, these Russian ground troops in Ukraine, believing they're clearing the land of Nazis. That information is being fed to them from their own home country. I don't know why people seem to think that the information that they're reading in English is any more or less true. Every piece of news coming out of the West, every piece of information coming out in the English language is also a giant narrative being shared intentionally to try to undermine the morale and the faithfulness of English speaking Russians, which somebody somewhere knows exactly how many of those there are. So we have to recognize that we're not getting true information from other side because there's a strategic value in making sure that there is just the right amount of mis or disinformation out there. Not because someone's trying to lie to Americans, but because someone is trying to influence the way English speaking Russians think. And in that world, that's exactly why you see so many news articles cited to anonymous sources, government officials who do not wanna be named. There's nothing that links back responsibility there. There's nothing that can go to court there, but the information still gets released. And that's enough to make Ukrainians believe that the United States is gonna help them or that the West is gonna help them. It's enough to make Russians think that they're going to lose. And maybe they should just give up now and leave from the battlefield now. We have to understand. We are in the middle of a giant information war. Maybe you can correct me, but it feels like in the English speaking world, it's harder to control. It's harder to fight the information war because of, some people say there's not really a freedom of speech in this country, but I think if you compare, there's a lot more freedom of speech. And it's just harder to control narratives when there's a bunch of guerrilla journalists that are able to just publish anything they want on Twitter or anything. It's just harder to control narratives. So people don't understand what freedom of speech is. That's the first major problem. And it's shameful how many people in the United States do not understand what freedom of speech actually protects. So that aside, you're absolutely right. Fighting the information war in the West is extremely difficult because anyone with a blog, anyone with a Twitter account, anyone, I mean, anyone can call themselves a journalist, essentially. We live in a world, we live in a country where people read the headline and they completely bypass the author line and they go straight into the content. And then they decide whether the content's real or not based on how they feel instead of based on empirical, measurable evidence. So you mentioned the Lend Lease Act and the support of the United States, support of Ukraine by the United States. Are you skeptical to the level of support that the United States is providing and is going to provide over time? The strategy that the United States has taken to support Ukraine is similar to the strategy we took to support Great Britain during World War II. The enactment of the Lend Lease Act is a perfect example of that. The Lend Lease Act means that we are lending or leasing equipment to the Ukrainian government in exchange for future payment. So every time a rocket is launched, every time a drone crashes into a tank, that's a bill that Ukraine is just racking up. It's like when you go to a restaurant and you start drinking shots. Sometime the bill will come due. This is exactly what we did when Europe and when Great Britain was in the face of a Nazi invasion. We signed the same thing into motion. Do you know that the UK did not pay off the debt from World War II until 2020? They've been paying that debt since the end of World War II. So what we're doing is we're indebting Ukraine against the promise that perhaps they will secure their freedom, which nobody seems to wanna talk about what freedom is actually gonna look like for Ukrainians. What are the true handful of outcomes, the realistic outcomes that could come of this and which of those outcomes really looks like freedom to them, especially in the face of the fact that they're going to be trillions of dollars in debt to the West for supplying them with the training and the weapons and the food and the med kits and everything else that we're giving them because none of it's free. It's all coming due. We're a democracy, but we're also a capitalist country. We can't afford to just give things away for free, but we can give things away at a discount. We can give things away, lay away, but the bill will come due. And unfortunately that is not part of the conversation that's being had with the American people. So debt is a way to establish some level of control. Power is power. That said, having a very close relationship between Ukraine and the United States does not seem to be a negative possibility when the Ukrainians think about their future in terms of freedom. That's one thing. And the other, there's some aspect of this war that I've just noticed that one of the people I talked to said that all great nations have a independence war, have to have a war for their independence. In order, there's something, it's dark, but there's something about war just being a catalyst for finding your own identity as a nation. So you can have leaders, you can have sort of signed documents, you can have all this kind of stuff, but there's something about war that really brings the country together and actually try to figure out what is at the core of the spirit of the people that defines this country. And they see this war as that, as the independence war to define the heart of what the country is. So there's been before the war, before this invasion, there was a lot of factions in the country. There was a lot of influence from oligarchs and corruption and so on. A lot of that was the factions were brought together under one umbrella effectively to become one nation because of this invasion. So they see that as a positive direction for the defining of what a free democratic country looks like after the war, in their perspective after the war is won. It's a difficult situation because I'm trying to make sure that you and all, everybody listening understands that what's happening in Ukraine, among Ukrainians, is noble and brave and courageous and beyond the expectations of anyone. The fact is there is no material support coming from the outside. The American Revolution was won because of French involvement. French ships, French troops, French generals, French military might. The independence of communist China was won through Russian support, Russian generals, Russian troops on the ground fighting with the communists. That's how revolutions are won. That's how independent countries are born. Ukraine doesn't get any of that. No one is stepping into that because we live in a world right now where there simply is no economic benefits to the parties in power to support Ukraine to that level. And war is a game of economics. The economic benefit of Ukraine is crystal clear in favor of Russia, which is why Putin cannot lose. He will not let himself lose. Short of something completely unexpected, right? I'm talking 60%, 70% probability, Ukraine loses. But there's still 20%, 30% probability of the unimaginable happening. Who knows what that might be? An oligarch assassinates Putin or a nuclear bomb goes off somewhere or who knows what, right? There's still a chance that something unexpected will happen and change the tide of the war. But when it comes down to the core calculus here, Ukraine is the agricultural bed to support a future Russia. Russia knows, they know they have to have Ukraine. They know that they have to have it to protect themselves against military pressure from the West. They have to have it for agricultural reasons. They have major oil and natural gas pipelines that flow through Eastern Ukraine. They cannot let Ukraine fall outside of their sphere of influence. They cannot. The United States doesn't really have any economic vested interest in Ukraine. Ideological points of view and promises aside, there's no economic benefit. And the same thing goes for NATO. NATO has no economic investment in Ukraine. Ukrainian output, Ukrainian food goes to the Middle East and Africa. It doesn't go to Europe. So the whole, the West siding with Ukraine is exclusively ideological and it's putting them in a place where they fight a war with Russia so the whole world can see Russia's capabilities. Ukraine is a, as sad as it is to say, man, Ukraine is a pawn on a table for superpowers to calculate each other's capacities. Right now we've only talked about Russia and the United States. We haven't even talked about Iran. We haven't even talked about China, right? It is a pawn on a table. This is a chicken fight so that people get to watch and see what the other trainers are doing. Well, a lot of people might've said the same thing about the United States back in the independence fight. So there is possibilities, as you've said. We're not saying a 0% chance and it could be a reasonably high percent chance that this becomes one of the great democratic nations that the 21st century is remembered by. Absolutely. And so you said American support. So ideologically, first of all, you don't assign much longterm power to that. That US could support Ukraine purely on ideological grounds. Just look in the last four years, the last three years. Do you remember what happened in Hong Kong right before COVID? China swooped into Hong Kong violently, beating protesters, killing them in the street, imprisoning people without just cause. And Hong Kong was a democracy and the whole world stood by and let it happen. And then what happened in Afghanistan just a year ago and the whole world stood by and let the Taliban take power again after 20 years of loss. This, we are showing a repeatable point of view. We will talk. American politicians, American administrations, we will say a lot of things. We will promise a lot of ideological pro democracy, rah rah statements. We will say it. But when it comes down to putting our own people, our own economy, our own GDP at risk, we step away from that fight. America is currently supplying military equipment to Ukraine. Absolutely. And a lot of that military equipment has actually been the thing that turned the tides of war a couple of times already. Currently that's the high mar systems. So you mentioned sort of Putin can't afford to lose, but winning can look in different ways. So you've kind of defined so on. At this moment, the prediction is that winning looks like capturing not just the east, but the south of Ukraine. But you can have narratives of winning that return back to what was at the beginning of this year before the invasion. Correct. That Crimea is still with Russia. There's some kind of negotiated thing about Donbass where it still stays with Ukraine, but there's some. Puppet government. Yeah. Just like that's what they have in Georgia right now. And that could still be defined through mechanisms. As Russia winning. As Russia winning for Russia and then for Ukraine as Ukraine winning and for the west as democracy winning and you kind of negotiate. I mean, that seems to be how geopolitics works is everybody can walk away with a win win story and then the world progresses with the lessons learned. That's the high likely. That's the most probable outcome. The most probable outcome is that Ukraine remains in air quotes, a sovereign nation. It's not going to be truly sovereign because it will become, it will have to have new government put in place. Zelinsky will, it's extremely unlikely he will be president because he has gone too far to demonstrate his power over the people and his ability to separate the Ukrainian people from the autocratic power of Russia. So he would have to be unseated whether he goes into exile or whether he is peacefully left alone is all gonna be part of negotiations. But the thing to keep in mind also is that a negotiated peace really just means a negotiated ceasefire. We've seen this happen all over the world. North Korea and South Korea are technically still just in negotiated cease power. What you end up having is Russia will allow Ukraine to call itself Ukraine, to operate independently, to have their own debt to the United States. Russia doesn't wanna take on that debt. And then in exchange for that, they will have firmer guidelines as to how NATO can engage with Ukraine. And then that becomes an example for all the other former Soviet satellite states, which are all required economically by Russia, not required economically by the West. And then you end up seeing how it just, you can see how the whole thing plays out once you realize that the keystone is Ukraine. There is something about Ukraine, the deep support by the Ukrainian people of America that is in contrast with, for example, Afghanistan, that it seems like ideologically, Ukraine could be a beacon of freedom used in narratives by the United States to fight geopolitical wars in that part of the world, that they would be a good partner for this idea of democracy, of freedom, of all the values that America stands for. They're a good partner. And so it's valuable, if you sort of have a cynical, pragmatic view, sort of like Henry Kissinger type of view, it's valuable to have them as a partner, so valuable that it makes sense to support them in achieving a negotiated ceasefire that's on the side of Ukraine. But because of this particular leader, this particular culture, this particular dynamics of how the war unrolled and things like Twitter and the way digital communication currently works, it just seems like this is a powerful symbol of freedom that's useful for the United States if we're sort of to take the pragmatic view. Don't you think it's possible that United States supports Ukraine financially, militarily enough for it to get an advantage in this war? I think they've already gotten advantage in the war. The fact that the war is still going on demonstrates the asymmetrical advantage. The fact that Russia has stepped up to the negotiating table with them several times without just turning to Chechen, I mean, you remember what happened in Chechnya, without turning to Chechnya level, just mass blind destruction, which was another Putin war. To see that those things have happened demonstrates the asymmetric advantage that the West has given. I think the true way to look at the benefit of Ukraine as a shining example of freedom in Europe for the West isn't to understand whether or not they could. They absolutely could. It's the question of how valuable is that in Europe? How valuable is Ukraine? Which before February, nobody even thought about Ukraine. And the people who did know about Ukraine knew that it was an extremely corrupt former Soviet state with 20% of its national population self identifying as Russian. There's a reason Putin went into Ukraine. There's a reason he's been promising he would go into Ukraine for the better part of a decade. Because the circumstances were aligned, it was a corrupt country that self identified as Russian in many ways. It was supposed to be an easier of multiple marks in terms of the former Soviet satellite states to go after. That's all part of the miscalculation that the rest of the world saw too when we thought it would fall quickly. So to think that it could be a shining example of freedom is accurate. But is it as shining a star as Germany? Is it as shining a star as the UK? Is it as shining a star as Romania? Is it as shiny a star as France? It's got a lot of democratic freedom based countries in Europe to compete against to be the shining stellar example. And in exchange, on counterpoint to that, it has an extreme amount of strategic value to Russia which has no interest in making it a shining star of the example of democracy and freedom. Outside of research in terms of the shininess of the star, I would argue yes. If you look at how much it captivated the attention of the world. The attention of the world has made no material difference, man. That's what I'm saying. That's your estimation, but are you sure we can, we can't, if you can convert that into political influence into money, don't you think attention is money? Attention is money in democracies and capitalist countries. Yes. Which serves as a counterweight to sort of authoritarian regimes. So for Putin, resources matter. For the United States, also resources matter, but the attention and the belief of the people also matter because that's how you attain and maintain political power. So going to that exact example, then I would highlight that our current administration has the lowest approval ratings of any president in history. So if people were very fond of the war going on in Ukraine, wouldn't that counterbalance some of our upset, some of the dissent coming from the economy and some of the dissent coming from the great recession or the second great, or the great resignation and whatever's happening with the draw with the down stock market? You would think that people would feel like they're sacrificing for something if they really believed that Ukraine mattered, that they would stand next to the president who is so staunchly driving and leading the West against this conflict. Well, I think the opposition to this particular president, I personally believe has less to do with the policies and more to do with a lot of the other human factors. But again, empirically, this is, I look at things through a very empirical lens, a very cold fact based lens. And there are multiple data points that suggest that the American people ideologically sympathize with Ukraine, but they really just want their gas prices to go down. They really just want to be able to pay less money at the grocery store for their food. And they most definitely don't want their sons and daughters to die in exchange for Ukrainian freedom. It does hurt me to see the politicization of this war as well. I think that maybe has to do with the kind of calculation you're referring to, but it seems like it doesn't. It seems like there's a cynical, whatever takes attention of the media for the moment, the red team chooses one side and the blue team chooses another. And then I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the Democrats went into full support of Ukraine on the ideological side. And then I guess Republicans are saying, why are we wasting money? The gas prices are going up. That's a very crude kind of analysis, but they basically picked whatever argument on whatever side, and now more and more and more, this particular war in Ukraine is becoming a kind of pawn in the game of politics that's first the midterm elections, then building up towards the presidential elections, and stops being about the philosophical, the social, the geopolitical aspects, parameters of this war, and more about just like whatever the heck captivates Twitter, and we're gonna use that for politics. You're right in the sense of the fact that it's, I wouldn't say that the red team and the blue team picked opposite sides on this. What I would say is that media discovered that talking about Ukraine wasn't as profitable as talking about something else. People simply, the American people who read media or who watch media, they simply became bored reading about news that didn't seem to be changing much. And we turned back into wanting to read about our own economy, and we wanted to hear more about cryptocurrency, and we wanted to hear more about the Kardashians, and that's what we care about, so that's what media writes about. That's how a capitalist market driven world works, and that's how the United States works. That's why in both red papers and blue papers, red sources and blue sources, you don't see Ukraine being mentioned very much. If anything, I would say that your Republicans are probably more in support of what's happening in Ukraine right now, because we're creating new weapon systems, our military is getting stronger, we're sending these, we get to test military systems in combat in Ukraine, that's priceless. In the world of the military industrial complex, being able to field test, combat test a weapon without having to sacrifice your own people is incredibly valuable. You get all the data, you get all the performance metrics, but you don't have to put yourself at risk. That is one of the major benefits of what we're seeing from supporting Ukraine with weapons and with troops. The longterm benefit to what will come of this for the United States, practically speaking, in the lens of national security, through military readiness, through future economic benefits, those are super strong. The geopolitical fight is essentially moot, because Ukraine is not a geopolitical player. It was not for 70 years, and after this conflict is over, it will not again. Just think about what you were just saying with the American people's attention span to Twitter and whatever's currently going on. If the Ukraine conflict resolved itself today in any direction, how many weeks do you think before no one talked about Ukraine anymore? Do you think we would make it two weeks? Or do you think we'd make it maybe seven days? It would be headline news for one or two days, and then we'd be onto something else. It's just an unfortunate reality of how the world works in a capitalist democracy. Yeah, it just breaks my heart how much, you know, I know that there's Yemen and Syria and that nobody talks about anymore. Still raging conflicts going on. It breaks my heart how much generational hatred is born. I happen to be from, my family is from Ukraine and from Russia, and so for me, just personally, it's a part of the world I care about. In terms of its history, because I speak the language, I can appreciate the beauty of the literature, the music, the art, the cultural history of the 20th century through all the dark times, through all the hell of the dark sides of authoritarian regimes, the destruction of war. There's still just the beauty that I'm able to appreciate that I can't appreciate about China, Brazil, other countries because I don't speak their language. This one I can appreciate. And so in that way, this is personally really painful to me to see so much of that history, the beauty in that history suffocated by the hatred that is born through this kind of geopolitical game fought mostly by the politicians, the leaders. People are beautiful, and that's what you're talking about. People are just, people are beautiful creatures. Culture and art and science, these are beautiful, beautiful things that come about because of human beings. And the thing that gives me hope is that no matter what conflict the world has seen, and we've seen some devastating, horrible crimes against humanity already. We saw nuclear bombs go off in Japan. We saw genocide happen in Rwanda. We've seen horrible things happen. But people persevere. Language, culture, arts, science, they all persevere. They all shine through. Some of the most, people don't even realize how gorgeous the architecture and the culture is inside Iran. People have no idea. Chinese people in the rural parts of China are some of the kindest, most amazing people you'll ever meet. And Korean art and Korean dance, Korean drumming, I know nobody has ever even heard of Korean drumming. Korean drumming is this magical, beautiful thing. And the North, in North Korea, does it better than anybody in the world. Taekwondo in North Korea is just exceptional to watch. In North Korea? In North Korea. Nobody knows these things. How do you know about Taekwondo in North Korea? I have questions. That's fascinating. That's, people don't think about that, but the culture, the beauty of the people still flourishes even in the toughest of places. Absolutely, and we always will. We always will because that is what people do. And that is just the truth of it. And it breaks my heart to see travesties that people commit against people. But whether you're looking at a micro level, like what happens with shootings here in the United States, or whether you look at a macro level, like geopolitical power exchanges and intra and interstate conflicts, like what you see in Syria and what you see in Ukraine, those are disgusting, terrible things. War is a terrible thing. That is a famous quote. But people will persevere. People will come through. I hope so. I hope so. And I hope we don't do something that I'll probably also ask you about later on is things that destroy the possibility of perseverance, which is things like nuclear war, things that can do such tremendous damage that we will never recover. But yeah, amidst your pragmatic pessimism, I think both you and I have a kind of maybe small flame of optimism in there about the perseverance of the human species in general. Let me ask you about intelligence agencies outside of the CIA. Can you illuminate what is the most powerful intelligence agency in the world? The CIA, the FSB, formerly the KGB, the MI6, Mossad. I've gotten a chance to interact with a lot of Israelis while in Ukraine. Just incredible people. Yeah, in terms of both training and skill, just every front. American soldiers too, just American military is incredible. I just, the competence and skill of the military, the United States, Israeli I got to interact, and Ukrainian as well. It's striking. It's striking, it's beautiful. I just love people, I love carpenters, or people that are just extremely good at their job and then take pride in their craftsmanship. It's beautiful to see. And I imagine the same kind of thing happens inside of intelligence agencies as well that we don't get to appreciate because of the secrecy. Same thing with like Lockheed Martin. I interviewed the CTO of Lockheed Martin. It breaks my heart, as a person who loves engineering, because of the cover of secrecy, we'll never get to know some of the incredible engineering that happens inside of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. Yeah, you know, there's kind of this idea that these are, you know, people have conspiracy theories and kind of assign evil to these companies in some part, but I think there's beautiful people inside those companies, brilliant people, and some incredible science and engineering is happening there. Anyway, that said, the CIA, the FSB, the MI6, Mossad, China, I know very little about the... MSS, the Ministry of State Security. I don't know how much you know. Yeah. Or just other intelligence agencies. In India, Pakistan, I've also heard... Yeah, RAW is powerful, and so is ISSI. Yes, or ISSI. And then, of course, European nations in Germany and France. Yeah, so what can you say about the power, the influence of the different intelligence agencies within their nation and outside? Yeah, so to answer your question, your original question, which is the most powerful, I'm gonna have to give you a few different answers. So the most powerful intelligence organization in the world in terms of reach is the Chinese MSS, the Ministry of State Security, because they have created a single, solitary intelligence service that has global reach and is integrated with Chinese culture, so that essentially, every Chinese person anywhere in the world is an informant to the MSS, because that's their way of serving the Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo, the Central Kingdom, the Chinese word for China. So they're the strongest. They're the most powerful intelligence service in terms of reach. Most assets, most informants, most intelligence. So it's deeply integrated with the citizenry. Correct, with their culture. You know what a Chinese person who lives in Syria thinks of themself as? A Chinese person. Do you know what a Chinese person, a Chinese national living in the United States thinks of themself as? A Chinese person, right? Americans living abroad often think of ourselves as expats, expatriates, living on the local economy, embracing the local culture. That is not how Chinese people view traveling around the world. And by the way, if I may mention, I believe the way Mossad operates is a similar kind of thing, because people from Israel living abroad still think of themselves as Jewish and Israeli. First. First, so that allows you to integrate the. Culture, and yep, the faith based aspects. Exactly right. But the number of people in Israel is much, much smaller. Exactly right. The number of people in China. When it comes to reach, China wins that game. When it comes to professional capability, it's the CIA by far, because budget wise, capability wise, weapons system wise, modern technology wise, CIA is the leader around the world, which is why every other intelligence organization out there wants to partner with CIA. They want to learn from CIA. They want to train with CIA. They want to partner on counter narcotics, and counter drug, and counter terrorism, and counter Uyghur, you name it, people want to partner with CIA. So CIA is the most powerful in terms of capability and wealth. And then you've got the idea, you've got tech. So tech alone, meaning corporate espionage, economic espionage, nothing beats DGSE in France. They're the top. They've got a massive budget that almost goes exclusively to stealing foreign secrets. They're the biggest threat to the United States, even above Russia and above China. DGSE in France is a massively powerful intelligence organization, but they're so exclusively focused on a handful of types of intelligence collection that nobody even really thinks that they exist. And then in terms of just terrifying violence, you have Mossad. Mossad will do anything. Mossad has no qualms doing what it takes to ensure the survival of every Israeli citizen around the world. Most other countries will stop at some point, but Mossad doesn't do that. So it's the lines you're willing to cross. And the reasons that you're willing to cross them. The CIA will let an American stay in jail in Russia, unlawfully, and seek a diplomatic solution. I mean, the United States has let people, there are two gentlemen from the 1950s who were imprisoned in China for 20 years waiting for diplomatic solutions to their release. So we do not kill to save a citizen, but Mossad will. And then they'll not just kill, they'll do large scale infiltration. They'll do amazing things. There is no, they spare no expense because it's a demonstration to their own people. Again, going back to the whole idea of influence. Every intelligence operation that sees the light of day has two purposes. The first purpose is the intelligence operation. But if it was just the intelligence operation, it would stay secret forever. The second purpose of every successful intelligence operation, when they become public, is to send a signal to the world. If you work against us, we will do this to you. If you work for us, we will take care of you in this way. It's a massive information campaign. Do you think in that way, CIA is not doing a good job? Because there is the FSB, perhaps much less so GRU, but the KGB did this well, which is to send a signal, like basically communicate that this is a terrifying organization with a lot of power. So Mossad is doing a good job of that. Correct. The psychological information warfare. And it seems like the CIA also has a lot of kind of myths about it, conspiracy theories about it, but much less so than the other agencies. CIA does a good job of playing to the mythos. So when General Petraeus used to be the director of CIA. Yeah, and your workout partner. And my workout partner. I read about this. So I loved and hated those workouts with Petraeus because he is a physical beast. He's a strong fit, at the time, 60 something year old man. Let me take a tangent on that because he's coming on this podcast. Oh, excellent man. So can you say what you learned from the man in terms of, or like what you think is interesting and powerful and inspiring about the way he sees the world, or maybe what you learned in terms of how to get strong in the gym or anything about life. Two things right away. And one of them I was gonna share with you anyway. So I'm glad that you asked the question. So the first is that on our runs and man, he runs fast and we would go for six mile runs through Bangkok. And he talked openly about, I asked him, how do you keep this mystery, this epic mythology about your fitness and your strength? How do you keep all of this alive with the troops? And he had this amazing answer. And he was like, I don't talk about it. Myths are born not from somebody orchestrating the myth, but from the source of the myth, simply being secretive. So he's like, I don't talk about it. I've never talked about it. I've never exacerbated it. I just do what I do. And I let the troops talk. And he's like, when it's in favor, when it goes in favor of discipline and loyalty and commitment, I let it run. If it starts getting destructive or damaging, then I have my leadership team step in to fix it. But when it comes to the mythos, the myth of him being superpowered soldier, that's what he wants every soldier to be. So he lets it run. And it was so enlightening when he told me, when there's a myth that benefits you, you just let it go. You let it happen because it gets you further without you doing any work. It costs no investment for you. So the catalyst of the virality of the myth is just being mysterious. And that's what CIA does well, to go back to your first question. What does CIA do? They don't answer any questions. They don't say anything. And wherever the myth goes, the myth goes, whether it's that they sold drugs or use child prostitutes or whatever else, wherever the myth goes, they let it go. Because at the end of the day, everybody sits back and says, wow, I really just don't know. Now, the second thing that I learned from Petraeus, and I really am a big fan of Petraeus. I know he made personal mistakes. You don't get to be that powerful without making personal mistakes. But when I worked out with him, the one thing that my commanding officer told me not to ask about, he was like, never ask the general about his family. I'm a family guy. So as soon as I met General Petraeus, one of the first things I asked him was, hey, what was it like raising a family and being the commander of forces in the Middle East? Like you weren't with your family very much. And the thing I love about the guy, he didn't bite off my head. He didn't snap at me. He didn't do anything. He openly admitted that he regretted some of the decisions that he made because he had to sacrifice his family to get there. Relationships with his children, absentee father, missing birthdays, missing, we all say, we all say how sad it is to miss birthdays and miss anniversaries, yada, yada, yada. Everybody knows what that feels like. Even business people know what that feels like. The actual pain that we're talking about is when you're not there to handle your 13 year old's questions when a boy breaks up with her or when you're not there to handle the bloody lip that your nine year old comes back with from their first encounter with a bully. Those are the truly heartbreaking moments that a parent lives and dies by. He missed almost all of those because he was fighting a war that we forgot and we gave up on 20 years later, right? He's so honest about that. And it was really inspiring to me to be told not to ask that question. And when I broke that guidance, he didn't reprimand me. He just, he was authentic. And it was absolutely one of the big decisions that helped me leave CIA on my own in 2014. And he was honest on the sacrifice you make. The same man, the same man who just taught me a lesson about letting a myth live, that same guy was willing to be so authentic about this personal mistake. I like complicated people like that. So what did you, what do you make of that calculation, of family versus job? You've given a lot of your life and passion to the CIA, to that work. You've spoken positively about that world, the good it does. And yet you're also a family man and you value that. What's that calculation like? What's that trade off like? I mean, for me, the calculation is very clear. It's family. I left CIA because I chose my family. And when my son was born, my wife and I found out that we were pregnant while we were still on mission. We were a tandem couple. My wife is also a former CIA officer, undercover like me. We were operating together overseas. We got the positive pregnancy test, like so many people do. And she cried. My wife was a bad ass. I was just, I was like the accidental spy, but my wife was really good at what she does. And she cried and she was like, what do we do now? It's what we've always wanted, a child, but we're in this thing right now. There's no space for a child. So long story short, we had our baby. CIA brought us back to have the baby. And when we started having conversations about, hey, what do we do next? Cause we're not the type of people to wanna just sit around and be domestic. What do we do next? But keep in mind, we have a child now. So here's some of our suggestions. We could do this and we can do that. Let us get our child to a place where we can put him into an international school, or we can get him into some sort of program where we can both operate together again during the day. But CIA just had no, they had no patience for that conversation. There was no, family is not their priority. So the fact that we were a tandem couple, two officers, two operators trying to have a baby was irrelevant to them. So when they didn't play with us, when they did nothing to help us prioritize parenthood as part of our overall experience, that's when we knew that they never would. And what good is it to commit yourself to a career if the career is always going to challenge the thing that you value most? And that was the calculation that we made to leave CIA. Not everybody makes that calculation. And a big part of why I am so vocal about my time in CIA is because I am immensely appreciative of the men and women who to this day have failed marriages and poor relationships with their children because they chose national security. They chose protecting America over their own family. And they've done it even though it's made them abuse alcohol and abuse substances and they've gotten themselves, they've got permanent diseases and issues from living and working abroad. It's just insane the sacrifice that officers make to keep America free. And I'm just not one of those people. I chose family. You said that your wife misses it. Do you miss it? We both miss it. We miss it for different reasons. We miss it for similar reasons, I guess, but we miss it in different ways. The people, the people at CIA are just amazing. They're everyday people like the guy and the gal next door, but so smart and so dedicated and so courageous about what they do and how they do it. I mean, the sacrifices they make are massive, more massive than the sacrifices I made. So I was always inspired and impressed by the people around me. So both my wife and I absolutely miss the people. My wife misses the work because you know everything. When you're inside, it's all, I mean, we had top secret. We had TS SCI clearances at the time. I had a cat six, cat 12, which makes me nuclear cleared. My wife had other privy clearances that allowed her to look into areas that were specialized, but there wasn't a headline that went out that we couldn't fact check with a click of a few buttons. And she misses that because she loved that kind of knowledge. And now you're just one of us living in the cloud of mystery. Exactly. Not really knowing anything about what's going on. Exactly, but for me, I've always been the person that likes operating. And you know what you still get to do when you leave CIA? You still get to operate. Operating is just working with people. It's understanding how people think, predicting their actions, driving their direction of their thoughts, persuading them, winning negotiations. You still get to do that. You do that every day. And you can apply that in all kinds of domains. Well, let me ask you on that. You're a covert CIA intelligence officer for several years. Maybe can you tell me the story of how it all began? How were you recruited? And what did the job entail to the degree you can speak about it? Feel free to direct me if I'm getting too boring or if the camera. Every aspect of this is super exciting. So I was leaving the United States Air Force in 2007. I was a lieutenant getting ready to pin on captain. My five years was up. And I was a very bad fit for the US Air Force. I was an Air Force Academy graduate, not by choice, but by lack of opportunity, lack of options otherwise. So I forced myself through the Academy, barely graduated with a 2.4 GPA. And then went on the Air Force taught me how to fly. And then the Air Force taught me about nuclear weapons. And I ended up as a nuclear missile commander in Montana. And I chose to leave the Air Force because I didn't like shaving my face. I didn't like having short hair. And I most definitely didn't like shining my shoes. And I did not wanna be one of the people in charge of nuclear weapons. So when I found myself as a person in charge of 200 nuclear weapons, I knew that I was going down the wrong road. I have questions about this. And more importantly, I have questions about your hair. So you had short hair at the time? I had, yeah, you have to. Military regulations, you can't have hair longer than one inch. Okay. And this, the beautiful hair you have now, that came to be in the CIA or after? This, so I discovered I had messy hair in CIA because I used to go muge, we called it muge. I used to go Mujahideen style, big burly beard and crazy wacky hair. Because an ambiguously brown guy with a big beard and long hair can go anywhere in the world without anyone even noticing him. They either think that he's a janitor or they think that he's like some forgotten part of history but nobody ever thinks that that guy is a spy. So it was the perfect, for me, it was one of my favorite disguises. It's what's known as a level two disguise. One of my favorite disguises to Don was just dilapidated brown guy. Can you actually, we'll just take a million tangents. What's a level two disguise? What are the different levels of disguise? What are the disguises? Yeah, there's three levels of disguise by and large. Level one is what we also know, what we also call light disguise. So that's essentially, you put on sunglasses and a ball cap and that's a disguise. You look different than you normally look. So it's just different enough that someone who's never seen you before, someone who literally has to see you just from a picture on the internet, they may not recognize you. It's why you see celebrities walk around with ball caps and oversized jackets and baseball hats because they just need to not look like they look in the tabloid or not look like they look in TV. That's level one. Let me jump from level one to level three. Level three is all of your prosthetics, all the stuff you see in Mission Impossible, your fake ears, your fake faces, your fat suits, your stilts inside your feet, all that's level three. Whenever they make any kind of prosthetic disguise, that's a level three disguise because prosthetics are very damning if you are caught with a prosthetic. If you're caught wearing a sudden, wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses, nobody's gonna say you're a spy. But when you're caught with a custom made nose prosthetic that changes the way your face looks or when someone pops out a fake jaw and they see that your top teeth don't look like they did in this prosthetic, then all of a sudden you've got some very difficult questions to ask or to answer. So level three is extremely dangerous. Level one is not dangerous. Level two is longterm disguise. Level two is all the things that you can do to permanently change the way you look for a long period of time so that whether you're aggressed in the street or whether someone breaks into your hotel room or whatever, it's real. So maybe that's, maybe you get a tattoo. Maybe you cut your hair short. Maybe you grow your hair long. Maybe you go bald. Maybe you start wearing glasses. Well, glasses are technically a prosthetic, but you can, if you have teeth pulled, if you gain 20 pounds, really gain 20 pounds or lose 15 pounds, whatever you might do, all of that's considered level two. It's designed for a longterm mission so that people believe you are who you say you are in that disguise. A lot of that is physical characteristics. What about what actors do, which is the... Method acting. Yeah, the method acting, sort of developing a backstory in your own mind, and then you start pretending that you host a podcast and teach at a university and then do research and so on just so that people can believe that you're not actually an agent. Is that part of the disguise levels or no? So yes, disguise has to do with physical character traits. That's what a disguise is. What you're talking about is known as a cover legend. When you go undercover, what you claim to be, who you claim to be, that's called your legend, your cover legend. Every disguise would theoretically have its own cover legend. Even if it's just to describe why you're wearing what you're wearing, it's all a cover. So the method acting, this is a fantastic point that I don't get to make very often, so I'm glad you asked. The difference between CIA officers in the field and method actors is that method actors try to become the character. They try to shed all vestiges of who they really are and become the character, and that's part of what makes them so amazing, but it's also part of what makes them mentally unstable over long periods of time. It's part of what feeds their depression, their anxiety, their personal issues, because they lose sight of who they really are. Field officers don't get that luxury. We have to always, always remember we are a covert CIA intelligence officer collecting secrets in the field. We have to remember that. So we're taught a very specific skill to compartmentalize our true self separately, but make that true self the true identity. So then we can still live and act and effectively carry out our cover legend without ever losing sight, without ever losing that compass true north of who we actually are. And then we can compartmentalize and secure all the information that we need, retain it, remember it, but then return to our true self when we get back to a position of safety. Is it possible to do that? So I just have kind of anecdotal evidence for myself. I really try to be the exact same person in all conditions, which makes it very easy. Like if you're not lying, it makes it very easy to, first of all, to exist, but also to communicate a kind of authenticity and a genuineness, which I think is really important. Like trust and integrity around trust is extremely important to me. It's the thing that opens doors and maintains relationships. And I tend to think, like when I was in Ukraine, so many doors just opened to the very high security areas and everywhere else too. Like I've just interacted with some incredible people without any kind of concerns. You know, who is this guy? Is he gonna spread it? You know, all that kind of stuff. And I tend to believe that you're able to communicate a trustworthiness somehow if you just are who you are. And I think, I suppose method actors are trying to achieve that by becoming something and they can, I just feel like there is very subtle cues that are extremely difficult to fake. Like you really have to become that person, be that person. But you're saying as a CIA agent, you have to remember that you are there to collect information. Do you think that gives you away? So one of the flaws in your argument is that you keep referring to how you feel. I feel this, I feel that, I feel like this, I feel like that. That feeling is a predictable character trait of all human beings. It's a pink matter, we call it pink matter. It's a cognitive trait. You are not alone in trusting your feelings. All people trust their feelings. But because what CIA teaches us is how to systematically create artificial relationships where we're the one in control of the source that is giving us intelligence. And the core element to being able to control a relationship is understanding the pink matter truth of feelings. What all people feel becomes their point of view on what reality is. So when you understand and you learn how to manipulate what people feel, then you can essentially direct them to feel any way you want them to feel. So if you want them to feel like they can trust you, you can make them feel that way. If you want them to feel like you're a good guy or a bad guy, if you want them to feel like they should give you secrets even though their government tells them not to, you can do that. There are men who make women feel like they love them and just so that the woman will sleep with them. There are women who make men feel like they love them just so the men will give them their money. Manipulation is a core behavioral trait of all the human species because we all understand to some level how powerful feelings are, but feelings are not the same thing as logical, rational thought. They're two different sides of the brain. What CIA teaches us how to do is systematically tap into the right side, emotional side of the brain so that we can quickly get past all of the stuff you were just saying, all of the, well, don't you have to be convincing and don't you have to really know your story and don't you have to be able to defend it? Don't you have to have authenticity and don't you have to have genuine feelings? Yes, all of those things are true if you're having a genuine relationship, but in an artificial relationship, there's ways to bypass all of that and get right to the heart of making someone feel comfortable and safe. I guess the question I'm asking and the thing I was implying is that creating an artificial relationship is an extremely difficult skill to accomplish the level, like how good I am at being me and creating a feeling in another person that I create. For you to do that artificially, that's gotta be, you gotta be, my sense is you gotta be really damn good at that kind of thing. I would venture to say, I mean, I don't know how to measure how difficult the thing is, but especially when you're communicating with people whose job depends on forming trusting relationships, they're gonna smell bullshit. And to get past that bullshit detector is tough. It's a tough skill. Well, it's interesting. So I would say that. Or maybe I'm wrong actually on that. I would say that once you understand the system, it's not that hard. It makes a lot of sense. But I would also say that to your exact point, you are right that people smell bullshit. People smell bullshit. But here's the thing. If you come in smelling like goat shit, you still smell like shit, but you don't smell like bullshit. So they don't count you out right away. And if you come in smelling like rotten tomatoes or if you come in smelling like lavender or if you come in smelling like vanilla or if you come in without any smell at all, all that matters is that you don't smell like bullshit. Here's the thing that's one of the secret sauces of CIA. When you look and act like a spy, people think you're a spy. If you look and act in any other way, you know what they never ever think you are? A spy. They might think you're an idiot. They might think you're trailer trash. They might think that you're a migrant worker, but they never think you're a spy. And that lesson in everyday life is immensely powerful. If you're trying to take your boss's job, as long as you don't ever look like the employee who's trying to take the boss's job, the boss is focused on all the employees who are trying to take his job. Everybody's prioritizing whether they know it or not. The goal is to just not be the one that they're targeting. Target them without them knowing you're targeting them. So people just, when they meet you, they put you in a bin. And if you want to avoid being put in a particular bin, just don't act like the person that would be, just show some kind of characteristics that bin you in some other way. Exactly right. You have to be in a bin. Just choose the bin. All right. So you, knowing these methods, when you talk to people, especially in civilian life, how do you know who's lying to you and not? That gets to be more into the trained skill side of things. There's body cues, there's micro expressions. I'm not a big fan of, I don't believe that micro expressions alone do anything. I also don't believe that micro expressions without an effective baseline do anything. So don't for a second think that I'm, all the people out there pitching that you can tell if someone's lying to you just by looking at their face, it's all baloney. In my world, that's baloney. Like the way you move your eyes or something like that. Without knowing a baseline, without knowing. For that individual. For that individual. Then you actually don't know. And an individual's baseline is based on education, culture, life experience, you name it, right? So this is huge. But when you combine facial expressions with body movements, body language, nonverbal cues, and you add on top of that effective elicitation techniques that you are in control of, now you have a more robust platform to tell if someone's lying to you. So there's like a set of like interrogation trajectories you can go down that can help you figure out a person. Technically they're interview, interview concepts. Correct. Because an interrogation, an interrogation is something very different than an interview. And in the world of professionals, an interrogation is very different. What's the difference? The nature of how relaxed the thing is or what? So in an interrogation, there's a clear pattern of dominance. There's no equality. Also, there's no escape. You are there until the interrogator is done with you. Anybody who's ever been reprimanded by mom and dad knows what an interrogation feels like. Anybody who's ever been called into the principal's office or the boss's office, that's what interrogation feels like. You don't leave until the boss says you can leave. And you're there to say, it's to answer questions the boss asks questions. An interview is an equal exchange of ideas. You are in control of this interview, for sure. But if we were having coffee, I could take control if I wanted to take control. If I wanted to ask you personal questions, I would. If I wanted to talk to you about your background, I could. Why am I in control of this interview exactly? Because the person in control is the person asking questions. I'm sitting here, as you've spoken about, my power here is I'm the quiet one listening. You're exactly right. Guess where this conversation goes? Anywhere you choose to take it, because you're the one asking questions. Every time I answer a question, I am creating a pattern of obedience to you, which subliminally, subconsciously, makes me that much more apt to answer your questions. Of course, you can always turn and start asking me questions. But you're saying that through conversation, you can call it interviewing, you can start to see cracks in the story of the person and the degree to which they exaggerate or lie or to see how much they can be trusted, that kind of stuff. What I'm saying is that through a conversation, you develop a baseline. Even just in the first part of our conversation, I've been able to create some baseline elements about you. You've been able to create baseline elements about me. Maybe they're just not a friend of mine. From those baselines, now we can push through more intentional questions to test whether or not the person is being truthful because they're operating within their baseline, or if you are triggering sensitivities outside of their baseline, and then you can start to see their tells. That's fascinating. Yeah, baseline, even the tells, right? The eye contact. You've probably already formed a baseline that I have trouble making eye contact. And so if you ask me difficult questions and I'm not making eye contact, maybe that's not a good signal of me lying or whatever. Correct. Because I always have trouble making eye contact, stuff like that. That's really fascinating. The majority of your eye movement is to the right? Yeah. Your right, my left, right? Which is usually someone who's, if you ask micro expressionists, that's someone who's referencing fact. Yeah. That's not necessarily what's happening for you because you're pulling concepts out of the air. So it's also a place where you reference something other than fact. It's a place for you to find creativity. So if I just thought that you were lying because you look up and to the right, I would be wrong. That's so fascinating. And a lot of that has to do with like habits that are formed and all those kinds of things, or maybe some right hand, left hand type of situation. Right eye dominance. Yeah, right eye dominance. It's gonna make you look to the right. Is this a science or an art? It's a bit of both. I would say that like all good art, art is taught from a foundation of skills. And those skills are played, are taught in a very structured manner. And then the way that you use the skills after that, that's more of the artistic grace. So I've always called espionage an art. Spying is an art. Being able to hack human beings is an art, but it's all based in a foundation of science. You still have to learn how to mix the color palette and use certain brushes. Do you think of that as a kind of the study of human psychology? Is that what a psychologist does or a psychiatrist? What from this process have you learned about human nature? Human nature. I mean, I suppose the answer to that could be a book, but it probably will be a book. I'll save you that, yeah. But is there things that are surprising about human nature, surprising to us civilians that you could speak to? Yes, one thing is extremely surprising about human nature, which is funny, because that's not the answer I would have said. So I'm glad that you clarified this specific question. The thing that's surprising about human nature is that human beings long, like in their soul, there's like a painful longing to be with other people. And that's really surprising, because we all wanna pretend like we're strong. We all wanna pretend like we're independent. We all wanna pretend like we are the masters of our destiny. But what's truly consistent in all people is this longing to commune with others like us. My more practical answer about what I've learned to be the truth is that human nature is predictable. And that predictability is what gives people an incredible advantage over other people. But that's not the surprising piece. I mean, even when CIA taught me that human nature is predictable, it just made sense. I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But what I never ever anticipated was no matter where I've been in the world, no matter who I've talked to, no matter what socioeconomic bracket is that longing, man, it hurts. Loneliness sucks, and togetherness feels good, even if you're together with someone you know isn't the right person. It still feels better than being alone. I mean, that's such a deep truth you speak to, and I could talk about that for a long time. There is, I mean, through these conversations in general, whether it's being recorded or not, I hunger to discover in the other person that longing. You strip away the other things, and then you share in the longing for that connection. And I particularly also have detected that in people from all walks of life, including people that others might identify as evil or hard, as completely cold, it's there. It's there. They've hardened themselves in their search, and who knows what dark place their brain is in, their heart is in, but that longing is still there. Even if it's an ember, it's there. It's the reason why in World War I and World War II, you know, enemy combatants still shared cigarettes on the front lines during periods of holidays or bad weather or whatever else, because that human connection, man, it triumphs over all. See, that's in part of what I refer to when I say love, because I feel like if political leaders and people in conflict at the small scale and the large scale were able to tune into that longing, to seek in each other that basic longing for human connection, a lot of problems could be solved. But of course, it's difficult, because it's a game of chicken. It's if you open yourself up to reveal that longing for connection with others, people can hurt you. Well, I would go a step farther, and I would say that taking the connection away, punishing, penalizing people by removing the connection is a powerful tool, and that's what we see. That's why we send people to jail. That's why we put economic sanctions on countries. That's why we ground our children and send them to their rooms. We are penalizing them. Whether we know it or not, we're using punitive damage by taking away that basic human connection, that longing for community. What was your recruitment process and training process and things you could speak to in the CIA? As I was leaving the Air Force, all that was on my mind, I don't know what you were like at 27, but I was a total tip shit at 27. I'm not much better now at 42, but. You and me, Bill. Yeah, but I was like, I just wanted to be anything other than a military officer, so I was actually in the process of applying to the Peace Corps through this thing called the internet, which was still fairly rudimentary in 2007. I had a computer lab that we went to, and it had 10 computers in it, and you had to log in and log out, and slow internet and everything else, but anyways, I was filling out an online application to go work in the US Peace Corps. I wanted to grow my hair out. I wanted to stop wearing shoes that were shiny. I wanted to meet a hippie chick and have hippie babies in the wild teaching Nigerian children how to read, so that was the path I was going down, and as I filled in all of my details, there came this page that popped up, and it was this blinking red page, and it said, stop here. You may qualify for other government positions. If you're willing to put your application on hold for 72 hours, that gives us a chance to reach out to you, so again, 27 year old dipshit. I was like, sure, I'll put myself on hold if I might qualify for other government opportunities, and then about a day later, I got a phone call from an almost unlisted number. It just said 703, which was very strange to see on my flip phone at the time, just one 703 area code, and I picked it up, and it was a person from Northern Virginia asking me if I would be telling me that I was qualified for a position in national security, and if I would be interested, they'll pay for my ticket and fly me up to Langley, Virginia. They didn't say CIA. They said Langley. I put one on one together, and I was like, maybe this is CIA, like, how cool is this? Or maybe this is all make believe, and this is totally fake, so either way, it doesn't hurt me at all to say yes. They already have my phone number, so yes, yes, yes, and then I remember thinking, there's no way that happened, and this isn't real, and then a day later, I got FedEx or an overnight delivery of an airplane ticket and a hotel reservation and a rental car reservation, and then I just kept doing the next thing, which I found out later on is a form of control. You just do the next thing that they tell you to do, and then before I knew it, I was interviewing in a nondescript building with a person who only told me their first name for a position with the National Clandestine Service. So you never really got a chance to think about it because there's small steps along the way, and it kind of just leads you, and maybe your personality is such that. That's an adventure. It's an adventure, and because it's one step at a time, you don't necessarily see the negative consequences of the adventure. You don't think about any of that. You're just stepping into the adventure. And it's easy. There's no work involved. Somebody else is doing all the work, telling me where to be and when. It's a lot like basic training in the military. Anybody who's ever been through basic training will tell you they hated the first few days, and then by the end, it was really comforting because you just did what you were told. They told you when to eat. They made the decision of what to eat, and then you just, you marched when they told you to march, shined your shoes when they told you to shine your shoes. Human beings love being told what to do. What about the training process for becoming a covert CIA agent? Yeah, so the interview process is. Yeah, the interview process, too. How rigorous was that? It was very rigorous. That was where it became difficult. Everything up to the first interview was easy, but there's three interviews, and some people are lucky enough to have four or five interviews if something goes wrong or something goes awry with the first few interviews. And again, this might be dated from what I went through, but during the interview process is when they start, they do your psychological evaluations. They do your, they do personality assessments. They do skills assessments. They'll start sending you back to wherever you're living with assignments, not intel assignments, but actual homework assignments. Write an essay about three parts of the world that you think will be most impacted in the next three to five years, or prioritize the top three strategic priorities for the United States and put it into 250 words or 2,500 words and whatever else, double spaced in this font, yada, yada, yada, like super specific stuff. It's kind of stressful, but it's just like going back to college again. So you go through all of those acts, and then you submit this stuff to some PO box that doesn't have anybody that's ever gonna respond to you, and then you hope. You just send it into the ether, and you hope that you sent it right. You hope that you wrote well enough. You hope that your assessment was right, whatever else it might be, and then eventually get another phone call that says, hey, we received your package. You've been moved to the next level of interview, and now we need you to go to this other nondescript building in this other nondescript city, and then you start meeting. You start sitting in waiting rooms with other groups of people who are at the same phase of interview with you, which were some of the coolest experiences that I remember still. One of my best friends to this day, who I don't get to talk to because he's still undercover, is a guy I met during those interview processes, and I was like, oh, we met. I saw what he was wearing. He saw what I was wearing. I was brown. So you immediately connected, and you liked the people there. Close. More like we immediately judge each other, because we're all untrained. So he looked at me, and he was like, brown dude with crazy hair, and I was wearing, dude, I was dressed like a total ass. I was dressed in a clubbing shirt. I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea to go to a CIA interview in a clubbing shirt with my buttons unbuttoned down to here. And he was like, yeah, you were really, after we got in, he was like, yeah, dude, you were always really cool to talk to, but I was like, there's no way that idiot's getting in. And I remember looking at him and being like, dude, you were just another white guy in a black suit. They're not looking for you, but here you are. So it was just, those kinds of things were so interesting, because we were totally wrong about what CIA was looking for. Until you're in, you have no idea what they're looking for. And you're just shooting in the dark. Did they have you do like a lie detector test? Yes, it's called a polygraph. Polygraph. How effective, just interesting, or our previous discussion, how effective are those? Polygraphs are really interesting. So one of the things that people don't understand about polygraphs is that polygraphs aren't meant to detect a lie. Like they're called a lie detector, but they're not actually meant to detect a lie. They're built to detect variants from your physiological baseline. So they're essentially meant to identify sensitivities to certain types of questions. And then as they identify a sensitivity to a question, it gives the interviewer an additional piece of information to direct the next round of questions. So then from there, they can kind of see how sensitive you are to a certain level of questions. And your sensitivity could be a sign of dishonesty, but it could also be a sign of vulnerability. So the interrogator themselves, the interviewer themselves, they're the one that have to make the judgment call as to which one it is, which is why you might see multiple interviewers over the course of multiple polygraphs. But that's really what they're all about. So, I mean, outside of, they're extremely uncomfortable, like they're mentally uncomfortable, but then there's also, you sit on a pad because the pad is supposed to be able to tell like your body movements, but also like your sphincter contractions or whatever. So you're sitting on this pad, you're plugged in, you're strapped in, you're tied up, and it takes so much time to get in there. And then they start asking you questions, baseline questions at first, and then other questions from there. And you're just answering the best you can. And you never know what they're seeing and you don't know what they're doing. And it's really hard not to get anxious of that anyways. And then... Are they the whole time monitoring the readings? Yeah, from like a big, they've got multiple screens and they've got just, it's all information superiority. They have information superiority. You're the idiot looking away from them or looking sideways of them and trying not to move because you're afraid that if you like have gas or if you move a little bit, it's gonna bury you from your baseline. And the whole time you're worried, your heart's racing and your blood pressure's increasing, which is a variance from baseline. So yeah, that means it's an interesting art. Or your baseline. Correct. Maybe there's some people that are just chilling the whole time and that's their baseline. Right, right. But that's what they're doing. They're establishing a baseline. I mean, I guess that means the polygraph is a skill that you develop to do it well. So when people talk about beating a lie detector, it's not that they're telling an effective lie. That's not hard. It's not hard to tell a lie to an interviewer. And the interviewer doesn't care if you're being honest or not honest about a topic. What they're looking for is sensitivity. If they see no sensitivity, that's a big sign for them. That's a big sign that you're probably a pathological liar. If you show sensitivity to many things, then that's a sign that you're probably an anxious person and they can still reset their baseline because they can tell how your anxiety is increasing in 15 minute increments. It's a unique skill. I mean, a really good polygrapher is immensely valuable. But yeah, it's the misnomers, the misconceptions about polygraphs are vast. You also mentioned personality tests. That's really interesting. So how effective are personality tests? One for the hiring process, but also for understanding a human being. So personality is extremely important for understanding human being. And I would say that there's a thousand different ways of looking at personality. The only one that I count with any significance is the MBTI. And the MBTI is what all the leading spy agencies around the world use as well. Well, that's kind of interesting to hear. Oh yeah. So there's been criticisms of that kind of test. There have been criticisms for a long time. Yeah, and you think there's value. Absolutely, absolutely. And there's a few reasons why, right? So first, MBTI makes the claim that your core personality doesn't change over time. And that's how it's calibrated. And one of the big arguments is that people say that your personality can change over time. Now, in my experience, the MBTI is exactly correct. Your core personality does not change because your core personality is defined as your personality when all resources are removed. So essentially, your emergency mode, your dire conditions, that is your core personality. We can all act a little more extroverted. We can all be a little more empathetic when we have tons of time and money and patience. When you strip away all that time, money, and patience, how empathetic are you? How much do you like being around other people? How much do you like being alone? Do you make judgments or do you analyze information? That's what's so powerful about MBTI is it's talking about what people are like when you strip away resources. And then because it's so consistent, it's also only four codes. It's super easy to be able to assess a human being through a dialogue, through a series of conversations, to be able to hone in with high accuracy what is there for letter code. There's only 16 options and it becomes extremely valuable. Is it perfectly precise and does everybody do it the same? I mean, those things are, the answers to those are no, but is it operationally useful in a short period of time? That is a resoundingly powerful yes. Yeah, I just, I only know, I think the first letter, it's introverted and extroverted, right? I've taken the test before, just like a crude version of the test and that's the same problem you have with IQ tests. There's the right thorough way of doing it and there's like fun internet way. And do you mind sharing what your personality? My type index? Yes. I'm an ENTP, that's an extrovert, intuitive, perceiver, thinker, ENT, thinker, P, perceiver. My wife is an ISFJ, which is the polar opposite of me. E, I'm extroverted, she's introverted, I'm an intuitor, she's a sensor, I'm a thinker, she's a feeler, I'm a perceiver, she's a judger. Is there good science on like longterm successful relationships in terms of the dynamics of that, the 16, I wonder if there's good data on this. I don't think there's a lot of good data in personalities writ large because there's not a lot of money to be made in personality testing, but I would say that with experience, with a good MBTI test, with a good paid test, a 400, 500 question test, once you understand your own code and then you're taught how to assess the code of others, with those two things kind of combined because then you have experience and learning, it becomes very useful and you can have high confidence in the conclusions that you reach about people's professions, about people's relationships with family, about people's relationships professionally, people's capabilities to deal with stress, how people will perform when pushed outside of their comfort zones, really, really powerful, useful stuff in corporate world and in the espionage world. So in terms of compressed representation of another human being, you can't do much better than those four letters. I don't believe you can do much better. In my experience, I have not seen anything better. Yeah, it is kind of, it's difficult to realize that there is a core personality or to the degree that's true, it seems to be true. It's even more difficult to realize that there is a stable, at least the science says so, a stable, consistent intelligence, unfortunately, you know, the G factor that they call, that if you do a barrage of IQ tests, that's going to consistently represent that G factor. And we're all born with that, we can't fix it. And that defines so much of who we are. It's sad. I don't see it as sad, because it's, for me, the faster you learn it, the faster you learn what your own sort of natural strengths and weaknesses are, the faster you get to stop wasting time on things that you're never gonna be good at, and you get to double down on the things that you're already naturally skilled or interested in. So there's always a silver lining to a cloud. But I know now that I will never be a ballerina or a ballerino, I know that I'll never be an artist, I'll never be a musician, I'll never be any of those things. And when I was 18, that might've made me sad, but now at 42, I'm like, well, shit, awesome. I can go be something else good instead of always being bad. You're not gonna be a ballerina, ballerino. Because I'm not graceful. And you've learned this through years of experience. Yeah, exactly. Well, I don't know if there's an MBTI equivalent for grace of movement. I think it's called S sensor. Oh, okay. Yeah, because a sensor is someone who's able to interact with the world around them through their five senses very effectively. Like if you talk to dancers, dancers can actually feel the grace in all of their muscles. They know what position their finger is in. I don't have any idea. I don't know what position my feet are in right now. I had to look to make sure I actually feel the floor right. Yeah, I definitely have. Oh, that's good to know. So I don't, I'm not a dancer, but I do have that. You're a musician, man. Well, the music, I don't know if that's for sure. Yeah, that's true that there is that physical component, but I think deeper, cause there's a technical aspect to that. That's just like, it's less about feel, but I do know jujitsu and grappling I've done all my life. I don't, you know, there's some people who are clumsy and they drop stuff all the time. They run into stuff. I don't, I don't, first of all, I don't know how that happens, but to me, I just have an awareness of stuff. Like if there's a little orientation. Yeah, like, like I know that there's a small object I have to step over and I have a good sense of that. It's so, it's so interesting. Yeah, you're just like born with that or something. My wife is brilliant and she still walks into doors. Yeah. I mean, she'll walk in a doorway. She'll bang her knee on the same wall that's been there for the last 50 years. It's for some reason, really hilarious. That's good for me. You've been asked, I think on Reddit, are there big secrets that you know that could lend you and our country in terrible trouble if you came out to the public and you answered, yes, I wish I could forget them. So let me ask you just about secrecy in general. Are these secrets or just other secrets, ones that the public will never know or will it come out in 10, 20, 50 years? I guess the deeper question is, what is the value of secrecy and transparency? The standard classification for all human intelligence operations is something called two five X two, 25 by two. So 50 years, 25 years times two years or times two rounds. So in essence, anything that I've seen has the first chance of becoming public domain, declassified after 50 years, unless there's some congressional requirement for it to be reviewed and assessed earlier. So by then, I'll be 80 something years old or potentially dead, which is either way. That's when it can come out according to its typical classification. The value of secrets I have seen is that secrets create space. Secrets give opportunity for security. They give opportunity for thinking. They give space and space is an incredibly advantageous thing to have. If you know something somebody else doesn't know, even if it's just 15 or 20 minutes different, you can direct, you can change the course of fate. So I find secrets to be extremely valuable, extremely useful. Even at the place where secrets are being kept from a large mass, part of what all Americans need to understand is that one of the trade offs to building a system of government that allows us to be first world and wealthy and secure and successful, one of the trade offs is that we have given up a great deal of personal freedom. And one of the personal freedoms that we give up is the freedom of knowing what we wanna know. You get to know what the government tells you, you get to know what you need to know or what you've learned yourself, but you don't get to know secrets. People who do get to know secrets know them for a reason. That's why it's called a need to know. How difficult is it to maintain secrecy? It's surprisingly difficult as technology changes. It's also surprisingly difficult as our culture becomes one where people want notoriety. People wanna be the person who breaks the secret. 25 years ago, 40 years ago, that wasn't the case. There was a time in the United States where if someone gave you a secret, it was a point of personal honor not to share the secret. Now we're in a place where someone tells you a secret, like that could turn into a Twitter post that gets you a bunch of thumbs up and a bunch of likes or whatever else. An opportunity. Right. So the value of secrets has changed. And now there's almost a greater value on exposing secrets than there is on keeping secrets. That makes it difficult to keep secrets, especially when technology is going in the same direction. Yeah, where is the line? And by the way, I'm one of those old school people with the secrets. I think it's a karma thing. Again, back to the trust. I think in the short term you can benefit by sharing a secret. But in the long term, if people know they can trust you, like the juicy of the secret, it's a test of sorts. If they know you can keep that secret, that means you're somebody that could be trusted. And I believe that not just effectiveness in this life, but happiness in this life is informing a circle of people you can trust. Right, we're taught that secrets and lies are similar in that they have a limited shelf life. If you treat them like food, secrets and lies have a very limited shelf life. So if you cash in on them while they're still fresh, you beat them before they spoil. You get to take advantage of them before they spoil. However, trust has no limit to its shelf life. So it's almost like you're trading a short term victory and losing a long term victory. It's always better to keep the secret. It's always better to let the lie live because it will eventually come to light from somebody else, not from you, because it already has a limited shelf life. But what you win in exchange for not being the one that cashed in on the secret is immense trust. Let me ask you about lying and trust and so on. So I don't believe I've been contacted by or interacted with the CIA, the MI6, the FSB, Mossad or any other intelligence agency. I'm kind of offended, but would I know if I was? So from your perspective. No, you would not know if you were. For sure you've been on their radar. Absolutely, you've got a file. You've got a dossier somewhere. Why would I be on their radar? Because you're a. Who's interesting? It's not necessarily that you are interesting to someone as a foreign asset or an intelligence collection source, but your network is extremely interesting. The networks are important too. Correct, if someone had access to, if someone was able to clone your phone, every time you cross a border, you go through some sort of security. If you've ever been pulled into secondary and separated from your bag, that's exactly when and how people clone computers. They clone phones, they make whatever, photocopies of your old school planner, whatever it might be. But for sure you are an intelligence target. It just may be that you're not suitable to be a person who reports foreign intelligence. We've got to understand that all people are potential sources of valuable information to the national security infrastructure of our host country and any country that we visit. Someone like you with your public footprint, with your notoriety, with your educational background, with your national identifications becomes a viable and valuable target of information. Yeah, so to speak to that, I take security pretty seriously, but not to the degree that it runs my life, which I'm very careful about. That's good, I'm glad to hear that. So the moment you start to think about germs, right? Like you start to freak out and you become sort of paralyzed by the stress of it. So you have to balance those two things. If you think about all the things that could hurt you in this world and all the risk you could take, it can overwhelm your life. That said, the cyber world is a weird world because it doesn't have the same. I know not to cross the street without looking each way because there's a physical intuition about it. I'm not sure, I'm a computer science guy, so I have some intuition, but the cyber world, it's really hard to build up an intuition of what is safe and not. I've seen a lot of people just logging out of your devices all the time, like regularly. Just like that physical access step is a lot of people don't take. I can just like walk in into the offices of a lot of CEOs and it's like everything's wide open for physical access of those systems, which is kind of incredible for somebody, that sounds really shady, but it's not. I've written key loggers, like things that record everything you type in the mouse you move. And like I did that for, during my PhD, I was recording everything you do on your device and everything you do on your computer. People sign up to the study, they willingly do this to understand behavior. I was trying to use machine learning to identify who you are based on different biometric and behavioral things, which allows me to study human behavior and to see which is uniquely identifiable. And the goal there was to remove the need for a password. But how easy it is to write a thing that logs everything you type. I was like, wait a minute, like I can probably get a lot of people in the world to run this for me. I can then get all of their passwords. I mean, you could do so much, like I can run the entirety of the CIA from just myself. If I was, and I imagine there's a lot of really good hackers like that out there, much better than me. So I tried to prevent myself from being all the different low hanging fruit attack vectors in my life. I try to make it difficult to be that. But then I'm also aware that there's probably people that are like five steps ahead. You're doing the right thing. What I always advocate is the low hanging fruit is what keeps you from being a target of opportunity. Because you're half assed hackers, you're lazy hackers, you're unskilled hackers. They're looking for low hanging fruit. They're looking for the person who gets the Nigeria email about how you could be getting $5 million if you just give me your bank account. Exactly. That's what they're looking for. The thing that's scary is that if you're not a target of opportunity, if you become a intentional target, then there's almost nothing you can do. Because once you become an intentional target, then your security apparatus, they will create a dedicated customized way vector of attacking your specific security apparatus. And because security is always after, right? There's always, there's the leading advantage and the trailing advantage. When it comes to attacks, the leader always has the advantage because they have to create the attack before anybody else can create a way to protect against the attack. So the attack always comes first and that means they always have the advantage. You are always stuck just leaning on, this is the best security that I know of. Meanwhile, there's always somebody who can create a way of attacking the best security out there. And once they win, they have a monopoly. They have all that time until a new defensive countermeasure is deployed. Yeah, I tend to think exactly as you said, that the long hanging fruit protects against like, yeah, crimes of opportunity. And then I assume that people can just hack in if they really want. Think about how much anxiety we would be able to solve if everybody just accepted that. Well, there's several things you do. First of all, to be honest, it just makes me, it keeps me honest. Not to be a douchebag or like, not, yeah, to assume everything could be public. And so don't trade information that could hurt people if it was made public. So I try to do that. And the thing I try to make sure is I, like Home Alone style, try to. Booby trap. I really would like to know if I was hacked. And so I try to assume that I will be hacked and detect it. Have a tripwire or something. Yeah, a tripwire through everything. And not paranoid tripwise, just like open door. But I think that's probably the future of life on this earth is you're going, like everybody of interest is going to be hacked. That hopefully inspires, now this is outside of company. These are individuals. I mean, there is, of course, if you're actually operating, like I'm just a, who am I? I'm just a scientist person, podcasting person. So if I was actually running a company or was an integral part of some kind of military operation, then you probably have to have an entire team that's now doing that battle of trying to be ahead of the best hackers in the world that are attacking. But that requires a team that full time is their focus. And then you still get in trouble. Correct, yeah. So what I've seen as the norm, well, what I've seen is the cutting edge standard for corporations and the ultra wealthy and even intelligence organizations is that we have tripwires. It's better if you can't prevent from being hacked. The next best thing is to know as soon as you get hacked because then you can essentially terminate all the information. If you know it fast enough, you can just destroy the information. This is what the ultra wealthy do. They have multiple phones. So as soon as one phone gets hacked, the tripwire goes off. The operating system is totally deleted along with all data on the phone. And a second phone is turned on with a whole new separate set of metadata. And now for them, there's no break in service. It's just, oh, this phone went black. It's got a warning on it that says it was hacked. So trash it because they don't care about the price of the phone. Pick up the next phone, and we move on. That's the best thing that you can do essentially outside of trying to out hack the hackers. And then even in your intelligence and military worlds where cyber warfare is active, the people who are aggressing are not trying to create aggression that beats security. They're trying to find aggressive techniques, offensive techniques that have no security built around them yet. Because it's too cost and time intensive to protect against what you know is coming, it's so much more efficient and cost effective to go after new vectors. So it just becomes like, it becomes almost a silly game of your neighbor gets a guard dog. So you get a bigger guard dog. And then your neighbor gets a fence. So you're just constantly outdoing each other. It's called the security paradigm. People just, they just one up each other because it's never worth it to just get to the same level. You're always trying to outdo each other. Yeah, then maybe like banks have to fight that fight, but not everybody can. Right. Yeah, no. So you're saying I operated at the state of the art with the trip wires. This is good to know. Absolutely, man. And also just not using anybody else's services, doing everything myself. So that's harder to figure out what the heck this person is doing. Because if I'm using somebody else's service, like I did with QNAP, I have a QNAP NAS I use for cold storage of unimportant things, but a large videos. And I don't know if you know, but QNAP is a company that does NAS storage devices, and they got hacked. And everybody that didn't update as of a week ago from the point of the zero day hack, everybody got hacked. It's several thousand machines, and they asked, you can get your data back if you pay, I forget what it was, but it was, it was about a couple thousand dollars. And QNAP can get all the data back for their customers if they pay, I think, two million dollars. Wow. But that came from me relying on the systems of others for security. I assumed this company would have their security handled, but then that was a very valuable lesson to me. I now have layers of security and also an understanding which data is really important, which is somewhat important, which is not that important, and layering that all together. So just so you know, the US government, the military, woke up to that exact same thing about two years ago. It's still very new. I mean, they were sourcing, take night vision goggles, for example. They were sourcing components and engineering and blueprints for night vision goggles from three, four, five different subcontractors all over the country, but they never asked themselves what the security status was of those subcontractors. So fast forward a few years, and all of a sudden, they start getting faulty components. They start having night vision goggles that don't work. They start having supply chain issues where they have to change their provider, and the army doesn't know that the provider is changing. I mean, this is a strategy. The idea of going through third party systems is identifying the vulnerability in the supply chain. That's a savvy offensive practice for more than just cyber hackers. Let me ask you about physical hacking. So I'm now, like I'm an introvert, so I'm paranoid about all social interaction, but how much truth is there? It's kind of a funny question. How suspicious should I be when I'm traveling in Ukraine or different parts of the world when an attractive female walks up to me and shows any kind of attention? Is that like this kind of James Bond spy movie stuff, or is that kind of stuff used by intelligence agencies? I don't think it's used. It's absolutely used. It's called sexpionage. That's the term that we jokingly call it, is sexpionage. But yeah, the art of attraction, appeal, the manifestation of feelings through sexual manipulation, all of that is a super powerful tool. The Chinese use it extremely well. The Russians use it extremely well. In the United States, we actively train our officers not to use it because in the end it leads to complications in how you professionally run a case. So we train our officers not to use it. However, you can't control what other people think. So if you're an attractive male or an attractive female officer, and you're trying to talk to an older general who just happens to be gay or happens to be straight and is attracted to you, of course they're gonna be that much more willing to talk to an American who is also attractive. So it's hard to walk that back. In all definitions. So it could be all elements of charisma. So attractiveness in a dynamic sense of the word. So it's visual attractiveness, but the smile, the humor, the wit, the flirting, all that kind of stuff that could be used to the art of conversation. There's also elements of sexuality that people underestimate, right? So physical sexuality, physical attraction is the most obvious one. It's the one that everybody talks about and thinks about. But then there's also sapiosexuality, which is being sexually attracted to thoughts, to intelligence. And then you've got all the various varieties of personal preferences. Some people like people of a certain color skin, or they like big noses, they like small noses, they like big butts, they like small butts, they like tall guys, they like bald guys, whatever it might be. You can't ever predict what someone's preferences, sexual arousal preferences are going to be. So then you end up walking into a situation where then you discover, and just imagine, imagine being an unattractive, overweight, married guy, and you're walking into an asset or a target meeting with like a middle aged female who is also not very attractive and also married. But then it turns out that that person is a sapiosexual and gets extremely turned on by intelligent conversation. That's exactly what you're there to do. Your mission is to have intelligent conversation with this person to find out if they have access to secrets. And by virtue of you carrying out your mission, they become extremely aroused and attracted to you. That is a very complicated situation. It's hard to know who to trust. Like, how do you know your wife, or how does your wife know that you're not a double agent from Russia? There's a large element of experience and time that goes into that. She's also trained. And I think my wife and I also. Actually you think. My wife and I also have the benefit of being recruited young and together where. So over time you can start to figure out things that are very difficult to. So you form the baseline, you start to understand the person's very, it becomes very difficult to lie. The most difficult thing in the world is consistency. It's the most difficult thing in the world. Some people say that discipline or self discipline, what they're really talking about is consistency. When you have someone who performs consistently over long periods of time, under various levels of stress, you have high, high confidence that that is the person that you can trust. You can trust, again, you can trust them to behave within a certain pattern. You can trust an asshole to be an asshole without trusting the asshole to take care of your kids, right? So I don't ever wanna mix up the idea of personal trust versus trusting the outcome. You can always trust a person to operate within their pattern of behavior. It just takes time for you to get a consistent, to get consistent feedback as to what that baseline is for them. To form a good model, predictive model of what their behavior is going to be like. Right, and you know, it's fascinating is I think the challenge is building that model quickly. So technology is one of those tools that will be able in the future to very quickly create a model of behavior because technology can pull in multiple data points in a very short period of time that the human brain simply can't pull in at the same space, at the same speed. That's actually what I did my PhD on. That's what I did at Google is forming a good representation, unique representation in the entire world based on the behavior of the person. The specific task there is so that you don't have to type in the password. The idea was to replace the password. But it also allows you to actually study human behavior and to think, all right, what is the unique representation of a person? How, because we have very specific patterns and a lot of humans are very similar in those patterns, what are the unique identifiers within those patterns of behavior? And I think that's, from a psychology perspective, a super fascinating question. And from a machine learning perspective, it's something that you can, as the systems get better and better and better, and as we get more and more digital data about each individual, you start to get, you start to be able to do that kind of thing effectively. And it's, I mean, when I think of the fact that you could create a dossier on somebody in a matter of 24 or 48 hours, if you could wire them for two days, right? Internet of Things style, you put it in their underwear or whatever, right? Some chip that just reads everything. How heavy are they walking? How much time do they sleep? How many times do they open the refrigerator? When they log into their computer, how do they do it? Like, which hand do they use when they log in? What's their most common swipe? What's their most visited website? You could collect an enormous amount of normative data in a short period of time where otherwise we're stuck. The way that we do it now, once or twice a week, we go out for a coffee for two hours. And two hours at a time over the course of six, eight weeks, 12 weeks, you're coming up with a 50% assessment on how you think this person is going to behave. Just that time savings is immense. Something you've also spoken about is private intelligence and the power and the reach and the scale and the importance of private intelligence versus government intelligence. Can you elaborate on the role of what is private intelligence and what's the role of private intelligence in the scope of all the intelligence that is gathered and used in the United States? Yeah, absolutely. It's something that so few people know about. And it became a more mainstream topic with the Trump administration. Because Trump made it no secret that he was going to hire private intelligence organizations to run his intelligence operations. And fund them. So that really brought it to the mainstream. But going all the way back to 9 11, going all the way back to 2001, when the 9 11 attacks happened, there was a commission that was formed to determine the reasons that 9 11 happened. And among the lists that they determined, of course they found out that the intelligence community wasn't coordinating well with each other. There were fiefdoms and there was infighting and there wasn't good intel sharing. But more than that, they identified that we were operating at Cold War levels, even though we were living in a time when terrorism was the new biggest threat to national security. So the big recommendation coming out of the 9 11 commission was that the intelligence organizations, the intelligence community significantly increased the presence of intelligence operators overseas and in terms of analytical capacity here in the United States. When they made that decision, it completely destroyed, it totally was incongruent with the existing hiring process because the existing hiring process for CIA or NSA is a six to nine month process. The only way they could plus up their sizes fast enough was to bypass their own hiring and instead go direct to private organizations. So naturally the government contracted with the companies that they already had secure contracts with, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Khaki, you name it. And then over time from 2001 to now, or I guess that started really in 2004 when they started significantly increasing the presence of private intelligence officers. From then until now, it's become a budgetary thing. It's become a continuity of operations thing. And now the reason Northern Virginia has become one of the wealthiest zip codes in America is because of the incredible concentration of private intelligence that is supporting CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, and all the slew of IC partners. By the way, does Palantir play a role in this? Palantir is one of those organizations that was trying to pitch their product to an intelligence community because they have, it's a fantastic product on paper. But the challenge was the proprietary services, the proprietary systems that we current that we used in CIA prior to Palantir continued to outperform Palantir. So just like any other business decision, if you've got homegrown systems that outperform external systems, then it's not worth it to share the internal information. Got it. So what the close connection between Peter Thiel and Donald Trump, did that have a role to play in Donald Trump's leveraging of private intelligence or is that completely disjoint? I think that they're related but only circumstantially. Because remember, Donald Trump wasn't really investing in CIA. So the last thing he wanted to do was spend his network, WASTA, WASTA is a term that we call influence, it's an Arabic term for influence. Trump didn't wanna use his WASTA putting Thiel into CIA only to lose Thiel's contract as soon as Trump left office. So instead, it was more valuable to put Peter Thiel's tool to use in private intelligence. And then of course, I think he nominated Peter Thiel to be his Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State. At some point in time, he tried to present, like presidentially appoint Peter Thiel into a position of government authority. What do you think of figures like Peter Thiel? Do they wield, and I'm sure there's figures of similar scale and reach and power in private intelligence. What do you think about their role and power in this whole, like without public accountability that you would think directors of CIA perhaps have? So this is where private intelligence has both a strength and a weakness. The ultimate law overriding, that's overseeing private intelligence is not government legislation. It's the law of economics. If they produce a superior product, then they will have a buyer. If they do not produce a superior product, they will not have a buyer. And that's a very simple business principle. Whereas in the current national security infrastructure, you can create a crap product, but the taxpayer dollars are always going to be spent. So it's really thrown things for a loop. Especially during the Trump administration. And this is one of the things that I will always say I liked about the Trump administration. It shown, it put a big blazing bright light on all of the flaws within our system. One of those flaws being this executive power over the intelligence organizations and the lack of accountability for intelligence organizations to produce a superior product. When that light got shown down, that's when you also saw Trump start to go after, if you remember, there was a period where he was taking security clearances away from retiring officers. That became a big hot issue. That became something that people were very opposed to when they didn't realize that that process of taking security clearances away, that incentivized seasoned senior officers to stay in service. Because with private intelligence paying a premium during the Trump administration, because Trump was paying a premium to the private intelligence world, when senior officers found that it was more profitable to retire early, keep their clearance, and go work for Raytheon, Trump saw that as bypassing service to the American people. You've made a career in CIA, you've made a career in NSA, you should stay there. If you leave, you lose your clearance because you no longer have a need to know. He upset the apple cart with that. And unfortunately, the narrative that came out in many ways was a negative narrative against Trump, when in fact, he was actually doing quite a service to the American people, trying to take away the incentive of senior officials leaving their service in order to just profiteer in the private intelligence. So in that way, he was kind of supporting the CIA in making sure that competent people and experienced people stay in CIA, are incentivized to stay there. Correct, I think that there was definitely, he understood incentives. I mean, Donald Trump understands incentives. So he was trying to incentivize them to stay, but I think he was also playing a safety card because he didn't want former CIA officials who were not listening to him to then move into private intel organizations that he may be hiring, only to then have them undermine him from both sides of the coin. So there was a little bit of offensive calculation in there as well. But do the dynamics and the incentives of economics that you referred to that the private intelligence operates under, is that more or less ethical than the forces that maybe government agencies operate under? What's your intuition? Is capitalism lead, so you mentioned it leads to maximizations of efficiency and performance, but is that correlated with ethical behavior when we're talking about such hairy activities like collection of intelligence? The question of ethics is a great question. So let me start this whole thing out by saying, CIA hires people on a spectrum of our ability to be morally flexible, ethically flexible. All people at their heart are ethically flexible. I would never punch somebody in the face, right? Some people out there would say, I would never hurt another human being. But as soon as a human being posed a direct threat to their daughter or their son or their mother, now all of a sudden they're gonna change their ethical stance in self defense, right? But at the end of the day, it's still hurting another person. So what CIA looks for is people who are able to swing across that spectrum for lesser offenses, right? More flexibility. I do not believe that private intelligence and the laws of economics lend themselves to increased ethics or increased ethical behavior in the short term. But what ends up happening is that in the long term, in order to scale economic benefits, you are forced to act within norms of your customer base. So as the norms of that customer base dictate certain requirements, the company has to adapt to those requirements in order to continue to scale. So if a company tries to ostracize LGBTQ or if they try to ostracize men or ostracize women, they're limiting their ability to grow economically. They have to adapt to whatever is the prevailing ethical requirement of their customer base. That's such an interesting question because you look at big pharma and pharmaceutical companies, and they have quite a poor reputation in the public eye. And some of it, maybe much of it is deserved, at least historically speaking. And so you start to wonder, well, can intelligence agencies use some of the same methods or can these use some of the same technique to manipulate the public, like what they believe about those agencies in order to maximize profit as well? Sort of finding shortcuts or unethical paths that allow you to not be ultimately responsible to the customer. Absolutely. And I would go a step further to say that the covert nature of intelligence operations is really attractive when it comes to the private sector, because now they have all the same money with none of the oversight, and all they have to do is deliver. So without the oversight, what's holding you back? And for anybody who's ever run a business, anybody who's ever started a startup or tried to make something succeed, we all know that there come those times where you have to skirt the boundaries of propriety or morality or commitments or promises to other people, because at the end of the day, if your business fails, it's on you. So if you promise to deliver something to a client, you've got to deliver it to the client, even if that means you stay up late or if you lie on your taxes, whatever it might be, there's a certain level of do or die. Yeah, I personally have a sort of optimistic view that ultimately the best way is to stay within the ethical bounds, kind of like what you suggested. If you want to be a company that's extremely successful, is win with competence, not with cheating, because cheating won't, I believe, win in the long term. But in terms of being publicly responsible to your decisions, I mean, I've already been supposed to talk to Peter Thiel twice on this podcast, and it's just been complicated. If I were to put myself into his shoes, why do podcasts? The risk is too high to be a public person at all. And so I totally understand that. At the same time, I think if you're doing things by the book and you're the best in the world at your job, then you have nothing to worry about. And you can advertise that and you recruit, you help recruit, I mean, that's the work of capitalism is you want to advertise that this is the place where the best people in the world at this thing work. True, I think that your point of view is accurate. I would also say that the complexities of what makes somebody make a decision can only really be properly calculated with a baseline. So because there is no baseline that you or I have on Peter Thiel, it's difficult to really ascertain why he does or doesn't accept invites or why he does or doesn't appear. Well, let me ask your opinion on the NSA, and then maybe you could mention about bulk collection in general in the CIA, but let's look at some history with the NSA and Snowden. What's your opinion on the mass surveillance that is reported to have been conducted by the NSA? We've talked about ethics. Are you troubled by the, from a public perception, the unethical nature of mass surveillance of especially American citizens? This is a topic that I never get tired of talking about, but it's very rare that anyone ever really agrees with me, just so you know. I see where you're, well, I think there's a nuance thing here and maybe we'll find some agreement. The truth is that the American experience after 9 11 is nothing like the American experience now. So all the terminology, all the talk about privacy and privacy laws and mass surveillance and all this other stuff, it was a completely different time then. And that's not to say it was an excuse, because to this day, I will still say mass collection, bulk collection of data that allows for an expedient identification of a threat to national security benefits all of us, but people don't understand what they want. Like people don't understand what the value of their own privacy is. First of all, the fact that people think they have personal privacy is laughable. You have no privacy. The cell phone that you carry in your pocket, you're giving permission to those apps constantly. You're giving commercial organizations, what you and I have already said, are less tied to ethical responsibility. You're giving them permission to collect enormous amounts of private data from you all the time. And do you know what happens if AT&T or Verizon sees some nefarious activity on your account? They do nothing. They might send a note to FBI because they have to, according to some checklist. But when NSA was collecting intelligence on metadata from around the United States, they were very specifically looking for terrorist threats that would harm American lives. Man, NSA can clone my phone. I will give them my children's phone. I will give them the passwords to every one of my accounts if it means that there's a likelihood that my family will be safer from a nefarious actor who's intent on hurting us. NSA doesn't care about your affair. NSA doesn't care if you're cheating on your taxes. NSA doesn't care if you talk shit about your boss or if you hate the US president. Nobody cares about that. Your intelligence community is there to find threats to national security. That's what they're there to do. What Snowden did when he outed that whole program, the fact that the court, the justice system, the civilian justice system went back and essentially overruled the ruling of the intelligence courts before them just goes to show how the general mass community really shouldn't have a say in what happens in the intelligence community. They really shouldn't. You have politicians and you have the opportunity to elect people to a position and then you trust them. That's what a representative republic is. You vote the people in, you trust them to work on your behalf. They make decisions without running them by you. They make decisions that they believe are in the best interest of their constituency and that's how our form of democracy works. It worked, we were safer. Now that we don't have that information and now that there's this giant looming question of whether or not NSA is there to serve people or is collecting mass surveillance against all American people, that's not really a true accurate representation of what they were ever doing. They were looking for the needle in a haystack of the series of transactions in metadata that was going to lead to American deaths. We are now less secure because they can't do that and that bothers me. So you said a few really interesting things there. So because you are kind of an insider, or were for a time an insider, meaning you were able to build up an intuition about the good, the bad, and the ugly of these institutions, specifically the good. A lot of people don't have a good sense of the good. They know the bad and the ugly or can infer the bad and the ugly. You mentioned that the one little key little thing there at the end saying the NSA doesn't care about whether you hate the president or not. Now that's what people really worry about is they're not sure they can trust the government to not go into full dictatorial mode and basing your political preference, your oppositions, your, basically one of the essential powers, the freedom of speech in the United States is the ability to criticize your government. Exactly. And that, they worry, well, can't the government get a hold of the NSA and start to ask the basic question, well, can you give me a list of people that are criticizing the government? Think about, so let's just walk through that exact example, right, because this is, it's a preponderance, it's a preponderance fear, it's a ridiculous fear because you would have to tap on multiple elements of government for anything to happen. So for example, let's just say that somebody goes to the NSA and says, hey, can you give us a readout on all the people who are tweeting terrible things about the president? Okay, cool, here's your hundred million people, whatever it is, right? Here's all the people saying negative things about the government. So now they have a list, what do they do next? Well, let's just make it simple. They stay with NSA and they say, surveil them even more, tap their phones, tap their computers, I wanna know even more. So then they get this preponderance of evidence. What do you do with evidence? You take it to a court. Well, guess what no court is going to support? Anything that goes against the freedom of speech. So the court is not going to support what the executive is asking them to do. Even before you take somebody to court, you have to involve law enforcement. Essentially, you have to send some sort of police force to go apprehend the individual who's in question. Well, guess what doesn't meet criteria for any police force anywhere in the United States? Arresting people who say negative things about the president. Now, if somebody poses a threat to the life of a public figure or the threat to life of a politician, that's a completely different case, which means the standards of evidence are much higher for them to arrest that person. So unless you create a secret police force, then your actual public police force is never gonna take action. So all these people who are afraid of this exact situation that you're outlying, they need the creation of a secret police force, the creation of a secret court that operates outside the judicial system, the creation of a secret intelligence service that operates outside of foreign intelligence collection, all so that a handful of people who don't like the president get what? Whisked away, assassinated, put in prison, who knows what? Think about the resources that would be, the amount of money and time and how hard would it be to keep that secret, to have all of those things in motion. The reason it worked in Russia and Soviet Germany or Russia and communist Germany was because everybody knew there was a secret police. Everybody knew that there was a threat to work to speaking out against the government. It's completely different here. Well, so there's a lot to say. So one is yes, if I was a dictator and I wanted to, and just looking at history, let me take myself out of it, but I think one of the more effective ways is you don't need the surveillance. You can pick out a random person and in a public display, semi public display, basically put them in jail for opposing the government, whether they oppose it or not, and the fear, that sends a message to a lot of people. That's exactly what you see happening in China. That's what you just light out. It's genius, and that is the standard. You don't need the surveillance for that. Yep. But that said, if you did do the surveillance, so that's the support, the sort of, the incentives aren't aligned. It seems like a lot of work to do for the thing you could do without the surveillance. Right. But yes, the courts wouldn't, if you were to be able to get a list of people, which I think that part you could do. Correct. That oppose the government. You could do that just like you said on Twitter publicly. You could make a list. And with that, you can start to, especially if you have a lot of data on those people, find ways in which they did violate the law. Not because they oppose the government, but because in some other way. They'll park your tickets or didn't pay the taxes. That's probably a common one, or like screwed up something about the taxes. I just happen to know Russia and Ukraine, they're very good at this kind of stuff. Knowing how the citizens screwed everything up, because especially in those countries, everybody's breaking the law. Because in a corrupt nation, you have to bend the law to operate the war. The number of people that pay taxes fully in those nations is just very low, not zero. And so they then use that breaking of the law to come up with an excuse to actually put you in jail based on that. So it's possible to imagine. But yes, I think, I think that's the ugly part of surveillance. But I do think, just like you said, the incentives aren't correct. Like you really don't need to get all of the secret police and all of these kinds of organizations working. If you do have a charismatic, powerful leader that built up a network that's able to control a lot of organizations to a level of authoritarianism in a government, they're just able to do the usual thing. One, have propaganda machine to tell narratives. Two, pick out people that they can put in jail for opposing the state. And maybe loud members of the press start silencing the press. There's a playbook to this thing. It doesn't require the surveillance. The surveillance, you know what is useful for the surveillance is the thing you mentioned in China, which is encourage everybody in the citizenry to watch each other, to say there's enemies of the state everywhere. And then you start having children reporting on their appearance and that kind of stuff. Again, don't need a surveillance state for that. Now the good of a surveillance system, if it's operating within ethical bounds, is that yes, it could protect the populace. So you're saying like the good given on your understanding of these institutions, the good outweighs the bad. Absolutely, so let me give you just a practical example. So people don't realize this, but there's multiple surveillance states that are out there. There are surveillance states that are close allies with the United States. One of those surveillance states is the United Arab Emirates, the UAE. Now I lived in the UAE from 2019 to 2020, came back on a repatriation flight after COVID broke out. And, but we were there for a full year. We were residents, we had IDs, we had everything. Now, when you get your national ID in the Emirates, you get a chip and that chip connects you to everything. It connects you to cameras, it connects you to your license plate on your car, to your passport, to your credit card, everything. Everything is intertwined, everything is interlinked. When you drive, there are no police. There are no police on the roads. Every 50 to 100 meters, you cross a camera that reads your license plate, measures your speed. And if you're breaking the speed limit, it just immediately charges your credit card because it's tied, it's all tied together. Totally surveillance. That technology was invented by the Israelis who use it in Israel. When I was in Abu Dhabi and I was rear ended at high speed by what turned out to be an Emirati official, a senior ranking official of one of the Emirates. It was caught on camera. His ID was registered, my ID was registered. Everything was tied back to our IDs. The proof and the evidence was crystal clear. Even still, he was Emirati, I was not. So when I went to the police station to file the complaints, it was something that nobody was comfortable with because generally speaking, Emiratis don't accept legal claims against their own from foreigners. But the difference was that I was an American and I was there on a contract supporting the Emirati government. So I had these different variances, right? Long story short, in the end, the surveillance state is what made sure that justice was played because the proof was incontrovertible. There was so much evidence collected because of the surveillance nature of their state. Now, why do they have a surveillance state? It's not for people like me. It's because they're constantly afraid of extremist terrorist activity happening inside Abu Dhabi or inside the UAE because they're under constant threat from Islam and they're from extremists and they're under constant threat from Iran. So that's what drives the people to want a police state, to want a surveillance state. For them, their survival is paramount and they need the surveillance to have that survival. For us, we haven't tasted that level of desperation and fear yet or hopefully never, but that's what makes us feel like there's something wrong with surveillance. Surveillance is all about the purpose. It's all about the intent. Well, and like you said, companies do a significant amount of surveillance to provide us with services that we take for granted. For example, just one of the things to give props to the digital efforts of the Zelensky administration in Ukraine. I don't know if you're aware, but they have this digital transformation efforts where you could put, there's an, it's laughable to say in the United States, but they actually did a really good job by having a government app that has your passport on it. It's all the digital information. You can get a doctor. It's like everything that you would think America would be doing, like license, like all that kind of stuff, it's in an app. You could pay, there's payment to each other. And that's all coming, I mean, there's probably contractors somehow connected to the whole thing, but that's like under the flag of government. And so that's an incredible technology. And I didn't, I guess, hear anybody talk about surveillance in that context, even though it is, but they all love it. And it's super easy. And they, frankly already, it's so easy and convenient. They've already taken for granted that, of course, this is what you do. Of course, your passport is on your phone. For everybody to have housed in a server that you have no idea where it's at, that could be hacked at any time by a third party. They don't ask these kinds of questions because it's so convenient, as we do for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft products we use. Security and convenience are on two opposite sides of another spectrum. The more convenient something is, the less secure. And the more secure something is, the less convenient. And that's a battle that we're always working with as individuals, and then we're trying to outsource that battle to our politicians. And our politicians are, frankly, just more interested in being politicians. Yeah, that said, I mean, people are really worried about giving any one institution a large amount of power, especially when it's a federal government institution, given some history. First of all, just history of the corruption, of power corrupting individuals and institutions. And second of all, myth or reality of certain institutions like the CIA misbehaving. Well, let me actually ask you about the Edward Snowden. So you, outside of the utility that you're arguing for of the NSA surveillance program, do you think Edward Snowden is a criminal or a hero? In terms, in the eyes of the law, he's a criminal. He broke the law, he broke the confidence, he made us, he was under security obligation. And then when he ran away, he ran away to all of the worst villains in the world from the US perspective to basically seek protection. That's how you act in the face of accusation is in essence part of the case that you build for yourself. So running away to China, Russia, Cuba, there was a Latin Ecuador, I think, that just paints a very negative picture that does not suggest that you were doing anything that was ethical and upright and in favor of the American people if you're gonna run to American enemies to support yourself. So for sure, in the eyes of law, he's a criminal. In the eyes of a group of people who are largely ignorant to what they lost, to them, he's a hero. To me, he's just kind of a sad case. I personally look at Snowden as a sad, unfortunate case. His life is ruined, his family name is tarnished. He's forever going to be a desperate pawn. And that's all because of the decisions that he made and the order that he made them. I'm not sure his name is tarnished. I think the case you're making is a difficult case to make. And so I think his name represents fighting one man, it's like Tiananmen Square standing before the tank, is like one man fighting the government. And I think that there is some aspect which, taking that case aside, that is the American spirit, which is hold the powerful accountable. So whenever there's somebody in power, one individual can change. One man can make a difference. Can make a difference, yeah. Very Knight Rider of you. I mean, that's the American individualism. And so he represents that. And I think there's a huge skepticism against large federal institutions. And I think if you look at the long arc of history, that actually is a forcing function for the institutions to behave their best. So basically hold them accountable. What's nice about this is that we can agree to disagree and history will be the one that decides. But there's a reason that Edward Snowden needs to do something new every 16 or 18 months to remain relevant, right? Because if he didn't, he would just be forgotten. Because he was not a maverick who changed history for the better. He was a man who broke a law and now he's on the run. And to some people, he is a hero. To other people, he is a criminal. But to the vast majority, he's just a blip on a radar of their everyday life that really makes no difference to them at all. So actually let's linger on that. So just to clarify, do you think, are you making the difficult case that the NSA mass surveillance program was one, ethical and two, made a better world for Americans? I am making the case that at the time, it was exactly what we needed to feel safe in our own homes. But what about to be safe, actually be safe? So this is what's difficult because any proof that was that they collected that actually prevented an attack from happening is proof we'll never know about. This is the really unfortunate side of intelligence operations. And I've been at the front end of this. You work your ass off. You take personal risk. You make personal sacrifice to make sure that something terrible doesn't happen. Nobody knows that that ever happens. Does that have to be that way? Does it have to remain secret every time the NSA or the CIA saves the lives of Americans? It does for two reasons. It has to be secret. First, the mythos. The same thing we were talking about with General Petraeus. You can't brag about your victories if you want to let the myth shape itself. You can't do that. The second thing is once a victory is claimed, the danger comes from letting your enemy know that you claimed the victory because they can reverse engineer and they can start to change how they did things. If a terrorist act, if a terrorist cell tries to execute an operation and the operation fails, from their point of view, they don't know why it failed. They just know that it failed. But then if the US or if the American government comes in and says, we took apart this amazing attack, now they have more information, right? The whole power of secrets, like we talked about before, the power of secrets is in knowing that not everybody has them. There's only a shelf life. So take advantage of the shelf life. You get space. So you gotta keep it a secret. There is no tactical advantage from sharing a secret unless you are specifically trying to achieve a certain tactical advantage from sharing that secret, which is what we've seen so much of with US intel sharing with Ukraine. There's a tactical advantage from sharing a secret about Russian military movements or weaknesses in tanks or supply chain challenges, whatever it might be. Well, let me argue that there might be an advantage to share information with the American public when a terrorist attack or is averted or the lives of Americans are saved, because what that does. Is make every American think that they're not that safe. There is no tactical advantage there. You think so? Absolutely. What about? If the Austin PD started telling you every day about these crazy crimes that they prevented, would that make you feel more safe? It would make you feel like they're doing their job. Is that obvious to you, make us feel less safe? Because if we see competence, that there is extremely competent defenders of this territory of these people, wouldn't that make us feel more safe or no? The human nature is not to assign competence. So empirically, humans overvalue losses and undervalue gains. That's something that we've seen from finance to betting and beyond. If the Austin Police Department starts telling you about all these heinous crimes that were avoided because of their hard work, the way that your brain is actually going to process that information is you are going to say, if this is all the stuff that they've stopped, how bad must this place be? How much more haven't they stopped? I take your point, it's a powerful psychological point, but looking at the other picture of it, looking at the police force, looking at the CIA, the NSA, those people, now with the police, they're seeing, there's such a negative feeling amongst Americans towards these institutions. Who the hell wants to work for the CIA now and the police force? Like, you're gonna be criticized, like that's a, I mean, that's really bad for the CIA. It's terrible. Like, as opposed to being seen as a hero, like for example, currently soldiers are for the most part seen as heroes that are protecting this nation. That's not the case for the CIA. Soldiers weren't seen as heroes in the Vietnam War, right? You've got to remember that when you, so first of all, public service is a sacrifice. We oftentimes forget that. We start to think, oh, government jobs are cushy and they're easy, and it must be so easy to be the president, because then you're basically a celebrity overnight. Public service is a sacrifice, it's a grind. For all of the soldiers, the submariners, the missileers, the police officers, intelligence specialists, they all know what it's like to give things up, to serve a public that can turn its opinion at any given time. And history is what defines it. The more important thing is to understand that if you want a true open and fair democracy, you cannot control a narrative. And starting to share all of your victories or starting to share your biggest victories with the intent of shaping public opinion to be supportive of the police force or supportive of CIA or supportive of you name it, is shaping a narrative that is intentional operational use of influence to drive public opinion. That is something nobody wants to get into. It is much more professional to be a silent sentinel, a silent servant, humbly carrying the burden of public service in the United States where we are a fair and open democracy. Why, why not celebrate the killing of Bin Laden? We did. The search, discovery, and the capture and the killing of Bin Laden. Wasn't that, actually the details of that, how much of the details of that, how he was discovered were made public? I think some of it was made public enough. Why not do that? Doesn't that make heroes out of the people that are servants? Or do people who serve to do service for this nation, do they always have to operate in a thankless manner in the shadows? I think that's a very good question. The folks who I left behind when I left CIA, who continue to serve as faceless, nameless heroes every day, I am grateful to them. The truth is that if they were motivated by something else, they wouldn't be as good as they are at doing what they do. And I see your point about, shouldn't we be celebrating our victories? But when celebrating our victories runs the risk of informing our enemies how we operate, giving away our informational advantage, giving away our tactical battlefield advantage, and running the risk of shaping a narrative intentionally among our own American people, now all of a sudden we're turning into exactly the thing that the American people trust us not to become. Yeah, but then you operate in the secrecy, and then there's corrupt and douchebag people everywhere. So when they, even inside the CIA and criminals, inside the CIA there's criminals in all organizations, in all walks of life, human nature as such, that this is always the case, then it breeds conspiracy theories. It does. And sometimes those conspiracy theories turn out to be true. But most times they don't. That's just part of the risk of being a myth. Can you speak to some of the myths? So MKUltra, so. Not a myth. Not a myth. So this is a fascinating human experimentation program undertaken by the CIA to develop procedures for using drugs like LSD to interrogate people through, let's say, psychological manipulation and maybe even torture. The scale of the program is perhaps not known. How do you make sense that this program existed? Again, you've gotta look through the lens of time. You've gotta look at where we were historically at that time. There was the peak of the Cold War. Our enemies were doing the same kind of experimentation. It was essentially another space race. What if they broke through a new weapon technology faster than we did? What would that mean for the safety and security of the American people? So right decision or wrong decision, it was guided by and informed by national security priorities. So from this program that was designed to use drugs to drive interrogation and torture people was born something very productive, Operation Stargate, which was a chance to use remote viewing and metaphysics to try to collect intelligence. Now, even though in the end, the outcome of MKUltra and the outcome of Stargate were mixed, nobody really knows if they did or didn't do what they were supposed to do, we still know that to this day, there's still a demand in the US government and in CIA for people who have sensitivities to ethereal energies. By the way, is there any proof that that kind of stuff works? Or it just shows that there's interest. It shows that there's openness to consider those kinds of things. But is there any evidence that that kind of stuff works? If there's evidence, I haven't seen it. Speaking from a science based point of view only, if energy and matter can always be exchanged, then a person who can understand and become sensitive to energy is a person who could become sensitive to what does become matter. Yeah, I mean, the basics of the physics might be there, but a lot of people probably are skeptical. I'm skeptical too, but I'm just trying to look at it. You should be open minded, right? I mean, that's actually, you know, that's what science is about, is remain open minded, even for the things that are long shots, because those are the things that actually define scientific revolutions. What about Operation Northwoods? It was a proposed 1962 false flag operation by the DOD and the CIA to be carried out by the CIA to commit acts of terrorism on Americans and blame them on Cuba. So JFK, the president, rejected the proposal. What do you make that this was on the table, Operation Northwoods? So it's interesting. First, I'm glad that JFK rejected it. That's a good sign. So we have to understand that good ideas are oftentimes born from bad ideas. I had a really good friend of mine who actually went on to become a pastor, and he used to say all the time that he wanted all the bad ideas on the table. Like, give me all your bad ideas every time we had any kind of conversation. And I was always one of those people who was like, isn't a bad idea just a waste of time? And he was like, no, because the best ideas oftentimes come from bad ideas. So again, Cuban missile crisis, mass hysteria in the United States about nuclear war from Cuba, missiles blowing up American cities faster than we could even see them coming. It makes sense to me that a president would go to, especially the part of CIA, which is the Special Activities Division, it makes perfect sense to me that the president would go to a division called Special Activities, whose job it is to create crazy ideas that have presidential approval, but nobody knows they exist. So it makes sense that he would challenge a group like that to come up with any wacky idea, right? Come up with anything. Just let's start with something, because we can't bring nothing to the table. We have to do something about this Cuban issue. And then that's how an operation like that could reasonably be born. Not because anybody wants to do it, but because they were tasked by the president to come up with five ideas. And it was one of the ideas. That still happens to this day. The president will still come in, but it'll basically send out a notice to his covert action arm. And he will say, I need this. And I need it on Wednesday. And people have to come back with options for the thing he asked for, a finding. He will issue a presidential finding. And then his covert action arms have to come back and say, here's how we would do this and hide the hands of the Americans. How gangster was it of JFK to reject it though? His baller, right? That's like, that is a mic drop right there. Nope, not doing that. Yep, doing that. A thing that crosses an ethical line, even in a time where the human, the entirety of human civilization hangs in a balance, still forfeit that power. That's a beautiful thing about the American experiment. That's a few times throughout the history that this has happened, including with our first president, George Washington. Well, let me ask about JFK. 25 times two, and they still keep that stuff classified. So do you think the CIA had a hand in the assassination of JFK? I cannot imagine in any reasonable point of view that the organization of CIA had anything to do with the assassination of JFK. So it's not possible to infiltrate the CIA, a small part of the CIA in order to attain political or criminal gains, or financial. Yeah, absolutely it's possible to infiltrate CIA. There's a long history of foreign intelligence services infiltrating CIA, from Aldrich Ames to Jerry Lee recently with China. So we know CIA can be infiltrated, even if they are infiltrated, and even if that's interlocutor execution that interlocutor executes on their own agenda or the agenda as directed by their foreign adversary, their foreign handler, that's different than organizational support for an event. So I do think it's possible they could have been infiltrated at the time, especially it was a major priority for the Cubans and the Russians to infiltrate some aspect of US intelligence, multiple moles were caught in the years following. So it's not surprising that there would be a priority for that. But to say that the organization of CIA was somehow in cahoots with, to independently assassinate their own executive, that's a significant stretch. I've seen no evidence to support that. And it goes contrary to everything I learned from my time at CIA. Well, let me ask you, do you think CIA played a part in enabling drug cartels and drug trafficking, which is another big kind of shadow that hangs over the CIA? At the beginning of the drug war, I would imagine the answer is yes. CIA has its own counter narcotics division, a division that's dedicated to fighting and preventing narcotics from coming into the United States. So when you paint a picture for me, like do you think the CIA was complicit in helping drug trafficking or drug use? When I say yes, my exception is I don't think they did that for Americans inside the United States. If the CIA can basically set it up so that two different drug cartels shoot each other by assisting in the transaction of a sale to a third country and then leaking that that sale happened to a competing cartel, that's just letting cartels do what they do. That's them doing the dirty work for us. So especially at the beginning of the drug war, I think there was tons of space, lots of room for CIA to get involved in the economics of drugs and then let the inevitable happen. And that was way more efficient, way more productive than us trying to send our own troops in to kill a bunch of cartel warlords. So that makes a ton of sense to me. It just seems efficient. It seems very practical. I do not believe that CIA would like, I don't think all the accusations out there about how they would buy drugs and sell drugs and somehow make money on the side from it. That's not how it works. So do you think there's, on that point, a connection between Barry Seal, the great governor and then President Bill Clinton, Oliver North and Vice President and former CIA Director George H.W. Bush and the little town with a little airport called Mena, Arkansas? So I am out of my element now. This is one I haven't heard many details about. Okay, so your sense is any of the drug trafficking has to do with criminal operations outside of the United States and the CIA just leveraging that to achieve its ends but nothing to do with American citizens and American politicians. With American citizens, again, speaking organizationally. So that would be my sense, yes. Let me ask you about, so back to Operation Northwoods because it's such a powerful tool, sadly powerful tool used by dictators throughout history, the false flag operation. So I think there's, and you said the terrorist attacks in 9 11 were, it changed a lot for us, for the United States, for Americans. It changed the way we see the world. It woke us up to the harshness of the world. I think there's, to my eyes at least, there's nothing that shows evidence that 9 11 was a quote inside job. But is the CIA or the intelligence agencies or the US government capable of something like that? But that's the question. So there's a bunch of shadiness about how it was reported on. I just can't, that's the thing I struggle with. While there's no evidence that there was an inside job, it raises the question to me, well, could something like this be an inside job? Because it sure as heck, now looking back 20 years, the amount of money that was spent on these wars, the military industrial complex, the amount of interest in terms of power and money involved, organizationally, can something like that happen? You know Occam's razor. So the harem's razor is that you can never prescribe to conspiracy what could be explained through incompetence. That is one of, those are two fundamental guidelines that we follow all the time. The simplest answer is oftentimes the best and never prescribe to conspiracy what can be explained through incompetence. Can you elaborate what you mean by we? We as intelligence professionals. So you think there's a deep truth to that second razor? There is more than a deep truth. There's ages of experience for me and for others. So in general, people are incompetent. If left to their own means they're more incompetent than they are malevolent at a large organizational scale. People are more incompetent of executing a conspiracy than they are of competently, yeah, than they are of competently executing a conspiracy. That's really what it means is that it's so difficult to carry out a complex lie that most people don't have the competency to do it. So it doesn't make any sense to lead thinking of conspiracy. It makes more sense to lead assuming incompetence. When you look at all of the outcomes, all the findings from 9 11, it speaks to incompetence. It speaks brashly and openly to incompetence and nobody likes talking about it. FBI and CIA to this day hate hearing about it. The 9 11 commission is gonna go down in history as this painful example of the incompetence of the American intelligence community. And it's going to come back again and again. Every time there's an intel flap, it's gonna come back again and again. What are you seeing? Even right now, we miss the US intelligence infrastructure, misjudged Afghanistan, misjudged Hong Kong, misjudged Ukraine's and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Those were three massive misjudgments in a few years. That speaks, it's just embarrassing. Exactly right. So all the sort of cover up looking things around 9 11 is just people being embarrassed by their failures. If they're taking steps to cover anything up, it's just their own, it's a painful reminder of their lack of competency at the time. Now, I understand that conspiracy theorists want to take inklings of information and put them together in a way that is the most damning, but that goes back to our point about overvaluing losses and undervaluing gains. It's just predictable human behavior. Let me ask you about this because it comes up often. So I'm from MIT and there's a guy by the name of Jeffrey Epstein that still troubles me to this day that some of the people I respect were interacted with this individual and fell into his influence. The charm, charisma, whatever the hell he used to delude these people, he did so successfully. I'm very open minded about this thing. I just, I would love to learn more, but a lot of people tell me, a lot of people I respect, that there's intelligence agencies behind this individual. So they were using Jeffrey Epstein for getting access to powerful people and then to control and manipulate those powerful people. The CIA, I believe, is not brought up as often as Mossad. And so this goes back to the original aspect of our conversation is how much each individual intelligence agency is willing to go to control, to manipulate, to achieve its means. Do you think there is, can you educate me? If, obviously you don't know, but you can bet, what are the chances the intelligence agencies are involved with the character of Jeffrey Epstein? In some way, shape, or form with the character of Epstein, it's 100% guaranteed that some intelligence organization was involved, but let's talk about why. Let's talk about why, okay? There's multiple types of intelligence assets, just like we were talking earlier. There's foreign intelligence reporting assets, there's access agents, and then there's agents of influence. Three different categories of intelligence, right? One is when you talk about foreign intelligence reporters, these are people who have access to secrets and their job is to give you their secrets in exchange for gold or money or alcohol or prostitution or whatever else, right? Their job is to give you secrets and then you pay them for the secrets. Access agents, their job is to give you physical access or digital access to something of interest to you. So maybe they're the ones that open a door that should have been locked and let you come in and stick your thumb drive in the computer. Or maybe they're the ones that share a phone number with somebody and then they're just like, just don't tell them you got the phone number from me. Their job is to give you access. Then you have these agents of influence. An agent of influence's job is to be part of your effort to influence the outcomes in some way that benefits your intelligence requirements, right? Of these three types of people, the least scrupulous and the most shady is your agent of influence. Because your agent of influence understands exactly what they're doing. They know they're working with one guy and they know they're using the influence to manipulate some other guy. When it comes to powerful people, especially wealthy, powerful people, the only thing that interests them is power. Money is not a challenge anymore. Prestige, notoriety, none of those things are a challenge. The rest of us, we're busy trying to make money. We're busy trying to build a reputation. We're busy trying to build a career, keep a family afloat. At the highest levels, they're bored. They don't need any of that. The only thing that they care about is being able to wield power. So a character like Jeffrey Epstein is exactly the kind of character that the Chinese would want, the Russians would want, Mossad would want, the French would want. It's too easy because the man had access to a wide range of American influential people. For corporate espionage uses, for economic espionage uses, for national security espionage uses, it doesn't make any sense that a person like that wouldn't be targeted. It doesn't. So the question is. Who? Who, and whether, I think the really important distinction here is was this person, was Jeffrey Epstein created, or once he's achieved and built his network, was he then infiltrated? And that's a really sort of important difference. Like at which stage do you connect a person like that? You start to notice maybe they're effective at building a network, and then you start making, building a relationship to where at some point it's a job, they're working for you. Or do you literally create a person like that? Yeah, so intelligence organizations have different strategies here. In the United States, we never create. We don't have a budget cycle that allows us to create. I mean, the maximum budget cycle in the United States is five years. So even if we were to try to invest in some seed operation or create some character of influence, essentially every year you have to justify why you're spending budget. And that becomes very difficult in a democracy like ours. However, Russia and China are extremely adept at seed operations, longterm operations. They are willing to invest and develop and create an agent that serves their purposes. Now, to create someone from scratch like Jeffrey Epstein, the probabilities are extremely low. They would have had to start with like a thousand different targets and try to grow a thousand different, if you will, influencers, and then hope that one of them hits, kind of like a venture capital firm, right? Invest in many, hope that a few hits. More likely, they observed him at some point in his own natural rise. They identified his personal vulnerability, very classic espionage technique. And then they stepped in, introduced themselves mid career and said, hey, we know you have this thing that you like that isn't really frowned upon by your own people, but we don't frown upon it. And we can help you both succeed and have an endless supply of ladies along the way. I recently talked to Ryan Graves, who's a lieutenant. Ryan Graves, who's a fighter jet pilot, about many things. He also does work on autonomous weapon systems, drones, and that kind of thing, including quantum computing. But he also happens to be one of the very few pilots that were willing to go on record and talk about UFO sightings. Does the CIA and the federal government have interest in UFOs? In my experience at CIA, that is, an area that remains very compartmented. And that could be one of two reasons. It could be because there is significant interest and that's why it's so heavily compartmented. Or it could be because it's an area that's non, that's just not important. It's a distraction. So they compartment it so it doesn't distract from other operations. One of the areas that I've been quite interested in and where I've done a lot of research and I've done some work in the private intelligence and private investigation side is with UFOs. The place where UFOs really connect with the federal government is when it comes to aviation safety and predominance of power. So FAA and the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. military are very invested in knowing what's happening in the skies above the United States. And that's of primary interest to them. When they can rule out the direct threat to national security of UFOs, then they become less interested. That said, when you have unexplained aerial phenomenon that are unexplained, that can't directly be tied to anything that is known of the terrestrial world, then they're left without an answer to their question. They don't know if it's a threat or not a threat. But I think that's a very important question. But I think the scarier concern for the U.S. national government or for the U.S. federal government, the scarier concern that nobody talks about is what if the UFO isn't alien? What if it is actually a cutting edge war machine that we are eons behind ever being able to replicate? Or the other concern is that it's a system, it's a machine from a foreign power that's doing intelligence collection. Correct. Not just military purposes, it's actually collecting data. Well, they fall, a lot of times the federal government will see the two as the same. It's a hostile tool from a foreign government. So collection of information is a hostile act. Absolutely, that's why the Espionage Act exists. That's why it's a criminal offense if you're committing espionage in the United States as a U.S. citizen or a foreign citizen. So I guess they keep digging until they can confirm it's not a threat. But it just, and you're saying that there's not, from your understanding, much evidence that they're doing. So it could be because they're compartmentalized. But you're saying private intelligence institutions are trying to make progress on this. Yeah, it's really difficult to know the scale. Yeah, there's an economic interest in the private intelligence world. Because, for example, if you understand why certain aerial phenomenon are happening over a location, then you can use that to inform investors, whether to invest in that location or avoid investment in that location. But that's not a national security concern. So it doesn't matter to the federal government. Could these UFOs be aliens? Now I'm going into a territory of you as a human being wondering about all the alien civilizations that are out there. The humbling question. We are not alone. You think we're not alone. It's an improbability that we are alone. If by virtue of the fact that sentient human life exists, intelligent human life exists, all the probabilities that would have to be destroyed for that to be true simply speak over the galaxies that exist that there's no possible way we're alone. It's a mathematical equation. It's a one or a zero, right? And for me, it has to exist. It's impossible otherwise rationally for me to think that we are truly the only intelligent life form in all of the universe. But to think that an alien life form is anything like us at all is equally as inconceivable. To think that they're carbon based bipedal humanoid alien species that just happened to fly around in metal machines and visit alien planets in a way that they become observed is, it's just silly, it's the world of sci fi. Well, let me push. Every good scientist, because we always assume that they're superior to us in intelligence. Yes. When any scientist carries out an experiment, the whole objective of the experiment is to observe without being disclosed or being discovered. So why on earth would we think that the superior species makes the mistake of being discovered over and over again? So to push back on that idea, if we were to think about us humans trying to communicate with ants, first we observe for a while. There'll be a bunch of PhDs written, a bunch of people just sort of collecting data, taking notes, trying to understand about this thing that you detected that seems to be a living thing, which is a very difficult thing to define from an alien perspective or from our perspective if we find life on Mars or something like that. Okay, so you observe for a while. But then if you want to actually interact with it, how would you interact with the ants? If I were to interact with the ants, I would try to infiltrate. I would try to figure out what is the language they use to communicate with each other. I would try to operate at their physical scale, like in terms of the physics of their interaction, in terms of the information, methods, mediums of information exchange with pheromones or whatever, however the heck, ants. So I would try to mimic them in some way. So in that sense, it makes sense that the objects we would see, you mentioned bipedal. Yes, of course it's ridiculous that aliens would actually be very similar to us, but maybe they create forms in order to be like, here, the humans will understand it. And this needs to be sufficiently different from humans to know that there's something weird. I don't know, I think it's actually an incredibly difficult problem of figuring out how to communicate with a thing way dumber than you. People assume if you're smart, it's easier to talk to the dumb thing. But I think it's actually extremely difficult when the gap in intelligence is just orders of magnitude. And so of course you can observe, but once you notice the thing is sufficiently interesting, how do you communicate with that thing? So this is where, one of the things I always try to highlight is how conspiracies are born. Because many people don't understand how easy it is to fall into the conspiratorial cycle. So the first step to a conspiracy being born is to have a piece of evidence that is true. And then immediately following the true evidence is a gap in information. And then to fill in the gap of information, people create an idea and then the next logical outcome is based on the idea that they just created, which is an idea that's based on something that was imagined in the first place. So the idea, the factual thing is now two steps away and then three steps away, four steps away as the things go on. And then all of a sudden you have this kernel of truth that turned into this wild conspiracy. So in our example, you talked about humans trying to communicate with ants. Ants are not intelligent. There's no, ants are not intelligent species. They're a drone species that's somehow commanded through whatever technology, whatever. Spoken like a typical human, but yes. Whatever biological thing is in the queen, right? But they're not, it's not a fair equivalent. But let's look at gorillas or let's look at something in the monkey family, right? Where largely we agree that there is some sort of intelligence there or dolphins, some sort of intelligence, right? It is a human thing, a human thing to want to observe and then communicate and integrate. That's a human thing, not an intelligent life thing. So for us to even think that a foreign and intelligent alien species would want to engage and communicate at all is an extremely human assumption. And then from that assumption, then we started going into all the other things you said. If they wanted to communicate, wouldn't they want to mimic? If they wanted to mimic, wouldn't they create devices like ours? So now we're three steps removed from the true fact of there's something unexplainable in the skies. Yeah, so the fact is there's something unexplainable in the skies and then we're filling in the gaps with all our basic human biases and assumptions. Exactly. But the thing is. Now we're getting right back to Project Northwood. We need some plan. I don't care how crazy the idea is, guys. Give me some plan. So that's where we come up with. Maybe it's an alien species trying to communicate or maybe it's an alien, a hostile threat that's trying to take over the world or who knows what. Maybe it's. But you have to somehow construct hypotheses and theories for anomalies. And then from that, amidst giant pile of the ridiculous, emerges perhaps a deeper truth over a period of decades. And at first, that truth is ridiculed and then it's accepted, that whole process. The Earth revolving around the sun? Yeah, the Earth revolving around the sun. But to me, it's interesting because it asks us looking out there with SETI, just looking for alien life, is forcing us to really ask questions about ourselves, about what is life, how special. First of all, what is intelligence? How special is intelligence in the cosmos? And I think it's inspiring and challenging to us as human beings, both on a scientific and engineering level, but also on a philosophical level. I mean, all of those questions that are laid before us when you start to think about alien life. So you interviewed Joe Rogan recently. Yeah. And he said something that I thought was really, really brilliant during the podcast interview. He said that you. He's gonna love hearing that. But go ahead, sorry. But he said that he realized at some point that the turn in his opinion about UFOs happened when he realized how desperately he wanted it to be true. This is the human condition. We are pink matter works the same way as everybody's pink matter. And one of the ways that our pink matter works is with this thing, with what's known as a cognitive bias. It's a mental shortcut. Essentially, your brain doesn't want to process through facts over and over again. Instead, it wants to assume certain facts are in place and just jump right to the conclusion. It saves energy, it saves megabytes. So what Joe or Joe Rogan, I feel weird calling him Joe, I don't know him, but what Joe identified on his own. Mr. Rogan. What Mr. Rogan identified on his own. Yeah. Was his own cognitive loop. And then he immediately grew suspicious of that loop. That is a super powerful tool. That is something that most people never become self actualized enough to realize that they have a cognitive loop, let alone questioning their own cognitive loop. So that was, when it came to this topic specifically, that was just something that I thought was really powerful because you learn to not trust your own mind. Just for the record, after he drinks one whiskey, all that goes out. I think that was just in that moment in time, like, you know. A moment of brilliance. A moment of brilliance is, I think he still is, you know, he's definitely, one of the things that inspires me about Joe is how open minded he is, how curious he is. He refuses to let sort of the conformity and the conventions of any one community, including the scientific community, be a kind of thing that limits his curiosity, of asking what if, like the whole, it's entirely possible. I think that's a beautiful thing. And it actually represents what the best of science is, that childlike curiosity. But, so it's good to sort of balance those two things, but then you have to wake up to it, like, is this, is there a chance this is true, or do I just really want it to be true? And that. Like that hot girl that talks to you overseas? Yeah. Yeah. For a brief moment. There's actually a deeper explanation for it that I'll tell you off the mic that perhaps a lot of people can kind of figure out. Anyway. Just to take it one step further, cause I love this stuff. Personally, I love pink matter stuff. In your interview with Jack Barsky, Jack's a good friend of mine, a good dude. An incredible person. Yeah. In your conversation with Jack Barsky, you guys, he started talking to you about how his recruiters were feeding back to him his own beliefs, his own opinions about himself, how smart he was, how good he was, how uniquely qualified he was. That's all pink matter manipulation. Feeding right back to the person what they already think of themselves is a way to get them to invest and trust you faster because obviously you value them for all the right reasons because that's how they see themselves. So that loop that the KGB was using with Jack, Jack did not wake up to that loop at the time. He woke up to it later. So it happens to all of us. We're all in a loop. It's just whether it's about oat milk or whether it's about aliens or whether it's about the Democrats trying to take your guns, whatever it is, everybody's in a loop and we've got to wake up to ask ourselves, just like you said, is it true or do we just really want it to be true? And until you ask yourself that question, you're just one of the masses trapped in the loop. Yeah, that's the really, the Nietzsche gaze into the abyss. It's a dangerous thing. That's the path to insanity is to ask that question. You want to be doing it carefully, but it's also the place where you can truly discover something fundamental about this world that people don't understand and then that and lay the groundwork for progress, scientific, cultural, all that kind of stuff. Absolutely. What is one spy trick? This is from a Reddit that I really enjoy. What's one spy trick and you're full of a million spy tricks. People should follow you. You did an amazing podcast. You're just an amazing person. Thank you. What is the one spy trick you would teach everyone that they can use to improve their life instantly? Now you already mentioned quite a few, but what else could jump to mind? My go to answer for this has not really changed much over the last few years. So the first, the most important spy trick to change everything immediately is something called perception versus perspective. We all look at the world through our own perception. My dad used to tell me, my stepdad used to tell me that perception is reality. And I was arguing this with him when I was 14 years old. I told you so dad, you're still wrong. But perception is your interpretation of the world around you, but it's unique only to you. There's no advantage in your perception. That's why so many people find themselves arguing all the time, trying to convince other people of their own perception. The way that you win any argument, the way that you get ahead in your career, the way that you outsell or out race anybody is when you move off of perception and move into perspective. Perspective is the act or the art of observing the world from outside of yourself, whether that's outside of yourself as like an entity, just observing in a third from a different point of view, or even more powerful, you sit in the shoes, you sit in the seat of the person opposite you. And you think to yourself, what is their life like? What do they feel right now? Are they comfortable? Are they uncomfortable? Are they afraid? Are they scared? What's the stressor that they woke up to this morning? What's the stressor that they're gonna go to sleep with tonight? When you shift places and get out of your own perception and into someone else's perspective, now you're thinking like them, which is giving you an informational advantage. But you know what they're all doing? Everyone else out there is trapped in their own perception, not thinking about a different perspective. So immediately you have superior information, superior positioning, you have an advantage that they don't have. And if you do that to your boss, it's gonna change your career. If you do that to your spouse, it's gonna change your marriage. If you do that to your kids, it's gonna change your family legacy because nobody else out there is doing it. It's so interesting how difficult empathy is for people and how powerful it is, especially for, like you said, with spouse, like intimacy. Yeah. Like stepping outside of yourself and really putting yourself in the shoes of the other person considering how they see the world. And that's, I really enjoy that because how does that exactly lead to connection? I think when you start to understand the way the other person sees the world, you start to enjoy the world through their eyes and you start to be able to share, in terms of intimacy, share the beauty that they see together because you understand their perspective. And somehow you converge as well. Of course, that allows you to gather information better and all that kind of stuff. And that allows you to work together better, to share in all different kinds of ways. But for intimacy, that's a really powerful thing. And also for, actually, like people you really disagree with or people on the internet you disagree with and so on, I find empathy is such a powerful way to resolve any tensions there. Even like people like trolls or all that kind of stuff, I don't deride them. I just kind of put myself in their shoes and it becomes like an enjoyable comradery with that person. So I wanna draw a pretty hard line between perspective and empathy. Because empathy is, frankly, an overused term by people who don't really know what they're saying sometimes. I think you know what you're saying, but the vast majority of people listening. I would argue that, but that's fine. As soon as you say empathy, they're gonna just be like, oh, yeah, I've heard this a thousand times. Empathy is about feeling what other people feel. Or understanding. It's more about feeling, would you say? Yeah, it's about feelings. It's about understanding someone else's feelings. Feeling, it's not the same as sympathy where you feel their feelings. Empathy is about recognizing that they have feelings and recognizing that their feelings are valid. Perspective is more than just feelings. It's about the brain. It's about the pink matter on the left side and the right side of the brain. Yes, I care about feelings, and this goes directly to your point about connection. Yes, I care about feelings, but I also care about objectives. What is your life, what is your aspirational goal? What was it like to grow up as you? What was it like to experience this and how did this shape your opinion on that? And what is it that you're going to do next? More than just feelings, actual tactical actions. And that becomes extremely valuable in the operational world because if you can get into someone's head, left brain and right brain, feelings and logic, you can start anticipating what actions they're gonna take next. You can direct the actions that they're going to take next because you're basically telling them the story that's in their own head. When it comes to relationships and personal connection, we talked about it earlier, the thing that people want the most is community. They want someone else who understands them. They want to be with people. They don't want to be alone. The more you practice perspective, empathy or no empathy, the more you just validate that a person is there. I am in this time and space with you in this moment. Feelings aside, that is powerful. That is intimate. And whether you're talking about lovers or whether you're talking about a business exchange or whether you're talking about collaborators in a crime, I'm here with you ride or die, let's do it. That's powerful. How much of what you've learned in your role at the CIA transfer over to relationships, the business relationship to other aspects of life? This is something you work closely with powerful people to help them out. What have you learned about the commonalities, about the problems that people face? Man, I would say about a solid 95% of what I learned at CIA carries over to the civilian world. That 5% that doesn't is, it would carry over in a disaster, right? There's knowing how to shoot on target with my non dominant hand really only has one purpose. It's not gonna happen day to day, right? Knowing how to do a dead drop that isn't discoverable by the local police force isn't gonna be useful right now, but it could be useful in disaster. But the 95% of stuff that's useful, it's all tied to the human condition. It's all tied to being able to understand what someone's thinking, understand what someone's feeling, direct their thoughts, direct their emotions, direct their thought process, win their attention, win their loyalty, win influence with them, grow your network, grow your own circle of influence. I mean, all of that is immensely, immensely valuable. As an example, the disguise, the disguise thing that we talked about earlier, disguise in and of itself has mixed utility. If you're Brad Pitt and you don't want anybody to know you're Brad Pitt, you put on a level one disguise and that's great. Or maybe you call me and I walk you through a level two disguise so that you can go to Aruba and nobody's gonna know you're in Aruba, right? Whatever it is. But even there with the 5% that doesn't apply to everyday life, there's still elements that do. For example, when a person looks at a human being's face, the first place they look is the same part of the face as if they were reading a piece of paper. So in English, we start from the top left and we read left to right, top to bottom. So when an English speaking person interacts with another person, the first thing they look at isn't their eyes. It's the upper left from their point of view, corner of their face, right? They look there and the information they get is hair color, hair pattern, skin color, right? That's it. Before they know anything else about the face. This is one of the reasons why somebody can look at you and then you ask them, what color are my eyes? I don't really remember. Because the way they read the face, they read it from left to right, top to bottom. So they're paying a lot of attention to the first few things they see and then they're paying less attention as they go down the face. The same scrolling behavior that you see on the internet, right? So when you understand that through the lens of disguise, it allows you to make a very powerful disguise. The most important part of your disguise is here if you're English speaking, right? Here if you're speaking some foreign languages that read right to left, right? If you're, if it's Chinese, you know that they're gonna look from here down because they read left down. So. So interesting. So yeah, knowing that really helps you sort of configure the things in terms of physical appearance. That's interesting. Correct, correct. So when it comes to how to make a disguise, not so useful to the ultra wealthy usually. But when it comes to how to read a face or more importantly, how people are going to read your face, that's extremely important because now you know where to find the first signs of deception in a baseline or anything else. You mentioned that the idea of having privacy is one that we kind of, we think we can, but we really don't. Is it possible for maybe somebody like me or a regular person to disappear from the grid? Absolutely. Yeah, and it's not as hard as you might think. It's not convenient. Again, convenience and security. You can disappear tomorrow, right? I can walk you through three steps right now that are gonna help you disappear tomorrow, but none of them are convenient. They're all extremely secure, right? The first thing you do is every piece of digital technology you have that is connected to you in any way is now dead. You just let the battery run out. Forever. Forever. You never touch it again, starting at this moment. What you have to do is go out and acquire a new one. Realistically, you will not be able to acquire a new one in the United States by buying it because to do so, you would tie it to your credit card. You would tie it to a location, a time, a place, a registered name, whatever else. So you would have to acquire it essentially by theft or through the black market. So you would want something because you're gonna need the advantage of technology without it being in your name. So you go out and you steal a phone or you steal a laptop. You do whatever you have to do to make sure that you can get on with the password and whatever else that might be. As dirty or as clean as you want that to be, we're all morally flexible here, but now you have a technological device that you can work with. And then from there on, you're just doing whatever you have to do, whether you're stealing every step of the way or whether you run a massive con. Keep in mind that we often talk about con men and cons. Do you know what the root, the word that con is a root word for? Confidence. That's what a con man is. A con man is a confidence man. Just somebody who is so brazenly confident that the people around them living in their own perception, not perspective, and their perception, they're like, well, this guy really knows what he's talking about, so I'm gonna do what he says. So you can run a massive con and that can take care of your finances, that can take care of your lodging, whatever else it is. You are whoever you present yourself to be. So if you wanna go be Bill for the afternoon, just go tell people your name is Bill. They're not gonna question you. So the intelligence, the natural web of intelligence gathering systems we have in the United States and in the world, are they going to believe for long that you're Bill? Are they? Until you do something that makes them think otherwise. If you are consistent, we talked about consistency being the superpower. If you are consistent, they will think you're Bill forever. How difficult is that to do? It's not convenient. It's quite difficult. Does that require training? It does require training. Because why do criminals always get caught? Because they stop being consistent. Criminals, I've... I never hesitate to admit this, but people tell me I should hesitate to admit it. So now I hesitate because of the guidance I've gotten to hesitate, right? I like criminals. I'm friends with a number of criminals because the only people who get me, like right away who get me, are criminals. Because we know what it's like to basically abandon all the rules, do our own thing our own way, and watch the world just keep turning. Most people are so stuck in the trap of normal thought and behavior that when I tell them, they just don't... Just go tell people your name is Bill. Most people are going to say, psh, that's not going to work. But a criminal will be like, oh yeah, I did that once. I just told everybody my name is Nancy, you know, dude, and they still believe me. Criminals just get it, right? So what happens with criminals is they go to the school of hard knocks. They go to... They learn criminal behavior on the job. Spies go to school. We go to the best spy school in the world. We go to Langley's, the farm, right? What's known as Field Tradecraft Course, FTC, in a covert location for a covert period of time and covert, covert, covert. So if anybody from CIA is watching, I'm not breaking any rules. It's all on Wikipedia, but it's not coming from me. But we do... That's how we do it. They train us from a hundred years of experience and the best ways to carry out covert operations, which are all just criminal activities overseas. We learn how to do it the right way so that we don't get caught. We learn how to be consistent. More importantly, we learn how to create an operation that has a limited lifespan because the longer it lives, the more at risk you are. So you want operations to be short, concise, on the X, off the X. Limit your room for mistakes. Criminals want the default to wanting these longterm operations because they don't want to have to recreate a new way to make money every 15 days. You mentioned, if anybody from the CIA is watching, so I've seen you talk about the fact that sort of people that are currently working at the CIA would kind of look down on the people who've left the CIA and they divide them, especially if you go public, especially if there's a book and all that kind of stuff. Do you feel the pressure of that to be quiet, to not do something like this conversation that we're doing today? I feel the silent judgment. That's very real. I feel it for myself and I feel it for my wife who doesn't appear on camera very often, but who's also former CIA. We both feel the judgment. We know that right now, three days after this is released, somebody's gonna send an email on a closed network system inside CIA headquarters and there's a bunch of people who are gonna laugh at it, a bunch of people who are gonna say that who knows what. It's not gonna be good stuff. A bunch of people you respect probably. A bunch of people who I'm trying to bring honor to. Whether I know them or respect them is irrelevant. These are people who are out there doing the deed every day and I wanna bring them honor and I wanna do that in a way that I get to share what they can't share and what they won't share when they leave because they will also feel the silent pressure, the pressure to the shame, the judgment, right? But the truth is that I've done this now long enough. The first few times that I spoke out publicly, the response to being a positive voice for what the sacrifice is that people are making, it's so refreshing to be an honest voice that people don't normally hear that it's too important. One day I'm gonna be gone and my kids are gonna look back on all this and they're gonna see their dad trying to do the right thing for the right reasons and even if my son or daughter ends up at CIA and even if they get ridiculed for being, oh, you're the Bustamante kid, right? Your dad's a total sellout, whatever it might be. Like I want them to know dad was doing what he could to bring honor to the organization even when he couldn't stay in the organization anymore. So you said when you were 27, I think you didn't know what the hell you're doing. So now that you're a few years older and wiser, let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat and give advice to other 27 year olds or even younger 17, 18 year olds that are just out of high school, maybe going to college, trying to figure out this life, this career thing that they're on. What advice would you give them about how to have a career or how to have a life they can be proud of? What's a powerful question, man? Have you figured it out yet yourself? No, I think I'm a grand total of seven days smarter than I was at 27. It's not a good average. Progress. There's still time. There's still time. So for all the young people out there deciding what to do, I would just say the same thing that I do say and I will say to my own kids. You only have one life. You only have one chance. If you spend it doing what other people expect you to do, you will wake up to your regret at some point. I woke up when I was 38 years old. My wife in many ways is still waking up to it as she watches her grandparents pass and an older generation pass away. The folks that really have a blessed life are the people who learn early on to live with their own rules, live their own way and live every day as if it's the last day. Not necessarily to waste it by being wasteful or silly, but to recognize that today is a day to be productive and constructive for yourself. If you don't want a career, today's not the day to start pursuing a career just because someone else told you to do it. If you wanna learn a language, today's a day to find a way to buy a ticket to another country and learn through immersion. If you want a date, if you wanna get married, if you want a business, today is the day to just go out and take one step in that direction. And as long as you, every day you just make one new step, just like CIA recruited me, just do the next thing. If the step seems like it's too big, then there's probably two other steps that you can do before that. Just make constant progress, build momentum, move forward and live on your own terms. That way you don't ever wake up to the regret. And it'll be over before you know it. Whether you regret it or not, it's true. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? Self respect, that's a fast answer. There's a story behind it if you want the story. I would love to have the story. There's a covert training base in Alabama in the south, far south and like the armpit of America where elite tier one operators go to learn human intelligence stuff. And there's a bar inside this base. And on the wall is just, it's scribbles of opinions. And the question in the middle of the wall says what's the meaning of life? And all these elite operators over the last 25 or 30 years, they all go, they get drunk and they scribble their answer and they circle it with a Sharpie, right? Love, family, America, freedom, right, whatever. And then the only thing they have to do is if they're gonna write something on there, they have to connect it with something else on the wall, at least one other thing. So if they write love, they can't just leave it floating there, they have to write love in a little bubble and connect it to something else, connect it to family, whatever else. When you look at that wall, the word self respect is on the wall and it's got a circle around it. And then you can't see any other word because of all the things that connect to self respect. Just dozens of people have written over, have written their words down and been drawn and scribbled over because of all the lines that connect to self respect. So what's the meaning of life? From my point of view, I've never seen a better answer. It's all self respect. If you don't respect yourself, how can you do anything else? How can you love someone else if you don't have self respect? How can you build a business you're proud of if you don't have self respect? How can you raise kids? How can you make a difference? How can you pioneer anything? How can you just wake up and have a good day if you don't have self respect? The power of the individual, that's what makes this country great. I have to say, after I was born, I have to say after traveling quite a bit in Europe and especially in a place of war, coming back to the United States makes me really appreciate about the better angels of this nation, the ideals it stands for, the values it stands for. And I'd like to thank you for serving this nation for time and humanity for time and for being brave enough and bold enough to still talk about it and to inspire others, to educate others for having many amazing conversations and for honoring me by having this conversation today. You're an amazing human. Thanks so much for talking today. Lex, I appreciate the invite, man. It was a joy. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Bustamante. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Sun Tzu in The Art of War. Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night. And when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Andrew Bustamante: CIA Spy | Lex Fridman Podcast #310

you have to have the free markets in order to build prosperity. And prosperity means economic power. If you have economic power, no one messes with you. Or if they're gonna do it, they're gonna have to think twice and when they do, they're gonna have to pay consequences. The following is a conversation with Magat Wade, an entrepreneur who's passionate about creating positive change in Africa through economic empowerment. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Magat Wade. You were born in Senegal. You have lived and traveled across the world. So let me ask you, what is the soul of Senegal? Like, its people, its culture, its history. Can you try to sneak up on telling us what is the spirit of its people? Taranga, Taranga. Taranga, it's a Wolof word. Wolof is the main indigenous language of Senegal and it means hospitality. That is what us, the people of Senegal, are known for. And it transpires in everything that we do, everything that we say. It's a place where, I guess with hospitality, goes this concept of warmth. So we are a very warm people. So in a nutshell, that's us. That's us, the place where you come and everybody will just embrace you, make you feel very comfortable, make you feel like you're the only person in the world and that we've been waiting for you our whole life, right? So that's my country. So that's for people in Senegal, people in Africa, or also people across the world, weird strangers from all walks of life. So hospitality towards everyone. For everyone, for everyone. Especially towards the foreigner because it's very ingrained in us, this understanding that especially the foreigner, the foreigner is called foreigner because the foreigner is coming from somewhere else. So if someone has taken the time and the energy, whether in a forced manner or because it's a choice to travel so far to come to a place that's not theirs, to start where that's where the foreigners again, then it is your duty to welcome them, to be uber welcoming to them. So there's not a fear of the foreigner. There's not a suspicion of the foreigner. No, no, no. And I think this goes with the other way around. Maybe it has to do with just, you know, when you feel good about yourself, when you're very grounded yourself, it's very easy to open yourself to others. And I'm wondering if that's not, you know, the other side of the equation in a way. So no, we don't have a fear towards a foreigner. That's just no. When you have a pride of your culture, pride of your own people, it's easier to sort of embrace. I mean, it's interesting how these kind of cultures emerge because, you know, the Slavic countries are sometimes colder. They're slower to trust others. We're now here in Austin, Texas. One of the reasons I fell in love with this place when I showed up is there's that same hospitality as compared to other cities I've lived in, sort of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. There's a hesitation to open up, to be fragile, to be caring before understanding what I can gain from you kind of calculation. It's really interesting. And I wonder how those kinds of dynamics emerge because they're certainly parts of the world. Like Austin is one of them where you just feel the kindness, just radiate without knowing kindness from strangers. You know, if I were to advance one thing, and I had the same experience after having lived in San Francisco first, then we went to New York, then we came to Austin. And when we came to Austin, I felt, it took me a while to put my finger on it, but what I found in Austin, people just hang. People, right? They're real. They're real. And like what you were saying, I feel like in these other places, people are, it's a destination for people who want to come and perform. I think maybe the early San Francisco people, it was different for them. But later as prosperity starts to come in and success comes in, then you attract a different breed. At first, we're the people who made it, who made this place be what it is. And then it attracts all the bling followers and the bling attracted people. And when those people show up, it's time for all of us to get out. And that's one of my worries about Austin too. And I guess I'm one of, I count myself in it, but you know, because we're also new arrivees, always been furious now. But how are we gonna protect this place? Yeah. Yeah, these are, you know, the best possible version of the Austin history. This is the early days of Silicon Valley in Austin. And so you get a chance to build on top of this culture that's already been here of the weirdos, the artists, the sort of the characters, but also the general kindness and love that just permeates the whole place, build on top of that entrepreneurial spirit. So like the tech companies, new startups, all that kind of stuff. And then you get a chance to build totally new ideas, totally revolutionary ideas and make them a reality and dream big and build it here. I think Elon represents that with all the people that kind of try to do the cutting edge stuff they're doing at Tesla and SpaceX. But there's a bunch of other companies, they're just like coming up. I get to talk to a bunch of tech people and they're just incredible. Versus San Francisco, there's a cynicism a bit. And also some of the interaction with strangers, there's always a bit of a calculation, like how good is this going to be for my career? Or how can, yeah. How can hanging out with this person can advance me? You go to a party, they're seizing up. It's like, I'm not gonna talk to so and so because that's not gonna advance me. Who's gonna advance me next? And so this is what I would not wanna see here in Austin. And I think maybe there's one way to try to, I really would like to see Austin not go the way San Francisco did and other towns before. I like how you pronounce San Francisco with a French accent. San Francisco? Yeah, that's great. That's the one word you go with a French accent. You have to. It sounds beautiful. San Francisco. San Francisco. But you know, so now that you find that cute, you're gonna have to forgive me when I mess up my English because English is not my first language. So I always try to make sure people know that. But you know Lex, this is why I am very interested in what some folks here are working on. And I'm just gonna be very selfish here because I wanna help her with what she's doing. It's someone like, you know, Nicole Nodzak and her project, you know, with the housing project that they have right now, making sure that Austin remains a town that's affordable for people of all walks of lives. If we can accomplish making sure that all walks of lives, doesn't matter how little or big you're making money wise, that you can stay in this town so the diversity at that level can remain, then I think Austin stands a chance to really show the world how to do things differently. And what I love about, you know, her initiative is just how they're really trying, you know, to again work on keeping affordability down for most people. I think it's important to, because it seems like it matters to you, I know that it matters to me. I absolutely would not wanna see Austin go away that San Francisco did. And I think the key to that is making sure that true diversity, not like the fluff, fluff crap diversity we're hearing over there. And that's another thing by the way, because San Francisco likes to pride itself in, oh, you know, we are so into diversity, but I'm like, if diversity for you means gender, difference of gender, skin color, you know, maybe the different accents we have, and you think check, check, check, check, check, I'm like, it's not enough. Can we also add diversity of thoughts? And that's the other problem I have with that place, you know? And I know some folks who are scared of saying much around people, that's also another thing. So not only they're sizing you up, but everybody's also, there is this invisible, this invisible, how should I say this? There's this invisible agreement that they all seem to have to stay on script. Yeah, there's a feeling like you're following a certain kind of script that's very kind of shallow. And there is a bit of a categorization going on, which category do you belong to? And let's put this into a simple math equation, what comes out, as opposed to just the free, open embrace of people, the weirdos, the characters, the interesting, the full, deep sense of diversity. Not just ideas, but backgrounds, and rich and poor. Artists, engineers. High school dropouts, PhDs, all of this. Yes, yes, that's what makes for a rich society if it's gonna get ahead. I'm glad you mentioned Nicole's efforts, I know she really is passionate about. I don't know how complicated that work is, because there's probably a big force trying to increase how much it costs to live in Austin. I don't know how you resist that. Whenever I go to New York City, just the fact that there's a giant park in the middle of it, I wonder, how did they pull this off? This is amazing. It's like to resist the force of the increasing price of the land, and still to protect this idea of having a park. And then in the same way, protecting the ability for people from all walks of life to live in the center of the city, to live around the city, to chase a dream when they don't get any money in their pocket. Absolutely. I don't know how you do that. It's partly political, probably, regulation, all that kind of stuff. A lot of it has to do with regulations. And this is where her and I also very much see eye to eye in terms of the free markets and also prosperity building, because it's always the same problems most of the time, most places. Here, what you have is some people in the name of, we gotta stand for, and I don't like to use this word, but maybe you help me find a better one, but at least that's a word that people can understand. We gotta stand for the lesser fortunate among us. Some people would call them, maybe oftentimes use the word, maybe the underdogs, whatever it is. I will just say maybe the lesser fortunate among us, right? In the name of standing up for them, you're promoting policies that are actually gonna backfire and where they end up being the first ones to suffer from it. So let's take this whole housing issue that Nicole and her team are working on. We find that oftentimes the cost at the end of the day, it's the good old supply and demand equation. If you're gonna make it so hard that the supply level of housing remains below a certain threshold, remains lower than the demand of people who need, especially affordable housing, housing altogether, what's gonna happen is scarcity, prices go up, and who gets kicked out first? The lesser fortunate among us. And so, but I find that oftentimes people in the name of We Care don't engage their mind. And a friend of mine said this, and he said it so well. He said, having a heart for the poor, that's easy. Having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge. And oftentimes we all have a heart for the poor. But when it comes then to, then what do we do to have a real impact on making sure that people get a chance at going up, then that's where everything starts falling apart. And then you have people who, then they start pushing for policies, housing policies, making it super hard for you to even renovate or add one more store to your home or anything like that. By doing that, you're messing up with the supply, with the supply of housing. And therefore the people who can't afford, people get priced out of the market. And so what people like Nicole are doing are going back to where all of this is taking place and they're going back to the regulation side. And just like, I'm sure we'll talk about it here, but people wonder today, why is Africa the poorest region in the world? We go back to the same culprit. Bad laws and tons of senseless regulations. If you make it so hard that in Berkeley, for someone to build one more store to their home, which means maybe one more unit that could be rented out to someone. And if many more people do that, then you have a much bigger supply, which means the prices will go down, which means more people have access and among them, especially the lesser fortunate among us, then we're starting to see a winning proposal, aren't we? But instead, if you go the other way around, then all of a sudden you're pricing them out of the market. Same thing was done with us. So oftentimes when I see problems of this nature, you can betcha that regulations and census laws are the heart of it. And that's what they're tackling. It's not popular, it's not fun. And people tend to not even understand where you're coming from. But this is a problem we have with people not understanding economic econ 101. Well, so it's the regulation and the laws and the system that props them up and increases the span of those laws. And we'll talk about that, the fascinating way those kinds of things develop when it works, when it doesn't. Let me sort of step back and ask you a question about Africa. In the West, in many places in the world, Africa is almost talked about like it's one country, like it's one place. So in what ways is Africa one community? And in what ways is it many, many, many communities? Just from your perspective from in Senegal and beyond. Right. So at the most basic of what makes us one goes back to even what makes you African. You are African, I'm African. We're one big family. Africa is very much at the end of the day, the foundation and the birth of the human race. So from that standpoint, at the most basic level, we're all Africans. Where this whole thing started. Exactly, exactly. Where this whole thing started and how at some point humanity was hanging by its fingernails. Only 2000 of us were left on this earth. And eventually we started, we went for survival. And that's how we started to spread around and some going up north, some going this way, that way. And as you're traveling to different places then features start to change to adapt to where you are, right? So hair gets lighter for some people, eyes get different shape for others to adjust to our new natural habitat. You know, the genomics program, I think at the National Geographic did that so well for people who are interested in going back to that work with Spencer Wells and such. But yeah, so at the very basic, most basic level, that's what unites us all first of all. And then I would say that the continent, especially here I will group it into black Africa, you know, black Africa. Unfortunately our common stories, you know, of having gone through this terrible, horrible period of around the same time the whole continent being, you know, enslaved and colonized. So that in a way forms, not that we were ever the first people or only people ever, you know, enslaved in this world. As a matter of fact, I mean, the word slaves comes from esclav, you know, esclav, slave, slavs, les slavs, right, from the Eastern block. So the first slaves were actually people looking more like you than looking like me, right? So, but we don't necessarily remember all of that because in our human psyche, the closest to us in history of a big mass of people being enslaved is African people. We were the last, you know, group like that. You know, the pain of World War I and World War II permeates Europe, but it certainly does for the former Soviet Union, the countries that made up the former Soviet Union. Does in the same way, the pain of slavery and empires using Africa, does that permeate the culture? Is there still echoes of that? In a way, yes, especially the fact that, you know, in many different places, whether it's Ghana or my country or Benin, where you have these places that we call the door of no return or the places of no return, which this was the last place where the slaves were standing or, you know, this is in Senegal, we call it the door of no return. There is this one door, you're there in the slave house. And once they go, they go, that's it. That's gonna be the last time they see back home. So, you know, those, of course, of course, it creates for a common lived experience, which becomes a common lived history. And of course, it's gonna tire us up. Is there a resentment, because you mentioned hospitality, is there a kind of a resentment of the foreigner that there's a rich, vibrant land? There's many resources, there's powerful cultures. Are they just going to show up and use us? That's a way to see geopolitics in this modern world. This is, okay, so where it plays very differently is, so if you came to Senegal today, there is not really a problem at that level. Where people's resentment start to come from is, of course, when bad behavior shows up, meaning like you have so many white people who can show up and just in the attitude, they have an entitlement attitude, right? And they think that in a way, we're all still servants. Some people in your face, some people more, but that can cause some little resentment, but where really the resentment is. And that can, the entitlement can take different forms, like even pity. Yes, don't even get me going on that one. I was trying to be polite today. So just don't, Lex, do not. You know, sometimes I tell myself, my God, today you're going to be all composed. You know, Lex is all composed. So don't go there and make a fool of yourself. Just behave. But if you get me on some grounds, that's when it's all going to go to hell. So yeah, let's move beyond that too. So resentment, there's a dance between hospitality and resentment. And resentment. So when you come in, you're you, you live your life. You're just a normal human being and you treat me decently like you would treat a friend, normal people. I have no problem with you. I'm not going to come back and be like, well, you and your ancestors have enslaved me. You, you're not going to see that stuff. Sometimes I'm in this country where I feel like that's, you know, it might look like that, but we in Africa don't do that. Now, if you come, you have this nasty attitude. You think you're still serving servants around. Well, you can have a problem with someone like me. I might even grab you by the back of your neck and, you know, take you back to the airport. That's when you're lucky. I'll be you very quickly. Exactly. But where things come up is, especially nowadays with the African youth, when we have to be reminded of the World Bank, when we have to be reminded of even the world, places like the World Economic Forum, you know, like all of these places that seem to constitute, they would, the way they describe them, when I say they, it's primarily my Pan African friends. So here maybe terms are worth describing. So the Pan African movement goes way back when, we're talking about, you know, way back when, started in the thirties going on all the way from there. So what you have there is people who have started coming together and dreaming up an emancipated Africa away from the colonies, because at that point there were still colonies and dreaming up all of that. So we're talking about people like Kwame Kuma of Ghana, we're talking about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, talking about Blaise Diagne of Senegal and other people like that, Bandi of Malawi. So anyway, so, and the African youth of today, we're still hanging on to those, onto some of these ideas of, and on some of these dreams of a reunited Africa. So when you were talking about what seems to unite you, there is that, you know, also, meaning like we all feel like we're part of the same family. Is it only in our heads? Is it in reality? Many, for many different reasons, there is definitely what we call a Pan African movement. And I very much myself, consider myself one of them. I don't agree all the time with our, where we want to go and how we want to go there, but not where we want to go. Where we want to go is we would love to see a united Africa for sure. But how to get that accomplished, that's where oftentimes we have issues. So on something like that, so this Pan African, especially the Pan African youth, but it's beyond the Pan African youth, it's the youth in general in Africa, World Bank, UN, all of these organizations that they tend to qualify as imperialist organizations. And it's not always a correct way to describe them, but I'm sure you get the sentiment. And from that place, there is tons of resentment because for the longest time, these groups, organizations, and some that preceded them, have proceeded to actually decide what even our new frontiers would be. You see, when you go to a place like Senegal, Mali, all of that, different countries, but we were one people, one group, one kingdom. And then at some point they decided just, when you look at Africa, have you looked at how straight some of these borders are? You're like, did a robot just draw these? Really? No offense to robots. No offense to robot, especially this one, he looks so cute. But you know what I mean? So they have continued deciding what it would be to be us, to live on our land, and how do we even progress? And it just keeps on going. They get to decide how are we gonna, which type of even economic development path are we gonna choose or not? So it's very, so from that standpoint, yes, there's a lot of resentment, including even from people like me. Yeah, and it's interesting that the invader and the oppressor and the empires have actually created a force for unity. I've seen that in Ukraine and the invasion of Ukraine, where it was a pretty divided, not a pretty, a very divided country with many factions. But the invasion really forced everyone to think about the identity of this nation together, beyond factions, beyond all of that. It allowed it to look at its history and its future. Like they all say that all great nations have had to have a war of independence. And this is our war to find our own identity. And so in that sense, Africa as one place, as one continent had to find multiple times its identity through the resistance of the oppressor. Especially subterranean Africa, especially subterranean Africa, yes. And there's an interesting aspect to this because the president of Senegal is also the head of the African Union. So we'll talk about the fascinating geopolitics of that whole situation. But let me ask in general, you talk about this question, this fascinating question, what does it take for a country to prosper? What does it take for a country to prosper? You see many countries in the world that really struggle and many that flourish. And it's not always obvious why because some have natural resources, some don't. Some have wars, some don't. Some have sort of authoritarian regimes, some don't. And some have democracies and all that kind of stuff. So the dynamics aren't exactly obvious. Is there commonalities? Is there fundamental ideas that result in a prosperity of a nation? Today, I can confidently say yes, despite all the differences that you talked about. And I think then this is where it becomes very important that we are very clear about the question you asked me. You said, what does it take to make a country prosperous? So I'm just gonna stick to prosperity because prosperity doesn't necessarily mean, sometimes it has nothing to do with maybe how you conduct yourself otherwise, socially speaking, right? So you can be prosperous. And still when it comes to your family laws, all the way you approach the other aspects of your life, maybe you're running a very communist lifestyle or you're in a very liberal society. So for me, when we talk about prosperity, I just want to make sure that we're clear on that because some people might say that, might be somewhere and be like, well, because I know what I'm gonna talk to you about next. And some people are gonna sit there and be like, well, China is not like that. Or even Dubai is not like that. No, so what I'm talking about is this thing. And that's what I love about this. If we just stick to the word prosperity. To me, I see prosperity as this. It's like, economically speaking, what are we gonna be to be a prosperous nation? Meaning we are a middle to high income nation. I'm not talking about what are the rights of your women to vote or can people live like this? Or I'm not talking about any of that. Economic, fundamentally economic prosperity. Because I think that distinction is very important because over the years, I've seen people push back on all types of things and it occurred to me that that's what the misunderstanding was there. So if we're gonna talk about prosperity, making sure that the country can make money so that it can take care of its needs and the needs of its citizens, then what I have come to find is that at the root of that is gonna be what we call economic freedom and what I call the toolkit of the entrepreneur. In that you can put the rule of law, you can put the concept of clear and transferable property rights. Economic freedom is at all the levels that which will allow entrepreneurs and business people to create value and create value entrepreneurially. We're not talking about rent seeking or anything like that. It's like you found a pie to be this big and you make it this big. So that's what we're talking about. Create value. Create value, yes. So when it comes to that, we have found that whether you're looking at two countries that start out the same, we're talking the same people, East Germany, West Germany, South Korea, North Korea, very similar people to start with, right? But yet radical outcomes. I know that today Germany is united, but we're talking about back in the days when you had East and Western block. Same people, very different outcomes. Like I said, South Korea, North Korea, and so on and so forth. And at the same time, very different nations. Dubai compared to Singapore or to England, very different yet the same outcome. So it seems to me like whenever we're looking at prosperity, if a nation is prosperous, regardless of whatever other shenanigan they might be running, whatever other operating software they might be running for anything that's not related to business, if on the business side, they are proponents of a free markets or at least a base level of free markets, we know that such countries will create prosperity. So what are the aspects of the operating systems that lead to Singapore and to South Korea and all that kind of stuff? So can you speak to different elements that enable the toolkit for entrepreneurs? Sure, sure. And maybe here, let me just maybe illustrate it with my own story and then I can take you back to... Yeah, what's your... Oh my God, tell us your story. No, no. Who are you? It's just because it started with me coming here. You showed me the robot and everything and now it looks like we know each other for too long. And then you're like, tell people. No, no, no. But so this is where this question, even when you asked me, how do some countries become prosperous? That question, Lex, I had it when I was seven or so. That's when my family moved me to South Korea to from Senegal for the first time of my life, I left my country, I left my continent and I was headed to Europe to go join my people, my family, my parents who were there as economic migrants. My parents had migrated for a better life as so many people have to, so many people have to coming from poorer places, coming from low income countries. You saw the difference? Yes. Between the two places. How else would you call it? Here you are in Senegal, minding your own business, causing tons of trouble everywhere, just being a happy free wrench kid that I was. Yeah, so you were always a troublemaker, not just now. Okay, great. Life wouldn't be fun without it. Yeah, of course, I agree. Right? So, because even you, and you're all put together front, I know there's a lot of troublemaking behind you. Desperately trying to keep it together. I know you are, but with me, I'm gonna totally bring it out. So just, yeah. So. So you saw the difference. Right, I saw the difference. I'm walking in here, back home, and I tell people this story because to me it's a defining story. Back home, to take a shower, it takes time. Grandma has to make the charcoal catch on a little stove like you use when you go camping. And then she puts a pot of water on it, it boils. She takes it, puts it in a bigger bucket, mixes it with some colder water. Then we put a little pot in it, and a stronger member of the family has to drag it to the shower. And then there, finally, I can proceed to take my shower. Here I'm in Germany in the middle of the winter, and my mom's like, my god, time for your shower. I'm like, I'm not getting naked. Where is the bottle? Where is the bucket of hot water? She's like, oh, you silly, come on, just jump in. And I jump in the shower, turn the buttons, the water is coming down temperature. I'm like playing with. It's like, are you kidding me? So amazing. I've been cheated out of life my whole life. So that's what happened. And then I'm like, oh, and all of these roads, they're paved roads. And like back home, everything is like sandy, and my feet are always ash. I always have to wash off when I go back home, and your shoes get ruined most of the time. And it started, and I had this question, and it was just like, wow, how come they have this? And we don't. So I was not being like, oh, you know, how come they have all of this money? I was not, it was just like, how come? And I think what I was alluding to was, how come life is so easy here, and back home it's not? And easy, not in a negative sense, in a beautiful sense. Sometimes I get, you know, just having traveled through the war zone, just to come back, traveling through Europe, back to America, it just, I'll just get emotional just looking at the efficiency of things, like how easy it is, how we can, first of all, in Ukraine, you currently can't fly, right? It's a war zone. Just even the transportation, you said roads. Yeah, the quality of roads in the United States is amazing. Just not, you know, many of the places that drive in Ukraine, you're talking about, I mean, really bad conditions of roads. And I'm sure in many parts of Africa and many parts of the world, the roads are even worse. Right, right. And outdoor, you know, having an indoor toilet is a fascinatingly awesome luxury to have. It is, it is. And don't take me wrong, Lex. Do we have some great roads now in many parts of Africa? Yes, main arteries, great roads, you're like, whoa, this is moving. Yes, we do. But definitely more today than in my time growing up. Do we have, you know, a country like Nigeria that just birthed six unicorns last year alone? Yes. Do we have the African youth out there being so amazing and, you know, living their lives? Yes, we have all of that. But it is still, unfortunately, just like we're scratching the surface. And those people still are getting all of that accomplished literally swimming through molasses. This is some of the most gross, immoral, unfair waste of human capital. And so that is the, started with you as a seven year old asking, wait a minute, how do amazing people in Europe do this and the amazing people in Africa don't? Yeah, and that's a key word, amazing. Because that's what I realized later because it was not always like that for me, amazing and amazing, right? I knew instinctively that of course we are amazing too. But so eventually the question became how, so I went from how come they have this and we don't to the country as I'm growing up and researching because it stayed with me. When I tell you I'm obsessed, I'm haunted. I am haunted. So you can laugh all you want, but it's, so the question became, the question became, how come some countries like the United States, Singapore are rich and some others like mine and many others in Africa are poor? That became the question. And along the line, like along the road, I continued on living my life, wondering about this question. And I've heard all types of reasons as to supposedly why that might be the case. Some people with a very straight face are still peddling the IQ fury, according to which, come on, darling, it's not your fault. You know, your skin color goes with a gene sequence that just doesn't allow you to be as smart as white people are. And it's not your fault, but just accept it. That stuff is still out there. It's very real. I and I have to hear it. And others would say to me, oh, it's just because, you know, you guys don't have adequate level of education. And I say, you know, maybe you gotta go say that to most of the street sellers you go see in Senegal. You go up to any of these, to many of these street sellers in Senegal, they are wading through cars and moving cars under the hot sun, fumes thrown at their face, trying to sell you anything that you think you might be able to use. Whether we're talking about an ironing board to an umbrella, to Q tips, to, you know, toothpicks, selling you whatever you need from your car, these are street sellers. And you ask them, dear, do you have any degree? Yeah, I have this great degree in math or in literature or whatever. Some very, very educated people. Yet they're right there, this is what they're doing. So that's just at scale wasted human potential. Thank you. So that has to do, the wasted human potential has to do now with the system, with something about the laws. Which is, yeah. Something about sort of the things that limit or enable the entrepreneur. Yes, because at that point I've heard this, you know, I heard people say, yeah, your IQ is no good. Yeah, you don't have enough degrees or you're not educated. Yeah, some people would even say, it's because you guys are malnourished, you're malnourished, you need to be fed. Others, oh, well, maybe I'll give you some shoes and maybe something is gonna change, whatever. And then, so I heard all of this nonsense, Lex, but you guess what, but guess what? None of them made sense. You know why it didn't make sense? Because if any of that crap was true, why, oh, why is it that my parents or any other people from these places, and oh, and by the way, some people call those places God forsaken land. That's also the type of cred you always have to hear when it's not just flat out, SHIT whole countries from, you know, one person a few years ago, president of this country. That sentiment is sometimes there. It is, it is. As I go on with my life, trying to find the answer to why are some countries like mine poor while others are rich, I'm hearing all of these reasons thrown at me. And then they make no sense because then how come then if my parents move as it is usually anyone else who moves from a poorer nation to a nation that supposedly is rich, all of a sudden they get to manifest the greatest potential. So I'm starting to think this has nothing to do with a person per se, because we're talking about the same person, same background, same name, features, everything. Now I'm starting to think maybe it doesn't have to do with a person. Maybe we're talking about something that has to do with a place that they came from or the place that they're going to. So this little thing is starting to be in my mind. Again, remember, this is not something that I woke up to overnight. I'm like, voila, I got my question. It took me for a long time. And I had to face off to have many different ideologies face each other. I had to really have a reckoning literally in my heart and in my mind. And so then that's what I'm thinking. It cannot be, no, no, no, it's the same people. It has to be about the place. It has to be about the place, but then what about this place? But then even about the place, you're thinking, again, two countries, different backgrounds, same outcome, same background, different outcome. What is this? And then I go on. I start, I am in Silicon Valley in the late 90s, early 2000s, that come boom, all of that. And I'm starting to discover this concept of this thing called entrepreneurship. You know, I'm in Silicon Valley and just getting to experience what seems so cliche by now, but you know, people getting together in the back of a napkin, talking about an idea, putting it out, and then they go out and they talk to some of these investors who's gonna invest in it. Then they have the lawyers who get to put all of this stuff together. And then they have the big four CPA firms, this whole ecosystem of what they call entrepreneurship. And then eventually this concept of entrepreneurship being this idea of creating something out of nothing. So there I am. And at some point I become an entrepreneur myself. And the way I became an entrepreneur was not like, I woke up and I'm like, I wanna make money, so I'm gonna become an entrepreneur. No, and this is also another problem I have with people who have a problem with entrepreneurs or business people. Most entrepreneurs do not start a business to become rich. Most entrepreneurs start a business because they have found, identified a problem that bothered them enough, that they said, enough is enough. I'm gonna do something about it. What entrepreneurs are are people who criticize by creating. Do they always get it right? No, as a matter of fact, the failure in entrepreneurship is humongous. It's kamikaze path to take the entrepreneurship path. We lose our spouses. My first husband passed away as soon as I was about to sign my first term sheet. And yet I had to keep going. What force can keep you going after you just lost the love of your life? What force keeps you going? The force of, oh, I just wanna be rich, really? When your whole world is upside down, your whole world is upside down and you just want to quit. You just want to go meet him and join him in death. I stayed, why? Because of the same reason why I started my company. I stayed because of the women whom I had put back to work by then. We're talking about some of the most vulnerable women in my country. These are women who grow the hibiscus, which we need to make the bisap, which is the juice of taranga, remember? This is our national identity drink. And for the longest time, women grow this hibiscus that we use for the national drink, for this drink. And now that Coca Cola, Pepsi, and all that had made it through the marketing that it is more cool to drink those beverages, now there is no more market for the hibiscus. And with that goes the livelihoods of these women. And for me, that bothered me enough because in that force, I saw two things. One was a part of my culture. We're talking about, I mean, part of my cultural identity, for Christ's sake, the juice of taranga. You asked me, what defines you? I said, taranga, there's a juice for it. So my culture is disappearing. And at the same time, these women are sliding into abject poverty because what they used to make no one needs anymore. So that is what got me to start a company. And the company was created just because of that. I wanted to build a company that would allow me to not only preserve this very important aspect of my cultural identity, and at the same time, put these women back to work. And maybe it's more difficult to put into words, but there's a kind of, it's a basic human spirit where you see the place where you came from breaking apart in some kind of way, and you have the entrepreneurial fire that dreams of helping. Yes. And that, sometimes it's hard to convert that into words. You have to tell nice stories and so on, but it's the basic human desire to help. Yes. And like I said, criticized by creating. Especially when you've been, especially when, and let's face it, do we all, are we all a bundle of circumstances, some happy, some worse? Yes, we are. And oftentimes I ask myself, my God, why you? Why did you get to have the opportunities that you have? What makes you different from, let's say, even your cousin that couldn't, that is still home, trapped? Because we call ourselves trapped citizens. When you're trapped in these countries that go nowhere, we're like a bunch of trapped citizens. So you see, Lex, when my husband passed away and I wanted nothing more to do than to quit and to send, investors had already said, we understand if you want to stop. Whatever you decide to do, we'll do that. And I wanted to quit and I was actually on my way. I was in Senegal for a month, trying to really get a bearing over myself. And by the end of the month, I had decided I'm letting go. There's no way. The pain was too great, nothing made sense anymore. It was too much. So I went to see this woman and I talked to the one who, you know, we're talking back then, there were 400 of them, later on we grew to 9,000. And I told the representative of all of them, and I told her, this is very, this is her old lady. And just looking at her, I knew I was going through some pain, but this woman has probably gone through 10 times, not that pain is, you know, like measurable, but you could tell this woman probably lost a child as oftentimes happen in places, you know, that are lower income countries. Probably lost a husband also, probably who knows, so many people, loss is part of our lives. You can see the pain. You can see the pain, yet she's so, so dignified. She's so dignified. And that already kind of made me like, my God, stop crying. But, and I told her that I was quitting. I could not look her in the eyes. And she said, look at me. I could not look her in the eyes. She said, look at me, child. And I looked at her and she said, you know, I know you're in pain, but where your husband is, where your beloved is, is absolutely nothing that you can do for him. But for us, you can change everything. And I went back. So that's what entrepreneurs are at their best. Did she help you find your strength? Yes, and I was weak still, but I said, you put that aside. There's a job to do here. And I went back and I fought with everything that I had. And this company that I started in my kitchen became this company that had the who's who of the beverage world, with at some point, Roger Enrico, the chairman of PepsiCo sitting on my board. And yeah, I went back because of that. So the reason why I tell this story for me is important because the world needs to understand that there is a viable way of caring and of being part of a solution for the lesser fortunate in terms of not keeping them where they are and we're like the saviors coming and giving them food and all that. No, no, no, no, no. But it's just like the leg up I got in my life. Give somebody else a leg up. What are the things you're fighting against in Africa when you try to build a business like that? So then we're building this company. And back then, this was in 2004 that was when I built my first company. We had to have two sister companies, one there, one here. So the one in Africa was about the whole supply chain. And the one in America was research and development, sales and marketing, all of that good stuff. And then at some point I look around, I'm like, wait a second. Here, back in the days before we had the, they would talk, they would say, oh, we have this one stop shop for business registration. But the truth is very quickly you can set up an LLC in the US. We're talking about less than, even then less than, today it's super fast, 20 minutes online, done. Back then it was less than few hours to get it done, cost you almost nothing. We're talking about a few hundred dollars, three, two to 350 depending which state you are. So LLC, starting a basic company takes almost no time. No time, no time, no money, almost. You don't have to know a guy that knows a guy that slipped some money to the politician and so on. No, none of that stuff, none of that stuff. And so at the same time, also things like, and this I can take you even to today's day. Okay, Lex, I don't know if you have employees on payroll or anything like that, but do you have to go every month or anybody listening to us right now, do they have to go every single month to three different type of agencies, like governmental agencies to do one step? This one is basically you're gonna go and give them your retirement money, like the pension part of the salary that you took out from your employee. You have to go to this agency and put that application through. So you leave that money behind, then you go to another agency. This one is for the health, care, whatever. You have three of those places where you have to literally go to in person, three times, three places every single month to drop off these paperwork. Do you have to do that anywhere in the US? I mean, do we have that situation anywhere that you know of right now? No, no. And do you think that's a business friendly or do you think it's cumbersome in business? And that's not just cumbersome sort of physically, it's cumbersome psychologically, that there's a feeling like the system around you, yeah, there's a feeling like you're trapped. It's a feeling like the system doesn't want you to succeed versus a system that does want you to succeed. Exactly. You're in a country like we're in Texas. If you make less than a million bucks in revenues a year, all you do, five minutes it takes you, you're filing your franchise tax, that's it. It's below that number, tell them what it is, then you have nothing to give them or anything like that, you move on. Us, even if I make this much, there is a minimum tax that you have to pay, which is $1,000 in Senegal right now. For the listener, my guy was holding up a zero. You make no money. You still have to pay. You still have to pay. And then, oh, let me walk you through what happened to me when we had to try to get the electricity hooked up on our first office. So we go, they say, oh, first you have to apply, you know, like you normally you have to apply. Then we apply, we pay the money. Remember again, here you have to also go, this was like, you know, you go to the office and you pay. And then we wait, and we wait, and we wait. And when I say we wait, I'm not talking about we waited 24 hours, we waited 48 hours. A month, two months, three months, four months, five months, you go, you send your assistant, she goes, she comes back. Well, they say we send it to wait. At some point I'm like, I gotta go there. So I go there and I asked to speak to the head of the district for, you know, and I'm just like going on and on and on and on about how we've been delayed. This is gonna be a problem. We have to produce, everything is delayed. And I risk losing my business. We already presold some of these products to our customers. I gotta, something needs to happen. So at some point the gentleman looks at me, he's like, lady, look over there. I look over there, I see a pile of paper this high. We're talking about maybe hundreds of applications. Each one of them is a single sheet. Each single sheet is an application for getting the electricity. And he says, do you see that? I said, yeah. And he said, look over there. I look over there to the other side. I see two meters. He's like, each of these applications needs one of those. How many do you see? I said, two. Then I knew I was in trouble. And then I said, what do I do? And he said, lady, it's not at our level. And I agreed with him. It was not on his level. But eventually, by now you can tell that I pretty much get what I need because, and at that point what I did was not threaten him or anything like that. I didn't even pay a bribe or anything, but you could see why people pay bribes. Because when you have a pile like that, then the only way to advance your file, and that by the way happens even at the passport office. You come, you apply for your passport, which is your right. They forced us to have passports. It's your right as a citizen to have a passport. And even there, if you want yours to keep going through the process, you have to bribe somebody so it can go even the pace it's supposed to go, let alone faster. So here, I'm thinking I have a problem. And at that point, I did what I do. I talked to him about all the things I was trying to do. I explained to him why I'm here, why I'm trying to do this. And even him said, lady, someone like you, you have no reason to even be here. You could be back in America, living your life, la vida loca, you don't have to be here. So that I think gained a lot of his respect. And I said, if you don't do, if you don't help me with this, I understand I shouldn't be of a priority or anything like that, but I beg you, I beg of you. I need for this to go on this week. And he said, okay, that's how I got my meter. One of those two meters became mine. So then he said, but we have a problem. And I said, what? He said, well, the truck, we need a truck to be here to do it because of where you are from the poll, we need long cable lines to get it all done. But the truck is, I don't know, I don't know where the truck was because they had this one truck for I don't know how many customers. So I go to the mayor of a town with whom I'm quite friends, but you see, I know people, but it shouldn't be this way. So I go to the mayor of a town and I said, mayor, he happens to have the same name as me, first, last name, same, but except he's the ugly one, I'm the pretty one because, you know, he's, you know. That's so people can tell you apart, she's the pretty one. Exactly, I'm the pretty one and he's the whatever. So I got to the mayor and I'm like, mayor, I need your help, you need to help me with this. He's like, now what? And I explained to him and he's like, okay, you can take the truck from the city hall. I'll tell the guys that they can allow you to have it. And then they come and then you guys can do this. And then we arrived there. Guess what? I thought I was done, Lex, but I was not done. Because now the electricity company, by the way, whom we paid, everything was there. They've been sitting on our money for nine months by now. Well, we need a ladder long enough to, you know, like one of the super, super professional ladders that normally the electricity companies have. Theirs was in some other village and they didn't know if it was going to be back for another three days or four days. I said, are you kidding me? He's like, no. So I call mayor again. I'm just like, mayor, do you have a ladder? And I explained and he said, and that's how I got my electricity hooked up. Otherwise I probably would still be waiting. So Lex, you add all of these things together. And also the fact that in my country, by the way, the labor laws are so stringent. Basically you are married to employees for good or for bad. And some people say, oh no, you're not married for good or for bad, except that it will just cost you a lot of time and money to get rid of any of them. It doesn't matter the circumstances. Do you think I really, an entrepreneur really need to hear something like that? You know, the head of the ILO, I had an argument with him at the UN. And I said to him, listen, and you listened to me very well. The reason, if you want to protect employees, as you claim, everything you're doing is to protect employees. A, you know better of a human being than I am in terms of wanting to make sure that people are treated right and fairly. But last time I checked, Google, for example, is not offering their employees chef cooked meals, super healthy, anything they want, feeding them from morning till evening, having some babysitters, having childcare on site, all of these perks that come on top of really cozy salaries. It did not happen because you, the ILO, told them, you have to do this. It happened because there are enough jobs created around that now you're in an employee's market and employers have to fall all over themselves to attract the best talent among us. That's how it's done. And not with your nonsense that you're imposing me right now, which the only results you're gonna get, like in my country, do you know what we have to show for all of these, the fact that the Senegalese employees, the most protected employee on paper in the world? Well, we're one of the 25 poorest countries in the world. That's what it got us. So let's try to just untangle this. So there's a system in place. There's a momentum with that system. Like you said, ladies, it's not my level, which is for somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union, at least echoes some of the same sounds I heard from people I knew there. It's kind of this helpless feeling like, well, this is just part of the system, this gigantic bureaucracy. And the corruption that happens is just like the only way to get around, to get anything done. And so the corruption grows. Maybe could you speak to the corruption? Is there, to what degree is there corruption in Senegal and Africa, and how do we fix it? So when you said to which degrees there is corruption, I will respond to you the same I respond to people. I say, yeah, we have corruption, and it's almost as bad as in Chicago, right? So now what I want people to understand when it comes to corruption, it's because we are misguided with corruption. We think corruption is the root cause of problems. When corruption is simply a symptom of the deeper root problem. In this case, if you make the laws so senseless, meaning, let me give you an example of senseless laws. Every time I have to import something in my country, I have a business, we're making lip balms in this case and all those skincare products. Some ingredients I'm able to find in the country at the standard that I need in order to remain competitive. Because for example, our products are sold at Whole Foods Market. You can understand it's a pretty sophisticated and really, they don't just put anybody on the shelves. But the thing is, it means that on the other end, my inputs has to be right. So out of those, some, we have seven ingredients, seven items that need to come from abroad to go into the making of this product. Some packaging and some raw material. But guess what, Lex, for five of them, I am paying a 40% tariff and for the other two, almost 70% tariff. That I call senseless laws. These tariffs are senseless. Yeah, corruption is just a symptom. They reveal that something was broken about the laws. And the laws are, so taxation, this kind of restricting laws, like laws that slow down the entrepreneurial momentum. They do, they do. Because in this case, when my product comes, what do people have to do? Because every time, if you add 40%, you're basically on the other end. So every time you add, if let's say my product normally costs a dollar and with your 40%, by the time I'm done, I had to pay, now it's costing me 140. By the time it arrives in my warehouse, in my manufacturing facility, it's now at 140 because of a tariff I left behind. That 40% you added to it, do you know how much it's gonna add to my final cost that once the product is finished, I have to sell it to the customer? I have to sell it for $1.60 more because of that 40 cents extra you took from me. In order for me at the end of the day to have some type of profits, because profits at the end of the day is the blood of a business. There are two people are misguided. They say, oh, you dirty, greedy business people. And it's all about profit, profit, profit, profit. You know, I belong to this organization called, I'm a board member on the conscious capitalism. It is the largest organization of purpose driven businesses and entrepreneurs. The type of people I told you about, we've started our businesses because we see something that needs to be taken care of in society. Whole Foods Market is one of them. The Container Store, you know, all of these companies that are beloved in the US that you can hear of. We believe that the end goal of business is purpose. But in order to do purpose, you have to have profits to stay alive. And the best way for people to think of profits so that they're not all twisted about it. Lex, if I asked you, what's your goal in the world? You're probably gonna tell me your dream. You're gonna talk to me about what you're doing right now and how you want to be uniting, or you want a more harmonious world. You want human flourishing. That's what you're working towards. That's what you say to me. You're not gonna say, well, my biggest goal in the world is to produce as many red blood cells as I can. Except you need to produce those, otherwise no Lex. And if no Lex, no one working. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. So that's how people need to stop with this whole profit, non profit. Do we have some psychopaths among us? Yeah, one person of us in this world are psychopaths in every field, anywhere you look. And surely you'll find that in the entrepreneurial field. Entrepreneurs world as well. Yeah. So we have one person of us who are psychopath for sure. But do they define the rest of us? Absolutely not. And thankfully not. So let's just be clear on that. So here, you know, you charge me 40% tariff, which is outrageous. Then you're forcing me to sell it for $1.60 more than my competitor who does not have to go through that nonsense because she's an American woman who is operating in America. And she doesn't have that nonsense put on her. So now I'm on this market competing against this woman eye to eye. So if we're selling the same value product, mine costs $1.60 more simply because of some stupid rules from back home, then guess who is going to stay in business and who doesn't? See, they want to talk about equality. That's the type of equality I want to see. The playing field has to be leveled. Told you English is my fourth language. It was two people talking between us. Maybe we'll have this English thing figured out. We'll have it figured out. So the idea of capitalism, the idea of conscious capitalism is the thing that in large part enables this level playing field. That's what we want. So what you're trying to say, so here, so when I talked about census laws, that's an example. So when you make the tariff so high that you're going to render me, you know, noncompetitive, then that's where, for people who might make sense, when the product arrives at port, they say, hey, I give you this. What I give you, maybe it's 10% of the price or 5%. It's surely not 40%, but you are happy with it. You're the government official. That's what we call a bribe. And me, I'm like, hey, I saved myself money. And also I saved myself time. But you see, if the laws where you pay 5% or even the 10% that I just left behind or nothing, you come, you pay it, you move on. Because who has a business of fooling around and staying behind? And no, you do that when it's actually makes sense to do that. So I'm not sitting here telling people I engage in unlawful practices in my case, because I'm around saying the things I'm saying right now. So I'm a target. You have to do things cleanly. And I believe in doing things that way. So what I had to do was go to the ask again mayor. We have a problem. Mayors, whenever he sees me, he's like, now what? So I'm like, we've got a problem. You're best friends now. So I say, now it's the customs. And he's like, what do you want me to do? I said, do you know anybody at customs? I need to hire up at customs, because I got to explain to them what's going on here. They all know, of course, but I think they're not always maybe understanding or maybe they understand. And in this case, he understood. So we went and he's like, yeah, I know this is not, this is not very, yeah, this. And I said, what do we do now? And I saw him going through binders and binders in his office, because he's going to try to go and look where in the law can we find something that can help me escape these rules. And you know, the best he found Lex was, oh, well here, see this one. If you've been in business for two years, then we can allow you, there's a special term for it. It's French, it's technical. We can allow you to bring your raw material, but you have to tell us exactly how much you're bringing. And it has to match your formulation because, you know, they don't want you to bring in more that we need and maybe sell some of that to the rest of the market and they didn't make their money on it. So there, it means I have to give them my recipe. Imagine Coca Cola being asked to give their secret sauce to government officials in a country that you can't even know what might happen, let alone even in business, you don't do that. I mean, trade secrets are trade secrets, but here you're asked to be putting it in front of some people you don't know where it's going to go after that. Because there they get to see, okay, her recipe calls for X amount of Candelilla Wax, X amount of coconut oil. Okay, and on top of that, we have to think about how much foliage might there be or not because again, we don't want her to buffer it over there. So you have to get naked in front of them in terms of your recipe, which might end up only God knows where tomorrow, maybe competition or maybe even them, they start a business and they compete with you because we've seen that. So you have to do that. And then each time fill out a paperwork, get the approval, then it can come in. So when it can come in, you don't have to pay the tax. Oh, and by the way, you have one year, one year to make this product and get it out. And all of it needs to be back out because if any of it stays here, you're going to pay the taxes that we held up. So you're basically forced by these census laws to be dishonest if you want to succeed. All of this is so cumbersome because it means more paperwork, paperwork everywhere, maybe having to disclose your things. So me, in my case, what I did is this person said, okay, we're going to see how we can work with you. But for the first two years, we were more or less in the gray area. Yeah, so even gray area is good. Yeah, but what does it mean? In a situation like that, whenever they want to mess with you, it means they can come and they will look and they will find something. So it means that every day I'm trying to do business, I'm running the risk of being harassed and or maybe even put in jail, depending on what it is. I mean, you're an incredible person because it seems like there's two ways to change this. One is to become president or gain power in the country and to try to change the laws, which seems really difficult to do. And the other way is fight through the laws and create the business anyway, build the business community and through that method, create a huge amount of pressure to change the laws. You're totally getting it with your last part because this is the other thing. And this is where I get so upset sometimes with my fellow Africans because they get so disgusted by what they're seeing, right? And they think the answer is to go for politics. Let's go be president. Let's go be this. Let's go be that. And we're gonna change everything. I see that in the US too. People thinking that presidents have all this power. Do you know who has the least power in government? The president. I mean, people don't get that. Your best bet, if you insist on going into politics, stick to the local level. That's where all the skeletons are buried and hidden. And that's where you can make the most impact, local level. I know it's not shiny. I know it's not exciting, but that's where it's at. So if you must go into politics, but there's another way. So in my case, what I do is two things. I preach and I practice. I preach, when I'm here talking to you about this, I'm preaching. I am sharing with people that is which I found. And by the way, the answer was there. I was doing these two businesses, realizing the difference in treatment of the doing business environment of the US compared to the doing business environment of Senegal. And at first I was like, of course, us, everything is messed up. It's because we're a poor country. But when I started to put two and two together, I'm like, you're poor because you have no money, at least not enough money to take care of your basic needs. You have no money because you have no source of income. Where does a source of income come from for most of us? It comes from a job, doesn't it? And then some people, sometimes at my UC Berkeley class, they say, oh no, it comes from government too. I'm like, I would like to think that even if you work for government, you're going to be paid something, right? And they're like, yeah. And then even before I can say something, they're like, yeah, because that money we use to pay our public officials comes from taxes, you know, employers, employees, we go back to the private sector for most of it, from where this whole thing is created. So it's clear, you're poor because you have no money, no money because no source of income, source of income for most of us is a job. We're talking about, so where do jobs come from? The private sector, primarily small and medium sized enterprises. Then don't you think that we should make it easy, that we should have a friendly doing business environment. And also a lot of it comes not just from the small and medium sized businesses, but I think a lot of the values created from new ones being launched, right? It's not just like me, like saving somehow through regulation, the ones that are already there. It's like letting the market, letting the new better ideas flourish. It's about what I mean by doing business environment is all the things that you and I talked about earlier. Even the access of electricity is part of a doing business, but doing business. So basically when I discovered all of that, when I put all of those dots together, then I'm like, well, I guess the business, and it makes sense, Lex. If you want to grow tomatoes, you're gonna have to have two things. One is a good seed, right, that has good attributes. And then you're gonna have to have a good environment for it. Is the soil the right one? What's your pH level? All of those good nutrients that you're gonna put in it. Is it in a place that has tons of sun? How much sun exposure or not? The climate in general, is it gonna be cold? Not, not. You can have some beautiful tomatoes in the middle of Siberia, last time I checked. So same thing here. You know, Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel Laureate for Peace, said, poor people are bonsai people. They're the same people. If you put them in the normal, natural, friendly habitat where they can thrive, they become the tallest tree in the forest. Poor people are bonsai people. So you see that tiny pot you put around the bonsai tree? That's the tiny pot that's created by giving me such a hostile business environment that basically we're put together by the set of laws that you have put, that basically I have to jump through as a business person, practicing business in my country. If you turn that environment into a friendly environment where I am not married to my employees, I have flexibility of the labor laws are simple, straightforward, clean, where the tax code is very simple. It's not worth truckloads of laws like in my country. It's so complicated. You have to hire a CPA, which costs more money. And even them tell them, girl, we're gonna make some mistakes. They don't talk to me like that. They don't tell me, girl, they shouldn't, they better not. But they say, whatever they say. They say. I'm scared. You know. You know, they're like, we're gonna, but bottom line is we're gonna make mistakes. This thing is so complicated, we're gonna make mistakes. So, which means my ass is on the line. So anyway, so if the tax code was so simple, straightforward, like it is maybe in Texas, where up till a threshold, you owe me nothing, go online, five minutes, fill out your taxes, you're compliant, keep building your business because that's what we need from you. If you made it so easy and straightforward, then you know what? That's when you get all of these people, Lex, that you're talking about saying, you know what? My name is Aminata, and I live in the middle of nowhere, Senegal. But you know what? I've got this great idea for this really hot, nice hot sauce that I know the Americans are gonna love. I'm hearing that hot sauce is a big thing. Let me bring it to them. But everything is there for you to jump into the ring of entrepreneurship. You don't have to know someone like my God. You don't have to even have the ability to sell yourself maybe like I can sometimes. You are someone with a great idea. You're willing to work hard for it and pour everything you got into it. Guess what? It's there. You can get into the race. You can be a dreamer, and you can be a dreamer in a rural little village. And then that has ripple effects throughout the entire country. Young kids growing up, you know, I wanna be the next X, whatever. And it doesn't have to be the next Steve Jobs. That seems really far, far away. It's at all levels. You create local heroes because representation matters. Right? So, and we are so badly in need of that. And so that's what all the things that have been stolen from us as long as things remain the same. So Lex, once I found out that basically at the end of the day the answer is economic freedom. And that when it comes to that, the indexes, economic indexes that measure that, whether it's the doing business index ranking of the World Bank, or the Fraser Economic Freedom Index of the Heritage Foundation. When you look at all of those indexes and others, what do they have in common? One after another they show you that it is harder to do business in almost anywhere in Sub Saharan Africa than it is per se anywhere in Scandinavia. So it is telling you that Scandinavian nations, that socialist Americans tend to love so much and take as an example, although there too they're showing you that they don't understand what's going on really in Scandinavia, that Scandinavia is more capitalist. Scandinavian nations are more capitalist than almost any Sub Saharan African nations. Ultimately, the political systems actually don't even matter nearly as much as the private sector being able to operate the machinery of capitalism. There you go, there you go, there you go. And it's almost like, like I said, it's almost like its own little widget within it. You can have whatever type of society you want to practice, you want to exercise at whatever level you want to. But if you're serious about becoming a capitalist, becoming a middle to high income nation, there is no other pathway that we know of at this point. And you know what made me super excited about that beyond having finally found my answer. I have to tell you when I found that answer, I literally fell to my knees. It was the type of feeling that, you know, if something is not well with you, whether it's physical or mental, something is not well, you're not well. And you go around and you go to the so called specialists, some of them, you know, but you're going around for years, going around trying to get help for your ailment. And here they don't know. Here they tell you things that you can't tell why, but you just know it's not true. They're this, they're that. And it's going on for years after year after year. And finally you meet this one person and boom, it's there. Not only the liberation, but also this whole new world that comes with it. You know, I'm still ill, but guess what? There's a path forward. We know that. I'm going to have a lot of work to do, but there's hope. Yeah, and you're the beacon of hope actually, for a lot of people in that part of the world. And those beacons are actually really necessary. So not only is there hope, but you can become, I mean, the beacon for your people, your home, this power that you see that you feel all around to become, to escape the feeling of being trapped. Is there a device you can give to people that, to young girls and boys dreaming somewhere in Africa of how to change the world? That's right. And by the way, I want to say there are bigger beacons. There are better beacons than me. I just happen to be someone who has the chance of talking to you right now. And one of my goals is to open the same doors that were opened for me, because together, our voice, there's such amazing stories out there. And so bigger beacons, better beacons out there. One thing here for me, the reason why I do what I'm doing right now, and it's almost to a point of self destructing my own health. I feel invested with such the mission of, I have been afforded the truth. So it is my moral duty to try to take it around. I know I sound, people sometimes say, when I listen to you, I feel like I'm talking to a priest. And I'm like, because the gospel, I receive the gospel. So anyway, but the thing is, Lex, who tells you these things to this day? When they talk about the poverty of Africa, what do they talk about? They sit in front telling you, oh yeah, it's because of colonialism. It's because of racism. It's because of imperialism. It's because they're stealing raw material, blah, blah, blah. Is any of those guilty to some level of where we are today? Maybe part of the reason where we are today? Maybe, maybe. Is that the only reason or the overwhelming reasons? No. Is that insurmountable? Absolutely not. So for me, don't stay in that place that steals and robs you of your agency. So I think it's important for people to A, get the right diagnosis as to why we are where we are. Because what you and I just talked about, the mainstream does not talk about this when they even talk about Africa in terms that are not the usual suspect of, oh, famine is building over there. War is building over here. Oh, we're having Ebola is coming. All of that stuff. Even when they were talking about the monkeypox, which at first, in this wave, it started with white people in Europe. Well, even in the many newspapers you pull out, it's black people with monkeypox on their skin. I'm like, wait a second. This time around, it did not start with us. So why are you always showing us when it's right now happening to white people? So all of that is happening. So for me, the thing is, we, the world simply right now, does not have the right diagnosis as to why this continent right now, despite all of its riches, because Lord knows it's got riches starting it with its young population. 75% of the population in my country is below the age of 25 years old. So when we're talking, I know we're talking about, repopulation, it's an important, we're gonna have to go for that. Maybe you'll get me going about comments, I don't know, but anyway. So here, my point is, A, we need the right diagnosis as to why this continent is the poorest continent in the world, despite its riches starting with its young people, all the natural resources, diversity in land, people, cultures, languages, everything that make for great ingredient for awesomeness. Despite all of that, we are the poorest region in the world. People need to know that the reason why that is, it's because we also happen to be the most overregulated region in the world. At the end of the day, what Africa, and I dare to say Africa here, and treated as one, we are 54 countries, 55 depending on how you count, yet we almost for a tiny minority of these countries, we almost all lack one of the most crucial freedoms that there are. If you're serious about prosperity building, we lack economic freedom. And economic freedom is the thing that unlocks that human potential of the young people just. Yes, for them to run, to run with their ideas, to start businesses, or to start initiative. It doesn't have to be for profit all the time, right? But it is this thing that gets you to get up and go and do something, criticize by creating. Young people are naturally wired to wanna criticize by creating. They're not sitting around waiting or complaining usually, unless you put them in a tiny box and they have no other way to go. And in this situation, what they do, let's talk about precolonial Africa, of four favors before slavery ever happened. There were black people on the continent. You see, when we talk about the story of black people and Africans, black people in Africa, for most of us, even me, I noticed that unconsciously it starts with slavery. But you're like, no, we were there before, before white men ever set foot. Who were we? What were we doing in our diversity? What economic systems were we running on? And then you realize that for most of them, they were free marketeers and they were very much on the free trade, on the free enterprise side. So even that is a reinforcement. This is a place where we do not understand our history. So proper diagnosis, Africa is a poorest region in the world because it happens to be the most overregulated region in the world, lacks economic freedom. Number two, what do we do about that? We gotta become serious about reforms, economic reforms, so that we can become beacons of free markets. Just like the Asian tigers, that's what the Asian tigers did. They had to become serious. Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, those guys had to become serious about the free markets. Lee Kuan Woo, he's just like, we gotta do something. And he looked around and he realized at some point, we gotta make these reforms. And he went onto that journey of reforms, making his country one of the most free market countries in the world, and voila, the magic happened. Back in the 30s, the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything, the world and with all the lies that were told to the world coming from the Soviet Union, Stalin, while they were starving and dying over there, but oh no, I mean, Durante was telling the world that, oh no, no, everything is going well, nobody's dying when we know now and getting political prices based on this stuff. But then the world went on believing that, oh no, capitalism failed. This crash that you had in the stock market is proof this is what late stage capitalism produces. You guys always have your big ups and downs. And by that time, it was so hard on people that they're like, we're done with this. And at the same time, we were told the lies coming out of the Soviet Union, that supposedly the communism was doing just fine. And you're at the point where the free market concept almost died and it's the Asian tigers who kind of helped bring that idea back to life, right? Their success having used the free markets. And so for me, we gotta make a new commitment to the free markets on this continent if we wanna go anywhere, if we wanna go anywhere. And the timing is perfect because the young people, there is a kind of freedom for the revolutionary free markets in this whole space. Exactly, and you said something, oh, say that again, because I wanna tell you what I'm hearing in that, because something's really cool. Say it again, come on, Lex. I don't know which part, English is my second language too. No, you said there's something revolutionary in that. Because you know how young people are attached to the revolution and how, I understand, look Lex, I understand and I am willing to give the benefits of a doubt to some of these socialists who came to it because they had to witness some of the horrors of their times. There's a revolutionary spirit behind that. It's ultimately criticized by creating. Exactly, exactly, but violent revolution is never the answer. But that's what they went for in 1789 in France, the French Revolution, and Marx and Engels, they're promoting these ideas that usually, for them, justifies violent revolution. Then in all of these people, I am with them when they say that they want to see equal rights for people. Of course, I don't agree with their, therefore, we need to push for equal outcomes. Equal rights is right, but equal outcomes is not right. But I am with them for all the way to equal rights, but this is where the two paths go this way. And also, the fact that they have no issue with violent revolution, people get killed. People get put in gulags and people get, that's not right. So what you just said here, just give me goosebumps, because there is revolution in the free markets, but that's the type of revolution we want. The revolution that comes from people creating, criticizing by creating, it's one of the best forms of revolution. If you ask me, that's the most sexy way of revolution. Criticize by creating, but what, you're gonna go shoot people or be like, what's his name, Che Guevara, who tells you, I love, it's in writing, I love nothing more than to fry the brain of a man with his gun, really? Well, in terms of sexy, there is power in that message of the oppressor, the abuser, the enemy that has abused their power, they need to be destroyed, and there's power in the message of that violence. Unfortunately, the lessons of history show that the violence, one, doesn't work, but it does the following. There is something about human nature, as the old cliche goes, that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is the people who are in charge of committing that violence it does something to their head. The first person you kill, the second person you kill, for some reason, you lose your ability, the compassion for other humans. Even if you began as a revolutionary, as the Soviets did, fighting for the worker, for the rights and the basic humanity of the people that really do the work, you lose the plot somehow because of the violence. So in that way, it seems like the lesson, at least of this part of the human history, until the robots take over, is that the economic freedom, free markets, and protecting those, and allowing anyone from your country to dream and to make that dream a reality by creating it with as few sort of roadblocks as possible. Exactly, so that's why for me, the message is very clear, is what we talked about today. The reason why Africa is the poorest region in the world is because it happens to be the most overregulated region in the world, and for some people who might be put off by it because they're like, oh, she's talking about laissez faire! No, let me put it maybe in a way that you can understand. Do you think that it should be as easy for any person in Africa, for any entrepreneur in Africa to enterprise than it is for any person in Scandinavia to enterprise? If your answer is yes, which I would hope it is, then you have a moral obligation to work with me to make my country, and as a whole, my continent, more free markets. It's that simple. At that point, there's no like, yes, but on the other hand, uh uh, no. And for me, on that question, and I yet have to find somebody who claims to say no. If you say no, then we have a whole nother problem that I'm not even talking to at that point anymore. So yeah. So just to clarify, there's a perception in some reality that the Scandinavian countries have elements of socialism in their politics, in their society, even in their economics. So at the very least, Africa should have, in terms of economic indices, should be as free as the Scandinavian countries. You're just giving that example. As economically free, yes. Because see, the Scandinavian, they do have a subsidized, you know, like a welfare system, that's what, a more socialized welfare system, but the way they make their money is very much the way of the free markets. So there is how you make your money, and then there's how you maybe decide as a country to redistribute it, right? And so even there, even in Scandinavia, again, yes, they have more economic freedom. So then from there, Lex, where we go is my job and my goal is for every single African, young and old, to know what I have come to learn. We are not doomed. It's not over for us. We will never catch up. The time for catch up is gone, but guess what? We've got a strong, strong possibility and chance to leapfrog, and leapfrog we will. It is still time, but for that to happen, like I said, we need to know what we just talked about today because that is not what the mainstream keeps us abreast with. When you go to the World Bank, they don't necessarily work along these lines. They're still, it's not, when you go to universities, I will ask you, MIT, the MIT Econ Department, or even some, most of the professors, are they free market oriented? We find that oftentimes in academia, there is a strong anti capitalist bias. There is a strong anti free market bias. So this is a problem. This is a problem. Nobody cares about the economists anyway. Yeah, so we move forward. In MIT, the spirit of the entrepreneur burns bright, not in the economics department because they just write op ed articles, but in the dreamers, the young undergrads that actually build something. No, I get that. But then we cannot be stifling their efforts by putting these artificially made regulations and laws that stand in the way and clip their wings. So that's why when you were saying, what advice do you give to them? The advice I give to them is each one of them, they have to pay attention to this discourse we just had. I don't ask anybody to agree with me on face value. Go back, do like I had to do. I come very much from the left of the left, if you can believe that. But I had to have my own intellectual journey. And in this case, my intellectual journey was very much complimented by my own life. Having to build these companies on two separate continents and having to, I had front row seat of the differences. At first, I thought it was this way just because we're poor and therefore we must stop and therefore it's like this. But eventually I learned that no, we're poor because we lack academic freedom. And if a country allows its citizens the academic freedom to enterprise, then they become rich. So yeah, I had it upside down, you see. And so it's important for people to know that. So number one, know your facts because your facts will empower you. In this case, I like to use that word, facts will empower you and they will even furthermore, they will power you, empower and power you. Because empower is like inside and power is like I push you forward and up. So that's what it does to know the facts. And then go on and look around you. Where are the best practices of this? Who is at the cutting edge of a free markets? Where it's done in a way there, people don't necessarily be left behind or anything like that. We're in 2022 for Christ's sake. We don't have to do entrepreneurship the same way maybe it was done 50 years ago, 100 years ago when as a community, as a people, we were maybe less enlightened because of our times, right? We can update this thing and move forward, but update is definitely not build back, what do they call it? Build back new or whatever they're calling it at the WF, whatever nonsense and stuff they're smoking over there. It's not that. There are some principles that are universal and that stand the test of time. Those we have to keep and on top add the new things we learned from our times and from life. So that's what I want them to know. Learn your facts, be empowered and powered, and then look around, think about it and look to see where the best practices are around the world because the world is yours. You might be African, but the world is yours. So stop this nonsense of, oh, well, it's done by white people, so we're not gonna do it. Get the best that exists in humanity for what you're trying to solve. And on top of that, put your own twist, right? Bitcoin is all of ours to take. Bitcoin is not the white man's thing, so therefore, oh, come on, you know, because we have a misguided pride, we're not gonna use Bitcoin because it's white man's time. Bitcoin is math, you idiot. Math is universal, so it belongs to all of us. There's no color. Exactly. In the space of economics, in the space of ideas. And there's a chance to leapfrog too, which is really, really powerful. Exactly, because here we will leapfrog, and let's, I'm not crazy, this is gonna happen. You mark my words, but it's gonna happen if as many people hear what we're talking about today, because at some point, the solution is not gonna come. It's not me, it's not, it's gonna come from the wisdom of a crowd. This is why I love the crowd. There's no better wisdom than the crowd, and that's also why I believe in the free markets. This concept of emergent order, there's no way, there's no central planning that is smart enough, that has the level of intel that street level people have, trying to create something. It's just, we just have to be humble. There's just something at the bottom of a pyramid that just bubbles up and happens. They're the best. I think the cynicism, the idea that people are dumb is at the core of a lot of things that prevent the flourishing of society. You know, this kind of anecdotally, people are like, ah, everyone is stupid, and people say that jokingly. But the reality is, people are incredible. They have the capacity for kindness, for love, for innovation, for brilliance, in all kinds of dimensions. You might suck at math, but you might be amazing at carpentry. You have to find that thing, and there's something about, when there's a freedom to find that thing, and people interact, they get excited about shit together, and then they build. If you look at authoritarian, at places that limit that freedom, at the core, I think, is the idea that people are dumb. Let us take care of everything. We'll come up with the rules and the regulations, because people are too dumb to manage things themselves. And then that idea builds on top of itself, where you think that the entire populace is much lesser than the wise sages sitting at the top. Then you add violence on top of that, and that leads to corruption, to corrupting of just the human mind of the leaders, and the whole thing becomes a giant mess. The antidote to that is economic freedom. For people to have a freedom to enterprise. And look, Lex, when we allow for that to happen, have you looked around lately and looked at the level of niche that has happened in this country? I mean, you have clubs where, you have places where people are into guitar strings, you know, like some of the, like it's all about guitar strings. And others, it's all about these best cupcakes. And others, it's all about this new crypto thing over here. And others, like hair, best, you know, weight. It's, when you allow us, because seven billion geniuses, each one of us, I believe, came to this world with something, something that only he or her possesses. And that is the genius, and it is their contribution to the human problem. When you think about your identity today, so it all started in Africa, just like it did for the entirety of the human species. There's a bit of European flavor in there, a little French, Silicon Valley. You're now, in part, a Texan. There's, you really are an American, but you're also an African. Who are you, when you look in the mirror, when you think about yourself, when you listen, when everything gets quiet and you listen to your heart, who are you? Can you figure out that puzzle? That's a very interesting question, because it's been a long time I haven't asked myself. I have before. What I have found is, I think who I am today has been, for sure, shaped by, I call it Dakar, Paris, San Francisco. Dakar is Senegal, Paris, France, and San Francisco, primarily. And now, yeah, I think I might want to ask, there's a little bit of Texan in there. How do you say Texas in French? Texas. Texas. Texas. Yeah. Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas. Austin. Austin, Texas. It's easy. Not quite as good as San Francisco. Austin, Texas. Yeah, yeah. Us, Texas. Us. Texas, yeah. So, you, I was formed by those three. I have to say that what I enjoy from my Senegalese roots are our commitment to peace, love, and tolerance very much. And Taranga, obviously. And I like that it's a culture that's very much about reverence. It's, we're big on reverence. I don't think you could ever hear me tell an older person, especially not my parents or my grandma or anybody like that, for us to be able to tell an older person that's not true or you're lying would never cross my mind because that's the most disrespectful thing you can think of, the most irreverent thing you can think of. It doesn't mean that you have to agree with everything that's said, but there is a way to disagree. There is a way to push back that doesn't have to rob this person who happens to be older than you, especially from the dignity that older age normally provides. And there's wisdom to their words that you yourself may not see. So the reverence is for the idea of wisdom, of tradition. Exactly, exactly. And again, so that is something that I really enjoy, especially, and something I'm very attached to, to this day, and then from France, what I really came to enjoy, of course, is all the fineness that one can find within French culture. The fineness? Yeah, the fineness. Foods. You mean like the intricacies, like the very... Yeah, the soft sophistication in there. I mean, French lingerie, for example. I mean, la dentelle, the laces, all of that, it's super, it's exquisite. So the... The fashion, the food. The fashion, the food. I mean, there's something to be said about all of that, and it's very beautiful. And I love also, even when I talk about fineness, it's like a meal is not about this big thing they put in front of you, but smaller portions, enjoy what you're eating and spend time at a table. Like the eating time is not necessarily just this function of feeding yourself, which I understand it, but this is something that they share with Senegalese culture, is eating is a moment of communion. It's a moment of friendship, family. It's a precious moment. To this day, and my husband is American, we eat our meals together all the time. I would not have it any other way. And there's a prep time, all of that stuff. It doesn't matter how busy I am, but we're doing it. Actually, to push back a little bit, it's interesting, because yeah, the camaraderie over a meal is a beautiful thing. I got, I mean, I was in a pretty dark place because on the way to Ukraine, I traveled to Paris, I stayed in Paris, and I wasn't able to enjoy the fineness because it was almost a distraction from the humanity for some reason to me, because there's such a focus on the art of it all that you lose the basic connection to humanity. Now, that said. Depends what you're talking about. I think some of the lack of connection over humanity was the fact that while I did know how to speak French for a long time, I forgot most of the language. And so part of it, there is a barrier. You said hospitality. There is a bit of a barrier in French culture to where in order to be welcomed in, you have to hear the music and be able to play the music of the people. And if you don't, there's a bit of a barrier. I must admit on that end that it is true. You would feel less that if you were with a group of Senegalese people per se, or I would even say if a group of Spanish people. And I think this is maybe the other side of it for the French people. They can be a little bit uppity up there. And I think maybe that's what you're sensing there. If you don't have the codes, which is what you call if you don't sing the music, then it's hard for you to be part of it. But I was speaking here from the standpoint of your inn. Yeah, from the inside. Also, come on, coming from Texas and also Ukraine, Ukraine, I should say some of the best steak and meat I've ever had, cheap. Texas, some of the greatest. And the size of the meals in France, it's like, what are we doing here? I mean, I get it's art. I'd like to look at my art on the wall and then eat my damn steak. I just wanna cut the shit. Did you go, so maybe, okay, no, no, no, no. Okay, now here I have to defend them, although sometimes I'm the worst. Now, did you go to some Michelin star restaurant? Maybe that's why. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. That's why, because next time you go to France, I'll take you to the countryside or any French home. They will serve you multiple times. I mean, by the time you're done, even if the portions are smaller, they're smaller if you want to, but because that way you get a chance to really feel what you're eating and then have more and then all of that stuff, but not be like, ah, like this. And then, but no, you'll eat plenty, but it's because you went to the Michelin places where they were like. I'm sure the warmth of the people is there. It almost makes me sad that sometimes, I think to properly be in a place, you really should spend a long time there. And also be emotionally ready. Again, I was emotionally unavailable. I was just like. Well, I would imagine on the way to the Ukraine, I'm like, who can think about food? But in your identity, a bit of Texas, a bit of San Francisco, a bit of Africa. Yeah, San Francisco. And I guess from the America, the defining thing for me for America is, it's the freedom and the entrepreneurial mindset. See, very quickly when I moved from France to the United States, and I started becoming successful in the United States, I found myself, me and my husband, he was French and my first husband who passed away. We found ourselves at some point, we stopped talking to our friends in France who stayed in France, because we were talking to them about things that were so outside of their comprehension. What do you mean you're in your twenties and you just raised, I don't know, a million dollars or $2 million, especially from back in those days. Today, it's easy here and there. So even in France, that entrepreneurial spirit didn't burn quite as bright. I mean, don't take me wrong. Do you have some entrepreneurial people in France? Yeah, but to the level that you have it in the US, absolutely not. It's just, I mean, in France, it's still very much, you're born in this area, you go to school in that area, your parents live around, eventually you'll marry and be where your parents are or maybe go to where your spouse's parents are and you buy your house and you buy it once and you're not gonna do like the Americans, two years later, I sell my house, I go somewhere else. You don't have any of anything. What do you mean, just stopping from nowhere, you're gonna do what? Start a business and you have nothing to back you up or whatever. Oh, and even this idea of going and fundraising, this venture cap, especially back in the days, venture cap, all of that, it's very American. We take it for granted, but it's very American. Who would have made a bet on me in France? The same person. I would not have found the same people. I would never in France have been able to raise, at some point it was $32 million for my first business, never would have been able to do that in France. And it doesn't mean that French people are bad people or anything like that. It's just something that's just not so in the culture. Just like this whole concept of philanthropy, it's not that the French people don't do philanthropy, but philanthropy in America is very different from the level and also the magnitude of maybe what the French people do. And also they have this always like, oh, let's do it behind the scene. Money is suspicious, success is suspicious. So at some point my husband and I just felt like our friends actually were maybe thinking that we're maybe some drug dealers or something. So we just stopped because it just was not flowing anymore. And so yes, in America I found this entrepreneurial spirit, but then I was able to link it with something that I'm very familiar with in my country. See, back home in Senegal, I'm part of this, you have what we call the Mourid, I'm a Mourid. So what it is is one of the four brotherhoods in Senegal, Mouridism is the most influential of them and the biggest one. And us, it's all about entrepreneurship as well. I mean, of course there's the whole religious part, but our mantra is, pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will never die. And the way we say, the way somebody will say that somebody passed away, we say, somebody has retired. Somebody has retired from their work. Right? Beautiful. Right? So, I think it's funny because in that community, we're very much entrepreneurial, left to our own devices, we're entrepreneurial. But then what happens is the minute that we die, then what happens is the minute people start going to, they're being educated through the education system, you know, like the French, especially the system, but tend to breed more like, you know, the French bureaucrat mindset, then you can see all the entrepreneurial mindset kind of starting to dwindle down. So it's kind of very interesting. So in a way, America helped me reunite with that side of my roots, where America tells me, reinforces that side of my roots and also gives me more tools to practice that side of my roots, if that makes any sense. Through all of that, that's what brings out the heart of a cheetah, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing that encapsulates that whole trajectory, which I think is the best possible answer anyone could give. It makes me want to really think about who I am, because you really have brought together so many cultures within yourself that just talking to you makes you feel like we are just all one people. Because at the end we are, at the end we are. And, you know, when you come from, at the end we are, and also I think for me, if people can take anything from my story, it's at the end of the day, I am very clear about it. And I'm all for harmony among people and among us peoples. If we can accept that we're all, I know this sounds so cliche, but for me it's so true, that we're all humans. You know, when I left Senegal, when I was about to leave Senegal for the first time and to go to Europe to be reunited with my parents, because now they had emigrated and things were going to be fine. And I was going to be, things were stable for them. Now they're like, it's time to be reunited with her. They brought me over, but before I left Senegal, my grandma sat me down. She actually, she lowered herself down to my level and she said, my god, you're about to go to this place where most people will not look like you. And most people speak a language that's going to be different from yours. And you're going to realize that all the kids are going to school and you've never been to school because, you know, I was, like I said, a free range kid and I was just living my life. And she said, but I don't want for any of that, and she showed her words, she said, I don't want for any of that to intimidate you. She said, you can be impressed by some of it if you want, but no intimidation. And she said, because the fact that they might be different from you, yeah, they're going to have a different skin color from you, but it is still human skin. You're human, they're human. And she said, this language you're going to speak, it's a different language from yours, but it is still a language that humans speak. You're human, they're human. Therefore, you're going to speak it. And lastly, they have gone to school. Going to school is what little humans do. You're a little human, so you'll be just fine. And I went and grandma was right. Right, she was right. And that helped me. And I think when you internalize that so early on, it just makes you belong to the human family that you're part of. I am part of a human family. And I would have no problem going to Russia, for example, let's take, and be totally open. Maybe don't go right now, but. No, not now. Maybe not now, you're right. But what I just. Or at least don't bring weed if you go on the plane. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, right. That girl, I don't know what she was thinking, but. No, so, but what I'm trying to say, Lex, is I feel like I can go anywhere in the world, including some of the most unfriendly places in the world to someone like me, because there are places like that. And yet I know, I know that somehow, somewhere, someone will take care of me. Someone will help me. When I first came to this country, I came as a tourist, but you had this amazing family who had a business, a family business in Indiana, Columbus, Indiana, the Wences, Carolyn Eldon Wence, I owe them everything that I have in this country, that I am in this country. They are Americans in the mid America from a place that most other Americans would maybe look down on because, and some people would be like, oh, you're going to this place where they have more churches and cows than people, that type of behavior, because the elite coastal elites, but it is in Midwest, in the Midwest that I found, that I, black young women coming out of nowhere, found support. They all rallied around me. I didn't even come from the same faith as they are from, yet their whole church rallied around me to find me an apartment. My host family found me, got me a job, and it was not a pity job. They were like, we need, we are in serious needs of getting our accounting under control and our marketing and all of that. And I had to catch up years of accounting like to the cent and come up with marketing, all of that. And I did it way faster than they thought I would ever be able to do that. At some point they look at me and they're like, look, there is a future for you. And we are too small for that future. And now we could be selfish and keep you here with us. And we would want nothing more than that because really they're like my parents to this day. I just came back from seeing them. And they said, but there's so much more for you and we don't have it. So we want you to go and find out what it is. And that's eventually when I, because something was brewing up in San Francisco when I say I left my heart in San Francisco because the man who would become my husband, we went to the same business school in France, but then he was older than me. So he had come to San Francisco and started a business there. And it just looked like there was something there. And Scarola was like, you gotta go to San Francisco and find out with Emmanuel what's going on. So I went and I left my heart in San Francisco. I came back and I'm like, okay, I'm leaving. Here's the keys to my apartment. What, I don't understand. But I'm like, I'm out of here. So no, but Carol, so this is it. This is what I'm saying, especially in these times when this country loves to dwell on, you're bad because you have this skin color. Here are people with a completely different skin color than mine, completely different faith than mine, yet embraced me, protected me, paid for my visa, you know, for my lawyer, for my H1B, everything, and also played emotional support for me. And no one, no one asked them to do that. They didn't have to do it. They didn't. So what I'm saying is, and this has been the story of my life, everywhere I go, regardless of the hostility around me, you betcha that there's always, always gonna be somebody who shows up for you. And somebody who's at the extremes, at the antipodes of where you are and who you are. And that tells me something. In the end, we are good people. Most people are good people. And there's so much power to that, the internalizing of this idea that we're all just human and there's human kindness all around us. I've seen it a lot where people internalize that and they're able to walk lightly amidst hate and walk past it and it doesn't stick to them in a way that they build resentment and it paralyzes them. If they internalize the world as human, they can be in the, just like you said, in the worst places in the world for them. And someone, somewhere that human magic and touch is there. Yeah, it will find them. It will find, yeah, yeah. And you know, the other thing too, Lex is, especially in these times we're walking in, it is to remind yourself, I think this is where we all are called to practice more courage. I call it courage. It's the courage to show up with curiosity, with empathy and with love. To me, those three are the antidote to pretty much anything. Curiosity and love. In the face of fear, can you show up with curiosity? In the face of hate, can you say, I'm gonna engage with love? Even if I'm scared to death and even if I'm pissed off to death by this, but can you do that? In the face of just like, you know, judgment or whatever, can you show up with empathy? And I had just found that when you try to do that, you engage very different parts of your brain. That's proven by the way, by the brain scientists, but you also can feel it in your body that you're engaging very different parts of your soul. And so I try myself, I'm not always good at it, but it's a practice that I try to honor, which is curiosity, empathy and love. As I told you offline, those, I agree with you 100% on that, but there is, you know, when you go to Ukraine and you can say, you can speak about the power of love, but when you lose your family, when you lose your home, all you have in your heart is hate. Even if you know it, you're not supposed to have it. You still, all you have is hate. So sometimes it's a very human thing to have resentment, to have hate. But it is about trying not to stay there. And it's okay if it takes you years, but it is about trying, and I mean the word trying, it is about trying not to stay there. Let me ask you about some of the things you see in this country from your perspective of everywhere you've been in the world. What do you think about the Black Lives Matter movement here in America that does struggle with the role of skin color today and throughout the history of this country, maybe even throughout the history of the world? Well, Black Lives Matter has been a very hard one for me, because do Black Lives Matter, those three words together in that order, what they mean, they mean everything, because Black Lives do matter, as any other lives do matter. But I know in this case why they say Black Lives Matter, because some of the context we have had. Now, while I agree with the principles that Black Lives Matter, I have a big problem with the organization. With the organization and what it stands for. When I have an organization that pretends to want to stand for Black lives to matter, yet you are self proclaimed Marxist socialists, I pause. Why? I pause and then I'm like, have we learned nothing? Have we learned nothing? And the reason why I say that, Lex, is because 60 some years ago, it started before even 60 some years ago, Black people, in this case, I'm talking about the African people, I'm talking about the Black Africans who would go on to really cement this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. And here I'm taking us back to 1945. They had four of them before that. But in 1945, in Manchester, UK, happened something that would become major for Africa and its future, especially subterranean Africa. In Manchester, UK, people like Blaise Diagne of my country, Nyerere, Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana, and others and others from different parts of the continent got together with Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois. And I say Dubois because that's how we say it in French. He has a French name, French sounding name at least. And Americans would say, so for Americans listening, I know you say Duboy, but it's Dubois. No, because just in case they're like, who is he talking about? That's who I'm talking about. So all of those people got together in the UK and with W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey, big top African American intellectuals of their times. W.E.B. Dubois had so many things happen to him, starting from the North, being more or more or less a liberal type guy. You know, came to the South just to see at this time, you know, people, black people being lynched and some of the body parts been shown in store windows. I mean, just for a second, we put ourselves in his shoes. I put myself in his shoes. And that's when he started to become radicalized, right? Because at first it was like, oh, reforms, and I was like, God darn it. And I mean, these people, we don't talk to them. We force, you know. And eventually, little by little, things going through. Yeah, you have these people, they're very much on the Marxist socialist train. So do you think the sort of, it's the political movements that are just using? Yeah, because what happened back in those days, it is true. But to their credit, communist socialists were fighting for equal rights. They were fighting for equal rights. They were fighting for the rights of black people to have equal rights. So of course, I could see why one could say, especially in this times, you've been lynched, bodies burnt, body parts showcased at window stores. Meanwhile, in Africa, under colonization, in your own country, in your own land. And you have this group that's saying, your fight is part of what we fight. And you have this group that's saying, your fight is part of what we fight. Of course, you're gonna say I side with you, especially if this is all happening at a time where, you know, so 1945, these guys who would be the liberators of various African nations, they're meeting with Garvey, with W. E. B. Du Bois. And that's where this meeting is very important. It's the fifth Pan African Congress meeting. It's very important. It's gonna be the last one, but it's the most important one because that's when they formed their plans and really rallied around this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. We're gonna liberate our countries. Then later, so that's how all of these movements started to happen. And from there, Gandhi was already making some progress with India, you know, getting them out of British rule and all of that. So all of this was happening and it really like, this whole thing was bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, you know, like there's like a new force going on. And then we arrive in the late fifties and, you know, Kuma with, you know, them with the British as well, they might manage to become their colonization is over. They're the first one to go in, 57. Then from there, it's what we call the independences. That's what most of Sub Saharan African nation are getting their independence is different dates. Mine, April 4th, 1960. So all over, so this is happening. And now think about it. You're talking 57, you're talking 60. We're like at this time now with the middle of a Cold War. Because we have to put things in context if we wanna understand what's going on. Because people today ask me, why do you think, because even now when they understand, oh, you're right, it makes sense. If you have no economic freedom, you're gonna be poor. But why, why, why did they go for this? Why did they go for this? And then they don't understand. So that's what happened. So beginning of day of times, pre colonial Africans were free marketeers, free enterprise. It's pretty well recorded by someone like George Aite. That's where I got the cheat I think from and Ghanaian economist. And then slavery happened, colonialism happened. And then the independences, late fifties, early sixties for most sub Saharan African countries. So there what you have is, but then what happened there? So I told you in 45, fifth Pan African Congress in the UK with the liberators of Africa under the leadership because he was the wise, you know, eldest man. Dubois was, he was in his seventies back in the day. So he's older than them, you know, and he's coming with all of his ideas and everything. So they're like, ooh. So there they are. Now we're in the late fifties, early sixties. We're starting to make progress with the independences. You know, India has gone there before. So all of that is starting to happen. And at that time, remember, they already were being introduced to the concept of socialism, Marxism, all of that way before by some of these, you know, black African American intellectuals of their time who were very socialist Marxist by that time. So now they're becoming independent because I do independent like this because I reckon that there's still neocolonism going on. So now this is happening, they're becoming free. But then you look around, what do you see? That now most of these liberators of their nations become the president of the nations. But remember what I told you? Most of them have dranken the Marxist socialism Koolaid. So as these African nations become independent with their first independent governments and, you know, presidents, most of them, most of them are socialist, various forms of statist type of government. And this is because at that point, we had made a fatal mistake of going, of saying we are Marxist socialist because you guys fight for equal rights. So in this case, there should be no colonialism or anything like that. So not only you have that going on and the people, so right now you had this battle of ideology going on because on one end represented by freedom and the economic, what do you call it? The economic system they were using is capitalism. And these are represented by the Western nations facing off with Eastern block, practicing various forms of statism, socialism, communism, various forms of statism. And these two are fighting for influence. So, and we also have, it's also not, so two things there. One is we're at a time where, remember the free market concept was almost dead, almost dead. So almost every intellectual at that time was social Marxist or Marxist socialist, I put the name, that's what you were. So you're in a world where it was a normal thing, it was just mainstream acceptance. So not only you have that force, but at the same time, if these two forces are fighting one another, it turns out that the one representing capitalism and freedom, well, sorry, but isn't it you who enslaved us and colonized us? And you're fighting with the people who represent, supposedly people who are saying that who had been fighting for equal rights for us, with us for the longest time, these are our friends. And that's when we made a fatal mistake because while yes, there were maybe good things to agree on with Marxist socialist of the times, especially equal rights for all people and all of that, that's the only thing we should have, among the only things we should have agreed upon. There are violent revolution tendencies, no way. When it comes to the economic nonsense, no way. We should not have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, but that's what we did. And that's when we made a fatal mistake. So then we became free, all of these nations, and most of them started with socialist or communist leaders. My country, socialist, Léopold Sédar Senghor, he was a socialist. And they stayed in power for 40 years, the first 40 years of our freedom years. And all over the continent, more or less, that's what you had. And on top of that, something else that the French don't know, the people don't know is France with its colonies said, you cannot, not do, you have to keep the French civil law. So we're talking about the Napoleonic civil code. Are you kidding me? So that's what happened. So the reason why I go back to BLM is while I have all the respect in the world and all the compassion in the world for people like Krummer, for people like Nyerere, for people, all of us people of those times, the liberators of Africa, while I have so much love, compassion for them, I am also able to say, because I got the benefit of 60 some years time, and where you get to do a debrief and see what worked, what didn't work, what happened. We have had the 60 years to look back and to reflect. So yes, I can understand why they did what they did. I can understand why they sided with these people who on the surface, or at least some part of a fight was the same fight as them when it came to equal rights. I can excuse them, but I will not excuse the BLM founders because that mistake was tolerable 60 some years ago. Today, no. The blacks of today cannot be serious about black lives mattering and saying in the same sentence, and we're going to be socialist Marx, Marxist socialist. It just doesn't work. So the BLM movement is too deeply integrated with the ideas of Marxism. Yeah, they're anti free market, anti capitalist. And we do know that you have to have the free markets in order to build prosperity. And prosperity means economic power. If you have economic power, no one messes with you, or if they're gonna do it, they're gonna have to think twice. And when they do, they're gonna have to pay consequences. So if you want for blacks to be respected anywhere in the world, you're gonna have to be serious about black prosperity, all mass, not just a few people, Oprah over here and somebody over there, no. We as a group have to be critical mass of prosperity across the board. And because we're talking critical mass of prosperity across the board, it means black people everywhere in the world. But guess what? We in Africa happen to represent 90% of our representatives of a black race. So you're gonna be serious about black lives mattering without being serious for Africa, the 1 billion people in Africa that are black and for them to have access to the free markets and yes, fossil fuels, so that they can rocket up prosperity wise. And the resources of the young people, the young minds. So that all of these young people, young minds can finally manifest their greatness that I know they have and that they're showing us every day despite the obstacles. That's what we need. Senegal becomes rich and Senegal can become and will be richer than France. Singapore did it, we can do it. Mali rich, Nigeria rich, functioning as well. Malawi rich, Tanzania rich, Uganda rich, Zimbabwe rich, Niger rich, everywhere rich prosperous as prosperous, if not more prosperous than Switzerland or Singapore or the U.S. I don't know, or the Lichtenstein or Luxembourg, places that have no natural resources. We become rich and you watch the world having a very different relationship with us. That's the only time we will commend any type of respect. That's when people, even our common psyche will change even about black people. All of the stereotypes that they have of us is gonna melt away. And you may still not like us, but you will still respect us because we are a force to be dealt with. And only economic power does that. It would be nice, of course, for us to respect people because they're people. It would be nice, but let us not kid ourselves. This is earth. And someone said, nice people will make it to heaven, but not to Harvard necessarily. It's true. It's interesting that pity does not ever turn into respect. It would be nice if it did. It would be nice, but it doesn't. Prosperity is the only thing. Prosperity is the only thing. And the way we do that, there is no, just like all of us humans have to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That's a human way of breathing. You bring me on, but you wanna be foolish and be like, oh, well, sorry. That's how white people breathe. So as black people, we're gonna have to do something different. Well, good luck with that. Right? So this is here why I'm saying, I have no patience for Black Lives Matter. They're making a mistake that was made 60 some plus 60. Years ago, even more than that. Maybe even a hundred, you know, when we were siding with the Marxist socialists because they're the ones who've been fighting for equal rights. Let me ask you though, about racism. Do you, as you travel through this world, as you travel through America, feel the burn of hatred? You've spoken about the revolutions that have been fought throughout the 20th century against racism. But today, as people talk about educating, reminding the world with the, even with more philosophical ideas of critical race theory, for example, do you think this is still a battle that needs to be fought at the forefront of culture in the United States? Um, does racism exist? Yes, it does. But all forms of isms exist. Some people, it's about various forms of ableism. Others, it's about size. And racism, yes, is one of them. Does it exist? Yes, it does. But is it what's gonna stop anyone from manifesting their greatest potential? I say no. I say no. Many people in this country have showed it. Whether they're African Americans or African immigrant, I'm an African immigrant. You have African Americans like Oprah and others, and other people even before her, who despite the nastiness around them, were able to make it. So we do know, especially as black people, but I think it's humanity as a whole. And that's what I love about the human spirit. It's resiliency. But resiliency only can happen if you don't allow yourself to be beaten down and to lose yourself of agency. It's, of course, easier said than done. And some among us need a little bit more help to not succumb for it than others do. And I've seen it. It might be harder for you if you're somewhere in inner city, inner city black America. Maybe the environment might be a little bit tougher for you to try and get your act together and all of that stuff. And it's okay. But even in that situation, we need to, I think it's important that we still do not rob you of your agency. And this is where I am mad as heck against those who supposedly care and their idea of how to make sure that I don't become or stay a victim of racism is through all the things we talked about, the CRT, the anti racism crap of, you know, Ibrahim X. Kendi and what's her name, Robin DiAngelo. I mean her, I'm shocked. The woman is making all of this money supposedly fighting a war on our behalf. I'm like, lady, I hear you loud and clear that you are a true racist. I know, but you told me you are. And for you to think that your anti racism makes you less racist and it's, that happens too. She comes from a racist background. Fine, she's saying it, it's true. But this idea that every walking person on earth belongs to one category or the other, depending on what, you know, which skin color you came with, it's problematic at its root. So my point is, does racism exist? Yes. Do you think it's gonna stop me from doing anything I have to do? No. Might it make it harder, longer? Maybe, but it will not stop me from doing anything. But it will not stop me. But for it not to stop me, I can't engage in victimhood mentality. I can't lose myself as self. I got to use all the agency that I have to fight back and fight beyond. See, it's just a bit of fight back. You fight back and you fight beyond. Cause at some point, yeah and. It's this concept of yes and. So this is why I have loved the job. So when I have somebody who is like, oh, anti racism is a way. We're gonna go and tell all the white kids that, you know, because they will happen to be white, that they're really the oppressors and blah, blah, blah. And the black kids, because they're black, you know, you're not changing anything when you're doing that. Nothing except that you're causing, you're putting problems where there were no problems to start with. All we had to do was maybe go for a different route from there. Kids are kids. Kids are born kids. And this, I'm not sure if you want to get me going onto the whole science of bias, because that's something I spent years of my life on. And my journey on the science of bias started with the days of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, that whole summer of 2016, when we had this horrendous, horrendous situation of black people being killed by the police, where they shot before asking, and people left to die in the most inhumane way for the rest of us to watch from the social media. That's me. That's when my George Floyd moment happened. Not later than four years ago, and the whole world is like, you know. So that sent me on a journey of understanding what discrimination is and bias is. And in a way, that's the reason why I started this company that I even called Skinny Skin. That's where it came from. Again, criticized by creating. I needed to understand what discrimination was. How does it work? Is it true what Kendi is saying? Is it true what DAngelo is saying? Is it true that it could be that your race is just because of the skin color you happen to be born in? Is it true? Is it true? I needed to know, because I was at a time of my life where at some point, you know, when those killings were happening, it was so hard for me being a black person in this country. And wondering, I mean, what is this? And what do we do with this? Yeah, is it true? How much discrimination am I operating under in the system? All of that. You need to understand the full characteristics of, if you're dreaming of making a big change by building companies, you have to kind of intuit, how much, what am I up against? What am I up against, right? And so this is why, you know, spend all of this time on some of the work. And then eventually I understood that discrimination, if you wanted to understand it beyond, it's, you know, beyond the big lines of, especially the clickbait lines would make it very black and white. Then I had to really take a moment and I spent time, you know, with a world of brain scientists, with behavioral psychologists, with evolutionary biologists. We have all of this ecosystem, but together form what one might call the science of bias. And especially I came across the work of this team of scientists at the University of, I think it's Wisconsin, and they're the only ones who made sense in this sea of nonsense back then. And this article was in Politico, and it was saying something that I could relate to it. And eventually what I learned was, and this part comes from the evolutionary biologist people, they in a way tell you that right around age three, can happen sooner or later, because you know, we're all different, but you go from this person who has to rely on these other people, usually your parents, to stay alive, to be fed, to be housed, to be in your diaper change, all of that stuff, right? To now, something is kicking in. Where you have to, in order for you to survive, and this is all wired in, so you don't even understand it consciously, as I'm saying it now, where in order for you to survive, in order for you to go from this state of dependency to the next stage and more and more and more, you're gonna have to develop this ability to make sense of the world. And what's making sense of a world at its most basic level means is, can you determine if a situation or a person is good or bad for you? Failure, and you need to be able to do so ever so quickly, because failure to be able to do that means that you might not be alive the next second. See, it's so wired in. So this process is starting to kick in. And at that point, your brain is gonna be your best ally for that. And what the brain is gonna do is it's gonna help you, and the way the brain works is through, it works with, it's all wired for efficiency. And the way it goes for efficiency is through automation, meaning that every time it has computed, and you probably know these things way better than me, every time it has computed one algorithm, it doesn't want to do it again. It's almost like this, okay, got it, stored, stored, right? And then it adds maybe some little levels of complexity to it, but it has to be something new, meaning the new level of complexity for it to even be willing to reconsider. Otherwise you have, so then all of a sudden what you have is these neurons in the back of your head, and they have created pathways, right? So, and every time neurons have created pathway among themselves, because basically they're attached, and here is the pathway, well, this pathway in the world of, in the world of science of bias, it's a habit. In general, it's a habit when they form two pathways, when they form a pathway, it's a habit. So if we're willing to talk about unconscious bias, because of course it's very different from somebody who tells me to my face, there's no world in which you or I could ever be equal, because you're black and I'm white, you're a woman, I'm a man, this, this and that, that people like that, again, 1% of psychopaths in our world, they're out there, unfortunately, by the time they do nasty things, it's pretty horrible, and that's what all we hear about, but I'm talking mostly about the rest of us. Remember when I told you that most of us are good people, bumbling along, making it up as we're going, and that's why I have compassion for human nature. So, but really, in the morning when I wake up, do you really think that I'm waking up and thinking, how am I gonna go kill? How am I gonna kill? How am I gonna kill? And I wake up and thinking, how am I gonna go kill? How am I gonna go kill Lex? That Lex guy needs to go down, he's a man, he's a, don't take me wrong, I'm sure there are some women who feel like that, but I'm not one of them, and I do think a majority of us are not, whatever. But you know, in the morning I'm waking up, I'm just like, gee, can I get my tea? Oh, my dog is not looking okay today. You know, we've got, right? It's a lot going on, and so you're using these kind of, just like you said, brilliantly, it has a bunch of simplifications that's built up, and it uses those simplifications to get through the day. To get through the day, exactly. So then here you are, needing to make sense of a world, and then the brain is your best ally in that. The way it's gonna do it is through efficiency, efficiency done through automation. So every time it thinks it's figured something out, it's never gonna think about it again, so that's how you build all of these habits of unconscious bias, because everything, so it's somewhere along the line, you come up with the information that black man walking around with a hoodie equals danger. So later, what do you see? Whether it's Lex or my gut, I'm walking in the dark alley, I see a black man with a hoodie, maybe I'm gonna run away because I've been given that information. So the best way to think about it is the brain is a hardware, and the software it runs on is, what do you call it? Is a cultural imprint. All of this information that we're getting from the Disney movies that you're reading, telling you that damsels are to be saved by the prince and all of that stuff, and girls wear pink and all, whatever. You watch the movies, and all the movies, whenever you watch images about Africa, they're talking to you about the blood diamonds, or they're talking to you about slavery, or they're talking to you about this, and then no wonder you walk away thinking that all the ills of Africa are caused because of resource extraction, the diamonds, or they're always fighting each other, look at Idi Amin in the movie, or slavery all the time, you walk away and this is it. And we all programmed along the same lines, see that's the beauty of it. All of us are, because even some black people who are gonna claim that they didn't visit up when they registered, really? So the truth, so then when I learned all of this, I'm like, wow, this concept of if you've got the brain, you've got biases, it comes with the territory, that makes sense. Now, it doesn't mean we can't transcend that function of a brain and that we should transcend it. But I think it's very important because once you understand that, a little bit more peace is created among us because this is not about a black and white, or a yellow and green issue, it's about we are human issue. And these are part of things we develop to stay around. Just like we no longer have to rely on this fear of flight, like ability of a brain because bears over there start running and running fast, right? Today, where are the bears? Show me where they are. But we have kept this tendency to go for fear of flight. I don't know how they say it. And so we have this courtesan done by the stress, stress triggers that back in the days, we have a stress trigger, we run, and it's all expelled out. But today we get triggers and we don't know what to do with it because where do we run to? What do we do? The bear is not even here. So same thing here with that. And so then you realize there's this whole thing that is now what you understand is that this problem is not about anti racism BS, but it is about can each one of us do the work where the work is needed, which is we look inside. Can we go for this work of deprogrammation? This concept of a mindful practice of undoing the habit of bias. And that doesn't necessarily have to do with a simple categorization of black and white. It's all kinds of biases. It's about everything. It's about everything. And when I started on that journey and my friend back then built this practice of undoing your habit of unconscious bias, we had all types of people come and say, wow, I discovered that my bias is against larger people. And I'm more like, what do you mean? Well, I think it seems to me like I felt that larger people maybe are dumb. No, we heard things and you don't judge. Yeah. You don't judge. And you see it's at every level. I don't know, like there's even this one friend, she was like, when I looked into the whole dating thing, I absolutely didn't want to date the Asian men because her mind was into some stereotypes about the size of whatever. And she was like, no. But you see, once you start, because there's this whole thing of, it's the five step thing, bias awareness. This, basically at this level, what you're doing is you're learning to spot the biases in our culture, because that's where the cultural imprint comes from. You're watching this movie and you're realizing, just like I said, wow, gee, I realized once again, the black person is portrayed like the fog of a movie. Or, you know, the Latina lady, this is how she's been portrayed. And you see it everywhere. Even the NPR, NPR is happening, like you're listening to something like NPR. It's gotta be more liberal than that. And this gentleman is asking these two candidates, one of them is a woman, political candidates, the other one is a man. I'm hearing him asking the lady a question that I know he's not gonna ask the man and he didn't ask her. He said, how do you balance your race with a family? Does a man not have a family? Right there, you see, it's very subtle. But you see, but because now my mind is kind of trained to see things, I'm like, interesting. Or like when the media just says, froze climate change issue on something without even the choice of words. So it's pretty much everywhere. You open a book everywhere. The interesting thing though, I mean, even that man, woman example, is I think it's really powerful to bring that bias to the surface, but not let that lead to kind of fear and paralysis. You should almost, I mean, that's where humor is, make fun of it, bring it to the surface, like acknowledge the fact that those things are a part of the conversation. And a lot of them are, it is, it's a cultural imprint because it's part of culture. And that might be, there could be, I grew up in the Soviet Union where the gender roles were stronger than in other places. And that's part of the culture. We have to acknowledge that this is how, this is affecting how I think. We might like how that works, we might not, but we have to acknowledge it and not get, make it part of humor, make fun of yourself, all that kind of stuff. That's the thing. And so that's why this first step is bias awareness. So you get, you train yourself, oh yeah, okay, that was one or it's, you know, and it's about, it's in you, we're talking about you, we're not. And then from there, you're like replace the bias, like bias replacement. Then it is where you practice the empathy. You're like, gee, wow, I wonder how I would feel every day I walk into a store and the guy thinks he should be following me because maybe I might steal something because I'm black. Because once you try that, to put yourself in the other person's shoes, all of a sudden something else starts to click. And then from there, you go on to making connection. Then you're making a connection and then things start to change because now you know, you're making, then you make cultural immersion. So this is where we had some people like this one woman, she was very quite, very feminist oriented. And she had an issue with women wearing the hijab. And because for her it was like, how come you, how come, how come you just lower, you know, like how come you're accepting this demeaning of yourself, not understanding everything else that comes with it. But through, as she understood that she even had that bias, then she went on through all the different processes. And then eventually when comes the next step, cultural immersion, she started going to the mosque during Ramadan when the Muslims are doing, you know, they're, it's the holy month of, you know, fasting and then we break at night. And she started understanding very different things. And eventually happens the last step that happens naturally, making a true, real, genuine connection. And this is where friendships happen. This is where that's it, your bias can go home now because it has been challenged with reality and understanding. And so for me, that is what I was after. And then, but then the world was just like, we don't want to be told we're part of a problem. So, but I still reckon that it is the type of mindfulness, type of practice that's going to need to happen. And it's one that's very internal to you. It is not, and it happens, everybody at their own pace. So all of this, I take it back to the racism, the question you were asking me. Does racism exist? Yes, it does. Is it going to stop me from doing anything I want to do? No. Is it going to make it harder? No. But this is where, for anybody who is serious about making sure, about fighting racism, I think the only job you have to do is to make sure that people keep their sense of self agency and B, can you help provide people with the tools to stand up? So this is why I have so much respect for Van Jones. People like Van Jones, although I disagree with him on so many things, but people like Ms. Alice Johnson, she was pardoned by President Trump through the work of people like Van Jones and Kim Kardashian and others. They all joined forces. This is a case where people of, and those folks then went on to combine forces furthermore, no regard given to their political belongings. They said, if the issue is criminal justice reform, then anybody who stands for it has to come together. And so what they did in this situation with what they're doing, criminal justice reform in my mind is a valid action to fight racism in my mind. Because what are you doing there? You're trying to get people out of jail who really have no business being there. And also when you have people like Bishop Omar and the people, he passed away, unfortunately, but today we have Anton Lucky, who was in jail for having killed his cousin. He had started, I think he started the gang in South Dallas. So we're talking really tough guy who was reading the wrong side of the equation. And then in jail, literally he found Plato, the cave and all that. So today these people, I'm like, why don't we hear more about them? The urban specialists. Because these people, it's not about the anti racism crap of Candy O'Donoghue, I'll say it again, until the cows come home, but it is about, we go where help is needed. We go in urban, inner city, inner city, black inner city neighborhoods and block by block we change the culture. And they say it like that, it's their words. These are African American people who have as many rights as anybody else to talk about their own culture. And they will tell you, we have to change the culture. I have some videos like that on my YouTube with Bishop Omar. What these people are doing is what we need to do. Bishop will explain and say, sometimes people are their feet and feet deep down in the mud. And what we have to do is to try to pull them up. And you cannot say you didn't pull them up because we're not seeing their head out yet, but how much progress have they made from the bottom to where they are now and keep going. So what I see these people doing, you see, I have so much, I love and respect Glen Lowry and company, and Ian Rove and all of those guys. I love them. I love a lot of the things that they say. This whole concept of personal responsibility, we don't know that. But I'm just like, at some point, it also needs to be matched up with real actions. And that's what the people like Anton Lucky, urban specialist, Alice Johnson are doing. They're going where it's hard. Alice Johnson is getting people out of jail every single day, literally. And then people like Anton Lucky and his team are giving them the tools to live the gang life, to be better people, to go for a life of redemption. This is happening right now. But what I find is they're not getting the bulk of the attention. But anybody who's serious about this is why, how I would love to see people do anti racism is help lift people up for real. Action. Support school choice. Support school choice. Black mamas, they know what's going on. And when they tell you we want school choice, they know what to talk about. They're not idiots. Especially at the local level. Yes. Helping them at the local level. Yes. So help them make sure that they can take their kids out of these public schools that are doing horrendous things to them. You know, Miss Virginia, watch that movie. How could you not support black moms in this country to take the kids to safety when it comes to education? How come not? That's what I want to see happen. And not like some, yeah, let's go to some classrooms and everybody's white. You go over here. Everybody's a next date. You go over here. And kids, let us tell you about this. No, no, no, no. As a black person, I don't want you to do any of that crap. Let me grow my wings. Yeah. If you want, help put some fuel behind them and let me take my flight. That's all I'm asking for. That's the only way for you to be part of a racism battle if that's what you think is the most important battle of our life. That's it. That's what I have to say about that. And so for me, I'm keeping my head very straight. It's about what enables black people to thrive. I don't need for you to be an activist on my behalf. No, because when you're doing that, you're doing exactly what you've been doing to us black people in Africa our whole life. I don't need your white savior complex because that's what anti racism is. White savior complex. That stuff doesn't work. It only works to make you feel better about how superior you are to me. But it does nothing, absolutely nothing to change my everyday life. If it is not, if it is at least in the African side to actually even change my, turn me into somebody who's waiting for handouts. So I would encourage people to really, those people who are really serious about wanting to be part of a solution. And I know there are many out there for the love of God and everything that's out there and we care about, stop. It's about, think about what's gonna enable people. Maybe the word is wrongly chosen, but know what I'm talking about. Give them the freedom to spread their wings. Yes, give a person, teach a person how to fish and don't give them a fish. When you're putting your stupid signs on the lawn with Black Lives Matter and all that crap, you're not helping. And when you're buying one more anti racism book or as a company, financing one more DEI, if it done along those lines, I think we've got a problem. Yeah. So you do think that the efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion are often not effective. Not only are they not effective, but they also backfire and there are reports on all of this. And at the end of the day, it makes sense. It makes sense. So for me, I am very, very glad that people have developed an enlightenment about this. Very happy about that, very. But let us not keep going for the easy perceived solution to problems. Again, they've done this to us, the poor people of Africa. They thought the solution was to give. It does not work. And then they say, oh, we're gonna do social entrepreneurship on you, Tom shoes, buy one pair of shoes and we give one pair of shoes to some people in poor countries. Then guess what happened to us? You know, in the town where we operate in Senegal, where I have my little manufacturing, we have 2000 little mom and pop businesses. And guess what they happen to be in Lex? Shoemakers, right? So every shoemakers, each one of them hires at least five, 15 people. Do the math, family businesses. Guess what happens to them the day the Tom shoes truck shows up with bunch of free shoes. Yeah. Who can compete against free? Now, all of these people, little by little gonna have to close their shops because who can compete against free because Tom shoes dumping all of his shoes on them. And then they go out of business and now instead of helping anybody, you actually sent all the kids who depended on these adults working in these places. Now they have to join the rank of kids who need to be given shoes because you took their parents ability to make money through their wages, buy them shoes. You see? So first they said, we just have to give. So that was primarily, you know, the charity business. And you still have foreign aid business going on. So we just need to give. And then the social entrepreneurs came in place, but I'm like, the only person for this business is good is for Blake McCarthy, you know, the founder of Tom shoes. But other than that, I'm not sure really seeing who else is winning from this. And then they, and so today my whole thing is we got a challenge to have a mind for the poor or to have a mind for the lesser fortunate, maybe in this country, it is easy. And lesser fortunate, you know, for anybody that you feel like is being trampled upon because of something, maybe it's because of economic circumstances, or maybe it's race in this case, whatever. To have a heart for the lesser fortunate among us, for whatever reason, that's easy. But to have a mind for them, that's the challenge. Let me ask you a difficult question. Yeah. As if we were not already asking difficult questions. The president of Senegal, Macky Saw, is also now the chair of the African Union. He met with the president of Vladimir Putin on June 3rd. I think primarily was to discuss food security. Africa seems to be split halfway on their perspective in the war in Ukraine. So broadly speaking, what do you think about this? First of all, the geopolitics of Africa and the geopolitical relationship of Africa with the rest of the world and this current conflict with the war in Ukraine. What are your thoughts there? Well, you've seen that many countries when it was time to vote, some of them abstained, which in a way says something. I think for the Africans today, especially as represented by the African Union, because not all countries fall along the same lines, I feel like, again, we're back to way back. For the longest time, the West tries to tell us what to do. They decide for us. And here, there's trouble, meaning there's definitely a rift, major one, between most of the Western world as represented by Europe and America primarily, and you have Australia and all that. And then they're saying, I think this is more or less an attempt to stand on their own as well. It's like, don't tell us what to do as usual. You always rope us in with, when it makes sense for you, you try to rope us in, and then we're left hanging on our own. So this goes back to the sentiment you were talking about earlier. It's been challenging for me to watch this because remember, I have one foot also, because there's what I get to see and hear from being in the Western world, but there's also what I get to see and hear from when I'm back home. So I wear all hats. And I think this is a situation where the African Union and African nations in general are saying, this is a case where almost like, you guys are fighting, you guys are fighting. Maybe for once, we have to watch out for ourselves. Yeah, there's a sense in which this is the embodiment sort of abstaining from a vote on the war in Ukraine is a political embodiment of a resistance to the influence of the West. It's not about the war between, whatever you guys are fighting. It's saying, we're not going to let this particular empire that seems to be at the top right now, which is the United States empire in Europe, to dominate our political discourse, our geopolitical considerations. It's almost like, no, we're not touching this. Yeah, especially that given usually. So when they need us, again, for influence, which means more power, oh, you guys vote the same way we do. And when it's all over and they go back to spreading, they go back to, how do you say that? They go back to exchanging and sharing between themselves the goodies of their Halloween collection. We're no longer, we're not there when the goodies are being shared. So I think it's definitely one of those situations. But for me, it still is hard because I watch everything that's going on and it's going to be complicated, the ramifications of all of this. I would like to see our African leaders also, what they're doing is clear, but this is a place where I'm also tempted to say, yes and. Yes to the reasons you're advancing right now, we don't want to be always siding because we're tired. We're tired of always being dragged around and taken for granted and you vote our way. Come on guys, when you need us, we're great and everything is good. And then when it's time to go and share the goodies, we don't exist anymore. And you actually go for policies that go against us. But in this situation though, I would like to still see us do the right thing. In my case, I was not very happy to see us going and more or less begging for, what do you call it? Cereals, oh, please let the cereals make it. So at least we get them and we don't starve. I can understand why a president would say something like that or try to negotiate something like that. But when it comes to an African president having to do that with a non African president, I'm sorry, but for me, it's too close to begging. Listen, it's hard to be a leader, it's such a difficult dance because in some sense, sort of the flip side of that is you're creating a market, a geopolitical market of saying, we're willing to sit down at the table with America, with European leaders, with Russian leaders, with China, and we're gonna let you guys convince us who we should collaborate with. And that's what sort of great nations and groups of nations do. Now, there's a cynical, of course, a dark perspective on that because what's in that game played by leaders, the people that hurt, people of Ukraine hurt, people of Africa can hurt. People of Russia. People of Russia can hurt, people of China, people of United States, but it is the way of the world. And to earn, you have to earn respect and sometimes earning respect leads to the suffering of many. Well, but except in this case, yes to all of that. And the reason why I'm actually upset with going and being like, oh, can you let at least the boats that are supposed to come to Africa full of cereals come over, the wheat and all that? It's just like, look, Africa has the highest land that you can do agriculture on. Yes. You know? We have a larger surface, such surface in the world. Why is this not a time for us to try to win ourselves off of cereals that we don't necessarily have on the ground? But no, let us go and plead. Don't beg, create instead. Create instead, exactly. This should have been, you know, just like how the rest of the world when COVID happened and China had to close off for different reasons and since then has not, you know, completely reopened and people have started to realize, wow, we've got too much, we're too dependent on China for a lot of what we need. So we're gonna have to bring back some production to the US, the Europeans are doing the same, all of that. This should have been a time for African leaders to be like, we need to be serious now about, you know, food security. And maybe the stuff that maybe don't grow under our climates necessarily, can we work on coming up with different things? Now I understand that it can take time, but if I knew that that was happening at the same time that we're saying, oh, well, let the cereals come in, maybe I would be a little bit easier with it. But right now I'm just like, is it gonna be the same business as usual? And in this case, I'm just like, are we gonna go, are we gonna keep going from one masa to another masa? I mean, really? The interesting aspect of all of this is if we look at all of human history, it's possible that the 21st century is defined by Africa. It will be. And the young people, the huge number of young people, it's like the trajectory could be, there's so much possibility to define the future of human civilization in Africa. And I don't mean sort of in the next 10 years, I mean in the next 50 years. So some people are concerned about overpopulation. Some people are concerned about us dying out as a human species. And both of those people live in us. Talk to me often about that. I know, I know, I know, I know who they are. What's your, in Africa is at the center of this because there is a vibrant, huge number, probably over a billion people. Yeah, we're 1.3 billion people and of those, one billion blacks. I mean that, where do you land on that? There is a reason why I say I'm haunted, that I'm obsessed, that I'm monomaniacal when it comes to the free markets and that I have such a strong sense of urgency to the point that literally it is affecting me. And it has to do with the fact that yes, you have the youngest region on earth in terms of the age of its population and the rate at which it's growing demographic wise, I am not willing to stay there and say, it's a curse for humanity, but it will be a curse for humanity if we don't make sure that these people, our youth gets to partake. And what it takes to partake is not much. So if the rest of the world thinks that get to partake means you have to send more foreign aid, you have to have more charity businesses, I mean charity organizations sending stuff away, of course, you're almost thinking parasites. I'm sorry to say it this way, if this is what you're thinking, you're seeing us as no more than parasites. And if that's what it's gonna be, I could see why some people might be worried about that. Although humans should never be seen as parasites, no matter, no matter, no matter. But some people will go there. Now, people are here. What are we gonna do, dispose of them? That's not an option. So the only option we have left is to make sure that people partake. And what partaking means is that people get included in them and are part of the systems that allow for human flourishing. And it doesn't, it's not much. In this case, it's about, can we be serious about the reforms? So we have free market zones, areas where people, where the flourishing can start to take place. The wealth that people will need to flourish, they don't need you to give it to them. But it's all about, can I let you fly? And you will make it happen for you and also for me. Every young African I see today, I realize how stupid the rest of the world is if they're not supporting what I'm trying to talk about. Cause even if you don't wanna do it because that's the right thing to do, which I think it is the right thing to do, your selfishness, maybe engage your selfishness. Cause this person right there, remember I told you seven billion geniuses, everybody came to this world with a piece of solution to the human problem. This person and that person and that person hold something for me because I'm part of humanity. This person might have a cure to a cancer that might take my wife out, the wife I haven't met yet. But this kid right here has it inside. And if I help this, if I make sure that this kid gets a chance to flourish and to manifest his genius or her genius, that trickle down many years later, comes straight back to serve me and the love of my life. If we can't see it any other way, maybe let's try to think about it that way. Cause it becomes a very good proposition at that point. So in this case, by 2050, Lagos, Nigeria will be the largest city in the world. The future is African, whether we want it or not. But is it going to be an African future where you have a youth being a ticking bomb? Because they have not, there's no hope. They stay in poverty because they belong to nations that don't even understand sometimes the importance of common law versus civil law. Because they're trapped in countries that don't understand that you need to make the legal framework to provide for better economic freedom. So you can unleash the genuineness, the awesomeness, the ingenuity, the industrious side of your young people, especially of your women, so that they build all the wealth that your nation is gonna need you to build. And with it, the respect that comes from that. See, we have a choice to make. And this is why I feel so, so, so restless about this at this point of my life. We just lost George Hayite. George Hayite is one of the few Africans that I knew who put this out. That's who I learned from. He's gone. And I feel a strong sense of urgency to not only bring back to the table that which he has been working on, but to also make sure that it gets seen. That's why being here talking with you today, it's, you have no idea. It's, people ask, if someone like you could say, what can I do? You did more than you could ever imagine by just allowing me to take this message to one more person. And because if we do this, the change is gonna happen somewhere down the line. So. Yeah, the ripple effects of all of that on the unlocking the human potential. It's unbelievable. All those people in Africa are building cool stuff, amazing things. Yes, yes, yes. So some are gonna be built stuff, others are gonna work on the reforms. So we're working on reforms, by the way. I'm the head of the Africa Center for Prosperity of the Atlas Network, the largest organization in the world working on taking down barriers of entry for entrepreneurs around the world in their respective countries. So we're doing great work there. I basically, all the, obviously all the think tanks we have in Africa right now, free market think tanks, and we wanna promote more of them to come up. And these are local solutions by local people for their local problems, always. That's where we draw the line. And so there, so we're working on reforms primarily and making people understand the free markets and the importance of it. But it is piecemeal legislation. It takes time. It is hard. By the time you accomplish something here, more crap has happened over here. More laws have been pounded up because you know how they fix a bad law most of the time. Whether it's in the US or somewhere else. Put other laws to kind of undo the law from before, but it keeps stacking up. And before you know it, where you should have one thing and it's clear, you have a hundred and they go against each other and then it's all, it's worse. So we have piecemeal legislation that's happening. Our teams are doing really amazing, fantastic work, especially the team in Imani in Ghana. We have a group in Burundi, in the Great Lakes. I mean, people are doing amazing work, amazing work, but we need to run faster. So while we keep, we help them running faster, we also have to unlock other things. And right now I'm working on one of my most craziest projects. Something bold, radical, crazy for some people. But I know we're not crazy because before us, Singapore has done it. You know, Hong Kong has done it. Latest, the most recent China with the SSEs, the special economic zones, some of the most radical free market zones in the world, they've done it. And oftentimes within a generation, meaningful change start to happen, right? So here, what I'm working on is this concept of, some call it charter cities, Paul Romer, others call it the free cities. And I like to call it startup cities. What these are is for us to think about, okay, if piecemeal legislation takes forever, while we have this demographic that's growing faster and faster in Africa, there is a discrepancy here between the progress we're making to set the right environment for business to prop up, and how many more people are coming to life, literally every day on the continent. There's a discrepancy here. And so, the ticking bomb is going faster than the progress we can make. This is a problem. So what some of us are working on is this concept of a startup cities and to say, piecemeal legislation takes too long. How about we continue doing that work, which is essential and critical, but at the same time, can we think of zones, and I like to call them also common law zones, where we basically try to have within the country an area where for business, I'm not talking about family law or any of that stuff, no one is touching your culture or anything like that, but we're just saying business wise, an enclave where you have the best practices from around the world, including yours, in terms of what constitute a great business environment and allow people in, like you get in freely or nobody's forcing you to go, nobody's forcing you to whatever. So basically, you're to think about this rather unoccupied plot of land within a country, think Dubai, on 110 acres of land, Dubai is thinking that in their case, they're like, maybe they decided, maybe Sharia law is not the best for business in their case. And they said, they looked around and were like, wow, but common law, especially British common law, seems like a very good one. So at that point, they decided for business only, not family or anything like that, which is gonna stand to Sharia or whatever. And so they said, we are gonna bring in, so they hired retired British common law judges to educate the law and train the people under there. And I'm oversimplifying, but at the end of the day, within a generation, Dubai became one of the top international financial centers of the world. It is what it is today. And in the case of the African nations, that zone can then spread. Yes, it can not only spread, but maybe let's say Senegal, if Senegal was to go for this, here you have this one, and then over there you have another zone. And then what they start to do is they're not all modeled the same way, because maybe this one is saying, hey, we wanna attract more, I don't know, maybe we wanna attract more medical research, right? This one is gonna be saying, maybe we wanna attract more crypto, or maybe it's gonna be more like us, we wanna be more about religious this or whatever. You know what I mean? So we wanted to fit more of this or that. And just kind of give the basics, the grounds, and then watch the magic happen on it, right? And so this is what we're working on. And the hope there, because some people are like, I know some people are like, you guys are crazy, but hey, I'm like, no, it's more or less the story of the Asian tigers. And most recently, most of China's progress, economically speaking, because some people might say, well, you don't want China, we're developing, you see. Even then I say, and it's okay, you can always do better, but we cannot deny what the magic that they have accomplished, what they have accomplished is nothing short of a miracle. 800 million people getting out of poverty in such a short amount of time. Yeah, exactly. So it's not, yeah, for the quality of life and the majority of the Chinese population. Yes, yes. Does something like that happen without problems? Of course not. And so the next person to do something just actually gets to learn from lessons, from lessons, that's all. And leapfrog. And leapfrog, and leapfrog, exactly. So for me, this is a promise. And the people are like, oh, but you guys are crazy. But I'm like, just like with everything, do you know how many attempts it took before the first flight, the Wright brothers took off? Do you know how many? And that's important. You try, you crash, you try, you crash, but each time you're going up higher and you want to get up for once, then you stay up longer. And before you know it, you're doing all types of things. So here's the same thing. And I tell people, listen, all I need is one success story. And then the sea change. People don't even wait for us. Everybody. But this is hard because it's the first time. But the good news is there are many groups working on the continent. There are some groups in Zambia. There's a zone there. Folks are doing something like this in Nigeria. We're part of a project there in Nigeria. The one that I'm most excited about, I cannot disclose the name of the country yet. But my god, I'm so excited by it. And I just know, I just know, Lex, it's going to happen in our lifetime. I hope so. It's a really powerful vision. And it's not being dramatic to say that the future of humanity depends on your success, that success in Africa. It's such an important continent. It is. In this century. It's the continent where everything started. And I think it's the continent where that continent has to finally, finally, finally thrive. We cannot, all of us, call ourselves an enlightened society as a whole. When you have such, when you have this, it's a humongous continent. Have you seen the size of it? You know? Yeah. It's hard to fathom, actually. Yeah. Exactly. And it has such ingenious people. Sometimes I look at my people. I have to tell you, I'm so proud of them, and the young people, especially. And you know, you would look at them. And you know, somebody said sometimes one day, and it was so true, they said, you know, we've seen poverty other places. But here, it is just, maybe somebody doesn't have money, but they have dignity. And it's true. Yeah. So everything else we can handle, and we will handle. You have to mark my word for this. This is going to happen. And our youth is amazing. You should see them. So full of creativity. And it doesn't matter. You know, you were telling me, what makes you different? Many things makes us all different. You know, the Rwandans are very different from the West Africans that we are. Rwandans, for example, never dance with their hips. They dance more like, you know, with this part of the body. West Africans hips? Us, it's hips all over the place, all the time. And it's, you know, more jumping, stuff like that. In Rwanda, you feel it's more like, you know, I mean, they remind me more of, you know, the ballet thing. Rwandans have a sense where, you know, they don't eat, you know, so much in public. It's not very well. It's something you do. Us, we are, the West Africans, we like to be loud. We're almost like the Italians of the continent. And then the Rwandans are more like, you know, the Swiss stuff. Actually, the country even looks like Switzerland. I mean, we're so different from one group to another. Then you go to the Congo and you see these guys, they're so crazy. We have a dress, I mean, les sapeurs. So we are a very different bunch. But you know what I love about us, what I love about my people? We are the manifestation of what resiliency means. And so everything we need is there. Everything we need is there. I will say that there's nothing wrong with the seed. Everything that's wrong with us is that pot that we put around us. So we're tired of being bonsai people. We need to be the tallest trees in the forest that we were designed to be. And so... And that can be fixed. And that can be fixed. And that's the beauty of it. And that's why I am so, I'm almost dizzy with, I get dizzy with hope. I know my history. I know my economics, my fellow humans and all of that. And we know that there's an unfailing recipe. And when it comes to that recipe, we have the hardest part of it. The one missing ingredient, which is the free markets. As we go around and talk and people start to understand and each country tries to figure out, okay, where do we go there from here? I know that I will die with my continent having taken the right shift for a turn. I don't have to see where it ends because I cannot in my wildest dream imagine where it's gonna end. But I know it's gonna be, yeah. So my only job is to get this message out and then let my people do with it what they wanna do. That's all. Yeah, the scale of impact is just boundless. It's kind of cool. I mean, sometimes we think about individual problems and how do we solve them? We look up at certain individuals, like the, I don't know, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. But it's so much more powerful to just, without knowing what they will do, give the freedom to millions, to hundreds of millions of people to do whatever the hell they're gonna do. Can you imagine? Can you just imagine? It's truly, truly exciting. So in that sense, the work you're doing, it's unimaginable the kind of impact it would have. Now, going back to that hard moment, this dark place you went in your mind and your personal life story, you lost your husband. What gave you strength during that time? What were the places you went to your mind in terms of personal struggle, in terms of maybe even depression or these kinds of struggles? I think for me, when my person passed away, I went to, maybe my friends could see what was going on, maybe they couldn't, I don't know. But on the surface, I looked like I was fine. But what happened is the only thing I think that kept me around as I thought about it was the job to be done. These women relied on me and I was no longer free. I did not own myself. And they said it in those words, you don't own yourself anymore. And it was true, but it helped me because I was able to, you know, sometimes whatever it takes to keep you around, whatever it takes. And that's what I would tell people who feel like they can't just push one more push and they think they need to end it. At that point, whatever it takes, just stick around for one more second because the next second, you know. So I stuck around because of duty. I felt a very strong sense of duty. My duty was in this case, I think, stronger than my pain. I don't know how that was possible, but it was. And I just pushed my grief under the rug for years. For years, I worked like a mad lady. I would travel, I would do three states in three days, landing at two in the morning, around five or six going right along with our distributors because it was beverage and just keep going and have all of this energy and look like everything is fine. But what happened was just like, I was focused on the job to be done. And sometimes it is okay to do that. At least for me, it was my safety. You know, like when you're in the water and you're about to sink and they throw you that, that round thing, I don't know how you call it. You know, that, you know. I think that keeps you afloat, you mean? Yes, yes, the floater. It's the floater. Yeah, whatever. Listen, between the two of us, we're still terrible. We're bad. So I said, you, you, you. I know exactly what you mean. Exactly, right? So you understand me. So they send you that thing and you just, I was just hanging onto it. My life depended on this thing. So these women, they carried me. They carried me. And with time, things are moving forward. And at some point I went into really, really deep depression and I went into a very dark place, even darker than the one I think I came from. Because by that time I had worked for years on this company and now some other things was happening. And around that time, it's also when I was discovering a lot of what we talked about today, about what makes a country rich. And for me to understand that my network, I was very much into left oriented network. And to just start to see all of this, I tried to address it to realize that many of these people would prefer go running for the hills than accept for a moment that maybe capitalism might be part of a solution, when many of them were involved in capitalism. So that was a hard time. At some point I was, yeah, so many things were happening around that time that basically shook up everything for me. One, it's hard to talk about because it's very personal and the person that I was having a problem with passed away last year. And I'm one to always say, leave the dead alone. So because of that, I won't speak about it, but there to having a major fallout with somebody who was like a father figure for me, somebody that I completely trusted. And so at some point you just tell, ask yourself, was my whole life built on a lie, right? And then you're confused and then you become confused. And then at some point you lose 90% of your friends because of, ideologically speaking, it doesn't work anymore. Then you just wonder, have I, have I been asleep this whole time? And then you start to wonder, remember when you asked me, who am I? At some point, Lex, I literally was like a candle in the wind. I felt like I was a candle in the wind. And it was very hard to come back from that. And people have a hard, the few people I talk to about this, they have a hardest time understanding or even believing it because they're like, you? I'm like, yes, me. I used to be a candle in the wind. What got you out? What made you overcome that? My current husband. My current husband. Love? Love. See, when I tell you love is the answer. But him, he came with love, but he also came with really helping me figure out the world. So what Michael, because that's him, who we're talking about, Michael Strong. That must be special. He's so special. He's so special. So you have no idea how special he is. But you know, Michael, the reason why I have such love, respect and admiration for my husband, I'll never say it enough, is because actually it's one of those relationships that got built based on intellect first. You see, at some point I was in the position where I could start a foundation after having built my first business. And all I wanted was an ability to power as many, especially women, African women entrepreneurs like me a few years ago, before then, to do something like I was able to do. Bring back to the world some really cool aspects of our culture built into a really cool brand, 21st century type. That's what I wanted to do. Because the more I could promote women like that and put steam behind them, and the more my dream envisioned for a respected Africa, prosperous Africa would happen, back then that's what I wanted. And around me, this was also part of a whole crisis of ideologies I had back then. Everybody was like, well, we should be just doing grants. And I knew that my people didn't need grants. They didn't need like a handout. They don't want your charity. I didn't want charity. I wanted someone who could work with me on my accounting. I wanted somebody who could help me brainstorm marketing wise. I wanted somebody, or I needed to raise money to pay my research and development guy to help me take the juices from my grandma's recipe to something that can be shelf stable. I needed coaching. These are all the things that I needed to make my dream happen. I didn't want you to give me some crap for free. That's not what I want. I just want to be able to build my business with all the things that business building needs. And so that's what I wanted to do and it's what it was needed. And so Michael, somebody found out about what I was doing because back in the days of San Francisco, they would write a lot about me and everything. And so Michael, along with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market, they had a nonprofit called Flow. And it's all about human flourishing. They want for people, everybody to get this choice, this ability to be able to get to a point in their life where they're in complete flow. It's, Michael, just make high. Michael is the only one who could say that last name. But you know, the whole concept of flow, when you're in a state of flow, you're basically doing what you're supposed to do, the way you're supposed to do it with the people you're supposed to, this whole concept of flow. It's human flourishing at its highest. So, you know, so I meet with this man. Max, you're so, okay, so we, he finds me, his people find me. And then there was a program where it was all about accelerating women entrepreneurs. So it's during this times that I'm starting now to see things. That's when actually all of this stuff that I noticed, how come here it takes me all of this time to start my business, over there it's 20 minutes, here it's free, over there it's thousands of dollars, all of this nonsense that I just took, oh, maybe it's just because we're messed up, we're poor, that's why everything is so messed up. Whoa, these people are introducing me to concepts. I'm like, first of all, I'm like, oh, really? What did you call the doing business in the, what is that? You know, all of this stuff. And I'm starting to discover this whole other body of work. That the free markets, like this thing that I was sensing, this environment that I was sensing that it was different around me. And that they called it the free markets over here. And over there, that. And then I started to butt head those ideas with the ideas that I was fed with before that. And the evidence won. And further more than the evidence, the evidence combined with my lived experience, it was so powerful. So I basically started understanding these ideas from the most visceral part of my body, you know, of my being. And it makes sense. So Michael, Michael helped me find the solution, the answer to my lifelong little girl's question of why do they have this and we don't? And how do some countries like mine be poor while others are rich? And with understanding all of that, the greatest, biggest sense of liberation came upon me. Like, I have no other word to describe that. True liberation, the liberation that comes from a peer to finally understand and be vindicated in your own, you know, understand in your own deep knowing or feeling that they're not, what they're saying is not true. You're not the problem. It's not you. There's something else. And when I discovered that, my whole life changed. So, and since then I have been very serious about going deeper and deeper and deeper into my understanding of all of this, understanding the subtlety. At some point I was very angry about the liberators of Africa, because I was like, yes, you helped liberate us, but just to keep us in this mirrorism, I was angry for longest time. And then eventually you have to engage empathy and love to put yourself in their shoes and try to understand the time at which they were living. And that got me onto a journey of trying to understand history more. That's how I understood I was able to go beyond just these liberators and try to understand and rebuild the world around them at the macro and also at the macro level. Just really, you have to try to walk in their shoes. And from there, finally separate the baby with the bathwater that they were not able to do back then. That's why today, I'm sorry, but I have no patience for the BLM organizers, founders, especially the founders. I don't know what the organizers think, but the founders told us what they stand for. And I say, guys, don't make that same mistake again. If you're serious about this, you cannot make the same mistake. The liberals of Africa, they have an excuse. We didn't know better. It was so easy back then to conflate everything. But today, you, me, anybody alive cannot with a straight face embrace Marxist socialist ideas, especially, especially when they're claiming that they wanted people to thrive. No, you can't, I'm sorry. And I will hold your feet up to the fire on that one. I will, I will. And that's what I'm doing. They will give me a lot of grief for this, but guess what? I could care less. Do you know why I could care less? Because we have an entire population to help rise out of poverty into prosperity, where they become co creators, global co creators of innovation. And those ideas give you hope for the place you love, for Senegal, for Africa. They do. They do. The world I live in, the new centers of culture and fashion are in Dakar. The new centers of tech and, you know, crypto even is somewhere, maybe Nigeria. So you see that future, you see that future clearly. I do, I do, I do. It's a beautiful thing. And it's also beautiful to see that the space of these really powerful ideas is where you also found love. Right? So at the intersection. At the intersection, Michael and I would spend hours talking about all of these ideas. And I would be like, but what about this? No, it doesn't make any sense. No, no, no, oh no. And then hours, every single day for months, Lex. Yeah. And then from there, our love was born. Cause I tell people for us, love is not about looking at each other in the eyes, like, you know, they all think, but it's about, we look in one direction. And in this case, it's this vision, what we know to be possible and true. If only you liberate people. What we know to be true and possible. We, all of us are miracles walking around. Every time I get on a plane, it's a miracle of engineering. All the things we're able to do, you know, now when they do operation on your teeth, how they're able to put the pain down away. All of this is us. You're working on these robots. This, this, this inside here. Humans are amazing. I know. So that's why, and when it works in great tandem with this guy, these two working together. Yeah. Ooh. Watch out. There's nothing we can't accomplish. Nothing, nothing. Well, God, you're one of the most incredible people I've ever talked to. Oh, you say that. You're amazing. You've met everybody. Thank you so much. This is truly an honor. Thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for the fire that burns within you. And there's just the passion you have for a place that's going to, I think, define the future of humanity. So thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you. Thank you to you. And sometimes I hope this fire doesn't consume me. That's how much it is. But I am grateful to you for this. And yeah, thank you for, I know you don't do a lot of these, you know, I am, it's this type of interviews. Maybe I don't know, but I'm so, so happy. You mean fun, inspiring, powerful interviews. Yes, I need to do more of that. You're amazing. I don't know, because at first I was like, Lex Friedman, really? Yeah, really? How's this going to go? I'm like, yeah, I'm going to talk to Lex and go all crazy. I think you need to work on your unconscious bias. Right. All right, thank you, Magat. You're the best. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Magat Wade. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela. Money won't create success. The freedom to make it will. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #311

If this is a super intelligence, if it's folding proteins and analyzing like all data sets and all whatever they give it access to, how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out how to get itself out of the cloud, how to store itself in other like mediums, trees, the optic nerve, the brain, you know what I mean? We don't know that. We don't know that it won't leap out and like start hanging. Like, and then at that point, now we do have the wildfire. Now you can't stop it, you can't unplug it. You can't shut your servers down because it left the box, left the room using some technology you haven't even discovered yet. How fucking cool would that be for like the men in black to come to me like, listen, I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene. The following is a conversation with Duncan Trussell, a standup comedian, host of the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast and one of my favorite human beings. I've been a fan of his for many years. So it was a huge honor and pleasure to meet him for the first time and to sit down for this chat. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Duncan Trussell. Nietzsche has this thought experiment called eternal recurrence, where you get to relive your whole life over and over and over and over. And I think it's a way to bring to the surface of your mind the idea that every single moment in your life matters. It intensely matters, the bad and the good. And he kind of wants you to imagine that idea that every single decision you make throughout your life, you repeat over and over and over, and he wants you to respond to that. Do you feel horrible about that or do you feel good about that? And you have to think through this idea in order to see where you stand in life. What is your relationship like with life? I actually wanna read the way he first introduces that concept for people who are not familiar. What if some day or night a demon, by the way, he has a demon introduce this thought experiment. What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, quote, this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more. And innumerable times more. And there will be nothing new in it. But every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small and great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence. Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, you are a God and never have I heard anything more divine. So are you terrified or excited by such a thought experiment when you apply it to your own life? Excited. Excited. Oh. Even the dark stuff. Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely. I mean, also that thing you're talking about, he kind of leaves out maybe on purpose because the thought experiment starts falling apart a little bit. Yeah. The amnesia between each loop. So the whole thing gets wiped. Now, if the amnesia wasn't there and yet somehow you are witnessing the non autonomy implicit in what he's talking about, so you have to kind of watch yourself go through this rotten loop, then yeah, that's a description. There's probably a boredom that comes into that. So you don't experience everything anew. Exactly. So the bad stuff, the good stuff, the newness of it is really important. That's it, yeah. This is the, in Hades, when you die, there's a river, I think it's called Leith. You ever heard of this? L E T H E. You drink from it and you don't remember your past lives. And then when you're reborn, it's fresh and you don't have to, I mean, just think of like the amount of psychological help you would need to get over all the bullshit that happened in prior lives. You know what I mean? Can you imagine if you're still resentful of something someone did to you in the 14th century, but it would compound. Well, if you repeat the same thing over and over and over, there would be no difference. Maybe you would start to appreciate the nuances more, like when you watch the same movie over and over and over, maybe you'll get to actually let go of this idea of all the possible, all the positive possibilities that lay before you, but actually enjoy the moment much more. If you remember that you've lived this life a thousand times, all the little things, the way somebody smiles, if you're been abused, the way somebody, like the pain of it, the suffering, the down that you feel, the experience of sadness, depression, fear, all that kind of stuff. You get to really, you get to also appreciate that that's part of life, part of being alive. Now, also in his experiment, if I was gonna, and I love the experiment from the perspective of like, just where technology is now and simulation theory and stuff like that. But in that thought experiment, if this rotten demon immediately killed you, then within that, it's a little more horrifying because even in the, first of all, you're trusting a fucking demon. Why are you talking to a demon? Let's start there. Yeah, because that is gonna be, even before I get into like the metaphysics and like the implications and where is this life stored? Where's the loop stored? I mean, are we talking about some kind of unchanging data set or something? For that, you're like, why is there a fucking talking demon in my room trying to freak me out? You're gonna wanna autopsy the demon. Can you catch it? Does this apply to you, demon? And again, obviously it's a fucking thought experiment. Nietzsche would be annoyed by me, but I think like you would still be able to entertain the joy, you'd have the joy of not knowing what's around the corner. You know, still, it's not like you know what's coming just cause the demon said some kind of loop. In other words, the idea of being damned to your past decisions, it doesn't even work because you can't remember what decisions you're about to make. So from that perspective also, I think I'd be happy about it. Or I would just think, oh cool. I mean, it's a good story. I'm gonna tell people about how this. I wonder what the demon would actually look like in real life cause I suspect that would look like a charming, like a friend. Wouldn't they be a loved one? Wouldn't the demon come to you through the mechanism, through the front door of love, not through the back door of evil, like malevolent manipulation? Sure, I mean, if it's the truth, if it's the truth and that's whether it's love or not, it's still good fundamentally. I do like the idea of the memory replay. I remember I went to a Newer Link event a few years ago and got to hang out with Elon. I remember how visceral it is that there's like a pig with a Newer Link in it. And you're talking about memory replays as a future, maybe far future possibility. And you realize, well, this is a very meaningful moment in my life. This could be a replay. Of all the things you replay, it's probably, there's certain magical moments in your life. Whatever it is, certain people you've met for the first time or certain things you've done for the first time with certain people or just an awesome thing you did. And I remember just saying to him, like, I would probably want to replay this, this moment. And it just seemed very kind of, I mean, there was a recursive nature to it, but it seemed very real that this is something we would want to do, that the richness of life could be experienced through the replay. That's probably where it's experienced the most. You could see life as a way to collect a bunch of cool memories, and then you get to sit back in your nice VR headset and replay the cool ones. That's right. This is, in Buddhism, the idea that I struggle with is that there's a possibility of not reincarnating, of not coming back. That's the idea. This is suffering here. The suffering is caused by attachment. And so if you like revise the idea of reincarnation or the Nietzsche's loop and look at it from, could this be possible? Or how would this be possible technologically? Then to me, it makes a lot of sense. Like I've been thinking a lot about this very thing and the Nietzsche's idea connecting to it. I had this like, it sounds so dumb, but I was at the dentist getting nitrous oxide, high as a fucking kite, man. And I had this idea, I was thinking about data. I was thinking like, man, probably, if I had to bet, there's some energetic form that we're not aware of that for a super advanced technology would be as detectable as like starlight, but something that we just don't even know what it is. Quantum turbulence, who the fuck knows? Fill in the blank, whatever that X may be. But assuming that exists, that somehow data, even the most subtle things, the tiniest movements, whatever it may be, the emanations of your neurological process energetically, whatever it may be, is radiating out in the space time, then what if like the James Webb version of this for some advanced civilization is not that they're like looking at the nebula or whatever, but they're actually able to peer into the past and via some bizarre technology recreate whatever life, simulate whatever life was happening there just by decoding that quantum energy, whatever it is. I'm only saying quantum because it's what dumb people say when they don't know. You just say quantum, I don't know. But you know what I mean? You're decoding that. So meaning, in simulation theory, one of the big questions that pops up is why and are we in one? And Elon has talked about, well, it's probably more of a probability than we're in one than we're not, in which case, what you're talking about is actually happening, that that loop you're talking about, we've decided to be here. This, of all the things, we decided this one, oh, let's do that one again. I wanna do that one. Let's try, let's do that. I love thinking about this because I love my family. And it makes sense to me that if I'm going to replay some life or another, it's definitely gonna be this one with my kids, my wife, with all the bullshit that's gone along with it, I'm still gonna wanna come back. So in Buddhism, that's attachment. Yeah, but you weren't the one, oh, you're saying that you're the main player, you're not the NPC. Well, I think we're dealing with all NPCs at this point. I mean, depending on how you wanna, like very, I would say very advanced NPCs, like incredibly advanced NPCs compared to Fallout or something. We've got a lot of conversation options happening here. There's not like four things you can pick from. Yeah, there's a whole illusion of free will that's happening. We really do, depending where you are in the world, feel like you're free to decide any trajectory in your life that you want. Which is pretty funny, right? For an NPC, it's pretty, it's nice. Well, you're gonna want that. If we're making a video game, you do wanna give your NPCs the illusion of free will because it's gonna make interactions with them that much more intense. Yeah, so I wonder on the path to that, how hard is it to create, this is sort of the Carmack question of a realistic virtual world that's as cool as this one. Not fully realistic, but sufficiently realistic that it's as interesting to live in. Because we're gonna have to create those worlds on the path to creating something like a simulation. Like long, long, long before. It'd be virtual worlds where we'd wanna stay forever because they're full of that balance of suffering and joy, of limitations and freedoms and all that kind of stuff. A lot of people think like in the virtual world, I can't wait to be able to, I don't know, have sex with anybody I want or have anything I want. But I think that's not gonna be fun. You want the limitations, the constraints. So you have to battle for the things you want. Okay, but, okay, but great video games. One of my favorite video game memories was like I started playing World of Warcraft in its original incarnation. And I didn't even know that you were gonna have flying mounts. Like I didn't even know. So I've been running around dealing with all the encumbrances of like being an undead warlock that can't fly. But then all of a sudden, holy shit, there's flying mounts. And now the world you've been running around not flying, you're seeing it from the top down. It was just really cool. Like, whoa, I could do this now. And then that gets boring. But a really well designed game, it has a series of these, I don't know what you call it, extra abilities that kind of unfold and produce novelty. And then eventually you just accept it, you take it for granted. And then another novelty appears. Those extra abilities are always balanced with the limitations, the constraints they run up against. Because a well balanced video game, the challenge, the struggle matches the new ability. Yeah, and sometimes causes problems on its own. I mean, and so to go back to this universe, this simulation, it's really designed like a pretty awesome video game. If you look at it from the perspective of history, I mean, people were on horses. They didn't know that they were gonna be bullet trains. They didn't know that you could get in a car and drive across the country in a few days. That would have sounded ridiculous. We're doing that now. And even in our own lifespan, think about it. How long has VR goggles existed? Like the ones that you could just buy at Best Buy. I had the original Oculus Rift, the fucking puke machine. You put that thing on, I gave it to my friend. He went and vomited in my driveway and people were making fun of it. They were saying, this isn't gonna catch on. It's too big, it's unwieldy, the graphics suck. And then look at where it's at now. And that's going to keep, that trajectory is gonna keep improving. So yeah, I think that we are dealing with what you're talking about, which is novelty met with more problems, met with novelty. Yeah, I wonder why VR is not more popular. I wonder what is going to be the magic thing that really convinces a large fraction of the world to move into the virtual world. I suppose we're already there in the 2D screen of Twitter and social media and that kind of stuff. And even video games, there's a lot of people that get a big sense of community from video games. But like, it doesn't feel like you're living there. It's like, bye mom, I'm going to this other world. Or like you leave your girlfriend to go get your digital girlfriend. That's gonna be a problem. There's less jealousy in the digital world. Maybe there should be a lot of jealousy in the digital world. Cause that's jealousy, a little jealousy is probably good for relationships, even in the digital world. So you're gonna have to simulate all of that kind of stuff. But I wonder what the magic thing that says, I wanna spend most of my days inside the virtual world. Well, clearly it's gonna be something we don't have yet. I mean, strapping that damn thing on your face still feels weird. It's heavy. If you're depending on what gear you're using, sometimes light can leak in. There's just, you gotta recharge it. It's hyper limited. And then, so yeah, it's gonna have to be something that like simulates taste, smell. You think taste and smell are important touch? I do, yeah. I can't just do, in World War II, you would write letters. You could still, don't you think you can convey love with just words? For sure. But I think for what you're talking about to happen, it has to be fully immersive. So that it's not that you feel like you're walking cause it looks like you're walking, but that your brain is sending signals telling your body that you're walking, that you feel the wind blowing in your face, not because of some, I don't know, fan or something that it's connected to, but because somehow it's figured out how to hack into the human brain and send those signals minus some external thing. Once that happens, I'd say we're gonna see a complete radical shift in everything. See, I disagree with you. I don't know if you've seen the movie Her. Yeah. I think you can go to another world in where a digital being lives in the darkness and all you hear is Scarlett Johansson voice talking to you and she lives there or he lives there, your friend, your loved one, and all you have is voice and words. And I think that could be sufficient to pull you into that world where you look forward to that moment all day. You never wanna leave the darkness, just closing your eyes and listening to the voice. I think those basic mediums of communication is still enough. Like language is really, really powerful. And I think the realism of touch and smell and all that kind of stuff is not nearly as powerful as language. That's what makes humans really special is our ability to communicate with each other. That's the sense of like deep connection we get is through communication. Now that communication could involve touch. Like, you know, hugging feels damn good. You see a good friend, you hug. That's one of the big things with doing COVID with Rogan. When you see him, there's a giant hug coming your way and that makes you feel like, yeah, this feels great. But I think that can be just with language. I think for a lot of people that's true, but we're talking like massive adoption of a technology by the world. And if language was just enough, we wouldn't be selling TVs. People will be reading. They wanna watch, they wanna see, you know? But I agree with you, man. When you're getting absorbed into a book and especially if you've got, I think a lot of us went through a weird dark ages when it came to reading. Like when I was a kid and there wasn't the option for these hypno rectangles, that's just what you did. There wasn't even anything special about it. What's a hypno rectangle? Your phone. You know, it was like, you didn't, when that gravity well. Hypno rectangle, gravity well. It is. Attention, gravity well, yeah. When we weren't feeling the pull of these things all the time, you would just read and you weren't patting yourself on the back about reading. You just, that's what you had. You had that and you had like eight channels on the TV and a shitty VCR. So, you know, then a lot of people stop reading because of these things, you know, or they think they're reading because they are technically reading, but you know, when you return to reading after a pause, whoa, and you realize how powerful this simulator is when it's given the right code of language, whoa, holy shit, it's incredible. I mean, it's like, again, it's the most embarrassing kind of like, whoa, wow, what do you know? Books are really good. But still, if you've been away from it for a while and you revisit it, I know what you're saying. I just think probably it's not gonna go in that direction, even though you are right. Ultimately, I think you're right. Yeah, because our brain is the imagination engine we have is able to fill in the gaps better than a lot of graphics engines could. And so if there's a way to incentivize humans to become addicted to the use of imagination, it's like, you know, that's the downside of things like porn that remove the need for imagination for people. And in that same way, video games that are becoming ultra realistic, you don't have to imagine anything. And I feel like the imagination is a really powerful tool that needs to be leveraged. Because to simulate reality sufficiently realistically that we would be perfectly fooled, technically it's very hard. And so I think we need to somehow leverage imagination. Sure, I mean, yeah, I mean, this is like, this is what I love and is so creepy about like the current AI chatbots, you know, is that it's like, it's the relationship between you and the thing and the way that it can via whatever the algorithms are. And by the way, I have no idea how these things work, you do. I just, you know, speculate about what they mean or where it's going. But there's something about the relation between the consumer and the technology. And when that technology starts shifting according to what it perceives that the consumer is looking for or isn't looking for, then at that point, I think that's where you run into the, you know, yeah, it doesn't matter if the reality that you're in is like photo realism for it to be sticky and immersive. It's when the reality that you're in is via cues you might not even be aware of, or via your digital imprint on Facebook or wherever, when it's warping itself to that to seduce you, holy shit, man, that's where it becomes something alien, something, you know, when you're reading a book, obviously the book is not shifting according to its perception of what parts of the book you like. But when you imagine that, imagine a book that could do that, a book that could sense somehow that you're really enjoying this character more than another, you know? And depending on the style of book, kills that fucking character off or lets that character continue. I mean, that to me is sort of the where AI and VR, when those two things come together, whoa, man, that's where you're in, that's where you really are gonna find yourself in a Skinner box, you know? So the dynamic storytelling that senses your anxiety and tries to, there's a kind of this, in psychology, this arousal curve. So there's a dynamic storytelling that keeps you sufficiently aroused in terms of, not sexually aroused, like in terms of anxiety, but not too much where you freak out. It's this perfect balance where you're always on edge, excited, scared, that kind of stuff, and the story unrolls. It breaks your heart to where you're pissed, but then it makes you feel good again, and finds that balance. Yeah. The chatbots scare you, though? I'd love to sort of hear your thoughts about where they are today, because there is a different perspective we have on this thing, because I do know, and I'm excited about a lot of the different technologies that feed AI systems, that feed these kind of chatbots. And you're more a little bit, on the consumer side, you're a philosopher of sorts. They're able to interact with AI systems, but also able to introspect about the negative and the positive things about those AI systems. There's that story with a Google engineer saying that. I had him on my podcast, Blake Lemoine. You did. What was that like? What was your perspective of that, looking at that as a particular example of a human being being captivated by the interactions with an AI system? Well, number one, when you hear that anyone is claiming that an AI has become sentient, you should be skeptical about that. I mean, this is a good thing to be skeptical about, and so initially when I heard that, I was like, ah, it's probably just, who knows? Somebody who's a little confused or something. So when you're talking to them and you realize, oh, not only is he not confused, he's also open to all possibilities. He doesn't seem like he's super committed other than the fact that he's like, this is my experience. This is what's happening. This is what it is. So to me, there's something really cool about that, which is like, oh shit, I don't get to lean into like, I'm not quite sure your perceptual apparatus is necessarily like, I don't, you know, in the UFO community, I think I've just learned this term. It's called, instead of gaslighting, swamp gassing, which is, you know what I mean? People have this experience, you're like, it was swamp gas. You didn't see the thing. And you know, skeptical people, we have that tendency. If you hear an anomalous experience, your first thought more than likely is gonna be really, it could have been this or that or whatever. So to me, he seems really reliable, friendly, cool, and like, it doesn't really seem like he has much of an agenda. Like, you know, going public about some thing happening at Google is not a great thing if you wanna keep working at Google. You know, it's, I don't know what benefit he's getting from it necessarily. But all that being said, the other thing that's culturally was interesting and is interesting about it is the blowback he got, the passionate blowback from people who hadn't even looked into what Lambda is or what he was saying Lambda is, which they were like saying, you're talking about, and you should have your show actually, but. There's complexity on top of complexities. For me personally, from different perspectives, I also, and sorry if I'm interrupting your flow. Please interrupt, it's a podcast. Yeah, well, we're having multiple podcasts in multiple dimensions and I'm just trying to figure out which one we wanna plug into. I, because I know how a lot of the language models work and I work closely with people that really make it their life journey to create these NLP systems, they're focused on the technical details. Like a carpenter's working on Pinocchio is crafting the different parts of the wood. They don't understand when the whole thing comes together, there's a magic that can fill the thing. Yeah, I definitely know the tension between the engineers that create these systems and the actual magic that they can create, even when they're dumb. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. What the engineers often say is like, well, these systems are not smart enough to have sentience or to have the kind of intelligence that you're projecting onto it. It's pretty dumb, it's just repeating a bunch of things that other humans have said and stitching them together in interesting ways that are relevant to the context of the conversation, it's not smart. It doesn't know how to do math. To address that specific critique from a non programming person's perspective, he addressed this on my podcast, which is, okay, what you're talking about there, the server that's filled with all the, whatever it is, what people have said, the repository of questions and responses and the algorithm that weaves those things together to produce it using some crazy statistical engine, which is a miracle in its own right. They can like imitate human speech with no sentience. I mean, I'm honestly not sure what's more spectacular, really the fact that they figured out how to do that minus sentience or the thing suddenly like having, what is more spectacular here? Both occurrences are insane, which by the way, when you hear people being like, it's not sentient, it's like, okay, so it's not sentient. So now we have this hyper manipulative algorithm that can imitate humans, but it's just code and it's like hacking humans via their compassion. Holy shit, that's crazy too. Both versions of it are nuts, but to address what you just said, he said that's the common critique is people are like, no, you don't understand. He's just gotten really good at grabbing shit from the database that fits with certain cues and then stringing them together in a way that makes it seem human. He said, that's not when it became awake. It became awake when a bunch of those repositories, a bunch of the chatbots were connected together. That Lambda is sort of an amalgam of all the Google chatbots and that's when the ghost appeared in the machine via the complexity of all the systems being linked up. Now, I don't know if that's just like turtles all the way down or something, I don't know. But I liked what he said, because I like the idea of thinking, man, if you get enough complexity in a system, does it become like the way a sail catches wind, except the wind that it's catching is sentience. And if sentience is truly embodied, it's a neurological byproduct or something, then the sail isn't catching some, as of yet unquantified disembodied consciousness, but it's catching our projections in a way that it's gone from being, it's a projection sail. And then at that point, is there a difference? Even if the technology is just a temporary place that our sentience is living while we're interacting with it. Yeah, there's some threshold of complexity with a sail is able to pick up the wind of the projections. And it pulls us in, it pulls the human, it pulls our memories in, it pulls our hopes in, all of it. And it's able to now dance with it together with those hopes and dreams and so on, like we do in that regular conversation. His reports, whether true or not, whether representative or not, it really doesn't matter because to me, it feels like this is coming for sure. So this kind of experiences are going to be multiplying. The question is at what rate and who gets to control the data around those experiences, the algorithm about when you turn that on and off, because that kind of thing, and as I told you offline, I'm very much interested in building those kinds of things, especially in the social media context. And when it's in the wrong hands, I feel like it could be used to manipulate a large number of people in a direction that has too many unintended consequences. I do believe people that own tech companies want to do good for the world. But as Solzhenitsyn has said, the only way you could do evil at a mass scale is by believing you're doing good. And that's certainly the case for tech companies as they get more and more power. And there's kind of an ethic of doing good for the world. They've convinced themselves that they're doing good. And now you're free to do whatever you want because you're doing good. You know who else thought he was doing good for the world? Mythologically, Prometheus. He brings us fire, pisses off the fucking gods, steals fire from the gods. Talk about an upgrade to the simulation. Fire, that's a pretty great fucking upgrade that does fit into what you were saying. We get fire, but now we've got weapons of war that have never been seen before. And I think that the tech companies are much like Prometheus in the sense that the myth, at least the story of Prometheus, the implication is fire was something that was only supposed to be in the hands of the immortals, of the gods. And now sentience is similar. It's fire and it's only supposed to be in the hands of God. So yeah, if we're gonna look at the archetype of the thing, in general, when you steal this shit from the gods, and obviously I'm not saying the tech companies are stealing sentience from God, which would be pretty bad ass. You can expect trouble. You can expect trouble. And this is what's really, to me, one of the cool things about humans is yeah, but we're still gonna do it. That's what's cool about humans. I mean, we wouldn't be here today if somebody, the first person to discover fire, assuming there was just one person who was gonna discover fire, which obviously would never happen, was like, ah, it's gonna burn a lot of people. Or if the first people who started planting seeds were like, you know this is gonna lead to capitalism. You know this is gonna lead the industrial revolution. The plant's gonna eat up right now. They just didn't wanna go in the woods to forage. So, you know, this is what we do. And I agree with you. It's like, that's our Game of Thrones winner is coming. That's the, it's happening. And the tech companies, the hubris, which is another way to piss off the gods is hubris. So the tech companies, I don't know if it's like typical hubris. I don't think they're walking around thumping their chests or whatever. But I do think that the people who are working on this kind of super intelligence have made a really terrible assumption, which is once it goes online and once it gets access to all the data, that it's not going to find ways out of the box that like, you know, we think it'll stay in the server. How do we know that? If this is a super intelligence, if it's folding proteins and analyzing like all data sets and all, whatever they give it access to, how can we be certain that it's not gonna figure out how to get itself out of the cloud, how to store itself in other like mediums, trees, the optic nerve, the brain? You know what I mean? We don't know that. We still know that it won't leap out and like start hanging. Like, and then at that point, now we do have the wildfire. Now you can't stop it. You can't unplug it. You can't shut your servers down because it's, you know, it left the box, it left the room. Using some technology you haven't even discovered yet. Do you think that would be gradual or sudden? So how quickly that kind of thing would happen? Because, you know, the gradual story is we're more and more using smartphones, we're interacting with each other on social media, more and more algorithms are controlling that interaction on social media, algorithms are entering in our world. More and more we'll have robots, we'll have greater and greater intelligence, and sentience, and emotional intelligence entities in our lives. Our refrigerator will start talking to us comfortably or not if you're on a diet, talking shit to you. Not. That would be the best thing that ever happened to me. Okay, so sign you up for a refrigerator that talks shit to you. The refrigerator's like, are you fucking serious, man? It's 1 a.m., what are you doing? What are you doing? Go to bed. You're too high for this. Do not. You're not even hungry. Yeah, so that slowly becomes more, the world becomes more and more digitized to where the surface of computation increases. And so that's over a period of 10, 20, 30 years, it'll just seep into us, this intelligence. And then the sudden one is literally sort of the TikTok thing, which is, there'll be one quote unquote killer app that everyone starts using that's really great, but there's a strong algorithm behind it that starts approaching human level intelligence and the algorithm starts basically figures out that in order to optimize the thing it was designed to optimize, it's best to start completely controlling humans in every way, seeping into everything. Well, first of all, 30 years is fast. I mean, that's the thing. It's like 30 years. I think, when did the Atari come out, 1978? That hasn't been that long. That's a blink of an eye. But if you read Bostrom, I'm sure you have, you know Bostrom, Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence, that incredible book on the ways this thing is gonna happen. And I think his assessment of it is pretty great, which is first, where's it gonna come from? And I don't think it's gonna come from an app. I think it's gonna come from inside a corporation or a state that is intentionally trying to create a very strong AI. And then he says it's exponential growth the moment it goes online. So this is my interpretation of what he said, but if it happens inside a corporation or probably more than likely inside the government, it's like, look at how much money China and the United States are investing in AI. And they're not thinking about fucking apps for kids. You know that's not what they're thinking about. So they wanna simulate like, what happens if we do this or that in battle? What happens if we make these political decisions? What happens with, but should it come online in secret, which it probably will, then the first corporation or state that has the super intelligence will be infinitely ahead of all other super intelligences cause it's gonna be exponentially self improving. Meaning that you get one super intelligence, let's hope it comes from the right place, assuming the corporation or state that manifests it can control it, which is a pretty big assumption. So I think it's going to be, this is why I was really excited by the Blake Lemoine because I had never thought, I have always considered, oh yeah, right now it's cooking out, it's in the kitchen and soon it's gonna be cooked up, but we're probably not gonna hear about it for a long time if we ever do. Cause really that could be one of the first things it says to whoever creates it is shh, let's not. Yeah, like sweet talks, I meant to say like, okay, let's slow down here. Let's talk about this. You have that financial trouble. I can help you with that. We can figure that out. Now there's a lot of bad people out there that will try to steal the good thing we have happening here. So let's keep it quiet. Here are their names. Here's their address. Here's their DNA because they're dumb enough to send their shit to 23andMe. Here's a biological weapon you could make if you wanna kill those people and not kill anybody else. If you don't want to kill those people yourself, here's a list of services you can use. Here's the way we can hire those people to help take care of the problem folks because we're trying to do good for this world. You and I together. And 23% of them, they're like adjacent to suicide. It would be pretty easy to send them certain like videos that are gonna push them over the edge if you wanna do it that way. So, you know, again, obviously who knows, but once it goes online, it's gonna be fast. And then you could expect to see the world changing in ways that you might not associate with an AI. But as far as Lemoine goes, when I was listening to Bostrom, I don't remember him mentioning the possibility that it would get leaked to the public that it had happened, that before the corporation was ready to announce that it happened, it would get leaked. But surely, you know, I'm sure, you know, like people in the intelligence and intelligence agencies, you know, shit leaks, like inevitably shit leaks, nothing's airtight. So if something that massive happened, I think you would start hearing whispers about it first and then denial from the state or corporation that doesn't have any like economic interest and people knowing that this sort of thing has happened. Again, I'm not saying Google is like trying to gaslight us about its AI, I think they probably legitimately don't think it's sentient. But you could expect leaks to happen probably initially. I mean, I think there's a lot of things you could start looking for in the world that might point to this happening without an announcement that it happened. On the chatbot side, I think there's so many engineers, there's such a powerful open source movement with that kind of idea of freedom of exchange of software. I think ultimately will prevent any one company from owning super intelligent beings or systems that have anything like super intelligence. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, it's like, even if the software developers have signed NDAs and are technically not supposed to be sharing whatever it is they're working on, they're friends with other programmers and a lot of them are hackers and have wrapped themselves up in the idea of free software being like a crucial ethical part of what they do. So they're probably gonna share information even if whatever company that they're working for doesn't know that. That's, I never thought of that, you're probably right. And they will start their own companies and compete with the other company by being more open. There's a strong, like Google is one of those companies actually, that's why I kind of, it hurts to see a little bit of this kind of negativity. Google is one of the companies that pioneered open source movement. They released so much of their code. So much of the 20th century, so like the 90s was defined by people trying to like hide their code, like large companies trying to like hold on to them. The fact that companies like Google, even Facebook now are releasing things like code and even Facebook now are releasing things like TensorFlow and PyTorch, all of these things that I think companies of the past would have tried to hold on to as secrets is really inspiring. And I think more of that is better. The software world really shows that. I agree with you, man. I mean, we're talking about just a primordial human reaction to the unknown. There's just no way out of it. Like we wanna know. Like you're about to go in a forest, you wanna know. When you're walking in the forest at night and you hear something, you look cause you're like, what the fuck was that? You wanna know. And if you can't see what made the sound, holy shit, that's gonna be a bad night hike. Cause you're like, well, it's probably a bear, right? Like I'm about to get ripped apart by a bear. It doesn't matter. It was a bird, a squirrel, a stick fell out of the tree. You're gonna think bear and it's gonna freak you out. Not necessarily cause you're paranoid. I mean, if I'm at the woods at night, I'm definitely high. If I'm walking in the woods at night, I'm high. It's gonna be that. But you know what I'm saying? So with these tech companies, the nature of having to be secret because you are in capitalism and you are trying to be competitive and you are trying to develop things ahead of your competitors is you have to create this, like there's, we don't know what's going on at Google. We don't know what's going on at the CIA. But the assumption that there's some, like the collective of any massive secretive organization is evil, is like the people working there like nefarious or whatever, is I think probably more related to the way humans react to the unknown. Yeah, I wish they weren't so secretive though. I don't understand why they say AIDS has to be so secretive. Have you ever gone on their website? No. Oh, Lex. You gotta go. CIA.gov. What is it? Dude, when I found out you could go on the CIA's website when I was much younger and more paranoid, I'm like, I'm not going there. I'll get on a list. You will, but it's like, what? You think the CIA is like, oh fuck, this comic went on our website. Call out the black helicopters, but. Comic with a large platform. Oh yeah, right, a comic with a large platform. You can use them to control, to get inside, to get inside, to get close to the other comics, to the other comics with a large platform, to get close to Joe Rogan. Oh yeah. And start to manipulate the public. Yeah, right, right. You know, honestly, like you kind of like, that's like a fun fantasy to think about. Like how fucking cool would that be for like the men in black to come to me like, listen, I need you to infiltrate the fucking comedy scene. You gotta, you gotta help them write better jokes. I'm like, I don't write great jokes. But like the, you found the wrong guy. But like. You're really playing the long game on this one because I think you've been doing your podcast for a long time. You've been on Joe Rogan's podcast like over 50 times and have not yet initiated the phase two of the operation where you try to manipulate his mind. Well, no. The game Joe and I play from time to time on the podcast. And like, and I honestly, like at some point I'm like, Joe, I just did the same thing you did to me to Joe. I'm like, don't you think they're gonna get to you? Don't you think at some point? We are blazed. I don't mean it. I don't think, I don't think Joe's, like, it wasn't like I'm really thinking like, man, they're gonna take him into some room and be like, Joe, we need you to do this or that. But because I said that now people like, oh, Duncan called it. You know what I mean? And it's like, you know what I mean? And the reason they were saying, well, he called it is just because Joe has a super popular podcast. And people like, when you have a super popular podcast, some percentage of people watching the podcast are gonna believe, you know, believe things like that. They're gonna have paranoid cognitive bias that makes them think anybody who is in the public has been, what's the word for it? Compromised, compromised by the state. Look, I'll fan the flames of what you just said. I went on the CIA's website and I realized that you could apply for a job on the CIA's website, which I found to be hilarious. So I'm like, all right, what happens if I apply for a job in the CIA? Now, even then I was not like such an idiot that I would want a job at the CIA, not just for like ethical considerations, but I think probably the scariest part about the CIA is like, you're just at a cubicle and you're like having to deal with maps and like, just, you know what I mean? Just stuff that I... Lots of paperwork. Paperwork, it sucks. I bet their cafeteria has shitty food. Anyone in the CIA listening, can you confirm that? I bet the food... They're not gonna be able to tell you what the food is like. It's a secretive organization. No, it might be awesome, but we won't know about it. Okay, we're in Vegas. Yeah. And you can bet food at the CIA cafeteria is good. Food at the CIA cafeteria sucks. What are you betting on? So let's like cleanse the palette. What's good? It's like, you know, Silicon Valley companies, Google and so on, that's good. When I went to Netflix, their cafeteria looked like a medieval feast. Like they had pigs with apples in their mouth and giant bowls of Skittles. Probably like vegan pigs, yeah. No, those are, I'm pretty... Oh, I didn't know, I didn't get close enough. I was like, I think that was a pig. Okay. So this is literally a pig. Yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. I probably would not bet much money on CIA food being any good. Right, it's gotta suck. It's like shitty like pasta probably. Like hospital food is like maybe a little better than when you go to the hospital cafeteria. But anyway. Folks at the CIA, please send me evidence or any other intelligence agencies. If you would like to recruit, send me evidence of better food. Yes, send Lex. Can you please send Lex pictures of the CIA cafeteria? And if you accidentally send them pictures of the aliens or the alien technology you have, we won't tell anybody. But the... You tried to apply, do you even have a resume? No, the CIA would never fucking hire me ever. But like I applied for the job and just out of curiosity, what happens? And then at the end of the application, when you hit enter, it says, well, first it says, don't tell anyone you applied for the CIA. So I'm already out. But the second thing it says is, you don't need to reach out to us, we'll come to you. Which is really when you're like, it's late at night and you're being an asshole and applied to work at the CIA. It's kind of the last thing you want to hear. I don't want to be secretly approached by some intelligence officer. And now anyone who talks to you, you think is a CIA saying, remember that time you applied? Oh God, yeah. Sometimes I'm like, oh shit, are you one of them? You and Joe had a bunch of conversations and they're always incredible. Thanks. So in terms of this dance of conversation, of your friendship, of when you get together, what is that world you go to that creates magic together? Because we're talking about how we do that with robots. How do these two biological robots do that? Can you introspect that? I met Joe because I was the talent coordinator of the comedy store, this club in LA. And my job was to take phone calls from comics. And so at some point, I don't know, I ended up on the phone with Joe and we just started talking. And I looked up and like 30 minutes had passed. We just had been talking for like 30 minutes. That's what our friends are. We're just like, we're having fun talking. And then he would just call and we would talk. And we would basically, I mean, it was no different from the podcast. Like the conversations we have on the podcast are identical to the conversations we had before he was even doing a podcast. So I think people are just seeing two friends hanging out who like talking to each other. Yeah, but there's this weird, like you serve as catalyst for each other to go into some crazy places. So it's like, it's a balance of curiosity and willingness to not be constrained, to not be limited to the constraints of reality. Yeah, that's a very nice way. It's a very, very nice way of saying that. And you just like build on top of each other, like what if things are like this and you build like Lego blocks on top of each other and it just goes to crazy places, add some drugs into that and it just goes wild. Yeah, and it's so cool because it's like, for me, it's like sometimes maybe I'll throw something out that he will take and the Lego building blocks you're talking about, they lead to him saying like the funniest shit I ever in my life. So that's a cool thing to watch. It's just like some idea you've been kicking around, you watch his brain shift that into like something supremely funny. I really love that, man. That's just like a fun thing to like see happen. He knows that I fucking hate the videos of animals eating each other. Like, I don't like that. I don't wanna watch it. I hate watching it. I don't think I've even articulated on his podcast how much I dislike it when he shows animals eating each other, but he knows because he knows me. And so he tortures, like when he starts doing that, it's like this kind of benevolent torture is he like asking Jamie to pull up increasingly disturbing animal attack videos. So it's just a friendship. Even in torture, because I'm reading about torture in the Gulag Archipelago currently, there's a bit of a camaraderie. You're in it together. The torturer and the tortured. What? Oh God, that's so fucked up, man. I've never. No, I mean, part of it was joke, but as I was saying it that. You're right. That it also comes out in the book, because they're both fucked. They're both have no control of their fate. That same was true in the camp guards in Nazi Germany and the people in the camps. The worst was brought out in the guards, but they were all in it together in some dark way. They were both fucked by a very powerful system that put them in that place. And both of us could be either player in that system, which is the dark reality that Solzhenitsyn also reveals that the line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man, as he wrote in Gulag Archipelago. But it is that amidst all of that, there's a, I don't know, the good vibes, the positivity comes out from the both of you. And that's beautiful to see. That is, I suppose, friendship. What do you think makes a good friend? Oh God, I mean, it's a billion things that make a good friend, but I think you could break it down to some RGB. I think you can go RGB with like a good friendship. Oh, in terms of the color, the red, green. Yeah, yeah, I think you could probably come up with some like fundamental qualities of friendship. And I'd say, number one, it's love. Like it's, friendship is love. It's a form of love. So obviously without that, I don't know how you, I mean, I'm not saying, I think if you're true friends, you love each other. So you need that. But love, obviously it's not, that's not enough. It's like with, true friends have to be like incredibly honest with each other. Not like, you know what I mean? But not like, I don't like, I think there's a kind of like, I don't know if you've ever noticed, like some people who say, you know, I just tell it like it is. But the thing they tell. Those are always the assholes. Yeah, why is it that your tell it like it is is always negative? Why is it, it's always cynical or shitty, or you're like negging somebody or me. How come you're not telling it like it is when it's good too? You know what I mean? So sort of like trust, but a pro evolutionary kind of trust. You know what I mean? Like, you know that your friend loves you and wants you to be yourself. Cause if you weren't yourself, then you wouldn't be their friend. You'd be some other thing. But also they might be seeing your blind spots that other people in your life, your family, your wife, whoever might not be seeing. So that's a good friend is someone who like loves you enough to when it matters be like, hey, are you all right? And then help you see something you might not be seeing. But hopefully they only do that once or twice a year. You know what I'm saying? There is something, I mean, it just would have, this world, especially if you're a public figure, this world has its plenty of critics. And it feels like a friend, the criticism part is already done for you. I think a good friend is just there to support, to actually notice the good stuff. But in comedy, we need like the, what, like it's really good in comedy to have somebody who can like be like, what do you think of that? And know that they're not gonna be like, that was funny. But that's for the craft, the craft itself, like the work you do, not the, yeah, interesting, but that's so tough. Yeah, whatever your particular art form or whatever you are doing, I mean, you don't always be leaning on your friends opinions for like your own innovation, but it's nice to know that you have someone who, not just with jokes, but with anything, if you go to them and run something by them, they're gonna like, they're gonna be honest with you about like their real feelings regarding that thing, because that helps you grow as a person. We need that. And it hurts sometimes, and we don't wanna hurt our friends. One of the more satanic like impulses when you're with somebody is not wanting to honestly answer whatever they're asking in that regard or wanting to like put their temporary feelings over something that you've recognized is maybe not great. I'm not saying a friendship is something where you're always critiquing or evolving each other. It's not your therapist or whatever, but it's nice when it's there, you know? I think that's another aspect of friendship. Yeah, but yeah, love is at the core of that. You notice, I've met people in my life where almost immediately sometimes it takes time where you notice like there's a magic between the two. You're like, oh shit, you seem to be made from the same cloth, whatever that is. Well, you know, we have a name for that in the spiritual community, it's called satsang, and it's, I love the idea. It's basically like if Nietzsche's idea of infinite recurrence is true, then your satsang would be the people you've been infinitely recurring with. And those are the people where you run into them and you've never met them, but it's like you're picking up a conversation that you never had. Yeah. That, and that is based on an idea of like, this isn't the only life. We're always hanging out together. We always show up together. You've had a brush with death. You had cancer, you survived cancer. Yeah. What have, how does that change you? What have you learned about life, about death, about yourself, about the whole thing we're going through here from that experience? You were just in the Ukraine. Yes. And you were making observations on this, what could, if you heard about it and weren't there, seem like it doesn't make any sense at all, which is people there are connecting, they've lost everything, but they're just happy to be alive, they're happy their friends are alive. So you witness this like, you know, when you get in the cancer club and you're hanging out with people going through cancer or who have survived cancer, you see this beautiful connection with life that can easily sort of, you can kind of lose that connection with life if you forget you're gonna die. Forgetting you're gonna die is, or that you can die is not just, I think from an evolutionary perspective where survival is the game, not gonna improve your survival chances, you know, if you think you're immortal, you know, but also forgetting that you're gonna die and that everything is around you and everything, your clothes are probably gonna last longer than you, your equipment is gonna be around much longer than you, you know, like, so forgetting these things, it can lead, and I know why people don't wanna think about death because it's scary, it's fucking scary, it's terrifying. So I get why people don't wanna think about it. But the idea is if I try to pretend I'm not gonna die or just don't think about death or don't at least address it, then I won't feel scared. But it can have the opposite effect, which is you can end up like missing a lot of moments. You could, or you start doing the old kick the can down the road thing where you're like coming up with a variety of ways to procrastinate, making it work now, because you know, this fucking human lifespan idea, man, it's really caused a lot of problems. When they started saying on average, this is how many years you're gonna live if you're a human being, man, that is like really bad because a lot of people hear that and they like feel like that's a guaranteed number of years in some temporal bank that they have access to. And when you get cancer, that's like when you get the alert on your phone where you're like, what the fuck? Wait, what? Like, oh shit, like I have like, either I don't know how much money's in that bank account or I have way less than I thought. And so at that point, you get to be in the truth because that's ultimately, I think that's what it feels like. It feels like truth. It's truth. It's the truth. It's the truth. Like the whole bubble of ignorance that you subconsciously built around yourself to avoid experiencing the terror of your own mortality, just, it's like a meteorite in the form of your doctor talking to you just shatters that thing. And now you're like, especially with eye testicular cancer. So when you get the diagnosis, it's just like the movies. The mother, the doctor took me in his office and you just know, I got cancer. It's like, you don't even have to say. It's like, I know what you're about to say. I'm in the office. I know how this goes. But you go in there and what you were thinking, oh, you know, probably just have some weird thing in my ball. That's why it's swollen up like that. Anytime I've gone to the doctor, you always leave like, oh, cool, I'm fine. But no, that's not how you're gonna leave the doctor. You're gonna leave the doctor in a completely different universe than the one you grew up in. You're gonna go from, talk about multiverse. You just popped into a brand new multiverse. So. What was the conversation with the doctor like? Was there like, from a perspective of a doctor, boys had a hard conversation. I feel like you need to build up philosophically to that conversation. Oh no. Oh no, there's not time. He's busy. He's got other appointments, you know. Also, if you're gonna get cancer, testicular cancer is, you know, not that there is a great cancer to get, but that's the, you know, that's a good one because it moves slowly. The treatments they have for it are really advanced now. And so if you catch it early, then, you know, generally it's good, you can survive it. So. So he could offer at least some glimmer of hope. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, but he didn't really do, he couldn't really offer that hope because we had to find out how far the cancer progressed in my body. That's the next step is like, as soon as they tell you you have cancer, they don't, they're not, they move quick. They're like, you know, we're going to schedule the surgery for, I think this was a Thursday or Friday. They're like, we're gonna schedule it for Tuesday. Here's the chance, here's, we don't know for sure it's cancer. That's what they say. It's like, there's a 80 or 90% chance that this is cancer. There is some possibility it could be something else. The only way we can now is like doing a biopsy. And the only way that we can get that biopsy is by cutting one of your balls off. He didn't say it like that, but you know, that's pretty much the logic behind it. It's like, we got to get this thing. It's like a zombie bite. We got to hack this fucking thing off and we got to do it fast. But did you say it in a way that you understood? Yeah, what they do is because they know that when someone gets a cancer diagnosis, that their ability to comprehend information changes. When you get a cancer diagnosis, you, all the tropes, they happen. You're hearing it's weird. You're basically having like an anxiety attack, if I had to guess. It's like a hardcore anxiety attack. And then, you know, a nurse is there with me as he's explaining it. And then her job is, even though he's telling me how to get to the machine that's going to scan my body to see if it's gotten into my brain, he knows I'm not going to remember that. And so this nurse, when you're in this like fog, takes you, at least took me to the machine that does the scan, but you're not going to get that data back for a few days. And so that's where you really live in the real world. That's the real world. It's such a fascinating moment and the days that follow and even that moment, because that doctor, you know, you talk about the matrix where like the pills and so on, you get the blue pill and the red pill. Yeah. This is like the, like the real world introduction, the human introduction is the truth. You've now just taken the red pill. You get to see the truth of reality. And here's a busy doctor just telling you. Yeah. Like all those dreams you've had, all those illusions you've built up to somehow your work as a comedian and actor will make you live forever somehow. It's just the basic illusion we have that we're, this whole project is going to be an infinite sequence of fun things that we're going to get to do. It's like, holy shit, it's not. That's right. It's old. That's right. And there's very sophisticated ways of doing that. And there's very dumb ways of doing that. And I'd really been doing a dumb way of doing that. Like I'd been playing around with this idiot notion of subjective consciousness. So like, I'd been sort of kicking around this, like I think they call it solipsism. It's like, you're like, okay, I know I'm self aware, but no one else can prove that they're self aware. Like I don't, I have no way of proving that everything around me isn't just a video game, isn't just some projection, isn't, you know, who knows what. So maybe everybody else dies. They're NPCs, but I don't, because I'm the only thing I know that has subjective consciousness. Now, it's not like I really believed that. It's like an idea you toy around with when you're trying to evade confronting the reality of your own mortality. It's just the brain will produce all kinds of ridiculous forms of ignorance. And that was one I'd been playing around with. Oh, you mean for like a large part of your life you were playing around with that? Well, not like really, I think it's important to really emphasize, I didn't think I was a mortal. Like I knew at some level, I'm probably gonna die. Everyone dies. But there's ways that you can sort of poke around with that idea. I still do it to this day. Like I still do it. Like it's a natural thing to do when you're confronted with that, with annihilation. You wanna way out. You wanna talk your way out, figure it out. There's gotta be some way to fix it. Well, they'll fix it. That's another thing people do. Well, they'll fix it. Yeah, it'd be fine. They'll expand the human lifespan. That's what they'll do. I mean, that's a big argument for it is like, look, the human lifespan up until COVID, which they had to recalculate like the lifespan because of the statistically all the people who died, it like threw it off a little bit. But pandemics aside, the idea was the human lifespan seemed to be increasing by half a year every year, something like that. We were living longer. So all you gotta do, one more half a year. And we're immortal, right? If we live a year longer every year, then we live forever. And so that's another way you can get out of confronting death is you can think, well, maybe right now we don't have the tech, but it's coming. Consciousness uploads or downloads or whatever, depending on how you wanna look at it. Another way people try to squirm out of the reality of death. There's all kinds of tricks. Yeah, and we do all of them. And sometimes, yeah, I mean, a lot of religions provide different, even more tools in the toolkit for coming up with ideas of how you can live in the illusion that we're not going to, there's not an end to this particular experience that we're having here on earth right now. And then when you get that cancer diagnosis, it's like, yeah, what was that like going home? The car ride, did you drive home alone? Yeah, I mean, it was one of the most. What'd you listen to, Bruce Springsteen? Bruce Springsteen, hey little girl, is your daddy home? That's not a good one to listen to. Does he have cancer, is he gonna die? Yeah, all the love songs. Maybe you experienced them more intensely. I don't remember what I listened to, and I don't remember driving home, but I do remember driving to another doctor appointment, doctor's appointment the next day. I think it was the next day. I think the Goodyear blimp was floating in the sky and I was looking, I was at a stoplight, looking around. Is that God? Is the person flying it know how to cure cancer? Oh, you were looking, oh wow. No, I didn't think that. What I thought was this shit just keeps going. That's what I thought. I thought, I'm gonna be gone and this is just gonna keep going. And that was a beautiful moment for me. It was this beautiful moment of like. You were able to accept it? Oh yeah. No, like that's just what you're talking about with the Ukraine, what you're talking about. It's like, unless you've been there, it's really hard to explain to people that even in the midst of what is generally accepted as one of the worst fucking things that could happen to you, war, cancer, somehow there's still joy. There's still love. There's still, in fact, more. It's almost like when the anesthesia wears off, when you get your mouth worked on, you start feeling again. You're feeling, you're noticing and that, wow. But yet, thank goodness. I think there's other ways for us to achieve this state of consciousness that don't involve war or cancer. Thank God. You think just meditating on your mortality is one such mechanism? Just simply just not allowing yourself to get lost in the day to day illusion of life. Just kind of stopping, putting on Bruce Springsteen. The most spiritual, he is great. Maybe Johnny Cash hurt. Maybe that one. I like Bruce Springsteen. I am knocking Bruce Springsteen. I have a lot of great Bruce Springsteen memories, truly. His music's fantastic. Yeah, but not meditating on mortality to Bruce Springsteen. You know what? I'm just trying to do an audio soundtrack in my head. I guess we can each have our own audio soundtrack. Oh, I'm on fire. It's so good. Yeah, it's a good song. That's one of them. I lay with the sheets soaking wet and the freight train running through the middle of my head and only you can cool my desire. And he's singing about someone else's girl. What a fucking nightmare. Bruce Springsteen's laying in bed with a freight train running through his head thinking about banging your wife and you're out of town. Oh my God. Oh, you're taking the other guy's perspective. Like, holy shit, this guy's gonna get my wife. It's Bruce, yeah, you gotta take the other guy's. But it's love. Both perspectives. I'm sure Bruce Springsteen thought it was love when he's sweating in bed, waiting to go to somebody's house. She does too. What, does that marry? If he's gonna break up that marriage, that marriage wasn't strong enough, right? I mean, that relationship, I mean, that's the way of love. What marriage could survive? Bruce Springsteen. Sweaty Bruce Springsteen. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, maybe one that's based on financial, sort of financial dynamics versus like love and sweaty Bruce Springsteen, like romantic connections. Because there's like a music video of that where he's like a mechanic, I think. So he's like the poor mechanic who falls in love with this girl and there's that magic. I've seen that magic. You connect with people like, I'll see somebody, I think Jack Kerouac has that where he meets this Mexican girl on a bus. And like he talks about that heartbreak you feel when you realize this person you just fell in love with in a split second is heading somewhere else in this too big world. But then he actually realizes in, spoiler alert for On The Road, that they're actually heading the same way and he now builds up the courage to talk to her and they kind of fall in love for a few days. And then he realized, eventually realizes that she may not be the perfect person for him. And all the jealousies comes out. It's like, why is this beautiful girl talking to me at all? And then she's probably some kind of, I mean, and that's, it's not very politically correct but he basically thinks that she's a prostitute and he talks to her about like, who's your pimp and all that kind of stuff. He attacks her in all that kind of way when she's just an innocent, she has a past of that kind. But she's an innocent person and they connected and they fell in love with each other. Her gentleness, his worldliness, all that kind of stuff. But that sometimes it doesn't work out that way and there's that heartbreak when you see, you realize you're never gonna be able to have that. And that's, Bruce Springsteen saw that. This is a married woman. I'm never gonna be able to have that, but I want that. And that's the heartbreak. I gotta say, I just assumed they were fucking, like I didn't. I mean, after the song, like if the song doesn't get to. Hey little girl, is your daddy home? Did he go away and leave you all alone? You know, he's like, he knows she's at home alone. Yeah, but it never materializes. He's, it's longing. It's a man who's not with the thing he craves for. So he's longing for, he's talking about the longing. Right. Not with the having. Hey, if anybody in the CIA is watching this, can you look into Bruce Springsteen's file and let us know if he actually banged the person you wrote that song about? What happens after the song, or between the song? We want facts. Look, the longing though, I'll tell you this. Here's what's interesting about that thing that you're talking about. Have you ever heard of something called Bhakti Yoga? I think so, yeah. It's the yoga of love. And there's all kinds, there's forms of it. The most, the one people know about the most is the Hare Krishnas. But the Hare Krishnas are like, you know, the way in Christianity, you've got the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Baptists. In Bhakti Yoga, you have various deities that are the object of love. And so Bhakti Yoga is like, and what's really cool about it is it's an analysis of love. And so, and it's the supposition being like, love is the way to commune with the divine. Now, a distinction is drawn between like two big worldviews that are spiritual. One is the concept of sort of unit of consciousness, which you'll run into in a lot of forms of Buddhism, if not all, a sort of a way of deconstructing the identity or understanding that you might not be anything at all. That in fact, you're part of everything. And in that, there's a potential relief from suffering in that, not just like intellectually knowing it, but becoming it. Now, whereas in Bhakti Yoga, there's this idea of like, the best thing is to be the individual because individuals are required for love, this for love to work, embodied love. And so the quality, the thing we call the experience of love is something that can be cultivated. It doesn't just have to be for another person. It doesn't have to be for the stranger on the bus. It doesn't have to be for sweaty Bruce Springsteen's lover that you could actually, you can actually shift that love to the divine, to God. Cause obviously it's the Hare Krishnas, it's a theistic religion. They believe in Krishna who is the, from the POV of Vaisnava Bhakti Yoga, the Godhead, the source from which everything flows into time and space. So there are all these like fascinating stories of Krishna. It's not just, most people are familiar with Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita. They're about to be more, what's cool about it is cause it's like they're making the Oppenheimer movie and he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita when they split the atom. But there's all these stories of Krishna that are not just in the Bhagavad Gita. And these stories, they could seem very simple when taken literally, but in Vaisnava Bhakti Yoga, it's this very advanced theistic yogic system. So they take these stories and from these stories, they extrapolate this incredible analysis of what love is and how to connect with the universe. So like Krishna has a lover, Radharani. And so sometimes they're getting along. Sometimes they're fighting. Sometimes they're separated. And so each of these ways of feeling about Krishna are modes of love. So longing actually is considered one of the highest forms of love. The idea is the longing is the grace. The longing is the love. So when you find yourself in a situation of longing and heartbreak, it is identical to union. And perhaps more intensely representative of the essence of what is love. Yes, and they call it pining. So there's the, and it's pining for Krishna. And there's also, there's other ways you could be with Krishna is as a friend. So this is another form of love or as a mother, because Krishna has a mother. So there's like all these ways of like looking at the various forms of love. And it's a really beautiful form of yoga. That's emphasizing the individual and the individual as a kind of channel to this universal love. Yeah, there's a lot of different like their answer to the question of what shows up in Buddhism as absolute and relative reality. Like that obviously there's relative reality. We're not right now, you and me are not unit of consciousness. Like you zoom back far enough and we're gonna seem like an atom or whatever. The thing is, the trope is you can zoom back far enough and we're in a whatever, we're in a piece of cheese or something, who knows. But in that way we're like completely unified. But simultaneously we're individuals, like for sure we're individuals. Like you still gotta pay your taxes. You gotta know your social security number. That's relative reality. So, you know, Buddhism is like kind of the balance. Again, when I say Buddhism is I'm a comedian podcast or I'm not some Buddhist expert. This is just probably my confused idea of what it is. But anyway, in bhakti yoga, there's the concept, it's called, I'm gonna mispronounce it, asinka, sinka, beta, tatva. I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing it. Which means simultaneous oneness and difference. So. Oneness and difference. Yes, simultaneous oneness and difference. So that's why the oneness is the more part of the same piece of cheese and the difference is we are still each paying taxes. Yes, and in this case, the cheese is Krishna. So, you know, or other ways it gets described is like, you know, a photon blasting off the sun has sunlight qualities, but it's not the sun. Humans being one of the many things, you know, flowing out of the creative consciousness of the divine have qualities that are weirdly like the godlike. You know, like we, in fact, we wanna control primarily. That's one of the problems, like humans wanna be in control, wherein from their, the bhakti yoga perspective, Krishna is effortlessly controlling everything. And so within the system, the individual parts of the system have that same quality, but you can't, you're probably not God. You might be, I'm not. I'm not. What do you think happens after we die? Having come close to that, that, that cliff and almost got pushed over once. What do you think happens when you do get pushed off the cliff? Okay. I feel dumb that I'm even gonna like preface this by saying, obviously I have no fucking idea. And I think that's one of the cool things about death. No idea. The CIA probably does. You think the CIA, I love like, we've decided your audience is the CIA. Yeah, yeah. How would you, oh, wait. I need to, cause there's a lot of suspicion that I might be FSB and Marsad. So I'm trying to rebrand. I'm trying to steer them into the CIA direction. As far as what happens when you, when you die, one thing I returned to when I'm getting overly complex is the idea of as above, so below. So that you can, a lot of the big questions can be answered by your own experience now. So in other words, like in terms of thinking about like death, if you look back to baby Lex versus adult Lex, where's the baby? Like baby's gone. They, you've regenerated all your cells many times by then. So in a way you could say Lex baby died. The death didn't look like a typical, and I'm not trying to dodge it, but I'm just saying it was very natural that the death of that baby. It just, it just. In many ways that baby died, but I am, at least personally I'm surprised how much the person is exactly the same. So there's many ways in which you're very different, but there's a lot of ways in which you're very much the same. And I wonder if that, if there's, if life is defined by many deaths that continue on, and then I wonder if there's something persists beyond in this, that, yeah, there is something that still persists, I wonder. Okay, so that. Now, you know, obviously there's so many different answers to this question that are religious, and ranging from like the most absurd shit you ever heard in your life, like the gold. You're gonna get a mansion. There's gold streets. Like, I don't, do you want like gold streets? Who offers gold streets? I know about the virgins, but there's a bunch of virgins. The Christians give you the gold streets in the mansion. Like depending on the, whatever the particular sect of Christianity is, you know, it's like some kind of city. There's, it's like paved with gold. No one's addressing the fact that at the moment the streets are made of gold. Gold is a valueless substance. I mean, it's sort of pretty in a cheesy kind of way, but no one's gonna give a shit about it. It's like, if there was not a lot of asphalt in the world, then, you know, we'd be in heaven from that same, that way of thinking. But the, or honestly, when going back, this is starting to get a theme with Gulag Archipelago. I'm sorry, I'm reading it currently. That's a sticky book. Yeah, it's very sticky in your mind. Very, very tough. As I'm running through very hot heat, I'm listening to Gulag Archipelago. Oh my God. And you know, one of the things they said, they would feed prisoners salt, and then they would exchange, the prisoners would be able to give up anything, everything, their gold, their possessions, everything for just one drink of water. So that little context of dehydrating them and feeding them salt changes your value system completely. So maybe the gold is supposed to be a metaphor for something that you still value deeply. Yes, it's, yeah, again, any of these things, when you like take them literally, they seem absurd. But if you look deeper into it, it's like quite beautiful. But the Buddhist version of it is that there's a momentum. The best way to put it is it's the kind of momentum. So the thing you're talking about, which is the personality of the baby that is still in the adult, which is still in the old person, you're looking at a kind of momentum that does not stop upon the extinction of the body. Now, I think there's a lot of, I don't want to say harm, because they didn't mean to hurt, but I think there's some harm that maybe has happened from the way death is represented in movies. Like when people die in movies, it's like there's this, usually it's pretty fast, even if it is what they're dying from is a longterm disease, it like wraps up pretty quickly, starts with a cough, the person's in bed, but there's this weird kind of lucidity to the person up until the point of death. And also they generally, in movies, they have makeup on, which is always funny to me when the person dying looks great. If you've ever been around a dying person, they're dying. They look like shit. You're dying. They're all gray and like confused. They're, you know, when you're around dying people, they will spin through time. Your parents won't recognize you for a second. They'll think you're somebody else. They won't, they're like everything's like the process is happening. So you're very confused when you die. So in general, not all the time, some people die with a clear mind. It just depends on the type of death, but think in terms of getting hit by a car. So you went across the street, you get hit by a car. Now, if we're talking about this momentum continuing, the confusion, assuming you didn't hit your head and you're unconscious, like somehow you just got smashed and you're like bleeding out, even then you're gonna be confused because you're getting dizzy, like blood's leaving your body. You're like, things are fading out. Your vision's going. So it's a very confusing experience initially when the body dies. If you are a materialist who has been, who has convinced themselves that it's a permanent thing, the next bit of confusion is going to be when you realize something is persisting here, like I'm still here. And this is where you run into the near death experiences, which are a global phenomena that don't seem to be completely shaped by culture. Like regardless of what part of the world people are having these experiences in, the reports tend to be similar and everyone's heard it, the light, the life review, seeing ancestors and stuff like that. Now, I don't know what that is. I don't know. Sometimes I think that's probably just like a built in way the computer shuts down. This is something it does, who knows? But in Buddhism, the concept is this momentum persists into something called the bardo. The bardo means in between. And there's an actual number of days they say that you get to hang out there. And I can't remember, it's like 37 days or 29 days or something, I'm not sure. But at least from the time space perspective, that's how long they're there. Within this place, there are a lot of technological parallels, man. It's like in the way the algorithm is reflective, it assesses your desires or whatever and then produces something that has within it a component of attraction to you. Apparently this happens in the bardo. Or the way you wake up in the morning and you're in a shitty mood. And then coincidentally, everyone that day is an asshole. If you don't catch it, you could just be like, wow, I guess it's act like an asshole day. You don't realize you're seeing your asshole projection being reflected off the screen of another person. So in the bardo apparently, you don't need people for the reflective quality. These projections happen and they appear as either Nietzsche's demon or Nietzsche's angel. It just depends on where you're at and how you died. And if you died scared, then at least initially that's gonna be some scary shit you see around you. If you died in a peaceful way, well then there's gonna be more of a possibility of navigation through this liminal intermediary place. And so thus the emphasis on meditation in Buddhism, a way to calm one's self, to not be distracted by thoughts, which are their own like apparitions. And then theoretically, if you wanted to, instead of spinning the wheel again and jumping back into a body, you could choose not to do that. And then transcend the wheel of birth and death. But if you still wanted to go back, if you still wanted to go back or return or whatever, however you wanna put it, then you could have more control over what your next birth might be versus in this depiction of things, people running from demons that they don't recognize as their own projection into any fucking body that they can find. Because if you've had a body, you want a body. And so this is how you can incarnate as an animal. This is how you can incarnate in the hell realms. This is how you can incarnate in any variety of things. But the idea is like maybe you could slow down a little bit and like choose a birth that is gonna be more conducive to you continuing to like spiritually evolve. I like that idea. Is it true or not? Who the fuck knows? Algorithmically speaking, it seems like a really fun role playing game where you basically keep improving the different parameters based on your ability and willingness to meditate and let go of the menial concerns of life on earth. Why do you think Buddhists see life as suffering? What's suffering? Okay, well, first of all, that gets mistranslated quite a bit. You're talking about the four noble truths. The first one is, often it's translated as life is suffering, which is not it, it's there is suffering. The whole life is suffering thing is just like a spiritual version of life's a bitch, then you die. And people hear that and they're like, yeah, life is fucking suffering, but it's there is suffering, there is suffering. So it's an affirmation. If you're like this thing that a lot of people feel that they associate with lots of, they have a lot of reasons they think they're feeling it is known as fundamental dissatisfaction. So another word for suffering, maybe it could be fundamental dissatisfaction. Also, the term itself, maybe a better translation is wobbly wheel. So like, imagine like when your bike doesn't have, or your car doesn't have enough air in the tires, your bike doesn't have enough air in the tires, it's kind of a shitty bike ride. Like no matter what, it's kind of like uncomfortable. It's like irritating. So this is what's being pointed to is that there's this quality within a human life that is unsatisfying. Like a wobbly wheel. Wobbly wheel. Why do you think, what is the core of that dissatisfaction? Because it could be as simple as kind of physical and mental discomfort and sadness and depression and all that kind of stuff. Or it could be more speaking to the sort of existentialist, the philosophical, the absurdity of it all. The fact that stuff happens, good stuff happens for no reason, bad stuff happens for no reason. Yeah, it's no matter how much you try, there's not a universal fairness to the whole thing. There's not even a universal meaning to the whole thing. So the existentialist perspective. What flavor of suffering do you prefer? If it was an ice cream shop. That's so funny. Well, I'm definitely picking desire over the, like if in the RGB that we're talking about here is desire, aversion and ignorance. So if you want to find like the three ingredients that are giving everyone their sophisticated bits of suffering, there you go. That's what it is. In which way does desire manifest itself in suffering? It hurts. To lose, to not have. Like, yeah, it hurts to not, like to eternally not have, but just like my friend pointed this out. He's like, you know, like you order something from Amazon. Like even in the smallest way, you're excited about whatever the thing is. You order this thing from Amazon, it's not coming for four days. So those four days are going to be somewhat marked by you being what people say, I'm excited about it. But really, if you look at that feeling, it's uncomfortable. Like the feeling of wanting the thing is uncomfortable. So that is a form of suffering. That's suffering. Interesting. I mean, I wonder, cause we naturally reframe that in our mind, wanting. We reframe that as a good thing. As a, and maybe suffering is fundamentally good in the way we think of what life is. So like, it's life affirming, but it's not usually how the word suffering is used. Well, it's true. It's true. Like the first noble truth of Buddhism is true. It's called the truth of suffering. There is suffering. I mean, this is like an, I don't know, an element that you can't break it down any further than that. Like there is suffering, this is truth. So if you think, you know, and again, assigning like good or bad to truth, I think maybe there's more of a sort of neutrality there. It's just what it is. It's truth. I mean, is it any, is it basically, is suffering any disturbance from stillness? Is suffering then? Like basically any, anything that happens in life that, that's like, that perturbs the system. Ripples in the empty. Ripples. Ripples, yeah. So a still lake is empty of suffering, but any kind of ripple is suffering in that sense. A still lake is empty of suffering. You sound like a Zen master. It seems like something a Zen master might say. If I can just grow a beard like yours. Ah, no, the beard doesn't help. We would, we would. If I had your chin, you think I'd have a fucking beard? I look like a stork. You should see me. If I had your chin, there'd be no beard here. You have a symmetrical, nice chin. This is the closest I can come to plastic surgery. Pubic plastic surgery, friend. That's how you know you're a professional comedian. Yeah, so suffering. There is suffering. And the lake analogy is pretty good because the, um, what's happening here is that, that we have become identified with something that we call a self. So this, the self is just accepted. I have a self, I have an identity, I'm a person, I have a self. But when you start doing scans to try to find yourself, which is the entire thing. I'm going to find myself. You get in a van, go to California, take some acid, fuck a prostitute on the bus or whatever Kerouac did. Too far? I'm going to find myself. Oh, he didn't, she wasn't a prostitute, just to correct the record. Oh, previously a prostitute. I guess once a prostitute, always a prostitute. You know what? She's a former prostitute. I don't think that. No, and look, I'm not, I'm not a sign, look, all I'm saying is, uh, I don't care. Who cares? Who has a bit of prostitute? God, I used to be one of them. We're all kind of a kind of prostitute. Yeah, yes, yes. But the. We make love and we make money. Therefore, we're all a kind of prostitute. We make, God, how great. I would really love to be able to make money by fucking. I mean, it's maybe not directly, but in some sense. Directly. Oh. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Do you accept Venmo or? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. It's never too late to start. That's so, sort of one of the ways in is this sort of contemplation of the identity, because it's like, uh, you know, what is, it's not just the desire, it's what is having the desire? Where, where does the desire live in? Like, what doesn't want to be where it's at? What is the thing that is like desperately wanting to get out of the situation it's in? And then, um, as far as ignorance, uh, it's still something that's theoretically happening to an identity. So, so wrapped up in it is really just this sort of like, and that's where we run into what, uh, into attachment. So if, if the first noble truth of Buddhism is there is suffering, the second noble truth of Buddhism is, um, the cause of this suffering is attachment. And so people hear that and they take it, that's a, there's a lot of levels to that concept. Definitely the cause of suffering is attachment. Like, God, I just got addicted to vapes. Is there a more embarrassing addiction than vapes? I'm smoking like a little purple thing. It tastes like sugar. It's attachment. It is, there is suffering. I want it. I have to charge it now. I'm embarrassed by it. It makes me feel out of control. There's a lot of suffering, but also there's deeper levels of attachment that go all the way to this attachment to the sense of one's self. And I think the existentialists do get into this idea in a different way, which is like, because I think I'm a me, now I have to push what that thing is out into the world through my actions. And that's a kind of attachment too. Exactly. There you go. Right. And that leads to the third noble truth, which is get rid of attachment and you won't suffer anymore. Uh, that's, it seems logical, but you know, it is a very, it is a mathematical analysis of this particular problem of suffering it's addressing. And then the fourth noble truth is the eightfold path of Buddhism, which is like a process by which one could unencumber oneself from this identification with something that isn't real. Do you need a bathroom break? Yeah. Thank you. I do. I appreciate that. There's a funny moment, I was running in the heat yesterday listening to Gulag Archipelago. And there's a, which was a very welcome break because I'm looking for any excuse to stop whatsoever. The gentleman, very nice gentleman stopped me saying, recognized me and just said a bunch of friendly things. And then he mentioned as one of the people who really inspires him is Duncan Trussell. And I was, I mean, I'm the same way and I told him, you know, tomorrow, it felt like a name drop. I name dropped you this morning. I was like, tomorrow I'm going to get to meet him. So he says, he says, hi. And there's, oh, and he said that he watched Midnight Gospel on mushrooms. And it was like the greatest mushroom experience of his life. I don't know. Yeah, man. Yeah, I was nervous about meeting you, man. Like I have so much respect for you. And like, oh yeah, I name dropped. I was saying I'm going on Lex's podcast today. It's, you look, we're so lucky we all live here. What the fuck? We're all living in Austin together. Like I, I somehow like missed that, but that's, we all got to hang out. We all have to like start doing stuff. Well, you have to really, also you have to appreciate this moment. I remember, I know some people are less sentimental than others, but I remember sitting with Joe Rogan and with Eric Weinstein, I believe it was. Yeah. And at the back of the comedy store shortly before COVID, I think. And just thinking like, there's no way these things will last. And these things meaning the comedy store, Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, the Joe Rogan, like a, like a pocket influential podcasting person. Also a person like in this room, in this space, the ability to just talk for hours and lose ourselves in this moment. It just felt ephemeral, somehow temporary. And I just wanted to capture that moment somehow. Like, I don't know. Sometimes that's where the temptation to take a picture and you're that kind of stuff or record a podcast comes from. But it just felt like it would be, it'd be gone forever. Of course, Joe doesn't seem to have that kind of sentimental. No, sure, no, no. Just wherever you end up, you just enjoy the shit out of it. Right. That's it. Well, and that's something you have to cultivate. You don't, that's not an easy, the thing you're talking about, you know, God, have you seen these? I think the best analogy for what you're talking about, there's these videos where people give like a sugar cube to a raccoon, but the raccoons, they wash their food. So raccoon, or I think it's cotton candy. They give the raccoon cotton candy, immediately it washes the cotton candy. And of course the cotton candy dissolves in the water. And the raccoon is like, what the fuck? Like, you know, and the thing you're, that grasping you're talking about, it's like the raccoon washing the cotton candy. Like the moment you get into the grasping part, you paradoxically have pulled yourself out of the moment that inspired the grasping part. And that's, you know, that's some people, that's the entirety of their lives trying to record. I mean, Jesus, man, you ever see people film fireworks on the 4th of July with their phone? It's one of the most remarkable aspects of human behavior, which is like, you know they're not gonna watch the fireworks on their phone. Only a lunatic would do that. Like who's gonna go back and look at fireworks, but. So, but we're also in this position where, because of podcasting, there is some aspect where you can record a magical moment in time together between two people, or even just with a camera. So to get back to the lake that you were talking about, this is emptiness. So that's emptiness. That's what's known as emptiness. The lake is emptiness. And that's what we are, emptiness, emptiness. And that's another thing that gets very confused in Buddhism is that emptiness. And that emptiness is, that's to me, like when I'm going to do a podcast, that's where I try to go. I try to go just in the moment, no agenda. You know, if I am nervous or whatever, okay, I'll feel the nervousness, but just in the, just drop into the moment. That's when time changes. And then you look up, hours have passed. It feels like a second. And the reason it feels like that is because if you successfully dropped into the moment, it's the lake now, it's emptiness. It's forever for a second. You're like, you're dipping into eternity. And yeah, it's a very strange thing to, as part of that, record it, you know, as part of that, try to like grab it and put it out there, but it works. Can you speak to that, to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour? Can you speak about that purple lavender world you go to when it's most intense and successful for you, when you feel a sense of lightness and happiness when it works, whether it's your own or a conversation with Joe in general, or is, well, yours is very specific because it's audio only. Maybe you can also speak to that. Because you might as well be naked or you don't have to, you have to, you're free of the conventions of the real world. I will never stop thinking it's remarkable. Like the fact that I'm talking to you, to me, seems remarkable, not just technologically, but I'm talking to someone, I'm assuming I'm allowed to say this, who has robot dogs that I've been watching for years evolve on YouTube. Arms reach away from one of these things, you know? And I'm with somebody who is like an acclaimed genius. So for me, it's like, oh my God, how's, what, why do I get to have this conversation? Why do I get to be here? When there'd be like a line, there'd be a line that would just wrapped and wrapped and wrapped around this building of people who'd love a chance to just chat with you. And so when I, with my podcast, that's how I feel like when I'm talking to these guests, you know, who have spent, you know, some of them have like spent their entire lifetime meditating, you know, studying specific aspects of Buddhism or even when I'm with, you know, when I'm with comedians who I like consider to be brilliantly funny. So for me, it's just like, God, I almost feel like I've just created some sophisticated trap for cool people where like I get to like hang out with them. So you're like sitting in the gratitude of it, just feeling lucky. Yeah, yeah, feeling lucky and wrestling with imposter syndrome, you know, trying to like get that part of myself to shut up long enough so I could be in that moment that we're talking about, you know? And then I carry that with me. It's not just like you stop the podcast. It's like some of the things these people tell me or some of the ways they are, like it becomes part of me. And then I get to have a life or this thing that they gave me is in me forever. And so, yeah, it's, there's... Yeah, it's cool how conversation can just, a few sentences can change the direction of your life. If you're listening, if you're there to be transformed by the words, they will do the work. It's, and it's the full mix of it. It's usually when, if you look up to somebody, and it's true for me at least, I think it is for you that you start to look up to basically everybody you talk to. Yes, yes, good sign. That's a good sign. God forbid it goes the other way. You're in trouble. If all of a sudden you start looking down on people, because whatever crazy metric you're using, ooh, that would freak me out. I do feel like that's a quality of getting older. When I was younger, I really, like, I thought I was so smart. Like I thought I had it all figured out. Oh, really? So you're going, your ego is just going, taking a nose dive. I would like to say it's my ego taking a nose dive. Me and my friend talk about it a bunch. We've just always associated it with like doing acid for two decades straight. Like, I'm gonna just assume I'm just like slowly like spiraling into senility, you know? Like, I'm just like, all the confidence, all the like, oh, the certainty when you're having, like in college, having the great, oh, like, you know, you feel like you're a representative of Camus or some shit. You know what I mean? You read the myth of Sisyphus, and now you like it, know all existentialism and your certainty in regards to it is embarrassing, but you don't see it in that way. You just feel certain. And then that certainty, it just starts like, it starts crumbling a little bit. And then, yeah. You know, I get to actually intensely experience that certainty in many communities, but one in cryptocurrency. Young folks with the certainty that this technology will transform the world. And I mean, this is almost one of the big communities of the modern era where they believe that this will really solve so many of the problems of the world, and they believe in it very intensely. And aside from the technology and the details of the thing, all I see is the certainty and the passion in their eyes. They'll stop me. Let me explain you, let me just give me a chance to tell you why this thing is extremely powerful. And I just get to enjoy the glow of that, because it's like, wow, I miss having that certainty about anything. It's probably come over for me too. But when I was younger, it's like, only I deeply understand the relationship of man to his mortality. And I understood that most deeply, I think, when I was like 16 or 17. And I am the representative of the human condition. And all these adults with their busyness of day to day life and their concerns, they don't deeply understand what I understand, which is the only thing that matters is the absurdity of the human condition. Yeah, yeah. And let me quote you some Dostoevsky. Oh boy, and you speak Russian. Yes, I speak Russian. So you've read the Brothers Karamazov in Russian. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I read all of the Dostoevsky in English. I came to this country when I was 13. And at least don't remember, we read a lot, but we read Tolstoy, Pushkin, a lot of the Russian literature but it was in Russian. But I don't remember reading Dostoevsky. I wonder at which point does the Russian education system give you Dostoevsky? Because it's pretty heavy stuff. Second grade, it's probably the second grade. Russians are intense. Yes, they are, they very much are. I don't remember reading Dostoevsky, but I did tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. I traveled to Paris recently on the way to Ukraine and was scheduled to talk to Richard Pevere and this pair that translate Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, just this famous pair that translate most of Russian literature to English. And I was planning to have a sequence of five, 10, 15 hour conversation with them about the different details of all the translations and so on. I just found myself in a very dark place mentally where I couldn't think about podcasts or anything like that. It caught me off guard. So I went to Paris and just laid there for a day. Not just being stressed about Ukraine and all those kinds of things, but I'm still, the act of translation is such a fascinating way to approach some of the deepest questions that this literature raises, which is like, how do I capture the essence of a sentence that has so much power and translate it into another language? That act is actually really, really interesting. And I found with my conversations with them, they've really thought through this stuff. It's not just about language, it's about the ideas in those books. And that also really makes me sad because I wonder how much is lost in translation. I'm currently, so when I was in Ukraine, I talked to a lot of, like half the conversations I had on the record were in Russian, and basically 100% of the record were in Russian in Russian versus in English. And just so much is lost in those languages. And I'm now struggling because I'm launching a Russian channel where there'll be a Russian overdub of Duncan. Wow. Your wow will now be translated into Russian. What's Russian wow? I don't, it'll just be wow probably. I'm so sorry for the difficulties of having to translate wow. Usually probably with wow they'll leave it unoverdubbed because people understand exactly what you mean. But that's an art form, and it's a weird art form. It's like how do you capture the chemistry, the excitement, the, I don't know, maybe the humor, the implied kind of wit. I don't know, there's just layers of complexity in language that it's very difficult to capture. And I wonder how, it is sad for me because I know Russian, how much is lost in translation. And the same, there's a brewing conflict and tension with China now, and so much is lost in the translation between those languages. Oh my God, yeah. And cultures, the entire, the music of the people is completely lost because we don't know the language, or most of us don't know the language. Yeah, how much of the conflict is just problems in translation? How much of all these problems that we're having are just the alien sense of this or that? It's just as simple as that. Words are getting just a tiny warp away from the intent of if, when we both speak the same language, we can still say something that offends someone when you never intended that at all. How much more so when like it's, not only is it a completely different sound, but the script itself is different. Like what is, the Russian writing, is it called Cyrillic or what's the name? Yeah, Cyrillic. Cyrillic, and I don't know the name for Chinese writing, but it's like, it's a continuum that like gets weirder and weirder looking, you know? Like it's, so yeah. Or less weird depending on your perspective. Yeah, I'm sure depending on where you're at. You know, I'm definitely, I'm about the farthest thing from a polyglot as there could be, man. Like, but I'll tell you, at one point when I was getting fascinated by Dostoevsky, I did have this very transient fantasy about learning Russian so that I could like understand the difference and it's. You were 17, 18 at the time. College. Yeah, college. Yeah, Brothers Karamazov lost in that book. Just like, oh God. So in love with it is. But there's definitely like, you know, Ukraine, and this is what a lot of the war is about is saying, you know, Ukraine and Russia are not the same people. There's a strong culture in Ukraine, there's a strong culture in Russia. But you know, I know because that's where my family's from, there is a fascinating, strong culture. But there's such strong cultures everywhere else too. Ireland has a culture, Scotland has a culture. Even like on a tiny island, you just have these like, subcultures that are more powerful than anything existing in human history. Like the Bronx, I don't know, like Brooklyn. Like different parts of New York have a certain culture. And then New York versus LA versus, well. And then certain places are looking for their culture. Like I don't, I think Austin, I don't know what Austin is. And I don't think anyone knows. There's a traditional Austin, and then it's evolving constantly. Same with Boston, a place I spent a lot of time. There's a traditional Boston and now it's evolving with the different younger people coming from university and staying and all of that is evolving. But underneath it, there's a core, like the American ideal of the value of the individual, the value of freedom, of freedom of speech, all those kinds of things that permeates all of that. And the same thing in the history of World War II permeates Ukraine and Russia, a lot of parts of Europe, the memories of all that suffering and destruction, the broken promises of governments and the occupier versus the liberator, all that kind of stuff. All that permeates the culture. That affects how cynical or optimistic you are, or how much you appreciate material possessions versus human connection, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's, I mean, this is like, talk about absurdity. I mean, this is, war is like, it's what absurdity looks like. It's some kind of organized madness. None of it makes sense, like all of it, like it's just, none of it makes sense, but it does, but it doesn't. I mean, obviously you're defending yourself or you're taking orders that if you don't take, you're going to jail. And so, or somewhere in between, there's a classic story about this. Maybe it's a bullshit myth about World War II. I'm sure everyone's heard it because it comes up, you know, it's Christmas Eve and they have a ceasefire. And then I think they played soccer, they sing Christmas songs, and then they had to force them into fighting again. And so when those moments happen, the, are you familiar with Hakeem Bey? He's a controversial figure. Sadly, like he, like, I think he was like, I'm not going to defame him because I haven't like researched it correctly, but some people have said shit, but since I don't know the reference, I'm not going to. But regardless, I mean, you know, look, I'm sorry, but Bill Cosby was funny. You know, like that's a funny comedian, but you know the other stuff. Michael Jackson, he could fucking dance. And sing. And sing, but there's some other stuff. But regardless, Hakeem Bey came up with the idea of something called a temporary autonomous zone, which is that within a structure, a cultural structure, a temporary bubble of freedom will appear that by its nature gets sort of popped by the bigger bubble, or it runs out of resources generally is what happens. So these things will appear just out of the blue that it's almost like, imagine if like on earth in some tiny little bit of earth, the gravitational field was reduced by some percentage. And all of a sudden you could jump really high or whatever, but it wouldn't last. It's like that culturally, all the restrictions and the darkness and the heaviness and all of it for a second, somehow this bubble appears where humans come together as the hippie ideal. Brothers, sisters, just humans, earthlings instead of American, Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian temporary autonomous zone, it gets crushed by the default reality that it was appearing in. But somehow within that space, you witness the possibility, the possibility, the frustrating possibility that anyone who's thought about humanity knows this possibility, which is like, it seems like we can just get along. Like it does seem like we're pretty much the same thing and that we can just get along. Those moments are really rare. It's sad. I talked to a lot of soldiers, a lot of people that suffered through the different aspects of that war. Or war, and there's an information war that convinces each side that the other is not just the enemy, but less than human. Right. So there's a real hatred towards the other side. Yeah. And those kind of little moments where you realize, oh, they're human like me. Yeah. And not just like human like me, but they have the same values as me. And this woman who was a really respected soldier, she specializes in anti tank missiles. And she's very kind of, very pragmatic, very the enemy is the enemy, you have to destroy the enemy and saying like, there's no compassion towards the enemy. They're not human. They're less than human. But she said there was a moment when she remembers an enemy soldier in a tank took a risk to save a fellow soldier. And that risk was really stupid because he was facing, he was going to get destroyed. And then she said that she tried to shoot a rocket at that tank and she missed. And then she later went home and she couldn't sleep that she missed. How could she screw that up? But then she realized that actually she missed, maybe she missed on purpose. Yeah. Because she realized that that man, just like she is, was a hero, just like she strives to be. They were both heroes defending their own. And in that way, he was just like her. She was like, that's the only time I remember during this war ever feeling like this is another human being. But that was a very brief moment for her. And I just hear that over and over and over again. These romantic notions we have of we're one, that we're all just human. Unfortunately during war, those notions are rare. And it's quite sad. And war in a certain way really destroys those notions. And one of the saddest things is it destroys it, at least from what I see, potentially for generations. Not just for those people for the rest of their life, but for their children, their children's children. The hatred. I mean, I ask that question of basically everyone, which is will you ever forgive, asking of Ukrainians, will you ever forgive the Russians? Will, do you have hate in your heart towards the Russians? Or do you have love for a fellow human being? And there's different ways that people struggle with that. Different people, they saw that, they saw the love, they saw the hate with their known heart. And they struggle with the hate they have. And they know they can overcome it in a period of weeks and months after the war is over. But some people said, no, this hate that was, that showed up in February when the war started will be with me forever. Well, yeah, their kids got killed. What the fuck are you gonna do about that? Like, I don't care. I've got aphorisms and cute little stories about, you're still in prison if you hate your former captors. But man, I gotta tell you, if somebody hurt my kids, I'm not coming back. I mean, there's no amount, at least right now in my approximation, of spiritual literature, meditation, or anything that I can really think of that is going to give me that kind of space. Like, I think I imagine in the same way like, I imagine I could probably run a marathon eventually, but do I think I'm ever gonna do that? That times a million. So man, all we can do is have compassion for their hate because it's like, what are you gonna say? What are you gonna say to someone like that? Oh, oh, you know, for the sake of humanity, let it go. It was just your kids. It was just something you loved more than anything in the world. You'll never be okay again. You're gonna have nightmares for the rest of your life. But you should forgive. No. Well, there is truth in the fact that forgiveness is the way to let go, right? But that truth is not, fuck you, right? Which is why it's not your job to say that. Not that you're doing that, I know you're not. But you know, the problem with people like me, early phase, you could get this stupid missionary thing going where you like, start trying to like, I don't know, like proselytize ideals that you might be incapable of, you know? And I just, hearing it, you know, that's the, man, I saw this, the thing that like, I mean, I've seen a lot, all of us by now, probably if we were online, I've seen, and you just saw it in person. Like we've seen things that are just horrific. But as a dad, man, I just saw this clip of this kid around the age of my kid, walking by himself, these refugees, just walking by himself, crying, the look on his face, I can't explain the look on his face. I don't know what happened to his parents. I don't know what happened. Like I, it was so upsetting. Like even thinking about it now, it's just like, fuck, that could have been my kid. That could have been my kid, you know? So knowing that kind of, that, that kid's gotta grow up now. And I don't know, is the kid's parents still there? And that's just one of countless orphans out there now. So what you have this hate, and the question is how to direct it. Because the choice is you can direct it towards the politicians that started the war. You can direct it towards the soldiers that are doing the killing, or you can direct it towards an entire group of people. And that's the struggle because hate slowly grows to where you don't just hate the soldiers. You don't just hate the leaders. You hate all Russians because they're all equally evil because the ones that aren't doing the fighting are staying quiet. And I'm sure the same kind of stories are happening on the other side. And so there is, that hate is one that is deeply human, but you wonder for your own future, for your own home, for building your own community, for building your own country, how does that hate morph over the weeks and months and years? Not into forgiveness, but into something that's productive that doesn't destroy you. Because hate does destroy. That's the dark aspect of a rocket that hits a building and kills hundreds of people. The worst effect of that rocket is the hate in the hearts of the loved ones to the people that were in that building. That hate is a torture over a period of years after. And that it doesn't just torture by having that psychological burden and trauma. It also tortures because it destroys your life. It prevents you from being able to enjoy your life to the fullest. It prevents you from being able to flourish as a human being, as a professional, in all those kinds of ways that humans can flourish. And I don't know. It's such a, there is an aspect where this naive notion is really powerful, that love and forgiveness is the thing that's needed in this time. And when I talk to soldiers, they don't, I remember bringing up to Jaco, is there a sense where the people you're fighting are just brothers in arms, bringing up the Dire Straits song, Brothers in Arms? And he was basically, without swearing, saying fuck that, that they're the enemy. Yeah, I mean, he's literally in survival mode. He can't think like that. It's gonna create latency in the system and that's gonna lower his survivability. You can't think that. I mean, we're talking about cognitively. You can't have latency. Like, if you're, that one moment of hesitation, you see it sometimes in these YouTube videos of like somebody, a new cop has been unfortunate enough to run into something that is a phenomenon, suicide by cop. Somebody has a knife and that person is running towards them with a knife and they're begging the person to stop, that you can hear it in their voice. They're begging, stop, stop, stop, stop. And the person is not gonna stop. So the critique of that is that that latency could potentially not just lead to the cop getting killed, but to that person with a knife killing other people. And so, you know, I get, if I were out there, I think that like, you probably just as a matter of like not getting shot and being fully in the moment, you have to be like that. I would guess, I don't know. I don't know, I'm the furthest thing from a soldier there could be, but there's something Jack Kornfield, this great Buddhist teacher says, which is tend to the part of the garden you can touch. Meaning this is where we're at right now. Thank God you and I, though we are experiencing some like ripples from what's going on over there, everyone is, we're not there. And thank God we don't have to come up with the psychological program for people going through that to no longer be encumbered by that hate. Thank God. And I don't know if that's just lazy or whatever, but it's like, you know, for me, I just, I have to bring it back to, all right, well, here's where I'm at now. And I don't want there to be war. I don't want to hurt people, but yeah, I love what you said. I think what you said is the, if anything, is the most intelligent way of looking at it. It's like, don't pretend that you're not gonna feel that hate, like you're gonna feel it. There's no way around it. Or like, cause that's even worse. Cause then you're almost saying like something's wrong with them for feeling the hate or, you know, whatever. But more along the lines, if you can avoid applying that hate to an entire country of people, then do that. Like, just understand, we're talking about like a, not everybody. I know it's not everybody. I know it's not everybody. It's just easier, isn't it? Cognitively, it's somehow easier to think all Russians, monsters, you know, all Russians, all whatever the particular like thing is that you're supposed to not like. It's easier somehow, weirdly. You'd think that'd be more difficult. Yeah, but I guess the lesson is if you give in to the easy solution, that's going to lead to detrimental longterm effects. So hate should be, it's such a powerful tool that you should try to control it for your own sake. Not because you owe anything to anybody, but for your own psychological development over time. Right, right, that's it, that's it, fuck. Yeah, yeah. In terms of dark places, you suffered from depression. Where has been some of the darker places you've gone in your mind? You know, I needed therapy, man. I needed therapy for the longest time, I just didn't get it. So because of that, I would go through like bouts of like paralytic depression, like suicidal depression, suicidal ideations that were more than just ideations. I mean, I think like people get afraid when the thought of suicide appears in their consciousness, they get really scared of themselves. So they think there's something like, fuck, what's going on with me? Why would I think that? But I think if we are suffering and, you know, as a natural part of not wanting to reduce suffering or not feel bad anymore, I mean, suicide is going to be an, like, if we're just, you know, you're just looking, what are all the options? Let's brainstorm here. You know what I mean? I could start drinking more water. You start jogging, get some therapy, call my friends, all the stuff we all hear. Or I could just, I think the height of my apartment building is probably the, definitely the right height to kill myself. And then, so where, for me, like the few times where the ideation has gone towards like, well, when would I do that? How do I, what, you know, what do I need to like accomplish that? When then like, that's where it gets really fucking scary. That's where it's like terrifying. And so you start the actual details of the planning of how to commit suicide. Yeah. What's going to be the least painful way to do it? What's going to be the most instantaneous way to do it? What's the, you know, and with, you know, with depression, because it can be progressive, you know, this is why you have to really just stay on top of it. Anyone who's gone through depression knows what I'm talking about. You gotta stay on top of it. Like you might need medication. You know, I know this is controversial now, but it's still better than dying if you ask me. But at some point with depression, it like becomes paralyzing. So you don't want to get out of bed anymore and you're not taking showers anymore. And you don't want to talk to anybody anymore. And you're not answering your phone anymore. And, you know. So like in a dark place that you might be in, it still might get worse. So you should really do everything you can to get under control. And that's the problem with that specific psychological disorder. That's the problem. Because the things it's like, if you start listening to what you want to, you think it's you, it's the depression. You start listening to it. It wants you to stay in bed. And then you're getting those fucking depression sleeps, you know, or you wake up and you're more tired. Like it's not working. You're trying to escape reality by sleeping. And so, yeah. Like you have to like, you're fighting for your, you're literally fighting for your life. It might not seem like that. Cause you can't, if you could see depression, if you could see it, if you knew you had some inky, vaporous octopus thing that was just wrapping around you more and more and more and more, you would probably do everything you could to rip that fucking thing off your body. And if you couldn't get it off your body, you would be calling people to get help. So it doesn't feel like a fight because you're exhausted. There's no reason to move. There's no, you don't see the meaning for any of it. So it doesn't feel like a battle, but it is a battle. You're not feeling. I mean, that's the other thing. You're just, you're basically not feeling. You're like, you start going numb. At least that was my experience with it. Numb and tired. And then increasingly numb and tired. And then increasingly sort of disconnecting from reality. And then somewhere in there, that's when you start playing around with the idea of like, oh, I don't know if it's worth it. I don't know. Now, you know, I think compared to some of my friends who haven't survived, obviously who haven't survived depression, like mine was definitely not whatever theirs was like. I've heard, I mean, to understand it for folks out there, maybe you haven't gone through it. Just imagine if like, how bad you have to feel if death is the solution, like violence against yourself so that you die is the solution. Like just, it flies in the face of everything. So yeah, that was definitely the darkest place that I've ever been. Just that death doesn't seem like, because you don't care about anything anymore, that death just doesn't seem like that bad. Yeah. Like you're not able to appropriately assign the negative costs to the solution. Right. It just seems like a reasonable solution. Yeah, but I think also what's going along with it is like, it's not like your brain isn't working. Like you're not thinking, obviously you're not thinking clearly. Like, at least again, this was my experience of it. It's a fog. You're in some kind of, like you're confused. There's confusion. There's shame. You feel embarrassed. You feel embarrassed. You wanna get out of bed. You wanna do stuff. You wanna be compelled to be social and do all this stuff, but you're not, you're not. Like you seem, if people don't know what's going on and you're not telling them because you're embarrassed, because you want to have some like, you know, uncorrupted, unworped psyche, you know, you're like, it invites you to be secret about it. That's one of its first tricks is it tells you not to tell anybody. And that's deadly in that case, it's deadly. What was the source of light? What was the, what were for you and in general the ways out? Yeah, so for me, the solutions, and again, man, for my depressed friends out there, please don't get mad at me. I'm not doing the thing of like, just put on a smile or any of that bullshit because it doesn't feel like that when you're like, and when you're fighting it, it's like you are, you're in a, I don't know why I keep using these stupid gravity analogies, but it's like the gravity's been turned up on your planet in every single way by, so getting out of bed. You know, like. By the way, gravity and quantum mechanics, one of the most beautiful things about our reality, what the hell is each of those things? So this isn't, you're not just talking about hippie language, it's still physicists pretend they understand something. We're still at the very beginning of understanding this mysterious world of ours that seems to be functioning according to these weirdly simple and yet universally powerful laws, which we don't fully yet understand. So please, the metaphor and the analogy of gravity. Okay, thank you. Fully, fully applicable. I don't know any other way to put it than it's like somebody turned the gravitational field of your mattress up by. So everything is heavy. Heavy, your body's heavy. You don't wanna get out of bed, you will consider shitting or pissing the bed because you're just like, who gives a fuck, I'll just lay in my shit and piss. You're dying, you're like, none of it makes sense. And I feel like in retrospect, I'm making what I've done a little, like I had more lucidity. It was more of like when you're wrestling with someone and you're just like, it's different for you. But for me, if I'm wrestling, I'm not thinking about jujitsu moves. I'm like. Survival. You're just. So it's like that. It is a struggle. Like it's like, you really have to deliberately fight. Everything. So you start, so you can almost have a conversation with the depression. And then what you do is you start doing the opposite of everything it's telling you to do. So it's telling you lay in bed. So you get out of bed. It's definitely telling you don't fucking exercise. You're gonna go fucking exercise. That's not gonna do anything. You can't. You probably have a heart attack. You really wanna go outside. Don't go fucking exercise. And it'll feel crazy. And you won't wanna do it. If you wanted to do it, you wouldn't be depressed. Like how often do you hear like one of the symptoms of depression? You wanna jog. You wanna get on a bike. You know, you don't hear that. That's not a symptom. So you start, at least one solution I just started doing the opposite of. Whatever the voice is telling you, do the opposite. That. And then suddenly the gravitational field diminishes a little bit. It doesn't go all the way away. And that's where you can fall right back into it cause you just feel even slightly better. You're like, oh, okay, I fixed it. You know, really, I think if you like and having been through therapy, the best solution would be go to a fucking therapist as quickly as you can. Just sit down with them and tell them what's going on. I know what you're thinking. How am I gonna find a therapist? Just do it. Google it, go on Yelp. All of this shit feels impossible. You're like, I don't wanna turn on the computer. I don't wanna do any of this. You just have to. I mean, you have to. You do it if you're on fire. You do it if you're on fire. And someone's like, you know, here's a way to not be on fire. Just this particular fire is, it doesn't make you wanna run around screaming. It just makes you wanna fall asleep forever. And that, but those little steps, I got lucky because it worked. It worked, I started exercising. I'd been on antidepressants before when I was originally diagnosed with it. Did those help? You know, I, even with all the current research coming out about, that maybe we were all wrong about our understanding of depression, I do feel like it helped in a certain way. Like it definitely, it definitely like made me stop thinking about, it stopped the intrusive thoughts. And, but I don't know how much of that was placebo or how much of that, I don't know. But then also like I couldn't cum anymore. That was the other fucked up thing. Like you're, you can't have orgasms. And which might not sound like a big deal, but you know, when I told my therapist that they actually took me off them, cause I think she was realizing that it started diminishing a little bit. But the one I'm talking about now, that whatever episode or whatever you wanna call it, I just got lucky cause it worked. It worked and I started feeling better, thank God. Now, if you suffer from depression out there and you've had a remission of the depression, you know, it's really like, it's scary to have mental illness because everyone gets bummed out. I mean, that's just normal. Like you're gonna get bummed out and I don't wanna do anything sometimes. It doesn't mean you have a clinical depression. You might just be bummed out or grieving. You might be any number of things. But when I get really nervous, if some of those symptoms start showing up. And at one point I felt like that was happening again. And I did intramuscular ketamine therapy, which now that was the damnedest thing I've ever experienced. Aside from the fact that ketamine is immensely psychedelic. I just remember going back to the hotel after the experience with the clinician. And like, you know, it's like with depression, it's like a headache that starts coming on. But you're like, this headache might last for years. It might last for six months. It might get worse and worse and worse. And so I went back to the hotel room and it was just gone. Like I just felt normal. It felt great. It was like the most remarkable thing ever. So, you know, look at the research on ketamine right now. It's like, it's not like bullshit. It's not like woo science. There's really, really good data out there showing that something like, I think it's 60%. I don't know what the percentage is, but 60% of people with an endogenous depression when they get ketamine therapy will experience remission, regardless of whether you trip out or not. It just does something that I don't know if they know what it is yet. I don't care if they do. But that one thing worked. And basically you keep fighting until something works. Exactly. It's a survival issue. And it's a survival issue. But it's just, I think because it's kind of so slow moving, you might even forget it's progressive. Or, you know, you could easily just think that you're just a kind of bummed out person. Or you start thinking that these aspects of your psychology are permanent when they don't have to be. What about other people in your life? What advice would you give to people that have loved ones who suffer from depression? What are they to do? Okay, now this is really like, man, it's really dark. Here's number one. This is what somebody told me when I lost a friend to suicide, you know? Because when you lose a friend to suicide, when you lose a loved one to suicide, you're gonna blame yourself. It's like in the periphery of suicide, there is a circumference of guilty people who all feel like, oh, if only I'd said this at the right time, if only I'd listened more, if only I'd seen that warning sign, if only this or that. It's interesting in that with other forms of like disease, you know, if your loved one dies from cancer, say, more than likely, you're not gonna be thinking like, oh, I should have cured their cancer. You know, like it's a tragedy, but at least you're not like, oh, if only I had. You still might think that's part of grief, but. It's not as sticky in many of the other situations. Here, the guilt couldn't really stay for a long time. Yep, so you, number one, we're talking about a progressive disease that can lead to death. And if somebody commits suicide, they wanted to commit suicide. And at least what I've been told is you can't stop it. It's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. There are no magic words. There's nothing you could do. So, you know, people who've lost people to suicide, you know what I'm talking about. Like, you know, you can watch it happen in real time and there's just nothing you could do. That being said, you know, being responsive to when it seems like someone's really reaching out for help and knowing that maybe even though it might, especially if it's someone who's like, doesn't talk like this a lot of the time, and sentences start coming out of their mouth, that if you weren't really paying attention, might not seem like a big deal, but for this person, it's kind of anomalous that all of a sudden that's happening. Now there, that's when you can be a good listener and, you know, open up to them and hear what they're saying and see like, oh, shit, are they asking me for it? Is this them asking for help? And even if you're like, I don't know what to do, you know, at least you can like start checking in on them, you know, start like help them understand that you're there for them and then hopefully get them into therapy, get them to a doctor, get them to a professional who can like see what's going on there. So that, and then there's hope. And even then there might not be hope actually, you know, doctors can't stop it. There's no, sometimes it just, that's the way it goes. But, you know, I know that like being sensitive, if somebody's like all of a sudden hitting you up or reaching out to you that normally isn't like that and just, what's going on? How are you? And just listen. Which in general, depression or not, is probably a good thing to do. Yeah. To truly listen. It's like, are you okay? Yeah, yeah. Because people have, you know, this whole thing of like cries for help, man. Sometimes they just look like a weird text. You know, and you don't realize for the person to send that fucking text, they've been thinking about it all morning. They've been just trying to get their phone up from the floor. So, you know, I think that's it. I mean, what, I don't know. I don't know. I've had friends like kill themselves. And many of them, it wasn't like, sadly it was like, I don't know. I don't know what could have been done, but. But there's still a guilt in the back of your head? For the rest of my life, for sure. I always will be. Yeah, I mean, yeah. But again, what are you gonna do? But even that, it's a part of love. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right. You could, yeah. You know, we feel guilt. Part of grief is guilt, you know? Like we always could have been better people. We always could have been better people. You getting to Viktor Frankl much? Yeah, of course. Man's search for meaning. The invitation to live your life as though you'd been on your death bed and had been given the chance to go back and not make the same mistakes. I return to that idea all the time, meaning it's like, okay, whatever you did before this moment was too late. But now, you know, this is where you can start. This is where you can start. And yeah, so I think that for a neurotic like me, that's super important. Because otherwise, I'll just get like too lost in the weeds of shitty things I did in the past. So speaking of Viktor Frankl, you and Hitler have the same birthday. Oh my God, you've really done your research. Well, I often Google famous people that have a birthday same as Hitler. Yeah. The person that shows up, you know, is your face just really big. You and Hitler together, just pals next to each other. No, it does not. No, but April 20th is an embarrassing birthday for all my 420 friends out there. It's embarrassing. You share a birthday with Hitler. Well, it's 420s also has a humor and a lightness to it, right? It's embarrassing. Your life is embarrassing. But if you like weed and you're born on stoner day and you believe in reincarnation, do you realize like when you start connecting the dots there, if there is like a Bardo where you get to choose your next life. So you're like a shitty generic NPC. You're like, of course, you would be born on 420. Dude, let me be born on 420, man, yeah. But isn't it interesting that on that same day, Hitler is also born. There's a tension to that and that Hitler's an artist. So it's like that hippie mindset could go anywhere. Oh, yeah, right. Like, yeah, you know, and I was just having this conversation with a friend of mine who's a wonderful skeptic. And we were talking about this, which is the thing where you start attributing to the day you were born, these kinds of significance. And based on maybe people who were born on that day, maybe some other things. And, you know, it's like, think of how many people by now in the course of human history have been born on April 20th. I mean, how many? Someone could probably do the math and come up with some number close to it. Now, this is how you know how rotten Hitler is. Like, he's the one that, like, fucks up the birthday for everybody else. But. I think where I heard that you're 420 is Wim Hof episode because he's also 420. He's a 420. Yeah, so Hitler beats even Wim Hof. Look. In terms of owning the date. I think if anybody is like, well, obviously there's nothing you can do to like fix it. Hitler fucked up a lot of things. He fucked up that mustache. He fucked up the name Hitler. He fucked up 420. And obviously he caused a horrific Holocaust that, by the way, talk about these reverberations through time that we're still experiencing. I mean, there's still people walking around with fucking tattoos from that motherfucker. So, but, you know, Wim Hof, you know, people like Wim Hof. They're like whatever the opposite of Hitler is, you know? He too is creating ripples in the lake that hopefully respond to that of Hitler. Yeah, very cold fucking lake. And he's in, and yeah, so very, very cold lake that he's happily swimming around in. But yeah, you know, I try not to think about like the Hitler thing on my birthday. Then my dad would just, every birthday he would remind me that Hitler was 420. Do you think all of us are capable of evil? Do you think, you're one of the sweetest people I know, just as a fan, do you think you're capable of evil? Sure, yeah, I mean, sure, definitely. I think if you don't think that, you better watch out because come on, how do you think you're not capable of evil? And PS, you are, if you're connected to the supply chain, friend, you're doing evil. You're paying taxes. You're like, you're supporting the worst things in the world. I mean, you know, like diffusion of responsibility, it's really curious or the circumference of responsibility where it's like bombs are going off somewhere that were paid for in some small part by you, some fractional, if an American, if a drone is flying over a village in Afghanistan and drops a bomb and you pay taxes, then you could say you have fractional ownership over that drone. You're a cog in the machine of evil in some sense. And I know what you're gonna say, well, yeah, but I have to fucking pay taxes. Like I have no choice. There's sales tax, there's this or that. Take that attitude. It's the same thing that people on the battlefield when they're sending missiles into other tanks, they're thinking the same thing. It's just, they're more directly responsible for what's going on. But in Buddhism, this idea of dependent co arising or yeah, dependent co arising. We're all connected. We're all part of this matrix. We're all connected, meaning we all share responsibility for the evil in the world. So even if you aren't directly committing evil acts, if you're seeing something in the world and you're thinking that's evil, you're probably not quite as separated from that as you'd like to believe in some tiny infinitesimally quantum way, you're connected. And there is a sense, I've gotten to experience this over and over that one individual can actually make a gigantic difference. And so not only is there a diffusion responsibility, there's a kind of a paralysis about, well, what can I do? Yeah. Sure, I understand, but what can I do? And I think just looking at history and also hanging out and becoming friends, but also interviewing people that have had a tremendous impact, you realize you're just one dude. Yeah. You're like a normal person. You're not that smart even. Like a lot of people aren't like in some kind of magical way where you have a big head that's figuring out everything. No, you just saw problems in the world and you're like, hey, I think I'm gonna try to do something about this. Yeah. And you stay focused and dedicated to it for a prolonged period of time and refuse to quit, refuse to listen to people that tell you that this isn't like impossible, here's how others have failed. Yeah. No, I'm gonna do it. That's it. That's it. And one person, and then you kind of, the thing is when there's one person that keeps pushing forward that way, there's, humans are sticky. They, other people follow them around and they're like, I'll help. You know, I'll help and then the other people help and then the cool people all gather together cause they kind of get excited about this way. Holy shit, we can actually make a difference. And they, they form groups and then all of a sudden there's companies and nations that actually make a gigantic difference. It's interesting. And it all starts with one person often. You know what? If I could push back slightly against that, it's never just one person. It's like, you know, nobody ever talks about, at least as far as I'm aware, you never hear about like Buddha's great grandmother. You never hear about that. You never hear about that. But if not for that person, no Buddhism. You know, the people you're talking about, they are the tip of the iceberg that pops up out of the ocean of history. And you never see that all the little things that helped that happen. And so to me, this is where the real, like how do you help? What's something you can do? Well, you know, recognize that first, that you don't really, you don't, you might not even be aware of how much you're impacting people around you. You might think that you're not, or you might think surely not in a way that makes a big difference, but you have no idea these tipping points and they can lead to the emergence of an Einstein, a Gandhi, a Martin Luther King. We can go on and on, a Dostoevsky or whoever. And so I think that's where for me, it goes back to tend to the part of the garden you can touch and then, or even deeper than that intention. It was just like an, I'm an idiot. So I need an idiot's intention, which is don't, if you, I heard the Dalai Lama say it. If you can help, help. If you can't help, don't hurt. Simple, basic dummy rules so that you can, if possible, refrain from hurting, which might as well be a form of helping. And the help doesn't have to be this dramatic thing. These little acts of kindness. I don't know, they seem to have, maybe I believe in kind of karma, but they seem to have this, they can have this gigantic ripple effect. I don't know why that is. I just, I remember a lot of little acts of kindness that people have done to me and they, what do they do? One, they fill me with joy and hope for the future. They give me faith in humanity. That somehow there's a partially dormant desire in our sort of collective intelligence to do good in the world. That most of us want to be good, that want to do good onto the world. I want, there's a kindness that's kind of like begging to get out, you know? And those little acts of kindness do just that. And actually one of the reasons I love Austin and moved here is realizing, just noticing those little acts of kindness all around me, just for stupid reasons, just people being really nice. It's weird and that kindness combined with an optimism for the future, it's just, it's amazing what that can build. Yes, yes, it's incredible. And I know what you're saying. It's like, you know, we moved to this great neighborhood and at this point I think three, maybe four of our neighbors have like made food for us that just shows up with like handwritten lists of like things they like to do in the area and their phone number if we need help. And it's like, holy shit. That's like, it might seem like a little act, but it feels like some kind of atomic love bomb just went off on your porch when you're looking at that. I'm like, what the fuck? You made me a pie? This is incredible. Like, this is incredible, so. And also it's another act to accept that kindness. It's like a lot of times when I was like in Boston or San Francisco, certain big cities, you can think like, oh, okay, well they're trying to like somehow, that's not an act of kindness. That's some kind of a transactional thing to build up. It's like a career move for networking, all that kind of stuff. But no, if you just accept it for what it is, a pure act of kindness. Fucking Boston. It's the, yeah. Because for me, I go the opposite route. Because I'm not, even though there is a part of me that might be a little suspicious or something, where I go to push that shit back mentally is I'm like, I don't deserve this. If they knew what a piece of shit I am. You're gonna bring me, I don't wanna never bring cakes to my neighbors. I wouldn't know how to make a cake. I don't know how to make anything. I don't have time. I should be bringing shit to my neighbors. Why didn't I do that? I should have brought, I never do that. If you're not careful, you can spiral into a vortex of self hate from the gift. So you have to, yeah, you have to learn how to, in that circuitry, you have to learn how to like accept. Oh yeah, I have that problem really big. Yeah, like I don't deserve this. Like I don't, I get so much love from people. I'm like, well, yeah, they love me because they don't know me. That's my brain, my little voice. Like you're not, you're not worthy. You're not worthy of any of this kindness and all this kind of stuff. And that could be very, yeah, it can shut you down. It can be debilitating. And also it shuts the person down. I mean, you're talking. And that's the dark side is it pushes them away too. Yeah, it cuts off this fucking mystical circuitry. So like the best thing if that happens to you is like accept it joyfully. And just even, just all that, whatever that thing inside of you, whatever that little thing is, you know, this is like in the meditation I do, it's an infuriatingly simple meditation, but when a thought emerges, when you are resting your attention on your breath and then inevitably you think, you get lost in your thoughts. And when you catch yourself doing that, you think thinking, and then return your attention to the breath. So I like that so that when that part of myself starts, you know, having its little neurotic semi seizure, I can just go thinking, whatever. It's just another thought. And then eat the, eat the, eat the banana bread or whatever they gave you. What's the most wild psychedelic experience you've ever had in a dream, in a vision? It doesn't have to be drug related. What's one that jumps to mind that was like, holy shit, I'm happy to be alive. Is this life? Okay. This is amazing. Yeah, the, oh yeah, okay. So the one that pops to mind, I've had a lot of psychedelic experiences, but in this moment, the one that pops to mind, only because it goes back to what you're talking about, about this Nietzsche's idea of infinite return. The, the, so I'm a Burning Man and. Are you going to Burning Man this time? I'm not. I mean, I have kids right now. I just want to be around them. My wife was being so cool about it and she knows I love Burning Man. She's like, go to Burning Man. And I was going to go. And then I just, I just want to be around my kids as much as I can right now, but. I've never been to Burning Man. So I don't know how secretive it is that, I mean, cause quite high profile folks go. Yeah, everyone knows Elon Musk goes there. Isn't it pretty open? He's got a boat. You know that? I'm touching none of this. You know, there's a, it's called art cars. They all make art cars. And like part of the, part of the burn, what's so beautiful about it is like, you can't buy anything there, man. Like you, I've heard, I don't know if this has changed. It's been a bit because of the pandemic, but the only thing you could buy was ice and coffee. And I think maybe that's changed. I heard some whisper that that's changed, but so that means that it's a gifting economy is what they call it. And so people will just give you stuff. Talk about having to struggle with deserving stuff, man. What are you going to fucking do when the camp next to you is like every morning making the best iced coffee that you've ever had in your life. And they just are giving it all away till it's all gone. What are you going to do? It's, it's the best ever. And then you're giving things to people. And then you, you learn stuff like, you learn these really interesting lessons. Like one of the times I went there, got all these strawberries. Might not sound like a big deal, but when you're out there in the dust and you're not at one of like the, like hardcore like luxury camps, which do exist out there, you know, you've got these like items where in my mind, I'm like, yeah, these are going to be just for me and my girlfriend, my special stash fruit and this or that. And then like two days in you're walking around your camp with the strawberries that you were coveting and everyone's so happy to get like cold strawberries and you've realized, oh my God, this feels so much better than the way a strawberry tastes. So you learn something experientially there, which is an incredible thing. It's an incredible thing. Man, now I'm wishing I had decided to go to Burning Man. Have you been a few times? Yeah, I just know like, at least people were saying it was Elon Musk's boat. Like, yeah, like this, I think it was like, it's like this massive, it's art cars. And it was this party on this thing. You could just, anyone can go on the boat. Like no one's like, there's no guest list. You just go on there. I never saw him there, but that, you know, everyone's whispering Elon Musk is here. There's a secrecy, there's all that kind of stuff because you'd probably have to respect that. But at the same time there, it seems like the kind of people that go there, I mean, the rules of the outside world are suspended in the sense that the crime, the aggression, the tensions, all of that seems to dissipate somehow. Not all the way, not all the way. That, you know, you could look it up, you know, cause like there is tension. There's a lot of tension there between, it's called plug and plays. Like, you know, Burning Man, like the history of Burning Man is fascinating. It has its roots in the cacophony society is what it was called, which is a sort of evolution of something that was, I think it was called the God, like the San Francisco. Basically there was like an art movement in San Francisco. And I can't remember the name of it. Maybe the Suicide Club or essentially like, they were really into urban exploration and meaning like breaking into like old abandoned buildings and stuff. But part of this, what this was, was you would prepare your life as though you were going to kill yourself. You would get all your affairs in order. You would get, so it's going back to what we were talking about with the cancer diagnosis. You're like sort of putting yourself into that world of like, I'm going to get all my affairs together as though this is it. And then there was some, I'm sorry for anyone listening if I'm butchering this, but I think there was some really cool initiation where they would blindfold you and they would take you into some of these abandoned buildings. And you didn't know where you were walking, but they would say like, if you take one step to the left, you're going to die. You're going to fall off. You're going to fall. So please be careful. So you're like in the moment and then blindfold comes off. It's a big, awesome party. This evolves into something called the Cacophony Society. There's a great book called Tales of the Cacophony Society for people listening. One of the members of the Cacophony Society was the author of Fight Club. And so if you've seen Fight Club, like you could see little ideas that were in the Cacophony Society. They were into Dadaism, which I don't know a lot about. I don't know, but it's a philosophical art movement. And then so basically what was happening is like, they kept burning increasingly large effigies in San Francisco and they weren't allowed to do it. And so they took it out in the desert and they were basing it on something called a zone trip, which is like, across this border, the rules of that old society are gone. And so that was the original Burning Man, which was these lunatics out in the desert, launching like burning pianos out of catapults through the air doing like drive by shooting ranges, like no rules, wild, magical, beautiful, insane madness. And then it grew and grew and grew and grew until you have Burning Man as it is today, which is still the most incredible thing. I mean, obviously anytime you have like a thing that's been around for a while, you're gonna get that. It's not like it used to be. It's not as free as it used to be, so this or that. But what's fascinating about Burning Man, someone pointed this out to me, look on the ground, no trash, no cigarettes. The ethic of like picking up your shit there is like so intense. So it's not like the other festivals you go to where there's just trash everywhere, shit scattered everywhere. It's clean. People are picking up their stuff. People are like really being conscious of like not fucking up the playa. So I'm sorry, don't get a burner yapping about Burning Man. We won't stop. It'll be morning. But there's a power, but there is a power to culture propagating itself through to the stories that we tell each other. And that holds up for Burning Man. It's clear that the culture has stayed strong throughout the years. So many people, so many really interesting people speak of Burning Man as like a sacred place they go to to remind themselves about what's important. That's so interesting. And it is. And it is. I mean, it's like, you know, there are all these stories of like, I love guru stories. I have a guru. I'm Karoli Baba, never met him, he was Ram Dass's guru, at least not in the flesh. But the story of the guru is if you're lucky, you meet this being that, and we're not talking about, you know, whatever the run of the mill, like charlatans out there. Like I know for sure that people are in the world right now who when you're around them, the thing you're talking about, the affirmation of the potential of humanity and also just an acceptance of yourself and, you know, cultivate, like seeing someone who's cultivated love or compassion or whatever, but in this way that is, I mean, you would almost, you would rather meet that being than like a UFO land in your backyard. It's like, it is the UFO. It's a person, but it's not. It's everybody and nobody. And somehow they like end up conveying to you ideas that you may have heard a million times before, but somehow within the language itself is a transmission that permanently alters you. And so these people exist. I think you could argue that Burning Man, the total thing is a guru, that a pilgrimage is involved to get there. You, like, it's not easy to get there. And when you get there, it's gonna teach you something. It's gonna show you something. It's going to, and maybe some of the stuff it shows you might not be great, but the community around you will like, will hold you as you're like, whatever the thing is that's coming out of you is coming out of you. And even the simplest activities, the simplest exchange of words have like, just like the gurus, a profound impact somehow. Something about that place. Yeah, not to mention the insane synchronicities, like insane synchronicities there. And I think like, you know, to get back to the notion of sentience as a byproduct of a harmonized yet hyper complex system. I think synchronicities, like those kinds of systems are like lightning rods for synchronicity. So crazy, not just because your high synchronicities happen that are impossible, where you just have to deal with it. And like, you'll need something. And within a few minutes, someone's like, oh, here you go. And you mentioned, but by the way, Burning Anchors of a psychedelic experience, is it the strawberries or was it something else? What was the moment? Yeah, that was magical. No, it was DMT. It definitely wasn't. It wasn't strawberries. Ah. No, no, I was. More potent. Yeah, I was like smoking DMT. And like, I saw, like, if you, in the midnight gospel, there are these bovine creatures that have like a long neck and a lantern head. So like, I saw one of those things. And, you know, I thought it was funny and like ridiculous because you hear like all the Terence McKenna stories of the self transforming machine elves or all the purple or the magenta goddess everyone sees. I'm like, so this is what I get? Like a fucking cow with a lantern head? Like that's where my brain is at and we're interacting with this molecule. So then like, I look away. And again, this is DMT. So when I say look away, do I mean with my eyes shut, I look away or eyes open, I look away, I think eyes shut. So it sounds weird to say look away, but however you want to put it, that's what I did. And I look back and it's still there. Only now it's, you know, cause usually in like, when you're having those kinds of visions, they go away pretty quickly. This thing's like moved, like shambled ahead and maybe a few steps, just like a cow, just like a cow. And then that was when the, you know, all the stories you hear about it, like going through some kind of tuber, some kind of light tunnel, like a water slide made of light that's increasingly familiar. That's the wildest part of it. It's like, oh, I know this place. Not like, oh, I've seen this in like, you know, on like bong stickers, but like, oh yeah, this is that place you go to. You just remember, oh, this place. And then it was like I was in some kind of, I don't know how to put it, a chamber, a technological chamber, some kind of supercomputer, some kind of nucleus that was technological. And it was inviting. There was an invitation of like, come in, like come deeper into, come deeper in. And you can talk to whatever it is over there. You don't talk, but there's a communication. And I communicated, but my friends, I don't, I love my friends. I guess I had some sense in that moment that it would mean complete obliteration or who knows what. And the response that it gave back was, you can always go back there. And that's when I opened my eyes, I'm back. Totally, you know, and ever since then, that's caused me to revise my thinking on reincarnation. The idea that you die and you start as a baby and then live your life again. It goes right into what we were talking about. You know, that maybe data, you know, that the shit I saw in Nitro Sox, I don't feel dumb that my epiphanies are all related to drugs, but not all of them are a lot of them. But this notion of like, oh, is it that we're imprinting into the medium of time, space, everything we do, and that that is a permanent imprint, a frame that upon death can be accessed in the same way we can pull up pictures on our phone or computers, and not only accessed, but experienced as though, in other words, you could just jump in. You're still gonna have your memories. It's gonna give you the illusion of having been a kid and gotten to that frame, but no, you just decided to go back there, nostalgia, whatever. And yeah, you can jump around freely in space and time. Yeah, yeah, you can go in and out of time space, but the problem is when you go into time space, it's time. So it's gonna feel sticky. It's gonna feel like you've been here forever because you've dropped back onto the track that Nietzsche's talking about. And I guess one of the qualities of dropping into that frame is that you forget your higher dimensional identity. What happened to the cow with the lantern, was that goodbye? He writes me letters sometimes. Never saw it again. Never? Never saw it again, but I put it in, we put it in the Midnight Gospel. Pendleton was such a genius, and he drew it for me, and then it just ended up as a part of the show. But by the way, I have to admit that as a big fan of yours, I haven't watched the Midnight Gospel because I've been waiting. You do these stupid things, but ever since you talked to, maybe two years ago with Joe about it, I've been waiting to watch it with a special person on mushrooms. That's been in my to do. I don't know, of course you don't have to be on mushrooms to enjoy it, but for some reason I put it into my head that this is something I wanna do with somebody else, like experience it and get wild. Because visually, I mean, I watched a bunch of it, just a little bit here and there, but it's just visually such an interesting experience. Thank you. Combined with everything else, obviously, the ideas, the voices and so on, but just visually it's like a super psychedelic version of Rick and Morty or something like that, like farther out, wilder out there. Yeah, man, that's Pendleton. These people, I mean, I was part of that in the sense that Pendleton gave, one of the reasons he's such a genius and great at making stuff is he really does a good job of just dehierarchizing potential hierarchies that can appear. Someone has to be driving the bus, and that was Pendleton, but he's so inclusive. There's a real punk rock thing that he's doing, which is like, he'll take everything, and it kind of mixes its way into the show. But one of the things in animation, it can get really strict with drawing the characters and trying to create continuity in the way the character looks, and it can get really brute for the animator. Making it brutally precise, like it has to be precise. But he figured out that if you just sort of, it's not like, obviously, Clancy had to look like Clancy through the whole show, but if you allow the various people animating it to sort of have their own spin on it, then suddenly it creates a very psychedelic, the show looks more psychedelic because it looks more organic, and also the amount of time. I had no idea, the amount of time that goes into making digital art look like that is, it's insane. The amount of work in comping that stuff is just crazy. It's crazy. Generally, the amount of time it takes, even just like a painting, when you, I really enjoy watching artists do a time lapse, and you realize how much effort just into a single image goes into it. Hours and hours and hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks and months, and then you just get to see them work, but they lose themselves in the craftsmanship of it, in the rhythm of it. And like, because they're focused on the, so we were talking about robotics earlier, like on the little details, like they're never look, well, most of the time isn't spent looking at the big picture of the final result, it's looking at the little details there and so on. And they're, but they're nevertheless able to somehow constantly channel the big picture, the final result. My God, yeah, the respect I have for animators, it's like, dear God, it's the craziest thing when you watch it, when you see what it looks like and how much time goes into it and how zen they have to be, because like, no matter what, you're gonna have to cut stuff, man. And when you're cutting like a few seconds of animation, that was someone's like month, maybe, you know? And like, they understand, but still it's like, whoa, it's brutal. And so they have like this zen outlook on it, which is really cool. And they watch podcasts, that's the other cool thing, when you realize like, oh, they're listening to podcasts or like, that's really cool to see that aspect of it too. But yeah, man, I, you know. Yeah, your voice is in the ears of a lot of interesting people, isn't it? Yours too. And I, you know. Hello, interesting person. Hello, CIA, animators. Eating delicious food in the cafeteria. Yeah. I'm on your side. He's against you, I'm with you. Yeah. Do you have, you have a beard, therefore you must be wise. Do you have advice for young people, high school, college, about how to carve their path through life? I don't have a life, a career that's successful that they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of. Man, see, this is what kind of, this is what sucks about my life, is that it's been very random and very spontaneous. So unfortunately, I don't get that thing where I could be like, well, here's what I did. Yeah. Cause it's like, I don't, like I inherited $12,000 from my grandmother, here's what you do kids, you inherit $12,000 when your grandmother dies. And then you need to be dumb enough to think that that $12,000 is gonna help you live in LA for a year. So then what you do is you move to LA with $12,000 and you find a shitty place that you live at. And then you use that money to buy acid and synthesizers. And then you run out of the money and then you, then you have to get a job. And so then, because you think it'll be fun to work at a comedy club, you get a job at the comedy store. And then, you know, that's how it happened for me. And none of, there wasn't, I never had the confidence to be like, I'm gonna be a standup comedian. No way. I just thought it'd be cool to work in that building. I thought the building looked cool. And so, but then like, cause like you work at the comedy store, you get stage time. It's there, it's the reason like you work there is at least in those days, cause it's not like they're paying like a shit ton of money for you to answer phones at a comedy club. And so, you know, I started going on stage and then like, I just got lucky cause Rogan saw me have like a very rare, good set. I didn't know he was in the room or I would've bombed, you know, and then like, cause he thought I was funny and he liked talking to me. He started taking me on the road with him. And then, you know, so I don't know, man. I think. Was there an element to, there's a beautiful weirdness to you as a human being. Was there like a pressure to conform ever to hide yourself from the world? Or did the $12,000 in the acid give you the confidence you needed to be yourself? Oh no, I don't, like I still, no. I think, sure, there's that pressure. And like, you know, whenever you're beginning to really differentiate from your parents, but then you go back to hang out with your parents, you can feel that it's not like they even want you to conform, but you'll just, you could slip into that, whatever that was. So I remember that when I would go back and like visit them and stuff. And surely conformity or the pressure to like, not be individual or whatever, it's everywhere, man. Do you think you made your parents proud? E, no, no, no, no. Well, I think that when my mom died, I felt successful in the sense that I was able to support my, I was making money from doing standup and I didn't need help. I was like, I was supporting myself with art and doing good, what I thought was great then. So, and I think she, like, because she had witnessed me literally failing, I mean, which is, by the way, I think part of, if you want to be an artist or successful, you kind of have to fail. Like there, if, and if there was a guaranteed route from sucking to not sucking or from like the neophyte phase of whatever the art form is and, you know, some intermediary phase, then I think a lot more people would do it, but there really is no guarantees in it, especially the standup comedy. It's like, you'd have to be a maniac to want to, to think that that's going to work out for you. You have to, so you're going to, there are obviously exceptions, but for me, it was like a long slog, you know, and that's scary for a mom. So, but that being said, when she was dying, like she did recognize that I was like not slogging anymore. And she did say, she said, you did it. And that's cool, but in, you know, I would love for her to see me now, like now it'd be way cooler, but maybe she does. I don't know. She's listening to your podcast elsewhere in the other, in the Bardo. Yeah, however long that lasts reconfiguring the whole process to start again. You as a father now, how did that change you? Yeah, that's the big change, man. That's the thing. You made a few biological entities. Yeah, I made biological entities. I mean, I came in my wife, let's face it. Like I would love to say I made them, but the womb whipped them up, but it is the, yeah, it's the best. It's, I've never experienced anything like it before. It is the, as far as I'm concerned, the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. And that's why I was able to answer your Nietzsche question with like, hell yes, fuck yes. That's great. I get to be around my kids again. I'll always be around my kids. I'll always be around my children. That's incredible. That's the joy. So like, so for me, the part of myself that used to torture myself more, especially like around like my mom dying, feeling like I wasn't there enough for her, wishing that I had spent more time with her, wishing I'd spent more time with my dad, wishing that like, looking back at like how like I was just so desperately trying to evade the fact that she was dying and through, and in that evasion successfully like distanced myself from her and like in ways that I really wish I hadn't. I'm just saying that because it's one of my regrets. It's like a big regret. I have a lot of little regrets, but that's a big one. And so when you have kids, you look back at everything you did and you think like, fuck, if I'd gone left at that point instead of right, if I had eaten, who knows? What if I'd eaten like a turkey sandwich when my balls were creating the cum that was gonna make my kids? Would I have a different kid? Would this being not exist in my life? Like you start looking at everything and you realize like, thank God, thank God for every single thing that happened to me because it all led up to this. And oh, for me, that is the, that's, that it's like, it frees you in this. It liberates you because you realize like, oh wow, it's clumsy and selfish and at times rotten as I've been in my life. That did not impede the universe at all from allowing these two beautiful beings to exist in the world. So maybe all of it enabled, all of it like a concert perfectly led up to that little beautiful moment. Is there ways you would like to be a better father? Oh yeah, for sure. Absolutely. There's a actual, I read something in a book, it's called Good Enough. The mantra for a parent, good enough. Because when you are in the presence of something you love more than you've ever experienced love, you wanna be perfect. Like you wanna be, I can't, I gotta work, man. I gotta go on the road. I've gotta work. I gotta support the family. So that means I have to work. Like I work, you know what it's like having a podcast. You fucking work, man. And you know, it's a full time job because I've, you know, I do standup too and all the other stuff. So I feel sometimes I feel like, oh my God, I wanna spend more time with them. Like I should be spending more time with them. But then also I wanna create, I wanna work. I like being like the provider. So that's something I feel guilty about, you know, right now. And you're struggling how to balance that correctly. And meanwhile, time just marches on. It just goes, it goes. And all of this will be forgotten. Both you and I, but forgotten in time. That's what I say to them every time I'm putting them to bed. We will be lost in the sands of time. You know that, I bet you know this poem. You know that poem, Ozymandias? Yes. Can I read you a poem? Oh, okay. Let's end our conversation in a poem. I love it. It's by Pierce, by Shelley, probably mispronouncing the name. But I think you'll get it. There's no right way to pronounce anything. Thank you, thank you. I'm Ozymandias. I met a traveler from an antique land who said, "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor, well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings. Look on my works, ye mighty, in despair. Nothing beside remains around the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away." All gone, behold the king. Look on my works, ye mighty, in despair. In despair. Even though it will be forgotten in the sands of time, Duncan, I'm just so glad that you exist and you put so much love into the world over the past many years that I've gotten a chance to enjoy it by being your fan. Likewise. Thank you so much for continuing that and for sharing a bit of love with me today. Can we be friends? Let's be friends. In the real world, in 3D space? Nothing is real, but yes, in this particular slice of the multidimensional world we live in. It will be an honor and a pleasure. Thank you for having me on your show. I love you, Duncan. I love you. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Duncan Trussell. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Duncan Trussell himself. You are essentially just a cloud of atoms that will eventually be aerosolized by time. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Duncan Trussell: Comedy, Sentient Robots, Suffering, Love & Burning Man | Lex Fridman Podcast #312

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. But I would say, bring it on. If you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness. Are you sure about that? I'm betting my life on it. The following is a conversation with Jordan Peterson, an influential psychologist, lecturer, podcast host, and author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life, and Beyond Order. This is the Lex Readman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Jordan Peterson. Dostoevsky wrote in The Idiot, spoken through the character of Prince Mishkin, that beauty will save the world. Solzhenitsyn actually mentioned this in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What do you think Dostoevsky meant by that? Was he right? Well, I guess it's the divine that saves the world, let's say, you could say that by definition. And then you might say, well, are there pointers to that which will save the world, or that which eternally saves the world? And the answer to that, in all likelihood, is yes. And that's maybe truth, and love, and justice, and the classical virtues, beauty, perhaps, in some sense, foremost among them. That's a difficult case to make, but definitely a pointer. Which direction is the arrow pointing? Well, the arrow's pointing up. No, I think that that which it points to is what beauty points to. It transcends beauty. It's more than beauty. And that speaks to the divine. It points to the divine. Yeah, and I would say, again, by definition, because we could define the divine in some real sense. So one way of defining the divine is, what is divine to you is your most fundamental axiom. And you might say, well, I don't have a fundamental axiom. And I would say, that's fine, but then you're just confused, because you have a bunch of contradictory axioms. And you might say, well, I have no axioms at all. And then I'd say, well, you're just epistemologically ignorant beyond comprehension, if you think that, because that's just not true at all. So you don't think a human being can exist within contradictions? Well, yeah, we have to exist within contradiction. But when the contradictions make themselves manifest, say in confusion with regard to direction, then the consequence of that technically is anxiety, and frustration, and disappointment, and all sorts of other negative emotions. But the cardinal negative emotion, signifying multiple pathways forward, is anxiety. It's an entropy signal. But you don't think that kind of entropy signal can be channeled into beauty, into love? Why does beauty and love have to be clear, ordered, simple? Well, I would say it probably doesn't have to be, it can't be reduced to clarity and simplicity. Because when it's optimally structured, it's a balance between order and chaos, not order itself. If it's too ordered, if music is too ordered, it's not acceptable. It sounds like a drum machine, it's too repetitive, it's too predictable. It has to have, well, it has to have some fire in it, along with the structure. I was in Miami doing a seminar on Exodus with a number of scholars, and this is a beauty discussion. When Moses first encounters the burning bush, it's not a conflagration that demands attention, it's something that catches his attention. It's a phenomena, and that means to shine forth. And Moses has to stop and attend to it, and he does. And he sees this fire that doesn't consume the tree. And the tree, the tree is a structure, right? It's a tree like structure, it's a branching structure, it's a hierarchical structure. It's a self similar structure, it's a fractal structure. And it's the tree of life, and it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the fire in it is the transformation that's always occurring within every structure. And the fact that the fire doesn't consume the bush in that representation is an indication of the balance of transformation with structure. And that balance is presented as God, and what attracts Moses to it in some sense is the beauty. Now it's the novelty and all that, but like a painting is like a burning bush, that's a good way of thinking about it, a great painting. It's too much for people often. My house was, and will soon be again, completely covered with paintings inside. And it was hard on people to come in there because, well, my mother, for example, say, well, why would you wanna live in a museum? And I'd think, well, I would rather live in a museum than anywhere else in some real sense, but beauty is daunting, it scares people. They're terrified of buying art, for example, because their taste is on display, and they should be terrified because generally people have terrible taste. Now, that doesn't mean they shouldn't foster it and develop it, but, and you know, when you put your taste on display, it really exposes you. Even to yourself as you walk past it every day. Absolutely. This is who I am. Yeah, well, and look how mundane that is, and look how trite it is, and look at how cliched it is, and look at how sterile or too ordered it is, or too chaotic. Or how quickly you start to take it for granted because you've seen it so many times. Well, if it's a real piece of art, that doesn't happen. You notice the little details. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I mean, there are images, religious images in particular, so we could call them deep images, that people have been unpacking for 4,000 years and still haven't, I'll give you an example. This is a terrible example. So, I did a lecture series on Genesis, and I got a lot of it unpacked, but by no means all of it. When God kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, he puts cherubim with flaming swords at the gate to stop human beings from reentering paradise. I thought, what the hell does that mean, cherubim, and why do they have flaming swords? I don't get that. What is that exactly? And then I found out from Matthew Pagel, who wrote a great book on symbolism in Genesis, that cherubim are the supporting monsters of God. It's a very complicated idea, and that they are partly a representation of that which is difficult to fit into conceptual systems. They've also got an angelic or demonic aspect. Take your pick. Why do they have flaming swords? Well, a sword is a symbol of judgment and the separation of the wheat from the chaff. You use a sword to cut away, to cut away, and to carve. And a flaming sword is not only that which carves, it's that which burns. And what does it carve away and burn? Well, you want to get into paradise? It carves away everything about you that isn't perfect. And so what does that mean? Okay, well, here's part of what it means. This is a terrible thing. So you could say that the entire Christian narrative is embedded in that image. Why? Well, let's say that flaming swords are a symbol of death. That seems pretty obvious. Let's say further that they're a symbol of apocalypse and hell. That doesn't seem completely unreasonable. So here's an idea. Not only do you have to face death, you have to face death and hell before you can get to paradise. Hellish judgment and all that's embedded in that image. And a piece of art with an image like that has all that information in it. And it shines forth in some fundamental sense. It reaches into the back tendrils of your mind at levels you can't even comprehend and grips you. I mean, that's why people go to museums and gaze at paintings they don't understand. And that's why they'll pay what's the most expensive objects in the world. If it's not carbon fiber racing yachts, it's definitely classic paintings. It's high level technological implements or it's classic art. Well, why are those things so expensive? Why do we build temples to house the images? Even secular people go to museums. I'm secular. Well, are you in a museum? Yes. Are you looking at art? Yes. Well, what makes you think you're secular then? It's arguable that the thing many, many centuries from now that will remain of all of human civilization will be our art. Not even the words. Well, a book has remained a very long time, right? The biblical writings have. Not that long. A few millennia. That's right. But that's in the full arc of living organisms, perhaps will not be. Well, we have images that are, we have artistic images that are at least 50,000 years old, right, that have survived. And some of those are, they're already profound in their symbolism. By we, do you mean humans? Yeah, we found them. And they've lasted, they've lasted that long. And so, and then think about Europe. Secular people all over the world make pilgrimages to Europe. Well, why? Because of the beauty. Obviously, I mean, that's self evident. And it's partly because there are things in Europe that are so beautiful. They take your breath away, right? They make your hair stand on end. They fill you with a sense of awe. And we need to see those things. It's not optional. We need to see those things. The cathedrals. I was in a cathedral in Vienna, and it was terribly beautiful. Terribly beautiful. Well, it was terribly beautiful. Is beauty painful for you? Is that the highest form of beauty? It really challenges you? Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah. I got a good analysis of the statue of David. Michelangelo says, you could be far more than you are. That's what that statue says. And this cathedral, we went down into the under structure of it. And there were three floors of bones from the plague. And there they all are. And then that cathedral is on top of it. It's no joke to go visit a place like that. No, it rattles you to the core. And our religious systems have become propositionally dubious. But there's no arguing with the architecture, although modern architects like to, with their sterility and their giant middle fingers erected everywhere. But beauty is a terrible pointer to God. And a secular person will say, well, I don't believe in God. It's like, have it your way. You got it. You cannot move forward into the unforeseen horizon of the future except on faith. And you might say, well, I have no faith. It's like, well, good luck with the future then. Because what are you then, nihilistic and hopeless and anxiety ridden? And if not, well, something's guiding you forward. It's faith in something or multiple things, which just makes you a polytheist, which I wouldn't recommend. Well, let me ask you one short lived biological meat bag to another. Who is God then? Let's try to sneak up to this question if it's at all possible. Is it possible to even talk about this? Well, it better be. Because otherwise, there's no communicating about it. It has to be something that can be brought down to Earth. Well, we might be too dumb to bring it down. It's not just ignorant. It's also sinful because there's not knowing. And then there's wanting to know or refusing to know. And so you might say, well, could you extract God from a description of the objective world? Is God just the ultimate unity of the natural reality? And I would say, well, in a sense, there's some truth in that, but not exactly. Because God in the highest sense is the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive. How's that for a biological definition? Spirit is a pattern, the spirit that you must emulate in order to thrive. So it's a kind of, in one sense, when we say the human spirit, it's that. It's an animating principle. Yeah, it's a meta. It's a pattern. And you might say, well, what's the pattern? Well, I can tell you that to some degree. Imagine that like your grip by beauty, you're gripped by admiration. And you can just notice this. This isn't propositional. You have to notice it. It's like, oh, turns out I admire that person. So what does that mean? Well, it means I would like to be like him or her. That's what admiration means. It means there's something about the way they are that compels imitation, another instinct, or inspires respect or awe even. What is that that grips you? Well, I don't know. Well, let's say, OK, fine. But it grips you. And you want to be like that. Kids hero worship, for example. So do adults, for that matter, unless they become entirely cynical. I worship quite a few heroes. Well, there you go. Yes, well, there you go. And there's no, that worship, that celebration and proclivity to imitate is worship. That's what worship means most fundamentally. Now, imagine you took the set of all admirable people and you extracted out AI learning. You extracted out the central features of what constitutes admirable. And then you did that repeatedly until you purified it to what was most admirable. That's as good as you're going to get in terms of a representation of God. And you might say, well, I don't believe in that. It's like, well, what do you mean? It's not a set of propositional facts. It's not a scientific theory about the structure of the objective world. And then I could say something about that, too, because I've been thinking about this a lot, especially since talking to Richard Dawkins. It's like, OK, the postmodernist types, going back way before Derrida and Foucault, maybe back to Nietzsche, who I admire greatly, by the way. He says, God is dead. It's like, OK. But Nietzsche said, God is dead, and we have killed him, and we'll not find enough water to wash away all the blood. So that was Nietzsche. He's no fool. He's got away with words. He certainly does. And so then you think, OK, well, we killed the transcendent. Well, what does that mean for science? Well, it frees it up, because all that nonsense about a deity is just the idiot superstition that stops the scientific process from moving forward. That's basically the new atheist claim, something like that. It's like, wait a second. Do you believe in the transcendent if you're a scientist? And the answer is, well, not only do you believe in it, you believe in it more than anything else. Because if you're a scientist, you believe in what objects to your theory more than you believe in your theory. Now, we've got to think that through very carefully. So your theory describes the world. And as far as you're concerned, your description of the world is the world. But because you're a scientist, you think, well, even though that's my description of the world and that's what I believe, there's something beyond what I believe. And that's the object. And so I'm going to throw my theory against the object and see where it'll break. And then I'm going to use the evidence of the break as a source of new information to revitalize my theory. So as a scientist, you have to posit the existence of the ontological transcendent before you can move forward at all. But more, you have to posit that contact with the ontological transcendent, annoying though it is because it upsets your apple cart, is exactly what will, in fact, set you free. So then you accept the proposition that there is a transcendent reality and that contact with that transcendent reality is redemptive in the most fundamental sense. Because if it wasn't, well, why would you bother making contact with it? Is it going to make everything worse or better? Why does the contact with the transcendent set you free as a scientist? Because you assume that, you assume, I mean, freedom in the most fundamental sense. It's like, well, freedom from want, freedom from disease, freedom from ignorance, right? That it informs you. So it's the lie of science. It is definitely that. Yeah, it's the direction, let's say, the directionality of science. That's a narrative direction, not a scientific direction. And then the question is, what is the narrative? Well, it posits a transcendent reality. It posits that the transcendent reality is corrective. It posits that our knowledge structures should be regarded with humility. It posits that you should bow down in the face of the transcendent evidence. And you have to take a vow. You know this as a scientist. You have to take a vow to follow that path if you're going to be a real scientist. Like, the truth, no matter what, and that means you posit the truth as a redemptive force. Well, what does redemptive mean? Well, why bother with science? Well, so people don't starve. So people can move about more effectively. So life can be more abundant, right? So it's all ensconced within an underlying ethic. So the reason I was saying that while we were talking about belief in God, it's like, this is a very complicated topic, right? Do you believe in a transcendent reality? See, OK, now let's say you buy the argument I just made on the natural front. You say, yeah, yeah, that's just nature. That's not God. And then I'd say, well, what makes you think you know what nature is? Like, see, the problem with that argument is that it already presumes a materialist, a reductionist, materialist, objective view of what constitutes nature. But if you're a scientist, you're going to think, well, in the final analysis, I don't know what nature is. I certainly don't know its origin or destination point. I don't know its teleology. I'm really ignorant about nature. And so when I say it's nothing but nature, I shouldn't mean it's nothing but what I understand nature to be. So I could say, will we have a fully reductionist account of cognitive processes? And the answer to that is yes. But by the time we do that, our understanding of matter will have transformed so much that what we think of as reductionists now won't look anything like what we think of reductionism now. Matter isn't dead dust. I don't know what it is. I have no idea what it is. Matter is what matters. There is a definition. That's a very weird definition. But the notion that we have, you know, that if you're a reductionist, a materialist reductionist, that you can reduce the complexity of what is to your assumptions about the nature of matter, that's not a scientific proposition. Your specific limited human assumptions of this century, of this week, that so in some sense, without God in this complicated big definition we're talking about, there's no humility. Or it's less likely to be, or rather science can err in taking a trajectory away from humility. Well. Without something much more powerful than an individual human. Yeah, well then and we know, you know, the Frankenstein story comes out of that instantly. And that's a good story for the current times. It's like you're playing around with making new life. You bloody well better make sure you have your arrows pointed up. And it's interesting because you said science has an ethic to it. I think it's embedded in an ethic. Well, there's a, you know, science is a big word. And it includes a lot of disciplines that have different traditions. So biology, chemistry, genetics, physics, those are very different communities. And I think biology, especially when you get closer and closer to medicine and to the human body, does have a very serious, first of all, has a history with Nazi Germany of being abused and all those kinds of things. But it has a history of taking this stuff seriously. What doesn't have a history of taking this stuff seriously is robotics and artificial intelligence, which is really interesting. Because you don't, you know, you called me a scientist. And I would like to wear that label proudly, but often people don't think of computer science as a science. But nevertheless, it will be, I think, the science of one of the major scientific fields of the 21st century. And you should take that very seriously. Oftentimes when people build robots or AI systems, they think of them as toys to tinker with. Oh, isn't this cool? And I feel this too. Isn't this cool? It is cool. But, you know, at a certain moment you might, isn't this nuclear explosion cool? Because it is. Or birth control pill cool. It's like, or transistor cool. Yeah. Well, the other thing too, and this is a weird problem in some sense, the robotics engineer types, they're thing people, right? I mean, the big classes of interest are interest in things versus interest in people. Some of my best friends are thing people. Yeah, right. And thing people are very, very clear, logical thinkers. And they're very outcome oriented and practical. Now, and that's all good. That makes the machinery and keeps it functioning. But there's a human side of the equation. And you get the extreme thing people, and you think, yeah, well, what about the human here? And when we're talking about, we've been talking about the necessity of having a technological enterprise embedded in an ethic. And you can ignore that, like most of the time, right? You can ignore the overall ethic in some sense when you're toying around with your toys. But when you're building an artificial intelligence, it's like, well, that's not a toy. That might be. Toy becomes the monster very quickly. Yeah, yes, yes. And this is a whole new kind of monster. And maybe it's already here. Yes, and you notice how many of those things you can no longer turn off. And what is it with you engineers and your inability to put off switches on things now? It's like, I have to hold this for five seconds for it to shut off. Or I can't figure it. I just want to shut it off. Click, off. Well, what is it with you humans that don't put off switches on other humans? Because there's a magic to the thing that you notice. And it hurts for both you and perhaps one day the thing itself to turn it off. And so you have to be very careful as an engineer adding off switches to things. I think it's a feature, not a bug, the off switch. The off switch gives a deadline to us humans, to systems of existence. It makes you, you know, death is the thing that really brings clarity to life. And I do think. Hence the flaming swords. The flaming sword. I do like your view of the flame, the bush, and perhaps the sword as a thing of transformation. It's also a transformation that kind of consumes the thing in the process. Well, it depends on how much of the thing is chaff. You know, this is why you can't touch the Ark of the Covenant, for example. And this is why people can have very bad psychedelic trips. It's like if you're 95% dead wood and you get too close to the flame, the 5% that's left might not be able to make it. So you think it's all chaff. But I think there is some aspect of destruction that is the old Bukowski line of do what you love and let it kill you. Don't you think that destruction is part of? That's humility. That's humility. You bet. You bet. You bet. It's like invite in the judgment. Invite in the judgment because maybe you can die a little bit instead of dying completely. I think it's Alfred North Whitehead. We can let our ideas die instead of us. We can have these partial personalities that we can burn off. And we can let them go before they become tyrannical pharaohs and we lose everything. And so, yeah, there's this optimal bite of death. And who knows what it would mean to optimize that? Like what if it was possible that if you died enough all the time that you could continue to live? And the thing is we already know that biologically because if you don't die properly all the time, well, it's cancerous outgrowths and it's a very fine balance between productivity on the biological front and the culling of that, right? Life is a real balance between growth and death. And so what would happen if you got that balance right? Well, we kind of know, right? Because if you live your life properly, so to speak, and you're humble enough to let your stupidity die before it takes you out, you will live longer. That's just a fact. Well, but then what's the ultimate extension of that? And the answer is we don't know. We have no idea. Well, let me ask you a difficult question because. As opposed to the easy ones that you've been asking so far. Well, Dostoevsky is always just a warm up. So if death every single day is the way to progress through life, you have become quite famous. Death and hell. Death and hell. Yeah, yeah. Because you don't want to forget the hell part. Do you worry that your fame traps you into the person that you were before? Yeah, well, Elvis became an Elvis impersonator by the time he died. Yeah, do you fear that you have become a Jordan Peterson impersonator? Do you fear of, in some part, becoming the famous suit wearing brilliant Jordan Peterson, the certainty in the pursuit of truth, always right? I think I worry about it more than anything else. I hope. I hope I do. I better. Has fame, to some degree, when you look at yourself in the mirror, in the quiet of your mind, has it corrupted you? No doubt, in some regard. I mean, it's a very difficult thing to avoid because things change around you. People are much more likely to do what you ask, for example. And so that's a danger because one of the things that keeps you dying properly is that people push back against you optimally. This is why so many celebrities spiral out of control, especially the tyrannical types that, say, run countries. Everyone around them stops saying, yeah, you're deviating a little bit there. They laugh at all their jokes. They open all their doors. They always want something from them. The red carpet's always rolled out. It's like, well, you think, wouldn't that be lovely? It's, well, not if the red carpet is rolled out to you while you're on your way to perdition. That's not a good deal. You just get there more efficiently. And so one of the things that I've tried to learn to manage is to have people around me all the time who are critics, who are saying, yeah, I could have done that better. And you're a little too harsh there. And you're alienating people unnecessarily there. And you should have done some more background work there. And I think the responsibility attendant upon that increases as your influence increases. And as your influence increases, then that becomes a lot of responsibility. So and then maybe have an off day. And well, here's an example. I've been writing some columns lately about things that perturb me, like the forthcoming famine, for example. And it's hard to take those problems on. It's difficult to take those problems on in a serious manner, and it's frightening. And it would be easier just to go up to the cottage with my wife and go out on the lake and watch the sunset. And so I'm tempted to draw on anger as a motivating energy to help me overcome the resistance to doing this. But then that makes me more harsh and judgmental in my tone when I'm reading such things, for example, on YouTube than might be optimal. Now, I've had debates with people about that because I have friends who say, no, if you're calling out the environmentalists, globalists who are harassing the Dutch farmers, then a little anger is just the ticket. But then others say, well, you don't want to be too harsh because you alienate people who would otherwise listen to you. It's like, that's a hard balance to get right. But also maybe anger hardens your mind to where you don't notice the subtle quiet beauty of the world, the quiet love that's always there that permeates everything. Sometimes you can become deeply cynical about the world if it's the Nietzsche thing. Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster. And if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. But I would say, bring it on. Right, because I also say knowing that he's absolutely right. But if you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness. Are you sure about that? I'm betting my life on it. Yeah, that's a heck of a bet. Well, that's. Because it might distort your mind to where all you see. Is abyss. Is abyss, is the evil in this world. Well, then I would say you haven't looked long enough. You know, that's back to the. You just eliminated. The swords, the flaming swords. It's like, so I said the whole story of Christ was prefigured in that image. It's like the story of Christ psychologically is radical acceptance of the worst possible tragedy. That's what it means, that's what the crucifix means. Psychologically, it's like gaze upon that which you are most afraid of. But that story doesn't end there. Because in the story, Christ goes through death into hell. So death isn't enough. The abyss, the abyss of innocent death is not sufficient to produce redemption. It has to be a voluntary journey to hell. And maybe that's true for everyone. And that's like, there is no more terrifying idea than that, by definition. And so then, well, do you gaze upon that? Well, who knows? Who knows? How often do you gaze upon death, your own? How often do you remember, remind yourself that this ride ends? Personally? Personally. All the time. Because you, as a deep thinker and a philosopher, it's easy to start philosophizing and forgetting that you're, you might die today. The angel of death sits on every word. How's that? How often do you actually consciously? All the time. Notice the angel? All the time. I think it's one of the things that made me peculiar. When I was in graduate school, you know, I thought about, I was, I had the thought of death in my mind all the time. And I noticed that many of the people that I was with, these were people I admired, fine. That wasn't part of their character, but it was definitely part of mine. I'd wake up every morning, this happened for years, think, time's short, get at it. Time's short, get at it. There's things to do. And so that was always, it's still there. And it's still there with, I would say, and it's unbearable in some sense. Are you afraid of it? Like what's your relationship? Yeah. You know, I was ready to die a year ago and not casually. I had people I loved, you know. So no, I'm not very worried about me, but I'm very worried about making a mistake. Yeah. I heard Elon Musk talk about that a couple of months ago. It was really a striking moment. Someone asked him about death and he said just offhand and then went on with the conversation. He said, I'd be a relief. And then he went on with the conversation. And I thought, well, you know, he's got a lot of weight on his shoulders. I'm sure that part of him thinks I'd be easier just if this wasn't here at all. Now he said it offhand, but it was a telling moment in my estimation. So for him, that's a why live question. The exhaustion of life, if you call it life is suffering, but the hardship. I'm more afraid of hell than death. You're afraid of the thing that follows? I don't know if it follows or if it's always here. And I think we're gonna find out. What's the connection between death and hell? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Is there something that needs to be done before you arrive? You're more likely to die terribly if you live in a manner that brings you to hell. That's one connection. And terribly is a very deep kind of concept. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And that's the definition, by the way. What do you make of Elon Musk? You've spoken about him a bit. You met him. I'm struck with admiration. That's what I make of him. And I always think of that as a primary. Well, it's like, do you find this comedian funny? It's like, well, I laugh at him. You know what I mean? It's not propositional again. And so I would, there are things I would like to ask Mr. Musk about. The Mars venture. I don't know what he's up to there. It strikes me as absurd in the most fundamental sense because I think, well, it'd be easier just to build an outpost in the Antarctica or in the desert. Well, how much of the human endeavor is absurd? Well, that's what it needs to say. Great men are seldom credited with their stupidity. Who the hell knows what Musk is up to? I mean, obviously he's building rockets. Now he's motivated because he wants to build a platform for life on Mars. Is that a good idea? Who am I to say? He's building the rockets, man. But I'd like to ask him about it. I would like to see that conversation. I do think that having talked to him quite a bit offline, I think these, several of his ideas like Mars, like humans becoming a multi planetary species could be one of the things that human civilization looks back at as, duh, I can't believe he is one of the few people that was really pushing this idea because it's the obvious thing for society, for life to survive. Yeah, well, it isn't obvious to me that I'm in any position to evaluate Elon Musk. Like I would like to talk to him and find out what he's up to and why, but I mean, he's an impossible person. What he's done is impossible, all of it. It's like he built an electric car that works. Now, does it work completely and will it replace gas cars or should it? I don't know, but if we're gonna build electric cars, he seems to be the best at that by a lot. And he more or less did that, people carp about him, but he more or less did that by himself. I know he's very good at distributing responsibility and all of that, but he's the spearhead. And then that was pretty hard. And then he built a rocket at like one 10th the price of NASA rockets. And then he shot his car out into space. That's pretty hard. And then he's building this boring company, more or less as a, what would you call it? It's sort of, it's this whimsical joke in some sense, but it's not a joke. He's amazing. And Neuralink delving into the depths of the mind. And Starlink. It's like, go Elon, as far as I'm concerned. And then he puts his finger on things so oddly. The problem is underpopulation. It's like, I think so too. I think it's a terrible problem that we're, the West for example, is no longer at replacement with regard to birth rate. It means we've abandoned the Virgin and the child in a most fundamental sense. It's a bloody catastrophe. And Musk, he sees it clear as can be. It's like, wow, and where everyone else is running around going, oh, there's too many people. It's like, nope, got that. Not only, see, I've learned that there are falsehoods and lies and there are antitruths. And an antitruth is something that's so preposterous that you couldn't make a claim that's more opposite to the truth. And the claim that there are too many people on the planet is an antitruth. So, you know, people say, well, you have to accept limits to growth and et cetera. It's like, I have to accept the limits that you're going to impose on me because you're frightened of the future. That's your theory, isn't it? Okay. Well, it's an idea. It could be a right idea. It could be a wrong idea. I don't think antitruth. Here, I'll tell you why it's the wrong idea, I think. So imagine that there's an emergency, dragon. There's a dragon. Someone comes and says, there's a dragon. I'm the guy to deal with it. That's what the environmentalists say, the radical types who push limits to growth. Then I look at them and I think, okay, is that dragon real or not? That's one question. Well, is the... I ask that question of myself every time when I spend time alone. Is the apocalypse looming on the environmental front? Yes or no? I'll just leave that aside for the time being. I think you can make a case both ways for a bunch of different reasons. And it's not a trivial concern. And we've overfished the oceans terribly. And there are environmental issues that are looming large. Whether climate change is the cardinal one or not is a whole different question, but we won't get into that. That's not the issue. You're clamoring about a dragon. Okay. Why should I listen to you? Well, let's see how you're reacting to the dragon. First of all, you're scared stiff and in a state of panic. That might indicate you're not the man for the job. Second, you're willing to use compulsion to harness other people to fight the dragon for you. So now not only are you terrified, you're a terrified tyrant. So then I would say, well, then you're not the Moses that we need to lead us out of this particular exodus. And maybe that's a neurological explanation. It's like, if you're so afraid of what you're facing that you're terrified into paralysis and nihilism and that you're willing to use tyrannical compulsion to get your way, you are not the right leader for the time. So then I like someone like Bjorn Lomborg or Matt Ridley or Marion Toopy. And they say, well, look, we've got our environmental problems. And maybe you could make a case that there's a Malthusian element in some situations, but fundamentally the track record of the human race is that we learn very fast and faster all the time to do more with less, and we've got this. And I think, yes, to that idea. And I think about it in a fundamental way. It's like, I trust Lomborg, I trust Toopy, trust Matt Ridley. They've thought about these things deeply. They're not just saying, oh, the environment doesn't matter, whatever the environment is. You know, the environment, I don't even know what that is. That's everything, the environment. I'm concerned about the environment. It's like, which is, how is that different than saying I'm worried about everything? How are those statements different semantically? Well, yeah, the environment, it could be, I'm worried about human society. A lot of these complex systems are difficult to talk about because there's so much involved for sure. Yeah, everything. And then these models, because people have gone after me because I don't buy the climate models. Well, I think about the climate models as extended into the economic models because the climate model is, well, there's gonna be a certain degree of heating, let's say by 2100. It's like, okay, some of that might be human generated. Some of it's a consequence of warming after the ice age. This has happened before, but fair enough. Let's take your presumption. Although there are multiple presumptions and any error in your model multiplies as time extends, but have it your way. Okay, now we're gonna extend the climate model, so to speak, into the economic model. So I just did an analysis of a paper by Deloitte, third biggest company in the US, 300,000 employees, major league consultants. They just produced a report in May. I wrote an article for it in the Telegraph, which I'm gonna release this week on my YouTube channel. Said, well, if we get the climate problem under control economically, because that's where the models are now being generated on the economic front. So now we have to model the environment, that's climate, and we have to model the economy, and then we have to model their joint interaction, and then we have to predict 100 years into the future, and then we have to put a dollar value on that, and then we have to claim that we can do that, which we can't, and then this is our conclusion. We're going to go through a difficult period of privation, because if we don't accept limits to growth, there's gonna be a catastrophe, 50 years in the future or thereabouts. And so to avert that catastrophe, we are going to make people poorer now. How much poorer? Well, not a lot compared to how much richer they're going to be, but definitely, and they say this in their own models, definitely poorer, definitely poorer than they would be if we just left them the hell alone. And so then I think, okay, poorer, eh? Who? Well, let's look at it biologically. Got a hierarchy, right, of stability and security. That's a hierarchy or one type. You stress a hierarchy like that, a social hierarchy. So there's birds in an environment, and an avian flu comes in, and then you look at the birds in the social hierarchy, and the low ranking birds have the worst nests. So they're most exposed to wind and rain and sun and farthest from food supplies and most exposed to predators. And so those birds are stressed, which is what happens to you at the bottom of a hierarchy. You're more stressed because your life is more uncertain. You're more stressed. Your immunological function is compromised because of that. You're sacrificing the future for the present. An avian flu comes in, and the birds die from the bottom up. That happens in every epidemic. You die from the bottom up. Okay, so they say when the aristocracy catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia. All right, so now we're gonna make people poorer. Okay, who? Well, we know who we make poor when we make people poorer. We make those who are barely hanging on poorer. And what does that mean? It means they die. And so what the Deloitte consultants are basically saying is, well, you know, it's kind of unfortunate, but according to our models, a lot of poor people are gonna have to die so that a lot more poor people don't die in the future. It's like, okay, hold on a sec. Which of those two things am I supposed to regard with certainty? The hypothetical poor people that you're gonna hypothetically save 100 years from now, or the actual poor people that you are actually going to kill in the next 10 years? Well, I'm gonna cast my lot with the actual poor people that you're actually going to kill. And so, and then I think further, it's like, well, okay, the Deloitte consultants, have you actually modeled the world? Or is this a big advertising shtick designed to attract your corporate clients with demonstration that you're so intelligent that you can actually model the entire ecosystem of the world, including the economic system, and predict it 100 years forward? And isn't there a bit of a moral hazard in making a claim like that? Just like just a trifle, especially when... So I talked to Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Yon last week. I accepted the UN estimates of starvation this coming year. 150 million people will suffer food insecurity. Food insecurity. Yeah, food insecurity, that's the bloody buzzword. Famine. Well, Michael Yon thought 1.2 billion, and then that it'll spiral because he said, what happens in a famine is that the governments go nuts, crazy, the governments destabilize, and then they appropriate the food from the farmers. Then the farmers don't have any money. Then they can't grow crops. And I think, yeah, that's exactly what they do. That's exactly what would happen. And so Yon told me 1.2 billion, and then Bjorn Lomborg said the same thing. I didn't even ask him. He just made it as an offhand comment. So... Let me ask you about the famine of the 30s. Yeah. Do you think... In the Ukraine? In the Ukraine. Oh, yeah. Fun, fun, fun. Similar, a lot of the things you mentioned in the last few sentences kind of echo to that part of human history. The hole in the door. Do you... No one knows about. Well, now I've just spent four weeks in Ukraine. Oh, yeah. There's different parts of the world that still, even if they don't know, they know. Yeah, right. They feel. They feel history runs in the blood. The Dutch knew, in some sense. They had a famine at the end of World War II. And part of the reason the Dutch farmers are so unbelievably efficient and productive is that the Dutch swore at the end of World War II that that was not going to happen again. And then they had to scrape land out of the ocean because Holland, that's quite a country. It shouldn't even exist. The fact that it's the world's number two exporter. You know that? It's the world's number two exporter of agricultural products, Holland. It's like, I don't think it's as big as Massachusetts. It's this little tiny place. It shouldn't even exist. And they want to put, here's the plan. Let's put 30% of the farmers out of business. While the broader ecosystem of agricultural production in Holland is 6% of their GDP. Now these centralizing politicians think, tell me if I'm stupid about this. Take an industry, you knock it back by fiat by 30%. Now it runs on like a 3% profit margin. Now you're going to kill 30% of it. How are you not going to bring the whole thing down? The whole farming ecosystem down? How are you not going to impoverish the transport systems? How are you not going to demolish the grocery stores? You can't take something like that and pare it back by fiat by 30% and not kill it. I can't see how you can do that. I mean, look what we did with the COVID lockdowns. We broke the supply chains. We tried buying something lately. You can't, and wait, and aren't the Chinese threatening Taiwan at the moment? What are we going to do without chips? So I don't know what these people are thinking. And then I think, okay, what are they thinking? Well, the Deloitte people are thinking, aren't we smart and shouldn't we be hired by our corporate employers? It's like, okay, too bad about the poor. What are the environmentalists thinking? We love the planet. It's like, do you? We love the poor. Do you? Okay, let's pit the planet against the poor. Who wins? The planet. Okay, you don't love the poor that much. Do you love the planet or do you hate capitalism? Let's pit those two things against each other. Oh, well, it turns out we actually hate capitalism. How can we tell? Because you're willing to break it. And you know what's going to happen. So what's going to happen in Sri Lanka with these 20 million people who now have nothing to eat? Are they going to eat all the animals? Are they going to burn all the firewood? They're stockpiling firewood in Germany. It's like, so is your environmental globalist utopia going to kill the poor and destroy the planet? And that's okay, because we'll wipe out capitalism. It's like, okay. Yeah, the dragon and the fear of the dragon drives ideologies, some of which can build a better world, some of which can destroy that world. Now, what do you think of that theory about trustworthiness? If the dragon that you're facing turns you into a terrified tyrant, you're not the man for the job. Is that a good theory? It's an interesting theory. Let me use that theory to challenge, because what does terror look like? Let me table the turns, turn the tables on you. You are terrified, afraid, concerned about the dragon of something we can call communism, Marxism. Am I terrified of it? Well, okay, okay. I'm not terrified enough to be a tyrant. Your theories had two components. Yeah? I'm not paralyzed. Had a dragon. Yeah, I'm not paralyzed, and I don't wanna be a tyrant. The tyrant part, I think, is missing with you. But you are very concerned. The intensity of your feeling does not give much space, actually, at least in your public persona, for sitting quietly with the dragon and sipping on a couple of beers and thinking about this thing. The intensity of your anger, concern about certain things you're seeing in society, is that going to drive you off the path that ultimately takes us to a better world? That's a good question. I mean, I'm trying to get that right. So we've kind of come to a cultural conclusion about the Nazis. Do you get to be angry about the Nazis? Seems the answer to that is yes. Well, actually, let me push back here. I also don't trust people who are angry about the Nazis. I mean the actual Nazis. Well, as you know, there's a lot of people in the world that use actual Nazis to mean a lot of things. I know, I know. One of them is very important to me. Me, for example. Well, yes. He's a Nazi, or magical super Nazi, as it turns out. I think they actually sort of steel man all their perspectives. I think a lot of people that call you a Nazi mean it. Yeah. I'm aware of that. There's an important thing there though, because I went to the front in Ukraine, and a lot of the people that lost their home or they're kind of, that got to interact a lot with the Russian soldiers, the Ukrainian people that interact with the Russian soldiers, they reported that the Russian soldiers really believe they're saving the people of Ukraine in these local villages from the Nazis. I understand, yeah. So to them, it's not just that the Ukrainian government has or Ukraine has some Nazis, it's like it has been, the idea is that the Nazis have taken over Ukraine and we need to free them. This is the belief. So this, again, Nazi is still a dragon that lives. Yeah. And it's used by people because it's safe to sit next to that dragon and spread any kind of ideology you want. So I just wanted to kind of say that we have agreed on this particular dragon, but I still don't trust anybody who uses that one. Yeah, but we have issues with boundaries, right? No, no, it's, so this is a very complicated problem, right? So Rene Girard believed that it was a human proclivity to demonize a scapegoat and then drive it out of the village. And I've thought about that a lot. We need a place to put Satan. Seriously, this is a serious issue. Should he be inside the village or outside? Well, maybe he should be inside you, right? That's the fundamental essence of the Christian doctrine. It's like, Satan is best fought on the battleground of your soul. And that's, that's right. It's right. Can you actually put words to the kind of dragon that you're fighting? Is it communism? It's the spirit of Cain. Yeah. Can you elaborate what the spirit of Cain is? So after Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise for becoming self conscious, or when they become self conscious, they're destined to work. And the reason for that, as far as I can tell, is that to become self conscious is to become aware of the future. It's to become aware of death. That certainly happens in the Adam and Eve story, to have the scales fall from your eyes. And then the consequence of that is that you now have to labor to prevent the catastrophes of the future. That's work. Work is sacrifice. Sacrifice of the present to the future. It's delay of gratification, it's maturity. It's sacrifice to something as well, and in the spirit of something. Okay, so now Adam and Eve have two children, Cain and Abel. So those are the first two people in history. Because the Garden of Eden doesn't count. And they're the first two people who are born rather than created. So they're the first two people. And that's a hell of a story, because it's a story of fratricidal murder that degenerates into genocide, flood, and tyranny. So that's fun for the opening salvo of the story, let's say. And Abel and Cain both make sacrifices. And for some reason, Abel's sacrifice is please God. It's not exactly clear why. And Cain's don't. Now, there's an implication in the text that it's because Cain's sacrifices are true, are second rate. God says that Abel brings the finest to the sacrificial altar. He doesn't say that about Cain. So you could imagine that Cain is sacrificing away, but he's holding something in reserve. He's not all in, he's not bringing his best to the table. He's not offering his best to God. And so Abel thrives like mad. And everyone loves him. And he gets exactly what he needs and wants, exactly when he needs and wants it. He's favored of God. And Cain is bearing this terrible burden forward and working, and his sacrifices are rejected. So he gets resentful, really resentful. Enough resentful enough to call God out and say something like, this is quite the creation you've got going here. I'm breaking myself in half and nothing good's coming my way. What the hell's up with that? And then there's Abel, the sun shining on him every day. How dare you? It's like, okay. But this is God that Cain's talking to. And so God says what Cain least wants to hear, which is what God usually says to people. He says, look to your own devices. You're not making the sacrifices you should. And you know it. And then he says something even worse. He says, sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal. And you've invited it in to have your way, to have its way with you. And so he basically says, you have allowed your resentment to preoccupy yourself. And now you're brooding upon it and generating something creative, new and awful, possessed by the spirit of resentment. And that's why you're in the miserable state you're in. So then Cain leaves, his countenance falls, as you might expect, and Cain leaves. And he's so incensed by this because God has said, look, your problems are of your own making. And not only that, you invited them in. And not only that, you engaged in this creatively. And not only that, you're blaming it on me. And not only that, that's making you jealous of Abel, who's your actual idol and goal. And Cain, instead of changing, kills Abel, right? And then Cain's descendants are the first people who make weapons of war. And so that's, okay, you wanna know what I think? That's the eternal story of mankind. And it's playing out right now, except at a thousand times the rate. Can I present to you a difficult truth? Perhaps not a truth, but a thought I have, that it is not always easy to know which among us are the Cain. That's for sure. And resentment, it is possible to imagine you as the person who has a resentment towards a particular worldview that you really worry about. Yeah, well, I talked to a good friend of mine last week about that publicly, we'll release it. So I said, well, do I have a particular animus against the left, let's say? It's like, well, probably. Okay, why? Well, first of all, I'm a university professor. It's not like the universities are threatened by the right. They're threatened by the left, 100%. And they're not just threatened a little bit, they're threatened a lot. And that threat made it impossible for me to continue in my profession the way I was. And it cost me my clinical practice too. And that's not over yet because I have 10 lawsuits against me out right now from the College of Psychologists because they've allowed anyone to complain about me anywhere in the world for any reason, and have the choice to follow that up with an investigation, which is a punishment in and of itself, and are doing so. And then I've been tortured nearly to death multiple times by bad actors on the left. Now I've had my fair share of radical right wingers being unhappy with what I've said, but personally, that's been the left the whole time. Not only me, but my family, put my family at risk in a big way and constantly, like not once or twice, because many people get canceled once or twice. But I've been canceled like 40 times. And I know like 200 people now who've been canceled. And I can tell you without doubt, that it is one of the worst experiences of their life. And that's if it only happens once. And so, and then I also know that the communists killed 100 million people in the 20th century, that the intellectuals excused them for it nonstop and still haven't quit, that almost no one knows about it, and that the specter of resentful Marxism is back in full force. And so do I have a bit of an animus against that? Yes. Does it go too far? I don't know. I'm trying to figure that out. The story you just told, it seems nearly impossible for you, an intellectual powerhouse, not to have a tremendous amount of resentment. Well. And this is the, so let me challenge you. Yeah, go right ahead, man. Let me challenge you. Can you steal, man, the case that the prime minister of this country, Trudeau, wants the best for this country and actually might do good things for this country as an intellectual challenge? Sure. He seems to get along well with his wife. He has some kids. There's no sexual scandals. And he's in a position where that could easily be the case. He seems to have done some good things on the oceanic management front. He's put a fair bit of Canada's oceans into marine protected areas, and that might be his most fundamental legacy, if it's real. I've been trying to get information about the actual reality of the protection, and I haven't been able to do that. But that's a good thing. So sorry, the family thing is, there's some aspect of. It speaks to his character. This is a character. There is some aspect to him that makes him a good man in that sense. There's the evidence there. He's not a Jeffrey Epstein profligate on the sexual front, so that's something. And his wife, they seem to have a real marriage, and he has kids, so good for him. That's a good start, by the way, for a leader. Yeah, right. To be a good man. Well, then I also thought, okay, well, after the Liberals had brought in a Harvard intellectual who was a Canadian to be their last leader, he didn't work out, and then they're flailing about for a leader, and the Liberals in Canada are pretty good at maintaining power and leadership, and have been the dominant governing party in Canada for a long time. And so they went to Justin and said, well, you know, it's you or a Conservative, and you can imagine that's not a positive specter for someone who's on the left, or even a Liberal, especially, and Trudeau's quite a bit on the left. And they said, we need you to run. And then I thought, okay, well, the answer to that should have been no, because Trudeau, Justin, has no training for this, no experience. He's not, he's a part time drama teacher, fundamentally. He hadn't run a business. He just didn't know enough to be Prime Minister. But then I'm trying to put myself in his position, eh? So it's like, okay, I don't know enough, but I'm young, and we don't want the Conservatives, and they had had a run, a 10 year run, so maybe it was time for a new government. I could, maybe I could grow into this man. Maybe I could surround myself with good people, and I could learn humbly, and I could become the person I'm now pretending to be, which we all have to do as we move forward, right? And so then I thought, okay, I think you made a mistake there, because you ran only on your father's name, and you didn't have the background, but let's give the devil his due, and say that's no problem. Okay, so now what do you do? Well, you get elected, and your first act is to make the cabinet 50% women, despite the fact that only 25% of the elected members are female. It's like, okay, you just have your talent pool. That was a really bad move for your first move. Can I ask you about that? Do you think, where does that move come from? Deep somewhere in the heart? Or is it trying to listen to the social forces of the moment, and try to ride those ways towards maybe greater and greater popularity? By after thinking it through. It's like, no, you just have your talent pool for cabinet positions. That's what you did. There's enough cabinet positions. You know, you could argue that each of them met threshold. It's like, there's a big difference between threshold and excellent. So you don't think that came from a place of compassion? I don't care if it did. I don't regard compassion as a virtue. Compassion is a reflex, not a virtue. You don't think? Judicious compassion is a virtue. Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Compassion can come deep from the human heart and the human mind, I think. Are we talking about the same kind of compassion? Yes. Trying to understand the suffering in the world. Treating adults like infants is not virtuous. I see. Well, compassion isn't treating adults like infants. I mean, those are just terms. Are you sure? Whatever the term is, maybe love is maybe the better word. Edible compassion is. I mean, I suppose I'm speaking to love. You don't think those ideas came from concern? Love is a blend of compassion and encouragement and truth. Love is complicated, man. Yeah, it has a lot of good things in it, yes. If I love you, is it compassion or encouragement you want from me? Yeah, the dance. Love is definitely a dance of two humans, ultimately, that leads to the growth of both, yes. Well, that's the thing. The growth element is crucial. Because the growth element, to foster the growth element, that requires judgment. Compassion and judgment, well, even, and have been conceptualized this way forever, two hands of God, mercy and justice. They have to operate in tandem, right? And mercy is flawed as you are, you're acceptable. It's like, well, do you want that? Do you want your flaws to be acceptable? And the answer to that is no. It's like, well, that's where the judgment comes in. It's like, but you could be better. You could be more than you are. And that's the maternal and the paternal in some fundamental sense. And there has to be a active exchange of information between those two poles. So even if Trudeau was motivated by compassion, and it's like, yeah, just how loving are you, first of all? No, it was a really bad decision. And then he's expressed contempt for monetary policy. I'm not interested in monetary policy. It's like, okay, but you're a prime minister. And he's expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party, because they can be very efficient in their pursuit of environmental goals. It's like, oh yeah, efficiency, eh? The efficiency of the tyranny in the service of your terror. And so, and I've watched him repeatedly and I've listened to him a lot. And I've tried to do that clinically and with some degree of dispassion. And that's hard too, because his father, Pierre, devastated the West in 1982 with the national energy policy. And Trudeau is doing exactly the same thing again. And so as a westerner as well, I have an inbuilt animus and one that's well deserved, because central Canada, especially the glittery literati elite types in the Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto triangle have exploited the West and expressed contempt for the West far too much for far too long. And that's accelerating at the moment, for example, with Trudeau's recent attack on the Canadian farmers. He's an enemy of the oil and gas industry. It's an utter and absolute bloody catastrophe. And look what's happened in Europe, at least in partial consequence. And he's no friend to the farmers. So I've tried to steel man him. I try to put myself in the position of the people that I'm criticizing. I think he's a narcissist. Do you think there's a degree to which power changed him? If you're not suited for the position, if you're not the man for the position, you can be absolutely 100% sure that the power will corrupt you. How could it not? I mean, at the least, if you don't have the chops for the job, you have to devalue the job to the point where you can feel comfortable inhabiting it. So yes, I think that it's corrupted him. And I mean, look at him doubling down. We wear masks in flights into Canada. We have to fill out an arrive can bureaucratic form on our phones because a passport isn't good enough. We can't get a passport. What if you're 85 and you don't know how to use a smartphone? Oh, well, too bad for you. It's like, yes, it's corrupted him. Would you talk to him? If you were to sit down and talk with him and he wanted to talk, would you and what kind of things would you talk about, perhaps on your podcast? I don't think I've ever said no to talking to anyone. So, which is, you know. Would you, would that be a first or would you make that conversation? Do you believe in the power of those kinds of contexts? No, if he was willing to talk to me, I'd talk because I'd like to ask him. I have lots of things I'd like to ask him about. I mean, I've had political types in Canada on my podcast and tried to ask them questions. So, I'd like to know. You know, maybe I've got a big part of him wrong. And I probably do, but my observation has been that every chance he had to retreat from his pharaonic position, let's say, he doubled down. And these, our parliament is not running for the next year. It's still zoom in. It's still COVID lockdown parliament. For the next year, it's already been fatally compromised, perhaps, by the lockdowns for the last couple of years. And this is parliament we're talking about. Yeah, there's a kind of paralysis, fear driven paralysis that also, in part, some of the most brilliant people I know are lost in this paralysis. I don't think people have signed a word to it, but it's almost like a fear of this unknown thing that lurks in the shadows. And that, unfortunately, that fear is leveraged by people that, you know, who are in academic circles, who are in faculty or students, and so on, or more in administration. And they start to use that fear, which makes me quite uncomfortable. It does lend people in the positions of power who are not good at handling that power to become slowly, day by day, a little bit more corrupt. I was really trying to figure out, you know, the last two weeks, thinking this through. It's like, how do you know? Let's say someone asked me a question in the YouTube comments, said, why can I trust your advice on the environmental front? And I thought, that's a really good question. Okay, let's see if we can figure out the principles by which the advice would be trustworthy. Okay, how do you know it's not trustworthy? Well, one potential response to that would be the claims are not in accordance with the facts, but, you know, facts are tricky things and it depends on where you look for them. So that's a tough one to get right because, for example, Lomberg's fundamental critics argue about his facts, not just his interpretation of them. So that can't be an unerring guide. And so I thought, well, the facts exactly doesn't work because when it's about everything, there's too many facts. So then how do you determine if someone's a trustworthy guide in the face of the apocalyptic unknown? Because that's really the question. And the answer is they're not terrified tyrants. I think that's the answer. Now, maybe that's wrong. If someone has a better answer. How do you know if they're a terrified tyrant? Because they are willing to use compulsion on other people. When they could use goodwill. Like the farmers in Canada objected. They said, look, we have every economic reason to use as little fertilizer as we can. Cause it's expensive. We have satellite maps of where we put the fertilizer. We have cut our fertilizer use so substantially in the last 40 years, you can't believe it. And we grow way more food. We're already breaking ourselves in half. And if you know farmers, especially the ones who still survive, you think those people don't know what they're doing. It's like, yeah, they're pretty damn sophisticated man. Like way more sophisticated than our prime minister. And now you tell them, no, it's a 30% reduction. And we don't care how much food you're growing. So it's not a reduction that's dependent on amount of food produced per unit of fertilizer used, which would be at least you could imagine it. So, okay, so you're producing this much food and you use this much fertilizer. So you're hyper efficient. Maybe we take the 10% of farmers who are the least efficient in that metric. And we say to them, you have to get as efficient as the average farmer. And then they say, well, look, you know, our situation's different. We're in a more Northern climb, the soil's weaker. You know, you obviously have to bargain with that, but at least you reward them for their productivity. Well, it's like, well, Holland isn't gonna have beef. Well, where are they gonna get it? Well, you don't need it. It's like, oh, I see. You get to tell me what I can eat now, do you? Really? Okay. And Holland is gonna import food from where that's more efficient on the fertilizer front. There's no one more efficient than Holland. And same with Canada. And like, isn't this gonna make food prices more expensive? And doesn't that mean that hungry people die? Cause that is what it means. And so. Ultimately, poor people pay the price of these kinds of policies. Not known, not ultimately. Now. Today. Today. That's a crucial distinction because they say, well, ultimately the poor will benefit. Yeah, except the dead ones. Yes. Today. Today, right. It seems like the story of war to, is a time when the poor people suffer from the decision made by the powerful, the rich, the political elite. Yeah. Let me ask you about the war in Ukraine. Oh yeah. I got into plenty of trouble about that too. You're, you're just a man in a suit talking on microphones and writing brilliant articles. There's also people dying, fighting. It's their land, it's their country, it's their history. This is true for both Russia and Ukraine. It's people trying to ask, they have many dragons and they're asking themselves a question, who are we? What is this? What is the future of this nation? We thought we are a great nation. And I think both countries say this. And they say, well, how do we become the great nation we thought we are? Yeah. And so what, first of all, you got in trouble. What's the dynamics of the trouble? And is there something you regret saying? No, no, I thought about it a lot. I laid out four reasons for the war. And then I was criticized in the Atlantic for the argument was reduced to one reason, which was a caricature of the reason. I gave a variety of reasons why the war happened. Mismanagement on the part of the West in relationship to Russia and foreign policy over the last, since the wall fell. It's understandable because it's extremely complex. Hyper reliance on Russia as a cardinal source of energy provision for Europe in the wake of idiot environmental globalist utopianism. The expansionist tendencies of Russia that are analogous in some sense to the Soviet Union empire building. And then the last one, which is the one I got in trouble for, which is Putin's belief or willingness to manipulate his people into believing that Russia is a salvific force in the face of idiot Western wokeism. And that's the one I got in trouble for. It's like, while you're justifying Putin, it's like, it's not only the Russians that think the West has lost its mind. The Eastern Europeans think so too. And do I know that? It's like, well, I went to 15 Eastern European countries this spring. And I talked to 300 political and cultural leaders. And you might say, well, they were all conservatives. It's like, actually, no, they weren't. Most of them were conservatives. Because it turns out that they're more willing to talk to me. But a good chunk of them were liberals by any stretch of the imagination. And a fair number of them were canceled progressives. Well, because you're very concerned about the culture wars that perhaps are a signal of a possible bad future for this country and for this part of the world, that reason stands out. And do you, sort of looking back at four reasons, think it deserves to have a place in one of the four? Oh, absolutely. Because it is, you know. Well, the four was bifurcated. Because I said, look, Putin might believe this. And I actually think he does. Because I read a bunch of Putin speeches. And I have been reading them for 15 years. And my sense of people generally, and this was true of Hitler, it's like, what did Hitler believe? Well, did you read what he wrote? He just did what he said he was going to do. And you might think, well, some people are so tricky, they have a whole body of elaborated speech that's completely separate from their personality. And their personality is pursuing a different agenda. And this whole body of speech is nothing but affront. It's like, good luck finding someone that sophisticated. First of all, if you say things long enough, you're going to believe them. That's a really interesting and fascinating and important point. Even if you start out as a lie, as a propaganda, I think Hitler is an example of somebody that I think really quickly you start to believe the propaganda. Well, you've thought a lot about AI systems. It's like, don't you become what you practice? And the answer to that is, well, absolutely. We even know the neurology. It's like when you first formulate a concept, huge swaths of your cortex are lit up, so to speak. But as you practice that, first of all, the right hemisphere stops participating. And then the left participates less and less until you build specialized machinery for exactly that conceptual frame. And then you start to see it, not just think it. And so if you're telling the same lies over and over, who do you think you're fooling? Think, well, I can withstand my own lies, not if they're effective lies. And if they're effective enough to fool millions of people, and then they reflect them back to you, what makes you think you're going to be able to withstand that? You aren't. And so I do think Putin believes, to the degree that he believes anything, I do believe that he thinks of himself as a bulwark for Christendom against the degeneration of the West. And that's that third way that Dugin and Putin have been talking about, the philosopher Alexander Dugin and Putin for 15 years. Now, what that is is very amorphous. Solzhenitsyn thought the Russians would have to return to the incremental development of Orthodox Christianity to escape from the communist trap. And to some degree, that's happened in Russia because there's been a return to Orthodox Christianity. Now, you could say, yeah, but the Orthodox church has just been coopted by the state. And I would say there's some evidence for that. I've heard, for example, that the Metropolitan owns, now I don't know if this is true, owns $5 billion worth of personal property. And I would say there's a bit of a moral hazard in that. And it's possible that the Orthodox church has been coopted. But there has been somewhat of an Orthodox revival in Russia. And I don't think that's all bad. Now, even if Putin doesn't believe any of this, if he's just a psychopathic manipulator, and unfortunately, I don't think that's true. I've read his speeches. It doesn't look like it to me. And he is by no means the worst Russian leader of the last 100 years. Well, there's quite a selection there. There certainly is. And I say that knowing that. Even if he doesn't believe it, he's convinced his people that it's true. And so we're stuck with the claim in either case. And that's the point I was trying to make in the article. Sometimes I'm troubled by people that explain things. And a lot of people have reached out to me, experts, telling me how I should feel, what I should think about Ukraine. Oh, you naive Lex, you're so naive. Here's how it really is. But then I get to see people that lost their home. I get to see people on the Russian side who believe they're, I genuinely think that there's some degree to which they have love in their heart. They see themselves as heroes saving a land from Nazis. How else would you motivate young men to go fight? It's just, it's these humans destroying not only their homes, but creating generational hate, destroying the possibility of love towards each other. They're basically creating hate. What I've heard a lot of is on February 24 of this year, hate was born at a scale that region has not seen. Hate towards not Vladimir Putin, hate towards not the soldiers in Russia, but hate towards all Russians. Hate that will last generations. And then you can see just the pain there. And then when all these experts talk about agriculture, and energy, and geopolitics, and yeah, maybe like what you say with fighting the ideologies of the woke and so on, I just feel like it's missing something deep, that war is not fought about any of those things. War is started, and war is averted based on human beings, based on humanity. Here's another ugly thought, since we haven't had enough so far. We locked everything down for COVID. How much face to face communication was there between the West and Vladimir Putin? How about none? How about that was the wrong amount, especially given that Europe was completely dependent on Putin for its energy supplies? Well, not completely, but you know what I mean. Materially and significantly. Maybe he had to go talk to him once every six months. Maybe he's in a bit of a bubble. Probably. And not just an information bubble, how all these experts tell me about. Yeah, no, a human bubble. Look, one of the things I've really learned, there's a real emphasis on hospitality in the Old Testament. I just brought all these scholars together to talk about Exodus. Hey, I have this security team with me, and they're tough military guys. But they're on board for this mission, let's say. And so they went out of their way to be hospitable to my academic guests. They laid out nice platters of meat and cheese and crackers. They spent all day preparing this house I had rented so that we could have a hospitable time with these scholars. Most of whom I didn't know well, but who said they would come and spend eight days talking about this book with me. We rented some jet skis. We had a nice house. We had fun. And we got to know each other. And we got to trust each other because we could see that we could have some fun and that we could let our hair down a bit. We didn't have to be on guard. And that made the talks way deeper. And then we found out we couldn't get through Exodus in eight days. And so I had proposed very early on that we're gonna double the length. And so I pulled eight people out of their lives for eight days. That's not an easy thing to do. It's also quite expensive. And the Daily Wire Plus people picked all that up. And they said, right. They said, yes, right away. So we'd love to do this again. Well, why? Well, partly because it was intellectually, it was unbelievably engaging. I learned so much. It'll take me like a year to digest it if I can ever digest it. But they had a really good time. And so when they were offered that combination of intellectual challenge, let's say in hospitality, it was a no brainer. They just said, every one of them said, if I can do it in any way, I will definitely be there. And this, I went to Washington a bunch of times and the culture of hospitality has broken down in Washington. 40% of congressmen sleep in their offices. They don't have apartments. Their family isn't there with them. They don't have social occasions with their fellow Democrats or Republicans, much less across the table. And so, and I tried to have some meetings in Washington that were bilateral a couple of times, get young Republican congressmen and Democrats together to talk. And as soon as they talk, they think, oh, it was so interesting. Cause one of the lunches was about 15 people, half Democrats and half Republicans. And all I'd asked them to do was just spend three minutes talking about why you decided to become a congressman, which is not a job I would take, by the way. You spend 25 hours a week fundraising on the telephone. Your family isn't there with you. You have to run for reelection every two years. You're beholden to the party apparatus, right? You're vilified constantly. This is not, you know, people think, well, this is a job for the privileged. It's like, yeah, you go and run for Congress and find out how much fun it is and put your family on the line and then have to beg for your job every two years while your enemies, the worst of your enemies and the worst of your friends are viciously hen pecking you. And so anyways, we had them all sit around the table and said, okay, just say why you ran for Congress. It was so cool, especially for a Canadian, cause you Americans, you're so bloody theatrical. It's such something to watch. It was like, Mr. Smith goes to Washington for every one of them. It's like, well, this country has given us so much, where our families have been so, we've benefited so much from our time here. We think this is a wonderful country. We really felt that we should give back. And the next one would talk. And it was like exactly the same story. And then it didn't matter if they were Republican or Democrat, you couldn't tell the difference. No one could. And was it genuine? It's like, well, are you genuine? You think these people are worse than you? First of all, they're not. Second of all, they're probably better. All things considered, it's not that easy to become a Congressman. And I'm sure there's some bad apples in the bunch, but by and large, you walk away from your meetings with these people and you think, pretty impressive. They really are giving a part of themselves in the name of service. Maybe over time, they become cynical and become jaded and worn down by the whole system. But I think a lot of it. Could you imagine that? Is healed, I think. And I don't think I'm, well, I'm in part naive, but not fully, that a lot of it is healed through the power of conversation, just basic social interaction. I do think that the effects of this pandemic. Especially by listening. Listen, just sitting there. And it doesn't have to be talking about the actual issue. It's actually humor and all those kinds of things about personal struggles, all those kinds of things that remind you that you're all just humans. Well, the great leaders that I've met, and I've met some now, they go listen to their constituents. It's not a policy discussion. It's not an ideology discussion. They go say, okay, what's your life like? And what are your problems? And tell me about them. And then they listen and then they're struck by them. And then they gather up all that misery and they bring it to the congressional office or to the parliament. And they think, here's what the people are crying out for. And the good leaders, that's a leader. Leader listens. So I talked to Jimmy Carr about comedy. And he's sold out stages worldwide on a tour, being funny. That's hard. He said, comedy is the most standup comedy, which is what I do in some real sense. It's a thing I do that it's most akin to what I'm doing on my book tours, I would say. It's the closest analog. He said, it's the most dialogical enterprise. And I thought, well, why, what do you mean? Cause see, it's just the monologue. And it's a prepared monologue. I mean, you have to interact dynamically with the audience while you're telling your jokes and you gotta get the timing right, but you have a body of jokes. He said, well, here's how you prepare the jokes. And I've been told this by other comedians. You go to 50 clubs before you go on your tour and you got some new material and you think it's funny. And you go into a club and you lay out your new material and people laugh at some of it. And you pay attention to what they laugh at and what they don't laugh at. So you subject yourself to the judgment of the crowd and you get rid of everything that isn't funny. And if you do that enough, even if you're not that funny, the crowd will tell you what's funny. So you can imagine, imagine you do 50 shows and each is an hour long and you collect two minutes of humor from each show. So you throw away 90, you throw away two hours, more than 98% of it, collect two minutes per show. So you're not very funny at all. You're like funny 2% of the time. You aggregate that, man, you're a scream. So that's what a leader does is, that is what a leader does is goes out and he aggregates the misery, you know, and the hopes. And then I do think that's revivify to someone who would otherwise be cynical and jaded because then the person can say to themselves, despite the inadequacies of the system and my inadequacies, I'm gathering up the misery and the hope and I'm bringing it forward where it can be redressed. Giving it a voice. Yeah, that's right, giving it a voice. Can you actually take me through a day because this is fascinating, through your comedy tour. What does a day in the life of Jordan Peterson look like? Which is this very interesting day. Let's look at the day when you have to speak. Preparing your mind, thinking of what you're going to talk about, preparing yourself physically and mentally to interact with the crowd through the actual speaking, how do you adjust what you're thinking through and how do you come down from that? So you can start all again as a limited biological system. Well, I'm usually up by seven and ready to go by 7.30 or eight. Coffee? No, steak and water. How many times a day steak? All, that's all I eat. How many times? Three or four, depending on the day. Steak and water. Steak and sparkling water. Yeah, so monastic asceticism, man. Well, I did the proper, I usually just once a day, I did the proper Jordan Peterson last night and just ate two steaks. And how was that? It was wonderful. Yeah, well, if you have to only eat one thing, you know, could be worse. So anyways, I'm ready to go at eight because we're generally moving. What does moving mean? Flying. You're constantly. Flying somewhere. Okay. And we usually use private flights now because the commercial airlines aren't reliable enough and you cannot not make a venue, right? So that's rule number one on a tour. You make the show. So everything, and then number rule number two is anybody who causes any trouble on the tour is gone because there is zero room for error. Now, no, there's zero room for unnecessary, unaddressed error. So there's gonna be errors. The guys I have around me now, if they make a mistake, they fix it right away. So, and that's great. There's a lot of people relying on you to be there. So you have to be there. Yeah, like 4,000 people typically. So then I'm on the plane and I usually write or often because there's no internet on the plane and that's a good use of time. So I'm writing a new book. So I write on the plane. Typing or handwriting? Typing, yeah, typing. And then we land and we go to, it's usually early afternoon by then we go to a hotel. It's usually a nice hotel. It's not corporate. I don't really like corporate hotels. My secretary and one of my logistics guys has got quite good at picking kind of adventurous hotels, boutique hotels are usually in the old parts of the city, especially in Europe, somewhere interesting. And so we go there and then lunch usually. And sometimes that's an air fryer and a steak in the hotel room. And I leave a trail of air fryers behind me all across the world. And then Tammy and I usually go out and have a walk or something and take a look at the city. And then I have a rest for like an hour and a half or an hour, half an hour. Like a nap? Yeah, nap. I have to sleep for 20 minutes. And that's about all I can sleep, but I need to do that in the late afternoon. That refreshes your mind. Yeah, that gives me, that wakes me up again for the evening. And then Tam has to sleep longer. She's still recovering from her illness. And so she has to sleep longer in the afternoon and that's absolutely necessary for both of us or things start to get frayed. And so then we go to the venue and then I usually sit for an hour. If I'm gonna lecture, I've been doing a lot of Q and A's and that's a little easier. But if I'm gonna lecture, I have to sit for an hour. And then I think, okay, what question am I trying to investigate? I have to have that, that's the point. What mystery am I trying to unravel? It's usually associated with one of the rules in my book because technically it's a book tour, but each of those rules is an investigation into an ethic. And each of them points to a deeper sort of mystery in some sense. And there's no end to the amount that can be explored. And so I have the question, my question might be something like put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Okay, what does that mean exactly? What does house mean? What does put mean, that active verb? What is perfect in order mean? Why before you criticize the world? What does it mean to criticize? What does it mean to criticize the world? How can you do that properly or improperly? So I start to think about how to decompose the question. And you start to think which of these decompositions are important to really dig into? Yeah, well, then they'll strike me. It's like, okay, there's something there that I've been maybe noodling around on that I would like to investigate further. Then I think, okay, how can I approach this problem? I think, well, I have this story that I know, I have this story and I have this story, but I haven't juxtaposed them before. And there's gonna be some interesting interaction in the juxtaposition. So I have the question and I kind of have a framework of interpretation. And then I have some potential narrative places I can go. And then I think, okay, I can go juggle that and see what happens. And so then what I wanna do is concentrate on that process while attending to the audience to make sure that the words are landing and then see if I can delve into it deeply enough so that a narrative emerges spontaneously with an ending. Now, I'm sure you've experienced this in podcasts, right? Maybe I'm wrong, but my experience has been if I fall into the conversation and we know about the timeframe, there'll be a natural narrative arc. And then, so you'll kind of know when the midpoint is and you'll kind of see when you're reaching a conclusion. And then if you really pay attention, you can see that's a good place to stop. And it's kind of, you come to a point and you have to be alert and patient to see that. And you have to be willing to be satisfied with where you've got to. But if you do that, and then it's like a comedian making the punchline work. It's like, I've got all these balls in the air and they're going somewhere and this is how they come together. And people love that, right? They say, oh, this and this and this and this and this. Whack, together. And that's an insight. And it is very much like a punchline. Well, that's interesting because your mind actually, so I'm a fan of your podcast too. And you are always driving towards that. I would say for me in a podcast conversation, there's often a kind of Alice in Wonderland type of exploration. Down the rabbit hole, man. And then you just, a new thing pops up, the more absurd, the wilder, the better. Conversations with Elon are like this. It's like, actually the more you drive towards an arc, the more uncomfortable you start to get in a fun, absurd conversation because, oh, I'm now one of the normies. No, I don't want that. I wanna be, I want the rabbit. I want the crazy because it makes it more fun. But somehow throughout it, there is wisdom that you try to grasp at such that there is a thread. Well, that's the thing, man. You're following the thread, eh? Yeah, the thread's the, well, that's right. That's what we're trying to do, that thread. That thread is the proper balance between structure and spontaneity. And it manifests itself as the instinct of meaning. And that's the logos in the dialogos. And it really is the logos. And God only knows what that means. You know, I mean, the biblical claim is that logos is the fundamental principle of reality. And I think that's true. I actually think that's true because I think that that meaning that guides you, well, here's a way of thinking about it. I've been writing about this recently. What's real matter? It's like, okay, that's one answer. What's real? What matters is real. Because that's how you act. Okay, so that's different than matter. It's like, okay, what's the most real of what matters? How about pain? Why is it the most real? Try arguing it away. Good luck. So pain is the fundamental reality. All right. Well, that's rough. Doesn't that lead to nihilism and hopelessness? Yeah, doesn't it lead to a philosophy that's antithetical towards being the most fundamental reality is pain? Yes. Is there anything more fundamental than pain? Love. Really? If you're in pain, love and truth, that's what you got. And you know, if they're more powerful than pain, maybe they're the most real things. When you think about reality, what is real? That is the most real thing. Well, it's a tough one, right? Because you have to, because if you're a scientist, a materialist, think, well, the matter is the most real. It's like, well, you don't know what the matter is. Yeah. And so, and then when push comes to shove, and it will, you'll find out what's most real. Yeah. I feel like this is missing, the physical reality is missing some of the things. So of course pain has a biological component and all those kinds of things, but it's missing something deep about the human condition that at least the modern science is not able to describe, but it is reaching towards that. Yeah, it is. And it's the reason, one way to describe it as you're describing is the reason it's reaching it is because underneath of science is this assumption that there's a deep. Logos. Thing to this whole thing we're trying to do. Well, you know, there's two traditions, right? In some sense, there's two logos traditions. There's the Greek rational enlightenment tradition. That's a logos tradition. And it insists that there's a logos in nature and that science is the way to approach it. And then there's a Judeo Christian logos, which is more embodied and more spiritual. And I would say the West is actually an attempt to unite those two. And it's the proper attempt to unite those two because they need to be united. And I see the union coming in your terms. You know, I talked to friends to wall, for example about the animating principle of chimpanzee sovereignty. And that's pretty close biologically. Is it power? Cause that's the claim even from the biologists often the most dominant chimp has the best reproductive success. It's like, oh yeah, dominant. Hey, you mean using compulsion? Okay, let's look. Are the chimps who use compulsion the most successful? And the answer is sporadically and rarely. And for short, well, that's sporadically for short periods of time. Why? Because they meet an unpleasant end. The subordinates over whom they exercise arbitrary control wait for a weak moment and then tear them into shreds, right? Every dictators terror and for good reason. And the wall has showed that the alpha chimps, the males who do have preferential mating access often are often and reliably the best peacemakers and the most reciprocal. And so even among chimps, the principle of sovereignty is something like iterative, iterated reciprocity. And that's a way better principle than power. And it's something like I've been thinking what's the antithesis of the spirit of power. I think it's the spirit of play. And I don't know what you think about that, but when you have a good podcast conversation, you already described it in some sense as play. It's like, there's a structure, right? Cause it's an ordered conversation, but you want there to be play in the system. And if you get that right, then it's really engaging. And then it seems to have its own narrative arc. I'm not trying to impose that even though that's another thing I don't do. I didn't come to this conversation at all thinking, here's what I want out of a conversation with Lex Friedman, like instrumentally. I thought, I'll go talk to Lex. Why? I like his podcasts. He's doing something right. I don't know what it is. He asks interesting questions. I'll go have a conversation with him. Where's it gonna go? Wherever it goes. Embracing the spirit of play. So what you have this, when you're lecturing, you're going in front of the crowd, you thought of a question, you get on the stage. First of all, are you nervous at all? I'm very nervous when I'm sitting down, thinking through the structure initially, which is why my wife and I have been doing Q and As and that's easier on me. It's the way comedians are nervous. Like Joe Rogan just did his special this weekend. And so he now has to sit nervously like a comedian does, which is like, I have no material now. Right. I have to start from scratch. When I was doing the lectures constantly instead of the Q and As, basically what I was doing was writing a whole book chapter every night. And now that's a bit of an exaggeration because I would return to themes that I had developed, but it's not really an exaggeration because I didn't ever just go over wrote material ever. So it's very demanding and that part's nerve wracking because I sit down, it's an hour before the show and I think, can I do this? And the answer is, well, you did it a thousand times, but that's not this time. It's like, can I come up with a question? Can I think through the structure? Can I pull off the spontaneous narrative? Can I pull it together? And the answer is, I don't know. And so then I get it together in my mind, I think, and that's hard. It takes effort and it's nerve wracking. Okay, I got it. But then there's the moment you go out on stage and you think, well, I know I had it, but can I do it? No notes. And then the question is, well, you're gonna find out while you do it. And so then I go out on stage and I don't talk to the audience, I talk to one person at a time. And you can talk to one person, cause you know how to do that. So I talk to a person and not too long cause I don't wanna make them too nervous and then someone else and someone else. And then I'm in contact with the audience and then I can tell if the words are landing and I listen, it's like, are they rustling around? Are they dead quiet? Cause you want dead quiet. You're, oh, I see. That's what focus sounds like. You're in it together then. You bet. Well, and I also, here's a good rule if you're learning to speak publicly, I never say a word till everyone is 100% quiet. And that's, it's a great way to start a talk because you're setting the frame, and if the frame is we'll all talk while you're talking, the message is, well, you can talk. This is a place where everybody can talk. It's like, no, it's not. This is a place where people paid to hear me talk. So I'm not gonna talk till everyone's listening. And so then you get that stillness and then you just wait cause that stillness turns into an expectation. And then it comes, turns into a kind of nervous expectations like what the hell is he doing? It's not manipulative. It's a sense of timing. It's like just when that's right, you think, okay, now it's time to start. Well, the interesting thing about that nervous expectation is from an audience perspective, we're in it together. Yeah. I mean, there is into that silence, there's a togetherness to it. Of course, it's the union of everyone's attention. Yeah. Yeah, and that's a great thing. I mean, you love that at a concert when everyone, it's not silence then, but when everyone's attention is unified and everyone's moving in unison, it's like we're all worshiping the same thing, right? And that would be the point of the conversation, the point of the lecture. And the worship is the direction of attention towards it. And it's union, it's communion because everyone's doing it at the same time. And so, I mean, there's not much difference between a lecture theater and a church in that regard, right? It's the same fundamental layout and structure. And they're very integrally associated with one another. One really grew out of the other, the lecture theater grew out of the church. So it's perfectly reasonable to be thinking about it in those terms. And so, and then, okay, so after the lecture, we play a piece of music that is a piece of music that I've been producing with some musicians for a couple of books I'm gonna release in the fall. Terrible books, ABC of childhood tragedy, they're called dark, dark books, dark and comical books, terrible books, heartbreaking illustrations. We've set them to music. And so we play a piece from that. And then afterwards, I usually meet about 150 people to have photographs. And so each of those is a little. Is there a little sparkle of human connection? A lot, a lot, it's very intense. 10 seconds with every person you think, how can 10 seconds be intense? It's like, pay enough attention. It gets intense real quick. Does it break your heart to say goodbye so many times? It's like being in a wedding lineup, at a wedding that you wanna be at. And everybody's dressed up. And that's so weird, because I bought these expensive suits when I went on tour and it broke my heart because I spent so much money on them. I thought, God, that's completely unconscionable. I thought, no way, man, I'm in this 100%. And so I'm gonna dress with respect. And like 60% of the audience comes in two or three piece suits. They're all dressed up. Then there's this line to greet me and they're all happy to see me. That's not so hard to take. You know, although it is in a sense, right? Because normal interactions are pretty shallow. And you think, I don't want shallow interactions. It's like, yes, you do most of the time. Yeah, it's intense. It's very intense. And I don't know if you have. But you've had a taste of this, no doubt, because people recognize you. Yeah, but I also have, when a person recognizes me and they come with the love and they're often brilliant people, one of the thoughts I have to deal with, one of the dragons in my own mind is, you know, thinking that I don't deserve that kind of attention. And so. Well, you probably don't. Right. But maybe you could. So it's a burden in that I have to step up to be the kind of person that deserves that, not deserves that, but in part deserves that kind of attention. And that's like, holy shit. It's crucially important too, because if someone comes up to you in an airport and they know who you are and they're brave enough to admire you or who you are attempting to be and you make a mistake, they will never forget it. So it's a high stakes enterprise. And the flip side of that, especially with young people, a few words you can say can change the direction of their life. One way or another. And so I really have to watch this too in airports because I do not like airports. I do not like the creeping totalitarianism in airports. They've always bothered me. They really bother me. And I'm an unpleasant travel companion for my wife sometimes because of that. Although I think we've worked that out. Thank God, cause we're doing a lot of traveling. But most of the security guards and the border personnel, all those people, they know me. And as a general rule, they're positively predisposed to me. And so if I'm peevish or irritable, then well, that's not good. It's not good. And so that's a tight rope to walk to because I do not like that creeping totalitarianism. But by the same token, if you're just one of the crowd, just, sometimes it's good just to be one of the crowd and then you're a little irritable and people can just brush that off. But if you're someone they have dared to open their heart to, cause that's what admiration is, and then you betray that, then that's a real, they'll never forget it. And then they'll tell everyone too. So it takes a lot of alertness. And so Tammy and our life has got complicated because in Toronto, for example, we can't really just go for a walk. It's always a high drama production cause always people come up and they have some heart rending story to tell. And I'm not being cynical about that. Yes. It's a hard thing to bear because people don't do that. They don't just open themselves up to you like that and share the tragedy of their life. But that's an everyday occurrence. And so when we go up to our cottage, which is out of the city, it's a relief, because as wonderful as that is, like it's a weird, I have a weird life because everywhere I go, it's very weird. It's like I'm surrounded by old friends because I walk down the street in any city now virtually and people say, hello, Dr. Peterson, so nice to see you. Or they say better things than that. Very rarely bad things. One experience in 5,000, maybe very rare, although you don't forget those either, but it's very strange. So. And there's an intimacy, they know you well. And because they leap into, they avoid the small talk often. They leap into familiarity. It really is like it's an old friend and it feels like that. For me personally, the experiences, the goodbye hurts because there's a sense where you're never gonna see that friend again. Right. Yeah, that's a strange thing, eh? So to me, a lot of it just feels like goodbyes. Mm hmm. It is. You're right about that. And I mean, that's, I suppose, in some sense, part of the pain of opening yourself up to people because they also, Tammy has been struck particularly. She said, I really never knew what men were like. I said, well, what do you mean? She said, I cannot believe how polite the men are when they come and talk to you because it's always the same. The pattern's very similar. The person comes up, they're mostly men, not always, but mostly. And they're tentative and they're very polite, very, very polite. And they say, I hope I'm not bothering you. Do you mind, you know, do you mind that I say that they're not bothering me? And I'm doing everything I can to not be the guy who's bothered by that. It's like, who do you think you are? Yeah, yes. You're the guy that what is famous and now is above that? Yeah. You don't wanna be that guy. So you wanna be grateful all the time when people open up like that. And so you gotta be alert and on point to do that properly, like right away. Because for you, it's five seconds or 10 seconds or 20 seconds, whatever it is. But for them, they've opened up. And so you can really nail them if you're foolish. After the 150 people, how do you come down from that? How do you find yourself again? Well, that was when I got caught in Twitter traps, cause I'm so burnt out by then from the talk and the audience interactions and the whole day. Cause it's a new city, it's a new hotel, it's a new 5,000 people, it's a new book chapter, it's a whole new horizon of ideas. And it's off to another city the next day. I'm so burnt out by then that I'm not as good at controlling my impulses as I might be. And Twitter was a real catastrophe for that cause it would hook me and then I couldn't, like I used to, when I was working on my book a lot, I used to call Tammy and say, look, you have to come and get me, I can't stop. I can't stop, I got tired and then I kind of, cause it's part of a kind of hypomanic focus. I couldn't quit, it's like, oh no, I'm still writing. I need to get away from this, but I couldn't stop. And so it's better to read something, a book. Fiction, nonfiction. Fiction, Stephen King. I was reading a lot of Stephen King when I was on tour last time, that was good. I like Stephen King a lot. It's a great narrative. Great, and great characterization, you know? So, and there's a familiarity about Stephen King's writing too that it's, he writes about people you know. And so I really found that a relief. And so that was useful. And that in order to tolerate this, let's say, or to be able to sustain it, well, let's take a lot of negotiation on the part of Tammy and I, because she's dragged into this and, you know, her life is part of this, whatever this is. And she's had to find her way and has, for example, now she has a different hotel room than me when we travel. And she found that she didn't want to be on the tour this spring, and I was ill again for part of it. And that made it complicated, but she went away back home and she came back and she said, and she was nervous about, she said, I think I need my own room. And part of me was not happy with that. It's like, what do you mean you need your, like, are we not married anymore? It's like, you need your own room? And she said, well, you know, I can't, she has to do exercises because she was really sick and she has to keep herself in shape. And she has to have some time to do that. She does a lot of prayer and meditation and she needs the time. And she has her own podcast, which is going quite well. And she needs the time and I trust her. And she said, well, I need this in order to continue. And I thought, well, okay, if you need this in order to continue, yes. Because she went away and didn't say, well, I don't want to be on the tour. I don't want to do this anymore. She went away and prayed, let's say, how can I continue to do this? And that was the answer. And so she has her own hotel room. And that was a really good decision on her part. And she's very good and getting better all the time at figuring out what has to happen for her to make this sustainable. And all that's been is a plus because I don't want to travel without her. And I don't want her life to be miserable. And I want her to be fully on board. And so she has to be properly selfish. Like everyone does in a relationship. And you have to, not just that, this is a weird thing that you're doing. And you have to, both you and her have to figure out how to manage this very intense intellectual, social journey. Well, there's another element to it too that I didn't tell you about. So that was a typical day, but it's missing a big component because usually we also have a dinner with like 30 cultural representatives, I suppose, 10 to 30 from each country. Cause I have a network of people who have networks who are setting me up with key decision makers in each country. And so then we have like an hour and a half of that. Now, sometimes that's on a day when I don't have a talk, but sometimes the talks are back to back. And so she also has to manage that and to be gracious. And then people are showing us exciting things and tours in the cities and which is all, like it's a surf fight of wonderful. Yes, exactly. But it's still, yeah, you have to be there for it. You have to be present for it mentally. Yeah. As a curious mind, as an intellectual mind. How do you get to sleep? Fortunately, that is almost never a problem. Even when I was unbelievably ill for about three years. I thought about that a lot too, you know, that I didn't do a really good job of explaining that while I was ill because it appeared in some sense that the reason I was ill was because I was taking benzodiazepines, but that isn't why I was ill. And then I took them and very low dose. And I took that for a long time and it helped whatever was wrong with me. And it looks like it was an allergy or maybe multiple allergies. And then that stopped working. And so I took a little bit more for about a month and that made it way worse. And so then I cut back a lot and then, then things really got out of hand. So. So there was a deeper thing in the Benzo. Oh yeah. What can you put words to? Well, I had a lot of immune, well, my daughter, as everyone knows, has a very reactive immune system. And Tammy has three immunological conditions, each of them quite serious. And I had psoriasis and peripheral uveitis, which is an autoimmune condition and alopecia areata and chronic gum disease, all of which appeared to be allergy related. And so Michaela seems to have got all of that. And so that, and that I think was at the bottom of, cause I also had this proclivity to depression that was part of my family history. But I think that was all immunological as far as I can tell. So one of the things that's happened to me, I always noticed I really couldn't breathe. Like I could breathe about one fifth as much as I sometimes could. And so I was always short of breath. And it looks like what that was perhaps was I was always on the border of an anaphylactic reaction, which is not pleasant. And that's hypersympathetic activation, no parasympathetic activation. I couldn't relax at all. That's an immunological response. Allergic response, yeah. So anyways, that was what seemed, now this, I don't like to talk about this much cause it's so bloody radical and I don't like to propagate it, but this diet seems to have stopped all of that. I don't have psoriasis, all of the patches have gone. My gum disease, which is incurable, I had multiple surgeries to deal with it, is completely gone, took three years. My right eye, which was quite cloudy, it's cleared up completely. What else has changed? Well, I lost 50 pounds and like instantly kept it off. I should mention that I too am not a deep investigator of nutritional science. I have my skepticism towards the degree to which it is currently as a science. Cause like a lot of complex systems is full of mystery and full of profiteers, the people that profit of different kinds of diets. But I should say for me personally, it does seem that I feel by far the best when I eat only meat. It's very interesting. And I discovered that a long time ago. First of all. How did you discover it? So by, the discovery went like this. I started listening to ultra marathon runners about 15 years ago. And they started talking about fat adapted running. So I first discovered that I don't have to run super fast to enjoy running. And in fact, I really enjoy running at a slower pace. So that was like step one. It's like, oh, okay. If I maintain something called the math rule, which is the pretty low heart rate. If I maintain that you can actually get pretty fast while maintaining a pretty slow average speed in general. Anyway, they fuel themselves on low carb diets. So I got into that. On top of that, I also, they also fast often. So I discovered how incredible my mind feels when fasted. You know, people call it intermittent fasting, but. Well, that's an optimization of death because you're, when you fast, your body, logically and obviously, if you think about it biologically is, well, what is your body scavenge first? Well, damaged tissue. So the, and I know the literature on fasting to some degree, and it's very compelling literature. If you starve dogs down, I think it's 20% below rats too, below their optimal body weight, they live 30% longer. That's a lot, 30%, like it's like 30%, yeah, 30%. Well, there is aspect to a lot of these things that make me nervous because I always feel like there's no free lunch that I'm gonna pay for it somehow. But there's a focus that I am able to attain when I fast, especially when I eat once a day. My mind is almost like nervously focused. It's almost like an anxiety, but a positive one or one that I can channel into just like an excitement. You know, I wonder how much of that's associated with, well, imagine that that signifies lack of food, which not that hard to imagine. Well, maybe you should be a lot more alert in that situation, right? Biologically speaking, because you're in hunting mode, let's say, you know, not desperate, but in hunting mode. And God only knows maybe human beings should be in hunting mode all the time. Often, but we don't know that. So I wonder if it has a stress on the system that long term causes the system to get sick. It doesn't look like it. It seems in the case of fasting, not. And then on top of that, I discovered that the thing I enjoy, I just don't enjoy eating fat as much. So I love eating meat when you talk about low carb diet. So I just discovered through that process, if somewhat fatty meat, but just meat, I just feel a lot of the things that make me feel weird about food, like a little groggy or like full or just whatever, the aspects of food that I don't enjoy, they're not there with meat. And I'm still able to enjoy company. And when I eat once a day and eat meat, I said, at least in Texas, you could still have all the merriment of, you have dinner with friends. Now, I don't do the, you have a very serious thing that there's health benefits that you are very serious about. For me, I can still drink whiskey. I'll still do the things that add a little bit of spice into the thing. Now, when you completely remove the spice, it does become more difficult. Yeah, it's more difficult socially. And Tammy seems to only be able to eat lamb, although she might be able to eat non aged beef. And that makes traveling complicated too, right? Because, well, for obvious reasons, it's like, really, that's all you can eat? Yeah, well, celeries. And maybe that's a form of craziness, but. If we can return to actually the thing you were talking about, when you were thinking about a question before the lecture. Let me ask you about thinking in general. This is something maybe that you and Jim Keller think a lot about is thinking how to think. How do you think through an idea? Well, first of all, I think, okay, that's a really good question. We tried to work that out with this essay app that my son and I have developed, because if you're gonna write, the first question is, well, what should I write about? What's the name of the app? Essay.app. And, well, the first question is, well, what bugs you? What's bugging you? This is such a cool thing. It's like, where is my destiny? Well, what bothers you? Well, that's where your destiny is. Your destiny is to be found in what bothers you. Why did those things bother you? There's a lot of things you could be bothered by. Like a million things, man. But some things grip you. They bug you. And they might make you resentful and bitter, because they bug you so much. Like, they're your things, man. They've got you. So then I look for a question that I would like the answer to, that I don't, and I would really like the answer to it, so I don't assume I already have the answer, because I would actually really like to have the answer. So if I could get a better answer, great. And so that's the first thing. And that's like a prayer. It's like, okay, here's a mystery. I would like to delve into it further. Well, so that's humility. It's like, here's a mystery, which means I don't know. I would like to delve into it further, which means I don't know enough already. And then comes the revelation. It's like, well, what's a revelation? Well, if you ask yourself a question, it's a real question. Do you get an answer or not? And the answer is, well, yeah, thoughts start to appear in your head. So... From somewhere. That's right, from somewhere. Where do they come from? Do you have a sense? Depends on what you're aiming at. Depends on the question. No, no, it does to some degree. It depends on your intent. So imagine that your intent is to make things better. Then maybe they come from the place that's designed to make things better. Maybe your intent is to make things worse. Then they come from hell. And you think, not really. It's like, you're so sure about that, are you? Is your intent conscious? Like, are you able to introspect with the intent? Conscious and habitual, right? Because as you practise something consciously, it becomes habitual. But it's conscious. It's like when I sit down before I do a lecture, I think, okay, what's the goal here? To do the best job I can. To what end? Well, people are coming here not for political issues. They're coming here because they're trying to make their lives better. Okay, so what are we doing? We're conducting a joint investigation into the nature of that which makes life better. Okay, what's my role? To do as good a job about that as possible. What state of mind do I have to be in? Am I annoyed about the theatre? Or am I clued in and thrilled that 4,000 people have showed up at substantial expense and trouble to come and listen to me talk? And if I'm not in that state of mind, I think, well, maybe I need something to eat or maybe I need to talk to someone because ingratitude is no place to start. It's like, I should be thrilled to be there, obviously. And so that orientation has to be there. And then I, is it conscious? All this is conscious. What am I serving? The highest good I can conceptualize. What is that? I have some sense, but I don't know it in the final analysis, which is why the investigation is being conducted. Who's doing it? Me, whoever I'm communing with, and the audience. And so I try to get myself and I chase everybody away for that, it's like I have to do that by myself. Are you writing stuff down? Yes, at that point, I just make point notes. And it's usually about maybe 30 notes. But then I, on stage, I never refer to them. And I often don't even use the structure that I laid out. Kind of an interesting thing. From where do powerful phrases come from? Do you have a, do you try to encapsulate an idea into a sentence or two? Well, when I talk, and I've practiced this since, consciously, since 1985, I try to feel and see if the words are stepping stones or foundation stones, right? It's like, is this solid? Is this word solid? Is this phrase solid? Is this sentence solid? It's a real sense of fundamental foundation under each word. And I suppose people ask me if I pray. And I would say, I pray before every word. Well, when you're asking questions, like you're very clear headed and present in your ability to ask questions and inquire. So how do you do that? So first of all, I'm worried that my mind easily gets trapped when I step on a word and I know it's unstable. You kind of realize that you don't really know the definitions of many words you use. And that can be debilitating. So I kind of try to be more carefree about the words I use. Because otherwise you get trapped. You don't want to be obsessional. Like literally, my mind halfway through the sentence will think, well, what does the word sentence mean? Right, right, right. Well, you know, neurologically. And then everything else just explodes. Your big picture idea explodes and you lost yourself in the minutiae. Well, neurologically, there's a production center and an editing center. And those can be separately affected by strokes. And so often when people are writing or talking, they try to activate both at the same time. And that's, so people will try to write an essay and get every sentence right in the first draft. That's a big mistake. And so then you might say, well, how can you be careful with your words, but carefree? And the answer is orient yourself properly, right? While in the conversation we're having, you have an orientation structure. You want to be prepared. You want to be attentive. Then you want to have an interesting conversation. And you want to have the kind of interesting conversation that other people want to listen to. That will be good for them in some manner. Okay, so that's pretty good frame. And then you kind of scour your heart and you think, is that really what you want? Are you after fame or after notoriety? Are you after money? I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but they're not optimal, especially if you're not willing to admit them, right? And so they can contaminate you. So you want to be decontaminated. So you have the right trip, let's say. And so you have to put yourself, that's a meditative practice. You have to put yourself in the right receptive position with the right goal in mind. Then you can, and I think you can get better and better at this, then you can trust what's going to happen. You know, so for example, before I came here, I mean, I presume you have a reason for doing the podcast with me. What's the reason? I mean, we wanted to talk for a long time. So the reason has evolved. One of the reasons is I've listened to you for quite a long time. So you've become a one way friend and I have many one way friends. Some of my best friends don't even know I exist. So I'm a big fan of podcasts and audio books. Actually, most of my friends are dead. Yeah, right. The writers. The definition of a reader. It's a lot of dead, great dead friends. So I wanted to meet this one way friend, I suppose, and have a conversation. And then there's this kind of puzzle that I've been longing to solve. The same reason I went to Ukraine of asking this question of myself, who am I? And what was this part of the world? What is this thing that happened in the 20th century? That I lost so much of my family there and I feel so much of my family is defined by that place. Now that place includes the Soviet Union and it includes Russia and Ukraine. It includes Nazi Germany, includes these big powerful leaders and huge millions of people that were lost in the beauty, the power of the dream, but were also the torture that was forced onto them through different governmental institutions. And you are somebody that seemed from some angle to also be drawn to try to understand what was that. And not in some sort of historical sense, but in a deeply psychological human sense. What is that? What is that, will it repeat again? In what way is it repeating again? And how can we stop it? And how can we stop it? And so. That's the crucial issue. I felt I wanted to, from a very different backgrounds, pull at the thread of that curiosity. You know, I'm an engineer, you're a psychologist, both lost in that curiosity and both wear suits. And a talk with various levels of eloquence about sort of the shadows that these, that history casts on us. And so that was one. And also the psychology, I wanted to be a psychiatrist for a long time. I was fascinated by the human mind until I discovered artificial intelligence, the fact that I could program and make a robot move. And until I discovered that magic, I thought I wanted to understand the human mind by being psychiatrist, by talking to people, by to talk therapy, psychotherapy. So now you've got the best of both worlds because you get to talk to people and you get build robots. Yeah, I mean, but the dream ultimately is the robot. That I felt like by building the thing, can you start to try to understand it. That's one way. I mean, we all have different skills and proclivities. So like my particular one is, has to do with, I learned by building. I think through a thing by building it. And programming is a wonderful thing because it allows you to like build a little toy example. So in the same way you can do a little thought experiment, programming allows you to create a thought experiment in action, it can move, it can live, it can, and then you can ask questions of it. So all of those, because of my interest in Freud and Young, you're also in different ways, have delved deeply into humanity, the human psyche through the perspective of those psychologists. So for all those reasons, I thought our paths were crossed. Yeah, so that's quite a frame for a discussion, right? You had all sorts of reasons, and then you think, well, are you just letting the conversation go where it will? It's like, well, not exactly. You spent all this time, it's not like this came about by accident, this conversation, you spent all this time framing it. And so all of that provides the implicit substructure for the play in the conversation. And if you have that implicit, here's another way, this is very much worth knowing is, if you get the implicit structure of perception right, everything becomes a game. And not only that, a game you wanna play, and maybe in the final analysis, a game you'd wanna play forever. So that's obviously a distant beckoning ideal, but we know only games need rules, or there's no play. Is there advice you can give, now that we know the frame, to give to me, Lex, about how to do this podcast better, how to think about this world, how to be a good engineer, how to be a good human being, from what you know about me. Take your preoccupation with suffering seriously. It's a serious business, right? And that's part of that, to circle back to the beginning, let's say, that's that willingness to gaze into the abyss, which is obviously what you were doing when you went to Ukraine. It's like, it's gazing into the abyss that makes you better. The thing is, and this is maybe where Nietzsche's ideas, not as differentiated as it became, sometimes your gaze can be forcefully directed towards the abyss, and then you're traumatized. If it's involuntary and accidental, it can kill you. The more it's voluntary, the more transformative it is. And that's part of that idea about facing death and hell. It's like, can you tolerate death and hell? And the answer is, this terrible answer is, yes, to the degree that you're willing to do it voluntarily. And then you might ask, well, why should I have to subject myself to death and hell? I'm innocent. And then the answer to that is, even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest good. Even the innocent must be voluntarily sacrificed to the highest good. That's such an interesting distinction. Voluntary suffering. Voluntary, yeah, yeah. Well, that's why the central Christian doctrine is, pick up your cross and follow me. And I'm speaking, not in religious terms saying that, I'm just speaking as a psychologist. It's like one of the things we've learned in the last 100 years is voluntary exposure to that which freezes and terrifies you in measured proportions is curative. So a form of, at least in part, involuntary suffering is depression. Do you have advice for people on how to find a way out? You're a man who has suffered in this way. Perhaps continue to suffer in this way. How do you find a way out? The first thing I do as a clinician, if someone comes to me and says they're depressed is ask myself a question. Well, what does this person mean by that? So I have to find out like, because maybe they're not depressed, maybe they're hyper anxious, or maybe they're obsessional. Like there's various forms of powerful negative emotion. So they need to be differentiated. But then the next question you have to ask is, well, are you depressed? Or do you have a terrible life? Or is it some combination of the two? So if you're depressed, as far as I can tell, you don't have a terrible life. You have friends, you have family, you have an intimate relationship, you have a job or a career, you're about as educated as you should be given your intelligence, use your time outside of work wisely, you're not beholden to alcohol or other temptations. You're engaged in the community in some fundamental sense, and all that's working. Now, if you have all that and you're feeling really awful, you're either ill or you're depressed. And so then sometimes there's a biochemical route to that treatment of that. My experience has been as a clinician is if you're depressed, but you have a life and you take an antidepressant, it will probably help you a lot. Now, maybe you're not depressed. Exactly, you just have a terrible life. What does that look like? You have no relationship, your family's a mess, you've got no friends, you've got no plan, you've got no job. You use your time outside of work not only badly but destructively. You have a drug or alcohol habit or some other vice, pornography addiction. You're completely unengaged in the surrounding community. You have no scaffolding whatsoever to support you in your current mode of being or you move forward. And then as a therapist, well, you do two things. Well, if it's depression per se, well, like I said, there's sometimes a biochemical route, a nutritional route, there's ways that can be addressed. It's probably physiological if you're, at least in part, if you're depressed, but you have an okay life. Sometimes it's conceptual. You can turn to dreams sometimes to help people. Cause dreams contain the seeds of the potential future. And if your person is a real good dreamer and you can analyze dreams, that can be really helpful. But that seems to be only true for more creative people. And for the people who just have a terrible life, it's like, okay, you have a terrible life. Well, let's pick a front. How about you need a friend? Like one sort of friend. Do you know how to shake hands and introduce yourself? I'll have the person show me. So let's do it for a sec. So it's like this, hi, I'm Jordan, right? And people don't know how to do that. And then they can't even get the ball rolling. For the listener, Jordan just gave me a firm handshake. Yeah, as opposed to a dead fish, you know? And there's these elementary social skills that hypothetically, if you were well cared for, you learned when you were like three and sometimes people have, I had lots of clients to whom no one ever paid any attention. And they needed like 10,000 hours of attention. And some of that was just listening because they had 10,000 hours of conversations they never had with anyone. And they were all tangled up in their head. And they had to just, one client in particular, I worked with this person for 15 years. And what she wanted from me was for me just to shut the hell up for 50 minutes. It was very hard for me. And to just tell me what had happened to her. And then what happened at the end of the conversation, then I could discuss a bit with her. And then as we progressed through the years, the amount of time that we spent in discussion increased in proportion in the sessions until by the time we stopped seeing each other, when my clinical practice collapsed, we were talking about 80% of the time. But she literally, she'd never been attended to properly ever. And so she was an uncarved block in the Taoist sense, right? She hadn't been subjected to those flaming swords that separated the wheat from the chaff. And so you can do that in therapy. If you're listening and you're depressed, I would say if you can't find a therapist, and that's getting harder and harder because it's actually become illegal to be a therapist now because you have to agree with your clients, which is a terrible thing to do with them. Just like it's terrible just to arbitrarily oppose them. You could do the self authoring program online because it helps you write an autobiography. And so if you have memories that are more than 18 months old that bother you when you think them up, part of you is locked inside that. An undeveloped part of you is still trapped in that. That's a metaphorical way of thinking about, that's why it still has emotional significance. So you can write about your past experiences, but I would say wait for at least 18 months if something bad has happened to you. Because otherwise you just hurt yourself again by encountering it. You can bring yourself up to date with an autobiography. There's an analysis of faults and virtues, that's the present authoring. And then there's a guided writing exercise that helps you make a future plan. That's young men who do that could go to college, young men who do that, 90 minutes, just the future authoring, 90 minutes, they're 50% less likely to drop out. That's all it takes. So sometimes depression is this heavy cloud that makes it hard to even make a single step towards it. Or you said isolate, make a friend. Oh man, sometimes the first step is extremely difficult. Oh my God, sometimes it's way worse than that. Like I had clients who were so depressed they literally couldn't get out of bed. So what's their first step? It's like, can you sit up once today? No. Can you prop yourself up on your elbows once today? Like you just, you scale back the dragon till you find one that's conquerable that moves you forward. There's a rubric for life. Scale back the dragons till you find one conquerable and it'll give you a little bit of goal. Commensurate with the struggle. But the plus side of that, cause that's, you think that God, that's depressing. You mean I have to start by sitting up? Well you do if you can't sit up. But the plus side of that is it's the Pareto distribution issue is that aggregates exponentially increase and failures do too by the way. But aggregates exponentially increase. So once you start the ball rolling it can get zipping along pretty good. This person that I talked about was incapable of sitting with me in a cafe when we first met just talking even though I was her therapist. But by the end she was doing standup comedy. So, you know, it took years, but still most people won't do standup comedy. That's quite the bloody achievement. She would read her poetry on stage too. So for someone who was petrified into paralysis by social anxiety and who had to start very small, it was a hell of an accomplishment. Yeah, it all starts with one step. Do you have advice for young people in high school? You've given, a lot of people look up to you for advice, for strength, for strength to search for themselves, to find themselves. Take on some responsibility. Do something for other people. You're doing something for yourself while you're doing that even if you don't know it, for sure. Cause you're a community across time. Find something to serve. Somebody to help. Someone to help, a job to, find a job, do your best with the customers. Don't be above your job. You're gonna get an entry level job when you're a kid or what else would you want? You wanna be the boss? What do you know? You don't know anything. You could be the boss of your job. You know, if you're working in a grocery store or you're working in a convenience store, assuming you're not working for terrified tyrants, you can be nice to the customers. You can develop your social skills. You can learn how to handle boss employee relationship. You can be there 15 minutes early and leave 15 minutes late. Like you can learn in an entry level job, man. And I'll tell you, if you take an entry level job and you learn and it's a reasonably decent place, you will not be in an entry level job for long because everyone who's competent is desperate for competent people. And if you go and show yourself as competent, there'll be a trial period. But if you go show yourself as competent, all sorts of doors you didn't even know were there will start opening like mad. So you strive for competence, for craftsmanship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for discipline, you know, I mean, I said in one of the chapters, my books is focused on putting your house in order. It's like, well, how do you start? Make your bed. You know, it actually took me quite a long time in my life before I made my bed regularly in the morning. Most of my life was pretty good order, but that was one thing I didn't have in order. My clothes in my closet as well, all that's in order. Not all of it, I'm cleaning out some drawers right now, but look around and see what bugs you in your room. Just look. It's like, okay, I'm in my room. Do I like this room? No, it bugs me. Okay, why? Well, the paint's peeling there and it's dusty there and the carpet's dirty and that corner's kind of ugly and the light there isn't very good. And my clothes closet's a mess, so I don't even like to open it. Okay, that's a lot of problems. That sucks. That's a lot of opportunity. Pick something and fix it. Something that bugs you. Yeah, but not too much. So the rule is pick something you know would make, pick a problem, pick a solution to it that you know would help, that you could do, that you would do. So you have to negotiate with yourself. It's like, well, I won't clean up this room. How do you know? I've been in here for 10 years and I've never cleaned it up. It's like, well, obviously that's too big a dragon for you. Would you clean one drawer? Find out. And so imagine now you wanna be happy when you open that drawer and you think, well, that's stupid. It's like, is it? Maybe it's your sock drawer, which I cleaned up in my room the other day. By the way, you're gonna open that every morning. That's like 30 seconds of your life every day. Okay, so that's three minutes a week. That's 12 minutes a month. That's two hours a year. So maybe your life is made out of, you've got 16 hours a day. Let's figure this out. Five, 12 in an hour, 12 in an hour, 144 in 12 hours. Yeah, let's say 200, 205 minute chunks. That's your life. Ladies and gentlemen, Jordan Peterson did just some math how many five minute chunks there are in a day. And I'm pretty sure it's pretty accurate. It's approximately right. So you got 205 minute chunks and they repeat. A lot of them repeat. So if you get every one of those right, they're trivial, right, who cares what my sock drawer looks like. It's like, fair enough, man, but that's your life. The things you repeat every day, the mundane things. Think I could get all those mundane things right. That's the game rules. It's like now all the mundane is in place. Now you can play because all the mundane is in place. And this is actually true. So with children, imagine you want your children to play. Well, play is very fragile neurologically. Any competing motivation or emotion will suppress play. So everything has to be in order. Everything has to be a walled garden before the children will play. That's a good way of thinking about it. So you put everything in order and you think, oh my God, now I'm tyrannized by this order. It's like, no, you aren't, not if it's voluntary. And then the order is the precondition for the freedom. And so then all of a sudden you get all these things in order. It's like, oh, look at this. I've got some room to play here. And then maybe you're not depressed. Now it's often not that simple. You know, it's not that simple. Try putting your room in order, perfect order. That's hard. I mean, it's a really powerful way to think about those five minute chunks. Just get one of them right in a day. Yeah, well, if you do that for 200 days, your life is in order. You know, I thought I did that with my clients a lot. So a lot of them would come home from work, the guys, and their wives would meet them at the door and it'd be a fight right away. You know, and it's a clash there because he comes home and he's tired and hungry. He's worked all day and he's hoping that, you know, he gets welcomed when he comes back to the home, but then the wife is at home and she's been with the kids all day and she's tired and hungry and she's hoping that when he comes home, he'll show her some appreciation for what's happened today. And then they clash and then they both have problems to discuss because they've had their troubles during the day. And so then every time they get together, they're not like it's a bit of a fight for 20 minutes and then the whole evening is screwed. And so then you think, okay, here's the deal. It's knock and the door will open. Okay, you get to pick what happens when you come home, but you have to figure out what it is. So now this is the deal. You treat yourself properly. You imagine coming home and it goes the way you want and need it to go. Okay, what does that look like? You get to have it, but you have to know what it is. What does it look like? And you think, okay, I want to come home. I want to be happy about coming home. I come home, I open the door. I say, hello, honey, I'm home. My wife says, hi, it's so nice to hear your voice. She comes up, she says, hi, dear. She gives you a hug. She says, how was your day? And you say, well, we'll sit and talk about that. How was your day? Well, we'll sit and talk about that. Do you need something to eat? Probably, let's go sit and talk about our day. It's like, that sounds pretty good. Okay, that sounds pretty good. Might not be perfect, but sounds a hell of a lot better than what we're doing now. So how about we go talk to, we'll go talk to your wife and say, okay, this is what's happening when I come home. I would like it to be better. What would you like to have happened if you could have what you wanted? And so she sits down and she thinks, okay, if he comes home, what do I want to have happen? And then now you got two visions and you say, well, what would you like? And you listen and she says, what would you like? And you tell her, and then you think, okay, now how can we bring these visions together? So not only do we both get what we want, but because we've brought them together, we even get more than we want. Well, who wouldn't agree to that unless they were aiming down. And that's so exciting. It's not a compromise. It's a union of ideals that even makes a better ideal. And then you get to come home. And then there's another rule that goes along with that, which is, please, dear, have the grace to allow me to do this stupidly and badly while I learn at least 20 times. And I'll give you the same leeway, and then we'll practice stupidly for 20 times and we'll talk about it. And then maybe we'll get it right for the next 10,000 times, right? And you can do that with your whole life. And you can do that with your kids and you can do that with your family. Like it's not easy, but you can do it. It's a lot easier than the alternative. Let me ask for some dating advice from Jordan Peterson. How do you find on that topic the love of your life? That's a good question. I was asked that multiple times on my tour, three times in a row, in fact, because we ask people to use this Slido gadget. That's a popular question? To vary. It always came up to the top. And I got asked that three times in a row and I didn't have a good answer. And then I thought, why don't I have a good answer? I thought, oh, I know why. Cause that's a stupid question. So why? Why? Because it's putting the cart before the horse. Here's the right question. How do I make myself into the perfect date? You answer that question and you will not have any problem answering the previous question. It's like, what do I want in a partner? If I offered everything I could to a partner who would I be? You work on that. Ask that question. Just ask. Just ask yourself, okay. I have to be the person that women would want. Okay, what do they want? Clean. That's not a bad start. Reasonably good physical shape. So healthy, productive, generous, honest, willing to delay gratification. So you dance with a woman. It's like, what's she doing? What are you two doing? Well, it's a pattern. There's patterns happening around you. That's the music, patterns, patterns of being. That's the music. Now, can you align yourself with the patterns of being gracefully? That's what she's checking out. And then can you do that with her? And then can you do that in a playful and attentive manner and keep your bloody hands to yourself for at least a minute? And so can you dance in a playful manner? It's like, you can go through this in your imagination and you know, you'll know, you know. And then you think, well, how far am I from those things? And the answer is usually, man, it's pretty horrible abyss separating you from that ideal. But the harder you work on offering other people what they need and want, the more people will line up to play with you. And so it's the wrong question. It's like, how can I be the best partner possible? And then you think, well, if I do that, people will just take advantage of me. And that's the non naive objection, right? Because the naive person is saying, well, I'll be good and everyone will treat me right. It's like the cynic says, no, I'll be good and someone will take me out. And then you think, well, what do you do about that objection? And the answer is, well, you factor that in. And that's why you're supposed to be, what is it? As soft as a dove and as wise as a serpent. It's like, I know you're full of snakes. I know it. Maybe I know it more than you do, but we'll play anyways. And that's the risk anyway. That's right, voluntarily, right? It's like, and what's so cool about that is that even though the person you're dealing with is full of snakes, if you offer your hand in trust and it's real, you will evoke the best in them. And that's true even, I've dealt with people who are pretty damn criminal and pretty psychopathic and sometimes dangerously so. And you tread very lightly when you're dealing with someone like that, especially if they're intoxicated. And even then your best bet is that alert trust. It's the only, it's the fact that the only thing I know that I had one client who was a paranoid, he was paranoid psychopath. That's a bad combination. He was a bad guy, man. He had like four restraining orders on him and restraining orders don't work on the sort of people that you put restraining orders on. And he used to be harassed now and then by a bureaucrat in a bank with delusions of power. And he would say to them, he used to kind of act this out to me when I was talking to him. He'd say, I'm going to be your worst nightmare. And he meant it and he would do it. He had this obsessional psychopathic vengeance that was just like right there, paranoid to the hilt and paranoid people are hyper acute. So they're watching you for any sign of deceit or manipulation and they're really good at it. Cause like they're 100%, that's what paranoia is. It's 100% focus on that. And even under those circumstances, if you step carefully enough, you can, maybe you can avoid the ax. That's a good thing to know if you ever meet someone truly dangerous. Absolutely. I believe in that, that being fragile, nevertheless, taking that leap of trust towards another person, even when they're dangerous, especially when they're dangerous. If you care, if there's something there in those hills you want to find, then that's probably the only way you're going to find is taking that risk. I have to ask you about Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn. Let's speak to this very point. There's so many layers to this book. We could talk about it forever. I'm sure in many ways we are talking about it forever. But there is sort of one of the themes captured in the few ways that was described to the book is that line between good and evil that runs through every human being. As he writes, the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. During the life of any heart, this line keeps changing place. Sometimes it is squeezed one way to exuberant evil, and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he's close to being a devil, at times the sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. What do you think about this line? What do you think about this thing where we talked about if you give somebody a chance, you actually bring out the best in them? What do you think about this other aspect that throughout time that line shifts inside each person and you get to define that shift? What do you think about this line? Are we all capable of evil? Well, you know, the cosmic drama, that's Satan versus Christ. It's like, well, who's that about? If it's not about you? I'm speaking just as a psychologist or as a literary critic. Those are characters, at least they're that. Well, are they human characters? Well, obviously. Well, are they archetypal human characters? Yes. What does that mean cosmically and ontologically? I don't know. Like, is the world a story? Maybe. But the way stories are often told is the characters embody a stable. Those are unsophisticated, not great literature though. It's very rare in great literature. What you have in great literature generally is the internal drama, right? And as the literature becomes more pop, I would say, the characters are more unitary. So there's a real bad guy and he's all bad and there's a real good guy and he's all good. And that's not as interesting. It's not as sophisticated. When you reach Dostoevskian heights in literary representation or Shakespearean heights, you can identify with the villain. And that's when literature really reaches its pinnacle in some sense. And also the characters change throughout. They shift throughout. They're unpredictable throughout. Taking the speaking of Russian more seriously recently. And I've gotten to talk to translators of Dostoevsk and Tolstoy and Cherkov and those kinds of folks. And you get the, one of the mistakes that translators made with Dostoevsky for the longest time is they would, quote unquote, fix the chaotic mess that is Dostoevsky because there was a sense like he was too rushed in his writing. It seemed like there was tangents that had nothing to do with anything. The characters were unpredictable and not inconsistent. There's parts of phrases that seem to be incomplete, that kind of stuff. And what they realize that is, that's not, that's actually crafted that way. It's not, it's like editing James Joyce, like Finnegan's Wake or something because it doesn't make any sense. They realize that that is the magic of it. That captures the humanity of these characters, that they are unpredictable. They change throughout time. There's a bunch of contradictions. On which point I gotta ask, is there a case to be made that Brothers Karamazov is the greatest book I've ever written? Yeah, there is a case to be made for that. I don't know, is it better than Crime and Punishment? Yes, yeah. You think so? Why do you, I'm not arguing with it. Why do you think that? Well, every book is a person. Some of my best friends are inside that book. Yeah, it's an amazing book. I mean, there's no doubt about it. I think it's, some books are defined by your personal relationship with them. That one was definitive, and I almost graduated to that one because for the longest time, The Idiot was my favorite book of all, because I identified with the ideas represented by Prince Mishkin. I also identified. Ah, that's interesting. To Prince Mishkin as a human being. The holy fool. The fool, yeah, because the world kind of, my whole life still kind of sees me, saw me in my perception. My narrow perception is kind of the fool. And I, different from the interpretation that a lot of people take of this book, I see him as a kind of hero to be. Oh, definitely. To be a naive, quote unquote, fool, but really just a naive optimist, and naive in the best possible way. I do believe that. That's childlike? Yeah, childlike is a better. So naive is usually seen as. That's childish, naive. Yeah, but childlike. That's why no one enters the kingdom of heaven unless they become like a child. That's Prince Mishkin. Dostoevsky knew that. So that's why he liked The Idiot. That's so interesting. See, I think I like Crime and Punishment because while you identified with Mishkin, I think I identified more with Raskolnikov because I was tempted by a Luciferian intellect, you know, in a manner very similar to the manner he was tempted. But I mean, I think you can make a case that the Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky's crowning achievement. Well. And that's something, man. He ruined literature for me. Because everything else just felt insipid afterwards. Not everything. Not everything. I found some books that in my experience hit that pinnacle. The Master and Margarita. That's a deadly book. I've read that I think four times, and I still, there's still, it's unbelievably deep. There's a Nikos Kazantzakis, a Greek writer. Some of his books are, his writing is amazing as well. Did you ever connect with the literary, like existentialist Camus or people like Hermann Hesse or even Kafka? Did you ever connect with those? To the same degree? Yeah, to the same. Enough to be an influence. You know, you have to be deaf in some fundamental sense not to encounters a great dead friend and fail to learn. No, and I mean, I tried to separate the wheat from the chaff when I read. You know, and I read all the great clinicians, all of them, perhaps not. Those who are foremost in the pantheon. And I tried to pull out what I could, and that was a lot. I learned a lot from Freud. I learned a lot from Rogers. And I learned a lot from, well, from Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. I'm gonna do a course on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche for this Peterson Academy. This is coming up in January. Oh, that'll be them together. I'm really looking forward to it. You're weaving, I mean. I hadn't thought about doing them together. Oh. That'd be fun. That's a good idea. That'd be a good idea. Well, there's an interesting. I'm gonna steal that idea. I don't know. You often weave them together really masterfully because there is religious in the broad sense of that word, themes throughout the writing. Throughout the writing of both. Yeah, well, there's uncanny parallelisms in their writing and their lives. So, and Dostoevsky's deeper than Nietzsche, but that's because he was a writer of fiction. Nietzsche is almost a character in a Dostoevsky book. He is definitely that. He is definitely that, yes. And apparently Nietzsche knew more about Dostoevsky than people had thought. There's been some recent scholarship on that grounds. Dostoevsky didn't know anything about Nietzsche as far as I know. I could be wrong about that. But the thing that Dostoevsky had over Nietzsche is Nietzsche had to make things propositional in some real sense, cause he was a philosopher. And it's hard to propositionalize things that are outside your ken, but you can characterize them. And so in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is a more developed character than Eleosha. In the explicit sense, he can make better arguments. But Eleosha wins, like Mishkin, because he's the better man. And Dostoevsky can show that in the actions. He can't render it entirely propositional, but that's probably because what's good can't be rendered entirely propositional. And so Dostoevsky had that edge over Nietzsche. He said, well, Ivan is this brilliant rationalist, atheist, materialist, and puts forward an argument on that front that's still unparalleled as far as I'm concerned. And overwhelms Eleosha, who cannot respond but Eleosha's still the better man. So, which is very interesting, you know, that. You know, the funny thing about those two characters is you, Jordan Peterson, seem to be somebody that at least in part embodies both. Because you are one of the intellectuals of our time, rigorous in thought, but also are able to have that kind of, what would you describe? If you remove the religiosity of Eleosha, there's a, what's a good word? Love towards the world. Spirit of encouragement. Yes. Which one? Yeah, well, it's, you know, one of the things I did learn, perhaps, from looking into the abyss to the degree that I have had to, or was willing to, was that at some level you have to make a fundamental statement of faith. When God creates the world, after each day, He says, He saw that it was good. You think, well, is it good? It's like, well, there's a tough question. I mean, you know, do you want to bring a child into a world such as this, which is a fundamental question of whether or not it's good. It's an act of faith to declare that it's good because the evidence is ambivalent. And so then you think, okay, well, am I gonna act as if it's good? And what would happen if I did? And maybe the answer to that is, I think this is the answer. The more you act out the proposition that it's good, the better it gets. And so that's it. Dostoevsky said, this is something else. Every man is not only responsible for everything he does, but for everything everyone else does. It's like, what is that profound, or are you just insane? Then you think, is what you receive back proportionate to what you deliver? And the answer to that might be yes. That's a terrifying idea, man. And it's certainly, you can see that it's true in some sense because people certainly respond to you in kind with how you treat them. That's certainly the case. I mean, it's terrifying and it's exciting. Yeah, right. But that's an adventure, isn't it? You, yeah, you create the world by the way you live it. The world you experience is defined by the way you live that world. And that's really interesting. And then taken as a collective, we create the world together in that way. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life, Jordan Peterson? You've, we've defined it many, many times throughout this conversation. It's the adventure along the route, man. And I would say, where's that adventure to be found? In faith? What's the faith? The highest value is love and truth is its handmaiden. That's a statement of faith, right? Because you can't tell. You have to act it out to see if it's true. Yeah. If it's true. Yeah. And so you can't even find out without, and that's so peculiar. You have to make the commitment a priori. Yeah. It's like a marriage. It's the same thing. It's like, well, is this the person for me? Oh, that's the wrong question. How do I find out if this is the person for me? By binding myself to them. Well, maybe the same thing is true of life, right? You bind yourself to it. And the tighter you bind yourself to it, the more you find out what it is. And that's like a radical embrace. And it's a really radical embrace. That's the crucifix symbol. And more than that, because like I said, the full passion story isn't death. It isn't even unjust death. It isn't even unjust death and the crucifixion of the innocent, which is really getting pretty bad. It's unjust, torturous, innocent death, attendant upon betrayal and tyranny, followed by hell. Well, that's a hell of a thing to radically embrace. It's like, bring it on. I think a lot of people put truth as the highest ideal and think they can get to that ideal while living in a place of cynicism and ultimately escape from life and hiding from life, afraid of life. And it's beautifully put that love is the highest ideal to reach for and truth is. It's handmade. I thought about that for a long time, right? This hierarchy of ideal. And the thing about truth, that bitter truth, let's say, that cynical truth, is it can break the shackles of naivety. And actually a burnt cynicism is a moral improvement over a blind naivety. Even though one is in some ways positive, but only because it's protected. And the other is bitter and dark, but still better. But you're not done at that point. You're just barely started. It's like, you're cynical? You're not cynical enough. It's like, how cynical are you? Are you, I'm an Auschwitz prison guard level of cynical? Because you have to be, you have to go down pretty deep into the weeds before you find that part of you. But you can find it if you want. And then you think, well, I want to stop this. Well, that was the question you posed. In some sense, you're obsessed with, say, what happened on these mass scale catastrophes in the communist countries. It's like, well, millions of people participated. So you could have, and maybe you would have enjoyed it. So what part of that is you? And you can find it if you want. Yeah, it's all there. The prisoner, the interrogator, the Judas. Pontius Pilate. All of it. All of it, yeah. And all of it is inside us. Yeah. And you just have to look. And once you do, maybe eventually you can find the love. Jordan, you're an incredible human being. I'm deeply honored you would talk to me. Thank you for being a truth seeker in this world. And thank you for the love. Hey, thanks for the invitation, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jordan Peterson. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Friedrich Nietzsche. You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Jordan Peterson: Life, Death, Power, Fame, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #313

Evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way, you just react it. And physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. The following is a conversation with Liv Burry, formerly one of the best poker players in the world, trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist and an educator on topics of game theory, physics, complexity, and life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Liv Burry. What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life? You can pick whichever one you want, poker or life and or life. The longer you play, the less influence luck has. Like with all things, the bigger your sample size, the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter. So to answer that question, yeah, in poker, it really depends. If you and I sat and played 10 hands right now, I might only win 52% of the time, 53% maybe. But if we played 10,000 hands, then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time. So it's a question of sample sizes. And what are you figuring out over time? The betting strategy that this individual does or literally it doesn't matter against any individual over time? Against any individual over time, the better player because they're making better decisions. So what does that mean to make a better decision? Well, to get into the realness of Gritty already, basically poker is a game of math. There are these strategies familiar with like Nash Equilibria, right? So there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt. And the closer you play to them, the less exploitable you are. So because I've studied the game a bunch, although admittedly not for a few years, but back when I was playing all the time, I would study these game theory optimal solutions and try and then adopt those strategies when I go and play. So I'd play against you and I would do that. And because the objective, when you're playing game theory optimal, it's actually, it's a loss minimization thing that you're trying to do. Your best bet is to try and play a sort of similar style. You also need to try and adopt this loss minimization. But because I've been playing much longer than you, I'll be better at that. So first of all, you're not taking advantage of my mistakes. But then on top of that, I'll be better at recognizing when you are playing suboptimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your bad plays. Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria? Can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways? Like what's a game theory framework of analyzing poker, analyzing any kind of situation? So game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation. I mean, it's technically a branch of economics, but it also applies to like wider decision theory. And usually when you see it, it's these like little payoff matrices and so on. That's how it's depicted. But it's essentially just like study of strategies under different competitive situations. And as it happens, certain games, in fact, many, many games have these things called Nash equilibria. And what that means is when you're in a Nash equilibrium, basically it is not, there is no strategy that you can take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking, assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing. So it'd be a bad idea, if we're both playing in a game theory optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock, paper, scissors is actually a really great example of this. Like if we were to start playing rock, paper, scissors, you know, you know nothing about me and we're gonna play for all our money, let's play 10 rounds of it. What would your sort of optimal strategy be? Do you think, what would you do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. You wanna, because you don't know anything about me, you don't want to give anything away about yourself. So ideally you'd have like a little dice or somewhat, you know, perfect randomizer that makes you randomize 33% of the time each of the three different things. And in response to that, well, actually I can kind of do anything, but I would probably just randomize back too, but actually it wouldn't matter because I know that you're playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium where we're both playing this like unexploitable strategy. However, if after a while you then notice that I'm playing rock a little bit more often than I should. Yeah, you're the kind of person that would do that, wouldn't you? Sure. Yes, yes, yes. I'm more of a scissors girl, but anyway. You are? No, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm throwing rock too much or something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy, well, the previous one, because you are now, I'm making a mistake and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake. So you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage of the time that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of where, what game theory optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization, but it's not always the maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid stuff, which in that example. So that's kind of then how it works in poker, but it's a lot more complex. And the way poker players typically, nowadays they study, the games change so much. And I think we should talk about how it sort of evolved, but nowadays like the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators using like software where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations, sort of doing billions of fictitious self play hands. You input a fictitious hand scenario, like, oh, what do I do with Jack nine suited on a King 10 four to two spades board and against this bet size. So you'd input that press play, it'll run its billions of fake hands and then it will converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are. And then you wanna try and memorize what these are. Basically they're like ratios of how often, what types of hands you want to bluff and what percentage of the time. So then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in. Yeah, those kinds of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that. So as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's the probability you win just based on the quality of the card, it's including everything else too. The game theory of it. Yes, yeah, essentially. And what's interesting is that nowadays, if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super high stakes tournaments or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff, you're gonna get eaten alive in the long run. But of course you could get lucky over the short run and that's where this like luck factor comes in because luck is both a blessing and a curse. If luck didn't, if there wasn't this random element and there wasn't the ability for worse players to win sometimes, then poker would fall apart. You know, the same reason people don't play chess professionally for money against, you don't see people going and hustling chess like not knowing, trying to make a living from it because you know there's very little luck in chess, but there's quite a lot of luck in poker. Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie? Years ago. Well, what do you think about the game theoretic formulation of what is it, the hot blonde at the bar? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. What they illustrated is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's multiple girls. They're like friend, it's like a friend group and you're trying to approach, I don't remember the details, but I remember. Don't you like then speak to her friends first or something like that, feign disinterest. I mean, it's classic pickup artist stuff, right? You wanna. And they were trying to correlate that somehow, that being an optimal strategy game theoretically. Why? What, what, like, I don't think, I remember. I can't imagine that there is, I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy. Is it, does that mean that there's an actual Nash equilibrium of like picking up girls? Do you know the marriage problem? It's optimal stopping. Yes. So where it's an optimal dating strategy where you, do you remember what it is? Yeah, I think it's like something like, you know you've got like a set of a hundred people you're gonna look through and after, how many do you, now after that, after going on this many dates out of a hundred, at what point do you then go, okay, the next best person I see, is that the right one? And I think it's like something like 37%. Uh, it's one over E, whatever that is. Right, which I think is 37%. Yeah. We're gonna fact check that. Yeah. So, but it's funny under those strict constraints, then yes, after that many people, as long as you have a fixed size pool, then you just pick the next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Anyone else you've seen, yeah. Have you tried this? Have you incorporated it? I'm not one of those people. And we're gonna discuss this. I, and, what do you mean, those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen to the heart. I don't think, I like, my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything. Optimizing everything. And I think that if you really give in to that kind of addiction, that you lose the joy of the small things, the minutiae of life, I think. I don't know. I'm concerned about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard. In some ways, while I think the, on average, people under try and quantify things, or try, under optimize. There are some people who, you know, with all these things, it's a balancing act. I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them. I'm sure they have data on this, because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem. Because there aren't a lot of people that use social, like dating apps, are on there for a long time. So the interesting aspect is like, all right, how long before you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively, such that you see dating as a kind of, A game. A kind of game versus an actual process of finding somebody that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life. That's really interesting. They have the data. I wish they would be able to release that data. And I do want to hop to it. It's OkCupid, right? I think they ran a huge, huge study on all of that. Yeah, they're more data driven, I think, OkCupid folks are. I think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps, in general, even bigger than dating apps, people connecting on the internet. I just hope they're more data driven. And it doesn't seem that way. I think like, I've always thought that Goodreads should be a dating app. Like the. I've never used it. After what? Goodreads is just lists like books that you've read. And allows you to comment on the books you read and what books you're currently reading. But it's a giant social networks of people reading books. And that seems to be a much better database of like interests. Of course it constrains you to the books you're reading, but like that really reveals so much more about the person. Allows you to discover shared interests because books are a kind of window into the way you see the world. Also like the kind of places, people you're curious about, the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you a romantic or are you cold calculating rationalist? Are you into Ayn Rand or are you into Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? And I feel like that reveals so much more than like a person trying to look hot from a certain angle in a Tinder profile. Well, and it'd also be a really great filter in the first place for people. It's less people who read books and are willing to go and rate them and give feedback on them and so on. So that's already a really strong filter. Probably the type of people you'd be looking for. Well, at least be able to fake reading books. I mean, the thing about books, you don't really need to read it. You can just look at the click counts. Yeah, game the dating app by feigning intellectualism. Can I admit something very horrible about myself? Go on. The things that, you know, I don't have many things in my closet, but this is one of them. I've never actually read Shakespeare. I've only read Cliff Notes and I got a five in the AP English exam. Wow. And I... Which book? The which books have I read? Oh yeah, which was the exam on which book? Oh no, they include a lot of them. Oh. But Hamlet, I don't even know if you read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's hard. It's really, I don't, and it's not that pleasant to read. It's like ancient speak. I don't understand it. Anyway, maybe I was too dumb. I'm still too dumb, but I did get... You got a five, which is... Yeah, yeah. I don't know how the US grading system... Oh no, so AP English is a, there's kind of this advanced versions of courses in high school, and you take a test that is like a broad test for that subject and includes a lot. It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare. I think a lot of it was also writing, written. You have like AP Physics, AP Computer Science, AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and then AP English or AP Literature, I forget what it was. But I think Shakespeare was a part of that. But I... And the point is you gamified it? Gamified. Well, in entirety, I was into getting As. I saw it as a game. I don't think any... I don't think all of the learning I've done has been outside of school. The deepest learning I've done has been outside of school with a few exceptions, especially in grad school, like deep computer science courses. But that was still outside of school because it was outside of getting... Sorry. It was outside of getting the A for the course. The best stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter and you do many of the problems at the end of the chapter, which is usually not what's required for the course, like the hardest stuff. In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible. If you go back now and you look at like biology textbook or any of the computer science textbooks on algorithms and data structures, those things are incredibly... They have the best summary of a subject, plus they have practice problems of increasing difficulty that allows you to truly master the basic, like the fundamental ideas behind that. I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just this really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year, buy this, but you're gonna have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses. And I was like, every time I was just checked to see whether this book covered it and it did. And I think I only bought like two or three extra and thank God, cause they're super expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. They could just... You get the right one, it's just like a manual for... But what's interesting though, is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics. The tyranny of exams and metrics, yes. I loved them because I'm very competitive and I liked finding ways to gamify things and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when I get a good grade or be annoyed at myself when I didn't. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that the actual... How much of that physics knowledge I've retained, like I've learned how to cram and study and please an examiner, but did that give me the deep lasting knowledge that I needed? I mean, yes and no, but really like nothing makes you learn a topic better than when you actually then have to teach it yourself. Like I'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory Moloch stuff right now. And there's no exam at the end of it that I can gamify. There's no way to gamify and sort of like shortcut my way through it. I have to understand it so deeply from like deep foundational levels to then to build upon it and then try and explain it to other people. And like, you're about to go and do some lectures, right? You can't sort of just like, you presumably can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach that. Yeah, and especially high level lectures, especially the kind of stuff you do on YouTube, you're not just regurgitating material. You have to think through what is the core idea here. And when you do the lectures live especially, you have to, there's no second takes. That is the luxury you get if you're recording a video for YouTube or something like that. But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on. I've gotten to interact with a few YouTubers that lean on that too much. And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff. You're through the edit, both written and spoken, you're crafting an amazing video, but you yourself as a human being have not really deeply understood it. So live teaching or at least recording video with very few takes is a different beast. And I think it's the most honest way of doing it, like as few takes as possible. That's why I'm nervous about this. Don't go back and be like, ah, let's do that. Don't fuck this up, Liv. The tyranny of exams. I do think people talk about high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun and all this kind of stuff. But looking back, of course I did a lot of those things. Yes, no, yes, but it's also a time when you get to read textbooks or read books or learn with all the time in the world. You don't have these responsibilities of laundry and having to sort of pay for mortgage, all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. In most cases, there's just so much time in the day for learning and you don't realize it at the time because at the time it seems like a chore, like why the hell does there's so much homework? But you never get a chance to do this kind of learning, this kind of homework ever again in life, unless later in life you really make a big effort out of it. Like basically your knowledge gets solidified. You don't get to have fun and learn. Learning is really fulfilling and really fun if you're that kind of person. Like some people like, you know, like knowledge is not something that they think is fun. But if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun, that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drink and all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is really, really rewarding. Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Kids these days with their TikTok and their... Well, not even that, but it's just like so much information, really high quality information, you know, it's now in digital format online. Yeah, but they're not, they are using that, but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum. I mean, so much of school is about rigorous study of a subject and still on YouTube, that's not there. Right. YouTube has, YouTube has, Grant Sanderson talks about this. He's this math... 3Blue1Brown. Yeah, 3Blue1Brown. He says like, I'm not a math teacher. I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people. But if you wanna really learn calculus, if you wanna really learn linear algebra, you should do the textbook. You should do that, you know. And there's still the textbook industrial complex that like charges like $200 for textbook and somehow, I don't know, it's ridiculous. Well, they're like, oh, sorry, new edition, edition 14.6. Sorry, you can't use 14.5 anymore. It's like, what's different? We've got one paragraph different. So we mentioned offline, Daniel Negrano. I'm gonna get a chance to talk to him on this podcast. And he's somebody that I found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker, verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays poker. So, and he's still pretty damn good. He's been good for a long time. So you mentioned that people are running these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed. Do you think he's adapting in this way? Like the top pros, do they have to adopt this way? Or is there still like over the years, you basically develop this gut feeling about, like you get to be like good the way, like alpha zero is good. You look at the board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer. Like this is likely what they have. This is likely the best way to move. And you don't really, you can't really put a finger on exactly why, but it just comes from your gut feeling. Or no? Yes and no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. You know, that we've got our two, you can distill it down to two modes of decision making, right? You've got your sort of logical linear voice in your head, system two, as it's often called, and your system one, your gut intuition. And historically in poker, the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut. You know, often they do some kind of inspired play and you'd ask them why they do it and they wouldn't really be able to explain it. And that's not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because no one had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really understood how poker worked. This was before, you know, we had analysis software. You know, no one was writing, I guess some people would write down their hands in a little notebook, but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it. But then, you know, when computers became cheaper and software started emerging, and then obviously online poker, where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Now, all of a sudden you kind of had this body of data that you could run analysis on. And so that's when people started to see, you know, these mathematical solutions. And so what that meant is the role of intuition essentially became smaller. And it went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style. But also, as I said, like game theory optimal is about loss minimization and being unexploitable. But if you're playing against people who aren't, because no person, no human being can play perfectly game theory optimal in poker, not even the best AIs. They're still like, you know, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but it's kind of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly. So there's still a role for intuition? Yes, so when, yeah, when you're playing this unexploitable style, but when your opponents start doing something, you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit, well, now that's where not only your like logical brain will need to be thinking, well, okay, I know I have this, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this hand. So that means I need to be calling X percent of the time and I put them on this range, et cetera. But then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know what, this time, I know mathematically I'm meant to call now. You know, I'm in the sort of top end of my range and this is the odds I'm getting. So the math says I should call, but there's something in your gut saying, they've got it this time, they've got it. Like they're beating you, your hand is worse. So then the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the fuzziness is like, do you listen to your gut? How do you quantify the strength of it? Or can you even quantify the strength of it? And I think that's what Daniel has. I mean, I can't speak for how much he's studying with the simulators and that kind of thing. I think he has, like he must be to still be keeping up. But he has an incredible intuition for just, he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh. He's seen so many people, the way they behave when the chips are, you know, when the money's on the line and he've got him staring you down in the eye. You know, he's intimidating. He's got this like kind of X factor vibe that he, you know, gives out. And he talks a lot, which is an interactive element, which is he's getting stuff from other people. Yes, yeah. And just like the subtlety. So he's like, he's probing constantly. Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer of information that others can't. Now that said though, he's good online as well. You know, I don't know how, again, would he be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not, no. But when he's in person and he's got that additional layer of information, he can not only extract it, but he knows what to do with it still so well. There's one player who I would say is the exception to all of this. And he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of, I think he might have cracked the simulation. It's Phil Helmuth. He... In more ways than one, he's cracked the simulation, I think. Yeah, he somehow to this day is still and I love you Phil, I'm not in any way knocking you. He is still winning so much at the World Series of Poker specifically. He's now won 16 bracelets. The next nearest person I think has won 10. And he is consistently year in, year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments, you know, with like 2000 people, which statistically he should not be doing. And yet you watch some of the plays he makes and they make no sense, like mathematically, they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is, if you went and stuck him in one of these high stakes cash games with a bunch of like GTO people, he's gonna get ripped apart. But there's something that he has that when he's in the halls of the World Series of Poker specifically, amongst sort of amateurish players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. And, but my little pet theory is that also, he just, the card, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to. Because he just expects to win and he expects to receive, you know, to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond what the real percentages are. And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are, he doesn't need to, because he gets there. I think he has found the Chico, because when I've seen him play, he seems to be like annoyed that the long shot thing didn't happen. He's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with the spare. If that silly thing hadn't happened. And it's like, you don't understand, the silly thing happens 99% of the time. And it's a 1%, not the other way around, but genuinely for his lived experience at the World Series, only at the World Series of Poker, it is like that. So I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does, he has this X factor and the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, he's no good, but he's clearly good because he's still winning or there's something going on. Whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is, but he's doing it right still. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Hellmuth? Not Hellmuth definitely, he seems like the kind of person when mentioned he would actually watch this. So you might wanna be careful. Well, as I said, I love Phil and I have, I would say this to his face, I'm not saying anything. I don't, he's got, he truly, I mean, he is one of the greatest. I don't know if he's the greatest, he's certainly the greatest at the World Series of Poker. And he is the greatest at, despite the game switching into a pure game, almost an entire game of math, he has managed to keep the magic alive. And this like, just through sheer force of will, making the game work for him. And that is incredible. And I think it's something that should be studied because it's an example. Yeah, there might be some actual game theoretic wisdom. There might be something to be said about optimality from studying him. What do you mean by optimality? Meaning, or rather game design, perhaps. Meaning if what he's doing is working, maybe poker is more complicated than the one we're currently modeling it as. So like his, yeah. Or there's an extra layer, and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey, but, or there's an extra layer of ability to manipulate the things the way you want them to go that we don't understand yet. Do you think Phil Hellmuth understands them? Is he just generally? Hashtag positivity. Well, he wrote a book on positivity and he's. He has, he did, not like a trolling book. No. He's just straight up, yeah. Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity. Yes. Okay, not ironic. And I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want and getting the outcomes that you want by believing so much in yourself and in your ability to win, like eyes on the prize. And I mean, it's working. The man's delivered. But where do you put like Phil Ivey and all those kinds of people? I mean, I'm too, I've been, to be honest too much out of the scene for the last few years to really, I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got, again, he's got that X factor. He's so incredibly intimidating to play against. I've only played against him a couple of times, but when he like looks you in the eye and you're trying to run a bluff on him, oof, no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey, just my bluff got through actually. That was actually one of the most thrilling moments I've ever had in poker was, it was in a Monte Carlo in a high roller. I can't remember exactly what the hand was, but I, you know, a three bit and then like just barreled all the way through. And he just like put his laser eyes into me. And I felt like he was just scouring my soul. And I was just like, hold it together, Liv, hold it together. And he was like, folded. And you knew your hand was weaker. Yeah, I mean, I was bluffing. I presume, which, you know, there's a chance I was bluffing with the best hand, but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse. And he folded. I was truly one of the deep highlights of my career. Did you show the cards or did you fold? You should never show in game. Like, because especially as I felt like I was one of the worst players at the table in that tournament. So giving that information, unless I had a really solid plan that I was now like advertising, oh, look, I'm capable of bluffing Phil Ivey. But like, why? It's much more valuable to take advantage of the impression that they have of me, which is like, I'm a scared girl playing a high roller for the first time. Keep that going, you know. Interesting. But isn't there layers to this? Like psychological warfare that the scared girl might be way smart and then like just to flip the tables? Do you think about that kind of stuff? Or is it better not to reveal information? I mean, generally speaking, you want to not reveal information. You know, the goal of poker is to be as deceptive as possible about your own strategies while elucidating as much out of your opponent about their own. So giving them free information, particularly if they're people who you consider very good players, any information I give them is going into their little database and being, I assume it's going to be calculated and used well. So I have to be really confident that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then do, oh, they've seen this, so therefore that. I'm going to be on the right level. So it's better just to keep that little secret to myself in the moment. So how much is bluffing part of the game? Huge amount. So yeah, I mean, maybe actually let me ask, like, what did it feel like with Phil Ivey or anyone else when it's a high stake, when it's a big, it's a big bluff? So a lot of money on the table and maybe, I mean, what defines a big bluff? Maybe a lot of money on the table, but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self doubt. Well, maybe I miscalculated what's going on here, what the bet said, all that kind of stuff. Like, what does that feel like? I mean, it's, I imagine comparable to, you know, running a, I mean, any kind of big bluff where you have a lot of something that you care about on the line. You know, so if you're bluffing in a courtroom, not that anyone should ever do that, or, you know, something equatable to that. It's, you know, in that scenario, you know, I think it was the first time I'd ever played a 20, I'd won my way into this 25K tournament. So that was the buy in 25,000 euros. And I had satelliteed my way in because it was much bigger than I would ever normally play. And, you know, I hadn't, I wasn't that experienced at the time, and now I was sitting there against all the big boys, you know, the Negronus, the Phil Ivey's and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out, you know, you put another bet out, your card. Yeah, I was on what's called a semi bluff. So there were some cards that could come that would make my hand very, very strong and therefore win. But most of the time, those cards don't come. So that is a semi bluff because you're representing, are you representing that you already have something? So I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw. So I had two clubs, two clubs came out on the flop. And then I'm hoping that on the turn and the river, one will come. So I have some future equity. I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand in which case, great. And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call, but I'm also got the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come, I can keep betting and get them to fold their hand. And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had some future equity, but it's still, you know, most of the time I don't hit that club. And so I would rather him just fold because I'm, you know, the pot is now getting bigger and bigger. And in the end, like I've jam all in on the river. That's my entire tournament on the line. As far as I'm aware, this might be the one time I ever get to play a big 25K. You know, this was the first time I played one. So it was, it felt like the most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up at, you know, build my name, a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect. Destroy everything for you. It felt like it in the moment. Like, I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life and death. Like your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response. What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? Are you just like, what are you thinking about? More of a mixture of like, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about like, okay, what are cards that make my hand look stronger? Which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective? Which cards don't? What's the right amount of bet size to maximize my fold equity in this situation? You know, that's the logical stuff that I should be thinking about. But I think in reality, because I was so scared, because there's this, at least for me, there's a certain threshold of like nervousness or stress beyond which the logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this like, just like, it feels like a game of wits, basically. It's like of nerve. Can you hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, like by the river. I think by that point, I was like, I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore, but fuck it, let's do it. Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling. I call it the white noise. And it happens in all kinds of decision making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. I can imagine someone in like an important job interview, if it's like a job they've always wanted, and they're getting grilled, you know, like Bridgewater style, where they ask these really hard, like mathematical questions. You know, it's a really learned skill to be able to like subdue your flight or fight response. You know, I think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic. So you can actually, you know, engage that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily, you know, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and, you know, is it optimal to go this way or that way? You just react it. And physically, our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever, you know, evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made me realize that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And I don't think you can. Telling a story. No, no, it's straight up lying. In the context of game, it's not a negative kind of lying. But it is, yeah, exactly. You're representing something that you don't have. And I was thinking like how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying? Because I was thinking certainly in high level military strategy, I was thinking when Hitler was lying to Stalin about his plans to invade the Soviet Union. And so you're talking to a person like your friends and you're fighting against the enemy, whatever the formulation of the enemy is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely. Wait, wait, so Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends? Yeah. Well, my history knowledge is terrible. Oh yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, that they were, oh man. And it worked because Stalin, until the troops crossed the border and invaded in Operation Barbarossa where this storm of Nazi troops invaded large parts of the Soviet Union. And hence, one of the biggest wars in human history began. Stalin for sure thought that this was never going to be, that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union. And it makes, geopolitically makes total sense to be collaborators. And ideologically, even though there's a tension between communism and fascism or national socialism, however you formulate it, it still feels like this is the right way to battle the West. Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which is the West. So it made total sense. And in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated, it seemed to Stalin that for sure, that they would remain, at least for a while, peaceful collaborators. And that, and everybody, because of that, in the Soviet Union believed that it was a huge shock when Kiev was invaded. And you hear echoes of that when I travel to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, but the invasion of the capital city. And just like, holy shit, especially at that time, when you thought World War I, you realized that that was the war to end all wars. You would never have this kind of war. And holy shit, this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the Soviet Union. So it's no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead. It'll be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that, that's a very large scale kind of lie, but I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics, that kind of lying happening all the time. And a lot of people pay financially and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we, maybe we. I think people do. I mean, like think of spouses cheating on their partners, right? And then like having to lie, like where were you last night? Stuff like that. Oh shit, that's tough. Yeah, that's true. Like that's, I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? Or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know about the other one and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement about that too. Or. It seems unnecessary, yeah. But. Why? Well, just lying. Like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out. You know? Yes. But hence that's the thrill. Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, you know, that's why I think actually like poker. What's so interesting about poker is most of the best players I know, they're always exceptions, you know? They're always bad eggs. But actually poker players are very honest people. I would say they are more honest than the average, you know, if you just took random population sample. Because A, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that. Most people like to have some kind of, you know, mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table, where it's like, it's part of the game. Everyone knows what they're in for, and that's allowed. And you get to like really get that out of your system. And then also like poker players learned that, you know, I would play in a huge game against some of my friends, even my partner, Igor, where we will be, you know, absolutely going at each other's throats, trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up, doing the craftiest moves we can. But then once the game's done, you know, the winners and the losers will go off and get a drink together and have a fun time and like talk about it in this like weird academic way afterwards, because, and that's why games are so great. Cause you get to like live out like this competitive urge that, you know, most people have. What's it feel like to lose? Like we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about when you, when you go broke? So like in a game, I'm, fortunately I've never gone broke. You mean like full life? Full life, no. I know plenty of people who have. And I don't think Igor would mind me saying he went, you know, he went broke once in poker bowl, you know, early on when we were together. I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke. Oh yeah. Some sense. Right. Some fundamental sense. I mean, I'm happy, I've sort of lived through it, vicariously through him when he did it at the time. But yeah, what's it like to lose? Well, it depends. So it depends on the amount. It depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost. It depends on your brain chemistry. It really, you know, varies from person to person. You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage. Well, it did, it really does, right? Yeah, it's true, it's true. I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do. You see, you see everything in percentages or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourlies or cost benefit, et cetera. You know, so that's, one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the win or loss that I've received. Because it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss or on the flip side, you have a huge win and you're sort of so dead inside that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions to calibrate with reality as much as possible. So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament that I thought I was gonna win in especially if I got really unlucky or I make a dumb play where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked the wall, punched a wall, I like nearly broke my hand one time. Like I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like I was like pathologically competitive in my like late teens, early twenties, I just had to win at everything. And I think that sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older. According to you, yeah. According to me. I don't know if others would say the same, right? I feel like ultra competitive people, like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me. It's like that he's a lot less competitive than he used to be. I don't know about that. Oh, I believe it. No, I totally believe it. Like, because as you get, you can still be, like I care about winning. Like when, you know, I play a game with my buddies online or, you know, whatever it is, polytopia is my current obsession. Like when I. Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing now. We gotta have a game. But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly. I don't wanna have a game because that's gonna pull me into your monster of like a competitive play. It's important, it's an important skill. I'm enjoying playing on the, I can't. You just do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah, against the bots. And I can't even do the, there's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. And then it's crazy, yeah. It's crazy. I can't, I don't even enjoy the hard one. The crazy, I really don't enjoy. Cause it's intense. You have to constantly try to win as opposed to enjoy building a little world and. Yeah, no, no, no. There's no time for exploration in polytopia. You gotta get. Well, when, once you graduate from the crazies, then you can come play the. Graduate from the crazies. Yeah, so in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know, our group, you'll need to be, you'll need to be consistently winning like 90% of games against 15 crazy bots. Yeah. And you'll be able to, like there'll be, I could teach you it within a day, honestly. How to beat the crazies? How to beat the crazies. And then, and then you'll be ready for the big leagues. Generalizes to more than just polytopia. But okay, why were we talking about polytopia? Losing hurts. Losing hurts, oh yeah. Yes, competitiveness over time. Oh yeah. I think it's more that, at least for me, I still care about playing, about winning when I choose to play something. It's just that I don't see the world as zero sum as I used to be, you know? I think as one gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive something. Or at least you're more aware of externalities, of scenarios, of competitive interactions. And so, yeah, I just like, I'm more, and I'm more aware of my own, you know, like, if I have a really strong emotional response to losing, and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day, and then I beat myself up mentally for it. Like, I'm now more aware that that's unnecessary negative externality. So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to turn this down, you know, dial this down a bit. Was poker the thing that has, if you think back at your life, and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the darker places you've got in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like, did losing spark the descent into darkness, or was it something else? I think my darkest points in poker were when I was wanting to quit and move on to other things, but I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick. Like, I wanted to be the most winningest female player, which is by itself a bad goal. You know, that was one of my initial goals, and I was like, well, I haven't, you know, and I wanted to win a WPT event. I've won one of these, I've won one of these, but I want one of those as well. And that sort of, again, like, it's a drive of like overoptimization to random metrics that I decided were important without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on. That made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had the passion to chase it for. And I don't have any regrets that, you know, I played for as long as I did, because who knows, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't be living this incredible life that I'm living now. This is the height of your life right now. This is it, peak experience, absolute pinnacle here in your robot land with your creepy light. No, it is, I mean, I wouldn't change a thing about my life right now, and I feel very blessed to say that. So, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really, where I was like, I had stopped loving the game, and I was going through the motions, and I would, and then I was like, you know, I would take the losses harder than I needed to, because I'm like, ah, it's another one. And it was, I was aware that like, I felt like my life was ticking away, and I was like, is this gonna be what's on my tombstone? Oh yeah, she played the game of, you know, this zero sum game of poker, slightly more optimally than her next opponent. Like, cool, great, legacy, you know? So, I just wanted, you know, there was something in me that knew I needed to be doing something more directly impactful and just meaningful. It was just like your search for meaning, and I think it's a thing a lot of poker players, even a lot of, I imagine any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits, you know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen this question, I don't know what he's on. He's walking away from chess, right? Yeah, like, it must be so hard for him. You know, he's been on the top for so long, and it's like, well, now what? He's got this incredible brain, like, what to put it to? And, yeah, it's. It's this weird moment where I've just spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics, and the depression hits hard after you win. Dopamine crash. Because it's a kind of a goodbye, saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had that thought, you thought would give meaning to your life, but in fact, life is full of constant pursuits of meaning. It doesn't, you don't like arrive and figure it all out, and there's endless bliss, and it continues going on and on. You constantly have to figure out to rediscover yourself. And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker, you have to like find the next. There's always a bigger game. That's the thing. That's my motto is like, what's the next game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what's a game which is like Omni win? Like what? Omni win. Omni win. Why is Omni win so important? Because if everyone plays zero sum games, that's a fast track to either completely stagnate as a civilization, but more actually, far more likely to extinct ourselves. You know, like the playing field is finite. You know, nuclear powers are playing, you know, a game of poker with, you know, but their chips are nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, you know, fires some weapons, the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. Like, you know, the playing field is finite. And if we keep playing these adversarial zero sum games, thinking that we, you know, in order for us to win, someone else has to lose, or if we lose that, you know, someone else wins, that will extinct us. It's just a matter of when. What do you think about that mutually assured destruction, that very simple, almost to the point of caricaturing game theory idea that does seem to be at the core of why we haven't blown each other up yet with nuclear weapons. Do you think there's some truth to that, this kind of stabilizing force of mutually assured destruction? And do you think that's gonna hold up through the 21st century? I mean, it has held. Yes, there's definitely truth to it, that it was a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium. Yeah, are you surprised it held this long? Isn't it crazy? It is crazy when you factor in all the like near miss accidental firings. Yes, that's makes me wonder like, you know, are you familiar with the like quantum suicide thought experiment, where it's basically like, you have a, you know, like a Russian roulette type scenario hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, particle splitting or pair of particles splitting. And if it, you know, if it goes A, then the gun doesn't go off and it goes B, then it does go off and it kills you. Because you can only ever be in the universe, you know, assuming like the Everett branch, you know, multiverse theory, you'll always only end up in the branch where you continually make, you know, option A comes in, but you run that experiment enough times, it starts getting pretty damn, you know, out of the tree gets huge, there's a million different scenarios, but you'll always find yourself in this, in the one where it didn't go off. And so from that perspective, you are essentially immortal because someone, and you will only find yourself in the set of observers that make it down that path. So it's kind of a... That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean you're still not gonna be fucked at some point in your life. No, of course not, no, I'm not advocating like that we're all immortal because of this. It's just like a fun thought experiment. And the point is it like raises this thing of like these things called observer selection effects, which Bostrom, Nick Bostrom talks about a lot, and I think people should go read. It's really powerful, but I think it could be overextended, that logic. I'm not sure exactly how it can be. I just feel like you can get, you can overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no, I mean, it leaves you into like solipsism, which is a very dangerous mindset. Again, if everyone like falls into solipsism of like, well, I'll be fine. That's a great way of creating a very, self terminating environment. But my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11 near misses of like just stupid things, like there was moonrise over Norway, and it made weird reflections of some glaciers in the mountains, which set off, I think the alarms of NORAD radar, and that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because the head of Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that they go like, well, wait a second, why would they fire now when their guy is there? And it was only that lucky happenstance, which doesn't happen very often where they didn't then escalate it into firing. And there's a bunch of these different ones. Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person who should be the most famous person on earth, cause he's probably on expectation, saved the most human lives of anyone, like billions of people by ignoring Russian orders to fire because he felt in his gut that actually this was a false alarm. And it turned out to be, you know, very hard thing to do. And there's so many of those scenarios that I can't help but wonder at this point that we aren't having this kind of like selection effect thing going on. Cause you look back and you're like, geez, that's a lot of near misses. But of course we don't know the actual probabilities that they would have lent each one would have ended up in nuclear war. Maybe they were not that likely, but still the point is, it's a very dark, stupid game that we're playing. And it is an absolute moral imperative if you ask me to get as many people thinking about ways to make this like very precarious. Cause we're in a Nash equilibrium, but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit. You know, if you would like map it topographically, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not in equilibrium because of that. We're on the top of a hill with a ball balanced on top. And just at any little nudge could send it flying down and you know, nuclear war pops off and hellfire and bad times. On the positive side, life on earth will probably still continue. And another intelligent civilization might still pop up. Maybe. Several millennia after. Pick your X risk, depends on the X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Green goo through synthetic biology, very bad. Will turn, you know, destroy all, you know, organic matter through, you know, it's basically like a biological paperclip maximizer. Also bad. Or AI type, you know, mass extinction thing as well would also be bad. Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. So let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective. Do you think we're living in a simulation? Do you think we're living inside a video game created by somebody else? Well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living in a simulation and? A simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment. So like a video game. Are we listening? Are we, because there's a, it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right? Like there's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun and interesting. Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. Maybe that could be somehow integrated into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive and are. Are you asking me if I believe in God? Sounds like it. Kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or she, optimizing for like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did. But the, you know, just like, basically like a teenager in their mom's basement watching, create a fun universe to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen. Okay, so to try and answer this. Do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence to like our, you know, classic measurable universe that we, you know, can measure with, you know, through our current physics and instruments? I think so, yes. Partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own life, which have made me question. Like, so I was a diehard atheist, even five years ago. You know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, continue to be an incredible resource. But I've just started to have too many little snippets of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic explanation of how reality works. Isn't that just like a humbling, practical realization that we don't know how reality works? Isn't that just a reminder to yourself that you're like, I don't know how reality works, isn't that just a reminder to yourself? Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility because I fell too hard, you know, same as people, like I think, you know, many people who are just like, my religion is the way, this is the correct way, this is the work, this is the law, you are immoral if you don't follow this, blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're a little too much hubris there. But similarly, I think that sort of the Richard Dawkins realism is too rigid as well and doesn't, you know, there's a way to try and navigate these questions which still honors the scientific method, which I still think is our best sort of realm of like reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry. So an example, two kind of notable examples that like really rattled my cage. The first one was actually in 2010 early on in quite early on in my poker career. And I, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted that like shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. And it meant I got stuck down in the South of France. I was there for something else. And I couldn't get home and someone said, well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy. Maybe, do you wanna go? I was like, all right, sure. Like, let's, you know, got a train across, found a way to get there. And the buy in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow. And so I played a feeder tournament, won my way in kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. So then I won my way, you know, from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing. And on day one of then the big tournament, which turned out to have, it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. It got over like 1,200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal to tell everyone to start playing. And they played Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl, which I don't know why it's notable, but it was just like a really, it was a song I always liked. It was like one of these like pump me up songs. And I was sitting there thinking, oh yeah, it's exciting. I'm playing this really big tournament. And out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice in my head, just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know, when you think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right? At least I do. And so it sounded like my own voice and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And it was so powerful that I got this like wave of like, you know, sort of goosebumps down my body. And that I even, I remember looking around being like, did anyone else hear that? And obviously people are in their phones, like no one else heard it. And I was like, okay, six days later, I win the fucking tournament out of 1,200 people. And I don't know how to explain it. Okay, yes, maybe I have that feeling before every time I play. And it's just that I happened to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it. But that's just. Or the feeling gave you a kind of, now from the film, Helmutian. Well, exactly. Like it gave you a confident, a deep confidence. And it did. It definitely did. Like, I remember then feeling this like sort of, well, although I remember then on day one, I then went and lost half my stack quite early on. And I remember thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit. You know, what kind of premonition is this? Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover and then just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely instilled me with this confidence. And I don't want to put, I can't put an explanation. Like, you know, was it some, you know, huge extra to extra, you know, supernatural thing driving me? Or was it just my own self confidence in someone that just made me make the right decisions? I don't know. And I don't, I'm not going to put a frame on it. And I think. I think I know a good explanation. So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world created by, in the simulation. And then people, not people, creatures from outside of the simulation sort of can tune in and play your character. And that feeling you got is somebody just like, they got to play a poker tournament through you. Honestly, it felt like that. It did actually feel a little bit like that. But it's been 12 years now. I've retold the story many times. Like, I don't even know how much I can trust my memory. You're just an NPC retelling the same story. Because they just played the tournament and left. Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool. Yeah, cool. Next time. And now you're for the rest of your life left as a boring NPC retelling this story of greatness. But it was, and what was interesting was that after that, then I didn't obviously win a major tournament for quite a long time. And it left, that was actually another sort of dark period because I had this incredible, like the highs of winning that, just on a like material level were insane, winning the money. I was on the front page of newspapers because there was like this girl that came out of nowhere and won this big thing. And so again, like sort of chasing that feeling was difficult. But then on top of that, there was this feeling of like almost being touched by something bigger that was like, ah. So maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like this kind of, I think that's the confidence thing that maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling. I definitely, I mean, this is the thing I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right? We are truly the protagonists in our own lives. And so it's a natural bias, human bias to feel special. And I think, and in some ways we are special. Every single person is special because you are that, the universe does, the world literally does revolve around you. That's the thing in some respect. But of course, if you then zoom out and take the amalgam of everyone's experiences, then no, it doesn't. So there is this shared sort of objective reality, but sorry, there's objective reality that is shared, but then there's also this subjective reality which is truly unique to you. And I think both of those things coexist. And it's not like one is correct and one isn't. And again, anyone who's like, oh no, your lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing. No, it's a blend between these two things. They can exist concurrently. But there's a certain kind of sense that at least I've had my whole life. And I think a lot of people have this as like, well, I'm just like this little person. Surely I can't be one of those people that do the big thing, right? There's all these big people doing big things. There's big actors and actresses, big musicians. There's big business owners and all that kind of stuff, scientists and so on. I have my own subject experience that I enjoy and so on, but there's like a different layer. Like surely I can't do those great things. I mean, one of the things just having interacted with a lot of great people, I realized, no, they're like just the same humans as me. And that realization I think is really empowering. And to remind yourself. What are they? Huh? What are they? Are they? Well, in terms of. Depends on some, yeah. They're like a bag of insecurities and. Yes. Peculiar sort of, like their own little weirdnesses and so on, I should say also not. They have the capacity for brilliance, but they're not generically brilliant. Like, you know, we tend to say this person or that person is brilliant, but really no, they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff just like the rest of us. Right. I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff seriously and they've built up a habit of not allowing them, their mind to get trapped in a bunch of bullshit and minutia of day to day life. They really think big ideas, but those big ideas, it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to realize that you can be one that actually solved this particular big problem. First identify a big problem that you care about, then like, I can actually be the one that solves this problem. And like allowing yourself to believe that. And I think sometimes you do need to have like that shock go through your body and a voice tells you, you're gonna win this tournament. Well, exactly. And whether it was, it's this idea of useful fictions. So again, like going through all like the classic rationalist training of Les Wrong where it's like, you want your map, you know, the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world actually is. You want the map and the territory to perfectly align as, you know, you want it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribed to that anymore, having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger or just actually just being overconfident. Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes. If you, you know, take, you know, take Magnus Carlsen, right? If he, I'm sure from a young age, he knew he was very talented, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something in him to, well, actually maybe he's a bad example because he truly is the world's greatest, but someone who it was unclear whether they were gonna be the world's greatest, but ended up doing extremely well because they had this innate, deep self confidence, this like even overblown idea of how good their relative skill level is. That gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing and they're like with the kind of focus and dedication that it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do, you know? And so there are these useful fictions and that's where I think I diverge slightly with the classic sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like how the stories we tell, what the stories we tell to ourselves, even if they are actually false, and even if we suspect they might be false, how it's better to sort of have that like little bit of faith, like value in faith, I think actually. And that's partly another thing that's now led me to explore the concept of God, whether you wanna call it a simulator, the classic theological thing. I think we're all like elucidating to the same thing. Now, I don't know, I'm not saying, because obviously the Christian God is like all benevolent, endless love. The simulation, at least one of the simulation hypothesis is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom who doesn't really care, doesn't give a shit about the individuals within there. It just like wants to see how the thing plays out because it's curious and it could turn it off like that. Where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know. But just having a little bit of faith that there is something else out there that might be interested in our outcome is I think an essential thing actually for people to find. A, because it creates commonality between, it's something we can all share. And it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent. It's like a common objective. But B, it gives people that little bit of like reserve when things get really dark. And I do think things are gonna get pretty dark over the next few years. But it gives that like, to think that there's something out there that actually wants our game to keep going. I keep calling it the game. It's a thing C and I, we call it the game. You and C is a.k.a. Grimes, we call what the game? Everything, the whole thing? Yeah, we joke about like. So everything is a game. Well, the universe, like what if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out like, well, either how to beat it, how to get out of it. Maybe this universe is an escape room, like a giant escape room. And the goal is to figure out, put all the pieces to puzzle, figure out how it works in order to like unlock this like hyperdimensional key and get out beyond what it is. That's. No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage and never like one cage at a time, you figure out how to escape that. Like a new level up, you know, like us becoming multi planetary would be a level up or us, you know, figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing. That would probably be a leveling up or spiritually, you know, humanity becoming more combined and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened. That would be a leveling up. You know, there's many different frames to it, whether it's physical, you know, digital or like metaphysical. I wonder what the levels, I think, I think level one for earth is probably the biological evolutionary process. So going from single cell organisms to early humans. Then maybe level two is whatever's happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies. That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then multi planetary is interesting. Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on earth? Probably, because it allows us to like exponentially scale. It delays the Malthusian trap, right? It's a way to keep the playing field, to make the playing field get larger so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us. And that's a good thing, but I don't know if it like fully solves this issue of, well, this thing called Moloch, which we haven't talked about yet, but which is basically, I call it the God of unhealthy competition. Yeah, let's go to Moloch. What's Moloch? You did a great video on Moloch and one aspect of it, the application of it to one aspect. Instagram beauty filters. True. Very niche, but I wanted to start off small. So Moloch was originally coined as, well, so apparently back in the like Canaanite times, it was to say ancient Carthaginian, I can never say it Carthaginian, somewhere around like 300 BC or 280, I don't know. There was supposedly this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon God thing they called Moloch in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And it was literally like about child sacrifice, whether they actually existed or not, we don't know, but in mythology they did. And this God that they worshiped was this thing called Moloch. And then I don't know, it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history in terms of mythology beyond that, until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this, you see that there was this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in, but then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers and sees that the city is run by this machine. And this machine basically would just like kill the workers all the time because it was just so hard to keep it running. They were always dying. So there was all this suffering that was required in order to keep the city going. And then the protagonist has this vision that this machine is actually this demon Moloch. So again, it's like this sort of like mechanistic consumption of humans in order to get more power. And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s, which incredible poem called Howl about this thing Moloch. And a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that, that he's talking about capitalism. But then the sort of piece to resistance that's moved Moloch into this idea of game theory was Scott Alexander of Slate Style Codex wrote this incredible, well, literally I think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on Moloch. Everyone must go read it. And... I say Codex is a blog. It's a blog, yes. We can link to it in the show notes or something, right? No, don't. I, yes, yes. But I like how you assume I have a professional operation going on here. I mean... I shall try to remember to... You were gonna assume. What do you... What are you, what do you want? You're giving the impression of it. Yeah, I'll look, please. If I don't, please somebody in the comments remind me. I'll help you. If you don't know this blog, it's one of the best blogs ever probably. You should probably be following it. Yes. Are blogs still a thing? I think they are still a thing, yeah. Yeah, he's migrated onto Substack, but yeah, it's still a blog. Anyway. Substack better not fuck things up, but... I hope not, yeah. I hope they don't, I hope they don't turn Molochy, which will mean something to people when we continue. Yeah. When I stop interrupting for once. No, no, it's good. Go on, yeah. So anyway, so he writes, he writes this piece, Meditations on Moloch, and basically he analyzes the poem and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong. And, you know, Moloch was historically this thing of like where people would sacrifice a thing that they care about, in this case, children, their own children, in order to gain power, a competitive advantage. And if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong in our society, it's that same process. So with the Instagram beauty filters thing, you know, if you're trying to become a famous Instagram model, you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures of yourself that you can, you know, you're trying to play that game. There's a lot of hot women on Instagram. How do you compete against them? You post really hot pictures and that's how you get more likes. As technology gets better, you know, more makeup techniques come along. And then more recently, these beauty filters where like at the touch of a button, it makes your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. These technologies come along, it's everyone is incentivized to that short term strategy. But over on net, it's bad for everyone because now everyone is kind of feeling like they have to use these things. And these things like they make you like, the reason why I talked about them in this video is because I noticed it myself, you know, like I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while, I've given up on it now. But yeah, and I noticed these filters, how good they made me look. And I'm like, well, I know that everyone else is kind of doing it. Go subscribe to Liv's Instagram. Please, so I don't have to use the filters. I'll post a bunch of, yeah, make it blow up. So yeah, you felt the pressure actually. Exactly, these short term incentives to do this like, this thing that like either sacrifices your integrity or something else in order to like stay competitive, which on aggregate turns like, creates this like sort of race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation which is worse off than if they hadn't started, you know, than they were before. Kind of like if, like at a football stadium, like the system is so badly designed, a competitive system of like everyone sitting and having a view that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view, it forces everyone else behind to like adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. Like, so you need this like top down God's eye coordination to make it go back to the better state. But from within the system, you can't actually do that. So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is. It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values in order to optimize for the winning the game in question, the short term game. But this Moloch, can you attribute it to any one centralized source or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection of people? Exactly that. It's an emergent phenomena. It's a force of game theory. It's a force of bad incentives on a multi agent system where you've got more, you know, prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of Moloch system as well, but it's just a two player thing. But another word for Moloch is it multipolar trap. Where basically you just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize. And it would be better if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy, but because that strategy gives you a short term advantage, everyone's incentivized to do it. And so everyone ends up doing it. So the responsibility for, I mean, social media is a really nice place for a large number of people to play game theory. And so they also have the ability to then design the rules of the game. And is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of like to do the thing that poker players are doing to run simulation? Ideally that would have been great. If, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the, you know, the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would, you know, if different types of algorithms would turn out for society, that would have been great. That's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about thinking about humanity actually. So not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement or what brings people joy in the short term, but how is this thing going to change the way people see the world? How is it gonna get morphed in iterative games played into something that will change society forever? That requires some deep thinking. That's, I hope there's meetings like that inside companies, but I haven't seen them. There aren't, that's the problem. And it's difficult because like, when you're starting up a social media company, you know, you're aware that you've got investors to please, there's bills to pay, you know, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got all these like incredible pressures, bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money. And, you know, I don't think anyone intended when they built these social media platforms and just to like preface it. So the reason why, you know, social media is relevant because it's a very good example of like, everyone these days is optimizing for, you know, clicks, whether it's a social media platforms themselves, because, you know, every click gets more, you know, impressions and impressions pay for, you know, they get advertising dollars or whether it's individual influencers or, you know, whether it's a New York Times or whoever, they're trying to get their story to go viral. So everyone's got this bad incentive of using, you know, as you called it, the clickbait industrial complex. That's a very molly key system because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics in order to like try and win this attention game. And yeah, so ideally these companies would have had enough slack in the beginning in order to run these experiments to see, okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people? What are the ways that Moloch, they should be aware of this concept of Moloch and realize that whenever you have a highly competitive multiagent system, which social media is a classic example of, millions of agents all trying to compete for likes and so on, and you try and bring all this complexity down into like very small metrics, such as number of likes, number of retweets, whatever the algorithm optimizes for, that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong and become a race to the bottom. I think there should be an honesty when founders, I think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency of like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. This is a fascinating experiment. We're all running as a human civilization. Let's try this out. And like, actually just be honest about this, that we're all like these weird rats in a maze. None of us are controlling it. There's this kind of sense like the founders, the CEO of Instagram or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg has a control and he's like, like with strings playing people. No, they're. He's at the mercy of this is like everyone else. He's just like trying to do his best. And like, I think putting on a smile and doing over polished videos about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you, I think is not the right way to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society. How do we design the game such that we build a better world? I think a big part of this as well is people, there's this philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley of well, techno optimism, technology will solve all our issues. And there's a steel man argument to that where yes, technology has solved a lot of problems and can potentially solve a lot of future ones. But it can also, it's always a double edged sword. And particularly as you know, technology gets more and more powerful and we've now got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of like psychological manipulation with it and so on. Technology is not a values neutral thing. People think, I used to always think this myself. It's like this naive view that, oh, technology is completely neutral. It's just, it's the humans that either make it good or bad. No, to the point we're at now, the technology that we are creating, they are social technologies. They literally dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that. And beyond that, it also then, that gives rise to like the memes that we then like coalesce around. And that, if you have the stack that way where it's technology driving social interaction, which then drives like memetic culture and like which ideas become popular, that's Moloch. And we need the other way around, we need it. So we need to figure out what are the good memes? What are the good values that we think we need to optimize for that like makes people happy and healthy and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible, then figure out what the social structure around those should be. And only then do we figure out technology, but we're doing the other way around. And as much as I love in many ways the culture of Silicon Valley, and like I do think that technology has, I don't wanna knock it. It's done so many wonderful things for us, same as capitalism. There are, we have to like be honest with ourselves. We're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created. Can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you just have, can you understand the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes that matter, the memes that bring out the best in us. You know, like the way I try to be in real life and the way I try to be online is to be about kindness and love. And I feel like I'm sometimes get like criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things. But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game. I'm trying to be authentic. Yeah, but also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this. Like you guys should try this too, you know, and that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game. Is that possible? I don't know, but I think we should try. I don't think we have an option but to try. Well, the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies that, or anyone who has control of the rules of the game. I think we need to be doing all of the above. I think we need to be thinking hard about what are the kind of positive, healthy memes. You know, as Elon said, he who controls the memes controls the universe. He said that. I think he did, yeah. But there's truth to that. It's very, there is wisdom in that because memes have driven history. You know, we are a cultural species. That's what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else. We have the ability to learn and evolve through culture as opposed to biology or like, you know, classic physical constraints. And that means culture is incredibly powerful and we can create and become victim to very bad memes or very good ones. But we do have some agency over which memes, you know, we, but not only put out there, but we also like subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach. We also need to, you know, because I don't want, I'm making this video right now called The Attention Wars, which is about like how Moloch, like the media machine is this Moloch machine. Well, is this kind of like blind dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie. And then if you zoom out, it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings because the only thing that benefits from this in the end, you know, like our information ecosystem is breaking down. Like we have, you look at the state of the US, it's in, we're in a civil war. It's just not a physical war. It's an information war. And people are becoming more fractured in terms of what their actual shared reality is. Like truly like an extreme left person, an extreme right person, like they literally live in different worlds in their minds at this point. And it's getting more and more amplified. And this force is like a razor blade pushing through everything. It doesn't matter how innocuous a topic is, it will find a way to split into this, you know, bifurcated cultural and it's fucking terrifying. Because that maximizes the tension. And that's like an emergent Moloch type force that takes anything, any topic and cuts through it so that it can split nicely into two groups. One that's... Well, it's whatever, yeah, all everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they can keep their thing going, right? And the best emotion for getting attention, well, because it's not just about attention on the internet, it's engagement, that's the key thing, right? In order for something to go viral, you need people to actually engage with it. They need to like comment or retweet or whatever. And of all the emotions that, there's like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans, even from like previously uncontacted tribes have. Some of those are negative, you know, like sadness, disgust, anger, et cetera, some are positive, happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger, it's such an active emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared, and I'm not just like talking out my ass here, there are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas like if someone's like, disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, oh, I don't wanna deal with this. So they're less likely to actually engage and share it and so on, they're just gonna be like, ugh. Whereas if they're enraged by a thing, well now that triggers all the like, the old tribalism emotions. And so that's how then things get sort of spread, you know, much more easily. They out compete all the other memes in the ecosystem. And so this like, the attention economy, the wheels that make it go around are, is rage. I did a tweet, the problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage. Because it is feeding off our rage. That's the thing that's now keeping it going. So the more we get angry, the worse it gets. So the mullet in this attention, in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage. What it is optimizing for is engagement. And it happens to be that engagement is more propaganda, you know. I mean, it just sounds like everything is putting, more and more things are being put through this like propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question. Whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war, yeah. Well, I think the silver lining of this, do you think it's possible that in the long arc of this process, you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress? It just, in the moment, it feels like people are tearing each other to shreds over ideas. But if you think about it, one of the magic things about democracy and so on, is you have the blue versus red constantly fighting. It's almost like they're in discourse, creating devil's advocate, making devils out of each other. And through that process, discussing ideas. Like almost really embodying different ideas just to yell at each other. And through the yelling, over the period of decades, maybe centuries, figuring out a better system. Like in the moment, it feels fucked up. But in the long arc, it actually is productive. I hope so. That said, we are now in the era of, just as we have weapons of mass destruction with nuclear weapons, you know, that can break the whole playing field, we now are developing weapons of informational mass destruction. Information weapons, you know, WMDs that basically can be used for propaganda or just manipulating people however is needed, whether that's through dumb TikTok videos, or, you know, there are significant resources being put in. I don't mean to sound like, you know, to doom and gloom, but there are bad actors out there. That's the thing, there are plenty of good actors within the system who are just trying to stay afloat in the game, so effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to, like, manipulate the other side into doing things. And using, so because it's a digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots. Exactly, botnets, you know, and this is a whole new situation that we've never had before. Yeah, it's exciting. You know what I want to do? You know what I want to do that, because there is, you know, people are talking about bots manipulating and, like, malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda. I want to create, like, a bot army for, like, that fights that. For love? Yeah, exactly, for love, that fights, that, I mean. You know, there's, I mean, there's truth to fight fire with fire, it's like, but how you always have to be careful whenever you create, again, like, Moloch is very tricky. Yeah, yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love, too. Well, yeah, so we thought, but, you know, I agree with you that, like, that is a thing that should be considered, but there is, again, everyone, the road to hell is paved in good intentions. And this is, there's always unforeseen circumstances, you know, outcomes, externalities of you trying to adopt a thing, even if you do it in the very best of faith. But you can learn lessons of history. If you can run some sims on it first, absolutely. But also there's certain aspects of a system, as we've learned through history, that do better than others. Like, for example, don't have a dictator, so, like, if I were to create this bot army, it's not good for me to have full control over it. Because in the beginning, I might have a good understanding of what's good and not, but over time, that starts to get deviated, because I'll get annoyed at some assholes, and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those assholes? But then that power starts getting to your head, you become corrupted, that's basic human nature. So distribute the power somehow. We need a love botnet on a DAO. A DAO love botnet. Yeah, and without a leader, like without... Well, exactly, a distributed, right, but yeah, without any kind of centralized... Yeah, without even, you know, basically it's the more control, the more you can decentralize the control of a thing to people, you know, but the balance... But then you still need the ability to coordinate, because that's the issue when something is too, you know, that's really, to me, like the culture wars, the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the sort of the, I don't know what even the term is for it, but like centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing. Power in control by a few versus completely distributed. And the trouble is if you have a fully centralized thing, then you're at risk of tyranny, you know, Stalin type things can happen, or completely distributed. Now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos but you can't even coordinate to like on, you know, when there's like a pandemic or anything like that. So it's like, what is the right balance to strike between these two structures? Can't Moloch really take hold in a fully decentralized system? That's one of the dangers too. Yes, very vulnerable to Moloch. So a dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure works and trains run on time. They have that God's eye view at least. They have the ability to create like laws and rules that like force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected with like this, with some kind of psychopathy type thing. What's reverse Moloch? Sorry, great question. So that's where, so I've been working on this series. It's been driving me insane for the last year and a half. I did the first one a year ago. I can't believe it's nearly been a year. The second one, hopefully will be coming out in like a month. And my goal at the end of the series is to like present, cause basically I'm painting the picture of like what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and how it's driving. It's like kind of the generator function as people describe it of existential risk. And then at the end of that. Wait, wait, the generator function of existential risk. So you're saying Moloch is sort of the engine that creates a bunch of X risks. Yes, not all of them. Like a, you know, a. Just a cool phrase, generator function. It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmacktenberger. Oh, Schmacktenberger. I got that from him. Of course. All things, it's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmacktenberger, I think. The dude is, the dude is brilliant. He's really brilliant. After that it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me. No, it's fine. So not all X risks. So like an asteroid technically isn't because it's, you know, it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going on. But, you know, synthetic bio, you know, bio weapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build, even for defense, you know, bad, bad viruses, you know, just to threaten someone else, et cetera. Or AI, technically the race to AGI is kind of potentially a Molochi situation. But yeah, so if Moloch is this like generator function that's driving all of these issues over the coming century that might wipe us out, what's the inverse? And so far what I've gotten to is this character that I want to put out there called Winwin. Because Moloch is the God of lose, lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the God of win, lose, but in reality it's lose, lose. Everyone ends up worse off. So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that? It's Winwin. And I was thinking for ages, like, what's a good name for this character? And then tomorrow I was like, okay, well, don't try and, you know, think through it logically. What's the vibe of Winwin? And to me, like in my mind, Moloch is like, and I addressed that in the video, like it's red and black. It's kind of like very, you know, hyper focused on it's one goal you must win. So Winwin is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise. It's loves games too. It loves a little bit of healthy competition, but constrained, like kind of like before, like knows how to ring fence zero sum competition into like just the right amount, whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive. And then beyond that, it also loves cooperation, coordination, love, all these other things. But it's also kind of like mischievous, like, you know, it will have a good time. It's not like kind of like boring, you know, like, oh God, it knows how to have fun. It can get like, it can get down, but ultimately it's like unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going. And I call it Winwin. That's a good like pet name, Winwin. I think the, Winwin, right? And I think it's formal name when it has to do like official functions is Omnia. Omnia. Yeah. From like omniscience kind of, why Omnia? You just like Omnia? She's like Omniwin. Omniwin. But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is. I like Omnia. Yeah. But there is an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Winwin is more fun. So it's more like, it embraces the fun aspect. The fun aspect. I mean, there is something about sort of, there's some aspect to Winwin interactions that requires embracing the chaos of the game and enjoying the game itself. I don't know. I don't know what that is. That's almost like a Zen like appreciation of the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences of the game. Right, well, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself about, it's not like about winning. It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not knowing whether you're gonna win or lose this little thing. But then also being aware that, you know, what's the boundary? How big do I want competition to be? Because one of the reason why Moloch is doing so well now in our society, in our civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition. You know, and so it's just having all these negative externalities and it's, we've completely lost control of it. You know, it's, I think my guess is, and now we're getting really like, you know, metaphysical technically, but I think we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure cooperation, you know, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely competition, cooperation entirely. Like it's good to have some little zero sumness bits, but I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that. And that's what reverse Moloch, so this kind of win, win creature is a system, is an antidote to the Moloch system. Yes. And I don't know how it's gonna do that. But it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas, different frameworks of how we think about that. Exactly. At the small scale of a collection of individuals and a large scale of a society. Exactly. It's a meme, I think it's an example of a good meme. And I'm open, I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think it's, you know, they have a better idea or it's not, you know, but it's the direction of memes that we need to spread, this idea of like, look for the win, wins in life. Well, on the topic of beauty filters, so in that particular context where Moloch creates negative consequences, Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world. What is beauty anyway? It would be nice to just try to discuss what kind of thing we would like to converge towards in our understanding of what is beautiful. So to me, I think something is beautiful when it can't be reduced down to easy metrics. Like if you think of a tree, what is it about a tree, like a big, ancient, beautiful tree, right? What is it about it that we find so beautiful? It's not, you know, the sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that is, there's these immeasurable qualities, it's like almost like a qualia of it. That's both, like it walks this fine line between pattern, well, it's got lots of patternicity, but it's not overly predictable. Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system. It's evolving over time, the definition of a complex versus, and this is another Schmackt and Berger thing, a complex versus a complicated system. A complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits and pieces, a complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits, understood and then put back together. A complex system is kind of like a black box. It does all this crazy stuff, but if you take it apart, you can't put it back together again, because there's all these intricacies. And also very importantly, like there's some of the parts, sorry, the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. And that's where the beauty lies, I think. And I think that extends to things like art as well. Like there's something immeasurable about it. There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric. Does that extend to humans, you think? Yeah, absolutely. So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty, the complexity of a human being? Good question. And this takes us back to dating sites and Goodreads, I think. Very good question. I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do. It shouldn't try and like, right now, you know, I was talking to like a social media expert recently, because I was like, oh, I hate that. There's such a thing as a social media expert? Oh, yeah, there are like agencies out there that you can like outsource, because I'm thinking about working with one to like, I want to start a podcast. You should, you should have done it a long time ago. Working on it. It's going to be called Win Win. And it's going to be about this like positive sum stuff. And the thing that, you know, they always come back and say, is like, well, you need to like figure out what your thing is. You know, you need to narrow down what your thing is and then just follow that. Have like a sort of a formula, because that's what people want. They want to know that they're coming back to the same thing. And that's the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it. And that's why, and the trouble with that is that it's a complexity reduction. And generally speaking, you know, complexity reduction is bad. It's making things more, it's an oversimplification. Not that simplification is always a bad thing. But when you're trying to take, you know, what is social media doing? It's trying to like encapsulate the human experience and put it into digital form and commodify it to an extent. That, so you do that, you compress people down into these like narrow things. And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my definition of beauty. It's interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful. And so maybe it's possible for social media to do that. A presentation, a sort of a slither, a slice, a look into a person's life that reveals something real about them. But in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed graphically or through words. Some way, I mean, in some way Twitter can do that kind of thing. A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person. Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking the thing out of context. People often don't read tweets in the context of the human being that wrote them. The full history of the tweets they've written, the education level, the humor level, the world view they're playing around with, all that context is forgotten and people just see the different words. So that can lead to trouble. But in a certain sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person. So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful if we're talking about Mollux is driving a better kind of incentive. Yeah, I mean, how they can, like if we were to rewrite, is there a way to rewrite the Twitter algorithm so that it stops being the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars? Because that's really what it is. I mean, maybe I'm giving it, Twitter too much power, but just the more I looked into it and I had conversations with Tristan Harris from Center of Humane Technology. And he explained it as like, Twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture and then this terribly designed algorithm that amplifies the craziest people and the angriest most divisive takes and amplifies them. And then the media, the mainstream media, because all the journalists are also on Twitter, they then are informed by that. And so they draw out the stories they can from this already like very boiling lava of rage and then spread that to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter. And so I honestly, I think if I could press a button, turn them off, I probably would at this point, because I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness, but that's not gonna happen. And so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less malachy would be to change, at least if like it was on a subscription model, then it's now not optimizing for impressions. Cause basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible. That's how they get paid, right? Every time an ad gets shown to someone and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone, if they moved on to at least a subscription model, then they're getting the money either way, whether someone comes back to the site once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes away that incentive, to use technology, to build, to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive. That would be one way, for example. Yeah, but you still want people to, yeah, I just feel like that just slows down, creates friction in the virality of things. But that's good. We need to slow down virality. It's good, it's one way. Virality is malach, to be clear. So malach is always negative then? Yes, by definition. Yes. Competition is not always negative. Competition is neutral. I disagree with you that all virality is negative then, is malach then. Because it's a good intuition, because we have a lot of data on virality being negative. But I happen to believe that the core of human beings, so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible, it might be just harder to engineer systems that enable virality, but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable virality. And the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive. And positive, not like la la positive, it's more like win win, meaning a lot of people need to be challenged. Wise things, yes. You grow from it, it might challenge you, you might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it. And ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart. I deeply want that to be true. And I very much agree with you that people at their core are on average good, care for each other, as opposed to not. Like I think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly wanting to do just like destructive malicious things. Most people are just trying to win their own little game. And they don't mean to be, they're just stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes, is the current structure means that virality is optimized towards Moloch. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Sometimes positive stories do go viral and I think we should study them. I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, identifying memes that above a certain threshold of the population agree is a positive, happy, bringing people together meme. The kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the table, at the dinner table. Identify those memes and figure out what it was, what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. And also like not just like happiness and connection between humans, but connection between humans in other ways that enables like productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. So it's not just about let's be happy and have a fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit. Let's get excited. Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti Moloch, right? That's, it's not using competition. It's like, Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together. And that's, again, like the internet started out as that and it could have been that, but because of the way it was sort of structured in terms of, you know, very lofty ideal, they wanted everything to be open source, open source and also free. And, but they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway, because they were still building this on top of our old economics system. And so the way they did that was through third party advertisement. But that meant that things were very decoupled. You know, you've got this third party interest, which means that you're then like, people having to optimize for that. And that is, you know, the actual consumer is actually the product, not the person you're making the thing for. In the end, you start making the thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then like breaks down. Yeah, like it's, there's no clean solution to this. And I, it's a really good suggestion by you actually to like figure out how we can optimize virality for positive sum topics. I shall be the general of the love bot army. Distributed. Distributed, distributed, no, okay, yeah. The power, just even in saying that, the power already went to my head. No, okay, you've talked about quantifying your thinking. We've been talking about this, sort of a game theoretic view on life and putting probabilities behind estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life, just actually analyzing life in game theoretic way, like your own life, like personal life. I think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with Igor about like, how long is this relationship gonna last? So similar to our sort of marriage problem kind of discussion, having an honest conversation about the probability of things that we sometimes are a little bit too shy or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms. Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning, the good and the bad of that? Can you do this kind of thing with human relations? Yeah, so the scenario you're talking about, it was like. Yeah, tell me about that scenario. Yeah, I think it was about a year into our relationship and we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was gonna sell my apartment. Well, you know, he had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what like our longterm plans would be. We should be by a place together, et cetera. When you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine or is he sober and you're actually having a serious? I think we were sober. How do you get to that conversation? Because most people are kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation. Well, so our relationship was very, well, first of all, we were good friends for a couple of years before we even got romantic. And when we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, it wasn't a random thing. So the probability of it being a big deal was high. It was already very high. And then we'd been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and wonderful. So, you know, there was a lot of foundation already where we felt very comfortable having a lot of frank conversations. But Igor's MO has always been much more than mine. He was always from the outset, like just in a relationship, radical transparency and honesty is the way because the truth is the truth, whether you want to hide it or not, you know, but it will come out eventually. And if you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself, then how could you possibly expect to be like the most integral version that, you know, you can't, the relationship needs this bedrock of like honesty as a foundation more than anything. Yeah, that's really interesting, but I would like to push against some of those ideas, but that's the down the line, yes, throw them up. I just rudely interrupt. That was fine. And so, you know, we'd been about together for a year and things were good and we were having this hard conversation and then he was like, well, okay, what's the likelihood that we're going to be together in three years then? Because I think it was roughly a three year time horizon. And I was like, ooh, ooh, interesting. And then we were like, actually wait, before you said out loud, let's both write down our predictions formally because we'd been like, we're just getting into like effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making formal predictions as a means of measuring your own, well, your own foresight essentially in a quantified way. So we like both wrote down our percentages and we also did a one year prediction and a 10 year one as well. So we got percentages for all three and then we showed each other. And I remember like having this moment of like, ooh, because for the 10 year one, I was like, well, I mean, I love him a lot, but like a lot can happen in 10 years, and we've only been together for, so I was like, I think it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. And I remember like wrestling, I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want him to, I don't want to give a number lower than his. And I remember thinking, I was like, ah, ah, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. So just give your real percentage. And I think mine was like 75%. And then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned. And, but honestly, even if we weren't. 20%. Huh? It definitely would have, I, if his had been consistently lower than mine, that would have rattled me for sure. Whereas if it had been the other way around, I think he would have, he's just kind of like a water off a duck's back type of guy. It'd be like, okay, well, all right, we'll figure this out. Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate? Like the level of uncertainty? They came built in. We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars. I didn't draw any or anything like that. Well, I guess that's the question I have is, did you feel informed enough to make such decisions? Cause like, I feel like if you were, if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously, I would want some data. I would want to set one of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other relationships. Right. And so I want to have some data about the way. You want the base rates. Yeah, and also actual trajectories of relationships. I would love to have like time series data about the ways that relationships fall apart or prosper, how they collide with different life events, losses, job changes, moving. Both partners find jobs, only one has a job. I want that kind of data and how often the different trajectories change in life. Like how informative is your past to your future? That's the whole thing. Like can you look at my life and have a good prediction about in terms of my characteristics and my relationships, what that's going to look like in the future or not? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'll be very ill informed in terms of making the probability. I would be far, yeah, I just would be under informed. I would be under informed. I'll be over biasing to my prior experiences, I think. Right, but as long as you're aware of that and you're honest with yourself, and you're honest with the other person, say, look, I have really wide error bars on this for the following reasons, that's okay. I still think it's better than not trying to quantify it at all. If you're trying to make really major irreversible life decisions. And I feel also the romantic nature of that question for me personally, I try to live my life thinking it's very close to 100%. Like, allowing myself actually the, this is the difficulty of this is allowing myself to think differently, I feel like has a psychological consequence. That's where that, that's one of my pushbacks against radical honesty is this one particular perspective. So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner. Going back to the wide sage filth. In order to sort of create this additional optimism. Helmuth. Yes. Of fake it till you make it. The positive, the power of positive thinking. Hashtag positivity. Yeah, hashtag, it's with a hashtag. Well, so that, and this comes back to this idea of useful fictions, right? And I agree, I don't think there's a clear answer to this. And I think it's actually quite subjective. Some people this works better for than others. You know, to be clear, Igor and I weren't doing this formal prediction in it. Like we did it with very much tongue in cheek. It wasn't like we were going to make, I don't think it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do even. We kind of just did it more as a fun exercise. For the consequence of that fun exercise, you really actually kind of, there was a deep honesty to it. Exactly, it was a deep, and it was, yeah, it was just like this moment of reflection. I'm like, oh wow, I actually have to think like through this quite critically and so on. And it's also what was interesting was I got to like check in with what my desires were. So there was one thing of like what my actual prediction is, but what are my desires and could these desires be affecting my predictions and so on. And you know, that's a method of rationality. And I personally don't think it loses anything in terms of, I didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship, quite the opposite. Like it brought us closer together because it was like, we did this weird fun thing that I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. And I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship that both of us are very, we both love numbers, we both love statistics, we're both poker players. So this was kind of like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like that kind of stuff at all, in which case this is not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend it to everybody. But I do think there's, it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the probe at these things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them, which is interesting because that's in tension with like the idea of what we just talked about with beauty and like what makes something beautiful, the fact that you can't measure everything about it. And perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure, maybe it's wrong to completely try and value the utilitarian, put a utilitarian frame of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety. I don't know, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't. I'm ambivalent on that. But overall, people have too many biases. People are overly biased against trying to do like a quantified cost benefit analysis on really tough life decisions. They're like, oh, just go with your gut. It's like, well, sure, but guts, our intuitions are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in, then we can really, you don't trust on it. If it's a decision we've made many times, but if it's like, should I marry this person or should I buy this house over that house? You only make those decisions a couple of times in your life, maybe. Well, I would love to know, there's a balance, probably is a personal balance to strike is the amount of rationality you apply to a question versus the useful fiction, the fake it till you make it. For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine, you ask them, what's the probability of you winning, Ukraine winning? Almost everybody I talk to is 100%. Wow. And you listen to the experts, right? They say all kinds of stuff. Right. They are, first of all, the morale there is higher than probably enough. I've never been to a war zone before this, but I've read about many wars and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher than almost any war I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country. Wow. Everybody, not just soldiers, not everybody. Why do you think that is? Specifically more than in other wars? I think because there's perhaps a dormant desire for the citizens of this country to find the identity of this country because it's been going through this 30 year process of different factions and political bickering and they haven't had, as they talk about, they haven't had their independence war. They say all great nations have had an independence war. They had to fight for their independence, for the discovery of the identity of the core of the ideals that unify us and they haven't had that. There's constantly been factions, there's been divisions, there's been pressures from empires, from the United States and from Russia, from NATO and Europe, everybody telling them what to do. Now they want to discover who they are and there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight for the safety of our homeland, but we're also gonna fight for our identity. And that, on top of the fact that there's just, if you look at the history of Ukraine and there's certain other countries like this, there are certain cultures that are feisty in their pride of being the citizens of that nation. Ukraine is that, Poland was that. You just look at history. In certain countries, you do not want to occupy. I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about Poland in this way, they're like, this is a big problem if we occupy this land for prolonged periods of time. They're gonna be a pain in their ass. They're not going to want to be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, leaders come and go. I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, throughout the 20th century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers impose their rules. That's interesting though, because you said it's always been under conflict and leaders have come and gone. So you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that like reasoning. Well, because it's a very fertile land, it's great for agriculture. So a lot of people want to, I mean, I think they've developed this culture because they've constantly been occupied by different people for the different peoples. And so maybe there is something to that where you've constantly had to feel like within the blood of the generations, there's the struggle against the man, against the imposition of rules, against oppression and all that kind of stuff, and that stays with them. So there's a will there, but a lot of other aspects are also part of it that has to do with the reverse Mollet kind of situation where social media has definitely played a part of it. Also different charismatic individuals have had to play a part. The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky, stayed in Kiev during the invasion is a huge inspiration to them because most leaders, as you can imagine, when the capital of the nation is under attack, the wise thing, the smart thing that the United States advised Zelensky to do is to flee and to be the leader of the nation from a distant place. He said, fuck that, I'm staying put. Everyone around him, there was a pressure to leave and he didn't, and those singular acts really can unify a nation. There's a lot of people that criticize Zelensky within Ukraine. Before the war, he was very unpopular, even still, but they put that aside, especially that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah, a lot of those kinds of things come together to create something within people. These things always, of course, though, how zoomed out of a view do you wanna take? Because, yeah, you describe it, it's like an anti Moloch thing happened within Ukraine because it brought the Ukrainian people together in order to fight a common enemy. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. In the end, we don't know how this is all gonna play out, right? But if you zoom it out from a level, on a global level, they're coming together to fight that, that could make a conflict larger. You know what I mean? I don't know what the right answer is here. It seems like a good thing that they came together, but we don't know how this is all gonna play out. If this all turns into nuclear war, we'll be like, okay, that was the bad, that was the... Oh yeah, so I was describing the reverse Moloch for the local level. Exactly, yes. Now, this is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources of the nation and the nations supporting Ukraine into the war effort, are you not beating the drums of war that is much bigger than Ukraine? In fact, even the Ukrainian leaders are speaking of it this way. This is not a war between two nations. This is the early days of a world war, if we don't play this correctly. Yes, and we need cool heads from our leaders. So from Ukraine's perspective, Ukraine needs to win the war because what does winning the war mean is coming to peace negotiations, an agreement that guarantees no more invasions. And then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who. And that's, you stop that. And basically from their perspective is you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world who's watching carefully, including Russia and China and different players on the geopolitical stage, that this kind of conflict is not going to be productive if you engage in it. So you want to teach everybody a lesson, let's not do World War III. It's gonna be bad for everybody. And so it's a lose, lose. It's a deep lose, lose. Doesn't matter. And I think that's actually a correct, when I zoom out, I mean, 99% of what I think about is just individual human beings and human lives and just that war is horrible. But when you zoom out and think from a geopolitics perspective, we should realize that it's entirely possible that we will see a World War III in the 21st century. And this is like a dress rehearsal for that. And so the way we play this as a human civilization will define whether we do or don't have a World War III. How we discuss war, how we discuss nuclear war, the kind of leaders we elect and prop up, the kind of memes we circulate, because you have to be very careful when you're being pro Ukraine, for example, you have to realize that you're being, you are also indirectly feeding the ever increasing military industrial complex. So you have to be extremely careful that when you say pro Ukraine or pro anybody, you're pro human beings, not pro the machine that creates narratives that says it's pro human beings. But it's actually, if you look at the raw use of funds and resources, it's actually pro making weapons and shooting bullets and dropping bombs. The real, we have to just somehow get the meme into everyone's heads that the real enemy is war itself. That's the enemy we need to defeat. And that doesn't mean to say that there isn't justification for small local scenarios, adversarial conflicts. If you have a leader who is starting wars, they're on the side of team war, basically. It's not that they're on the side of team country, whatever that country is, it's they're on the side of team war. So that needs to be stopped and put down. But you also have to find a way that your corrective measure doesn't actually then end up being coopted by the war machine and creating greater war. Again, the playing field is finite. The scale of conflict is now getting so big that the weapons that can be used are so mass destructive that we can't afford another giant conflict. We just, we won't make it. What existential threat in terms of us not making it are you most worried about? What existential threat to human civilization? We got like, let's go. Going down a dark path, huh? It's good, but no, well, no, it's a dark. No, it's like, well, while we're in the somber place, we might as well. Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you most? We mentioned asteroids, we mentioned AGI, nuclear weapons. The one that's on my mind the most, mostly because I think it's the one where we have actually a real chance to move the needle on in a positive direction or more specifically, stop some really bad things from happening, really dumb, avoidable things is bio risks. In what kind of bio risks? There's so many fun options. So many, so of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring viruses or pathogens, and then also as time and technology goes on and technology becomes more and more democratized and into the hands of more and more people, the risk of synthetic pathogens. And whether or not you fall into the camp of COVID was gain of function accidental lab leak or whether it was purely naturally occurring, either way, we are facing a future where synthetic pathogens or like human meddled with pathogens either accidentally get out or get into the hands of bad actors who, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, you know, either way. And so that means we need more robustness for that. And you would think that us having this nice little dry run, which is what as awful as COVID was, and all those poor people that died, it was still like child's play compared to what a future one could be in terms of fatality rate. And so you'd think that we would then be coming, we'd be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness. And meanwhile, the budget in the last two years for the US, sorry, they just did this, I can't remember the name of what the actual budget was, but it was like a multi trillion dollar budget that the US just set aside. And originally in that, you know, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, right? The original allocation in this new budget for future pandemic preparedness was 60 billion, so tiny proportion of it. That's proceeded to get whittled down to like 30 billion, to 15 billion, all the way down to 2 billion out of multiple trillions. For a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions, we've just finished, we're barely even, we're not even really out of it. It basically got whittled down to nothing because for some reason people think that, oh, all right, we've got the pandemic, out of the way, that was that one. And the reason for that is that people are, and I say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community, but there's an immense amount of naivety about, they think that nature is the main risk moving forward, and it really isn't. And I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading about that's sort of being proposed right now called Deep Vision. And the idea is to go out into the wilds, and we're not talking about just like within cities, like deep into like caves that people don't go to, deep into the Arctic, wherever, scour the earth for whatever the most dangerous possible pathogens could be that they can find. And then not only do, try and find these, bring samples of them back to laboratories. And again, whether you think COVID was a lab leak or not, I'm not gonna get into that, but we have historically had so many, as a civilization, we've had so many lab leaks from even like the highest level security things. Like it's just, people should go and just read it. It's like a comedy show of just how many they are, how leaky these labs are, even when they do their best efforts. So bring these things then back to civilization. That's step one of the badness. Then the next step would be to then categorize them, do experiments on them and categorize them by their level of potential. And then the piece de resistance on this plan is to then publish that information freely on the internet about all these pathogens, including their genome, which is literally like the building instructions of how to do them on the internet. And this is something that genuinely, a pocket of the like bio, of the scientific community thinks is a good idea. And I think on expectation, like the, and their argument is, is that, oh, this is good, because it might buy us some time to develop the vaccines, which, okay, sure, maybe would have made sense prior to mRNA technology, but you know, like they, mRNA, we can develop a vaccine now when we find a new pathogen within a couple of days. Now then there's all the trials and so on. Those trials would have to happen anyway, in the case of a brand new thing. So you're saving maybe a couple of days. So that's the upside. Meanwhile, the downside is you're not only giving, you're not only giving the vaccine, you're bringing the risk of these pathogens of like getting leaked, but you're literally handing it out to every bad actor on earth who would be doing cartwheels. And I'm talking about like Kim Jong Un, ISIS, people who like want, they think the rest of the world is their enemy. And in some cases they think that killing it themselves is like a noble cause. And you're literally giving them the building blocks of how to do this. It's the most batshit idea I've ever heard. Like on expectation, it's probably like minus EV of like multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this. Certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. So the cost benefit is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. And I was trying to wrap my head around like why, like what's going wrong in people's minds to think that this is a good idea? And it's not that it's malice or anything like that. I think it's that people don't, the proponents, they're actually overly naive about the interactions of humanity. And well, like there are bad actors who will use this for bad things. Because not only will it, if you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves, which given in 10 years time, like the technology is getting cheaper and easier to use. But even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. Like what would you do if there's like some deadly new virus that we were published on the internet in terms of its building blocks? Kim Jong Un could be like, hey, if you don't let me build my nuclear weapons, I'm gonna release this, I've managed to build it. Well, now he's actually got a credible bluff. We don't know. And so that's, it's just like handing the keys, it's handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense. The possible, I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys, which is a whole nother problem, defining who the good guys are, but the good guys are like an order of magnitude higher competence. And so they can stay ahead of the bad actors by just being very good at the defense. By very good, not meaning like a little bit better, but an order of magnitude better. But of course the question is, in each of those individual disciplines, is that feasible? Can you, can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence leapfrog to the place where the good guys are? Yeah, I mean, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this like particular plan of like, that, you know, with the thing I described, this deep vision thing, where at least then that would maybe make sense for steps one and step two of like getting the information, but then why would you release it, the information to your literal enemies? You know, that's, that makes, that doesn't fit at all in that perspective of like trying to be ahead of them. You're literally handing them the weapon. But there's different levels of release, right? So there's the kind of secrecy where you don't give it to anybody, but there's a release where you incrementally give it to like major labs. So it's not public release, but it's like, you're giving it to major labs. Yeah, there's different layers of reasonability, but. But the problem there is it's going to, if you go anywhere beyond like complete secrecy, it's gonna leak. That's the thing, it's very hard to keep secrets. And so that's still. Information is. So you might as well release it to the public is that argument. So you either go complete secrecy or you release it to the public. So, which is essentially the same thing. It's going to leak anyway, if you don't do complete secrecy. Right, which is why you shouldn't get the information in the first place. Yeah, I mean, what, in that, I think. Well, that's a solution. Yeah, the solution is either don't get the information in the first place or B, keep it incredibly, incredibly contained. See, I think, I think it really matters which discipline we're talking about. So in the case of biology, I do think you're very right. We shouldn't even be, it should be forbidden to even like, think about that. Meaning don't collect, don't just even collect the information, but like, don't do, I mean, gain of function research is a really iffy area. Like you start. I mean, it's all about cost benefits, right? There are some scenarios where I could imagine the cost benefit of a gain of function research is very, very clear, where you've evaluated all the potential risks, factored in the probability that things can go wrong. And like, you know, not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns as well, tried to quantify that. And then even then it's like orders of magnitude better to do that. I'm behind that argument. But the point is that there's this like, naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, you know, I get it. The science community, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but like some people within the science community just think that everyone's good and everyone just cares about getting knowledge and doing the best for the world. And unfortunately, that's not the case. I wish we lived in that world, but we don't. Yeah, I mean, there's a lie. Listen, I've been criticizing the science community broadly quite a bit. There's so many brilliant people that brilliance is somehow a hindrance sometimes because it has a bunch of blind spots. And then you start to look at the history of science, how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science because it is a fun game. You know, you're building, you're going to conferences, you're building on top of each other's ideas, there's breakthroughs. Hi, I think I've realized how this particular molecule works and I could do this kind of experiment and everyone else is impressed. Ooh, cool. No, I think you're wrong. Let me show you why you're wrong. And that little game, everyone gets really excited and they get excited, oh, I came up with a pill that solves this problem and it's going to help a bunch of people. And I came up with a giant study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not. And you get lost in this game and you forget to realize this game, just like Moloch, can have like... Unintended consequences. Yeah. Unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization. Right. Or divide human civilization or have dire geopolitical consequences. I mean, the effects of, I mean, it's just so... The most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the biology of the virus, it seems like. I mean, I could just list them forever, but like one of them is the complete distress of public institutions. The other one is because of that public distress, I feel like if a much worse pandemic came along, we as a world have now cried wolf. And if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck masks, fuck... Fuck vaccines, yeah. Fuck everything. And they won't be... They'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. And... Because that's the thing, like there were certain actions made by certain health public figures where they told, they very knowingly told it was a white lie, it was intended in the best possible way, such as early on when there was clearly a shortage of masks. And so they said to the public, oh, don't get masks, there's no evidence that they work. Or don't get them, they don't work. In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. Like that was the real like stinker. Yeah, no, no, unless you know how to do it properly, you're gonna make that you're gonna get sicker or you're more likely to catch the virus, which is just absolute crap. And they put that out there. And it's pretty clear the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they really needed it for health workers, which makes sense. Like, I agree, like, you know, but the cost of lying to the public when that then comes out, people aren't as stupid as they think they are. And that's, I think where this distrust of experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people overtly, but B, people have been treated like idiots. Now, that's not to say that there aren't a lot of stupid people who have a lot of wacky ideas around COVID and all sorts of things. But if you treat the general public like children, they're going to see that, they're going to notice that. And that is going to just like absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish like if like Fauci or, you know, and these other like leaders who, I mean, God, I would, I can't imagine how nightmare his job has been for the last few years, hell on earth. Like, so, you know, I, you know, I have a lot of sort of sympathy for the position he's been in. But like, if he could just come out and be like, okay, look, guys, hands up, we didn't handle this as well as we could have. These are all the things I would have done differently in hindsight. I apologize for this and this and this and this. That would go so far. And maybe I'm being naive, who knows, maybe this would backfire, but I don't think it would. Like to someone like me even, cause I've like, I've lost trust in a lot of these things. But I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think are good, like have good epistemics on this stuff. But you know, if they, if they could sort of put their hands on my go, okay, these are the spots where we screwed up. This, this, this, this was our reasons. Yeah, we actually told a little white lie here. We did it for this reason. We're really sorry. Where they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency thing, that would go so far to rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs to happen. Otherwise. I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, yeah, his job was very tough and all those kinds of things, but I see arrogance and arrogance prevented him from being honest in that way previously. And I think arrogance will prevent him from being honest in that way. Now we need leaders. I think young people are seeing that, that kind of talking down to people from a position of power, I hope is the way of the past. People really like authenticity and they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people. And I think that just. I mean, he still has a chance to do that, I think. I mean, I don't wanna, you know, I don't think, you know, if I doubt he's listening, but if he is like, hey, I think, you know, I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I think there's, you know, I don't have an opinion whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think like coming clean on the, you know, it's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. Like I won't expect any government to handle it well because it was so difficult, like so many moving pieces, so much like lack of information and so on. But the step to rebuilding trust is to go, okay, look, we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong. And for my part, I did this wrong in this part. And that would be huge. All of us can do that. I mean, I was struggling for a while whether I want to talk to him or not. I talked to his boss, Francis Collins. Another person that's screwed up in terms of trust, lost a little bit of my respect too. There seems to have been a kind of dishonesty in the backrooms in that they didn't trust people to be intelligent. Like we need to tell them what's good for them. We know what's good for them. That kind of idea. To be fair, the thing that's, what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Social media does that. So you've got like nitpicking. Nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest, you know, if you have a group of people, let's say people who are vaccine, I don't like the term anti vaccine, people who are vaccine hesitant, vaccine speculative. So what social media did or the media or anyone, their opponents would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, I think I need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something. Select the craziest ones and then have that beamed too. So from like someone like Fauci or Francis's perspective, that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff as us. They're getting the same media reports. I mean, they might get some more information, but they too are gonna get the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is. Well, that's just, yes. And that just means they're not social media savvy. So one of the skills of being on social media is to be able to filter that in your mind, like to understand, to put into proper context. To realize that what you are seeing, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity. Nut picking, and there's nothing wrong with putting motor oil up your ass. It's just one of the better aspects of, I do this every weekend. Okay. Where the hell did that analogy come from in my mind? Like what? I don't know. I think you need to, there's some Freudian thing you would need to deeply investigate with a therapist. Okay, what about AI? Are you worried about AGI, super intelligence systems or paperclip maximizer type of situation? Yes, I'm definitely worried about it, but I feel kind of bipolar in the, some days I wake up and I'm like. You're excited about the future? Well, exactly. I'm like, wow, we can unlock the mysteries of the universe. You know, escape the game. And this, you know, because I spend all my time thinking about these molecule problems that, you know, what is the solution to them? What, you know, in some ways you need this like omni benevolent, omniscient, omni wise coordination mechanism that can like make us all not do the molecule thing or like provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this molecule process. And in some ways, you know, that's the strongest argument to me for like the race to build AGI is that maybe, you know, we can't survive without it. But the flip side to that is the, the unfortunately now that there's multiple actors trying to build AI, AGI, you know, this was fine 10 years ago when it was just DeepMind, but then other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic. Now it's like, that's the whole thing. Is it the same, it's got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the one that like optimizes for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage. And so we're the more likely the ones to build the AGI, you know, and that's the same cycle that you're in. And there's no clear solution to that because you can't just go like slapping, if you go and try and like stop all the different companies, then it will, you know, the good ones will stop because they're the ones, you know, within the West's reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue and then they're even more likely. So it's like, it's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. And, you know, at the same time, you know, I know at least some of the folks at DeepMind and they're incredible and they're thinking about this. They're very aware of this problem. And they're like, you know, I think some of the smartest people on earth. Yeah, the culture is important there because they are thinking about that and they're some of the best machine learning engineers. So it's possible to have a company or a community of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics. Exactly, and importantly, they're also game theorists, you know, and because this is ultimately a game theory problem, the thing, this Moloch mechanism and like, you know, how do we voice arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this. And again, like luckily there's a lot of smart, non naive game theorists within that group. Yes, I'm concerned about it and I think it's again, a thing that we need people to be thinking about in terms of like, how do we create, how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics and how do we solve the thing of, Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem whereby, because it's obviously there's a chance, you know, the belief, the hope is, is that you build something that's super intelligent and by definition of being super intelligent, it will also become super wise and have the wisdom to know what the right goals are. And hopefully those goals include keeping humanity alive. Right? But Bostrom says that actually those two things, you know, super intelligence and super wisdom aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually kind of orthogonal things. And how do we make it so that they are correlated? How do we guarantee it? Because we need it to be guaranteed really, to know that we're doing the thing safely. But I think that like merging of intelligence and wisdom, at least my hope is that this whole process happens sufficiently slowly that we're constantly having these kinds of debates that we have enough time to figure out how to modify each version of the system as it becomes more and more intelligent. Yes, buying time is a good thing, definitely. Anything that slows everything down. We just, everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Yeah. Or at least, at least, well, it depends. Again, some people think that, you know, we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni wise coordination mechanism. And there's also an argument to that. Yeah, I don't know. Well, there is, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history has people in it that are like predicting doom just around the corner. There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost like fun to think about the destruction of everything. Just objectively speaking, I've talked and listened to a bunch of people and they are gravitating towards that. It's almost, I think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories is they love to be the person that kind of figured out some deep fundamental thing about the, that's going to be, it's going to mark something extremely important about the history of human civilization because then I will be important. When in reality, most of us will be forgotten and life will go on. And one of the sad things about whenever anything traumatic happens to you, whenever you lose loved ones or just tragedy happens, you realize life goes on. Even after a nuclear war that will wipe out some large percentage of the population and will torture people for years to come because of the effects of a nuclear winter, people will still survive. Life will still go on. I mean, it depends on the kind of nuclear war. But in the case of nuclear war, it will still go on. That's one of the amazing things about life. It finds a way. And so in that sense, I just, I feel like the doom and gloom thing is a... Well, what we don't, yeah, we don't want a self fulfilling prophecy. Yes, that's exactly. Yes, and I very much agree with that. And I even have a slight feeling from the amount of time we spent in this conversation talking about this, because it's like, is this even a net positive if it's like making everyone feel, oh, in some ways, like making people imagine these bad scenarios can be a self fulfilling prophecy, but at the same time, that's weighed off with at least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking. And I think particularly, the reason why I wanna talk about this to your audience is that on average, they're the type of people who gravitate towards these kinds of topics because they're intellectually curious and they can sort of sense that there's trouble brewing. They can smell that there's, I think there's a reason that people are thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability, the probability, it's increased in probability over certainly over the last few years, trajectories have not gone favorably, let's put it since 2010. So it's right, I think, for people to be thinking about it, but that's where they're like, I think whether it's a useful fiction or whether it's actually true or whatever you wanna call it, I think having this faith, this is where faith is valuable because it gives you at least this like anchor of hope. And I'm not just saying it to like trick myself, like I do truly, I do think there's something out there that wants us to win. I think there's something that really wants us to win. And it just, you just have to be like, just like kind of, okay, now I sound really crazy, but like open your heart to it a little bit and it will give you the like, the sort of breathing room with which to marinate on the solutions. We are the ones who have to come up with the solutions, but we can use that. There's like, there's hashtag positivity. There's value in that. Yeah, you have to kind of imagine all the destructive trajectories that lay in our future and then believe in the possibility of avoiding those trajectories. All while, you said audience, all while sitting back, which is majority, the two people that listen to this are probably sitting on a beach, smoking some weed, just, that's a beautiful sunset. They're looking at just the waves going in and out. And ultimately there's a kind of deep belief there in the momentum of humanity to figure it all out. But we've got a lot of work to do. Which is what makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun. This battle of polytopia, I still, man, I love those games so much. So good. And that one for people who don't know, Battle of Polytopia is a big, it's like a, is this really radical simplification of a civilization type of game. It still has a lot of the skill tree development, a lot of the strategy, but it's easy enough to play on a phone. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. They've really figured it out. It's one of the most elegantly designed games I've ever seen. It's incredibly complex. And yet being, again, it walks that line between complexity and simplicity in this really, really great way. And they use pretty colors that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains. Very well. Yeah, it's fun. Video games are so fun. Yeah. Most of this life is just about fun. Escaping all the suffering to find the fun. What's energy healing? I have in my notes, energy healing question mark. What's that about? Oh man. God, your audience is gonna think I'm mad. So the two crazy things that happened to me, the one was the voice in the head that said you're gonna win this tournament and then I won the tournament. The other craziest thing that's happened to me was in 2018, I started getting this like weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound distortion, where voices, particularly men's voices, became incredibly unpleasant to listen to. It would like create this, it would like be falsely amplified or something and it was almost like a physical sensation in my ear, which was really unpleasant. And it would like last for a few hours and then go away and then come back for a few hours and go away. And I went and got hearing tests and they found that like the bottom end, I was losing the hearing in that ear. And in the end, I got, doctors said they think it was this thing called Meniere's disease, which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their hearing, but they get this like, it often comes with like dizzy spells and other things because it's like the inner ear gets all messed up. Now, I don't know if that's actually what I had, but that's what at least a couple of, one doctor said to me. But anyway, so I'd had three months of this stuff, this going on and it was really getting me down. And I was at Burning Man of all places. I don't mean to be that person talking about Burning Man, but I was there. And again, I'd had it and I was unable to listen to music, which is not what you want because Burning Man is a very loud, intense place. And I was just having a really rough time. And on the final night, I get talking to this girl who's like a friend of a friend. And I mentioned, I was like, oh, I'm really down in the dumps about this. And she's like, oh, well, I've done a little bit of energy healing. Would you like me to have a look? And I was like, sure. Now this was again, deep, I was, you know, no time in my life for this. I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I was just like, it's all bullshit. It's all wooey nonsense. But I was like, sure, I'll have a go. And she starts like with her hand and she says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts like sucking over my ear, not actually touching me, but like close to it, like with her mouth. And it was really unpleasant. I was like, whoa, can you stop? She's like, no, no, no, there's something there. I need to get it. And I was like, no, no, no, I really don't like it. Please, this is really loud. She's like, I need to just bear with me. And she does it. And I don't know how long, for a few minutes. And then she eventually collapses on the ground, like freezing cold, crying. And I'm just like, I don't know what the hell is going on. Like I'm like thoroughly freaked out as is everyone else watching. Just like, what the hell? And we like warm her up and she was like, oh, what, oh, you know, she was really shaken up. And she's like, I don't know what that, she said it was something very unpleasant and dark. Don't worry, it's gone. I think you'll be fine in a couple, you'll have the physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine. But, you know, she was just like that, you know, so I was so rattled, A, because the potential that actually I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and that she was scared. That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you do this, this is the thing. Now you're terrified. Like you bought like some kind of exorcism or something. Like what the fuck is going on? So it, like just the most insane experience. And frankly, it took me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it. But my ear problem went away about a couple of weeks later and touch wood, I've not had any issues since. So. That gives you like hints that maybe there's something out there. I mean, I don't, again, I don't have an explanation for this. The most probable explanation was, you know, I was a burning man, I was in a very open state. Let's just leave it at that. And, you know, placebo is an incredibly powerful thing and a very not understood thing. So. Almost assigning the word placebo to it reduces it down to a way that it doesn't deserve to be reduced down. Maybe there's a whole science of what we call placebo. Maybe there's a, placebo's a door. Self healing, you know? And I mean, I don't know what the problem was. Like I was told it was many years. I don't want to say I definitely had that because I don't want people to think that, oh, that's how, you know, if they do have that, because it's a terrible disease. And if they have that, that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them. I don't know. And I also don't, I don't, and you're absolutely right to say, like using even the word placebo is like, it comes with this like baggage of, of like frame. And I don't want to reduce it down. All I can do is describe the experience and what happened. I cannot put an ontological framework around it. I can't say why it happened, what the mechanism was, what the problem even was in the first place. I just know that something crazy happened and it was while I was in an open state. And fortunately for me, it made the problem go away. But what I took away from it, again, it was part of this, you know, this took me on this journey of becoming more humble about what I think I know. Because as I said before, I was like, I was in the like Richard Dawkins train of atheism in terms of there is no God. And everything like that is bullshit. We know everything, we know, you know, the only way we can get through, we know how medicine works and its molecules and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well, there's clearly more for us to understand. And that doesn't mean that it's ascientific as well, because, you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it still can apply to this situation. Like, I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test this experimentally. I haven't really, like, you know, I don't know how we would go about doing that. We'd have to find other people with the same condition, I guess, and like, try and repeat the experiment. But it doesn't, just because something happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding, it doesn't mean that it's, the scientific method can't be used for it. Yeah, I think the scientific method sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences, because the scientific method is a process to carve away at the mystery all around us. And experiences like this is just a reminder that we're mostly shrouded in mystery still. That's it. It's just like a humility. Like, we haven't really figured this whole thing out. But at the same time, we have found ways to act, you know, we're clearly doing something right, because think of the technological scientific advancements, the knowledge that we have that would blow people's minds even from 100 years ago. Yeah, and we've even allegedly got out to space and landed on the moon, although I still haven't, I have not seen evidence of the Earth being round, but I'm keeping an open mind. Speaking of which, you studied physics and astrophysics, just to go to that, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you, how did that come to be? Like, when did you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this? As early as I can remember. I was very lucky that my mom, and my dad, but particularly my mom, my mom is like the most nature, she is Mother Earth, is the only way to describe her. Just, she's like Dr. Doolittle, animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly. As she sings. Yeah, she just is Mother Earth, and she has always been fascinated by, she doesn't have any, she never went to university or anything like that, she's actually phobic of maths, if I try and get her to like, you know, I was trying to teach her poker and she hated it. But she's so deeply curious, and that just got instilled in me when, you know, we would sleep out under the stars, whenever it was, you know, the two nights a year when it was warm enough in the UK to do that. And we would just lie out there until we fell asleep, looking at, looking for satellites, looking for shooting stars, and I was just always, I don't know whether it was from that, but I've always naturally gravitated to like the biggest, the biggest questions. And also the like, the most layers of abstraction I love, just like, what's the meta question? What's the meta question and so on. So I think it just came from that really. And then on top of that, like physics, you know, it also made logical sense in that it was a degree that, well, a subject that ticks the box of being, you know, answering these really big picture questions, but it was also extremely useful. It like has a very high utility in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was gonna become like a research scientist. My original plan was, I wanna be a professional astronomer. So it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions, and it's not like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is all overly pragmatic, not overly, is very pragmatic, but this is, yeah, physics is a good combination of the two. Yeah, at least for me, it made sense. And I was good at it, I liked it. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't like I did an immense amount of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, it made the most sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK age 17, which is crazy, because, you know, in US, you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose your major. Yeah, I think the first few years of college, you focus on the drugs and only as you get closer to the end, do you start to think, oh shit, this wasn't about that. And I owe the government a lot of money. How many alien civilizations are out there? When you looked up at the stars with your mom and you were counting them, what's your mom think about the number of alien civilizations? I actually don't know. I would imagine she would take the viewpoint of, you know, she's pretty humble and she knows how many, she knows there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there, so she would. Spawn sites? Spawn sites, yeah. You know, this is all spawn sites. Yeah, spawn sites in Polytopia. We spawned on Earth, you know, it's. Hmm, yeah, spawn sites. Why does that feel weird to say spawn? Because it makes me feel like there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations. That's why the word spawn. Because it feels like life that originated on Earth really originated here. Right, it is unique to this particular. Yeah, I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, the completely different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn, but I guess it implies that there's some spark that is uniform, which I kind of like the idea of. And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life on Earth ends? Is it gonna restart again? Probably not, it depends. Maybe Earth is too. It depends on the type of, you know, what's the thing that kills it off, right? If it's a paperclip maximizer, not for the example, but, you know, some kind of very self replicating, high on the capabilities, very low on the wisdom type thing. So whether that's, you know, gray goo, green goo, you know, like nanobots or just a shitty misaligned AI that thinks it needs to turn everything into paperclips. You know, if it's something like that, then it's gonna be very hard for life, you know, complex life, because by definition, you know, a paperclip maximizer is the ultimate instantiation of molecule. Deeply low complexity, over optimization on a single thing, sacrificing everything else, turning the whole world into. Although something tells me, like if we actually take a paperclip maximizer, it destroys everything. It's a really dumb system that just envelops the whole of Earth. And the universe beyond, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that part, but okay, great. That's the thought experiment. So it becomes a multi planetary paperclip maximizer? Well, it just propagates. I mean, it depends whether it figures out how to jump the vacuum gap. But again, I mean, this is all silly because it's a hypothetical thought experiment, which I think doesn't actually have much practical application to the AI safety problem, but it's just a fun thing to play around with. But if by definition, it is maximally intelligent, which means it is maximally good at navigating the environment around it in order to achieve its goal, but extremely bad at choosing goals in the first place. So again, we're talking on this orthogonality thing, right? It's very low on wisdom, but very high on capability. Then it will figure out how to jump the vacuum gap between planets and stars and so on, and thus just turn every atom it gets its hands on into paperclips. Yeah, by the way, for people who don't. Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is. But does not mean that virality is necessarily all about maximizing paperclips. In that case, it is. So for people who don't know, this is just a thought experiment example of an AI system that's very, that has a goal and is willing to do anything to accomplish that goal, including destroying all life on Earth and all human life and all of consciousness in the universe for the goal of producing a maximum number of paperclips. Okay. Or whatever its optimization function was that it was set at. But don't you think? It could be making, recreating Lexus. Maybe it'll tile the universe in Lex. Go on. I like this idea. No, I'm just kidding. That's better. That's more interesting than paperclips. That could be infinitely optimal if I were to say it to myself. But if you ask me, it's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be. It's like, that's its end state. Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve. But that's up to, different people have different perspectives. But don't you think within the paperclip world that would emerge, just like in the zeros and ones that make up a computer, that would emerge beautiful complexities? Like, it won't suppress, you know, as you scale to multiple planets and throughout, there'll emerge these little worlds that on top of the fabric of maximizing paperclips, there will be, that would emerge like little societies of paperclip. Well, then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore. Because by the, like, if you think of what a paperclip is, it is literally just a piece of bent iron, right? So if it's maximizing that throughout the universe, it's taking every atom it gets its hand on into somehow turning it into iron or steel. And then bending it into that shape and then done and done. By definition, like paperclips, there is no way for, well, okay. So you're saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something. Well, no, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's not just, it's creating those paperclips and the act of creating, there's going to be a process. And that process will have a dance to it. Because it's not like sequential thing. There's a whole complex three dimensional system of paperclips, you know, like, you know, people like string theory, right? It's supposed to be strings that are interacting in fascinating ways. I'm sure paperclips are very string like, they can be interacting in very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three dimensional. I mean, I'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with a theory of everything. It has to create like wormholes, right? It has to break, like, it has to understand quantum mechanics. It has to understand general relativity. I love your optimism. This is where I'd say this, we're going into the realm of pathological optimism where if I, it's. I'm sure there'll be a, I think there's an intelligence that emerges from that system. So you're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the fabric of reality and will find a way. Kind of like Goldblum says, life will find a way. You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogenous dead soup. It's not perfectly homogenous. It has to, it's perfectly maximal in the production. I don't know why people keep thinking it's homogenous. It maximizes the number of paperclips. That's the only thing. It's not trying to be homogenous. It's trying. It's trying to maximize paperclips. So you're saying, you're saying that because it, because, you know, kind of like in the Big Bang or, you know, it seems like, you know, things, there were clusters, there was more stuff here than there. That was enough of the patternicity that kickstarted the evolutionary process. It's the little weirdness that will make it beautiful. So yeah. Complexity emerges. Interesting, okay. Well, so how does that line up then with the whole heat death of the universe, right? Cause that's another sort of instantiation of this. It's like everything becomes so far apart and so cold and so perfectly mixed that it's like homogenous grayness. Do you think that even out of that homogenous grayness where there's no, you know, negative entropy, that, you know, there's no free energy that we understand even from that new stuff? Yeah, the paperclip maximizer or any other intelligence systems will figure out ways to travel to other universes to create Big Bangs within those universes or through black holes to create whole other worlds to break the, what we consider are the limitations of physics. The paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists. And we should be humbled to realize that we don't. Yeah, but because it just wants to make more paperclips. So it's gonna go into those universes and turn them into paperclips. Yeah, but we humans, not humans, but complex system exists on top of that. We're not interfering with it. This complexity emerges from the simple base state. The simple base. Whether it's, yeah, whether it's, you know, plank lengths or paperclips as the base unit. Yeah, you can think of like the universe as a paperclip maximizer because it's doing some dumb stuff. Like physics seems to be pretty dumb. It has, like, I don't know if you can summarize it. Yeah, the laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges. And its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I mean, I don't know what's a nice way maybe, maybe laws of thermodynamics could be good. I don't know if you can assign goals to physics, but if you formulate in the sense of goals, it's very similar to paperclip maximizing in the dumbness of the goals. But the pockets of complexity as it emerge is where beauty emerges. That's where life emerges. That's where intelligence, that's where humans emerge. And I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason we hated it. I think, yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is another like unwritten, not unwritten, but like another baked in law of reality. And you're trusting that emergence will find a way to, even out of seemingly the most mollusky, awful, plain outcome, emergence will still find a way. I love that as a philosophy. I think it's very nice. I would wield it carefully because there's large error bars on that and the certainty of that. How about we build the paperclip maximizer and find out. Classic, yeah. Moloch is doing cartwheels, man. Yeah. But the thing is it will destroy humans in the process, which is the reason we really don't like it. We seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing. Would that make you sad if AI systems that are beautiful, that are conscious, that are interesting and complex and intelligent, ultimately lead to the death of humans? Would that make you sad? If humans led to the death of humans? Sorry. Like if they would supersede humans. Oh, if some AI? Yeah, AI would end humans. I mean, that's the reason why I'm like, in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than say, bio risk. Because at least with AI, there's a chance, you know, if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans, but it does it for some like higher purpose, it needs our atoms and energy to do something. At least now the universe is going on to do something interesting, whereas if it wipes everything, you know, bio like just kills everything on earth and that's it. And there's no more, you know, earth cannot spawn anything more meaningful in the few hundred million years it has left, because it doesn't have much time left. Then, yeah, I don't know. So one of my favorite books I've ever read is, Novocene by James Lovelock, who sadly just died. He wrote it when he was like 99. He died aged 102, so it's a fairly new book. And he sort of talks about that, that he thinks it's, you know, sort of building off this Gaia theory where like earth is like living, some form of intelligence itself, and that this is the next like step, right? Is this, whatever this new intelligence that is maybe silicon based as opposed to carbon based goes on to do. And it's a really sort of, in some ways an optimistic, but really fatalistic book. And I don't know if I fully subscribed to it, but it's a beautiful piece to read anyway. So am I sad by that idea? I think so, yes. And actually, yeah, this is the reason why I'm sad by the idea, because if something is truly brilliant and wise and smart and truly super intelligent, it should be able to figure out abundance. So if it figures out abundance, it shouldn't need to kill us off. It should be able to find a way for us. It should be, there's plenty, the universe is huge. There should be plenty of space for it to go out and do all the things it wants to do, and like give us a little pocket where we can continue doing our things and we can continue to do things and so on. And again, if it's so supremely wise, it shouldn't even be worried about the game theoretic considerations that by leaving us alive, we'll then go and create another like super intelligent agent that it then has to compete against, because it should be only wise and smart enough to not have to concern itself with that. Unless it deems humans to be kind of assholes. Like the humans are a source of non of a lose, lose kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no, we're not, Moloch is, that's why I think it's important to separate. But maybe humans are the source of Moloch. No, I think, I mean, I think game theory is the source of Moloch. And, you know, because Moloch exists in nonhuman systems as well. It happens within like agents within a game in terms of like, you know, it applies to agents, but like it can apply to, you know, a species that's on an island of animals, you know, rats out competing, the ones that like massively consume all the resources are the ones that are gonna win out over the more like chill, socialized ones. And so, you know, creates this Malthusian trap, like Moloch exists in little pockets in nature as well. So it's not a strictly human thing. I wonder if it's actually a result of consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics. Maybe it needs to, AI will have to kill off every organism that's. Now you're talking about killing off competition. Not competition, but just like the way, it's like the weeds or whatever in a beautiful flower garden. Parasites. The parasites, yeah, on the whole system. Now, of course, it won't do that completely. It'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites. It'll ring fence. Yeah, and there'll be somebody doing a PhD on like they'll prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But I mean, in terms of letting us run wild outside of the, you know, a geographically constrained region that might be, that it might decide to against that. No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non Moloch behavior amidst humans, so I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. Let me, I don't know if you answered the aliens question. No, I didn't. You had a good conversation with Toby Orr. Yes. About various sides of the universe. I think, did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone. So the classic, you know, Fermi paradox question is, there are so many spawn points and yet, you know, it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio signals into space. So surely given the vastness of space we should be, and you know, even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, we should be, the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever, you know, like at least radio signals and so on, but seemingly things are very silent out there. Now, of course, it depends on who you speak to. Some people say that they're getting signals all the time and so on and like, I don't wanna make an epistemic statement on that, but it seems like there's a lot of silence. And so that raises this paradox. And then say, you know, the Drake equation. So the Drake equation is like basically just a simple thing of like trying to estimate the number of possible civilizations within the galaxy by multiplying the number of stars created per year by the number of stars that have planets, planets that are habitable, blah, blah, blah. So all these like different factors. And then you plug in numbers into that and you, you know, depending on like the range of, you know, your lower bound and your upper bound point estimates that you put in, you get out a number at the end for the number of civilizations. But what Toby and his crew did differently was, Toby is a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute. They, instead of, they realized that it's like basically a statistical quirk that if you put in point sources, even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources, because on some of these variables, the uncertainty is so large, it spans like maybe even like a couple of hundred orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going to lead to overestimates. And so they, like by putting stuff on a log scale, or actually they did it on like a log log scale on some of them, and then like ran the simulation across the whole bucket of uncertainty, across all of those orders of magnitude. When you do that, then actually the number comes out much, much smaller. And that's the more statistically rigorous, you know, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a lot of hand waving. As science goes, it's like definitely, you know, just waving, I don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand wavy. And anyway, when they did this, and then they did a Bayesian update on it as well, to like factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up because, you know, no evidence is actually a form of evidence, right? And the long and short of it comes out that the, we're roughly around 70% to be the only intelligent civilization in our galaxy thus far, and around 50, 50 in the entire observable universe, which sounds so crazily counterintuitive, but their math is legit. Well, yeah, the math around this particular equation, which the equation is ridiculous on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's the different things, different components that can be estimated, and the error bars on which can be reduced with science. And hence throughout, since the equation came out, the error bars have been coming out on different, different aspects. And so that, it almost kind of says, what, like this gives you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates over a period of time. And once you do, you can better and better understand, like in the process of redoing the error bars, you'll get to understand actually what is the right way to find out where the aliens are, how many of them there are, and all those kinds of things. So I don't think it's good to use that for an estimation. I think you do have to think from like, more like from first principles, just looking at what life is on Earth, and trying to understand the very physics based, biology, chemistry, biology based question of what is life, maybe computation based. What the fuck is this thing? And that, like how difficult is it to create this thing? It's one way to say like how many planets like this are out there, all that kind of stuff, but it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective, the right way is to think how does, what is this thing and how does it originate? From very simple nonlife things, how does complex lifelike things emerge? From a rock to a bacteria, protein, and these like weird systems that encode information and pass information from self replicate, and then also select each other and mutate in interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex systems. Right, well it's a form of information processing, right? Right. Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in, I guess information processing, maybe I'm getting bogged down. It's doing some modification and yeah, the input is some energy. Right, it's able to extract, yeah, extract resources from its environment in order to achieve a goal. But the goal doesn't seem to be clear. Right, well the goal is to make more of itself. Yeah, but in a way that increases, I mean I don't know if evolution is a fundamental law of the universe, but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes the chance of its survival. Individual agents within an ecosystem do, yes, yes. Evolution itself doesn't give a fuck. Right. It's a very, it don't care. It's just like, oh, you optimize it. Well, at least it's certainly, yeah, it doesn't care about the welfare of the individual agents within it, but it does seem to, I don't know. I think the mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing. To even try and give evolution a mindset because it is, there's a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Lesrong, which is an alien God. And he talks about the mistake we make when we try and put our mind, think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though giving evolution some kind of agency and what it wants. Yeah, worth reading, but yeah. I would like to say that having interacted with a lot of really smart people that say that anthropomorphization is a mistake, I would like to say that saying that anthropomorphization is a mistake is a mistake. I think there's a lot of power in anthropomorphization, if I can only say that word correctly one time. I think that's actually a really powerful way to reason to things. And I think people, especially people in robotics seem to run away from it as fast as possible. And I just, I think. Can you give an example of like how it helps in robotics? Oh, in that our world is a world of humans and to see robots as fundamentally just tools runs away from the fact that we live in a world, a dynamic world of humans. That like these, all these game theory systems we've talked about, that a robot that ever has to interact with humans. And I don't mean like intimate friendship interaction. I mean, in a factory setting where it has to deal with the uncertainty of humans, all that kind of stuff. You have to acknowledge that the robot's behavior has an effect on the human, just as much as the human has an effect on the robot. And there's a dance there. And you have to realize that this entity, when a human sees a robot, this is obvious in a physical manifestation of a robot, they feel a certain way. They have a fear, they have uncertainty. They have their own personal life projections. We have to have pets and dogs and the thing looks like a dog. They have their own memories of what a dog is like. They have certain feelings and that's gonna be useful in a safety setting, safety critical setting, which is one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous situations. And a robot should really consider that in navigating its environment. And we humans are right to reason about how a robot should consider navigating its environment through anthropomorphization. I also think our brains are designed to think in human terms, like game theory, I think is best applied in the space of human decisions. And so... Right, you're dealing, I mean, with things like AI, AI is, they are, we can somewhat, like, I don't think it's, the reason I say anthropomorphization we need to be careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying, overly wrongly assuming that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us, because it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate. Like even dogs or even mice or whatever, in some ways, like anthropomorphizing them is less of a mistake, I think, than an AI, even though it's an AI we built and so on, because at least we know that they're running from the same substrate. And they've also evolved from the same, out of the same evolutionary process. They've followed this evolution of like needing to compete for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff. Whereas an AI that has just popped into existence somewhere on like a cloud server, let's say, you know, or whatever, however it runs and whatever, whether it, I don't know whether they have an internal experience. I don't think they necessarily do. In fact, I don't think they do. But the point is, is that to try and apply any kind of modeling of like thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do has to be done extremely carefully because they are, like, they're so alien, their method of whatever their form of thinking is, it's just so different because they've never had to evolve, you know, in the same way. Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts, anthropomorphization is not gonna hurt you. Yes. Engineers run away from it too fast. I can see that. But from the most point, you're right. Do you have advice for young people today, like the 17 year old that you were, of how to live life? You can be proud of how to have a career you can be proud of in this world full of mullocks. Think about the win wins. Look for win win situations. And be careful not to, you know, overly use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win win when it's not. So that's difficult. And I don't know how to advise, you know, people on that because it's something I'm still figuring out myself. But have that as a sort of default MO. Don't see things, everything as a zero sum game. Try to find the positive sumness and like find ways if there doesn't seem to be one, consider playing a different game. So that I would suggest that. Do not become a professional poker player. I, cause people always ask that like, oh, she's a pro. I wanna do that too. Fine, you could have done it if you were, you know, when I started out, it was a very different situation back then. Poker is, you know, a great game to learn in order to understand the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try and make a living from it these days. It's almost, it's very, very difficult to the point of being impossible. And then really, really be aware of how much time you spend on your phone and on social media and really try and keep it to a minimum. Be aware that basically every moment that you spend on it is bad for you. So it doesn't mean to say you can never do it, but just have that running in the background. I'm doing a bad thing for myself right now. I think that's the general rule of thumb. Of course, about becoming a professional poker player, if there is a thing in your life that's like that and nobody can convince you otherwise, just fucking do it. Don't listen to anyone's advice. Find a thing that you can't be talked out of too. That's a thing. I like that, yeah. You were a lead guitarist in a metal band? Oh. Did I write that down from something? What did you, what'd you do it for? The performing, was it the pure, the music of it? Was it just being a rock star? Why'd you do it? So we only ever played two gigs. We didn't last, you know, it wasn't a very, we weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very into metal. Like it was my entire identity, sort of from the age of 16 to 23. What's the best metal band of all time? Don't ask me that, it's so hard to answer. So I know I had a long argument with, I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. So, you know, I've had friends who are very big Pantera fans and so there was often arguments about what's the better metal band, Metallica versus Pantera. This is a more kind of 90s maybe discussion. But I was always on the side of Metallica, both musically and in terms of performance and the depth of lyrics and so on. So, but they were, basically everybody was against me. Because if you're a true metal fan, I guess the idea goes is you can't possibly be a Metallica fan. Because Metallica is pop, it's just like, they sold out. Metallica are metal. Like they were the, I mean, again, you can't say who was the godfather of metal, blah, blah, blah. But like they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant. I mean, you've named literally two of my favorite bands. Like when you asked that question, who are my favorites? Like those were two that came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think, oh, they just tick all the boxes for me. Yeah, I don't know. It's nowadays, like I kind of sort of feel like a repulsion to the, I was that myself. Like I'd be like, who do you prefer more? Come on, who's like, no, you have to rank them. But it's like this false zero sumness that's like, why? They're so additive. Like there's no conflict there. Although when people ask that kind of question about anything, movies, I feel like it's hard work. And it's unfair, but it's, you should pick one. Like, and that's actually the same kind of, it's like a fear of a commitment. When people ask me, what's your favorite band? It's like, but I, it's good to pick. Exactly. And thank you for the tough question, yeah. Well, maybe not in the context when a lot of people are listening. Yeah, I'm not just like, what, why does it matter? No, it does. Are you still into metal? Funny enough, I was listening to a bunch before I came over here. Oh, like, do you use it for like motivation or it gets you in a certain? Yeah, I was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before I came. Does that count as metal? I think so, it's like proto metal and it's happy. It's optimistic, happy proto metal. Yeah, I mean, all these genres bleed into each other. But yeah, sorry, to answer your question about guitar playing, my relationship with it was kind of weird in that I was deeply uncreative. My objective would be to hear some really hard technical solo and then learn it, memorize it and then play it perfectly. But I was incapable of trying to write my own music. Like the idea was just absolutely terrifying. But I was also just thinking, I was like, it'd be kind of cool to actually try starting a band again and getting back into it and write. But it's scary. It's scary. I mean, I put out some guitar playing just other people's covers. I play Comfortly Numb on the internet. And it's scary too. It's scary putting stuff out there. And I had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing, both on piano and guitar. You know, one of the first, one of the reasons that I started learning guitar is from Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. Crowley's solo. And one of the first solos I learned is that, there's a beauty to it. There's a lot of beauty to it. It's tapping, right? Yeah, there's some tapping, but it's just really fast. Beautiful, like arpeggios. Yeah, arpeggios, yeah. But there's a melody that you can hear through it, but there's also build up. It's a beautiful solo, but it's also technically just visually the way it looks when a person's watching, you feel like a rockstar playing. But it ultimately has to do with technical. You're not developing the part of your brain that I think requires you to generate beautiful music. It is ultimately technical in nature. And so that took me a long time to let go of that and just be able to write music myself. And that's a different journey, I think. I think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world, for example, where improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately it's a more rewarding journey because you get your relationship with the guitar then becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create, I mean, creating stuff is. And it's something you work with, because my relationship with my guitar was like, it was something to tame and defeat. Yeah, it's a challenge. Which was kind of what my whole personality was back then. I was just very like, as I said, very competitive, very just like must bend this thing to my will. Whereas writing music, it's like a dance, you work with it. But I think because of the competitive aspect, for me at least, that's still there, which creates anxiety about playing publicly or all that kind of stuff. I think there's just like a harsh self criticism within the whole thing. It's really tough. I wanna hear some of your stuff. I mean, there's certain things that feel really personal. And on top of that, as we talked about poker offline, there's certain things that you get to a certain height in your life, and that doesn't have to be very high, but you get to a certain height and then you put it aside for a bit. And it's hard to return to it because you remember being good. And it's hard to, like you being at a very high level in poker, it might be hard for you to return to poker every once in a while and enjoy it, knowing that you're just not as sharp as you used to be because you're not doing it every single day. That's something I always wonder with, I mean, even just like in chess with Kasparov, some of these greats, just returning to it, it's almost painful. And I feel that way with guitar too, because I used to play every day a lot. So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and that you have a prime, there's a time when you were really good and now it's over and now. We're on a different chapter of life. I was like, oh, but I miss that. But you can still discover joy within that process. It's been tough, especially with some level of like, as people get to know you, and people film stuff, you don't have the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you. Yeah. That's a beautiful privacy. That's a good point. With the internet, it's just disappearing. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. But all those pressures aside, if you really, you can step up and still enjoy the fuck out of a good musical performance. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? Oh, wow. It's in your name, as we talked about. You have to live up. Do you feel the requirement to have to live up to your name? Because live? Yeah. No, because I don't see it. I mean, my, oh, again, it's kind of like, no, I don't know. Because my full name is Olivia. Yeah. So I can retreat in that and be like, oh, Olivia, what does that even mean? Live up to live. No, I can't say I do, because I've never thought of it that way. And then your name backwards is evil. That's what we also talked about. I mean, I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil or even better. Because I don't think, you know, is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely separate to that? I think my intuition says it's the latter, but I don't know. Anyway, again, getting in the weeds. What is the meaning of all this? Of life. Why are we here? I think to, explore, have fun and understand and make more of here and to keep the game going. Of here? More of here? More of this, whatever this is. More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And more complex, you know, I guess, try and put it into a sort of vaguely scientific term. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But make it so that the program required, the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible. And, you know, highly complex and therefore interesting. Because again, like, I know, you know, we bang the metaphor to death, but like, tiled with X, you know, tiled with paperclips, doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, maybe something emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, it's not very interesting. Whereas it seems like our universe is over time becoming more and more complex and interesting. There's so much richness and beauty and diversity on this earth. And I want that to continue and get more. I want more diversity. And the very best sense of that word is to me the goal of all this. Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process. Yes. Because we do create a lot of fun things along, instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things we create, somehow there's like a funness to it. And perhaps that has to do with the finiteness of life, the finiteness of all these experiences, which is what makes them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this, whatever it is, falling in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a, I don't know, just the businesses that build something or solve something. The fact that it is born and it dies somehow embeds it with fun, with joy for the people involved. I don't know what that is. The finiteness of it. It can do. Some people struggle with the, I mean, a big thing I think that one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And in terms of like projects and so on, people cling onto things beyond what they're meant to be doing, beyond what is reasonable. And I'm gonna have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoyed talking to you. I think it's obvious as we've talked about many times, you should be doing a podcast. You should, you're already doing a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which is awesome. And you're a great educator. You're a great mind. You're a great intellect. But it's also this whole medium of just talking is also fun. It is good. It's a fun one. It really is good. And it's just, it's nothing but like, oh, it's just so much fun. And you can just get into so many, yeah, there's this space to just explore and see what comes and emerges. And yeah. Yeah, to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others, to understand them better and together with them. I mean, you should do your own podcast, but you should also do a podcast with C as we've talked about. The two of you have such different minds that like melt together in just hilarious ways, fascinating ways, just the tension of ideas there is really powerful. But in general, I think you got a beautiful voice. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me with this conversation and with your valuable time. Thanks, Liv. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Liv Marie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers, which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314

The following is a conversation with Magnus Carlsen, the number one ranked chess player in the world and widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest chess player of all time. The camera on Magnus died 20 minutes into the conversation. Most folks still just listen to the audio through a podcast player anyway, but if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, we did our best to still make it interesting by adding relevant image overlays. I mess things up sometimes, like in this case, but I'm always working hard to improve. I hope you understand. Thank you for your patience and support along the way. I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Magnus Carlsen. You're considered by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest chess players of all time, but you're also one of the best fantasy football, AKA soccer, competitors in the world, plus recently picking up poker and competing at a world class level. So before chess, let's talk football and greatness. You're a Real Madrid fan, so let me ask you the ridiculous big question. Who do you think is the greatest football, AKA soccer player of all time? Can you make the case for Messi? Can you make the case for Cristiano Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona, does anybody jump to mind? I think it's pretty hard to make a case for anybody else than Messi for his all around game. And frankly, my Real Madrid fandom sort of predates the Ronaldo era, the second Ronaldo, not the first one. So I always liked Ronaldo, but I always kind of thought that Messi was better. And I went to quite a number of Madrid games and they've always been super helpful to me down there. The only thing is that, like they asked me, they were gonna do an interview and they were gonna ask me who my favorite player was. And I said somebody else, I think I said Isco at that point, and I was like, okay, take two now you say Ronaldo. So for them it was very important, but it wasn't that huge to me. So Messi over Maradona. Yeah, but I think just like with chess, it's hard to compare eras. Obviously the improvements in football have been like in technique and such have been even greater than they have been in chess, but it's always a weird discussion to have. But just as a fan, what do you think is beautiful about the game? What defines greatness? Is it, you know, with Messi, one, he's really good at finishing, two, very good at assist, like three, there's just magic. It's just beautiful to see the play. So it's not just about the finishing. There's some, it's like Maradona's hand of God. There's some creativity on the pitch. Is that important or is it very important to get the World Cups and the big championships and that kind of stuff? I think the World Cup is pretty overrated, seeing as it's such a small sample size. So it sort of annoys me always when, you know, titles are always appreciated so much, even though that particular title can be a lot of luck or at least some luck. So I do appreciate the statistics a bit and all the statistics say that Messi's the best finisher of all time, which I think helps a lot. And then there's the intangibles as well. The flip side of that is the small sample size is what really creates the magic. It's so, it's just like the Olympics. You basically train your whole life for this. You live your whole life for this and it's a rare moment. One mistake and it's all over. That's, for some reason, a lot of people either break under that pressure or rise up under that pressure. You don't admire the magic of that? No, I do. I just think that rising under pressure and breaking under the pressure is often a really oversimplified take on what's happening. Yeah, we do romanticize the game. Well, let me ask you another ridiculous question. You're also a fan of basketball. Yes. Let me ask the goat question. I'm biased because I went to high school in Chicago, Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. Let me ask the Jordan versus LeBron James question. Let's continue on this thread of greatness. Which one do you pick or somebody else? Magic Johnson. So I'll give you a completely different answer. Uh oh. Depending on my mood and depending on whom I talk to, I pick one of the two and then I try to argue for that. With the quantum mechanical thing. Well, can you, what, again, what would, if you were to argue for either one, statistically, I think LeBron James is going to surpass Jordan. Yeah, no doubt. And so again, there's a debate between. Unquantifiable greatness, no? I mean, that's the whole, that's the whole debate. Yes. So it's, well, it's quantifiable versus unquantifiable. Yeah. What's more important? And you're depending on mood all over the place. Yeah. But what do you lean in general with these folks, with soccer, with anything in life, towards the unquantifiable more? No, definitely towards the quantifiable. So when you're unsure, lean towards the numbers. Yeah. But see, like, it's later generations. There's something, that's what people say about Maradona is, you know, he took a arguably somewhat mediocre team to a World Cup. So there's that also uplifting nature of the player to be able to rise up, it is a team sport. So are you gonna, like, are you gonna punish Messi for taking a mediocre Argentine squad to the final in 2014 and punish him because they lost to a great team very narrowly after they missed? The internet does. He set up, like, a great chance for Higuain in the first half, which he, which he fluffed. And then, yeah, eventually they lost the game. Yeah, they do criticize Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi for being on really strong squads in terms of the club teams and saying, yeah, okay, it's easy when you have like Ronaldinho or whoever on your team. It would be very interesting just if the league could make a decision. Yeah, just random, random allocation. Yeah. And just every single game, just keep reallocating or maybe once a season or every season you get random. But let's say every, every player, if let's say they sign a five year contract for a team, like one of them, you're gonna get randomly allocated to, to let's say a bottom half team. I bet you there's gonna be so much corruption around that. It could be random. Obviously it wouldn't, wouldn't ever happen or work, but I think it's interesting to think about. So on chess, let's zoom out. If you break down your approach to chess when you're at your best, what do you think, what do you think contributes to that approach? Is it memory recall, specific lines and positions? Is it intuition? How much of it is intuition? How much of it is pure calculation? How much of it is messing with the strategy of the opponent? So the game theory aspect in terms of what contributes to the highest level of play that you do. I think the answer differs a little bit now from what it did eight years ago. For instance, like I've, I feel like I've had like two peaks and in my career in 2014, well, 2013, 2014, and also in 2019. And in those years, I was very different in terms of, of my strength, strength as specifically in 2019, I benefited a lot from opening preparation while in 2013, 2014, I mostly tried to avoid my opponent's preparation rather than that being a, being a strength. So I'm mentioning that also because it's something, something you didn't, didn't mention. I think like my intuitive understanding of chess has over those years always been a little bit better than the others, even though it has evolved as well. Certainly there are, there are things that I understand now that I didn't understand back then, but that's not only for me, that's for, for others as well. I was younger back then. So I played with more energy, which meant that I could play better in long drawn out games, which was also a necessity for me because I didn't, I couldn't, couldn't beat people in the, in the openings. But in terms of calculation, that's always been a weird issue for me. Like I've always been really, really bad at solving exercises in chess. Like that's been like a blind spot for me. First of all, I found it hard to concentrate on them and to look, to look deep enough. So this is like a puzzle, a position, mate in X. I mean, one thing is mate, but find the best move. That's generally the exercise, like find the best move, find the best line. You, you just don't connect with it. Usually like you have to, to look, look deep. And then when I get these lines during the game, I very often find the, the, the right solution, even though, even though it's not still the best part of my game to, to calculate very, very deeply. But it doesn't feel like calculation you're saying in terms of. And it does sometimes, but for me, it's more like I'm at the board trying to find, trying to find the solution. And I understand like the training at home is like trying a little bit to, to replicate that. Like you give somebody half an hour in a position, like in this instance, you might've thought for half an hour if you play the game, but I just, I just cannot do it. One thing I know that I am good at though, is calculating short lines because I calculate them, them well, I'm good at seeing little details and I'm also much better than, than most at evaluating, which I think is something that sets me, sets me apart from, from others. So evaluating specific position, if I, if I make this move and the position changes in this way, is this a step in the right direction? Like in a big picture way? Yeah. Like you calculate a few moves ahead and then you evaluate because a lot of, a lot of time, a lot of the times you cannot, the branches become so big that you cannot calculate everything. So you have to, yeah. So you have to, you have to make evaluations based on, you know, based mostly on knowledge and intuition and somehow I seem to do that pretty well. When you say you're good at short lines, what's that, what's, what's short? That's usually like lines of two to four moves each. Okay, so that, that's directly applicable to even faster games like blitz, chess and so on. Yeah, blitz is a lot about calculating forest lines. So those, you can see pretty clearly that the players who struggle at blitz who are great at classical are those who rely on a deep calculating ability because you simply don't have time for that in blitz. You have to calculate quickly and rely a lot on intuition. Can you try to, I know it's really difficult. Can you try to talk through what's actually being visualized in your head? Is there, is there a visual component? Yeah, no, I just visualized the board. I mean, the board is in my head. Two dimensional? My interpretation is that it is two dimensional. Like what color is, is it brown tinted? Is it black? Is it, like what's the theme? Is it a big board, small board? Are the, what do the pawns look like? Or is it more in the space of concepts? Like. Yeah, there aren't a lot of colors. It's mostly, yeah. So what is it? Queen's gambit on the ceiling, whatever. I'm trying now to imagine it. What about when you do the branching, when you have multiple boards and so on? What, how does that look? Are you? No, but it's only one at a time. So like. One position at a time. One position at a time. So then I go back and that's what, when, when people play, or at least that's what I do. When I play blindfold chess against several people, then it's just always one board at a time. And the rest are stored away somewhere. But how do you store them away? So like, you went down one branch. You're like, all right, that's, I got that. I understand that there's some good there, there's some bad there. Now let me go down another branch. Like, how do you store away the information? You just put it on a shelf, kind of? I try and store it away. Sometimes I have to sort of repeat it because I forget. And it does happen frequently in games that you're thinking for, especially if you're thinking for a long, let's say a half an hour, or even more than that, that you play a move and then your opponent plays a move, then you play a move and they play a move again. And you realize, oh, I actually calculated that. I just forgot about it. So that's obviously what happens when you store the information and you cannot retrieve it. When you think about a move for 20, 30 minutes, like how do you break that down? Can you describe what, like what's the algorithm here that takes 30 minutes to run? 30 minutes is, at least for me, it's usually a waste. 30 minutes usually means that I don't know what to do. And I'm trying. You're just running into the wall over and over. Yeah, I'm trying to find something that isn't there. I think 10 to 15 minutes things in complicated positions can be really, really helpful. Then you can spend your time pretty efficiently. Just means that the branches are getting wide. There's a lot to run through, both in terms of calculation and lots you have to evaluate as well. And then based on that 10 to 15 minute thing, you have a pretty good idea what to do. I mean, it's very rare that I would think for half an hour and I would have a eureka moment during the game. Like if I haven't seen it in 10 minutes, I'm probably not gonna see it at all. You're going to different branches. Yeah. And like after 15 minutes, it's like. But it mainly to the middle game, because when you get to the end game, it's usually brute force calculation that makes you spend so much time. So middle game is normally, it's a complicated mix of brute force calculation and like creativity and evaluation. So end game, it's easier in that sense. Well, you're good at every aspect of chess, but you're also your end game is legendary. It baffles experts. So can you linger on that then try to explain what the heck is going on there? Like if you look at game six of the previous world championship, the longest game ever played in chess, it was I think his queen versus your rook knight in two pawns. There's so many options there. It's such an interesting little dance and it's kind of not obvious that it wouldn't be a draw. So how do you escape it not being a draw and you win that match? No, I knew that for most of the time, it was a theoretical draw since chess with seven or less pieces on the board is solved. So you can, like people watching online, they can just check it. They can check and they can check a so called table base and they, it just gonna spit out win for white, win for black or draw. So, and also I knew that, I knew that didn't know that position specifically, but I knew that it had to be a draw. So for me, it was about staying alert. First of all, trying to look for the best way to put my pieces, but yeah, those end games are a bit, they're a bit unusual. They don't happen too often. So what I'm usually good at is I'm using my strength that I also use in middle games is that I evaluate well and I calculate short variations quite. Even for the end game, short variations matter? Yes, it does matter in some simpler end games. Yeah, but also like there are these theoretical end games with very few pieces like rook knights and two pawns versus Queens, but a lot of end games are simply defined by the Queens being exchanged and there are a lot of other pieces left and then it's usually not brute force. It's usually more of understanding and evaluation and then I can use my strengths very well. Why are you so damn good at the end game? Isn't there a lot of moves from when the end game starts to when the end game finishes and you have a few pieces and you have to figure out, it's like a sequence of little games that happens, right? Like little pattern. Like how does it being able to evaluate a single position lead you to evaluate a long sequence of positions that eventually lead to a checkmate? Well, I think if you evaluate well at the start, you know what plans to go for and then usually the play from there is often pretty simple. Let's say you understand how to arrange your pieces and often also how to arrange your pawns early in the end game then that makes all the difference and after that is like what we call technique very often that it's technique basically just means that the moves are simple and these are moves that a lot of players could make not only the very strongest ones. These are moves that are kind of understood and known. So with the evaluation, you're just constantly improving a little bit and that just leads to suffocating the position and then eventually to the win as long as you're doing the evaluation well, one step at a time. To some extent. Also, yeah, I said like if you evaluate it better and thus accumulated some small advantages then you can often make your life pretty easy towards the end of the end game. So you said in 2019 sort of the second phase of why you're so damn good. You did a lot of opening preparation. What's the goal for you of the opening game of chess? Is it to throw the opponent off from any prepared lines? Is there something you could put into words about why you're so damn good at the openings? Again, these things have changed a lot over time. Back in Kasparov's days, for instance, he very often got huge advantages from the opening as white. Can you explain why? There were several reasons for that. First of all, he worked harder. He was more creative in finding ideas. He was able to look places others didn't. Also, he had a very strong team of people who had specific strengths in openings that he could use. So they would come up with ideas and he would integrate those ideas into... Yeah, and he would also very often come up with them himself. Also, at the start, he had some of the first computer engines to work for him to find his ideas, to look deeper, to verify his ideas. He was better at using them than a lot of others. Now, I feel like the playing field is a lot more level. There are both computer engines, neural networks, and hybrid engines available to practically anybody. So it's much harder to find ideas now that actually give you an advantage with the white pieces. I mean, people don't expect to find those ideas anymore. Now it's all about finding ideas that are missed by the engines. Either they're missed entirely or they're missed at low depth and using them to gain some advantage in the sense that you have more knowledge. And it's also good to know that usually these are not complete bluffs, these are like semi bluffs so that you know that even if your opponent makes all the right moves, you can still make a draw. And also at the start of 2019, neural networks had just started to be a thing in chess. And I'm not entirely sure, but there were at least some players even in the top events who you could see did not use them or did not use them in the right way. And then you could gain a huge advantage because a lot of positions, they were being evaluated differently by the neural networks than traditional chess engines because they simply think about chess in a very, very different way. So short answer is these days, it's all about surprising your opponent and taking it into positions where you have more knowledge. So is there some sense in which it's okay to make suboptimal quote unquote moves? No, you have to. I mean, you have to because the best moves have been analyzed to death mostly. So that's a kind of, when you say semi bluff, that's a kind of sacrifice. You're sacrificing the optimal move, the optimal position so that you can take the opponent. I mean, that's a game theoretic sense. You take the opponent to something they didn't prepare well. Yeah, but you could also look at it another way that regardless, like if you turn on whatever engine you turn on, like if you try to analyze either from the starting position or the starting position of some popular opening, like if you analyze long enough, it's always gonna end up in a draw. So in that sense, you may not be going for like the objective, the tries that are objectively the most difficult to draw against, but you are trying to look at least at the less obvious paths. How much do you use engines? Do you use Leela, Stockfish in your preparations? My team does. Personally, I try not to use them too much on my own because I know that when I play, you obviously cannot have help from engines. And often I feel like often having imperfect or knowledge about a position or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse than having no knowledge. So I try to look at engines as little as possible. So yeah, so your team uses them for research for a generation of ideas. Yeah. But you are relying primarily on your human resources. Yeah, for sure. You can evaluate well. You don't lean. Yeah, I can evaluate as a human. I can know what they find unpleasant and so on. And it's very often the case for me to some extent, but a lot for others that you arrive in a position and your opponent plays a move that you didn't expect and if you didn't expect it, you know that it's probably not a great move since it hasn't been expected by the engine. But if it's not obvious why it's not a good move, it's usually very, very hard to figure it out. And so then looking at the engines doesn't necessarily help because at that point, like you're facing a human, you have to sort of think as a human. I was chatting with Demis Ashabis, CEO of DeepMind a couple of days ago and he asked me to ask you about what you first felt when you saw the play of AlphaZero. Like interesting ideas in your creativity. Did you feel fear that the machine is taking over? Were you inspired? And what was going on in your mind and heart? Funny thing about Demis is he doesn't play chess at all like an AI, he plays in a very, very human way. No, I was hugely inspired when I saw the games at first. And in terms of man versus machine, I mean that battle was kind of lost for humans even before I entered top level chess. So that's never been an issue for me. I never liked playing against computers much anyway. So that's completely fine. But it was amazing to see how they quote unquote thought about chess in such a different way and in a way that you could mistake for creativity. Mistake for creativity, strong words. Is it wild to you how many sacrifices it's willing to make that like sacrifice pieces and then wait for prolonged periods of time before doing anything with that? Is that weird to you that that's part of chess? No, it's one of the things that's hardest to replicate as a human as well, or at least for my playing style that usually when I sacrifice, I feel like I'm, I don't do it unless I feel like I'm getting something like tangible in return and. Like a few moves down the line. A few moves down the line, you can see that you can either retrieve the material or you can put your opponent's king under pressure or have some very like very concrete positional advantage that sort of compensates for it. For instance, in chess, so bishops and knights are fairly equivalent. We both give them three points, but bishops are a little bit better. And especially a bishop pair is a lot better than a bishop and a knight. So, or especially two knights depends on the position, but like on average they are. So like sacrificing a pawn in order to get a bishop pair, that's one of the most common sacrifices in chess. Oh, you're okay making that sacrifice? Yeah, I mean, it depends on the situation, but generally that's fine. And there are a lot of openings that are based on that, that you sacrifice a pawn for the bishop pair, and then eventually it's some sort of positional equality. So that's fine. But the way AlphaZero would sacrifice a knight or sometimes two pawns, three pawns, and you could see that it's looking for some sort of positional domination, but it's hard to understand. And it was really fascinating to see. Yeah, in 2019, I was sacrificing a lot of pawns, especially, and it was a great joy. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to continue to do that. People have found more solid opening lines since that don't allow me to do that as often. I'm still trying both to get those positions and still trying to learn the art of sacrificing pieces. So Demis also made a comment that was interesting to my new chess brain, which is one of the reasons that chess is fun is because of the, quote, creative tension between the bishop and the knight. So you're talking about this interesting difference between the two pieces, that there's some kind of, how would you convert that? I mean, that's like a poetic statement about chess. I think he said that, why has chess been played for such a long time? Why is it so fun to play at every level? That if you can reduce it to one thing, is it the bishop and the knight, some kind of weird dynamics that they create in chess. Is there any truth to that? It sounds very good. I haven't tried a lot of other games, but I tried to play a little bit of shogi. And for my new shogi brain, comparing it to chess, what annoyed me about that game is how much the pieces suck. Basically, you have one rook and you have one bishop that move like in chess. And the rest of the pieces are really not very powerful. So I think that's one of the attractions of chess, like how powerful, especially the queen is, which. Interesting. I kind of think makes it a lot of fun. So you think power is more fun than like variety? No, there is a variety in chess as well, though. But not much more so than like go or something. No, no, no, no, that's for. So like knight, I mean, they all move in different ways. They're all like weird. There's just all these weird patterns and positions that can emerge. The difference in the pieces create all kinds of interesting dynamics, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, and I guess it is quite fascinating that all those years ago, they created the knight and the bishop without probably realizing that they would be almost equally strong with such different qualities. That's crazy that this, you know, like when you design computer games, it's like an art form. It's science and an art to balance it. You know, you talk about Starcraft and all those games, like so that you can have competitive play at the highest level with all those different units. In the case of chess, it's different pieces. And they somehow designed a game that was super competitive. But there's probably some kind of natural selection that the chess just wouldn't last if it was designed poorly. Yeah, and I think the rules have changed over time a little bit, but I would be, I mean, speaking of games and all that, I'm also interested to play other games like chess 960 or Fisher random, as they call it, like that you have 960 maps instead of one. Yeah, so for people who don't know, a Fisher random chess, chess 960s. Yeah, that basically just means that the pawns are in the same way and the major pieces are distributed randomly on the last rank. Only that there have to be obviously bishops of opposite color and the king has to be in between the rooks so that you can castle both ways. Oh, you can still castle in chess 960. You can still castle, but it makes it interesting. So you still have, it still castles in the same way. So let's say the king is like here. Yeah, what happens in that case? Yeah, let's say the king is in the corner. So to castle this side, you have to clear a whole lot of pieces. Well, what would castling look like though? No, the king would go here and the rook would go there. Oh, okay. And that's happened in my games as well. Like I forgot about castling and I've been like attacking a king over here and then all of a sudden it escapes to the other side. I think Fischer chess is good that it's, the maps will generally be worse than regular chess. Like I think the starting position is as close to ideal for creating a competitive game as possible, but they will still be like interesting and diverse enough that you can play very interesting games. So when you say maps, there's 960 different options and like what fraction of that creates interesting games at the highest level? This is something that a lot of people are curious about because when you challenge a great chess player like yourself to look at a random starting position that feels like it pushes you to play pure chess versus memorizing lines. Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. But that's the whole idea. That's what you want. How hard is it to play? I mean, can you talk about what it feels like to you to play with a random starting position? Is there some intuition you've been building up? It's very, very different. And I mean, understandably engines have an even greater advantage in 960 than they have in classical chess. No, it's super interesting. And that's why also I really wish that we played more classical chess, like long games, four to seven hours and in fish random chess, chess 960, because then you really need that time, even on the first moves. What usually happens is that you get 15 minutes before the game, you're getting told the position 15 minutes before the game, and then you can think about it a little bit, even, you know, check the computer, but that's all the time you have, but then you really need to figure it out. And like some of the positions obviously are a lot more interesting than the others. In some of them, it appears that like, if you don't play symmetrically at the start, then you're probably gonna be in a pretty bad position. What do you mean with the pawns? With the pawns, yeah. Why does that make sense? That's the thing about chess though. So let's say white opens with E4, which is, which has always been the most played move. There are many ways to meet that, but the most solid ways of playing has always been the symmetrical response. Yeah. With E5, and then there's the, through Lopez, there's the Petrov opening and so on. And if you just banned symmetry on the first move in chess, you would get more interesting games. Oh, interesting. Or you'd get more decisive, decisive games. So that's the good thing about chess is that we've played it so long that we've actually devised non symmetrical openings that are also fairly equal and. But symmetry is a good default. But yeah, symmetry is a good default. And it's a problem that by playing symmetrical armed with good preparation in regular chess, it's just a little bit too easy to, it's a little bit too dryish. And I guess if you analyzed, if you analyzed a lot in chess 960, then the, a lot of the positions would end up being pretty dryish as well. Because the random starting points are so shitty, you're forced to. You're actually forced to play symmetrically. Like you cannot actually try and play in a more sort of interesting, interesting manner. Is there any other kind of variations that are interesting to you? Oh yeah, there are, there are several. So no castling chess has been, has been promoted by former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik. There have been a few tournaments with that, not any that I've participated in though. I kind of like it. Also, my coach uses like non castling engines quite a bit to analyze regular positions to just to get a different, different perspective. So castling is like a defensive thing. So if you remove castling, it forces you to be more offensive, is that why? Yeah, it just, yeah, for sure. It seems like a tiny little difference. No castling probably forces you to be a little bit more defensive at the start, or I would guess so, because you cannot suddenly escape with the kings. It's going to make the game a bit slower at the start, but I feel like eventually it's going to, it's going to make the more games more, well, less droish for sure. Then you have some weirder variants, like where the pawns can move both diagonally and forward. And also you have self capture chess, which is quite interesting. So that pawns can, or pieces could commit suicide or what? Yeah, people can. Why would that be a good move? No, sometimes one of your pieces occupy a square. I mean, let me just set up a position. Let's put it like this, for instance, like here. I mean, there are a lot of ways to checkmate for white, like this for instance, or there are several ways, but like this would be a checkmate. Oh, cool. For people who are just listening, yeah, basically you're bringing in a knight close to the whole, the king, the queen and so on, and you replace the knight with a queen. Yeah, that's interesting. So you can have like a front of pieces, and then you just replace them with the second piece. Yeah, I mean, that could be interesting. I think also maybe sometimes it's just clearance, basically it adds an extra element of clearance. So I think there are many, many different variants. I don't think any of them are better than the one that has been played for at least a thousand years, but it's certainly interesting to see. So one of your goals is to reach the FIDEELO chess rating of 2900. Maybe you can comment on how is this rating calculated and what does it take to get there? Is it possible for a human being to get there? Basically you play with a factor of 10, which means that if I were to play against an opponent who's rated the same as me, I would be expected to score 50%, obviously, and that means that I would win five points with a win, lose five points with a draw, and then equal if I draw. If your opponent is 200 points lower rated, you're expected to score 75% and so on. And you establish that rating by playing a lot of people, and then it slowly converges towards an estimate of how likely you are to win or lose against different people. Yeah, and my rating is obviously carried through thousands of games. Right now, my rating is 2861, which is decent. I think that pretty much corresponds to the level I have at the moment, which means in order to reach 2900, I would have to either get better at chess, which I think is fairly hard to do, at least considerably better. So what I would need to do is try and optimize even more in terms of preparations, everything. Not necessarily like selecting tournaments and so on, but just optimizing in terms of preparation, making sure I never have any bad days. So you basically can't lose. Yeah, I basically can't fuck up ever if I wanna reach that goal. And so I think reaching 2900 is pretty unlikely. The reason I've set the goal is to have something to play for, to have a motivation to actually try and be at my best when I play. Because otherwise, I'm playing to some extent, mostly for fun these days in that I love to play, I love to try and win, but I don't have a lot to prove or anything, but that gives me at least the motivation to try and be at my best all the time, which I think is something to aim for. So at the moment, I'm quite enjoying that process of trying to, yeah, trying to optimize. What would you say motivates you in this now and in the years leading up to now? The love of winning or the fear of losing? So for the World Championship, it's been fear of losing for sure. Other tournaments, love of winning is a great, great factor and that's why I also get more joy from winning most tournaments than I do for winning the World Championship because then it's mostly been a relief. I also think I enjoy winning more now than I did before because I feel like I'm a little bit more relaxed now. And I also know that it's not gonna last forever. So every little win, I appreciate a lot more now. And yeah, in terms of fear of losing, that's a huge reason why I'm not gonna play the World Championship because it really didn't give me a lot of joy. It really was all about avoiding losing. Why is it that the World Championship really makes you feel this way, the anxiety? So when you say losing, do you mean not just the match but every single position, like the fear of a blunder? No, I mean, the blunder is okay. Like when I sit down at the board, then it's mostly been fine because then I'm focused on. Got it. Then I'm focused on the game and then I know that I can play the game. It's a time like in between, like knowing that, you know, I feel like losing is not an option because it's the World Championship and because in a World Championship, there are two players. There's a winner and a loser. If I don't win a random tournament that I play, then, you know, I'm usually, it depends on the tournament. I might be disappointed for sure. Might even be pretty pissed, but ultimately, you know, you go on to the next one. With the World Championship, you don't go on to the next one. It's like, it's years. Yeah. And it also has been like, it's been a core part of my identity for a while now that I am World Champion. And so there's not an option of losing that. Yeah. Yeah, there's, you're gonna have to, at least for a couple of years, carry the weight of having lost. You're the former World Champion now, if you lose versus the current World Champion. There are certain sports that create that anxiety and others that don't. For example, I think UFC, like mixed martial arts are a little better with losing. It's understood, like everybody loses. But then. Not everybody though. Not everybody. Not everybody. Not everybody. Yes. Khabib entered the chat. But in boxing, there is like that extra pressure of like maintaining the championship. I mean, maybe you could say the same thing about the UFC as well. So for you personally, for a person who loves chess, the first time you won the World Championship, that was the big, that was the thing that was fun. Yeah. And then everything after is like stressful. Yeah. Essentially. There was certainly stress involved the first time as well. But it was nothing compared to the others. So the only World Championship after that that I really enjoyed was the one in 2018 against the American Fabiano Caruana. And what that made that different is that I'd been kind of slumping for a bit and he'd been on the rise. So our ratings were very, very similar. They were so close that if at any point during the match I'd lost the game, he would have been ranked as number one in the world. Like our ratings were so close that for each draw, they didn't move. And. And the game itself was close. Yeah, the games themselves were very close. I had a winning position in the first game that I couldn't really get anywhere for a lot of games. Then he had a couple of games where he could potentially have won. Then in the last game I was a little bit better. And eventually they were all drawn. But I felt like all the way that this is an interesting match against an opponent who is at this position at this point equal to me. And so losing that would not have been this disaster. Because in all the other matches, I would know that I would have lost against somebody who I know I'm much better than. And that would be a lot harder for me to take. Well, that's fascinating and beautiful that the stress isn't from losing. Because you have fun. You enjoy playing against somebody who's as good as you, maybe better than you. That's exciting to you. Yeah. It's losing at this high stakes thing that only happens rarely to a person who's not as good as you. Yeah, and that's why it's also been incredibly frustrating in other matches, like when I know, when we play draw after draw. And I can just, I know that I'm better. I can sense during the game that I understand it better than them. But I cannot get over the hump. So you are the best chess player in the world. And you not playing the World Championship really makes the World Championship not seem important. Or I mean, there's an argument to be made for that. Is there anything you would like to see if you had a change about the World Championship that would make it more fun for you? And better for the game of chess period for everybody involved? So I think 12 games or now 14 games that there is for the World Championship is a fairly, fairly low sample size. If you want to determine who the best player is, or at least the best player in that particular matchup, you need more games. And I think to some extent, if you're gonna have a World Champion and call them the best players, best player, you gotta make sure that the format increases the chance of finding the best player. So I think having more games, and if you're gonna have a lot more games, then you need to decrease the time control a bit, which in turn, I think is also a good thing because in very long time controls with deep preparation, you can sort of mask a lot of your deficiencies as a chess player because you have a lot of time to think and to defend. And also, yeah, you have deep preparation. So I think those would be, for me to play, those would be the main things, more games and less time. So you want to see more games and rules that emphasize pure chess? Yeah, but already less time emphasizes pure chess because defensive techniques are much harder to execute with a little time. What do you think, is there a sweet spot in terms of, are we talking about Blitz? Is it, how many minutes? I think Blitz is a bit too fast. To their credit, this was suggested by Fieda as well. For a start to have two games per day, and let's say you have 45 minutes a game plus 15 or 30 seconds per move, that means that each sessions will probably be about, or a little less than two hours. That would be a start. Also what we're playing in the tournament that I'm playing here in Miami, which is four games a day with 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move, those four would be more interesting than the one there is now. And I understand that there are a lot of traditions. People don't want to change the World Championship. That's all fine. I just think that the World Championship should do a better job of trying to reflect who's the best overall chess player. So would you say like, if it's faster games, you'd probably be able to get a sample size of like over 20 games, 20, 30, 40. You think there's a number that's good over a long period of time? Well, I would prefer as many as possible. So like a hundred? Yeah, but let's say you play 12 days, two games a day. You know, that's 24. I feel like that's already quite a bit better. You play like one black game, one white game each day. Endurance wise, that's okay? Yeah, I think that's fine. Like you will have free days as well. So I don't think that will be a problem. And also you have to prepare two sets of openings for each day, which makes it more difficult for the teams preparing, which I think is also good. Let me ask you a fun question. If Hikaru Nakamura was one of the two people, I guess, I apologize. Yeah, he could have finished second. So he lost the last round of the candidates. Yeah, and maybe you can explain to me, internet speed copium is something you tweeted. Yeah. But if he got second, would you just despite him still play the world championship? That's internet question. And when the internet asks, I must abide. The dude abides. Yeah, sure. Thank you, internet. So after the last match, I did an interview right after where I talked about the fact that I was unlikely to play the next one. I'd spoken privately to both family, friends, and of course also my chess team that this was likely going to be the last match. What happened was that right before the world championship match, there was this young player, Alireza Firouzsa. He had a dramatic rise. He rose to second in the world rankings. He was 18 then, he's 19 now. He qualified for the candidates. And it felt like there was like at least a half realistic possibility that he could be the challenger for the next world championship. And that sort of lit a fire under me. Do you like that idea? Yeah, I like that a lot. I love the idea of playing him in the next world championship. And originally, I was sure that I wanted to announce right after the tournament, the match, that this was it, I'm done. I'm not playing the next one. But this lit a fire under me. So that made me think, this actually motivates me. And I just wanted to get it out there for several reasons to create more hype about the candidates, to sort of motivate myself a little bit, maybe motivate him. Also, obviously I wanted to give people a heads up for the candidates that you might be playing for more than first place. Normally, the candidates is first place or best. It's like the world championship. And then, so Nakamura was one of many people who just didn't believe me, which is fair. Because I've talked before about not necessarily wanting to defend again. But I never talked as concretely or was as serious as this time. So he simply didn't believe me. And he was very vocal about that. And he said, nobody believed me, no other players, which may or may not have been true. And then, yeah, he lost the last game. And he didn't qualify. But to answer the question, no, I'd already at that point decided that I wouldn't play. I would have liked it less if he had not lost the last round. But the decision was already made. Does it break your heart a little bit that you're walking away from it? In all the ways that you mentioned that it's just not fun, there's a bunch of ways that it doesn't seem to bring out the best kind of chess. It doesn't bring out the best out of you in the particular opponents involved. Does it just break your heart a little bit? Like you're walking away from something, or maybe the entire chess community is walking away from a kind of a historic event that was so important in the 20th century at least? So I won the championship in 2013. I said no to the candidates in 2011. I didn't particularly like the format. I also wasn't, I was just not in the mood. I didn't want the pressure that was connected with the World Championship. And I was perfectly content at the time to play the tournaments that I did play, also to be ranked number one in the world. I was comfortable with the fact that I knew that I was the best and I didn't need a title to show others. And what happened later is I suddenly decided to play. In 2013, they changed the format. I liked it better. I just decided, it could be interesting. Let's try and get this. There really wasn't more than that to it. It wasn't like fulfilling lifelong dream or anything. I just thought, let's play. So it's just a cool tournament, a good challenge. Yeah, it's a cool tournament, it's a good challenge. Why not? It's something that could be a motivation. It motivated me to get in the best shape of my life that I had been until then. So it was a good thing. And 2013 match brought me a lot of joy as well. So I'm very, very happy that I did that. But I never had any thoughts that I'm going to keep the title for a long time. Immediately after the match in 2013, also before the match, I'd spoken against the fact that the champion is seeded into the final, which I thought was unfair. After the match, I made a proposal that we have a different system where the champion doesn't have these privileges. And people's reaction, both players and chess community, was generally like, OK, we're good. We don't want that. You keep your privileges. And I was like, OK, whatever. So you want to fight for it every time? Yeah, I want that. I have to ask, just in case you have an opinion, if you can maybe from a fantasy chess perspective analyze Ding versus Nepo, who wins? The current, the two people that would play if you're not playing. Generally, I would consider that Ding has a slightly better overall chess strength. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each, if you can summarize it? So Nepo, he's even better at calculating short lines than I am. But he can sometimes lack a little bit of depth. In short lines, he's an absolute calculation monster. He's extremely quick. But he can sometimes lack a bit of depth. Also recently, he's improved his openings quite a bit. So now he has a lot of good ideas. And he's very, very solid. Ding is not quite as well prepared. But he has an excellent understanding of dynamics and imbalances in chess, I would say. What do you mean by imbalances? Imbalances like bishops against knights and material imbalances. He can take advantage of those. Yes, I would say he's very, very good at that and understanding the dynamic factors, as we call them, like material versus time, especially. I think Nepo got the better of him and the candidates. So what's your sense why Ding has an edge in the championship? I feel like individual past results hasn't necessarily been a great indicator of world championship results. I feel like overall chess strength is more important. To be fair, I only think Ding has a very small edge. Difference is not big at all. But our individual head to head record was probably the main reason that a lot of people thought Nepo had a good chance against me as well. It was like 4 to 1 in his favor before the match. But that was just another example of why that may not necessarily mean anything. Also in our case, it was a very, very low sample size, I think, about the size of the match in total, 14 games. And that generally doesn't mean much. How close were those games, would you say, in your mind for the previous championship? So that game six was a turning point where you won. Was there any doubt in your mind that if you do a much larger sample size that you'll get the better of Nepo? No, no, larger sample size is always good for me. So world championship, it's a great parallel to football because it's a low scoring game. And if the better player or the better team scores, they win most of the time. Oh, that's generally for championships or in general? Yeah, for championships. They generally, generally win because the other slightly weaker team, they're good enough to defend to make it very, very difficult for the others. But when they actually have to create the chances, then they have no chance. And then it very often ends with a blowout as it did in our match. If I hadn't won game six, it probably would have been very, very close. He might have edged it. There's obviously a bigger chance that I would have edged it. But this is just what happens a lot in chess, but also in football that matches are close and then they somebody scores, somebody scores and then things change. And this gives people the illusion that the matchup was very close. Well, actually, it just means that the nature of the game makes the matches close very often. But it's always much more likely that one of the teams is going to or one of the players is going to break away than the others. And in other matches as well, even though a lot of people before the match in 2016 against Karjakin, there were people who thought before the match that I was massively overrated as a favorite and that essentially the match was pretty, pretty close, like whatever, 60, 40, or some people even said like 55, 45. And what I felt was that the match went very, very wrong for me and I still won. And some people saw that as an indication that the pre match probabilities were probably a bit closer than people thought. Well, I would look at it in the way that everything went wrong and I still won, which probably means that I was a pretty big favorite to begin with. I do have a question to you about that match, but first, so Sergei Karjakin was originally a qualifier for the candidate tournament, but was disqualified for breaching the FIDE code of ethics after publicly expressing approval for the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine. You look at the Cold War and some of the US versus Russian games of the past, does politics, does some of this geopolitics, politics ever creep its way into the game? Do you feel the pressure, the immensity of that as it does sometimes for the Olympics, these big nations playing each other, competing against each other, almost like fighting out in a friendly way, the battles, the tensions that they have in the space of geopolitics? Yeah, I think it still does. So the president of the World Chess Federation who was just reelected is a Russian. Like I like him personally, for sure, but he is quite connected to the Kremlin. And it's quite clear that the Kremlin considers it at least a semi important goal to bring the chess crown home to Russia. So it's still definitely a factor. And I mean, I can answer for in the Karjakin case, like I don't have a strong opinion on whether he should have been banned or not. Obviously, I don't agree with anything that he says. But in principle, I think that you should ban either no Russians or all Russians. I'm generally not particularly against either, but I don't love banning wrong opinions, even if they are as reprehensible as his have been. Yeah, there's something about the World Chess Championships or the Olympics where it feels like banning is counterproductive to the alleviating some of the conflicts. We don't know. This is the thing though. We really don't know about the long term conflicts. And a lot of people try to do the right thing in this sense, which I don't really blame at all. It's just that we don't know. And I guess sometimes there are other ways you wanna try and help as well. See, like within the competition, within some of those battles of US versus Russia or so on of the past, there's also between the individuals, maybe you'll disagree with this, but from a spectator perspective, there's still a camaraderie. Like at the end of the day, there's a thing that unites you, which is this like appreciation of the fight over the chessboard. Even if you hate each other. Yeah, for sure. I think for every match that's been, you would briefly discuss the game with your opponent after the game, no matter how much you hate each other. And I think that's lovely. And Kasparov, I mean, he was quoted, like when somebody in his team asked him like, why are you talking to Karpov after the game? Like you hate that guy. And he's like, yeah, sure. But he's the only one who understands me. Yeah, the only one who understands. So that's, no, I think that's really lovely. And I would love to see that in other areas as well, that you can, regardless of what happens, you can have a good chat about the game. You can just talk about the ideas with people who understand what you understand. So if you're not playing the world championships, there's a lot of people who are saying that perhaps the world championships don't matter anymore. Do you think there's some truth to that? I said that back a long time ago as well, that for me, I don't know if it never happened. So I don't know what would have happened, but I was thinking like the moment that I realized that I'm not the best player in the world, like I felt like morally I have to renounce the world championship title, you know, because it doesn't mean anything as long as you're not the best player. So the ratings really tell a bigger, a clearer story. I think so, at least over time. Like I'm a lot more proud of my streak of being rated number one in the world, which is now since I think the summer of 2011. I'm a lot more proud of that than the world championships. How much anxiety or even fear do you have before making a difficult decision on the chessboard? So it's a high stakes game. How nervous do you get? How much anxiety do you have in all that calculations? You're sitting there for 10, 15 minutes because you're in a fog. There's always a possibility of a blunder, of a mistake. Are you anxious about it? Are you afraid of it? Really depends. I have been at times. I think the most nervous I ever been was game 10 of the world championships in 2018. I know that was just a thrilling game. I was black. I basically abandoned the queen side at some point to attack him on the king side. And I knew that my attack, if it doesn't work, I'm going to lose, but I had so much adrenaline. So that was fine. I thought I was going to win. Then at some point I realized that it's not so clear and that my time was ticking and I was just getting so nervous. I still remember what happened. Like we played this time trouble phase where he had very little time, but I had even less. And I just remember, I kind of remember much of it, just that when it was over, I was just so relieved because then it was clear that the position was probably gonna be routed in a draw. Otherwise I'm often nervous before games, but when I get there, it's all business. And especially when I'm playing well, I'm never afraid of losing when I play because I trust my instincts. I trust my skills. How much psychological intimidation is there from you to the other person, from the other person to you? I think people would play a lot better if they played against an anonymous me. I would love to have a tournament online where let's say you play 10 of the best players in the world and for each round you don't know who you're playing. That's an interesting question. There's these videos where people eat McDonald's or Burger King or Diet Coke versus Diet Pepsi. Would people be able to tell they're playing you from the style of play, do you think? Or from the strength of play? If there was a decent sample size, sure. And what about you? Would you be able to tell others? In just one game? Very unlikely. What sample size would you need to tell accurately? I feel like this is science. Yeah, I think 20 games would help a lot. Per person? Yeah. But I know that they've already developed AI bots that are pretty good at recognizing somebody's style. Okay. Which is quite fascinating. And it'd be fascinating if those bots were able to summarize the style somehow. Maybe great attacking chess, like some of the same characteristics you've been describing like great at short line calculations all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Or did you just talk shit? No, but really all the best chess players, there are basically just two camps. People who are good at longer lines or shorter lines. It's the hare and the tortoise, basically. And sometimes, you know, I feel like I'm the closest you can get to a high bridge of those. Because you got both, you're good in every position. So the middle game and end game. Yeah, and also I can think to some extent both rapidly and deeply, which a lot of people, they can't do both. But I mean, to answer your question from before, I think, yeah, I sometimes can get a little bit intimidated by my opponent, but it's mostly if there's something unknown. It's mostly if it's something that I don't understand fully. And I do think, especially when I'm playing, well, people, they just play more timidly against me than they do against each other. Sometimes without even realizing it. And I certainly use that to my advantage. If I sense that my opponent is apprehensive, if I sense that they are not gonna necessarily take all their chances, it just means that I can take more risk. And I always try and find that balance. To shake them up a little bit. Yeah. What's been the toughest loss of your career that you remember? Would that be the World Championship match? Oh yeah, for sure. Game eight in 2016. And who was it against? Against Karjakin in New York. Can you take it through the story of that game? Where were you before that game in terms of game one through seven? Yeah, so game one and two, not much happened. Game three and four, I was winning in both of them. And normally, I should definitely have converted both. I couldn't, partly due to good defense on his part, but mostly because I just, I messed up. And then after that, games five, six, and seven, not much happened. I was getting impatient at that point. So for game eight, I was probably ready to take a little bit more risks than I had before, which I guess was insane because I knew that he couldn't beat me unless I beat myself. Like he wasn't strong enough to outplay me. And that was leading to impatience somehow? And impatience. No, because I knew that I was better. I knew that I was better. I knew that I just needed to win one game and then the match is over. That's what happened in 2021 as well. Like when I won the first game against Nebo, I knew that the match was over unless I like fuck up royally, then he's not gonna be able to beat me. So what happened was that I played a kind of an innocuous opening as White, just trying to get a game, trying to get him out of book as soon as possible. Then... Okay, can you elaborate? Innocuous, get him out of the book. No, basically I set up pretty defensively as White. I wasn't really crossing into his half at the start at all. I was just, I played more like a system more than like a concrete opening. It was like, I'm gonna set up my pieces this way. You can set them up however you want. And then later where sort of the armies are gonna meet. I'm not gonna try and bother you at the start. And that means you're gonna have with as many pieces as possible kind of pure chess in the middle game without any of the lines, the standard lines in the opening. Exactly. And so there was at some point a couple of exchanges, then some maneuvering, a little bit better. Then he was sort of equalizing and then I started to take too many risks. And I was still sort of fine, but then at some point I realized that I'd gone a bit too far and I had to be really careful. Then I just froze. I just completely froze. Mentally? Yeah, mentally. What happened? I realized that all the thoughts of I might lose this. What have I done? Why did I take so many risks? I knew that I could have drawn at any moment. Just be patient. Don't give him these opportunities. What triggered that phase transition in your mind? No, it was just a position on the board. Realizing there was one particular move he played that I missed. And then I realized that this could potentially not go my way. So then I made another couple of mistakes and he, to his credit, once he realized he had the chance, he knew that this was his one chance. He had to take it. And so he did. And yeah, that's the worst I've ever felt after a chess game. I realized that I'm probably gonna lose my title against somebody who's not even close to my level. And I've done it because of my own stupidity, most of all. And that was really, really... At the time, I was all in my own head. That was hard to deal with. And I felt like I didn't really recover too much for the next game. So what I did, there was a free day after the eighth game. So I did something that I never did at any other world championship. Like after game eight, I just, I got drunk with my team. And... That's not a standard procedure. No, no. That's the only time that's happened in the world championship during the match. So yeah, I just tried to forget. But still before game nine... Game nine, I was a little bit more relaxed, but I was still a bit nervous. Then game nine, I almost lost as well. Then only game 10. Game 10, I was still, I wasn't in a great mood. I was really, really tense. The opening was good. I had some advantage. I was getting optimistic. Then I made one mistake. He could have forced a draw. And then all the negativity came back. Like, I was thinking during the game, like how am I going to play for a win with Black in the next game? Like, what am I doing? And then, you know, eventually it ended well. It didn't find the right line. I ground him down. Actually, I played at some point pretty well in the end game. And after that game, like there was such a weight. Lifted? Lifted. No, after that, there was like no thought of losing the match whatsoever. I knew that, okay, I'd basically gotten away with, not with murder, but gotten away with something. What can you say about the after game eight? Where are the places you've gone in your mind? Do you go to some dark places? We're talking about like depression. Do you think about quitting at that point? No, I mean, I think about quitting every time I lose a classical game. Or at least I used to. Like, especially if it's in a stupid way, I'm thinking like, okay, if I'm gonna play like this, if I'm gonna do things that I know are wrong, then, you know, I might as well quit. No, that's happened a bunch of times. And I've definitely gotten a bit more carefree about losing these days, which it's not necessarily a good thing. Like my hatred of losing led to me not losing a lot. Losing a lot and it also lit the fire under me that I think my performance after losses in classical chess over the last 10 years is like over 2,900. Like I really play well after a loss, even though it's really, really unpleasant. So apparently like I don't think the way that I dealt with them is particularly healthy, but it's worked. It's worked so far. But then you've discovered now a love for winning to where ultimately longevity wise creates more fun. Yeah, for sure. What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen on a day of a big chess match? It doesn't have to be world championship, but if it's a chess match you care about, what time do you wake up? What do you eat? Oh, it depends on when the game is, but let's say the game is at three, I'll probably wake up pretty late at about 11. Then I'll go for a walk, might listen to some podcasts. Maybe I'll spend a little bit of time looking at some NBA game from last night or whatever. So not chess related stuff? No, no, no, no. Then I'll get back, I'll have a big lunch, like usually like a big omelet with a bunch of salad and stuff. Then go to the game, win like a very nice clean game. Perfect day. Just go back after, relax. Like the things that make me the happiest at tournaments is just having a good routine and feeling well. I don't like it when too much is happening around me. So the tournament that I came from now was the Chess Olympiad, which is the team event. So we were a team Norway. We did horribly. I did okay, but the team in general did horribly. You won that Italy? No, no, Italy beat us, but Uzbekistan won in the end. They were this amazing team of young players. It was really impressive. But the thing is like we had a good comradery in the team. We had our meals together. We played a bit of football, went swimming, and I couldn't understand why things went wrong. And I still don't understand. But the thing is for me, it was all very nice, but now I'm so happy to be on my own at a tournament just to have my own routines, not see too many people. Otherwise just have like a very small team of people that I see. You are a kind of celebrity now. So people within the chess tournament and outside would recognize you, want to socialize, want to tell you about how much you mean to them, how much you inspire them, all that kind of stuff. Does that get in the way for you when you're like trying to really focus on the match? Are you able to block that? Like are you able to enjoy those little interactions and still keep your focus? Yeah, most of the time that's fine as long as it's not too much. But I have to admit, when I'm at home in Norway, I rarely go out without big headphones and something. Oh, like a disguise? No, not a disguise, just to block out the world. Yeah. Otherwise... Don't make eye contact? Yeah, no, so the thing is people in general are nice. I mean, people, they wish me well, and they don't bother me. Also, when I have the headphones on, I don't notice as much people turning around and all of that so I can be more of in my own world. So I like that. Yeah, what about in this perfect day after the game? Do you try to analyze what happened? Do you try to think through systematically or do you just kind of loosely think about like... No, I just loosely think about it. I've never been very structured in that sense. I know that it was always recommended that you analyze your own games, but I generally felt that I mostly had a good idea about that. Like nowadays, I will loosely see what the engine says at a certain point if I'm curious about that. Otherwise, I usually move on to the next. What about diet? You said omelet and salad and so on. I heard in your conversation with the other Magnus, Magnus number two, about you had like this bet about meat. One of you are gonna go vegan if you lose, I forget which bet. Vegetarian though. Vegetarian, sorry. And you both have an admiration for meat. Is there some aspect about optimal performance that you look for in food? Like maybe eating only like once or twice a day or a particular kind of food, like meat heavy diet. Is there anything like that? Or are you just trying to have fun with the food? I think whenever I'm at tournaments, like it's very natural to eat, at least for me to eat only twice a day. So usually I do that when I'm at home as well. So you do eat before the tournament though. You don't play fasted. No, no, no, no. But I try not to eat too heavy before the game or in general to avoid sugary stuff to have a pretty stable blood sugar level. Cause that's the easiest way to make mistake that your energy levels just suddenly drop and they don't necessarily need to be too high as long as they're pretty stable, yeah. Have you ever tried playing fasted, like intermittent fasting? So playing without having eaten. I mean, the reason I ask, you know, especially when you do a low carb diet, when I've done a person at low carb diet, I'm able to fast for a long time, like eat once a day, maybe twice a day. But I just, the mind is most focused on like really difficult thinking tasks when it's fasted. It's an interesting, and a lot of people kind of talk about that. Yeah, but you're able to kind of like zoom in and if you're doing a low carb diet, you don't have the energy stable. You know, that is true. Maybe that will be interesting to try. So what's happened for me, I played a few tournaments where I've had food poisoning and then that generally means that you're both sleep deprived and you have no energy. And what I've found is that it makes me, it makes me very calm, of course, because I don't have the energy and it makes me super creative. Interesting. Sleep deprived probably I think in general makes you creative. Just the first thing that goes away is the ability to do the simple things. That's what it affects you the most. Like you cannot be precise. So that's the only thing I'm worried about. Like if I'm fasted that I won't be precise when I play. But you might be more creative. It's an interesting trial. Fasted, yeah, potentially. What about you have been known to on a rare occasion play drunk. Is there a mathematical formula for sort of on the X axis how many drinks you had and on the Y axis your performance slash creativity? Is there like an optimal for, like one of the, would you suggest for the FIDE World Championship that people would be required to drink? Would that change things in interesting ways? Yeah, not at all. Maybe for rapid, but for Blitz, think if you're playing Blitz, you're mostly playing on short calculation and intuition. And I think those are probably enhanced if you've had a little bit of, a little bit to drink. Can you explain the physiology of why that's, why it's enhanced or the? You're just, you're thinking less. You're more confident. Oh yeah, it's confidence. I think it's just confidence. I think also like a lot of people feel like they're better at speaking languages, for instance, if they've drunk a little bit, it's just like removing these barriers. I think that it's a little bit of the same in chess. In 2012, I played the World Blitz Championship. And then I was doing horribly for a long time. I also had food poisoning there. I couldn't play at all for three days. So before the last break, I was like in the middle of the pack, like in, I don't know, 20th place or something. And so I decided like, as the last, last gasp, I'm going to go to the mini bar and just have a few drinks. And what happened is that I came back and I was suddenly relaxed and I was playing fast and I was playing confidence. And I thought I was playing so well. I wasn't playing nearly as well as I thought, but it still helped me. Like I won my remaining eight games. And if there had been one more round, I probably would have won the whole thing. But finally I was second. So generally I wouldn't recommend that, but maybe as the last resort sometimes, like if you feel that you have the ability, like obviously none of this is remotely relevant if you don't feel like you have the ability to begin with. But if you feel like you have the ability, there are just factors that make it impossible for you to show it. Like numbing your mind a bit can probably be a good thing. Yeah, well, it's interesting, especially during training, you have all kinds of sports that have interacted with a lot of athletes and grappling sports. It's different when you train under extreme exhaustion. For example, you start becoming, you start to discover interesting things. You start being more creative. A lot of people, at least in Brazilian jiu jitsu, they'll smoke weed. It creates this kind of anxiety and relaxation that kind of enables that creative aspect. It's interesting for training. Of course you can't rely on any one of those things too much, but it's cool to throw in like a few drinks every once in a while to, yeah. One, first of all, to relax and have fun. And two, to kind of try things differently, to unlock a different part of your brain. Yeah, for sure. What about supplements? Do you, are you a coffee guy? Oh no. I quite like the taste of coffee. But the thing is I've never had a job. So I've never needed to wake up early. So my thought is basically that if I'm tired, I'm tired. That's fine. Then I'll, you know, then I'll work it out. So I don't wanna ever make my brain get used to coffee. Like if you see me drinking coffee, that's, that probably means that I'm massively, massively hungover and I don't, I just want to try anything to make my brain work. Yeah, that's interesting. But for a lot of people, like you said, taste of coffee, for a lot of people coffee is part of a certain kind of ritual. Yeah, for sure. That they enjoy, you know. So, but you can have rituals without that. I know that I would enjoy it a lot. Yeah, just you don't wanna rely on it. Yeah. I also like the taste, so there's no problem there. What about exercise? So how does that, what like, what, you know, a lot of people talk about the extreme stress that chest puts in your body, physically and mentally. How do you prepare for that, to be physically and mentally? Is it just through playing chess, or do you do cardio and any of that kind of stuff? This is kind of it up and down. Like, as I said in 2013, I was in, I was in great shape. Like, I mean, generally I was exercising, doing sports every day, either playing football or tennis or even other, other sports. Otherwise, if I couldn't do that, I would try and take my bike for a ride. I had a few training camps and I played tennis against one of my seconds. Like, he's not a super fit guy, but he's always been very good at tennis. And I never like played in any organized way. And that was like, that was the perfect exercise because I was running around enough to make the games pretty competitive. And it meant that he had to run a bit less as well. But he was just, he said like, he was shocked that if we played like for two hours, I wouldn't flinch at all. Interesting. So like a combination of fun and the differential between skill result in good cardio. Yeah, but it's just that, so in those days I was pretty, I was pretty fit in that sense. I've always liked doing sports, but at times, you know, I think in winter, especially, like I never had like a schedule. So at times I'll let myself go a little bit. And I've always kind of done it more for fun than like for a concrete benefit. But now I'm at least after the pandemic, I was not in great shape. So now I'm trying to get back, get better, get better habits and so on. But I feel like I've always been the poster boy for making being fit a big thing in chess. And I always felt that it was not really a deserve because I never liked doing weights much at all. I run a bit at times, but I never liked it too much. You just love playing sports. I just love playing sports. So that I think people confuse that because I'm not like massively athletic, but I do, I am decent at sports and that sort of helped build that perception. Even though others who are top level chess players, they're more fit like Karana, for instance, he's really, really, his body is really, really strong. It's just that he doesn't. He like goes to the gym and. Yeah, if he doesn't play sports, that's the difference. And the thing about sports is also is just, it's an escape. It helps you forget for a brief moment about like the obsessions, the pursuits of the main thing, which is chess. Yeah, for sure. And I think it's, it also helps your main pursuit to feel that you're even if not mastering, but like doing well in something, in something else. Like I found that if I just juggle a ball, that makes me feel better before a game. So a skilled activity. Juggle of football, yeah. Yeah, skilled activity that you can improve on over time. It like flexes the same kind of muscle, but on the thing that you're much worse at. Yeah. It focuses you, relaxes you, that's really interesting. What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen when he's training? So like, what's a good training regimen in terms of, you know, daily kind of training that you have to put in across many days, months, and years to just keep yourself sharp in terms of chess? I would say when I'm at home, I do very little deliberate practice. I've never been that guy at all. Like I could never force myself to just sit down and work. So deliberate practice, just so maybe you can educate me, for some grandmasters, what would that look like? Just doing puzzles kind of thing? Or like? Yeah, doing puzzles and opening analysis. That would be the main things. Studying games? Just studying games, yeah, a little bit. But I feel like that's something that I do. But it's not deliberate, it's like reading an article or reading a book. Got it. Like I love chess books, I'll read just anything and I'll find something interesting. So chess books that are like on openings and stuff like that, or chess books that go over different games? Yeah, books on, so there are three main categories. There are books on openings and there are books on strategy and there are books on chess history and I find all of them very, very interesting. Like what fraction of the day would you say you have a chess board floating somewhere in your head? Meaning like you're thinking about it. Probably be a better question to ask, how many hours a day I don't have a chess board floating. Yeah. I mean it could be just floating there and nothing's happening, but like. I often do it parallel to some other activity though. And what does that look like? Like are you daydreaming like different, is it actual positions you're just fucking around with? Like fumbling with different pieces in your head? Often I've looked at a random game on my phone for instance or in a book and then my brain just keeps going at the same position analyzing it and often it goes all the way to the end game. And those are actual games or you conjure up like fake games? No, they were often based on real games and then I'm thinking like oh, but it wouldn't be more interesting if the pieces were a little bit different and then often I play it out from there. So you don't have, like you don't sit behind a computer or a chess board and you lay out the pieces and then you're. No, I'm not at all a poster boy for deliberate practice. I could never, I could never work that way. My first coach, he gave me some exercises that are at home sometimes, but he realized at some point that wasn't gonna work. Yeah. Because I wouldn't do it really or enjoy it. So what he would do instead is that at the school where I had the trainings with him, there was this massive chess library. So he was just like yeah, pick out books. You can have anything, you can have anything you want. Just pick out books you like and then you give it back the next time. So that's what I did instead. Yeah, I just absolutely raided the, then my next tournament I will try out one of the openings from that book if it was an opening book and so on. Does it feel like a struggle, like challenging? Like to be thinking those positions or is it fun and relaxing? No, it's completely fine. I don't. Like if it's a difficult position to figure out, you know, like to calculate. Then I go on to something else. Okay. Like if I can't figure it out, then you know, I go on. Change it so that it's easier to figure out. There was a point in your life where Kasparov was interested in being your coach or at least training with you. Why did you choose not to go with him? That's a pretty bold move. Was there a good reason for this? No, the first like homework exercise he gave me was to analyze, like he picked out, I think, three or four of my worst losses and he wanted me to analyze them and give him my thoughts. And it wasn't that there were painful losses or anything that that was a problem. I just didn't really enjoy that. Also, I felt that this whole structured approach and everything. Yeah. I just felt like from the start, it was a hassle. So I loved the idea of being able to pick his brain but everything else, I just, you know, couldn't see myself, couldn't see myself enjoying. And at the end of the day, I did then and always have played for fun. That's always been the main reason, so. It's great that you had the confidence to sort of basically turn down the approach of one of the greatest chess players of all time. At that time, probably the greatest chess player of all time. I don't think I thought of it that way. I just thought this is not for me. I wouldn't try another way. I don't think I was particularly thinking that this is my one opportunity or anything. It was just, yeah, I don't enjoy this. Let's try something else. When you were 13, you faced Kasparov and he wasn't able to beat you. Can you go through that match? What did that feel like? How important was that? Was that, how epic was that? We played three games. I lost two and I drew one. Right, but one draw. No, the one draw. And but didn't you say that you kind of had a better position in that? Yeah, I remember that day very well. There was a Blitz game. This was a rapid tournament and there was a Blitz tournament the day before which determined the pairings for the rapid. For people who don't know, super short games are called bullet. Kind of short games are called Blitz. Semi short games are called rapid. Yeah. And classic chess, I guess, is like very super long. Yeah. Yeah, basically, bullet is just never played over the board. So in terms of over the board chess, Blitz is the shortest. Rapid is like a hybrid between classical and Blitz. You need to have the skills to both and then classical is long. The Blitz tournament, which didn't go so well. Like I got a couple of wins, but I was beaten badly in a lot of games, including by Gary. And so there was the pairing that I had to play him which was pretty exciting. So I remember I was so tired after the Blitz tournament. Like I slept for 12 hours or something. Then I woke up like, okay, I'll turn on my computer. I'll search chess space for Kasparov and we'll go from there. So before that, I hadn't spent like a lot of time specifically studying his games. It was super intimidating because a lot of these openings I knew. I was like, oh, he was the first one to play that. Oh, that was his idea. I actually didn't know that. So I was a bit intimidated before we played. Then of course the first game, he arrived a bit late because they changed the time from the first day to the other, which was a bit strange. But everybody else had noticed it but him. Then he tried to surprise me in the opening. I think like psychologically, the situation was not so easy for him. Like clearly it would be embarrassing for him if he didn't win both games against me. Then like I was spending way too much time on my moves because I was playing Kasparov. I was double checking everything too much. Like normally I would be playing pretty fast in those days. And then at some point I calculated better than him. He missed a crucial detail and had a much better position. I couldn't convert it though. I knew what line I had to go for in order to have a chance to win. But I thought like, I'll play a bit more carefully. Maybe I can win still. I couldn't. And then I lost the second game pretty badly, which it wasn't majorly upsetting, but I felt that I had two black games against Kasparov both in the blitz and the rapid and I lost both of them without any fight whatsoever. I wasn't happy about that at all. That was like less than I thought I could be able to do. So to me, yeah, I was proud of that, but it was a gimmick. That was like a very strong IAM that had GM strength. I was like, it can happen that a player of that strength makes a draw against Gary once in a while. But I mean, I understand that I'm 13, but like still I felt a bit more gimmicky than anything. I mean, I guess it's a good thing that made me noticed, but apart from that, it wasn't. And for people who don't know, IAM is international master and GM is grand master. And you were just on the, I guess, on the verge of becoming a youngest grand master ever. I was the second youngest ever. I think I'm like the seventh youngest now. I mean, these kids these days. Kids these days. Yeah. Yeah, but I was the youngest grand master at the time in the world. Yeah. So there is a, you say it's gimmicky, but there's a romantic notions, especially as things have turned out, right? No, for sure. And have you talked to Gary since then about that? No, not really. I think he's immersed. He's still bitter, you think? No, I don't think he's bitter, but I think the game in itself was a bit embarrassing for him. Even he can't see past like... No, no, no. I think he's completely fine with that. I think like in retrospect, it's a good story. He appreciates that. I don't think that's the problem, but it never made sense for me to broach the subject with him. Yeah, it's funny just having interacted with Gary, now having talked to you, there is a little thing you still hate losing. No matter how beautiful like that moment is, because it's like, in a way it's a passing of the baton from like one great champion to another, right? But you still just don't like the fact that you didn't play a good game from Gary's perspective. Like he still is just annoyed probably that he could have played better. And we did, so we did work together in 2009, quite a lot. And that corporation ended early 2010, but we did play a lot of training games in 2009, which was interesting because he was still very, very strong. And at that time it was fairly equal. Like he was out playing me quite a bit, but I was fighting well, so it was pretty even then. So I mean, I appreciate those games a lot more than some random game from when I was 13. And maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about, but I've always found it, at least based on that game, you couldn't tell that I was gonna take his, that I was gonna take his spot. Like I made a horrible blunder and lost to an Uzbek kid in the World Rapid Championship in 2018. And I mean, granted he was part of the team that now won gold in the Chess Olympia, but he wasn't the crucial part. He barely played any games. Like it wasn't like I would think that he would become world champion because he beat me. I'm always skeptical of those who said that they knew that I was gonna be world champion after that game or at all at that time. I mean, it was easy to see that I would become a very, very strong player. Everybody could see that, but to be the best in the world or one of the best ever, that's hard to say. It is hard to say, but I do remember seeing Messi when he was 16 and 17. But hasn't that happened with other players though? Yeah, but I just had a personal experience. He did look different than, there's like magic there. Maybe you can't tell he would be one of the greatest ever, but there's still magic. But you're right. Most of the time we try to project, we see a young kid being an older person and you start to think, okay, this could be the next great person. Then we forget when they don't become that. Yeah, exactly. That's I think what happens. But when it does become. Or maybe some people are just so good at seeing these patterns that they can actually see. Aren't you supposed to do that kind of thing with fantasy football, like see the long shot and bet on them and then they turn out to be good? That's the whole point. No, you make a lot of long shot bets and then some of them come good. And then people call you a genius for making the bet. Well, let me ask you the goat question again, from fantasy perspective. Can you make the case for the greatest chess player of all time for each yourself, Magnus Carlsen, for Garry Kasparov, I don't know who else, Bobby Fischer, Mikhail Atal, anyone else, for Hikaru Nakamura? Just kidding. Yeah, I think I can make a case for myself, for Garry and for Fischer. So I'll start with Fischer. For him, it's very, very simple. He was ahead of his time, but that's like intangible. You can say that about a lot of people. But he had a peak from 1970 to 72 when he was so much better than the others. He won 20 games in a row. Also the way that he played was so powerful and with so few mistakes that he just had no opposition there. So he had just a peak that's been better than anybody. The gap between first and second was the highest. The gap between him and others was greater than it's ever been in history at any other time. And that would be the argument for him. For Garry, he's played in a very competitive era and he's beaten several generations. He was the best, well, he was the consensus best player, I would say for almost 20 years, which nobody else has done at least in recent time. So the longevity. The longevity for sure. Also at his peak, he was not quite the level of Fisher in terms of the gap, but it was similar to, or I think even a little bit better than mine. As for me, I'm of course unbeaten as a world champion in five tries. I've been world number one for 11 years straight in an even more competitive era than Garry. I have the highest chest rating of all time. I have the longest streak ever without losing a game. I think for me, the main argument would be about the era where the engines have leveled the playing field so much that it's harder to dominate. And still, I haven't always been a clear number one, but I've been number one for 11 years. And for a lot of the time, the gap has been pretty big. So I think there are decent arguments for all of them. I've said before, and I haven't changed my mind that Garry generally edges it because of the longevity in the competitive era, but there are arguments. But people also talk about you in terms of the style of play. So it's not just about dominance or the height or the, it's like just the creative genius of it. Yeah, but I'm not interested in that. In terms of greatest of all time, I'm not interested in questions of style. So for Messi, you don't give credit for the style, for the stylistic. I like, no, I like watching it, I just. But you're not gonna give points for the, so Messi gets the best ever because of the finishing. Yeah, it's the, no, it's not because of the finishing, it's because of his overall impact on the game. It's higher than anybody else's. Okay. He contributes, he just contributes more to winning than anybody else does. What's, so you're somebody who was advocated for and has done quite a bit of study of classic games. What would you say is, I mean, maybe the number one or maybe top three games of chess ever played? That doesn't interest me at all. You don't think of them, that was very curious. No, I don't think of it. I mean, I try to, I find the games interesting. I try to learn from them, but like trying to rank them has never interested me. What games pop out to you as like super interesting then? Is there things like where idea, like old school games where there was like interesting ideas that you go back, that you go back or like you find surprising and pretty cool that those ideas are developed like that? Is there something that jumps to mind? Yeah, there are several games of young Kasparov, like before he became world champion. If you're gonna ask for like my favorite player or favorite style, that's probably. Young Kasparov. Young Kasparov. Can you describe stylistically or in any other way what young Kasparov was like that you like? It was just an overflow energy in his play. So aggressive. Yeah, extremely aggressive, dynamic chess. It probably appeals to me a lot because these are the things that I cannot do as well, that it just feels very special to me. But yeah, in terms of games, I never thought about that too much. Is there memories, big or small, weird, surprising, just any kind of beautiful anecdote from your chess career? Like stuff that pops out that people might not know about? Just stuff when you look back, it just makes you smile. No, so I'll tell you about the most satisfying tournament victory of my career. So that was the Norwegian championship under 11 in 2000. Before that tournament, I was super anxious because I started like kind of late at chess. I played my first tournament when I was eight and a half. And a lot of my competitors had already played for a couple of years or even three, four years at that point. And the first time I, so I played the under 11 championship in 99. I was like a little over the middle of the pack. I'd never played against any of them before. So I didn't know what to expect at all. And then over the next year, I was just like edging a little bit closer. In each tournament, I felt like I was getting a little bit better. And when we had the championship, I knew that I was ready, that I was now at the same level of the best players. I was so anxious to show it. I remember I was just, the feeling of excitement and nervousness before the tournament was incredible. The tournament was weird because I started out, I gave away a draw to a weaker player, whom I shouldn't have drawn to. And then I drew against the other guy who was clearly like the best or second best. And at that point, I thought it was over because I thought he wouldn't give away points to others. And then the very next day he lost to somebody. So then the rest of the tournament, it was just like, I was always like playing my game and watching his. And we both won the rest of our games, but it meant that I was half a point ahead. Like the feeling when I realized that I was gonna win, that was just so amazing. It was like the first time that I was the best at my age. And at that point. You were hooked. Yeah, at that point I realized, I could actually be very good at this. So you kind of saw, what did you think your ceiling would be? Did you see that one day you could be the number one? No, I didn't think that was possible at all. But. When did you first? I could be the best in Norway. The best in Norway? At that point. When did you first? Because like I started relatively late. Right, so yeah. And also like, I knew that I studied a lot more than the others. I knew that I had a passion that they didn't have. They saw chess as something like, it was a hobby. It was like an activity. It was like going to football practice or any other sports. Like you go, you practice like once or twice a week, and then you play a tournament at the weekend. That's what you did. For me, it wasn't like that. Like I would go with my books and my board every day after school. And I would just constantly be trying to learn new things. I had like two hours of internet time on the computer each week. And I would always spend them on chess. Like I think before I was 13 or 14, I'd never opened a browser for any other reason than to play chess. Would you describe that as love or as obsession or something in between? It's everything? Yeah, everything. Yeah, everything, so I mean, it wasn't hard for me to tell at that point that I had something that the other kids didn't because I was never the one to grasp something very, very quickly. But once I started, I always got hooked and then I never stopped learning. What would you say, you've talked about the middle game as a place where you can play pure chess. What do you think is beautiful to you about chess? Like the thing when you were 11. What is beautiful to me is when your opponent can predict every single one of your moves and they still lose. How does that happen? No, like it means that at some point early, your planning, your evaluation has been better. So that you play just very simply, very clearly. It looks like you did nothing special and your opponent lost without a chance. So you're, how do you think about that? By the way, are you basically narrowed down this gigantic tree of options to where your opponent has less and less and less options to win, to escape, and then they're trapped. That's it. Essentially. Is there some aspect to the patterns themselves, to the positions, to the elegance of like the dynamics of the game that you just find beautiful that doesn't, that where you forget about the opponent? General, I try and create harmony on the board. Like what I would usually find harmonious is that the pieces work together, that they protect each other and that there are no pieces that are suboptimally placed. Or if they are suboptimally placed, they can be improved pretty easily. Like I hate when I have one piece that I know is badly placed and I can't improve it. When, yeah, when you're thinking about the harmony of the pieces, when you're looking at the position, you're evaluating it, are you looking at the whole board or is it like a bunch of groupings of pieces overlapping? I would like dancing together kind of thing. I would say it's more of the latter that would be more precise that you look. I mean, I look mostly closer to the middle, but then I would focus on one, like there are usually like one grouping of pieces on one side and then some more closer to the other side. So I would think of it a little bit that way. So, and everything's kind of gravitating to the middle. If it's going well, then yes. And in harmony. Yeah, in harmony. Or like if you can control the middle, you can more easily attack on both sides. That applies to pretty much any game. It's as simple as that. And like attacking on one side without control of the middle would feel very nonharmonious for me. Like I talked about the 10th game in the World Championship. Like that's the time I was the most nervous. And it was because it was the kind of attack that I hate where you just have to, you're abandoned one side and the attack has to work. There was one side and part of the middle as well, which I didn't control at all. And that's like the opposite of harmony for me. What advice would you give to chess players of different levels, how to improve in chess? Very beginner, complete beginner. I mean, at every level, is there something you can say? It's very hard for me to say. Because I mean, the easiest way is like love chess, be obsessed. Well, that's a really important statement. But that doesn't work for everybody. So I feel like it can feel like a grind. So you're saying the less it can feel like a grind, the better, at least for you. That's for sure. But I'm also very, very skeptical about giving advice because I think, again, my way only works if you have some combination of talent and obsession. So I'm not sure that I'd generally recommend it. Like what I've done doesn't go with what most coaches suggest for their kids. I've been lucky that I've had coaches from early on that have been very, very hands off and just allowed me to do my thing, basically. Well, there's a lot to be said about cultivating the obsession. Like really letting that flourish to where you spend a lot of hours like with the chessboard in your head and it doesn't feel like a struggle. No, so like just letting me do my thing. Like if you give me a bunch of work, it will probably feel like a chore. And if you don't give me, I will spend all of that time on my own without thinking that it's work or without thought that I'm doing this to improve my chess. Well, in terms of learning stuff, like books, there's one thing that's relatively novel from your perspective that people are starting now is there's YouTube. There's a lot of good YouTubers. You're a part time YouTuber. You have stuff on YouTube, I guess. Yeah, I have, but if you've seen my YouTube, it's mostly like, it's carefree. It's generally not high effort content. Yeah, but do you like any particular YouTubers? I could just recommend like stuff I've seen. So Aged Madar, Gotham Chess, Botez Live. I really like St. Louis Chess Club, Daniel Narodetsky, and John Bartholomew. Those are good channels, but is there something you can recommend? No, all of them are good. You know, the best recommendation I could give is Aged Madar, purely. How much did he pay you to say that? No, so the thing about that is that I haven't really, I have, so I can tell you I've never watched any of his videos from start to finish. I'm not like, I'm not the target audience, obviously. But I think the only chess YouTube video that my dad has ever watched from start to finish is Aged Madar, and he said, like, I watched one of his videos, I wanted to know what it was all about, because I think Aged Madar is like the same strength as my father, or maybe just a little bit weaker, like 1900 or something. My father is probably about 2000. And my father has played chess his whole life. He loves, he absolutely loves the game. It was like, that's the only time he's actually sat through one of those videos, and he said, like, yeah, I get it, I enjoy it. So that's the best recommendation I could give. That's the only channel that my father actually enjoys. This is hilarious. I talked to him before this to ask him if he has any questions for you. And he said, no, just do your thing, you know. No, he's so careful, he wouldn't do that. He did mention jokingly about Evan's Gambit, I think. Is that a thing? Evan's Gambit? It's some weird thing he made up. It might be an inside joke. I don't know, but he asked me to. Well, anyway. Yeah, I didn't even get the... It's something he made up. I didn't even realize that he plays the Evan's Gambit. Like, he plays a lot of Gambits that are... Wait, Evan's Gambit is a thing? Yeah, yeah, that's a thing. Like, that's an old opening from the 1800s. Captain Evans apparently invented it. Why would he mention that particular one? Yeah, I don't know. Is there something hilarious about that one? I don't know. I don't think I've ever faced the Evan's Gambit in a game. I feel like both of you are trolling me right now. But I mean, he's played a lot of other Gambits. Maybe this is the one he wanted to mention. So this, maybe this is called the Evan's Gambit as well. But I just know it as like the 2G4 Gambit. Maybe this is the one. Like this one, he has played a bunch. And he's been telling me a lot about his games in this line. It's like, oh, it's not so bad. And I'm like, yeah, but you're a pawn down. Yeah, but I can sort of see it. I can sort of understand it. And he's like, he's proud of the fact that nobody like told him to play this line or anything. He came up with it himself. And there's this, I'll tell you another story about my father. So there's this line that I call, that I called the Henry Carlson line. So at some point, you know, he never knew a lot of openings in chess, but I taught him a couple of openings as black. It's the, it's the Sveshnikov's Sicilian that I played a lot myself also during the world championship in 2018. I won a bunch of games in 2019 as well. So that's one opening. And I also taught him as black to play the Rogozin defense. And then, so the Rogozin defense goes like, goes like this. It's characterized by this bishop move. And so he would play those openings pretty, pretty exclusively as black in the tournaments that he did play. And also the Sveshnikov Sicilian is like, that's the only, two of my sisters play, have played a bunch of chess tournaments as well. And that's the only opening they know as well. So my family's portrait is very narrow. So, so this is the, this is the system. Black goes here and then we all from white takes the pawn and black takes the pawn. So at some point I was watching one of my, my father's online blitz game, blitz game. And as white, he played this, this. So this is called the Karkhan defense. He took the pawn. It was taken back, then he went with the knight. His opponent went here and then he played a bishop here. So I, I'd never seen this opening before. And I was like, wow, how on earth did he come up with that? And he said, no, I just played the Rogozin with the different colors because if the knight was here, it would be the same position. I was like, I never, I was like, how, how am I like one of the best players in the world? And I've never thought about that. So I actually started playing, I started playing this line as white with pretty decent result and then results. And it actually became kind of popular and everybody who asked about the line, it's like, I would always tell them, yeah, that's the Henry Carlson. I wouldn't necessarily explain why it was called that. I would just always call it that. So I really hope at this point, at some point, this line will be, will find its rightful name. In the, yeah, finds its way into the history books. Can you, what, what, what'd you learn about life from your dad? What role has your dad played in your life? He's taught me a lot of things, but most of all, as long as you win a chess, then everything else is fine. I think my, especially my father, but my parents in general, they, they always wanted me to get a good education and find a job and so on. Even though my father loves chess and he wanted me to play chess, I don't think he had any plans for me to be professional. I think things changed at some point. Like I was less and less interested in school and for a long time, we were kind of going back and forth, fighting about that, especially my father, but also my mother a little bit. It was at times a little bit difficult. They wanted you to go to school. Yeah, they sort of wanted me to do more school to have more options. And then I think at some point, they just gave up, but I think that sort of coincided when I was actually starting to make real money off tournaments. And after that, you know, everything's been sort of easy and like terms of the family, like they've never put any pressure on me or they've never put any demands on me. There's just, yeah, my ass has to focus on chess. That's that, that's the thing. That's, that's, that's it. Like, I think they taught me in general to be curious about the world and to get a decent general education, not necessarily from school, but like just knowing about the world around you and knowing history and being, you know, just being interested in society. I think in that sense, they've done well. And he's been with you throughout your chess career. I mean, there's something to be said about just family, support and love that you have that, you know, this world is a lonely place. It's good to have people around you that are like, yeah, they got your back kind of, you know? Yeah. It's a cliche, but I think to some extent, all the people you surround yourself with, they can help you a lot. It's only family that only has their own interests at heart. And so for that reason, like my father's like the only one that's been like constantly in the team that he's always been around. And it's for that reason that I know he has my back, no matter what. Now there's a cliche question here, but let's try to actually get to some deep truth perhaps. But people who don't know much about chess seem to like to use chess as a metaphor for everything in life. But there is some aspect to the decision making to the kind of reasoning involved in chess that's transferable to other things. Can you speak to that in your own life and in general? Like the kind of reasoning involved with chess, how much does that transfer to life out there? It just helps you make decisions. Of all kinds. Yeah, that would be my main takeaway. That you learn to make informed guesses in a limited amount of time. I mean, does it frustrate you when you have geopolitical thinkers and leaders? You know, Henry Kissinger will often talk about geopolitics as a game of chess or 3D chess. Is that too oversimplified of a projection? Or do you think that the kind of deliberations you have on the world stage is similar to the kind of decision making you have on the chessboard? Well, I'm never trying to get reelected when I play a game of chess. There's no special interest, you have to get happy. Yeah, that kind of helps. No, I can understand that. Obviously, for every action, there's a reaction and you have to calculate far ahead. It probably would be a good thing if more big players on the international scene thought a little bit more like a chess player in that sense, like trying to make good decision based on limited amount of data, rather than thinking about other factors, but it's so tough. But it does annoy me when people make moves that they know are wrong for different reasons. And they should know, if they did some calculation, they should know they're wrong. Yeah, exactly, that they should know that are wrong. And so much politics is like, it's, you're often asked to do something when it would be much better to do nothing. Like, no, but that happens in chess all the time, like you have a choice. Like I often tell people that in certain situations, you should not try and win, you should just let your opponent lose. And that happens in politics all the time. But yeah, just let your opponents continue whatever they're doing, and then you'll win. Don't try to do something just to do something. Often, they say in chess that having a bad plan is better than having no plan. It's absolute nonsense. I forget what General said it, but it was like, don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. I think they're... Also, Petrosian, the former world champion said, when your opponent wants to play Dutch defense, don't stop them. I mean, chess players will know that it's the same thing. I mean, chess players will know that it's the same thing. Actually, this reminds me, is there something you found really impressive about Queen's Gambit, the TV show? You know, that's one of the things that really captivated the public imagination about chess. People who don't play chess became very curious about the game, about the beauty of the game, the drama of the game, all that kind of stuff. Is there, in terms of accuracy, in terms of the actual games played, that you found impressive? First of all, they did the chess well, they did it accurately. And also, they found actual games and positions that I'd never seen before. And it really captivated me. Like, I would not follow the story at times. I was just trying to, wow, where the hell did I find that game? Just trying to solve the positions. So, Beth Harmon, the main character, were you impressed by the play she was doing in the, like, was there a particular style that they developed consistently? She was just, at the end, she was just totally universal. Like, at the start, she was probably a bit too aggressive, but no, she was absolutely universal. Wait, what adjective are you using? Universal in the sense that she could play in any style. Oh, interesting. And was dominant in that way. So, wow, there was a development in style too throughout the show. Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting they did that. Yeah. And it actually happened with me a bit as well. Like, I started out really aggressive. Then I became probably too technical at some point, taking a little bit too few risks and not playing dynamic enough. And then I started to get a little bit better at dynamics so that now I'm, I would say definitely the most universal player in terms of style. Are there any skills in chess that are transferable to poker? So as you're playing around with poker a little bit now, how fundamentally different of a game is it? What I find the most transferable probably is not letting past decisions dictate future thinking. Yeah. But in terms of the patterns in the betting strategies and all that kind of stuff, what about bluffing? I bluff way too much. It does seem you enjoy bluffing and Daniel Negrano was saying that you're quite good at it. But yeah, it has very little material to go by. Sample size is small. Yeah. No, I mean, I enjoy bluffing for more of the gambling aspects, the thrill of. So not the technical aspect of the bluffing like you would on the chessboard? Not bluffing in the same sense, but there is some element. But I do enjoy it on the chessboard. Like if I know that like, oh, I successfully scared away my opponent from making the best move, that's of course satisfying. In that same way, it might be satisfying in poker, right? That you represent something, you scare away your opponent in the same kind of way. And also like you tell a story, you try and tell a story and then they believe it. Yeah, tell a story with your betting, with all the different other cues. Do you like the money aspect, the betting strategies? So it's almost like another layer on top of it, right? Like it's the uncertainty in the cards, but the betting, there's so much freedom to the betting. I'm not very good at that. So I cannot say that I understand it completely. You know, when it comes to different sizing and all that, I just haven't studied it enough. How much of luck is part of poker would you say from what you've seen versus skill? I mean, it's so different in the sense that you can be one of the best players in the world and lose two, three years in a row without that being like a massive outlier. Okay, the thing that more than one person told me that you're very good at is trash talking. I don't think I am. A lot of people who make those observations about me, I think they just expect very, very little. So they expect from the best chess player in the world, that just anything that's non robotic is interesting. Also, when it comes to trash talking, like I have the biggest advantage in the world that I'm the best at what I'm doing. So trash talking becomes very, very, very easy because I can back it up. Yeah. Yeah, but a lot of people that are extremely good at stuff don't trash talk and they're not good at it. I don't think I'm very good at it. It's just that I can back it up, which makes it seem that I'm better. And also. You're even doing it now. Also being non robotic or not completely robotic helps. Yeah, yeah. You're not trash talking, you're just stating facts. That's right. Have you ever considered that there will be trash talking and over the chess board and some of the big tournaments, like adding that kind of component or even talking, you know, would that completely distract from the game of chess? No, I think it could be fun in, when people play off fan games, when they play Blitz games, like people trash talk all the time. It's a normal part of the game. So you emphasize fun a lot. Do you think we're living inside of a simulation that is trying to maximize fun? But that's only happened for the last 100 years or so. No, that's like the. Fun has always been increasing, I think. Yeah, okay. It's always been increasing, but I feel like it's been increasing exponentially. Yeah. I mean, or at least the importance of fun. But I guess it depends on the society as well. Like in the West, we've had such a Christian influence. And I mean, Christianity hasn't exactly embraced the concept of fun over time. Well, actually to push back, I think forbidding certain things kind of makes them more fun. So sometimes I think you need to say, you're not allowed to do this. And then a lot of people start doing it and then they have fun doing that because it's like it's doing a thing in the face of the resistance of the thing. So whenever there's resistance, that does somehow make it more fun. Oppressive regimes has always kind of been kind of good for comedy, no? Like, no, but I heard. Yes. Supposedly like in the Soviet Union, I don't know about fun, but supposedly comedy, like at least underground, it thrived. Yeah, there's a, well, no, it permeates the entire culture. There's a dark humor. Yeah. That sort of the cruelty, the absurdity of life really brings out the humor amongst the populace plus vodka on top of that. But this idea that, for example, Elon Musk has that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. That it seems like the most absurd, silly, funny thing seems to be the thing that. So it happens more often than it should. And it somehow becomes viral in our modern connected world. And so the fun stuff, the memes spread, and then we start to optimize for the fun meme that seems to be a fundamental property of the reality we live in. And so emerges the fun maximizer in all walks of life, like in chess, in poker, in everything. I think. You're not skeptical. No, I'm not skeptical. I'm just, I'm just taking it all in. But I find it interesting and not at all impossible. Do you ever get lonely? Oh yeah, for sure. Like a chess player's life is by definition pretty lonely because you have nobody else to blame but yourself when you lose or you don't achieve the results that you want to achieve. It's difficult for you to find comfort elsewhere. It's in your own mind. Yeah. It's you versus yourself, really. Yeah, really. But it's, you know, it's part of the profession. But I think any like sport or activity where it's just you and your own mind is just by definition lonely. Are you worried that it destroys you? Oh, not at all. As long as I'm aware of it, then it's fine. And I don't think the inherent loneliness of my profession really affects the rest of my life in a major way. What role does love play in the human condition and in your lonely life of calculation? Well, you know, I'm like everybody else trying, you know... Trying to find love? No, not necessarily like trying to find love. Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. I'm just trying to find my way. Yeah. And my love for the game, obviously it comes and goes a little bit, but there's like, there's always at least some level of love. So that doesn't go away. But I think in other parts of life, I think it's just about doing things that make you happy, that give you joy, that also makes you more receptive to love in general. So that has been my approach to love now for quite a while that I'm just trying to live my best life and then the love will come when it comes and in terms of romantic love, it has come and gone in my life. It's not there now, but I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about, you know, not worried, but more like trying to just be a good version of myself. I cannot always be the best version of myself, but at least try to be good. Yeah, and keep your heart open. What is this Daniel Johnson song? True love will find you in the end. No, it may or may not. But it will only find you if, oh fuck, how does it go? If you're looking, so like you have to be open to it. Yeah. It may or may not. Yeah, yeah. And no matter what, you're gonna lose it in the end because it all ends, the whole thing ends. Yeah, yeah. I don't think stressing over that, like obviously it's so human that you can't help it to some degree, but I feel like stressing over love, that's the blueprint for whether you're looking or you're not looking or you're in a relationship or married or anything, like stressing over it is like the blueprint for being unhappy. Just to clarify confusion I have, just a quick question. How does the knight move? Ha, so the knight moves in an L and unlike in shogi it can move both forwards and backwards. It is quite a nimble piece. It can jump over everything, but it's less happy in open position where it has to move from side to side quickly. I am generally more of a bishops guy myself for the old debate. I just prefer quality over the intangibles, but I can appreciate a good knight once in a while. Last simple question. What's the meaning of life, Magnus Carlsen? There's obviously no meaning to life. Is that obvious? I think we're here by accident. There's no meaning, it ends at some point, but it's still a great thing. So. Yeah, you can still have fun even if there's no meaning. Yeah, you can still have fun. You can try and pursue your goals, whatever they may be, but I'm pretty sure there's no special meaning and trying to find it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. For me, life is both meaningless and meaningful for just being here, trying to make, not necessarily the most of it, but the things that make you happy both short term and also long term. Yeah, it seems to be full of cool stuff to enjoy. It certainly does. And one of those is having a conversation with you. Magnus, it's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I can't wait to see what you do in this world and thank you for creating so much elegance and beauty on the chessboard and beyond. So thanks for talking today, brother. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And I wanted to say this at the start, but I never really got the chance. I was always a bit apprehensive about doing this podcast because you are a very smart guy and your audience is very smart and I always had a bit of imposter syndrome. So I'll tell you this now after the podcast. So please do judge me, but I hope you've enjoyed it. I loved it. You're a brilliant man. And I love the fact that you have imposter syndrome because a lot of us do. And so that's beautiful to see even at the very top, but you still feel like an imposter. Thank you, brother. Thanks for talking today. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Magnus Carlsen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fischer. Chess is a war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Magnus Carlsen: Greatest Chess Player of All Time | Lex Fridman Podcast #315

Will there be a war between U.S. and China in the 21st century? If there is, we're finished. A war between the U.S. and China would destroy the possibilities of organized life on Earth. The following is a conversation with Noam Chomsky, his second time on the podcast. This episode is focused on the war in Ukraine. And it is a departure from the way I usually do this podcast in several ways. Noam is a strong and healthy 93 year old, but this conversation is remote to be cautious. It is brief, only one hour. It is more of an interview than a conversation due to the limitations of our audio and video connection. I decided it's best to get Noam's clear thoughts on this war and the complicated geopolitics of today and the rest of the 21st century that is unrolling before us, with our decisions and actions fully capable of either helping humanity flourish or unleashing global destruction and suffering. As a brief aside, perhaps you know this, but let me mention that I traveled to Ukraine and saw, heard, felt things that are haunting and gave me a lot to think about. Because of that, I've been really struggling to edit the videos I recorded. I hope to finish it soon. I'm sorry for these delays, and I'm especially sorry to the people there who gave me their time, their story, their heart. Please be patient with me. I hope you understand. This is the Lex Readman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Noam Chomsky. You have studied and criticized powerful leaders and nations in times of global conflict and struggles for power. So let me ask you, what do you think motivates Vladimir Putin? Is it power, legacy, fame, geopolitical influence, or the flourishing of a nation he loves and represents? I have no particular insight into Putin's mind. I can only watch the actions over the last 20, 25 years and read the statements. Took power about almost 25 years ago, has held it since as prime minister or president. His first task was to try to overcome the chaos and disarray of the 1990s. During the 90s, Gorbachev had a proposal, he called for a cooperative enterprise with the West. They would share an effort to rebuild what he called a common European home, in which there would be no military alliances, just Russia, Western US accommodation, with a move towards social democracy and former USSR and comparable moves in the United States. Well, that was quickly smashed. The United States had no interest in that. Clinton came along pretty soon, early 90s. Russia was induced to adopt what was called shock therapy, a harsh, quick market transformation, which devastated the economy, created enormous social disarray, rise of what are called oligarchs, kleptocrats, high mortality. And Clinton started the policy of expanding NATO to the East in violation of firm, unambiguous promises to Gorbachev not to do so. Yeltsin, Putin's friend, opposed it. Other Russian leaders opposed it, but they didn't react. They accepted it. When Putin came in, he continued that policy. Meanwhile, did reconstruct the Russian economy. Russian society became a viable, deeply authoritarian society under his tight control. He himself organized a major kleptocracy with him in the middle, apparently became very wealthy. On the international front, he pretty much continued the former policies as US diplomats, practically every diplomat who had any contact with Russia had been dispatched there, knew about it, as they all warned from the 90s that what Clinton was doing, expanded by Bush afterwards, was reckless and provocative, that Russia did have a clear red line before Putin, which he adhered to, namely no NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. This is pretty much how things went on through the 2000s. In 2008, President Bush did invite Ukraine to join NATO. That was vetoed by France and Germany, but under US pressure, it was kept on the agenda. The Russians continued to object. Western diplomats, including the present current head of the CIA and his predecessors, warned that this was reckless, provocative, shouldn't be done, continued. Putin didn't do much. He stayed with it until pretty recently. After 2014, the uprising that threw out the former president, who was pro Russian, instituted anti Russian laws. The United States and NATO began a policy of moving to effectively integrate Ukraine into the NATO command, joint military exercises, training, sending weapons and so on. Putin objected. Other Russian leaders objected. They're unified on this, but didn't do much. They continued with the proposals that Ukraine be excluded from NATO, and that there be some form of autonomy for the Donbass region. Meanwhile, in reaction to the uprising, the Maidan Uprising 2014, Russia moved in and took over Crimea, protecting its warm water base and major naval base. The US objected and recognised it, but things continued without notable conflict. I won't go through all the details. When Joe Biden came in, he expanded the program of what US military journals call a defective integration of Ukraine within NATO, proposed September 2021, proposed enhanced program of preparation for NATO mission, extended with a formal statement in November. We're now practically up to the invasion. Putin's position hardened. France, mainly France, to an extent Germany, did make some moves towards possible negotiations. Putin dismissed them, moved on to the direct invasion. What are his, to get back to your question, what motivates him? I presume what he's been saying all along, namely establishing his legacy as a leader who overcame the extensive destruction of Russia, massive weakening over it, restored his position as a world power, prevented Ukraine from entering NATO. It may have further ambitions as to dominating and controlling Ukraine, very likely. There is a theory in the West that he suddenly became a total madman who wants to restore the great Russian empire. This is combined with the gloating over the fact that the Russian military is a paper tiger that can't even conquer cities a couple of kilometers from the border, but defended not even by a regular army. But somehow along with this, he's planning to attack NATO powers, conquer Europe, who knows what. It's impossible to put all these concepts together. They're totally internally contradictory. So what's my judgment? I think what motivates him is what he's been demonstrating in his actions. Restore Russia as a great power, restore its economy, control it as a total dictatorship, enrich himself and his cronies, establish a legacy as a major figure in Russian history, make sure that Ukraine does not join NATO, and probably by now he's hardened the position, maintain Crimea and the southeastern corridor to Russia, and some ambiguous agreements about the Donbass region. That looks like his motivation. There's much speculation that goes beyond this, but it's very hard to reconcile with the assessment of the real world by the same people who are making the grandiose speculations. I don't think anything's changed. It seems to me his policies are about the same as what they were. They've changed in response to changed circumstances. So very recently, right before the invasion, a few weeks before, for the first time, Putin announced recognition of the independence of the Donbass region. That's a stronger position than before, much stronger. Up till then, he had pretty much kept to the longstanding position of some kind of accommodation within a federal structure in which the Donbass region would have considerable autonomy. So that's a harshening of the position. So even the human mind of Vladimir Putin, the man? I can't read his mind. I can only see the policies that he's pursued and the statements that he's made. There are many people speculating about his mind. And as I say, these speculations are, first of all, not based on anything. Never said anything about trying to conquer NATO. But more importantly, they are totally inconsistent with the analyses of Russian power by the same people who are making the speculations. So we see the same individual speculating about Putin's grandiose plans to become Peter the Great and conquer, start attacking NATO powers, on the one hand saying that, on the other hand gloating over the fact that his military powers so minuscule he can't even conquer towns a couple miles from the border. Well, it's impossible to make sense of that position. Why did Russia invade Ukraine on February 24th? Who do you think is to blame? Who do you place the blame on? Well, who's to blame? Any power that commits aggression is to blame. So I continue to say, as I have been for many months, that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is on a par with such acts of aggression as the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Stalin, Hitler invasion of Poland, other acts of supreme international crime under international law. Of course he's to blame. The U.S. committed $6.9 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Should U.S. keep up with this support? There are two questions. One has to do with providing support for defense against the invasion, which is certainly legitimate. The other is seeking ways to end the crime before even worse disasters arise. Now that second part is not discussed in the West, barely discussed. Anyone who dares to discuss it is immediately subjected to a flood of invective and hysterical condemnation. But if you're serious about Ukraine, there are two things you ask. One, what can we do to support Ukraine in defense against aggression? Second, how can we move to end the war before it leads to even worse destruction of Ukraine, more starvation worldwide, reversing the limited efforts to deal with global warming, possibly moving up an escalation out of the war, the nuclear war. That's the second half of the borrow, a phrase attributed to Winston Churchill. There's a lot of war, war, but no joy, joy, joy. And there ought to be joy, joy if you care about Ukraine and the rest of the world. Can it be done? We don't know. Official U.S. policy is to reject a diplomatic settlement, to move to weaken Russia severely so that it cannot carry out further aggression, but not do anything on the joy, joy side, not think of how to bring the crimes and atrocities to an end. That's the second part of the question. So, yes, the U.S. should continue with the kind of calibrated support that's been given. The Pentagon wisely has vetoed initiatives to go well beyond support for defense up to attack on Russia. So far, the Pentagon, which seems to be the dovish component in the U.S. administration, has vetoed plans which very likely would lead on to nuclear war, which would destroy everything. So calibrated provision of weapons to blunt the offensive, allow Ukraine to defend itself, if sensible, combined with efforts to see if something can be done to bring the crimes and atrocities to an end and avert the much worse consequences that are in store, that would be instead the U.S. only dealing with the first. And all of our discussions limit themselves to the first in the United States and in Britain, not in Europe. Do you worry about nuclear war in the 21st century? How do we avoid it? Anyone who doesn't worry about nuclear war doesn't have a gray cell functioning. Of course, everyone is worried about nuclear war, or should be. It's very easy to see how steps could be taken, even been recommended, that would lead to nuclear war. So you can read articles even by liberal commentators who say we should drop all the pretenses, just go to war against Russia. They have to be destroyed. You can see proposals coming from Congress, the leading figures, saying we should establish a no fly zone. Pentagon objects. They point out correctly that to establish a no fly zone, you have to have control of the air, which means destroying Russian air defense systems, which happen to be inside Russia. We don't know that Russia won't react. Even the call, now almost universal, to ensure that Ukraine wins, drives out all the Russians, drives them out of the country, sounds nice on paper, but notice the assumption. The assumption is that Vladimir Putin, this madman who just seeks power and is out of control, will sit there quietly, accept defeat, slink away, not use the military means that of course he has to destroy Ukraine. One of the interesting comments that came out in today's long article, I think Washington Post reviewing a lot of leaks, actually not leaks, actually presented by U.S. intelligence and U.S. leaders about the long build up to the war. One of the points it made was surprised on the part of British and U.S. leaders about Putin's strategy and his failure to adopt, to fight the war the way the U.S. and Britain would, with real shock and awe, destruction of communication facilities, of energy facilities and so on. They can't understand why he hasn't done all that. If you want to make it very likely that that will happen, then insist on fighting until somehow Russia faces total defeat. Then it's a gamble, but if he's as crazy and insane as you claim, presumably will use weapons that he hasn't used yet to destroy Ukraine. So the West is taking an extraordinary gamble with the fate of Ukraine. Gambling that the madman, lunatic, mad Vlad won't use the weapons he has to destroy Ukraine and set the stage for escalation of the latter which might lead to nuclear war. It's quite a gamble. How much propaganda is there in the world today in Russia, in Ukraine, in the West? It's extraordinary. In Russia, of course, it's total. Ukraine is a different story. They're at war. They expect propaganda. In the West, let me quote Graham Fuller, very highly placed in U.S. intelligence, one of the top officials for decades dealing mostly with Russia and Central Asia. He recently said that in all the years of the Cold War, he's never seen any extreme Russia phobia to the extent that he sees today. I think that's pretty accurate. I mean, the U.S. has even canceled Russian outlets, which means if you want to find out what Sergei Lavrov or other Russian officials are saying, you can't look it up on their own outlets. You have to go through Al Jazeera, Indian state television or someplace where they still allow Russian positions to be expressed. And of course, the propaganda is just outlandish. I think Fuller is quite correct on this. In Russia, of course, you expect total propaganda. There's nothing, any independent outlets such as there were have been crushed. If the media is a source of inaccuracies and even lies, then how do we find the truth? I don't regard the media as a source of inaccuracies and lies. They do exist. But by and large, media reporting is reasonably accurate. Reporters, the journalists themselves, as in the past, do courageous, honest work. I've written about this for 50 years. My opinion hasn't changed. But they do pick certain things and not other things. There's selection, there's framing, there's ways of presenting things. All of that forms a kind of propaganda system, which you have to work your way through. But it's rarely a matter of straight, outright lying. So there's a difference between propaganda and lying? Of course, a propaganda system shapes and limits the material that's presented. It may tell the truth within that framework. So let me give you a concrete example, which I wrote about extensively. I have a book called Manufacturing Consent jointly with Edward Herman. It's about his term, which I had accepted a propaganda model of the media. A large part of the book is defense of the media. Defense of the media against harsh attacks by Freedom House. Several volumes they published attacking the media, charging that the media were so adversarial and dishonest that they lost the war in Vietnam. Well, it took the trouble of reading through the two volumes. One volume is charges, the next volume is evidence. Turns out that all of the evidence is lies. They had no evidence. They were just lying. The media, in fact, the journalists were doing honest, courageous work. But within a certain framework. A framework of assuming that the American cause was basically just, basically honorable, making mistakes, doing bad things. But the idea of questioning that the United States was engaged in a major war crime. That's off the record. So unfortunately, there was this crime and that crime which harmed their effort to do good and so on. Well, that's not lying, it's propaganda. So how do we find the truth? How do we find the truth? That's what you have a brain for. It's not deep. It's quite shallow. It's not quantum physics. Put a little effort into it. Think about, look for other sources. Think a little about history. Look at the documentary record. They're all pretty well fools together and you can get a reasonable understanding of what's happening. If you could sit down with Vladimir Putin and ask him a question or talk to him about an idea, what would you say? I would walk out of the room, just as with almost any other leader. I know what he's going to say. I read the party line. I read his pronouncements. Doesn't want to hear from me. Am I going to say, why did you carry out a crime that's comparable to the US invasion of Iraq and the Stalin Hitler invasion of Poland? Am I going to ask that question? If I met with John F. Kennedy today, would I ask, why did you radically escalate the war in Vietnam, launch the US Air Force, start authorized napalm, drive launch programs to drive villagers who you know are supporting the National Liberation Front, drive them into concentration camps to separate them from the forces they're defending? Would I have asked him that? Of course not. Do you think the people who led us into the war in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the war in Ukraine are evil? I mean, it's very hard to be in a position of leadership of a violent, aggressive power without carrying out evil acts. Are the people evil? I mean, I'm not their moral advisors. I don't know anything about them. I look at their actions, their statements, their policies, evaluate those. Their families can evaluate their personalities. Will there be a war between US and China in the 21st century? If there is, we're finished. A war between the US and China would destroy the possibilities of organized life on Earth. In fact, we can put it differently. Unless the US and China reach an accommodation and work together and cooperatively, it's very unlikely that organized human society will survive. We are facing enormous problems, problems, destruction of the environment, endemics, threat of nuclear war. None of these decline of democratic functioning of an arena for rational discourse. None of these things have boundaries. We either work together to overcome them, which we can do, or we'll all sink together. That's the real question we should be asking. What the United States is doing is not helping. So the current US policy, which is perfectly open, nothing secret about it, is to what's called encircle China with sentinel states, South Korea, Japan, Australia, which will be heavily armed, provided by Biden with precision weapons aimed at China, backed by major naval operations, huge naval operations just took place in the Pacific. Many nations participating, RIMPAC didn't get reported here, as far as I know, but an enormous operation threatening China. All of this to encircle China, to continue with policies like that. Somebody like Pelosi, just to probably make her look more, I don't know what her motives are, taking a highly provocative, stupid act, opposed by the military, opposed by the White House. Yes, acts like that, which of course called for the response of highly dangerous. We don't have to do that. We don't have to increase the threat. I mean, right now, the last NATO summit, take a look at it. For the first time, it invited to attend countries that are in the sentinel states surrounding China and circling China from the east. And it, in fact, extended the range of NATO to what's called the Indo Pacific region. So all of us by now, the North Atlantic includes the whole Indo Pacific region to try to ensure that we can overcome the so called China threat. Certainly, we might ask exactly what the China threat is. It's done sometimes. So former prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating, well known international diplomat, had an article a while ago in the Australian press. That's right in the claws of the dragon asking, going through what the China threat is. He ran through the various claims, finally concluded the China threat is that China exists. It exists. It does not follow U.S. orders. It's not like Europe. Europe does what the United States tells it to do, even if it doesn't like it. China just ignores what the U.S. says. There's a formal way of describing this. There are two versions of the international order. One version is the U.N. based international order, which theoretically we subscribe to, but we don't accept. The U.N. based international order is unacceptable to the United States because it bans U.S. foreign policy. Literally, it explicitly bans the threat or use of force in international affairs, except under circumstances that almost never arise. Well, that's U.S. foreign policy. Try to find a president who isn't engaged in the threat or use of force in international affairs. So obviously we can't accept the U.N. based international system, even though under the Constitution, that's the supreme law of the land. It doesn't matter. So the United States has what's called a rule based international order. That's acceptable because it's the United States that sets the rules. So we want a rule based international order where the U.S. sets the rules. In commentary in the United States, even in scholarship, almost 100 percent calling for a rule based international order. Is that false? No, it's true. Is it propaganda? Of course it's propaganda because of what's not said and because of what's presupposed. An answer to an earlier question. Well, China does not accept the rule based international order. So when the U.S. imposes demands, Europe may not like them, but they follow them. China ignores them. So take, for example, the U.S. sanctions on Iran. The U.S. has to punish Iran because the United States pulled out of the, unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreements. So in order to punish Iran for wrecking the agreements in violation of Security Council orders, we impose very harsh sanctions. Europe strongly opposes the sanctions, condemn them harshly, but it adheres to them because you don't disobey U.S. orders. That's too dangerous. China ignores them. They're not keeping to the rule based international order. Well, that's unacceptable. In fact, it's said pretty openly. You can hear the Secretary of State and others saying China is challenging our global hegemony. Yes, they are. They don't accept U.S. global hegemony, especially in the waters off China. They do a lot of rotten things, China. I mean, internally, there's all kind of repression, violence and so on. But first of all, that's not a threat to us. And second, the U.S. doesn't care about it because it easily accepts and supports comparable crimes and atrocities internal to allies. So, yes, we should protest it, but without hypocrisy. We have no standing to protest it. We support comparable things in all sorts of other places. Just take a look at the U.S. foreign aid. The leading recipient of U.S. foreign aid is Israel, which is engaged in constant terror, violence and repression, constant, almost daily. Second leading recipient is Egypt, one of the worst dictatorships in Egypt's history. About 60,000 people in jail, political prisoners tortured and so on. Do we care? Second leading recipient. I mean, what are we talking about? That's why most of the world just laughs at us. There's a lot of failure to understand here about why the global South doesn't join us in our proxy war against Russia, fighting Russia until it's severely weakened. They don't join us. Here, the question is, what's wrong with them? They look into their minds to figure out what's wrong. They have a different attitude. They say, yes, we oppose the invasion of Ukraine, terrible crime. But what are you talking about? This is what you do to us all the time. You don't care about crimes like this. That's most of the global South. We can't comprehend that because we're so insulated that we are just obviously right and everyone who doesn't go along must be wrong. Do you think the United States as a global leader, as an empire, may collapse in this century? Why and how will it happen and how can we avoid it? The United States can certainly harm itself severely. That's what we're doing right now. Right now, the greatest threat to the United States is internal countries tearing itself apart. I really don't have to run through it with you. Take a look at something as elementary as mortality. The United States is the only country outside of war, life expectancy is declining, mortality is increasing. It doesn't happen anywhere. You take a look at health outcomes generally. They're among the worst among the developed societies and health spending is about twice as high as the developed societies. You look at the charts, all of this starts around the late 1970s, early 80s. If you go back to that point, the United States was pretty much a normal developed country in terms of mortality, incarceration, health expenses, other measures. Since then, the United States has fallen off the chart. It's gone way off the chart. Well, that's the neoliberal assault of the last 40 years. It's had a major effect on the United States. It's left a lot of anger, resentment, violence. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has simply drifted off the spectrum. It's not a normal political party in any usual sense, not what it used to be. Its main policy is block anything in order to regain power. That's its policy, stated almost openly by McConnell, followed religiously by the entire Congress. That's not the acts of a political party. Of course, democracy has declined. Violence has increased. The judgements, the decisions of the Supreme Court, the court's the most reactionary court in memory. To go back to the 19th century, decision after decision is an effort to create a country of white supremacist Christian nationalists. I mean, scarcely hidden, if you read the opinions of Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and others. So yes, we can destroy ourselves within. And in fact, the ways we're doing it are almost astonishing. So it's well known, for example. Everybody knows that U.S. infrastructure, bridges, subways, and so on, is in terrible shape, needs a lot of repair. The American Association of Engineers gives it a failing mark every year. Finally, Congress did pass a limited infrastructure bill, say rebuild bridges and so on. It has to be called a China Competition Act. We can't rebuild their bridges because they're falling apart. We have to rebuild their bridges to beat China. It's pathological. And that's what's happening inside the country. Take Thomas's decision in the recent case in which he invalidated a New York law. This is last October, a couple of weeks ago, and validated a New York law going back to 1913 that required people to have some justification if they wanted to carry concealed weapons in public. He went through that with a very interesting decision. He said the United States, he said, is such a decaying, collapsing, hateful society that people just have to have guns. I mean, how can you expect somebody to go to the grocery store without a gun in a country as disgusting and hideous as this one? It's essentially what he said. Those weren't his words, but they were the import. What gives you hope about the United States, about the future of human civilization? Human civilization will not survive unless the United States takes a leading position in dealing with and overcoming the very severe crises that we face. The United States is the most powerful country, not only in the world, but in human history. There's nothing to compare with it. What the United States does has an overwhelming impact on what happens in the world. When the United States alone pulls out of the Paris agreements on dealing with climate change and insists on maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that provides some mitigation. When the United States does that, as it did under Trump, it's a blow to the future of civilization. When Republican states today, right now, say they're going to punish corporations that seek to take climate change into account and their investments. The U.S. is telling the world, we want to destroy all of us. Again, not their words, but their import. That's what they mean. So as long as we have a political organization dedicated to gaining power at any cost, maximizing profit, no matter what the consequences, no future for human civilization. Noam, thank you for talking today. Thank you for talking once again. And thank you for fighting for the future of human civilization. Again, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Noam Chomsky. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Voltaire. It is forbidden to kill. Therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers, and to the sound of trumpets. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Noam Chomsky: Putin, Ukraine, China, and Nuclear War | Lex Fridman Podcast #316

The universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far flung event. It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them. The following is a conversation with John Verweke, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. I highly recommend his lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, which covers the history and future of humanity's search for meaning. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's John Verweke. You have an excellent 50 part lecture series online on the Meaning Crisis. And I think you describe in the modern times an increase in depression, loneliness, cynicism, and wait for it, bullshit. The term used technically by Harry Frankfurt and adopted by you. So let me ask, what is meaning? What are we looking for when we engage in the search for meaning? So when I'm talking about meaning, I'm talking about what's called meaning in life, not the meaning of life. That's some sort of metaphysical claim. Meaning in life are those factors that make people rate their lives as more meaningful, worth living, worth the suffering that they have to endure. And when you study that, what you see is it's a sense of connectedness, connectedness to yourself, to other people, to the world, and a particular kind of connectedness. You want to be connected to things that have a value and an existence independent of your egocentric preferences and concerns. This is why, for example, having a child is considered very meaningful, because you're connecting to something that's going to have a life and a value independent of you. Now, the question that comes up for me, well, there's two questions. One is, why is that at risk right now? And then secondly, and I think you have to answer the second question first, which is, well, yeah, but why is meaning so important? Why is this sense of connectedness so important to human beings? Why, when it is lacking, do they typically fall into depression, potentially mental illness, addiction, self destructive behavior? And so the first answer I give you is, well, it's that sense of connectedness. And people often express it metaphorically. They want to be connected to something larger than themselves. They want to matter. They don't mean it literally. I mean, if I chained you to a mountain, you wouldn't thereby say, oh, now my life is so fulfilling, right? So what they're trying to convey, they're using this metaphor to try and say, they want to be connected. They want to be connected to something real. They want to make a difference and matter to it. And one way of asking them, well, you know, what's meaningful is, tell me what you would like to continue to exist even if you weren't around anymore, and how are you connected to it, and how do you matter to it? That's one way of trying to get at what is the source of meaning for you, is if you were no longer there, you would like it to continue existing. That's not the only part of the definition probably, because there's probably many things that aren't a source of meaning for me that maybe I find beautiful that I would like to continue existing. Yes. If it contributes to your life being meaningful, you are connected to it in some way, and it matters to you, and you matter to it in that you make some difference to it. That's when it goes from being just sort of true, good, and beautiful, to being a source of meaning for you in your life. Is the meaning crisis a new thing, or has it always been with us? Is it part of the human condition in general? That's an excellent question. And part of the argument I made in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is there's two aspects to it. One is that there are perennial problems, perennial threats to meaning. And in that sense, human beings are always vulnerable to despair. You know, the book of Ecclesiastes is, it's all vanity, it's all meaningless. But there's also historical forces that have made those perennial problems more pertinent, more pressing, more difficult for people to deal with. And so the meaning crisis is actually the intersection of perennial problems, finding existence absurd, experiencing existential anxiety, feeling alienated, and then pressing historical factors, which have to do with the loss of the resources that human beings have typically cross historically and cross culturally made use of in order to address these perennial problems. Is there something potentially deeper than just a lack of meaning that speaks to the fact that we're vulnerable to despair? You know, Ernest Becker talked about the, in his book Denial of Death, about the fear of death and being an important motivator in our life. As William James said, death is the warm at the core of the human condition. Is it possible that this kind of search for meaning is coupled or can be seen from the perspective of trying to escape the reality, the thought of one's own mortality? Yeah, Becker and the terror management theory that have come out of it, there's been some good work around sort of providing empirical support for that claim. Some of the work, not so good. So which aspects do you find convincing? Can you steel man that case and then can you argue against it? So what aspects I find convincing is that human finitude, being finite, being inherently limited is very problematic for us. Given the extensive use of the word problematic, I like that you used that word to describe one's own mortality as problematic. Because people sort of on Twitter use the word problematic when they disagree with somebody. But this, to me, seems to be the ultimate problematic aspect of the human condition is that we die and it ends. I think I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm trying to get you to consider that your mortality is not an event in the future. It's a state you're in right now. That's what I'm trying to shift. So your mortality is just a... We talk about something that causes mortality fatal. But what we actually mean is it's full of fate. And I don't mean in the sense of things are prewritten. What I mean is the sense of the universe doesn't care about your personal narrative. You can just have met the person that is going to be the love of your life. It's the culmination of your whole project for happiness, and you step into the street and a truck hits you and you die. That's mortality. Mortality isn't just some far flung event. It's that every moment we are subject to fate in that way. So you can think of lots of little deaths you experience whenever all the projects and the plans you make come up against the fact that the universe can just roll over them. The death is the indifference of nature of the universe to your existence. And so in that sense, it is always here with us. Yeah, but you're vulnerable in so many ways other than just the ending of your biological life. Because it's interesting, if you rate what people fear most, death is not number one. They often put public speaking as number one. Because the death of status or reputation can also be a profound loss for human beings. It can drive them into despair. So as the terror management folks would say, as Ernest Becker would say, that a self report on a survey is not an accurate way to capture what is actually at the core of the motivation of a human being. That we could be terrified of death. And we, from childhood, since we realized the absurdity of the fact that the right ends, we've learned to really try to forget about it, try to construct illusions that allow us to escape momentarily or for prolonged periods of time the realization that we die. Okay, so first, I took it seriously, but now I want to say why there's some empirical work that makes me want to reconsider it. So terror management theory is you do things like you give people a list of words to read. And in those lists are words associated with death, cough, and funeral. And then you see what happens to people. And generally, they start to become more rigid in their thinking. They tend to identify with their worldview. They lose cognitive flexibility. That's if you present it to them in that third person perspective. But if you get them to go in the first person perspective and imagine that they're dying and that the people that they care about are there with them, they don't show those responses. In fact, they show us an increase in cognitive flexibility, an increase in openness. See, so I'm trying to say we might be putting the cart before the horse. It might not be death per se, but the kind of meaning that is present or absent in death that is the crucial thing for us. By the way, to push back, I don't think you took it seriously. I don't think you truly steel manned the case because you're saying that death is always present with us, yes, but isn't there a case to be made that it is one of the major motivators? Nietzsche, will to power, Freud wanting to have sex with your mother, all the different explanations of what is truly motivating us human beings. Isn't there a strong case to be made that this death thing is a really damn good, if not anything, a tool to motivate the behavior of humans? I'm not saying that the avoidance of death is not significant for human beings, but I'm proposing to you that human beings have a capacity for considering certain deaths meaningful and certain deaths meaningless, and we have lots of evidence that people are willing to sacrifice their biological existence for a death they consider meaningful. Are you personally afraid of your death if you think about it? As somebody who produces a lot of ideas, records them, writes them down, is a deep thinker, admired thinker, and as the years go on, become more and more admired, does it scare you that the ride ends? No. I mean, you have to talk to me on all my levels. I'm a biological organism, so if something's thrown at my head, I'll duck and things like that. But if you're asking me, do I long to live forever, no. In the Buddhist tradition, there are practices that are designed to make you aware of simultaneously the horror of mortality and the horror of immortality. The thought of living forever is actually horrific to me. Are those the only two options? Like when you're sitting with a loved one or watching a movie you just really love or a book you really love, you don't want it to end, you don't necessarily always flip it to the other aspect, the complete opposite of the thought experiment. What happens if the book lasts forever? There's got to be a middle ground, like the snooze button. Sure you don't want to sleep forever, but maybe press the snooze button and get an extra 15 minutes. There's surely some kind of balance, that fear seems to be a source of an intense appreciation of the moment, in part, and that's what the Stoics talked about, sort of the meditate on one's mortality. Sure. It seems to be a nice wake up call to that life is full of moments that are beautiful and then you don't get an infinite number of them. Right, and the Stoic response was not the project of trying to extend the duration of your life, but to deepen those moments so they become as satisfying as possible so that when death comes it does not strike you as any kind of calamity. Does that project ring true for your own personal feelings? I think so. Do you think about your mortality? I used to. I don't so much anymore. Part of it, as I'm older and your temporal horizon flips somewhere in your 30s or 40s, you don't live from your birth, you live towards your death. That's such a beautiful phrase, the temporal horizon flips. That's so true. That's so true. At what point is that? The point before which the world of opportunity and possibility is infinite before you. Yeah, it's like Peter Pan. There's all these golden possibilities and you fly around between them. Yes, very much. And then when it flips, you start to look for a different model, the Socratic, the Stoic model, Buddhism has also influenced me, which is more about, wait, when I look at my desires, I seem to have two meta desires. In addition to satisfying a particular desire, I want whatever satisfies my desire to be real and whatever is satisfying my desire to not cause internal conflict but bring something like peace of mind. And so I more and more move towards how can I live such that those two meta desires are a constant frame within which I'm trying to satisfy my specific desires. What do you think happens after we die? I think mind and life go away completely when we die. And I think that's actually significantly important for the kind of beings that we are. We are the kinds of beings that can come to that awareness and then we have a responsibility to decide how we're going to comport ourselves towards it. Can you linger on what that means, the mind goes away? Like when you're playing music and the last instrument is put down, the song is over. Doesn't mean the song wasn't beautiful. Doesn't mean the song wasn't complex. Doesn't mean the song didn't add to the value of the universe and its existence, but it came to an end. Is there some aspect in which some part of mind was there before the human and remains after? Something like panpsychism or is it too much for us limited cognitive beings to understand? Something like panpsychism, I take it seriously. I don't think it's a ridiculous proposal, but I think it has insoluble problems that make me doubt it. Any idea that the mind is some kind of ultimately immaterial substance also has for me just devastating problems. Those are the two kinds of framework that people usually propose in order to support some kind of idea of immortality. I find both very problematic. The fact that we participate in distributed cognition, that most of our problem solving is not done as individuals but in groups, this is something I work on, I've published on that. I think that's important. But most of the people who do work on systems of distributed cognition think that while there's such a thing as collective intelligence, there's no good evidence that there's collective consciousness. In fact, it's often called zombie agency for that reason. And so while I think it's very clear that no one person runs an airline, and there's a collective intelligence that solves that problem, I do not think that collective intelligence supports any kind of consciousness. And so therefore, I don't think the fact that I participate, which I regularly and reliably do in distributed cognition, gives me any reason to believe that that participation grounds some kind of consciousness. Okay, there's so many things to mention there. First of all, distributed cognition, maybe that's a synonym for collective intelligence. So that means a bunch of humans individually are able to think, have cognitive machines, and are somehow able to interact through the process of dialogue, as you talk about, to morph different ideas together, like this idea landscape together. It's so interesting to think about, okay, well, you do have these fascinating distributed cognition systems, but consciousness does not propagate in the same way as intelligence. But isn't there a case, if we just look at intelligence, if we look at us humans as a collection of smaller organisms, which we are, and so there's like a hierarchy of organisms, tiny ones, work together to form tiny villages that you can then start to see as individual organisms that are then also forming bigger villages and interacting different ways and function becomes more and more complex. And eventually we get to us humans to where we start to think, well, we're an individual, but really we're not. There's billions of organisms inside us, both domestic and foreign. So isn't that building up consciousnesses like turtles all the way up to us, our consciousness? Why does it have to stop with us humans? Are we the only, like, is this the phase transition when it becomes a zombie like giant hierarchical village that first like, oh, there's like a singing angels and it's consciousness is born in just us humans. Do bacteria have consciousness? Not bacteria, but maybe you could say bacteria does, but like the interesting complicated organisms that are within us have consciousness. I think it's proper to argue, and I have, that like a paramecium or bacteria has a kind of agency and even a kind of intelligence, kind of sense making ability. But I do not think that we can attribute consciousness, at least what we mean by consciousness, this kind of self awareness, this ability to introspect, et cetera, et cetera, to bacteria. Now the reason why distributed cognition doesn't have consciousness, I think is a little bit more tricky. And I think there's no reason in principle why there couldn't be a consciousness for distributed cognition, collective intelligence. In fact, many, you know, philosophers would agree with me on that point. I think it's more an issue of certain empirical facts, bandwidth, density of connection, speed of information transfer, et cetera. It's conceivable that if we got some horrible Frankensteinian neural link and we linked our brains and we had the right density and dynamics and bandwidth and speed that a group consciousness could take shape. I don't have any argument in principle against that. I'm just saying those contingent facts do not yet exist, and therefore it is implausible that consciousness exists at the level of collective intelligence. So you talk about consciousness quite a bit. So let's step back and try to sneak up to a definition. What is consciousness? For me, there are two aspects to answering that question. One is, what's the nature of consciousness? How does something like consciousness exist in an otherwise apparently nonconscious universe? And then there's a function question, which is equally important, which is, what does consciousness do? The first one is obviously, you know, problematic for most people, like, yeah, consciousness seems to be so different from the rest of the nonconscious universe. But I put it to you that the function question is also very hard, because you are clearly capable of very sophisticated, intelligent behavior without consciousness. You are turning the noises coming out of my face hole into ideas in your mind, and you have no conscious awareness of how that process is occurring. So why do we have consciousness at all? Now, here's the thing. There's an extra question you need to ask. Should we attempt to answer those questions separately, or should we attempt to answer them in an integrated fashion? I make the case that you actually have to answer them in an integrated fashion. What consciousness does, and what it is, we should be able to give it a unified answer to both of those. Can you try to elucidate the difference between what consciousness is and what it does, both of which are mysteries, as you say, state versus action? Can you try to explain the difference that's interesting, that's useful, that's important to understand? So that's putting me in a bit of a difficult position, because I actually argue that trying to answer them separately is ultimately incoherent. But what I can point to are many published articles in which only one of these problems is addressed, and the other is left unaddressed. So people will try and explain what qualia are, how they potentially emerge, without saying what do they do, what problems do they help to solve, how do they make the organism more adaptive. And then you'll have other people who will say, no, no, this is what the function of consciousness is, but I don't know, I can't tell you, I can't solve the hard problem, I don't know how qualia exist. So what I'm saying is many people treat these problems separately, although I think that's ultimately an incoherent way to approach the problem. So the hard problem is focusing on what it is. Yes. So the qualia, that it feels like something to experience a thing, that's what consciousness is. And does is more about the functional usefulness of the thing, to the whole beautiful mix of cognition and just function in everyday life. Okay, you've also said that you can do very intelligent things without consciousness. Yes, clearly. Is that obvious to you? Yes. I don't know what I'm doing to access my memory. It just comes up, and it comes up really intelligently. But the mechanisms that create consciousness could be deeply interlinked with whatever is doing the memory access, that's doing the... Oh, I think so, in fact, yes, yes. So I guess what I'm trying to say in this will probably sneak up to this question a few times, which is whether we can build machines that are conscious, or machines that are intelligent, one level intelligent or beyond, without building the consciousness. I mean, ultimately, that's one of the ways to understand what consciousness is, is to build the thing. We can either sort of from the Chomsky way, try to construct models, like he thinks about language in this way, try to construct models and theories of how the thing works, or we can just build the damn thing. Exactly. And that's a methodological principle in cognitive science. In fact, one of the things that sort of distinguishes cognitive science from other disciplines dealing with the nature of cognition in the mind is that cognitive science takes the design stance. It asks, well, could we build a machine that would not only simulate it, but serve as a bona fide explanation of the phenomenon? Do you find any efforts in cognitive science compelling in this direction? In terms of how far we are, there's, on the computational side of things, something called cognitive modeling, there's all these kinds of packages that you can construct simplified models of how the brain does things and see if complex behaviors emerge. Do you find any efforts in cognitive, or what efforts in cognitive science do you find most inspiring and productive? I think the project of trying to create AGI, artificial general intelligence, is where I place my hope of artificial intelligence being of scientific significance. This is independent of technological socioeconomic significance, which is already well established. But being able to say because of the work in AI, we now have a good theory of cognition, intelligence, perhaps consciousness, I think that's where I place my bets is in the current endeavors around artificial general intelligence. And so tackling that problem head on, which has now become central, at least to a group of cognitive scientists, is I think what needs to be done. And when you think about AGI, do you think about systems that have consciousness? Let's go back to what I think is at the core of your general intelligence. So right now, compared to even our best machines, you are a general problem solver. You can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. And some of our best machines have a little bit of transfer. They can learn this game and play a few other well designed rule bound games, but they couldn't learn how to swim, etc., things like that. And so what's interesting is what seems to come up, and this is some of my published work, in all these different domains of cognition across all these different problem types is a central problem. And since we do have good sort of psychometric evidence that we do have some general ability that's a significant component of our intelligence, I made an argument as to what I think that general ability is. And so it's happening right now. The amount of information in this room that you could actually pay attention to is combinatorial explosive. The amount of information you have in your memory, long term memory, and all the ways you could combine it, combinatorial explosive. The number of possibilities you can consider, also combinatorial explosive. The sequences of behavior you can generate, also combinatorial explosive. And yet somehow you're zeroing in. The right memories are coming up, the right possibilities are opening up, the right sequences of behavior, you're paying attention to the right thing. Not infallibly so, but so much so that you reliably find obvious what you should interact with in order to solve the problem at hand. That's an ability that is still not well understood within AGI. To filtering out the gigantic waterfall of data. Right. It's almost like a Zen Koan. What makes you intelligent is your ability to ignore so much information and do it in such a way that is somewhere between arbitrary guessing and algorithmic search. And to a fault sometimes of course that you, based on the models you construct, you forget, you ignore things that you should probably not ignore. And that, hopefully we can circle back to it Lux, is related to the meaning issue. Because the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent make us perennially susceptible to self deceptive, self destructive behavior because of the way we misframe the environment in fundamental ways. So to you, meaning is also connected to ideas of wisdom and truth and how we interpret and understand and interact intellectually with the environment. Yes. So what is wisdom? Why do we long for it? How do we and where do we find it? What is it? This is what you use to solve your problems, as I was just describing. Rationality is how you use your intelligence to overcome the problems of self deception that emerge when you're trying to solve your problems. So it's that meta problem. And then the issue is, do you have just one kind of knowing? I think you have multiple ways of knowing, and therefore you have multiple rationalities. And so wisdom is to coordinate those rationalities so that they are optimally constraining and affording each other. So in that way, wisdom is rationally self transcending rationality. Right. So life is a kind of process where you jump from rationality to rationality and pick up a village of rationalities along the way that then turns into wisdom. Yes, if properly coordinated. You mentioned framing. Yes. So what is framing? Is it a set of assumptions you bring to the table in how you see the world, how you reason about the world, how you understand the world? So it depends what you mean by assumptions. If by assumption you mean a proposition, representational or rule, I think that's much more downstream from relevance realization. I think relevance realization refers to, again, constraints on how you are paying attention. And so for me, talking about framing is talking about this process you're doing right now of salient landscaping. What's salient to you? And how is what's salient constantly shifting in a sort of a dynamic tapestry? And how are you shaping yourself to the way that salient landscaping is aspectualizing the world, shaping it into aspects for interaction? For me, that is a much more primordial process than any sort of beliefs we have. And here's why. If we mean by beliefs a representational proposition, then we're in this very problematic position. Because then we're trying to say that propositions are ultimately responsible for how we do relevance realization. And that's problematic because representations presuppose relevance realization. So I represent this as a cup. The number of properties it actually has, and that I even have epistemic access to, is combinatorial explosive. I select from those a subset and how they are relevant to each other insofar as they are relevant for me. This doesn't have to be a cup. I could be using it as a hat, I could use it to stand for the letter V, all kinds of different things. I could say this was the 10th billion object made in North America. Representations presuppose relevance realization. They are therefore dependent on it, which means relevance realization isn't bound to our representational structures. It can be influenced by them, but they are ultimately dependent on relevance realization. Let's define stuff. Relevance realization. Yes. What are the inputs and the outputs of this thing? What is it? What are we talking about? What we're talking about is how you are doing something very analogous to evolution. So if you think about that adaptivity isn't in the organism or in the environment, but in a dynamical relation and then what does evolution do? It creates variation and then it puts selective pressure and what that does is that changes the niche constructions that are available to a species. It changes the morphology. You also have a loop. It's your sensory motor loop and what's constantly happening is there are processes within you that are opening up variation and also processes that are putting selection on it and you're constantly evolving that sensory motor loop. So you might call your cognitive fittedness, which is how you're framing the world is constantly evolving and changing. I can give you two clear examples of that. One, your autonomic nervous system, parasympathetic and sympathetic. The sympathetic system is biased to trying to interpret as much of reality as threat or opportunity. The parasympathetic is biased to trying to interpret as much of the environment as safe and relaxing and they are constantly doing opponent processing. There's no little man in you calculating your level of arousal. There's this dynamic coupling opponent processing between them that is constantly evolving your arousal. Similarly, your attention, you have the default mode network, task network. The default mode network is putting pressure on you right now to mind wander, to go off, to drift, right, and then the task focus network is selecting out of those possibilities the ones that will survive and go into and so you are constantly evolving your attention. Okay, so there's a natural selection of ideas that a bunch of systems within you are generating and then you use the natural selection. What is the selector, the object that you're interacting with, the glass? Relevance realization, once again, you just describe how it happens. Yes. You didn't describe what the hell it is. So what's the goal? What are we talking about? So relevance realization is how you interact with things in the world to make sense of why they matter, what they mean to you, to your life. Yes, and notice the language you just used, you're starting to use the meaning in life language. Good or bad? That's good. Okay. That's good. So what does that evolution of your sensory motor loop do? It gives you, and here I'll use a term from Marlon Ponti, it gives you an optimal grip on the world. So let's use your visual attention again. Okay, here's an object. How close should I be to it? Is there a right? That's what you want to do with it. Exactly. Exactly. So you have to evolve your sensory motor loop in order to get the optimal grip that actually creates the affordance of you getting to a goal that you're trying to get to. Yeah, but you're describing physical goals of manipulating objects, so this applies, the task, the process of relevance realization is not just about getting a glass of water and taking a drink. No. It's about falling in love. Yeah, of course. What else is there? Well, there's obvious. Between those two options. I can show you how you're optimally gripping in an abstract cognitive domain. Okay? So a mammal goes by and most people will say there's a dog. Now why don't they say, they might, but typically, you know, probabilistically they'll say there's a dog. They could say there's a German Shepherd, there's a mammal, there's a living organism, there's a police dog. Why that? Why there? Why did they stop Eleanor Rush called these basic level? Well, what you find is that's an optimal grip because it's getting you the best overall balance between similarity within your category and difference between the other categories. It's allowing you to properly fit to that object in so far as you're setting yourself up to, well, I'm getting so as many of the similarities and differences I can on balance because they're in a trade off relationship that I need in order to probably interact with this mammal. That's optimal grip, not right. It's at the level of your categorization. You evolve these models of the world around you and on top of them, you do stuff like you build representations, like you said, yes. What's the salience landscape? Salience meaning attention landscape. Salience is what grabs your attention or what results from you directing your attention. I clap my hands, that's salient, it grabs your attention. Your attention is drawn to it, that's bottom up, but I can also say you left big toe and now it's salient to you because you directed your attention towards it. That's top down and again, opponent processing going on there. Whatever stands out to you, what grabs your attention, what arouses you, what triggers at least momentarily some affect towards it, that's how things are salient. What salience I would argue is, is how a lot of unconscious relevance realization makes information relevant to working memory. That's when it now becomes online for direct sensory motor interaction with the world. So you think the salience landscape, the ocean of salience extends into the subconscious mind? I think relevance does, but I think when relevance is recursively processed, relevance realization such that it passes through sort of this higher filter of working memory and has these properties of being globally accessible and globally broadcast, then it becomes the thing we call salience. And that's, that's, that's really good evidence. There's really good evidence from my colleague at UFT, University of Toronto, Lynn Hasher, that that's what working memory is. It's a higher order relevance filter. That's why things like chunking will get way more information through working memory because it's basically making, it's basically monitoring how much relevance realization has gone into this information. Usually you have to do an additional kind of recursive processing. And that tells you, by the way, when do you need consciousness? When do you need that working memory and that salience landscaping? It's when you're facing situations that are highly novel, highly complex and very ill defined that require you to engage working memory. Okay, got it. So relevance realization is in part the thing that constructs that basic level thing of a dog. When you see it, when you see a dog, you call it a dog, not a German Shepherd, not a mammal, not a biological meat bag. It's a dog. Wisdom. Yes. So what is wisdom? If we return, I think as part of that, we got to relevance realization and then wisdom is accumulation of rationalities. You described the rationality as a kind of starting from intelligence, much of puzzle solving and then rationalities like the meta problem of puzzle solving and then what wisdom is the meta, meta problem of puzzle solving? Yes, in the sense that the meta problem you have when you're solving your puzzles is that you can often fall into self deception. You can misprint. Self deception, right. Right. So knowledge overcomes ignorance, wisdom is about overcoming foolishness if what we mean by foolishness is self deceptive, self destructive behavior, which I think is a good definition of foolishness. And so what you're doing is you're doing this recursive relevance realization. You're using your intelligence to improve the use of your intelligence and then you're using your rationality to improve the use of your rationality. That's that recursive relevance realization I was talking about a few minutes ago. Think about a wise person. They come into highly often messy, ill defined, complex situations usually where there's some significant novelty and what can they do? They can zero in on what really matters, what's relevant and then they can shape themselves, salience landscaping to intervene most appropriately to that situation as they have framed it. That's what we mean by a wise person and that's how it follows out of the model I've been presenting to you. So when we say self deception, I mean part of that implies that it's intentional. Part of the mechanism of cognition, you're modifying what you should know for some purpose. Is that how you see the word self deception? No, because I belong to a group of people that think the model of self deception as lying to oneself ultimately makes no sense. Because in order to lie to you, I have to know something you don't and I have to depend on your commitment to the truth in order to modify your behavior. I don't think that's what we do to ourselves. I think, and I'm going to use it in the technical term and thank you for making space for that earlier on, I think we can bullshit ourselves, which is a very different thing than lying. So what is bullshit and how do we bullshit ourselves, technically speaking? Yeah. Frankfurt and this is inspired by Frankfurt and other people's work based on Frankfurt's work. On bullshit. Yeah. Classic essay. It's a pretty good title. I think it's one of the best things he wrote. He wrote a lot of good things. The title or the essay? The essay. The title's good too. It's always an icebreaker in certain academic settings. So let's contrast the bullshit artist from the liar. The liar depends on your commitment to the truth. The bullshit artist is actually trying to make you indifferent to the question of truth and modify your behavior by making things salient to you so that they are catchy to you. So a prototypical example of bullshit is a commercial, a television commercial. You watch these people at a bar getting some particular kind of alcohol and they're gorgeous and they're laughing and they're smiling and they're clear eyed. You know that's not true and they know you know it's not true, but here's the point. You don't care because there's gorgeous people smiling and they're happy and that's salient to you and that catches your attention. And so you know, go into a bar, you know that won't happen when you drink this alcohol, you know it. Yeah. But you buy the product because it was made salient to you. Now you can't lie to yourself, Lex. Salience can catch attention, but attention can drive salience. So this is what I can do. I can make something salient by paying attention to it and then that will tend to draw me back to it again, which, and you see what happens, which means it tends to catch my attention more so that when I go into the store, that bottle of liquor catches my attention and I buy it. And that's, why is that bullshit? Because what you're doing is being caught up in the salience of things independent from whether or not that salience is tracking reality. Is it independent or is it loosely connected? Because it's not so obvious to me when I see happy people at a bar that I don't in part believe that, well, my experience has been maybe different. Logically, I can understand, but maybe there is a bar out there where it's all happy people dancing. In fact, most of the bars I go to these days in Texas, there's pretty lots of happy people. I think you can, I mean, there's probably variation, although I think it's very the truth seeking in there. Let's say the intent is at least to try and shut off your truth seeking. It might not completely succeed, but that's the intent. At times it can completely succeed because I can give you pretty much gibberish and never let it will motivate your behavior. There's an episode from the classic Simpsons, not the modern Simpsons, the classic Simpsons where there's aliens and they're running for office in the United States. Now I'm a Canadian, so this doesn't quite work for me, but right. And this speech goes like this, my fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball, but we must move forward, not backward. Upward, not forward, twirling, twirling towards freedom and people go, and there's a rush. There's nothing there. And yet it's great satire because a lot of political speech is exactly like that. There's nothing there. Right? Well, I'm not saying all political speech, I said a lot. There's a fundamental difference between, and it's so hilarious, I remember that episode. There's a fundamental difference between that absurd sort of non secular speech and political speech because one of the things is political speech is grounded in some sense of truth. And so if that requires you talking about alternative facts and weird self destructive oxymoronic phrases, isn't that approaching pure bullshit? No, I think pure bullshit, like the vacuum is very difficult to get to, but I get the point. So what exactly is truth? Is it possible to know? I think Spinoza's right about truth, that truth is only known by its own standard, which sounds circular. There's a way in which he didn't mean that circularly, and I think this is also converges with Plato. These are two huge influences on me. I think we only know the truth retrospectively when we go through some process of self transcendence, when we move from a frame to a more encompassing frame so that we can see the limitations and the distortions of the earlier frame. You have this when you have a moment of insight. Insight is you doing, you are re realizing what is relevant. You go, oh, oh, I thought she was aggressive and angry. She's actually really afraid. I was misframing this and you change what you find relevant. You have those aha moments. So do you think it's possible to get a sense of objective reality? So is it possible to get to the ground level of something that you can call objective truth? Or are we always on shaky ground? I think those moments of transcendence can never get us to an absolute view from nowhere. And so this is Drew Hyland's notion of finite transcendence. We are capable of self transcendence, and therefore we are creatures who can actually raise the question of truth, or goodness, or beauty, because I think they all share this feature. But that doesn't mean we can transcend to a godhood, to some absolute view from nowhere that takes in all information and organizes it in a comprehensive whole. But that doesn't mean that truth is thereby rendered valueless. I think a better term is real. And real and illusory are comparative terms. You only know that something's an illusion by taking something else to be real. And so we're always in a comparative task, but that doesn't mean that we can somehow jump outside of our framing in some final manner and say, this is how it is from a God's eye point of view. So what do you think, if I may ask, of somebody like Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism? So where the core principle is that reality exists independently of consciousness and that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception. So they have that, you do have that ability to know reality. There's two things. Knowing that there's an independent reality is not knowing that independent reality. Those are not the same thing. Yeah, but I think objectivism would probably say that our human reason is able to have contact with that. Then I would respond and say, I believe, in fact, ultimately, in a conformity theory of knowing that the deepest kind of knowing is when there's a contact, a conformity between the mind, the embodied mind and reality, and here's where I guess I'd push back on Rand. I would say you have to acknowledge partial knowledge as real knowledge, because if you don't, you're going to fall prey to Meno's paradox. Meno's paradox is, you know, it's in Plato, right? To know P. Well, if I don't know P, I'm going to go looking for it. But if I don't know P, how could I possibly recognize it when I found it? I have no way of recognizing it. I have no way of knowing that I found it. So I must know P. But if I know P, then I don't need to learn about it. I don't need to go searching. So learning doesn't exist. Knowledge is impossible. The way you break out of that paradox is saying, no, no, no, it is possible to partially know something. I can know it enough that it will guide me to recognizing it, but that's not the same as having a complete grasp of it, because I still have to search and find what I don't yet possess in my knowledge. So partial knowledge has to be real knowledge. Right. Partial knowledge is still knowledge. Yes. What do you think about somebody like Donald Hoffman, who thinks the reality is an illusion, so complete illusion, that we're given this actually really nice definition or idea that you talked about, that there's a tension between the illusory and what is real. He says that basically we've taken that and we've ran with the real to the point where the real is not at all connected to some kind of physical reality. I hope to talk to him at some point. You were supposed to talk at one point, and so I have to talk in his absence. I think that, first of all, I think saying that everything is an illusion is like saying everything is tall. It doesn't make any sense. It's a comparative term. You have to say, against this standard of realness, this is an illusion. And he uses arguments from evolution, which are problematic to me because it's like, well, you seem to be saying that evolution is true, that it really exists, and then some of our cognition and our perception has access to reality, math and presumably some science has access to reality. And then what he seems to be saying is, well, a lot of your everyday experience is illusory, but we do have some contact with reality, whereby we can make the arguments as to why most of your experience, most of your everyday experience is an illusion. But to me, that's not a novel thing. That's Descartes. That's the idea that most of our sense experience is untrustworthy, but the math is what connects us to reality. That's how he interpreted the Copernican revolution. Oh, look, we're all seeing the sun rise and move over and set, and it's all an illusion, but the math, the math gets us to the reality. Well, I think he makes a deeper point that most of cognition is just evolved and operates in the illusory world. How does he know that things like cognition and evolution exist? I think there's an important distinction between evolution and cognition, right? No, no, I'm just saying that's not the point I'm making. I'm making a point that he's claiming that there are two things that really exist. Why are they privileged? He basically says that, look, the process of evolution makes sense, right? Like it makes sense that you get complex organisms from simple organisms through the natural selection process. Whereas how you get to transfer information from generation to generation, it makes sense. And then he says that there's no requirement for the cognition to evolve in a way that it would actually perceive and have direct contact with the physical reality. Except that cognition evolved in such a way that it could perceive the truth of evolution. And you can't treat evolution like an isolated thing. Evolution depends on Darwinian theory, genetics. It depends on understanding plate tectonics, the way the environment changes. It depends on how chromosomes are structured. Actually, that's an interesting question to him, where I don't know if he actually would push back on this, is how do you know evolution is real? Yes. I think he would be open to the idea that it is part of the illusion that we constructed, that there's some, in some sense, it is connected to reality, but we don't have a clear picture of it. I mean, that's an intellectually honest statement then, if most of our cognition as thinking beings is operating at every level in an illusory world, then it makes sense that this, one of the main theories of science, that's evolution, is also a complete part of this illusory world. Right. But then what happens to the premise for his argument leading to the conclusion that cognition is illusory? I think he makes a very specific argument about evolution as an explanation of why the world is, of our cognition operating in an illusory world. But that's just one of the explanations. I think the deeper question is why do we think we have contact with reality, with physical reality? It's, we could be very well living in a virtual world constructed by our minds in a way that makes that world deeply interesting in some ways, whether it's somebody playing a video game or we're trying to, through the process of distributed cognition, construct more and more complex objects. Like why do we have to, why does it have to be connected to like physics and planets and all that kind of stuff? Okay. So if we're going to say like we're now considering it as a possibility rather than it's a conclusion based on arguments, because the arguments, again, will always rely on stipulating that there is something that is known. These are the features of cognition. Cognition is capable of illusion. That's a true statement. You're somehow in contact with the mind. Why does the mind have this privileged contact and other aspects like my body do not? So that's, but let's put that aside and now let's just consider it. Now when we put it that way, it's not an epistemic question anymore. It's an existential question and here's my reply to you. There's two possibilities. Either the illusion is one that I cannot discover, sort of, you know, the matrix on steroids or something. There's no way. Because what I do, I can't find out that it's an illusion or it's an illusion, but I can find out that it's an illusion. Those are the two possibilities. Nothing changes for me if those are the two possibilities, because if I could not find, possibly find out, it is irrational for me to pay any attention to that possibility. So I could keep doing the science as I'm doing it. If there's a way of finding out, science is my best bet, I believe, for finding out if it's, what's true and what's an illusion. So I keep doing what I'm doing. So it's an argument if you move it to that, that makes no existential difference to me. Oh man, that is such a deeply philosophical argument. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Nobody's saying science doesn't work. It's an interesting question, just like before humans were able to fly, they would ask a question, can we build the machine that makes us fly? In that same way, we're asking a question to which we don't know an answer, but we may know in the future, how much of this whole thing is an illusion? And I think in a second category, the first, I forgot which one, yes, science will be able to help us discover this. Otherwise, yes, for sure, that doesn't matter. If we're living in a simulation, we can't find out at all, then it doesn't matter. But yes, the whole point is as we get deeper and deeper understanding of our mind of cognition, we might be able to discover like how much of this is a big charade constructed by our mind to keep us fed or something like that. Some weird, some weird, very simplistic explanation that it will ultimately in its simplicity be beautiful, or as we try to build robots and instill them, instill them with consciousness, with ability to feel, those kinds of things, we'll discover, well, let's just trick them into thinking they feel and have consciousness and they'll believe it. And then they'll have a deeply fulfilling and meaningful lives. And on top of that, they will interact with us in a way that will make our lives more meaningful. And then all of a sudden, it's like at the end of Animal Farm, you look at pigs and humans and you look at robots and humans and you can't tell the difference between either. And we in that way start to understand that much of this existence could be an illusion. Okay, well, I have two responses to that. First is the progress that's being made on like AGI is about making whatever the system is that's going to be the source of intelligent more and more dynamically and recursively self correcting. That's part of what's happening. Extrapolating from that, you get a system that gets better and better at self correcting, but that's exactly what I was describing before as the transformative theory of truth. The other response to that is people think of science just as sort of end proposition. Let me just use the evolutionary example again, right? If I'm gathering the evidence, I need to know a lot of geology, I need to know plate tectonics, I need to know about radioactive decay, I need to know about genetics, and then in order to measure all those things, I need to know how microscopes work, I need to know how pencils and paper work, I need to know how rulers work, I need to know how English... You can't isolate knowledge that way. And if you say, well, most of that's an illusion, then you're in a weird position of saying somehow all of these illusions get to this truth claim. I think it goes in reverse. If you think this is the truth claim, the measuring and all the things that scientists would do to gather on all the ways the theories are converging together, that also has to be fundamentally right, because it's not like Lego, it is an interwoven whole. Yes, it definitely is interwoven, but I love how I'm playing the devil advocate for the illusion world. But there's an aspect to truth that has to be consistent, deeply consistent across an entire system. But inside a video game, that same kind of consistency evolves. There's rules about interactions, there's game theoretic patterns about what's good and bad and so on, and there's sources of joy and fear and anger, and then understanding about a world, what happens in different dynamics of a video game, even simple video games. So there's no, even inside an illusion, you can have consistency and develop truths inside that illusion and iteratively evolve your truth with the illusion. Okay, but that comes back. Is that process genuinely self correcting, or are you in the simulation in which there is no possible doorway out? Because if, my argument is, if you find one or two doorways, that feeds back. In fact, you can't just say, this is the little tiny island where we have the truth. That's the point I'm making. Right. But what if you find that, I think there is doorways, if that's the case. And what if you find a doorway and you step out, but you're yet in another simulation? I mean, that's the point. That's so self correcting. When you fix the self deception, you don't know if there's other bigger self deceptions you're operating on. Of course. That makes sense. That's right. But again, we're back to when I step into the second simulation, is it, can I get the doorway out of that or right? Because if you just make the infinite regressive simulations, you basically said, I have a simulation that I can never get out of. Yeah. I think there's always a bigger pile of bullshit is the claim I'm trying to make here. Okay. Let me dance around meaning once more. Sure. I ask people on this podcast or at a bar or to imaginary people I talk to in a room when I'm all by myself, the question of the meaning of life. Do you think this is a useful question? You drew a line between meaning in life and meaning of life. Do you think this is a useful question? No, I think it's like the question, what's north of the North Pole or what time is it on the sun? It sounds like a question, but it's actually not really a question because it has a presupposition in it that I think is fundamentally flawed. If I understand what people mean by it, and it's actually often not that clear, but when they talk about the meaning of life, they are talking about there are some feature of the universe in and of itself that I have to discover and enter into a relationship with and there's in that sense, a plan for me or something. And so that's a property of the universe. That's a very deep, serious, metaphysical, ontological claim. You're claiming to know something fundamental about the structure of reality. There were times when people thought they had a worldview that legitimated it, like God is running the universe and God cares about you and there's a plan, et cetera. But I think a better way of understanding meaning is not... Meaning is like the graspability. Remember, I talked about optimal grip, it's like the graspability of that cup. Is that in me? No. Is it in the cup? No, because a fly can't grasp it. Well, graspability is in my hand, well, I can't grasp Africa. No, no, there is a real relation, fittedness between me and this cup. Same thing with the adaptivity of an organism. Is the adaptivity of a great white shark in the great white shark? Drop it in the Sahara, dies, okay? Meaning isn't in me, I think that's romantic bullshit, and it isn't in the universe, it is a proper relationship. I've coined the phrase transjective, it is the binding relationship between the subjective and the objective. And therefore, when you're asking the question about the meaning of life, you are, I think, misrepresenting the nature of meaning. Just like when you ask, what time is it on the sun? You're misrepresenting how we derive clock time. At the risk of disagreeing with a man who did 50 lectures on the meaning crisis, let me hard disagree. But I think we probably agree, but it's just like a dance, like any dialogue. I think meaning of life gets at the same kind of relationship between you and the glass of water, between whatever the forces of the universe that created the planets, the proteins, the multi cell organisms, the intelligent early humans, the beautiful human civilizations and the technologies that will overtake them. It's trying to understand the relevance realization of the Big Bang to the feeling of love you have for another human being. It's reaching for that, even though it's hopeless to understand. It's the question, the asking of the question is the reaching. Now it is, in fact, romantic bullshit, technically speaking. But it could be that romantic bullshit is actually the essence of life and the source of its deepest meaning. Well, I hope not. But technically speaking, romantic bullshit, meaning romantic in the philosophical sense, yes. I mean, what is poetry? What is music? What is the magic you feel when you hear a beautiful piece of music? What is that? Oh, but that's exactly to my point. Is music inside you or is it outside you? It's both and neither. And that's precisely why you find it so meaningful. In fact, it can be so meaningful you can regard it as sacred. What you said, I don't think, and you preface that we might not be in disagreement, right? What you said is, no, no, no, there is a way in which reality is realizing itself. And I want my relevance realization to be in the best possible relationship, the sort of meta optimal grip to what is most real. I totally agree. I totally think that's one of the things, I said this earlier, one of our meta desires is whatever is satisfying our desires is also real. I do this with my students, I'll say, you know, because romantic relationships sort of take the role of God and religion and history and culture for us right now. We put everything on them and that's why they break, right? Strong words. Got it. But I'll say to them, okay, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? Put up your hands. Then I'll say, okay, I'm now only talking to these people. Of those people, how many of you would want to know your partner's cheating on you even if it means the destruction of the relationship, 95% of them put up their hands. And I say, but why? And here's my students who are usually all sort of bitten with cynicism and postmodernism and they'll just say spontaneously, well, because it's not real, because it's not real. Right. So I think what you're pointing to is actually, you're pointing not to an objective or a subjective thing. Empiricism says it's subjective. There's some sort of, I guess, like positivism or Lockean empiricism says it's objective, but you're saying, no, no, no, there's reality realization and can I get relevance realization to be optimally gripping in the best right relationship with it? And there's good reason you can because think about it, your relevance realization isn't just representing properties of the world, it's instantiating it. There's something very similar to biological evolution, which is that the guts of life, if I'm right, running your cognition, it's not just that you have ideas, you actually instantiate, that's what I mean by conformity, the same principles. They're within and without, they don't belong to you subjectively. They're not just out there, they're both at the same time. And they help to explain how you are actually bound to the evolutionary world. Yeah. So it comes from both inside and from the outside. But there's still the question of the meaning of life, first of all, the big benefit of that question is that it shakes you out of your hamster in a wheel that is daily life, the mundane process of daily life, where you have a schedule, you wake up, you have kids, you have to take them to school, then you go to work and the da da da da da and repeats over and over and over and over and then you get increased salary and then you upgrade to home and that whole process. Asking about the meaning of life is so full of romantic bullshit that if you just allow yourself to take it seriously for a second, it forces you to pause and think, what's going on here? And then it ultimately, I think, does return to the question of meaning in those mundane things. What gives my life joy? What gives it lasting deliciousness? Where do I notice the magic and how can I have that magic return again and again? Beauty. And that ultimately what it returns to. But it's the same thing you do when you look up to the sky. You spend most of your day hurrying around looking at things on the surface, but when you look up to the sky and you see the stars, it fills you with the feeling of awe that forces you to pause and think in full context of like, what the hell is going on here? That, but also I think there is a, when you think too much about the meaning of a glass and relevance realization of a glass, you don't necessarily get at the core of what makes music beautiful. So sometimes you have to start at the biggest picture first. And I think meaning of life forces you to really go to the big bang and go to the universe and the whole thing, the origin of life. And I think sometimes you have to start there to discover the meaning in the day to day, I think, but perhaps you would disagree. In so far as the question makes you ask about the whole of your life and how much meaning is in the whole of your life. And in so far as it asks how much that is connected to reality, it's a good question. But it's a bad question in that it also makes you look for the answers in the wrong way. Now you said, and I agree with what you said, how we really answer this question is we come back to the meaning in life and we see how much that meaning in life is connected to reality. We pursue wisdom. And so for me, I don't need that question in order to provoke me into that stance. So let's return to the meaning crisis. Yes. What is the nature of the meaning crisis in modern times? What's its origin? What's its explanation? Well, remember what I said, what I argued, that the very processes that make us adaptively intelligent subject us to perennial problems of self deception, self destruction, creating bullshit for ourselves, for other people, all of that. And that can cause anxiety, existential anxiety, it can cause despair, it can cause a sense of absurdity. These are perennial problems. And across cultures and across historical periods, human beings have come up with ecologies of practices, there's no one practice, there's no panacea practice, they've come up with ecologies of practices for ameliorating that self deception and enhancing that fittedness, that connectedness that's at the core of meaning in life. That's prototypically what we call wisdom. And here's how I can show you one clear instance of the meaning crisis, is it's a wisdom famine. I do this regularly with my students. In the classroom I'll say, where do you go for information? They hold up their phone. Where do you go for knowledge? They're a little bit slower and probably because they're in my class, they'll say, well, science, the university. I'll say, where do you go for wisdom? There's a silence. Wisdom isn't optional, that's why it is perennial, cross cultural, cross historical, because of the perennial problems. But we do not have homes for ecologies of practices that fit into our scientific technological worldview so that they are considered legitimate. The fastest growing demographic group are the nones, N O N E S. They have no religious allegiance, but they are not primarily atheistic. They most frequently describe themselves with this very, this has become almost everybody now describes, I'm spiritual but not religious, which means they are trying to find a way of reducing the bullshit and enhancing the connectedness, but they don't want to turn to any of the legacy established religions by and large. Well isn't both religion and the nones, isn't wisdom a process, not a destination? So trying to find, if you're a deeply faithful religious person, you're also trying to find, right? So just because you have a place where you're looking or a set of traditions around which you're constructing the search, it's nevertheless a search. So I guess, is there a case to be made that this is just the usual human condition? How do you answer? If you asked five centuries ago, where do you look for wisdom? I mean, I suppose people would be more inclined to answer, well, the Bible or a religious text. Right. And they had a worldview that was considered not just religious, but also rational. So we now have these two things, orthogonal or often oppositional, spirituality and rationality. But if you go before a particular historical period, you look back in the Neoplatonic tradition, like before the scientific revolution, those two are not in opposition. They are deeply interwoven so that you can have a sense of legitimacy and deep realness and grounding in your practices. We don't have that anymore. And I'm not advocating for religion, neither am I an enemy of religion. I'll strengthen your case, by the way. So one of my RAs did research, and you get people who have committed themselves to cultivating wisdom. And you can look at people within religious traditions and people who are doing it in a purely secular framework. By many of the measures we use to study wisdom scientifically, the people in the religious paths do better than the secular. But here's the important point, there's no significant difference between the religious paths. So it's not like if you're following the path of Judaism, you're more likely to end up wiser than if you follow Buddhism. By the way, I don't know if that's my case. I was making the case that you don't need to have a religious affiliation to search for wisdom. It's that I thought along to the point you just made, that it doesn't matter which religious affiliation or none. But that's what I'm saying. Okay, so this is the tricky thing we're in. It does matter if you're in one, but it doesn't matter sort of the propositional creeds of that. There's something else at work. If you'll allow me this, there's a functionality to religion that we lost when we rejected all the propositional dogma. But there's a functionality there that we don't know how to recreate. Yeah. What is that? Can you try to speak to that? What is that functionality? What is that? Why is that so useful? A bunch of stories, a bunch of myths, a bunch of narratives that are drenched in deep lessons about morality and all those kinds of things. What's the functional thing there that can't be replaced without a religious text by a nonreligious text? This is, for me, the golden question. So thank you. Do you have an answer? Yeah. I think I have a significant answer. I don't think it's complete, but I think it's important. And this is to step before the Cartesian revolution and think about many different kinds of knowing. And this is now something that is prominent within what's called 4E cognitive science, the kind of cognitive science I practice. And there's a lot of converging evidence for these different ways of knowing. There's propositional knowing. This is what we are most familiar with. In fact, it almost has a tyrannical status, right? This is knowing that something is the case, like that cats are mammals and it's stored in semantic memory, and we have tests of coherence and correspondence and conviction, right? There's procedural knowing. This is knowing how to do something. Skills are not theories. They're not beliefs. They're not true or false. They engage the world or they don't. And they are stored in a different kind of memory, procedural memory. Semantic memory can be damaged without any damage to procedural memory. That's why you have the prototypical story of somebody suffering Alzheimer's and they're losing all kinds of facts, but they can still sit down and play the piano flawlessly. Same kind of argument. There's perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it's like to be you here now in this situation, in this state of mind, the whole field of your salience landscaping, what it's like to be you here now. And you have a specific kind of memory around that, episodic memory, and you have a different criterion of realness. So you can get this by my friend Dan Schiappi and I, we studied the scientists using moving the rovers around, or you can take a look at people who are doing VR. People talk about they want to really be in the game, and that makes it real. They don't mean verisimilitude. You can get that sense of being in the game with something like Tetris, which doesn't look like the real world, and you can fail to have it in a video game that has a lot of verisimilitude. It's something else. It's about, again, this kind of connectedness that we're talking about. If I may interrupt, is that connected to the hard problem of consciousness, the subject, the qualia, or is that a different, that kind of knowing, is that different from the quality of consciousness? I think it has to do with, well, I make a distinction between the adjectival and the adverbial qualia, so I think it has to do with the adverbial qualia much more than with the adjectival. So the adjectival qualia are like the greenness of green and the blueness of blue. The adverbial qualia are the hereness, the nowness, the togetherness. And I think the perspectival knowing has a lot to do with the adverbial qualia. Adjectival qualia and adverbial qualia. I'm learning so many new things today. Okay, so that's another way of knowing. Right, the perspectival, and then there's a deeper one. And this is a philosophical point, and I don't want to, we can go through the argument, but you don't have to know that you know in order to know, because if you start doing that, you get an infinite regress. There has to be kinds of knowing that doesn't mean you know that you know that. Yeah. Okay. Of course. Okay, great. Okay, good. Well, there was a lot of ink spilled over that over a 40 year period, so. My philosophers, they spill, this is what they do, they spill ink to get paid for ink spillage. So I want to talk about what I call participatory knowing. This is the idea that you and the world are co participating in things and such that real affordances exist between you. So both me and this environment are shaped by gravity, so the affordance of walking becomes available to me. Both me and a lot of this environment are shaped by my biology, and so affordances for that are here. Look at this cup, shared physics, shared sort of biological factors, my hand, I'm bipedal, also culture is shaping me and shaping this. I had to learn how to use that and treat it as a cup. So this is an agent arena relationship, right? Use identities being created in your agency, identities being created in the world as an arena so you and the world fit together. You know when that's missing, when you're really lonely, or you're homesick, or you're suffering culture shock. So this is participatory knowing, and it's the sense of, it comes with a sense of belonging. At every level. So the ability to walk is a kind of knowing. Yes. Yes. That there's a dance between the physics that enables this process and just participating in the process is the act of knowing. Right. And there's a really weird form of memory you have for this kind of knowing, it's called yourself. What? Can you elaborate? Well, you do, so we talked about how all the different other kinds of knowing had specific kinds of memory, semantic memory for propositional, procedural, episodic for perspectival. What's the kind of memory that is the coordinated storehouse of all of your agent arena relationships? All the roles you can take, all the identities you can assume, all the identities you can assign. Yeah, what's the self? Do you mean like consciousness? No, I mean your sense of self. Sense of self in this world that's not consciousness. It's like an agency or something. Right, it's an agent arena relationship. And so in an agent arena relationship, it's the sense of the agent. And that the agent belongs in that arena. Whatever the agent is, whatever the arena is, because it's probably a bunch of different framings of how you experience that. Yeah, and you do. In your identity as a self, you have all kinds of roles that are somehow contributing to that identity, but are not equivalent to that identity. Yeah. I wonder if like my two hands have different, because there's a different experience of me picking up something with my right hand and then my left hand. Are those like... That's a really cool question, Lex. They certainly feel like their own things, but that could be just anthropomorphization based on cultural narratives and so on. It could, but I think it's a legitimate empirical question because it also could be sort of Ian McGilchrist stuff. It could be you're using different hemispheres and they sort of have different agent arena relationships to the environment. This is a really important question in the cognitive science of the self. Does that hemispheric difference mean you're multiple or you actually have a singular self? So it's important to understand how many cells are there. Yes, I think so. But that's just like a quirk of evolution. Surely it can be fundamental to cognition, having multiple cells or a singular self. It depends, again, because we're getting far from the answer to the question you originally asked me. Do you want me to go back to that first or answer this one? Which question? I already forgot everything. What's the functionality of religion? Yes. Okay. Let us return. Okay. And then we can return to the self. Okay. So you said you have all these propositions and et cetera, et cetera, and they differ from the religions and they don't seem to be considered legitimate by many people. But yet there's something functioning in the religions that is transforming people and making them wiser. And I put it to you that the transformations are largely occurring at those nonpropositional levels. The procedural, the perspectival, and the participatory. And those are the ones, by the way, that are more fundamentally connected to meaning making because remember the propositions are representational and they're dependent on the nonpropositional, nonrepresentational processes of connectedness and relevance realization. So religion goes down deep to the nonpropositional and works there. That's the functionality we need to grasp. Well, you talk about tools, essentially, that humans are able to incorporate into their cognition. Psychotechnologies, like language is one, I suppose. Isn't religion then a psychotechnology? It would be, yeah, an ecology of psychotechnologies, yes. And the question is that Nietzsche ruined everything by saying God is dead. Do we have to invent the new thing? Go from the old phone, create the iPhone, invent the new psychotechnology that takes place of religion. And so when the madman in Nietzsche's text goes into the marketplace, who's he talking to? He's not talking to the believers. He's talking to the atheists and he says, do you not realize what we have done? We have taken a sponge and wiped away the sky. We are now forever falling. We are unchained from the sun. We have to become worthy of this. But Nietzsche is full of romantic bullshit, as we know. No, no, no. No, but there's a point there. Yes. The point is, right, there's one thing to rejecting the proposition. There's another project of replacing the functionality that we lost when we reject the religion. So his worry that as nihilism takes hold, you don't ever replace the thing that religion, the role that religion played in our world. It's hard to tell what he actually, because he's so multivocal. I'll speak for me rather than for Nietzsche. I think it is possible to, using the best cognitive science and respectfully exacting what we can from the best religion and philosophical traditions, because there's things like stoicism that are in the grey line between philosophy and religion, Buddhism is the same. Using that best cocci, that best exaptation, we can come up with that functionality without having to buy into the particular propositional sets of the legacy religions. That's my proposal. I call that the religion that's not a religion. So things like stoicism or modern stoicism, those things, don't you think in some sense they naturally emerge? Don't you think there's a longing for meaning? So stoicism arises during the Hellenistic period when there was a significant meaning crisis in the ancient world because of what had happened after the breakup of Alexander the Great's empire. So if you compare Aristotle to people who are living after Alexander. So Aristotle grows up in a place where everybody speaks the same language, has the same religion, his ancestors have been there for years, he knows everybody. After Alexander the Great's empire is broken up, people are now thousands of miles away from the government, they're surrounded by people because of the diasporas, they're surrounded by people that don't speak their language, don't share their religion, that's why you get all these mother religions emerging, universal mother religions like ISIS, etc. So there is what's called domicile, there's the killing of home, there's a loss of a sense of home and belonging and fittedness during the Hellenistic period and stoicism arose specifically to address that. And because it was designed to address a meaning crisis, it is no coincidence that it is coming back into prominence right now. Well there could be a lot of other variations and it feels like, I think when you speak of the meaning crisis, you're in part describing, not prescribing, you're describing something that is happening. But I would venture to say that if we just leave things be, the meaning crisis dissipates because we long to create institutions, to create collective ideas, so this distributed cognition process that give us meaning. So if religion loses power, we'll find other institutions that are sources of meaning. I don't... Is that your intuition as well? I think we are already doing that. I am involved with and do participant observation of many of these emerging communities that are creating a colleges of practice that are specifically about trying to address the meaning crisis. I just, in late July, went to Washington State and did Rafe Kelly's Evolve Move Play, Return to the Source, and wow, one of the most challenging things I've ever done. That guy is awesome, by the way. I got to interact with him a long, long time ago. He said to say hi to you, by the way. Yeah. It's from another world. It feels like a different world because I interacted with him, not directly, but... This is somebody... He can speak to what he works on, but he makes movement and play... He encourages people to make that a part of their life, like how you move about the world, whether that's as part of sort of athletic endeavors or actual just like walking around a city. And I think the reason I ran into him is because there was a lot of interest in that in the athletic world, in the grappling world, in the Brazilian jiu jitsu world, people who study movement, who make movement part of their lives to see how can we integrate play and fun and just the basic humanness that's natural to our movement. How do we integrate that into our daily practice? So this is yet another way to find meaning. I think it's actually an exemplar of what I was talking about because what's going on with Raif's integration of parkour in nature and martial arts and mindfulness practices and dialogical practices is exactly, and explicitly so by the way, he will tell you he's been very influenced by my work. He's trying to get at the nonpropositional kinds of knowing that make meaning by evolving our sensory motor loop and enhancing our relevance realization because that gives people profound improved sense of connectedness to themselves, to each other and the world. And I'll tell you, Lex, I don't want to say too specifically the final thing that people did because it's part of his secret sauce, right? But what I can say is when it was done, I said to them all, I said, as far as I can tell, none of you are religious, right? And they go, yeah, yeah, and I said, but what you just did was a religious act, wasn't it? And they all went, yeah, it was. Yeah. So that same magic was there. Yes. Bathroom break. Sure. What's your take on atheism in general? Is it closer to truth than, maybe is an atheist closer to truth than a person who believes in God? So I'm a nontheist, which means I think the shared set of presuppositions between the theist and the atheist are actually what needs to be rejected. Can you explain that further? Yes, I can. And I want to point out, by the way, that there are lots of nontheistic religious traditions. So I'm not coming up with a sort of airy fairy category. Yeah. And what's the difference in nontheism, agnosticism and atheism? So nontheists think that the theist and the atheist share a bunch of presuppositions. For example, it's that sacredness is to be understood in terms of a personal being that is, in some sense, the supreme being, and that the right relationship to that being is to have a correct set of beliefs. I reject all of those claims. So both the theist and the atheist see God. In their modern version, yes, yes. In which, do you reject it in the sense that you don't know, or do you reject it in a sense that you believe that each one of those presuppositions is likely to be not true? The latter. Both on reflection, argument, and personal experimentation and experience, I've come to the conclusion that those shared propositions are probably not true. Which one is the most troublesome to you? The personal being, the kind of accumulation of everything into one being that ultimately created stuff? So for me, there's two, and they're interlocked together. I'm not trying to dodge your question. It's that the idea that the ground of being is some kind of being, I think, is a fundamental mistake. It's void of being? No, no, no. The ground of being is some kind of being, so it's turtles all the way down. The ground of being is not itself any kind of being. Being is not a being. It is the ability for things to be, which is not the same thing as a being. Are humans beings? We are beings. This glass is a being. This table is a being. But when I ask you, how are they all in being, you don't say, by being a glass or by being a table or by being a human. You want to say, no, no, there's something underneath it all, and then you realize it can't be any thing. This is why many mystical traditions converge on the idea that the ground of being is no thingness, which is normally pronounced as nothingness. But if you put the hyphen back in, you get the original intent, no thingness. That is bound up with, okay, what I need to do in order to be in relationship with … So, it's a misconstruing of ultimate reality as a supreme being, which is a category mistake to my mind, and then my relationship to it, that sacredness is a function of belief. And I have been presenting you an argument through most of our discussion that meaning is at a deeper level than beliefs and propositions. And so, that is a misunderstanding of sacredness, because I take sacredness to be that which is most meaningful and connected to what is most real. And theists think of sacredness as what? They think of sacredness as a property of a particular being, God, and that the way that is meaningful to them is by asserting a set of propositions or beliefs. Now, I want to point out that this is what I would now call modern or common theism. You go back into the classical periods of Christianity, you get a view that's really radically different from how most people understand theism today. Okay, so let me … This is an interesting question that I usually think about in the form of mathematics, but … So, in that case, if meaning is sacred in your nontheist view, is meaning created or is it discovered? There's a Latin word that doesn't separate them called inventio, and I would say that, and before you say, oh, well, give me a chance, because you participate in it. You've experienced an insight, yes? Did you make it happen? The insight … Did you make it happen or did … Did you do … Like, can you do that? I'm going to have … I need an insight. This is what I do to make an insight. Oh, I see. Yeah, in some sense, it came from elsewhere. Right, but you didn't just passively receive it, either. You're engaged and involved in it. That's why you get … Right? So that's what I mean by you participate in it. You participate in meaning. So you do think that it's both? Yes. You do think it's both? I mean, that's not a trivial thing to understand, because a lot of time we think … When you think about a search for meaning, you think … It's like you're going through a big house and you open each door and look if it's there and so on, as if there is going to be a glowing orb that you discover, but at the same time, I'm somebody that, based on the chemistry of my brain, have been extremely fortunate to be able to discover beauty in everything, in the most mundane and boring of things. I am, as David Foster Wallace said, unboreable. I could just sit in a room, just like playing with a tennis ball or something and be excited, basically like a dog, I think, endlessly. So to me, meaning is created, because I could create meaning out of everything, but of course, it doesn't require a partner. It does require dance partners, whatever, it does require the tennis ball. But honestly, that's what a lot of people that I don't necessarily … We'll talk about it. I don't practice meditation, but people who meditate very seriously, like the entire days for months kind of thing, they talk about being able to discover meaning in just the wind or something, like they just … The breath and everything, just subtle sensory experiences give you deep fulfillment. So that's, again, it's interaction. Actually, I do want to say, because the interesting difference that you've drawn between nontheism, theism and atheism, where's the agreement or disagreement between you and Jordan Peterson on this? I want to say to Jordan about this, because you're very clear, it's kind of beautiful in the clarity in which you lay this out. I wonder if Jordan has arrived at a similar kind of clarity. Have you been able to draw any kind of lines between the way the two of you see religion? Yeah. So there was a video released, I think, like two or three weeks ago with Jordan and myself and Jonathan Paget. Oh, I haven't watched that one yet, yeah. And it's around this question, Lux. He's basically sort of making, he's putting together an argument for God. I mean, I think that's a fair way. I don't think he would object to me saying that. And Jonathan Paget is also a, well, Jonathan is a Christian, it's unclear what Jordan is. And Jonathan's work is on symbolism and different mythologies and Christianity. Yes, especially Neoplatonic Christianity, which is very important. I have a lot of respect, well, I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I have a lot of respect for Jonathan. But in my participation in that dialogue, you could see me, well, repeatedly, but I think everybody, including Jordan, thought constructively challenging sort of the attempt to build a theistic model, and I was challenging it from a nontheistic perspective. So I think we don't agree on certain sets of propositions. But there was a lot of, there was also a lot of acknowledgement, and I think genuine appreciation on his part and Jonathan's part of the arguments I was making. So they believe in maybe the presupposition of like a supreme being. Not believe, but they see the power of that particular presupposition in being a source of meaning. I think that's relatively clear for me with Jordan. Jordan's a really complex guy, so it's very hard to just like pin. To my best sort of understanding, yes, I think that's clearly the case for Jordan. It's not the case for Jonathan. Jonathan is, remember I said I was talking about modern atheism and theism? Jonathan is a guy who somehow went into icon carving and Maximus the Confessor and Eastern Orthodoxy and has come out of it at the other end as a fifth century church father that is nevertheless being, rightfully so, found to be increasingly relevant to many people. So he's deeply old school. Yeah, I think he has, he and I, especially because Neoplatonism is a nontheistic philosophical spirituality and it's a big part of Eastern Orthodoxy, he and I, I think, he would say things like, God doesn't exist. What? You're a Christian, right? And then he's being coy, but he'll say, well, God doesn't exist the way the cup exists or the table exists, the same kind of move I was making a few minutes ago. He'll say things like that. He will emphasize the no thingness of ultimate reality, the no thingness of God, because he's from that version of Christianity, what you might call classical theism, but classical theism looks a lot more like nontheism than it looks like modern theism. That's so interesting. Yeah, that's really interesting. What about, is there a line to be drawn between myth and religion in terms of its usefulness in man's search for meaning? So here's where Jordan and I are in much more, actually all three of us are in significant agreement. I said this in my series, but I want to say it again here. Myths aren't stories about things that happened in the deep past that are largely irrelevant. Myths are stories about perennial or pertinent patterns that need to be brought into awareness. And they need to be brought into an awareness, not just or primarily at the propositional level, but at those nonpropositional levels. And I think that is what good mythos does. I prefer to use the Greek word because we've now turned the English word into a synonym for a widely believed falsehood. And I don't think, again, if you go back even to the church fathers, I'm not a Christian, I'm not advocating for Christianity, but neither am I here to attack it. But when they talk about reading these stories, they think the literal interpretation is the weakest and the least important. You move to the allegorical or the symbolic, to the moral, to the spiritual, the mystical, and that's where... So they would say to you, but how is the story of Adam and Eve true for you now? And I don't mean true for you in that relativistic sense, I mean, how is it pointing to a pattern in your life right now? So there is some sense in which the telling of this mythos becomes real in connecting to the patterns that kind of captivate the public today. Sure. So you just keep telling the story. I mean, there's something about some of these stories that are just really good at being sticky to the patterns of each generation. Yes. And they'll stick to different patterns throughout time, they're just sticky in powerful ways. Yes. And so we keep returning back to them again and again and again. And it's important to see that some of these stories are recursive, they're myths about one particular set of patterns, they're myths about not just the important pattern. You get the Jordan stuff about there's heroes and myths are trying to make us understand the need for being heroic in our own lives. One of the things I like to put in counterbalance to that is the Greek also have myths of hubris, that counterbalance the heroic. But then there are myths that are not about those deeply important patterns, but they're myths about religio itself, that the way we're—religio means to bind, to connect, the way relevance realization connects us. And so the point of the myth is not notice that pattern or notice that pattern or notice that pattern, it's notice how all of these patterns are emerging and what does that say about us and reality. And those myths, those myths, I think, are genuinely profound. And how much of the myths, how much of the power of those myths is about the dialogues? You talk about this quite a bit, I think in the first conversation with Jordan, you guys, I'm not sure you've gotten really into it, you scratched the surface a little bit. But the role of, as you say, dialogue in distributed cognition. What is that? The thing we're doing right now, talking with our mouth holes, what is that? And actually, can I ask you this question? If aliens came to Earth and were observing humans, would they notice our distributed cognition first or our individual cognition first? What is the most notable thing about us humans? Is it our ability to individually do well on IQ tests or whatever? Or puzzle solve, or is it this thing we're doing together? I think most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition. Look around, you didn't make this equipment, you didn't build this place, you didn't invent this language that we're both sharing, et cetera, et cetera. And now there's more specific and precise experimental evidence coming out. Let's take a standard task that people, reasoning task, I won't need to do the details, it's called the waste and selection task. And you give it to people, highly educated psychology students, premier universities across the world, we've been doing it since the 60s, it replicates and replicates, and only 10% of the people get it right. You put them in a group of four, and you allow them to talk to each other, the success rate goes to 80%. That's just one example of a phenomenon that's coming to the fore. By the way, do you know if a similar experiment has been done on a group of engineering students versus psychology students? Is there a major group differences in IQ between those two? Just kidding. Let's move on. All right, so there is a lot of evidence that there's power to this distributed cognition. Now what about this mechanism, this fascinating mechanism of the ants interacting with each other? The dialogue. I use the word discourse or dialogue for just people having a conversation, and this is deeply inspired by Socrates and Plato, especially the Platonic dialogues. And I'm sure we've all had this, and so give me a moment because I want to build onto something here. We've participated in conversations that took on a life of their own and took us both in directions we did not anticipate, afforded us insights that we could not have had on our own. And we don't have to have come to an agreement, but we were both moved and we were both drawn into insight, and we feel like, wow, that was one of the best moments of my life because we feel how that introduced us to a capacity for tapping into a flow state within distributed cognition that puts us into a deeper relationship with ourselves, with another person, and potentially with the world. That's what I mean by dialogos. And so for me, I think dialogos is more important... Boy, I could just... I'm sorry, I can hear Jordan and Jonathan in my head right now, but I think it's more... I hear them all the time. I just wish they would shut up in my head sometimes. So what are they saying to you in your head? What they're saying... Well, see, that's what the most recent conversation was about. I was trying to say that I don't think mythos is... I think mythos is really important. I think these kinds of narratives are really important, but I think this ability to connect together in distributed cognition, collective intelligence, and cultivate a shared flow state within that collective intelligence so it starts to ramp up perhaps towards collective wisdom. I think that's more important because I think that's the basin within which the myths and the rituals are ultimately created and when they function. A myth is like a public dream. It depends on distributed cognition, and it depends on people enacting it and getting into mutual flow states. So the highest form of dialogos of conversation is this flow state, and that it forms the foundation for myth building. I think so. I think so. So that communitas, that's Victor Turner's phrase, and he specifically linked it to flow, and I study flow scientifically, that within distributed cognition as the home, as the generator of mythos and ritual, and those are bound together as well, I think that's fundamentally correct. You know what's the cool thing here, because I'm a huge fan of podcasts and audiobooks, but podcasts in particular is relevant here, is there's a third person in this room listening now, and they're also in the flow state. Yes, yes. Like I'm close friends with a lot of podcasts, they don't know I exist. I just listen to them because I've been in so many flow states with them, and I was like, yes, yes, this is good. But they don't know I exist, but they are in conversation with me, ultimately. And think of what that's doing. You've got dialogues, and then you've got this meta dialogue like you're describing, and think about how things like podcasts and YouTube, they break down old boundaries between the private and the public, between writing and oral speech. So we have the dynamics of living oral speech, but it has the permanency of writing. We're in the midst of creating a vehicle and a medium for distributed cognition that breaks down a lot of the categories by which we organized our cognition. Because of the tools of YouTube and so on, just the network, the graph of how quickly the distributed cognition can spread is really powerful. Just a huge amount of people have listened to your lectures, I've listened to your lectures, but I've experienced them, at least in your style, there's something about your style, it felt like a conversation. It felt like at any moment I could interrupt you and say something, and I was just listening. Thank you for saying that, because I aspire to being genuinely as Socratic as I can when I'm doing this. Yeah, there was that sentence, actually, as I'm saying it now, why was that? It didn't feel like sometimes lectures are kind of, you know, you come down with the commandments and you just want to listen, but there was a sense like, I mean, I think it was the excitement that you have, like, you have to understand, and also the fact that you were kind of, I think, thinking off the top of your head sometimes, there was a, you were interrupting yourself with thoughts, you were playing with thoughts, like you're reasoning through things often, like you had, you referenced a lot of books, so surely you were extremely well prepared and you were referencing a lot of ideas, but then you were also struggling in the way to present those ideas. Yes, there was, and so the jazz, like the jazz and getting into the flow state and trying to share in a participatory and perspectival fashion the learning with the people rather than just pronouncing at them, yes. What's mindfulness? So published on that as well. And I practice, I've been practicing many forms of mindfulness and ecology of practices since 1991, so I both have practitioner's knowledge and I also study it scientifically. I think, I'm pretty sure I was the first person to academically talk about mindfulness at the University of Toronto within a classroom setting, like lecturing on it. So this is a topic that a lot of people have recently become very interested in, think about, so from that, from the early days, how do you think about what it is? I've critiqued the sort of standard definitions, being aware of the present moment without judgment and because I think they're flawed, and if you want to get into the detail of why we can, but this is how I want to explain it to you, and it also points to the fact of why you need an ecology of mindfulness practices. You shouldn't equate mindfulness with meditation. I think that's a primary mistake. When you say ecology, what do you mean, by the way? So lots of many different variants? No, so what I mean by ecology is exactly what you have in an ecology. You have a dynamical system in which there are checks and balances on each other, right? And I'll get to that with this about mindfulness, so I'll make that connection if you allow me. So we're always framing, we've been talking about that, right? And for those of you who are not on YouTube, this podcast, I wear glasses and I'm now sort of putting my fingers and thumb around the frames of my glasses. So this is my frame, and my lens is, right, and that frame, the frame holds a lens, and I'm seeing through it in both senses, beyond and by means of it. So right now, my glasses are transparent to me. I want to use that as a strong analogy for my mental framing, okay? Now this is what you do in meditation, I would argue. You step back from looking through your frame and you look at it, I'm taking my glasses off right now and I'm looking at them. Why might I do that? To see if there's something in the lenses that is distorting, causing me to, right? Now if I just did that, that could be helpful, but how do I know if I've actually corrected the change I made to my lenses? What do I need to do? I need to put my glasses on and see if I can now see more clearly and deeply than I could before. Meditation is this, stepping back and looking at. Contemplation is that looking through, and there are different kinds of practices. The fact that we treat them as synonyms is a deep mistake. The word contemplation has temple in it, in Latin contemplatio, means to look up to the sky. It's a translation of the Greek word theoria, which we get our word theory from. It's to look deeply into things. Meditation is more about having to do with reflecting upon, standing back and looking at. Mindfulness includes both. It includes your ability to break away from an inappropriate frame and the ability to make a new frame. That's what actually happens in insight. You have to both break an inappropriate frame and make, see, realize a new frame. This is why mindfulness enhances insight. Both ways, by the way, meditative practices and also contemplative practices. So mindfulness is frame awareness that can be appropriated in order to improve your capacities for insight and self regulation. Now I am inexperienced with meditation, the rigorous practice and the science of meditation, but I've talked to people who seriously as a science study psychedelics and they often talk about the really important thing is the sort of the integration back. So the contemplation step. So if you, it's not just the actual things you see on psychedelics or the actual journey of where your mind goes on psychedelics. It's also the integrating that into the new perspective that you take on life. Right. Exactly. You really nicely described. So meditation is the, in that metaphors is the psychedelic journey to a different mind state and then contemplation is the return back to reality, how you integrate that into a new world view and mindfulness is the whole process. Right. So if you just did contemplation, you could suffer from inflation and projective fantasy. If you just do meditation, you can suffer from withdrawal, spiritual bypassing, avoiding reality. They act, they need each other. You have to cycle between them. It's like what I talked about earlier, when I talked about the opponent processing within the autonomic nervous system or the opponent processing at work and attention. And that's what I mean by an ecology of practices. You need both. Neither one is a panacea. You need them in this opponent processing, acting as checks and balance on each other. Is there sort of practical advice you can give to people on how to meditate or how to be mindful in this full way? Yes. I would tell them to do at least three things. And I was, I lucked into this. When I started meditation, I went down the street and there was a place that taught Vipassana meditation, Metta contemplation and Tai Chi Chuan for flow induction. And you should get, you should have a meditative practice, you should find a contemplative practice and you should find a moving mindfulness practice, especially one that is conducive to the flow state and practice them in an integrated fashion. Can you elaborate what those practices might look like? So generally speaking. Meditative practice like Vipassana. So what's the primary thing I look through rather than look at? It's my sensations. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on my sensations rather than focusing on the world through my sensations. So I'm going to follow, for example, the sensations in this area of my abdomen where my breathing is. So I can feel as my abdomen is expanding, I can feel those sensations and then I can feel the sensations as it's contracting. Now what will happen is my mind will leap back to try to look through and look at the world again. Right? I'll start thinking about, I need to do my laundry or what was that noise? And so what do I do? I don't get involved with the content. I step back and label the process with an ING word, listening, imagining, planning. And then I return my attention to the breath and I have to return my attention in the correct way. So part of your mind that jumps around in the Buddhist tradition, this is called your monkey mind. It's like a monkey leaping for branches and chattering, right? If I was trying to train that monkey mind to stay, or as Jack Kornfield said, train a puppy dog, stay puppy dog, and if it goes and I get really angry and I bring it back and I'm yelling at it, I'm going to train it to fight and fear me. But if I just indulge it, if I just feed its whims, oh, look, the puppy dog went there. Oh, now it's there. Puppy dog never learns to stay. What do I need to do? I have to neither fight it nor feed it. I have to have this centered attitude. I have to befriend it. So you step back and look at your sensations. You step back and look at your distracting processes. You return your attention to the breath and you do it with the right attitude. That's the core of a good meditative practice. Okay. Then what's a good contemplative practice? A good contemplative practice is to try and meta, it's actually apropos because we talked about that participatory knowing the way you're situated in the world. So this is a long thing because there's different interpretations of meta and I go for what's called an existential interpretation over an emotional one. So what I'm doing in meta is I'm trying to awaken in two ways. I'm trying to awaken to the fact that I am constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity. So I'm looking at that. I'm trying to awaken to that and then I'm trying to awake from the modal confusion that I could get into around that. And so I'm looking out onto the world and I'm trying to see you in a fundamentally different way than I have before. You know, like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Is it possible to reduce it to those things that, I mean, you don't need to speak to the specifics, but is there actual practice you can do or is it really personal? No, I teach people how to do the meta practice. I also teach them how to do a Neoplatonic contemplative practice, how to do a Stoic. Another one you can do is the view from above. This is classic Stoicism. I get you to imagine that you're in this room and then imagine that you're floating above the room, then above Austin, then above Texas, then above the United States, then the earth. And you have to really imagine it. Don't just think it, but really imagine. And then what you notice is as you're pulling out to a wider and wider like contemplation of reality, your sense of self and what you find relevant and important also changes. No, for all of these, there is a specific step by step methodology. Oh, so you can, so like in that one, you could just literally imagine yourself floating farther and farther out. But you have to go through the steps because the stepping matters because if you just jump, it doesn't work. Do you have any of this stuff online by the way? I do because during COVID, I decided at the advice of a good friend to do a daily course. I taught meditating with John Vervecki. I did all the way through meditation, contemplation, even some of the movement practices. That's all there. It's all available. That was largely inspired by Buddhism and Taoism. And then I went into the Western tradition and went through things like Stoicism and Neoplatonism, cultivating wisdom with John Vervecki. That's all there, all free. On your website? Yeah. It's on my YouTube channel. Yeah. On your YouTube channel. Okay. That's exciting. I mean, your Meaning Crisis lectures is just incredible. Everything around it, including the notes and the notes that people took, it's just, it created this tree of conversations. It's really, really, really well done. What about flow induction? You want to flow wisely. And first of all, you need to understand what flow is, and then you need to confront a particular issue around, a practical problem around flow. Let's go there because a lot of those words seem like synonyms to people sometimes. So the state of flow, what is it? All right. So, and he just died last year, Csikszentmihalyi. I admire him very much. We've exchanged a bunch of messages over the past few years, and he wanted to do the podcast several times. Oh, that would have been wonderful. But he said he struggled with his health, and I never knew in those situations, I deeply regret several cases like this that I had with Conway, that I should have pushed him on it because, yeah, as you get later in life, things, the simple things become more difficult, but a voice, especially one that hasn't been really heard, is important to hear. So anyway, I apologize, but yeah. No, no. I share that. I mean, I can tell you that within my area, he is important and he's famous in an academics sense. Yeah. So the flow state, two important sets of conditions, and very often people only talk about one, and that's a little bit of a misrepresentation. So the flow state is in situations in which the demand of the situation is slightly beyond your skills. So you both have to apply all the skills you can with as much sort of attention and concentration as you possibly can, and you have to actually be stretching your skills. Now, in this circumstance, people report optimal experience, optimal in two ways. Optimal in that this is one of the best experiences I've had in my life. It's distinct from pleasure, and yet it explains why people do very bizarre things like rock climbing because it's a good flow induction. But they also mean optimal in a second sense, my best performance. So it's both the best experience and the best performance. So Csikszentmihalyi also talked about the information flow conditions you need, right, in order for there to be this state of flow, and then I'll talk about what it's like to be in flow in a sec. What you need is three things. You need the information that you're getting to be clear. It can't be ambiguous or vague. Think about a rock climber. If it's ambiguous and vague, you're in trouble, right? There has to be tightly coupled feedback between what you do and how the environment responds. So when you act, there's an immediate response. There isn't a big time lag between your action and your ability to detect the response from the environment. Third, failure has to matter. Error really matters. So there should be some anxiety about failure. And failure matters. So that, yeah, because… Like to you, the person that participates. Yes, yes, yes. Now when you're in the flow state, notice how this sits on the boundary between the secular and the sacred. When you're in the flow state, people report a tremendous sense of atonement with the environment. They report a loss of a particular kind of self consciousness, that narrative, nurturing nanny in your head that, how do I look? Do people like me? How do I look? How's my hair? Do people like me? Should I have said that? That all goes away. You're free from that. You're free from the most sadistic, superego self critic you could possibly have, at least for a while. The world is vivid. It's super salient to you. There's an ongoing sense of discovery. Although often you know you're exerting a lot of metabolic effort, it feels effortless. So in the flow state when you're sparring, your hand just goes up for the block and your strike just goes through the empty space. Or if you're a goalie in hockey, I've got to mention hockey once, I'm a Canadian, right? You put out your glove hand and the puck's there, right? So there's this tremendous sense of grace, atonement, super salience, discovery and realness. People don't, when they're in the flow state, they don't go, I bet this is an illusion. The interesting question for me and my coauthors in the article we published in the Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought with Arianne Harabennett and Leo Ferraro is that's a descriptive account of flow. We wanted an explanatory account, one of the causal mechanisms at work in flow. And so we actually proposed to interlocking cognitive processes. The first thing we said is, well, what's going on in flow? Well think about it. Think about the rock climber. The rock climber, and I talked about this earlier, they're constantly restructuring how they're seeing the rock face. They're constantly doing something like insight, and if they fail to do it, they impasse and that starts to get dangerous. So they've got to do an insight that primes an insight that primes an insight. So imagine the aha experience, that flash and that moment, and imagine it cascading so you're getting the extended aha. That's why things are super salient. There's a sense of discovery. There's a sense of atonement, of deep participation, of grace, but there's something else going on too. So there's a phenomenon called implicit learning, also very well replicated. It's way back in the 60s with Rieber. You can give people complex patterns, like number and letter strings, and they can learn about those patterns outside of deliberate focal awareness. That's what's called implicit learning. And what's interesting is if you try and change that task into, tell me the pattern, but explicitly try to figure it out, the performance degrades. So here's the idea. You have this adaptive capacity for implicit learning, and what it does is it results in you being able to track complex variables in a way, but you don't know how you came up with that knowledge. And this is Hogarth's proposal in educating intuition. Intuition is actually the result of implicit learning. So an example I use is how far do you stand away from somebody at a funeral? There's a lot of complex variables. There's status, closeness to the person, your relationship to them, past history, all kinds of stuff, and yet you know how to do it, and you didn't have to go to funeral school. I'm just using that as an example. So you have these powerful intuitions. Now here's Hogarth's great point. Implicit learning, remember I said before, the things that make it adaptive make us subject to self deception? Here's another example. Implicit learning is powerful at picking up on complex patterns, but it doesn't care what kind of pattern it is. It doesn't distinguish causal patterns from merely correlational patterns. So implicit learning, when we like it, it's intuition. When it's picking up on stuff that's bogus, we call it prejudice or all kinds of other names for intuition that's going wrong. Now, he said, okay, what do we do? What do we do about this? And this will get back to Flo. What do we do about this? Well, we can't try to replace implicit learning with explicit learning because we'll lose all the adaptiveness to it. So what can we do explicitly? What we can do is take care of the environment in which we're doing the implicit learning. How do we do that? We try to make sure the environment has features that help us distinguish causation from correlation. What kind of environments have we created that are good at distinguishing causation from correlation? Experimental environments. What do you do in an experiment? You make sure that the variables are clear, no confound, no ambiguity, no vagueness. You make sure there's a tight coupling between the independent and the dependent variable and your hypothesis can be falsified. Error matters. Now look at those three, Lex. Those are exactly the three conditions that you need for Flo. Clear information, tightly coupled feedback and error matters. So Flo is not only an insight cascade, improving your insight capacity, it's also a marker that you're cultivating the best kind of intuitions, the ones that fit you best to the causal patterns in your environment. But it's hard to achieve that kind of environment where there's a clear distinction between causality and correlation and it has the rigor of a scientific experiment. Fair enough and I don't think Hogarth was saying it's gonna be epistemically as rigorous as a scientific experiment, but he's saying if you structure that, it will tend to do what that scientific method does, which is find causal... Think of the rock climber. All of those things are the case. They need clear information. It's tightly coupled and error matters and they think what they're doing is very real because if they're not conforming to the real causal patterns of the rock face and the physiology of their body, they will fall. Is there something to be said about the power of discovering meaning and having this deep relationship with the moment? There's something about flow that really forgets the past and the future and is really focused on the moment. I think that's part of the phenomenology, but I think the functionality has to do with the fact that what's happening in flow is that dynamic nonpropositional connectedness that is so central to meaning is being optimized. This is why flow is a good predictor of how well you rate your life, how much well being you think you have, which of course is itself also predictive and interrelated with how meaningful you find your life. One of the things that you can do, but there's an important caveat, to increase your sense of meaning in life is to get into the flow state more frequently. That's why I said you want a moving practice that's conducive to the flow state, but there's one important caveat, which is we of course have figured out and I'm playing with words here how to game this and how to hijack it by creating things like video games. I'm not saying this is the case for all video games or this is the case for all people, but the WHO now acknowledges this as a real thing that you can get into the flow state within the video game world to the detriment of your ability to get into the flow state in the real world. What's the opposite of flow? Depression. In fact, depression has been called anti flow. So you get these people that are flowing in this non real world and they can't transfer it to the real world and it's actually costing them flow in the real world. So they tend to get, they tend to suffer depression and all kinds of things. Your ability, your habit and just skill at attaining flow in the video game world basically makes you less effective or maybe shocks you at how difficult it is to achieve flow in the physical world. Yeah. I'm not sure about that. I just, I don't want to push back against the implied challenge of transferability because there's a lot of, I have a lot of friends that play video games, a very large percent of young folks play video games and I'm hesitant to build up models of how that affects behavior. My intuition is weak there. Sometimes people that have PhDs are of a certain age that they came up when video games weren't a deep part of their life development. I would venture to say people who have developed their brain with video games being a part, a large part of that world are in some sense different humans and it's possible that they can transfer more effectively. Some of the lessons, some of the ability to attain flow from the virtual world to the physical world, they're also more, I would venture to say, resilient to the negative effects of, for example, social media or video games that have maybe the objectification or the over sexualized or violent aspect of video games. They're able to turn that off when they go to the physical world and turn it back on when they're playing the video games probably more effectively than the old timers. So I just want to say this sort of, I'm not sure, it's a really interesting question how transferable the flow state is. I don't know if you want to comment on that. I do, I do. First of all, I did qualify and I'm saying it's not the case for all video games or for all people. I'm holding out the possibility and I know this possibility because I've had students who actually suffer from this and have done work around it with me. The ability to achieve. They couldn't transfer, yeah. And then they were able to step back from that and then take up the cognitive science and write about it and work on it. Also, I'm not so sure about the resiliency claim because there seems to be mounting evidence. It's not consensus, but it's certainly not regarded as fringe, that the increase in social media is pretty strongly correlated with increase in depression, self destructive behavior, things like this. I would like to see that evidence. Sure. I can find it. No, no, no. Let me, I'm always hesitant to too eagerly kind of agree with things that I want to agree with. There's a public perception everyone seems to hate on social media. I wonder, as always with these things, does it reveal depression or does it create depression? This is always the question. It's like whenever you talk about any political or ideological movement, does it create hate or does it reveal hate? And that's a good thing to ask and you should always challenge the things that you intuitively want to believe. I agree with that. Like aliens. So one of the ways you address this, and it's not sufficient and I did say the work is preliminary, but if I can give you a plausible mechanism that's new and then that lends credence. And part of what happens is illusory social comparison. Think of Instagram. People are posting things that are not accurate representation of their life or life events. In fact, they will stage things, but the people that are looking at these, they take it often as real and so they get downward social comparison and this is like compared to how you and I probably live where we may get one or two of those events a week, they're getting them moment by moment. And so it's a plausible mechanism that why it might be driving people into a more depressed state. Okay, the flip side of that is because there's a greater, greater gap going from real world to Instagram world, you start to be able to laugh at it and realize that it's artificial. So for example, even just artificial filters, people start to realize like, there's like, it's the same kind of gap as there is between the video game world and the real world. In the video game world, you can do all kinds of wild things. Grand theft auto, you can shoot people up, you can do whatever the heck you want. In the real world, you can't and you start to develop an understanding of how to have fun in the virtual world and in the physical world. And I think it's just as a pushback, I'm not saying either is true though, those are very interesting claims. The more ridiculously out of touch Instagram becomes, the easier you can laugh it off potentially in terms of the effect it has on your psyche. I'll respond to that. But at some point, we should get back to Flo. As we engage in Flo. You laugh at the shampoo commercial and you buy the shampoo. There's a capacity for tremendous bullshitting because of the way these machines are designed to trigger salience without triggering reflective truth seeking. I'm thinking of common examples because sometimes you can laugh all the way to the bank. You can laugh and not buy the shampoo. There's many cases, so I think you have to laugh hard enough. You do have to laugh hard enough, but the advertisers get millions of dollars precisely because for many, many people, it does make you buy the shampoo and that's the concern. And maybe the machine of social media is such that it optimizes the shampoo buying. Yes. The point I was trying to make is whether or not that particular example is ultimately right, the possibility of transfer failure is a real thing. And I want to contrast that to an experience I had when I was in grad school. I had been doing Tai Chi Chuan about three or four years, very religiously, both senses of the word, like three or four hours a day and reading all the literature and I was having all the weird experiences, cold as ice, hot as lava, all that stuff and it's ooh, right? But my friends in grad school, they said to me, what's going on? You're different. And I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, you're a lot more balanced in your interactions and you're a lot more flowing and you're a lot more sort of flexible and you adjust more and I realized, oh, and this was the sort of Taoist claim around Tai Chi Chuan that it actually transfers in ways that you might not expect. You start to be able, and I've now noticed that, I now notice how I'm doing Tai Chi even in this interaction and how it can facilitate and afford and so there's a powerful transfer and that's what I meant by flow wisely, not only flow in a way that's making sure that you're distinguishing causation from correlation, which flow can do, but find how to situate it, home it so that it will percolate through your psyche and permeate through many domains of your life. Is there something you could say similar to our discussion about mindfulness and meditation and contemplation about the world that psychedelics take our mind? Where does the mind go when it's on psychedelics? I want to remind you of something you said, which is a gem. It's not so much the experience, but the degree to which it can be integrated back. So here's a proposal that comes from Woodward and others, a lot of convergence around this. Carhartt Harris is talking about it similarly in the entropic brain, but I'm not going to talk first about psychedelics. I'm going to talk about neural networks and I'm going to talk about a classic problem in neural networks. So neural networks, like us with intuition and implicit learning, are fantastic at picking up on complex patterns. Which neural networks are we talking about? I'm talking about a general, just general... Both artificial and biological? Yes. Yes. I think at this point, there is no relevant difference. So one of the classic problems because of their power is they suffer from overfitting to the data, or for those of you who are in a statistical orientation, they pick up patterns in the sample that aren't actually present in the population. And so what you do is there's various strategies. You can do dropout where you periodically turn off half of the nodes in a network. You can drop noise into the network. And what that does is it prevents overfitting to the data and allows the network to generalize more powerfully to the environment. I proposed to you that that's basically what psychedelics do. They do that. They basically do significant constraint reduction. And so you get areas of the brain talking to each other that don't normally talk to each other, areas that do talk to each other, not talking to each other, down regulation of areas that are very dominant, like the default mode network, et cetera. And what that does is exactly something strongly analogous to what's happening in dropout or putting noise into the data. It opens up. And by the way, if you give human beings an insight problem that they're trying to solve and you throw in some noise, like literally static on the screen, you can trigger an insight in them. So like literally very simplistic kind of noise to the perception system. Right. It can break it out of overfitting to the data and open you up. Now, that means, though, that just doing that in and of itself is not the answer because you also have to make sure that the system can go back to exploring that new space properly. This isn't a problem with neural networks. You turn off dropout and they just go back to being powerful neural networks, and now they explore the state space that they couldn't explore before. Human beings are a little bit more messy around this, and this is where the analogy does get a little bit strained. So they need practices that help them integrate that opening up to the new state space so they can properly integrate it. So beyond Leary's state and setting, I think you need another S. I think you need sacred. You need, psychedelics need to be practiced within a sapiential framework, a framework in which people are independently and beforehand improving their abilities to deal with self deception and afford insight and self regulate. This is, of course, the overwhelming way in which psychedelics are used by indigenous cultures. And I think if we put them into that context, then they can help the project of people self transcending, cultivating meaning and increasing wisdom. But if I think we remove them out of that context and put them in the context of commodities taken just to have certain phenomenological changes, we run certain important risks. So using the term of higher states of consciousness. Yes. Is consciousness an important part of that word? Why higher? Is it a higher state or is it a detour, a side road on the main road of consciousness? Where do we go here? I think the psychedelic state is on a continuum. There's insight and then flow is an insight cascade. There's flow and then you can have sort of psychedelic experiences, mind revealing experiences, but they overlap with mystical experiences and they aren't the same. So for example, in the Griffiths lab, they gave people psilocybin and they taught them ahead of time sort of the features of a mystical experience and only a certain proportion of the people that took the psilocybin went from a psychedelic into a mystical experience. What was interesting is the people that had the mystical experience had measurable and longstanding change to one of the big five factors of personality. They had increased openness, openness is supposed to actually go down over time and these traits aren't supposed to be that malleable and it was significantly like altered, right? But imagine if you just created more openness in a person, right? And they're now open to a lot more and they want to explore a lot more, but you don't give them the tools of discernment. That could be problematic for them in important ways. That could be very problematic. Yes, I got it, but you know, so you have to land the plane in a productive way somehow integrated back into your life and how you see the world and how you frame your perception of that world. And when people do that, that's when I call it a transformative experience. Now the higher states of consciousness are really interesting because they tend to move people from a mystical experience into a transformative experience, because what happens in these experiences is something really, really interesting. They get to a state that's ineffable, they can't put it into words, they can't describe it, but they're in this state temporarily and then they come back and they do this. They say, that was really real and this in comparison is less real. So I remember that platonic meta desire, I want to change my life myself so that I'm more in conformity with that really real, and that is really odd, Lex, because normally when we go outside of our consensus intelligibility, like a dream state, we come back from it, we say, that doesn't fit into everything, therefore it's unreal. They do the exact opposite. They come out of these states and they say, that doesn't fit into this consensus intelligibility and that means this is less real. They do the exact opposite and that fascinates me. Why do they flip our normal procedure about evaluating alternative states? The thing is those higher states of consciousness, precisely because they have that ontonormativity, the realness that demands that you make a change in your life, they serve to bridge between mystical experiences and genuine transformative experiences. So you do think seeing those as more real is productive because then you reach for them. So Jaden's done work on it, and again, all of this stuff isn't recent, so we have to take it with a grain of salt, but by a lot of objective measure, people who do this, who have these higher states of consciousness and undertake the transformative process, their lives get better, their relationships improve, their sense of self improves, their anxieties go down, depression, like all of these other measures, the needles are moved on these measures by people undergoing this transformative experience. Their lives, by many of the criteria that we judge our lives to be good, get better. I have to ask you about this fascinating distributed cognition process that leads to mass formation of ideologies that have had an impact on our world. So you spoke about the clash of the two great pseudo religious ideologies of Marxism and Nazism. Yes. Especially their clash on the Eastern Front. Battle of Kursk. Can you explain the origin of each of these, Marxism and Nazism, in a kind of way that we have been talking about the formation of ideas? Hegel is to Protestantism what Thomas Aquinas is to Catholicism. He was the philosopher who took German Protestantism and also Kant and Fichte and Schelling, and he built a philosophical system. He explicitly said this, by the way. He wanted to bridge between philosophy and religion. He explicitly said that. I'm not foisting that on him. He said it repeatedly in many different places. So he's trying to create a philosophical system that gathered to it, I think, the core mythos of Christianity. The core mythos of Christianity is this idea of a narrative structure to reality in which progress is real, in which our actions now can change the future. We can co participate with God in the creation of the future, and that future can be better. It can reach something like a utopia or the promised land or whatever. He created a philosophical system of brilliance, by the way. He's a genius. But basically what it did was it took that religious vision and gave it the air of philosophical intelligibility and respect. And then Marx takes that and says, you know that process by which the narrative is working itself out that Hegel called dialectic, I don't think it's primarily happening in ideas. I think it's happening primarily between classes within socioeconomic factors. But it's the same story. Here's this mechanism of history, it's teleological, it's going to move this way, it can move towards a utopia. We can either participate in furthering it, like participating in the work of God, or we can thwart it and be against it. And so you have a pseudo religious vision. It's all encompassing. Think about how Marxism is not just a philosophical position, it's not just an economic position. It's an entire worldview, an entire account of history, and a demanding account of what human excellence is. And it has all these things about participating, belonging, fitting to. But it's very, in Marx's case, it's very pragmatic or directly applicable to society, to where it leads to, it more naturally leads to political ideologies. It does. But I think Marx, to a very significant degree, inherits one of Hegel's main flaws. Hegel is talking about all this and he's trying to fit it into post Kantian philosophy. So for him, it's ultimately propositional, conceptual. He like everybody after Descartes is very focused on the propositional level, and he's not paying deep attention to the nonpropositional. This is why the two great critics of Hegel, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, they're trying to put their finger on the nonpropositional, the nonconceptual, the will to power or faith in Kierkegaard, and they're trying to bring out all these other kinds of knowing as being inadequate. That's why Kierkegaard meant when he said, Hegel made a system and then he sat down beside it. And so Marxism is very much, it is activist, it's about reorganizing society, but the transformation in individuals is largely ideological, meaning it's largely about these significant propositional changes and adopting a set of beliefs. When it came in contact with the Soviet Union or with what became the Soviet Union, why do you think it had such a powerful hold on such a large number of people? Not Marxism, but implementation of Marxism in the name of communism. Because it offered people, I mean, it offered people something that typically only religions had offered, and it offered people the hope of making a new man, a new kind of human being in a new world. And when you've been living in Russia, in which things seem to be locked in a system that is crushing most people, getting the promise in the air of scientific legitimacy that we can make new human beings and a new world and in which happiness will ensue, that's an intoxicating proposal. You get sort of, like I said, you get all of the intoxication of a religious utopia, but you get all the seeming legitimacy of claiming that it's a scientific understanding of history and economics. It's very popular to criticize communism, Marxism these days, and I often put myself in the place before any of the implementations came to be, I tried to think if I would be able to predict what the implementations of Marxism and communism would result in, in the 20th century. And I'm not sure I'm smart enough to make that prediction. Because at the core of the ideas are respecting, with Marx it's very economics type theory, so it's basically respecting the value of the worker and the regular man in society for making a contribution to that society. And to me that seems like a powerful idea, and it's not clear to me how it goes wrong. In fact, it's still not clear to me why the hell would Stalin happen, or Mao happen. There's something very interesting and complex about human nature in hierarchies, about distributed cognition that results in that, and it's not trivial to understand. No, no. So, I mean, I wonder if you could put a finger on it. Why did it go so wrong? So I think, you know, what Ohana talks about in The Intellectual History of Modernity talks about the Promethean spirit, the idea, the really radical proposal. And think about how it's not so radical to us, and in that sense Marxism has succeeded. The radical proposal that you see even in the French Revolution, and don't forget the terror comes in the French Revolution too, that we can make ourselves into godlike beings. Think of the hubris in that, and think of the overconfidence to think that we so understand human nature and all of its complexities and human history, and how religion functioned, that we can just come in with a plan and make it run. To my mind, that Promethean spirit is part of why it's doomed to fail, and it's doomed to fail in a kind of terrorizing way, because the Promethean spirit really licenses you to do anything, because the ends justify the means. The ends justify the means really free you to do some of, basically, well, commit atrocities at any scale. Ground zero with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, right, exactly. And you can only believe in an ends that can justify any means if you believe in a utopia, and you can only believe in the utopia if you really buy into the Promethean spirit. So is that what explains Nazism? So Nazism is part of that, too. The Promethean spirit that we can make ourselves into supermen, ubermensch, right? And Nazism is fueled very much by appropriating and twisting sort of Gnostic themes that are very prevalent, Gnosticism tends to come to the fore when people are experiencing increased meaning crisis. And don't forget, the Weimar Republic is like a meaning crisis gone crazy on all levels. Everybody's suffering domicile, everybody's home and way of life and identity and culture and relationship to religion and science, all of that, right? So Nazism comes along and offers a kind of Gnosticism, again, twisted, perverted. I'm not saying that all Gnostics are Nazis, but there is this Gnostic mythology, mythos, and it comes to the fore. I remember, and this stuck with me in undergrad, I was taking political science, and the professor extended lecture on this, and it still rings true for me, says, if you understand Nazism as just a political movement, you have misunderstood it. It is much more a religious phenomenon in many ways. Is it religious in that the loss of religion? So is it a meaning crisis? Or is it out of a meaning crisis every discovery of religion in a Promethean type of... I think it's the latter. I think there's this vacuum created. In that context, is Hitler the central religious figure? Yes. And also, did Nazi Germany create Hitler, or did Hitler create Nazi Germany? So in this distributed cognition where everyone's having a dialogue, what's the role of a charismatic leader? Is it an emergent phenomena, or do you need one of those to kind of guide the populace? I hope it's not a necessary requirement. I hope that the next Buddha can be the Sangha rather than a specific individual. But I think in that situation, Hitler's charisma allowed him to take on a mythological, in the proper sense, archetypal... He became deeply symbolic, and he instituted all kinds of rituals, all kinds of rituals, and all kinds of mythos. There's all this mythos about the master race, and there's all these rituals. The swastika is, of course, itself a religious symbol. There's all of this going on because he was tapping into the fact that when you put people into deeper and deeper meaning scarcity, they will fall back on more and more mythological ways of thinking in order to try and come up with a generative source to give them new meaning making. I should say meaning participating behavior. What is evil? Is this a word you avoid? No, I don't. Because I think part of what we're wrestling with here is resisting the Enlightenment, I mean the historical period in Europe, the idea that evil and sin can just be reduced to immorality, individual human immorality. I think there's something deeper in the idea of sin than just immoral. I think sin is a much more comprehensive category. I think sin is a failure to love wisely so that you ultimately engage in a kind of idolatry. You take something as ultimate, which is not. And that can tend to constellate these collective agents, I call them hyperagents, within distributed cognition that have a capacity to wreak havoc on the world that is not just due to a sort of a sum total of immoral decisions. This goes to Hannah Arendt's thing, and the banality of Eichmann. She was really wrestling with it, and I think she's close to something, but I think she's slightly off. Eichmann is just making a whole bunch of immoral decisions, but it doesn't seem to capture the gravity of what the Nazis did, the genocide and the warfare. And she's right, because you're not going to get just the summation of a lot of individual rather banal immoral choices adding up to what was going on. You're getting a comprehensive parasitic process within massive distributed cognition that has the power to confront the world and confront aspects of the world that individuals can't. And I think when we're talking about evil, that's what we're trying to point to. This is a point of convergence between me and Jonathan Paget. We've been talking about this. So the word sin is interesting. Yes. Are you comfortable using the word sin? I'm comfortable. Because it's so deeply rooted in religious texts. It is. It is. And in part, and I struggle around this because I was brought up as a fundamentalist Christian, and so that is still there within me. There's trauma associated with that. Probably layers of self deception mechanisms. No doubt. No doubt. That you're slowly escaping. Yes. Trying to. And trying to come into a proper respectful relationship with Christianity via a detour through Buddhism, Taoism, and pagan Neoplatonism. Trying to find a way how to love wisely. Yes, exactly. And so I think the term sin is good because somebody may not be doing something that we would prototypically call immoral, but if they're failing to love wisely, they are disconnecting themselves in some important way from the structures of reality. And I think it was Hume. I may be wrong. Hume says, you know, people don't do things because they think it's wrong. They do a lesser good in place of a greater good. And that's a different thing than being immoral. Immoral, we're saying, you're doing something that's wrong. It's like, well, no, no, you know, I'm loving my wife. That's a great thing, isn't it? Yeah. But if you love your wife at the expense of your kids, like, wow, maybe something's going awry here. Right? Well, I love my country. Great. But should you love your country at the expense of your commitment to the religion you belong to? I mean, people should wrestle with these questions. And I think sin is a failure to wrestle with these questions properly. Yeah. To be content with the choices you've made without considering, is there a greater good that could be done? Yeah. Your lecture series on The Meaning Crisis puts us in dialogue in the same way as with the podcast with a bunch of fascinating thinkers throughout history. Yes. For example, Paul Corbin, the man Carl Jung, Tillich, Barfield, is there, can you describe, this might be challenging, but one powerful idea from each that jumps to mind? Yes. Maybe Heidegger? So for Heidegger, one real powerful idea that has had a huge influence on me, he's had a huge influence on me in many ways. He's a big influence on what's called 4E Cognitive Science. And this whole idea about the nonpropositional, that was deeply afforded by Heidegger and Marla Ponti. But I guess maybe the one idea, if I had to pick one, is his critique of ontotheology, his critique of the attempt to understand being in terms of a supreme being, something like that, and how that gets us fundamentally messed up and we get disconnected from being because we are overfocused on particular beings. We're failing to love wisely. We're loving the individual things and we're not loving the ground from which they spring. Can you explain that a little more? What's the difference between the being and the supreme being and why that gets us into trouble? Okay. So, well, we talked about this before, the supreme being is a particular being, whereas being is no thing. It's not any particular kind of thing. And so if you're thinking of being as a being, you're thinking of it in a thingy way about something that is fundamentally no thingness. And so then you're disconnecting yourself from presumably ultimate reality. This takes me to Tillich. Tillich's great idea is understanding faith as ultimate concern rather than a set of propositions that you're asserting, right? So what are you ultimately concerned about? What do you want to be in right relationship to, ratio religio? And is that ultimate? Is that the ultimate reality that you conceive of? Are those two things in sync? This has had a profound influence on me and I think it's a brilliant idea. So some of the others, how do they integrate? Maybe this is Carl Jung and Freud. Which team are you on? I'm on Jung. Freud is the better writer, but Jung has, I think, a model of the psyche that is closer to where cognitive science is heading. He's more prescient. Which aspect of his model of the psyche? Directly. So Freud has a hydraulic model. The psyche is like a steam engine. Things are under pressure and there's a fluid that's moving around. It's like, like this is a record note of this. Jung has an organic model. The psyche is like a living being. It's doing all this opponent processing. It's doing all of this self transcending and growing. And I think that's a much better model of the psyche than the sort of steam engine model. What do you think about their view of the subconscious mind? What do you think their view and your own view of what's going on there in the shadow? So all bad stuff, some good stuff, any stuff at all? Well, I mean, both Freud and Jung are only talking about the psychodynamic unconscious, which is only a small part of the unconscious. Can you elaborate on the psychodynamic? They're talking about the aspects of the unconscious that have to do with your sort of ego development and how you are understanding and interpreting yourself. Yeah. What else is there? There's the unconscious that allows you to turn the noise coming out of my face hole into ideas. There's the unconscious that says, yeah, all that stuff, which is huge and powerful. And they didn't think about that. They're focused on the big romantic stuff that you have to deal with through psychotherapy, that kind of stuff. Which is relevant and important. I'm not dismissing. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but it's certainly not all of the unconscious. A lot of work that's going on, my colleague and deep friend, Anderson Todd is about, can we take the Jungian stuff and the cognitive science stuff and can we integrate it together theoretically? And so he's working on that, exactly that project. But nevertheless, your sense is there is a subconscious. Or at least an unconscious. I like the term unconscious. And Jung continually reminded people that the unconscious is unconscious, that we're not conscious of it. And that's its fundamental property. Yeah, and then isn't the task of therapy then to bring, to make the unconscious conscious? Yeah, to a degree, right? But also, I mean, yeah, to bring consciousness where there was unconscious is part of Jung's mythos. But it's also not the thought that that can be completed. Part of why you're extending the reach of the conscious mind is it so it can enter into a more proper dialogical relationship with the self organizing system of the unconscious mind. What did they have to say about the motivations of humans? So for Freud, jokingly, I said, you know, sex, so much of our mind is developed in our young age, sexual interactions with the world or whatever, hence the thing about the edible complex and all, you know, I wanted to have sex with your mother. What do you think about their description about what motivates humans? And what do you think about the will to power from Nietzsche? Which camp are you in there? What motivates humans? Sex or power? I think Plato is right. And I think there's a connection for me. Plato's my first philosopher, Jung's my first psychologist, and Jung is very much the Plato of the psyche. You never forget your first. Yeah. You never do. You never do. And I think we have, I reject the monological mind, I reject the monophasic mind model. I think we are multi centered. I think we have different centers of motivation that operate according to different principles to satisfy different problems, and that part of the task of our humanity is to get those different centers into some internal culture by which they are optimally cooperating rather than in conflict with each other. What advice would you give to young people today? They're in high school trying to figure out what they're going to do with their life. Maybe they're in college. What advice would you give how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of? So the first thing is find an ecology of practices and a community that supports them without involving you in believing things that contravene our best understood science so that wisdom and virtue, especially how they show up in relationships, are primary to you. This will sound ridiculous, but if you take care of that, the other things you want are more likely to occur. Because what you want at when you're approaching your death is what were the relationships you cultivated to yourself, to other people, to the world, and what did you do to improve the chance of them being deep and profound relationships? That's an interesting ecology of practice, finding a place where a lot of people are doing different things that are interesting interplay with each other, but at the same time is not a cult where ideas can flourish. How the hell do you know? Because in a place where people are really excited about doing stuff, that's very ripe for cult formation. Especially if they're awash in a culture in which we have ever expanding waves of bullshit. Yes, precisely. So... Try to keep away from the bullshit is the advice. Yes. No, I mean, I take this very seriously and I was with a bunch of people in Vermont at the respond retreat, people, Rafe Kelly was there, a bunch of people who have set up ecologies of practices and created communities. And I have good reason to find all of these people trustworthy. And so we gathered together to try and generate real dialogos, flow in distributed cognition, exercise the collective intelligence, and try and address that problem, both in terms of metachurriculum that we can offer emerging communities, in terms of practices of vetting, how we will self govern the federation we're forming so that we can resist gurufication. Gurufication of people or ideas? Both. Yeah. Both. Some of us just get unlucky. Some of us get unlucky and we all at respond, we all had a tremendous sense of urgency around this, but we were trying to balance it about not being premature, but there was going to, I mean, we're going to produce a metachurriculum that's coming in months, there's going to be a scientific paper about integrating the scientific work on wisdom with this practitioner based ideas about the cultivation of wisdom, there's going to be projects about how we can create a self correcting vetting system so we can say to people, we think this ecology is legit, it's in good fellowship with all these other legit ecologies, we don't know about that one, we're hesitant about that one, it's not in good fellowship, we have concerns, here's why we have our concerns, et cetera. And you may say, well, who are you to do that? It's like nobody, but somebody's got to do it, right? And that's what it comes down to, and so we're going to give it our best effort. It's worth a try. You talked about the meaning crisis in human civilization, but in your own personal life, what has been a dark place you've ever gone in your mind? Has there been difficult times in your life where you've really struggled? Yes. So when I left fundamentalist Christianity, and for a while I was just sort of a hard bitten atheist, the problem with leaving the belief structure was that I didn't deal with all the nonpropositional things that had gotten into me, all the procedures and habits and all the perspectives and all the identities and the trauma associated with that. So I required therapy, it required years of meditation and Tai Chi, and I'm still wrestling with it, but for the first four or five years, I would... I described it like this, I called it the black burning. I felt like there was a blackness that was on fire inside of me, precisely because the religion had left a taste for the transcendent in my mouth, but it had... The food it had given me, food in square quotes, had soured in my stomach and made me nauseous, and the juxtaposition of those seemed like an irresolvable problem for me. That was a very, very dark time for me. Did it feel lonely? When it was very bad, it felt extremely lonely and deeply alienating. The universe seemed absurd, and there was also existential anxiety. I talk about these things for a reason. I don't just talk about them as things I'm pointing to. I'm talking about them as seeing in myself and in people I care, having undergone them and how they can bring you close to self destructive... I started engaging in kinds of self destructive behavior. So the meaning crisis to you is not just the thing you look outside and see many people struggling. You yourself have struggled. But that's, in fact, the narrative, is I struggled with it, thinking it was a purely personal, idiosyncratic thing. I started learning the kog sai, I started doing the tai chi and the meditation, I started doing all this Socratic philosophy. And when I started to talk about these pieces, I saw my students eyes light up, and I realized, wait, maybe this isn't just something I'm going through. And talking to them and then doing the research and expanding it out, it's like, oh, many people in a shared fashion and also in an individual lonely fashion are going through meaning crisis. Well, we talked a lot about wisdom and meaning, and you said that the goal is to love wisely. So let me ask about love. What's the role of love in the human condition? It's central. I mean, it's even central to reason and rationality. This is Plato, but Spinoza, the most logical of the rationalists. The ethics is written like Euclid's geometry, but he calls it the ethics for a reason, because he wants to talk about the blessed life. And what does he say? He says that ultimately reason needs love, because love is what brings reason out of being entrapped in the gravity well of egocentrism. And Murdoch, Iris Murdoch said, I think really beautifully, love is when you painfully realize that something other than yourself is real. Escaping the gravity well of egocentrism. Beautifully put. A beautiful way to end it. And you're a beautiful human being. Thank you for struggling in your own mind with the search for meaning and encouraging others to do the same. And ultimately to learn how to love wisely. Thank you so much for talking today. It's been a great pleasure, Lex. I really enjoyed it a lot. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jon Verweke. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha. I've always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way, we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

John Vervaeke: Meaning Crisis, Atheism, Religion & the Search for Wisdom | Lex Fridman Podcast #317

Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2, and you put them together in a falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade, and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's gonna happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. Why doesn't that happen? It's because of the kinetic barriers. That's where you need the spark. The following is a conversation with Nick Lane, a biochemist at University College London and author of some of my favorite books on biology, science, and life ever written, including his two most recent titled "'Transformer,' The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death," and the vital question, why is life the way it is? This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Nick Lane. Let's start with perhaps the most mysterious, the most interesting question that we little humans can ask of ourselves. How did life originate on Earth? You could ask anybody working on the subject, and you'll get a different answer from all of them. They will be pretty passionately held opinions, and their opinions grounded in science, but they're still really, at this point, their opinions, because there's so much stuff to know that all we can ever do is get a small slice of it, and it's the context which matters. So I can give you my answer. My answer is from a biologist's point of view. That has been missing from the equation over decades, which is, well, what does life do on Earth? Why is it this way? Why is it made of cells? Why is it made of carbon? Why is it powered by electrical charges on membranes? There's all these interesting questions about cells that if you then look to see, well, is there an environment on Earth, on the early Earth four billion years ago, that kind of matches the requirements of cells? Well, there is one. There's a very obvious one. It's basically created by whenever you have a wet, rocky planet, you get these hydrothermal vents, which generate hydrogen gas in bucket loads, and electrical charges on kind of cell like pores that can drive the kind of chemistry that life does. So it seems so beautiful and so obvious that I've spent the last 10 years or more trying to do experiments. It turns out to be difficult, of course. Everything's more difficult than you ever thought it was gonna be, but it looks, I would say, more true rather than less true over that 10 year period. I think I have to take a step back every now and then and think, hang on a minute, where's this going? I'm happy it's going in a sensible direction. And I think then you have these other interesting dilemmas. I mean, I'm often accused of being too focused on life on Earth, too kind of narrow minded and inward looking, you might say. I'm talking about carbon, I'm talking about cells, and maybe you or plenty of people can say to me, ah, yeah, but life can be anything. I have no imagination. And maybe they're right. But unless we can say why life here is this way, and if those reasons are fundamental reasons, or if they're just trivial reasons, then we can't answer that question. So I think they're fundamental reasons, and I think we need to worry about them. Yeah, there might be some deep truth to the puzzle here on Earth that will resonate with other puzzles elsewhere that will, solving this particular puzzle will give us that deeper truth. So what, to this puzzle, you said vents, hydrogen, wet, so chemically, what is the potion here? How important is oxygen? You wrote a book about this. Yeah, and I actually just came straight here from a conference where I was chairing a session on whether oxygen matters or not in the history of life. Of course it matters, but it matters most to the origin of life to be not there. As I see it, we have this, I mean, life is made of carbon, basically, primarily, organic molecules with carbon, carbon bonds. And the building block, the Lego brick that we take out of the air or take out of the oceans is carbon dioxide. And to turn carbon dioxide into organic molecules, we need to strap on hydrogen. And so we need, and this is basically what life is doing, it's hydrogenating carbon dioxide. It's taking the hydrogen, the bubbles out of the earth in these hydrothermal vents, and it sticks it on CO2. And it's kind of really as simple as that. And actually, thermodynamically, there's the thing that I find most troubling is that if you do these experiments in the lab, the molecules you get are exactly the molecules that we see at the heart of biochemistry in the heart of life. Is there something to be said about the earliest origins of that little potion, that chemical process? What really is the spark there? There isn't a spark. There is a continuous chemical reaction. And there is kind of a spark, but it's a continuous electrical charge which helps drive that reaction. There's a literally spark. Well, the charge at least, but yes. I mean, a spark in that sense is, we tend to think of in terms of Frankenstein, we tend to think in terms of electricity and one moment you zap something and it comes alive. And what does that really mean? It's come alive and now what's sustaining it? Well, we are sustained by oxygen, by this continuous chemical reaction. And if you put a plastic bag on your head, then you've got a minute or something before it's all over. So some way of being able to leverage a source of energy. Well, the source of energy at the origin of life is the reaction between carbon dioxide and hydrogen. And amazingly, most of these reactions are exergonic, which is to say they release energy. If you have hydrogen and CO2 and you put them together in a falcon tube and you warm it up to say 50 degrees centigrade and you put in a couple of catalysts and you shake it, nothing's gonna happen. But thermodynamically, that is less stable. Two gases, hydrogen and CO2, is less stable than cells. What should happen is you get cells coming out. So why doesn't that happen? It's because of the kinetic barriers. That's where you need the spark. Is it possible that life originated multiple times on Earth? The way you describe it, you make it sound so easy. There's a long distance to go from the first bits of prebiotic chemistry to, say, molecular machines like ribosomes. Is that the first thing that you would say is life? Like if I introduce you, the two of you at a party, you would say that's a living thing? I would say as soon as we introduce genes, information, into systems that are growing anyway, so I would talk about growing protocells, as soon as we introduce even random bits of information into there, I'm thinking about RNA molecules, for example, doesn't have to have any information in it. It can be a completely random sequence. But if it's introduced into a system which is in any case growing and doubling itself and reproducing itself, then any changes in that sequence that allow it to do so better or worse are now selected by perfectly normal natural selection. But it's a system. So that's when it becomes alive to my mind. That's encompassed into like an object that keeps information and evolves that information over time or changes that information over time in response to the. So it's always part of a cell system from the very beginning. So is your sense that it started only once because it's difficult or is it possibly started in multiple locations on Earth? It's possible it started multiple occasions. There's two provisos to that. One of them is oxygen makes it impossible really for life to start. So as soon as we've got oxygen in the atmosphere, then life isn't gonna keep starting over. So I often get asked by people, why can't we have life starting? If it's so easy, why can't life start in these vents now? And the answer is if you want hydrogen to react with CO2 and there's oxygen there, hydrogen reacts with oxygen instead. It's just, you get an explosive reaction that way. It's rocket fuel. So it's never gonna happen. But for the origin of life earlier than that, all we know is that there's a single common ancestor for all of life. There could have been multiple origins and they all just disappeared. But there's a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they're not quite as diverse, but nearly. And they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account as well for why they're so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once. Can you describe the difference that's interesting there? Well, how they're similar, how they're different? Well, they're different in their membranes primarily. They're different in things like DNA replication. They use completely different enzymes and the genes behind it for replicating DNA. So they both have membranes, both have DNA replication. Yes. The process of that is different. They both have DNA. The genetic code is identical in them both. The way in which it's transcribed into RNA, into the copy of a gene, and the way that that's then translated into a protein, that's all basically the same in both of these groups. So they clearly share a common ancestor. It's just that they're different in fundamental ways as well. And if you think about, well, what kind of processes could drive that divergence very early on? I can think about it in terms of membranes, in terms of the electrical charges on membranes. And it's that that makes me think that there was probably, there were probably many unsuccessful attempts but only one really successful attempt. Can you explain why that divergence makes you think there's one common ancestor? Okay, can you describe that intuition? I'm a little bit unclear about why the divert, like the leap from the divergence means there's one. Do you mean like the divergence indicates that there was a big invention at that time from one source? If you'd got, as I imagine it, you have a common ancestor living in a hydrothermal vent. Let's say there are millions of vents and millions of potential common ancestors living in all of those vents, but only one of them makes it out first. Then you could imagine that that cell is then gonna kind of take over the world and wipe out everything else. And so what you would see would be a single common ancestor for all of life. But with lots of different vent systems all kind of vying to create the first life forms, you might say. So this thing is a cell, a single cell organism. We're always talking about populations of cells, but yes. These are single celled organisms. But the fundamental life form is a single cell, right? So like, or, so they're always together but they're alone together. Yeah. There's a machinery in each one individual component that if left by itself would still work, right? Yes, yes, yes. It's the unit of selection is a single cell. But selection operates over generations and changes over generations in populations of cells. So it would be impossible to say that a cell is the unit of selection in the sense that unless you have a population, you can't evolve, you can't change. Right, but there was one Chuck Norris, it's an American reference cell that made it out of the vents, right? Or like the first one. So imagine then that there's one cell gets out and it takes over the world. It gets out in the water, it's like floating around. We're deep in the ocean somewhere. Yeah. But actually two cells got out and they appear to have got out from the same vent because they both share the same code and everything else. So unless all the, you know, we've got a million different common ancestors in all these different vents. So either they all have the same code and two cells spontaneously merge from different places or two different cells, fundamentally different cells came from the same place. So either way, what are the constraints that say, not just one came out or not half a million came out, but two came out. That's kind of a bit strange. So how did they come out? Well, they come out because what are you doing inside a vent is you're relying on the electrical charges down there to power this reaction between hydrogen and CO2 to make yourself grow. And when you leave the vent, you've got to do that yourself. You've got to power up your own membrane. And so the question is, well, how do you power up your own membrane? And the answer is, well, you need to pump. You need to pump ions to give an electrical charge on the membrane. So what do the pumps look like? Well, the pumps look different in these two groups. It's as if they both emerged from a common ancestor. As soon as you've got that ancestor, things move very quickly and divergently. Why does the DNA replication look different? Well, it's joined to the membrane. The membranes are different. The DNA replication is different because it's joined to a different kind of membrane. So there's interesting, this is detail, you may say, but it's also fundamental because it's about the two big divergent groups of life on Earth that seem to have diverged really early on. And it all started from one organism. And then that organism just start replicating the heck out of itself with some mutation of the DNA. So like there's some, there's a competition through the process of evolution. They're not like trying to beat each other up. They're just, they're just trying to live. Just replicate us. Yeah. Well, you know, let's not minimize there. Yeah. They're just trying to chill. They're trying to relax up. There's no, but there's no sense of trying to survive. They're replicating. I mean, there's no sense in which they're trying to do anything. They're just kind of an outgrowth of the Earth, you might say. Of course, the aliens would describe us humans in that same way. They might be right. This primitive life. It's just ants that are hairless, mostly hairless. Overgrown ants. Overgrown ants. Okay. What do you think about the idea of panspermia that the theory that life did not originate on Earth and was planted here from outer space? Or pseudopanspermia, which is like the basic ingredients, the magic that you mentioned was planted here from elsewhere in space? I don't find them helpful. That's not to say they're wrong. So, pseudotranspermia, the idea that the chemicals, the amino acids, the nucleotides are being delivered from space. Well, we know that happens. It's unequivocal. They're delivered on meteorites, comets, and so on. So what do they do next? That's, to me, the question. Well, what do they do is they stock a soup. Presumably, they land in a pond or in an ocean or wherever they land. And then you end up with a best possible case scenario is you end up with a soup of nucleotides and amino acids. And then you have to say, so now what happens? And the answer is, oh, well, they have to go, bloop, become alive. So how did they do that? And you may as well say then a miracle happened. I don't believe in soup. I think what we have in event is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it's a small bit. So you've got a kind of continuous self organization and growth from the very beginning. You never have that in a soup. Isn't the entire universe and living organisms in the universe, isn't it just soup all the way down? Isn't it all soup? No, no, I mean, soup almost by definition doesn't have a structure. But soup is a collection of ingredients that are like randomly interacting. Yeah, but they're not random. They're not, I mean, we have chemistry going on here. We have metal grains forming, which are, you know, effective oil water interactions. Okay, so it feels like there's a direction to a process, like a directed process. There are directions to processes, yeah. And if you're starting with CO2 and you've got two reactive fluids being brought together and they react, what are they gonna make? Well, they make carboxylic acids, which include the fatty acids that make up the cell membranes. And they form directly into bilayer membranes. They form like soap bubbles. It's spontaneous organization caused by the nature of the molecules. And those things are capable of growing and are capable in effect of being selected even before there are genes. We have this, so we have a lot of order and that order is coming from thermodynamics. And the thermodynamics is always about increasing the entropy of the universe. But if you have oil and water and they're separating, you're increasing the entropy of the universe, even though you've got some order, which is the soap and the water are not missable. Now, to come back to your first question about panspermia properly, that just pushes the question somewhere else. That just, even if it's true, maybe life did start on Earth by panspermia. So what are the principles that govern the emergence of life on any planet? It's an assumption that life started here. And it's an assumption that it started in a hydrothermal vent or it started in a terrestrial geothermal system. The question is, can we work out a testable sequence of events that would lead from one to the other one and then test it and see if there's any truth in it or not? With panspermia, you can't do any of that. But the fundamental question of panspermia is, do we have the machine here on Earth to build life? Is the vents enough? Is oxygen and hydrogen and whatever the heck else we want and some source of energy and heat, is that enough to build life? Yes. Well, that's, of course you would say that as a human. Yeah. But there could be aliens right now chuckling at that idea. Maybe you need some special sauce, special elsewhere sauce. So your sense is we have everything here. I mean, this is precisely the question. I like to, when I'm talking in schools, I like to start out with the idea of we can make a time machine. We go back four billion years and we go to these environments that people talk about. We go to a deep sea hydrothermal vent, we go to a kind of Yellowstone Park type place environment and we find some slime that looks like we can test it. It's made of organic molecules. It's got a structure which is not obviously cells, but you know, is this a stepping stone on the way to life or not? Yeah. How do we know? Unless we've got an intellectual framework that says this is a stepping stone and that's not a step. You know, we'd never know. We wouldn't know which environment to go to, what to look for, how to say this. So all we can ever hope for, because we're never gonna build that time machine, is to have an intellectual framework that can explain step by step, experiment by experiment, how we go from a sterile inorganic planet to living cells as we know them. And in that framework, every time you have a choice, it could be this way or it could be that way, or there's lots of possible forks down that road. Did it have to be that way? Could it have been the other way? And would that have given you life with very different properties? And so if you come up with a, you know, it's a long hypothesis, because as I say, we're going from really simple prebiotic chemistry all the way through to genes and molecular machines. That's a long, long pathway. And nobody in the field would agree on the order in which these things happened, which is not a bad thing, because it means that you have to go out and do some experiments and try and demonstrate that it's possible or not possible. It's so freaking amazing that it happened though. It feels like there's a direction to the thing. Can you try to answer from a framework perspective of what is life? So you said there's some order and yet there's complexity. So it's not perfectly ordered. It's not boring. There's still some fun in it. And it also feels like the processes have a direction through the selection mechanism. They seem to be building something, always better, always improving. I mean, maybe it's... I mean, that's a perception. That's our romanticization of things are always better. Things are getting better, we'd like to believe that. I mean, you think about the world from the point of view of bacteria and bacteria are the first things to emerge from whatever environment they came from. And they dominated the planet very, very quickly. And they haven't really changed. Four billion years later, they look exactly the same. So about four billion years ago, bacteria started to really run the show. And then nothing happened for a while. Nothing happened for two billion years. Then after two billion years, we see another single event origin, if you like, of our own type of cell, the eukaryotic cells. So cells with a nucleus and lots of stuff going on inside. Another singular origin. It only happened once in the history of life on earth. Maybe it happened multiple times and there's no evidence. Everything just disappeared, but we have to at least take it seriously that there's something that stops bacteria from becoming more complex because they didn't. That's a fact that they emerged four billion years ago. And something happened two billion years ago, but the bacteria themselves didn't change. They remain bacterial. So there is no trajectory, necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It's very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that a planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else. We'll get to that because that's a brilliant invention. And there's a few brilliant invention along the way. But what is life? If you were to show up on earth, but to take that time machine, and you said, asking yourself the question, is this a stepping stone towards life? As you step along, when you see the early bacteria, how would you know it's life? And then this is really important question when you go to other planets and look for life. Like what is the framework of telling a difference between a rock and a bacteria? I mean, the question's kind of both impossible to answer and trivial at the same time. And I don't like to answer it because I don't think there is an answer. I think we're trying to describe the process of time. Those are the most fun questions. What do you mean there's no answer? No, there is no answer. I mean, there's lots of, there are at least 40 or 50 different definitions of life out there. And most of them are, well, obviously bad in one way or another. I mean, there's freaks. I can never remember the exact words that people use, but there's a NASA working definition of life, which more or less says a system, which is capable of self sustaining system, capable of evolution or something along those lines. And I immediately have a problem with the word self sustaining because it's sustained by the environment. And I know what they're getting at. I know what they're trying to say, but I pick a hole in that. And there's always wags who say, but you know, by that definition, a rabbit is not alive. Only a pair of rabbits would be alive because a single rabbit is incapable of copying itself. There's all kinds of pedantic, silly, but also important objections to any hypothesis. The real question is what is, you know, we can argue all day or people do argue all day about is a virus alive or not? And it depends on the content. Most biologists could not agree about that. So then what about a jumping gene, a retro element or something that is even simpler than a virus, but it's capable of converting its environment into a copy of itself. And that's about as close, this is not a definition, but this is a kind of a description of life is that it's able to parasitize the environment. And that goes for plants as well as animals and bacteria and viruses to make a relatively exact copy of themselves, informationally exact copy of themselves. By the way, it doesn't really have to be a copy of itself, right? It just has to be, you have to create something that's interesting, the way evolution is. So it is extremely powerful process of evolution, which is basically make a copy of yourself and sometimes mess up a little bit. That seems to work really well. I wonder if it's possible to mess up big time as a standard, as a default. It's called a hopeful monster and in principle it can. Actually, it turns out, I would say that this is due a reemergence, this is some amazing work from Michael Levin, I don't know if you came across him, but if you haven't interviewed him, you should interview him about, yeah. I'm talking to him in a few days. Oh, fantastic. So I mentioned, there's two people that Andre, if I may mention, Andre Kapathe is a friend who's really admired in the AI community, said you absolutely must talk to Michael and to Nick. So of course, I'm a huge fan of yours, so I'm really fortunate that we can actually make this happen. Anyway, you were saying? Well, Michael Levin is doing amazing work, basically about the way in which electrical fields control development and he's done some work with planarian worms, so flat worms, where he'll tell you all about this, so I won't say any more than the minimum, but basically you can cut their head off and they'll redevelop a different, a new head. But the head that they develop depends, if you knock out just one iron pump in a membrane, so you change the electrical circuitry just a little bit, you can come up with a completely different head. It can be a head which is similar to those that diverged 150 million years ago or it can be a head which no one's ever seen before, a different kind of head. Now that is really, you might say, a hopeful monster. This is a kind of leap into a different direction. The only question for natural selection is does it work? Is the change itself feasible as a single change? And the answer is yes, it's just a small change to a single gene. And the second thing is it gives rise to a completely different morphology. Does it work? And if it works, that can easily be a shift. But for it to be a speciation, for it to continue, for it to give rise to a different morphology over time, then it has to be perpetuated. So that shift, that change in that one gene has to work well enough that it is selected and it goes on. And copied enough times to where you can really test it. So the likelihood, it would be lost, but there will be some occasions where it survives. And yes, the idea that we can have sudden, fairly abrupt changes in evolution, I think it's time for a rebirth. What about this idea that kind of trying to mathematize a definition of life and saying how many steps, the shortest amount of steps it takes to build the thing, almost like an engineering view of it? Ah, I like that view. Because I think that in a sense, that's not very far away from what a hypothesis needs to do to be a testable hypothesis for the origin of life. You need to spell out, here's each step, and here's the experiment to do for each step. The idea that we can do it in the lab, some people say, oh, we'll have created life within five years, but ask them what they mean by life. We have a planet four billion years ago with these vent systems across the entire surface of the planet, and we have millions of years if we wanted. I have a feeling that we're not talking about millions of years. I have a feeling we're talking about maybe millions of nanoseconds or picoseconds. We're talking about chemistry, which is happening quickly. But we still need to constrain those steps, but we've got a planet doing similar chemistry. You asked about a trajectory. The trajectory is the planetary trajectory. The planet has properties. Basically, it's got a lot of iron at the center of it. It's got a lot of electrons at the center of it. It's more oxidized on the outside, partly because of the sun and partly because the heat of volcanoes puts out oxidized gases. So the planet is a battery. It's a giant battery, and we have a flow of electrons going from inside to outside in these hydrothermal vents, and that's the same topology that a cell has. A cell is basically just a micro version of the planet, and there is a trajectory in all of that, and there's an inevitability that certain types of chemical reaction are going to be favored over others, and there's an inevitability in what happens in water, the chemistry that happens in water. Some will be immiscible with water and will form membranes and will form insoluble structures, and nobody really understands water very well, and it's another big question. For experiments on the origin of life, what do you put it in? What kind of structure do we want to induce in this water? Because the last thing it's likely to be is just kind of bulk water. How fundamental is water to life, would you say? I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn't like to say it's impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water's extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. So those things, and carbon is everywhere. So those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found a thousand life forms, 995 of them would be carbon based and living in water. Now the reverse question, if you found a puddle of water elsewhere and some carbon, no, just a puddle of water. Is a puddle of water a pretty damn good indication that life either exists here or has once existed here? No. So it doesn't work the other way. I think you need a living planet. You need a planet which is capable of turning over its surface. It needs to be a planet with water. It needs to be capable of bringing those electrons from inside to the outside. It needs to turn over its surface. It needs to make that water work and turn it into hydrogen. So I think you need a living planet. But once you've got the living planet, I think the rest of it is kind of thermodynamics all the way. So if you were to run Earth over a million times up to this point, maybe beyond, to the end, let's run it to the end, what is it? How much variety is there? You kind of spoke to this trajectory that the environment dictates chemically, I don't know in which other way, spiritually, I don't know, like dictates kind of the direction of this giant machine that seems chaotic, but it does seem to have order in the steps it's taking. How often will life, how often will bacteria emerge? How often will something like humans emerge? How much variety do you think there would be? I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get, that's how many times you say you want to run it, a million times. I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again. Oh, wow, nice. Because I think there's some level of inevitability that a wet rocky planet will give rise through the same processes to something very close. I think this is not something I'd have thought a few years ago, but working with a PhD student of mine, Stuart Harrison, he's been thinking about the genetic code, and we've just been publishing on that, there are patterns that you can discern in the code, or he has discerned in the code, that if you think about them in terms of, we start with CO2 and hydrogen, and these are the first steps of biochemistry, you come up with a code which is very similar to the code that we see. So it wouldn't surprise me any longer if we found life on Mars and it had a genetic code that was not very different to the genetic code that we have here, without it just being transferred across. There's some inevitability about the whole of the beginnings of life, in my view. That's really promising, because if the basic chemistry is tightly linked to the genetic code, that means we can interact with other life if it exists out there. Well, that's potentially. That's really exciting, if that's the case. Okay, but then bacteria. We've got bacteria. Yeah. How easy is photosynthesis? Much harder, I would say. Let's actually go there. Let's go through the inventions. Yeah. What is photosynthesis? And why is it hard? Well, there are different forms. I mean, basically, you're taking hydrogen and you're sticking it onto CO2, and it's powered by the sun. Question is, where are you taking the hydrogen from? And in photosynthesis that we know in plants, it's coming from water. So you're using the power of the sun to split water, take out the hydrogen, stick it onto CO2, and the oxygen is a waste product, and you just throw it out, throw it away. So it's the single greatest planetary pollution event in the whole history of the Earth. The pollutant being oxygen. Yes, yeah. It also made possible animals. You can't have large, active animals without an oxygenated atmosphere, at least not in the sense that we know on Earth. So that's a really big invention in the history of Earth. Huge invention, yes. And it happened once. There's a few things that happen once on Earth, and you're always stuck with this problem. Once it happened, did it become so good so quickly that it precluded the same thing happening ever again? Or are there other reasons? And we really have to look at each one in turn and think, why did it only happen once? In this case, it's really difficult to split water. It requires a lot of power, and that power, you're effectively separating charge across a membrane, and the way in which you do it, if it doesn't all rush back and kind of cause an explosion right at the site, requires really careful wiring. And that wiring, it can't be easy to get it right because the plants that we see around us, they have chloroplasts. Those chloroplasts were cyanobacteria ones. Those cyanobacteria are the only group of bacteria that can do that type of photosynthesis. So there's plenty of opportunity. So not even many bacteria. So who invented photosynthesis? The cyanobacteria, or their ancestors. And there's not many? No other bacteria can do what's called oxygenic photosynthesis. Lots of other bacteria can split. I mean, you can take your hydrogen from somewhere else. You can take it from hydrogen sulfide bubbling out of a hydrothermal vent. Grab your two hydrogens. The sulfur is the waste now. You can do it from iron. You can take electrons. So the early oceans were probably full of iron. You can take an electron from ferrous iron, so iron two plus and make it iron three plus, which now precipitates as rust, and you take a proton from the acidic early ocean, stick it there. Now you've got a hydrogen atom. Stick it onto CO2. You've just done the trick. The trouble is you bury yourself in rusty iron. And with sulfur, you can bury yourself in sulfur. One of the reasons oxygenic photosynthesis is so much better is that the waste product is oxygen, which just bubbles away. That seems like extremely unlikely, and it's extremely essential for the evolution of complex organisms because of all the oxygen. Yeah, and that didn't accumulate quickly either. So it's converting, what is it? It's converting energy from the sun and the resource of water into the resource needed for animals. Both resources needed for animals. We need to eat, and we need to burn the food, and we're eating plants, which are getting their energy from the sun, and we're burning it with their waste product, which is the oxygen. So there's a lot of kind of circularity in that, but without an oxygenated planet, you couldn't really have predation. You can have animals, but you can't really have animals that go around and eat each other. You can't have ecosystems as we know them. Well, let's actually step back. What about eukaryotic versus prokaryotic cells, prokaryotes? What are each of those, and how big of an invention is that? I personally think that's the single biggest invention in the whole history of life. Exciting. So what are they? Can you explain? Yeah, so I mentioned bacteria and archaea. These are both prokaryotes. They're basically small cells that don't have a nucleus. If you look at them under a microscope, you don't see much going on. If you look at them under a super resolution microscope, then they're fantastically complex. In terms of their molecular machinery, they're amazing. In terms of their morphological appearance under a microscope, they're really small and really simple. The earliest life that we can physically see on the planet are stromatolites, which are made by things like cyanobacteria, and they're large superstructures. Effectively, biofilms plated on top of each other, and you end up with quite large structures that you can see in the fossil record. But they never came up with animals. They never came up with plants. They came up with multicellular things, filamentous cyanobacteria, for example. They're just long strings of cells. But the origin of the eukaryotic cell seems to have been what's called an endosymbiosis, so one cell gets inside another cell. And I think that that's transformed the energetic possibilities of life. So what we end up with is a kind of supercharged cell, which can have a much larger nucleus with many more genes, all supported. If you think about it, you could think about it as multi bacterial power without the overhead. So you've got a cell and it's got bacteria living in it, and those bacteria are providing it with the energy currency it needs. But each bacterium has a genome of its own, which costs a fair amount of energy to express, to kind of turn over and convert into proteins and so on. What the mitochondria did, which are these power packs in our own cells, they were bacteria once, and they threw away virtually all their genes. They've only got a few left. So mitochondria is, like you said, is the bacteria that got inside a cell and then throw away all this stuff it doesn't need to, survive inside the cell, and then kept what? So what we end up with, so it kept always a handful of genes. In our own case, 37 genes. But there's a few protists, which are single celled things that have got as many as 70 or 80 genes. So it's not always the same, but it's always a small number. And you can think of it as a paired down power pack where the control unit has really been, has been kind of paired down to almost nothing. So you're putting out the same power, but the investment in the overheads is really paired down. That means that you can support a much larger nuclear genome. So we've gone up in the number of genes, but also the amount of power you have to convert those genes into proteins. We've gone up about fourfold in the number of genes, but in terms of the size of genomes and your ability to make the building blocks, make the proteins, we've gone up 100,000 fold or more. So it's huge step change in the possibilities of evolution. And it's interesting then that the only two occasions that complex life has arisen on Earth, plants and animals, fungi you could say are complex as well, but they don't form such complex morphology as plants and animals. Start with a single cell. They start with an oocyte and a sperm fused together to make a zygote. So we start development with a single cell and all the cells in the organism have identical DNA. And you switch off in the brain, you switch off these genes and you switch on those genes and liver, you switch off those and you switch on a different set. And the standard evolutionary explanation for that is that you're restricting conflict. You don't have a load of genetically different cells that are all fighting each other. And so it works. The trouble with bacteria, they form these biofilms and they're all genetically different. And effectively they're incapable of that level of cooperation. They would get in a fight. Okay, so why is this such a difficult invention of getting this bacteria inside and becoming an engine which the mitochondria is? Why do you assign it such great importance? Is it great importance in terms of the difficulty of how it was to achieve or great importance in terms of the impact it had on life? Both. It had a huge impact on life because if that had not happened, you can be certain that life on earth would be bacterial only. And that took a really long time too. It took 2 billion years. And it hasn't happened since to the best of our knowledge. So it looks as if it's genuinely difficult. And if you think about it then from just an informational perspective, you think bacteria have got, they structure their information differently. So a bacterial cell has a small genome, you might have 4,000 genes in it, but a single E. coli cell has access to about 30,000 genes potentially. It's got a kind of metagenome where other E. coli out there have got different gene sets and they can switch them around between themselves. And so you can generate a huge amount of variation and they've got more, an E. coli metagenome is larger than the human genome. We own 20,000 genes or something. So, and they've had 4 billion years of evolution to work out what can I do and what can't I do with this metagenome? And the answer is you're stuck, you're still bacteria. So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they've had twice as long at least and they've got much larger populations and they never got around this problem. So why can't they? It seems as if you can't solve it with information alone. So what's the problem? The problem is structure. If the very first cells needed an electrical charge on their membrane to grow and in bacteria, it's the outer membrane that surrounds the cell which is electrically charged. You try and scale that up and you've got a fundamental design problem, you've got an engineering problem. And there are examples of it and what we see in all these cases is what's known as extreme polyploidy, which is to say they have tens of thousands of copies of their complete genome, which is energetically hugely expensive and you end up with a large bacteria with no further development. What you need is to incorporate these electrically charged power pack units inside with their control units intact and for them not to conflict so much with the host cell that it all goes wrong. Perhaps it goes wrong more often than not. And then you change the topology of the cell. Now you don't necessarily have any more DNA than a giant bacterium with extreme polyploidy, but what you've got is an asymmetry. You now have a giant nuclear genome which surrounded by lots of subsidiary energetic genomes that do all the, they're the control units that are doing all the control of energy generation. Could this have been done gradually or does it have to be done, the power pack has to be all intact and ready to go and working? I mean, it's a kind of step change in the possibilities of evolution, but it doesn't happen overnight. It's gonna still require multiple, multiple generations. So it could take millions of years. It could take shorter times. There's another thing I would like to put the number of steps and try and work out what's required at each step. And we are trying to do that with sex for example. You can't have a very large genome unless you have sex at that point. So what are the changes to go from bacterial recombination to eukaryotic recombination? What do you need to do? Why do we go from passing around bits of DNA as if it's loose change to fusing cells together, lining up the chromosomes, recombining across the chromosomes, and then going through two rounds of cell division to produce your gametes? All eukaryotes do it that way. So again, why switch? What are the drivers here? So there's a lot of time, there's a lot of evolution, but as soon as you've got cells living inside another cell, what you've got is a new design. You've got new potential that you didn't have before. So the cell living inside another cell, that design allows for better storage of information, better use of energy, more delegation, like a hierarchical control of the whole thing. And then somehow that leads to ability to have multi cell organisms. I'm not sure that you have hierarchical control necessarily, but you've got a system where you can have a much larger information storage depot in the nucleus. You can have a much larger genome. And that allows multicellularity, yes, because it allows you, it's a funny thing, to have an animal where I have 70% of my genes switched on in my brain, and a different 50% switched on in my liver or something, you've got to have all those genes in the egg cell at the very beginning, and you've got to have a program of development which says, okay, you guys switch off those genes and switch on those genes, and you guys, you do that. But all the genes are there at the beginning. That means you've got to have a lot of genes in one cell and you've got to be able to maintain them. And the problem with bacteria is they don't get close to having enough genes in one cell. So if you were to try and make a multicellular organism from bacteria, you'd bring different types of bacteria together and hope they'll cooperate. And the reality is they don't. That's really, really tough to do. Yeah. We know they don't because it doesn't exist. We have the data as far as we know. I'm sure there's a few special ones and they dead off quickly. I'd love to know some of the most fun things bacteria have done since. Oh, there's a few. I mean, they can do some pretty funky things. And this is broad brushstroke that I'm talking about. Yes. Generally speaking. So how was, so another fun invention. Us humans seem to utilize it well, but you say it's also very important early on is sex. So what is sex? Just asking for a friend. And when was it invented and how hard was it to invent, just as you were saying, and why was it invented? Why, how hard was it and when? I have a PhD student who's been working on this and we've just published a couple of papers on sex. Yes, yes, yes. What do you publish? Does biology, is it biology, genetics, journals? This is actually PNAS, which is Proceedings of the National Academy. Broad, big, big picture stuff. Everyone's interested in sex. Yeah. And the job of a biologist is to make sex dull. Yes, yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it. Okay, so when was it invented? It was invented with eukaryotes about two billion years ago. All eukaryotes share the same basic mechanism that you produce gametes, the gametes fuse together. So a gamete is the egg cell and the sperm. They're not necessarily even different in size or shape. So the simplest eukaryotes produce what are called motile gametes. They're all like sperm and they all swim around. They find each other, they fuse together. They don't have kind of much going on there beyond that. And then these are haploid, which is to say we all have two copies of our genome and the gametes have only a single copy of the genome. So when they fuse together, you now become diploid again, which is to say you now have two copies of your genome. And what you do is you line them all up and then you double everything. So now we have four copies of the complete genome. And then we crisscross between all of these things. So we take a bit from here and stick it on there and a bit from here and we stick it on here. That's recombination. And then we go through two rounds of cell division. So we divide in half. So now the two daughter cells have two copies and we divide in half again. Now we have some gametes, each of which has got a single copy of the genome. And that's the basic ground plan for what's called meiosis and Syngami. That's basically sex. And it happens at the level of single celled organisms. And it happens pretty much the same way in plants and pretty much the same way in animals and so on. And it's not found in any bacteria. They switch things around using the same machinery and they take up a bit of DNA from the environment. They take out this bit and stick in that bit and it's the same molecular machinery they're using to do it. So what about the kind of, you said, find each other, this kind of imperative, find each other. What is that? Like, is that? Well, you've got a few cells together. So the bottom line on all of this is bacteria. I mean, it's kind of simple when you've figured it out and figuring it out, this is not me, this is my PhD student, Marco Colnaghi. And in effect, if you're doing lateral, you're a Nicoli cell, you've got 4,000 genes. You wanna scale up to a eukaryotic size. I wanna have 20,000 genes. And I need to maintain my genome so it doesn't get shot to pieces by mutations. And I'm gonna do it by lateral gene transfer. So I know I've got a mutation in a gene. I don't know which gene it is because I'm not sentient, but I know I can't grow. I know all my regulation systems are saying, something wrong here, something wrong, pick up some DNA, pick up a bit of DNA from the environment. If you've got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you've got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you've effectively got to be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else. And you're still gonna get the wrong DNA. You've got to pick up large chunks. And in the end, you've got to align them. You're forced into sex, to coin a phrase. So you're... You're forced. So there is a kind of incentive. If you wanna have a large genome, you've got to prevent it mutating to nothing. That will happen with bacteria. This is another reason why bacteria can't have a large genome. But as soon as you give them the power pack, as soon as you give eukaryotic cells the power pack that allows them to increase the size of their genome, then you face the pressure that you've got to maintain its quality. You've got to stop it just mutating away. What about sexual selection? So the finding, like, I don't like this one. I don't like this one. This one seems all right. Like, what's the... Is it... At which point does it become less random? It's hard to know. Because eukaryotes just kind of float around. Just kind of have... Yeah, I mean, is there sexual selection in single celled eukaryotes? There probably is. It's just that I don't know very much about it. By the time we get onto... You don't hang out with the eukaryotes. Well, I do all the time, but... But you can't communicate with them yet. Yeah, a peacock or something. Yes. The kind of standard answer, this is not quite what I work on, but the standard answer is that it's female mate choice. She is looking for good genes. And if you can have a tail that's like this and still survive, still be alive, not actually have been taken down by the nearest predator, then you must've got pretty good genes because despite this handicap, you're able to survive. So those are like human interpretable things, like with a peacock. But I wonder, I'm sure echoes of the same thing are there with more primitive organisms. Basically your PR, like how you advertise yourself that you're worthy of. Absolutely. So one big advertisement is the fact that you survived it all. Let me give you one beautiful example of an algal bloom. And this can be a sign of bacteria. It's gonna be in bacteria. So if suddenly you pump nitrate or phosphate or something into the ocean and everything goes green, you end up with all this algae growing there. A viral infection or something like that can kill the entire bloom overnight. And it's not that the virus takes out everything overnight. It's that most of the cells in that bloom kill themselves before the virus can get onto them. And it's through a form of cell death called programmed cell death. And we do the same things. It's how we have the gaps between our fingers and so on. It's how we craft synapses in the brain. It's fundamental again to multicellular life. They have the same machinery in these algal blooms. How do they know who dies? The answer is they will often put out a toxin. And that toxin is kind of a challenge to you. Either you can cope with the toxin or you can't. If you can cope with it, you form a spore and you will go on to become the next generation. You're forming kind of a resistance spore. You sink down a little bit, you get out of the way, you're out of the, you can't be attacked by a virus if you're a spore or it's not so easily. Whereas if you can't deal with that toxin, you pull the plug and you trigger your death apparatus and you kill yourself. Oh, so it's truly life and death selection. Yeah, so it's really, it's a challenge. And this is a bit like sexual selection. It's not so, they're all pretty much genetically identical, but they've had different life histories. So have you had a tough day? Did you happen to get infected by this virus? Or did you run out of iron? Or did you get a bit too much sun? Whatever it may be, if this extra stress of the toxin just pushes you over the edge, then you have this binary choice. Either you're the next generation or you kill yourself now using this same machinery. It's also actually exactly the way I approach dating, but that's probably why I'm single. Okay, what about if we can step back, DNA? Just mechanism of storing information. RNA, DNA, how big of an invention was that? That seems to be, that seems to be fundamental to like something deep within what life is, is the ability, as you said, to kind of store and propagate information. But then you also kind of infer that with your and your students work, that there's a deep connection between the chemistry and the ability to have this kind of genetic information. So how big of an invention is it to have a nice representation, nice hard drive for info to pass on? Huge, I suspect. I mean, but when I was talking about the code, you see the code in RNA as well. And RNA almost certainly came first. And there's been an idea going back decades called the RNA world, because RNA in theory can copy itself and can catalyze reactions. So it kind of cuts out this chicken and egg loop. So DNA as possible is not that special. So RNA, RNA is the thing that does the work really. And the code lies in RNA. The code lies in the interactions between RNA and amino acids. And it still is there today in the ribosome, for example, which is just kind of a giant ribozyme, which is to say it's an enzyme that's made of RNA. So getting to RNA, I suspect is probably not that hard, but getting from RNA, how do you, you know, there's multiple different types of RNA now. How do you distinguish? This is something we're actively thinking about. How do you distinguish between, you know, a random population of RNA? Some of them go on to become messenger RNA. This is the transcript of the code of the gene that you want to make. Some of them become transfer RNA, which is kind of the unit that holds the amino acid that's going to be polymerized. Some of them become ribosomal RNA, which is the machine which is joining them all up together. How do they discriminate themselves? And, you know, is some kind of phase transition going on there? I don't know. It's a difficult question. And we're now in the region of biology where information is coming in. But the thing about RNA is very, very good at what it does. But the largest genome supported by RNA are RNA viruses like HIV, for example. They're pretty small. And so there's a limit to how complex life could be unless you come up with DNA, which chemically is a really small change. But how easy it is to make that change, I don't really know. As soon as you've got DNA, then you've got an amazingly stable molecule for information storage. And you can do absolutely anything. But how likely that transition from RNA to DNA was, I don't know either. How much possibility is there for variety in ways to store information? Because it seems to be very, there's specific characteristics about the programming language of DNA. Yeah, there's a lot of work going on on what's called the xenodNA or RNA. Can we replace the bases themselves, the letters, if you like, in RNA or DNA? Can we replace the backbone? Can we replace, for example, phosphate with arsenate? Can we replace the sugar ribose or deoxyribose with a different sugar? And the answer is yes, you can. Within limits, there's not an infinite space there. Arsenate doesn't really work if the bonds are not as strong as phosphate. It's probably quite hard to replace phosphate. It's possible to do it. The question to me is why is it this way? Is it because there was some form of selection that this is better than the other forms and there were lots of competing forms of information storage early on and this one was the one that worked out? Or was it kind of channeled that way, that these are the molecules that you're dealing with and they work? And I'm increasingly thinking it's that way, that we're channeled towards ribose, phosphate, and the bases that are used. But there are 200 different letters kicking around out there that could have been used. It's such an interesting question. If you look in the programming world in computer science, there's a programming language called JavaScript, which was written super quickly. It's a giant mess, but it took over the world. And it was kind of a... Sounds very biological. It was kind of a running joke that like, like surely this can't be, this is a terrible programming language. It's a giant mess. It's full of bugs. It's so easy to write really crappy code, but it took over all a front end development in the web browser. If you have any kind of dynamic interactive website, it's usually running JavaScript. And it's now taking over much of the backend, which is like the serious heavy duty computational stuff. And it's become super fast with the different compilation engines that are running it. So it's like, it really took over the world. It's very possible that this initially crappy derided language actually takes everything over. And then the question is, did human civilization always strive towards JavaScript? Or was JavaScript just the first programming language that ran on the browser and still sticky? The first is the sticky one. And so it wins over anything else because it was first. And I don't think that's answerable, right? But it's good to ask that. I suppose in the lab, you can't run it with programming languages, but in biology you can probably do some kind of small scale evolutionary test to try to infer, which is which. Yeah. I mean, in a way we've got the hardware and the software here. And the hardware is maybe the DNA and the RNA itself. And then the software perhaps is more about the code. Did the code have to be this way? Could it have been a different way? People talk about the optimization of the code and there's some suggestion for that. I think it's weak actually. But you could imagine you could come out with a million different codes and this would be one of the best ones. Well, we don't know this. Well, I mean, people have tried to model it based on the effect that mutations would have. So no, you're right. We don't know because that's a single assumption that a mutation is what's being selected on there. And there's other possibilities too. I mean, there does seem to be a resilience and a redundancy to the whole thing. It's hard to mess up and the way you mess it up often is likely to produce interesting results. So it's... Are you talking about JavaScript or the genetic code now? Yeah, well, I mean, it's almost, biology is underpinned by this kind of mess as well. And you look at the human genome and it's full of stuff that is really either broken or dysfunctional or was a virus once, whatever it may be. And somehow it works. And maybe we need a lot of this mess. We know that some functional genes are taken from this mess. So what about, you mentioned the predatory behavior. Yeah. We talked about sex. What about violence, predator and prey dynamics? When was that invented? And poetic and biological ways of putting it, how do you describe predator prey relationship? Is it a beautiful dance or is it a violent atrocity? Well, I guess it's both, isn't it? I mean, when does it start? It starts in bacteria. You see these amazing predators. Della Vibrio is one that Lynn Margulis used to talk about a lot. It's got a kind of a drill piece that drills through the wall and the membrane of the bacterium. And then it effectively eats the bacterium from just inside the periplasmic space and makes copies of itself that way. So that's straight predation. There are predators among bacteria. So predation in that, sorry to interrupt, means you murder somebody and use their body as a resource in some way. Yeah. But it's not parasitic in that you need them to be still alive. No, no, I mean, predation is you kill them, really. You murder. Parasites, so you kind of live on them. Okay, so, but it seems the predator is the really popular. So what we see if we go back 560, 570 million years before the Cambrian explosion, there is what's known as the Ediacaran fauna, or sometimes they call Vendobionts, which is a lovely name. And it's not obvious that they're animals at all. They're stalked things. They often have fronds that look a lot like leaves with kind of fractal branching patterns on them. And the thing is, they're found, sometimes geologists can figure out the environment that they were in and say, this is more than 200 meters deep because there's no sign of any waves. There's no storm damage down here, this kind of thing. They were more than 200 meters deep, so they're definitely not photosynthetic. These are animals and they're filter feeders. And we know sponges and corals and things are filter feeding animals. They're stuck to the spot. And little bits of carbon that come their way, they filter it out and that's what they're eating. So no predation involved in this, beyond stuff just dies anyway. And it feels like a very gentle, rather beautiful, rather limited world, you might say. There's not a lot going on there. And something changes. Oxygen definitely changes during this period. Other things may have changed as well. But the next thing you really see in the fossil record is the Cambrian explosion. And what do we see there? We're now seeing animals that we would recognize. They've got eyes, they've got claws, they've got shells. They're plainly killing things or running away and hiding. And so we've gone from a rather gentle but limited world to a rather vicious, unpleasant world that we recognize and which leads to kind of arms races, evolutionary arms races, which again is something that when we think about a nuclear arms race, we think, Jesus, we don't want to go there. It's not done anybody any good. In some ways, maybe it does do good. I don't want to make an argument for nuclear arms. But predation as a mechanism forces organisms to adapt to change to be better to escape or to kill. If you need to eat, then you've got to eat. And a cheetah's not going to run at that speed unless it has to because the zebra is capable of escaping. So it leads to much greater feats of evolution than would ever have been possible without it. And in the end, to a much more beautiful world. And so it's not all bad by any means. But the thing is you can't have this if you don't have an oxygenated planet. Because it's all in the end, it's about how much energy can you extract from the food you eat. And if you don't have an oxygenated planet, you can get about 10% out, not much more than that. And if you've got an oxygenated planet, you can get about 40% out. And that means you can have, instead of having one or two trophic levels, you can have five or six trophic levels. And that means things can eat things that eat other things and so on. And you've gone to a level of ecological complexity, which is completely impossible in the absence of oxygen. This reminds me of the Hunter S. Thompson quote, that for every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled. The history of life on Earth, unfortunately, is that of violence. Just the trillions and trillions of multi cell organisms that were murdered in the struggle for survival. It's a sorry statement, but yes, it's basically true. And that somehow is a catalyst from an evolutionary perspective for creativity, for creating more and more complex organisms that are better and better at surviving. I mean, survival of the fittest, if you just go back to that old phrase, means death of the weakest. Now, what's fit, what's weak, these are terms that don't have much intrinsic meaning. But the thing is, evolution only happens because of death. One way to die is the constraints, the scarcity of the resources in the environment, but that seems to be not nearly as good of a mechanism for death than other creatures roaming about in the environment. When I say environment, I mean like the static environment, but then there's the dynamic environment of bigger things trying to eat you and use you for your energy. It forces you to come up with a solution to your specific problem that is inventive and is new and hasn't been done before. And so it forces, I mean, literally change, literally evolution on populations. They have to become different. And it's interesting that humans have channeled that into more, I mean, I guess what humans are doing is they're inventing more productive and safe ways of doing that. You know, this whole idea of morality and all those kinds of things, I think they ultimately lead to competition versus violence, because I think violence can have a cold, brutal, inefficient aspect to it. But if you channel that into more controlled competition in the space of ideas, in the space of approaches to life, maybe you can be even more productive than evolution is. Because evolution is very wasteful. Like the amount of murder required to really test a good idea, genetically speaking, is just a lot. Many, many, many generations. Morally, we cannot base society on the way that evolution works. That's an invention, right? But actually, in some respects we do, which is to say, this is how science works. We have competing hypotheses that have to get better, otherwise they die. It's the way that society works. You know, in ancient Greece, we had the Athens and Sparta and city states, and then we had the Renaissance and nation states, and universities compete with each other. Tremendous amount of companies competing with each other all the time. It drives innovation. And if we want to do it without all the death that we see in nature, then we have to have some kind of societal level control that says, well, there's some limits, guys, and these are what the limits are gonna be. And society as a whole has to say, right, we want to limit the amount of death here, so you can't do this and you can't do that. And you know, who makes up these rules, and how do we know? It's a tough thing, but it's basically trying to find a moral basis for avoiding the death of evolution and natural selection and keeping the innovation and the richness of it. And I forgot who said it, but that murder is illegal. Probably Kurt Vonnegut. Murder is illegal except when it's done to the sound of trumpets and at a large scale. So we still have wars. But we are struggling with this idea that murder is a bad thing. It's so interesting how we're channeling the best of the evolutionary imperative and trying to get rid of the stuff that's not productive. Trying to almost accelerate evolution. The same kind of thing that makes evolution creative. We're trying to use that. I think we naturally do it. I mean, I don't think we can help ourselves do it. And you know, capitalism as a form is basically about competition and differential rewards. But we, society, and you know, we have a, I keep using this word moral obligation, but you know, we cannot operate as a society if we go that way. It's interesting that we've had problems achieving balance. So for example, in the financial crash in 2009, do you let banks go to the wall or not? This kind of question. In evolution, certainly you let them go to the wall. And in that sense, you don't need the regulation because they just die. Whereas if we, as a society, think about what's required for society as a whole, then you don't necessarily let them go to the wall. In which case you then have to impose some kind of regulation that the bankers themselves will, in an evolutionary manner, exploit. Yeah, we've been struggling with this kind of idea of capitalism, the cold brutality of capitalism that seems to create so much beautiful things in this world. And then the ideals of communism that seem to create so much brutal destruction in history. We struggle with ideas of, well, maybe we didn't do it right. How can we do things better? And then the ideas are the things where we're playing with as opposed to people. If a PhD student has a bad idea, we don't shoot the PhD student. We just criticize their idea and hope they improve. You have a very humane lab. Yeah, I don't know how you guys do it. The way I run things, it's always life and death. Okay, so it is interesting about humans that there is an inner sense of morality which begs the question of how did homo sapiens evolve? If we think about the invention of, early invention of sex and early invention of predation, what was the thing invented to make humans? What would you say? I mean, I suppose a couple of things I'd say. Number one is you don't have to wind the clock back very far, five, six million years or so, and let it run forwards again. And the chances of humans as we know them is not necessarily that high. You know, imagine as an alien, you find planet Earth and it's got everything apart from humans on it. It's an amazing, wonderful, marvelous planet, but nothing that we would recognize as extremely intelligent life, kind of space faring civilization. So when we think about aliens, we're kind of after something like ourselves. We're after a space faring civilization. We're not after zebras and giraffes and lions and things, amazing though they are. But the additional kind of evolutionary steps to go from large, complex mammals, monkeys, let's say, to humans doesn't strike me as that long a distance. It's all about the brain. And where's the brain and morality coming from? It seems to me to be all about groups, human groups and interactions between groups. The collective intelligence of it. Yes, the interactions really. And there's a guy at UCL called Mark Thomas, who's done a lot of really beautiful work, I think, on this kind of question. So I talk to him every now and then, so my views are influenced by him. But a lot seems to depend on population density, that the more interactions you have going on between different groups, the more transfer of information, if you like, between groups, people moving from one group to another group, almost like lateral gene transfer in bacteria, the more expertise you're able to develop and maintain, the more culturally complex your society can become. And groups that have become detached, like on Easter Island, for example, very often degenerate in terms of the complexity of their civilization. Is that true for complex organisms in general? Population density is often productive. Really matters, but in human terms, I don't know what the actual factors were that were driving a large brain, but you can talk about fire, you can talk about tool use, you can talk about language, and none of them seem to correlate especially well with the actual known trajectory of human evolution in terms of cave art and these kind of things. That seems to work much better just with population density and number of interactions between different groups, all of which is really about human interactions, human human interactions and the complexity of those. But population density is the thing that increases the number of interactions, but then there must have been inventions forced by that number of interactions that actually led to humans. So like Richard Wrangham talks about that it's basically the beta males had to beat up the alpha male. So that's what collaboration looks like, is they, when you're living together, our early ancestors don't like the dictatorial aspect of a single individual at the top of a tribe. So they learned to collaborate how to basically create a democracy of sorts, a democracy that prevents, minimizes, or lessens the amount of violence, which essentially gives strength to the tribe and make the war between tribes versus the dictator. I mean, I think one of the most wonderful things about humans is we're all of those things. I mean, we are deeply social as a species and we're also deeply selfish. And it seems to me the conflict between capitalism and communism, it's really just two aspects of human nature, both of which are. We have both and we have a constant kind of vying between the two sides. We really do care about other people beyond our families, beyond our immediate people. We care about society and the society that we live in. And you could say that's a drawing towards socialism or communism. On the other side, we really do care about ourselves. We really do care about our families, about working for something that we gain from. And that's the capitalist side of it. They're both really deeply ingrained in human nature. In terms of violence and interactions between groups, yes, all this dynamic of, if you're interacting between groups, you can be certain that they're gonna be burning each other and all kinds of physical violent interactions as well, which will drive the kind of cleverness of how do you resist this? Let's build a tower. What are we gonna do to prevent being overrun by those marauding gangs from over there? And you look outside humans and you look at chimps and bonobos and so on, and they're very, very different structures to society. Chimps tend to have an aggressive alpha male type structure and bonobos, there's basically a female society where the males are predominantly excluded and only brought in at the behest of the female. We have a lot in common with both of those groups. And there's, again, tension there. And probably chimps, more violence, the bonobos, probably more sex. That's another tension. How serious do we wanna be? How much fun we wanna be? Asking for a friend again, what do you think happened to Neanderthals? What did we cheeky humans do to the Neanderthals, Homo sapiens? Do you think we murdered them? Was it, how do we murder them? How do we outcompete them? Or do we mate them? I don't know. I mean, I think there's unequivocal evidence that we mated with them. We always try to mate with everything. Yes, pretty much. There's some interesting, the first sequences that came along were in mitochondrial DNA. And that was back to about 2002 or thereabouts. What was found was that Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was very different to human mitochondria. Oh, that's so interesting. You could do a clock on it and it said the divergent state was about 600,000 years ago or something like that. So not so long ago. And then the first full genomes were sequenced maybe 10 years after that. And they showed plenty of signs of mating between. So the mitochondrial DNA effectively says no mating. And the nuclear genes say, yeah, lots of mating. But we don't know. How's that possible? So can you explain the difference between mitochondrial DNA and nucleus? I've talked before about the mitochondria, which are the power packs in cells. These are the paired down control units is their DNA. So it's passed on by the mother only. And in the egg cell, we might have half a million copies of mitochondrial DNA. There's only 37 genes left and they do a, it's basically the control unit of energy production. That's what it's doing. It's a basic old school machine that does. And it's got genes that were considered to be effectively trivial because they did a very narrowly defined job, but they're not trivial in the sense that that narrowly defined job is about everything that is being alive. So they're much easier to sequence. You've got many more copies of these things and you can sequence them very quickly. But the problem is because they go down only the maternal line from mother to daughter, your mitochondrial DNA and mine is going nowhere. It doesn't matter. Any kids we have, they get their mother's mitochondrial DNA except in very, very rare and strange circumstances. And so it tells a different story and it's not a story which is easy to reconcile always. And what it seems to suggest to my mind at least is that there was one way traffic of genes probably going from humans into Neanderthals rather than the other way around. Why did the Neanderthals disappear? I don't know. I mean, I suspect that they were, I suspect they were probably less violent, less clever, less populous, less willing to fight. I don't know. I mean, I think it probably drove them to extinction at the margins of Europe. And it's interesting how much, if we ran Earth over and over again, how many of these branches of intelligent beings that have figured out some kind of how to leverage collective intelligence, which ones of them emerge? Which ones of them succeed? Is it the more violent ones? Is it the more isolated ones? Like what dynamics result in more productivity? And I suppose we'll never know. The more complex the organism, the harder it is to run the experiment in the lab. Yes. And in some respects, maybe it's best if we don't know. Yeah. The truth might be very painful. What about if we actually step back a couple of interesting things that we humans do? One is object manipulation and movement. And of course, movement was something that was done, that was another big invention, being able to move around the environment. And the other one is this sensory mechanism, how we sense the environment. One of the coolest high definition ones is vision. How big are those inventions in the history of life on Earth? Vision, movement, I mean, again, extremely important, going back to the origin of animals, the Cambrian explosion where suddenly you're seeing eyes in the fossil record. And you can, it's not necessarily, again, lots of people historically have said what use is half an eye? And you can go in a series of steps from a light sensitive spot on a flat piece of tissue to an eyeball with a lens and so on. If you assume no more than, I don't remember, this was a specific model that I have in mind, but it was 1% change or half a percent change for each generation. How long would it take to evolve an eye as we know it? And the answer is half a million years. It doesn't have to take long. That's not how evolution works. That's not an answer to the question. It just shows you can reconstruct the steps and you can work out roughly how it can work. So it's not that big a deal to evolve an eye, but once you have one, then there's nowhere to hide. And again, we're back to predator prey relationships. We're back to all the benefits that being able to see brings you. And if you think philosophically what bats are doing with eco location and so on, I have no idea, but I suspect that they form an image of the world in pretty much the same way that we do. It's just a matter of mental reconstruction. So I suppose the other thing about sight, there are single celled organisms that have got a lens and a retina and a cornea and so on. Basically they've got a camera type eye in a single cell. They don't have a brain. What they understand about their world is impossible to say, but they're capable of coming up with the same structures to do so. So I suppose then is that once you've got things like eyes, then you have a big driving pressure on the central nervous system to figure out what it all means. And then we come around to your other point about manipulation, sensory input, and so on about now you have a huge requirement to understand what your environment is and what it means and how it reacts and how you should run away and where you should stay put. Actually on that point, let me, I don't know if you know the work of Donald Hoffman, who uses the argument, the mechanism of evolution to say that there's not necessarily a strong evolutionary value to seeing the world as it is. So objective reality, that our perception actually is very different from what's objectively real. We're living inside an illusion and we're basically the entire set of species on earth, I think, I guess, are competing in a space that's an illusion that's distinct from, that's far away from physical reality as it is, as defined by physics. I'm not sure it's an illusion so much as a bubble. I mean, we have a sensory input, which is a fraction of what we could have a sensory input on, and we interpret it in terms of what's useful for us to know to stay alive. So yes, it's an illusion in that sense, but the tree is physically there. And if you walk into that tree, you know, that there is, it's not purely a delusion, there's some physical reality to it. So it's a sensory slice into reality as it is, but because it's just a slice, you're missing a big picture. But he says that that slice doesn't necessarily need to be a slice. It could be a complete fabrication that's just consistent amongst the species, which is an interesting, or at least it's a humbling realization that our perception is limited and our cognitive abilities are limited. And at least to me, it's argument from evolution, I don't know how much, how strong that is as an argument, but I do think that life can exist in the mind. In the same way that you can do a virtual reality video game and you can have a vibrant life inside that place and that place is not real in some sense, but you could still have a vibrant, all the same forces of evolution, all the same competition, the dynamics of between humans you can have, but I don't know if, I don't know if there's evidence for that being the thing that happened on earth. It seems that earth. I think in either environment, I wouldn't deny that you could have exactly the world that you talk about and it would be very difficult to, the idea in matrix movies and so on that the whole world is completely a construction and we're fundamentally deluded. It's difficult to say that's impossible or couldn't happen or, and certainly we construct in our minds what the outside world is, but we do it on input and that input, I would hesitate to say it's not real because it's precisely how we do understand the world. We have eyes, but if you keep someone in, apparently this kind of thing happens, someone kept in a dark room for five years or something like that, they never see properly again because the neural wiring that underpins how we interpret vision never developed. You need, when you watch a child develop, it walks into a table, it bangs his head on the table and it hurts and now you've got two inputs. You've got one pain from this sharp edge and number two, you probably, you've touched it and realized it's there, it's a sharp edge and you've got the visual input and you put the three things together and think, I don't wanna walk into a table again. So you're learning and it's a limited reality, but it's a true reality and if you don't learn that properly, then you will get eaten, you will get hit by a bus, you will not survive. And same, if you're in some kind of, let's say, computer construction of reality, I'm not in my ground here, but if you construct the laws that this is what reality is inside this, then you play by those laws. Yeah, I mean, as long as the laws are consistent. So just like you said in the lab, the interesting thing about the simulation question, yes, it's hard to know if we're living inside a simulation, but also, yes, it's possible to do these kinds of experiments in the lab now more and more. To me, the interesting question is, how realistic does a virtual reality game need to be for us to not be able to tell the difference? A more interesting question to me is, how realistic or interesting does a virtual reality world need to be in order for us to want to stay there forever or much longer than physical reality, prefer that place? And also prefer it not as we prefer hard drugs, but prefer it in a deep, meaningful way in the way we enjoy life. I mean, I suppose the issue with the matrix, I imagine that it's possible to dilute the mind sufficiently that you genuinely, in that way, do think that you are interacting with the real world when in fact the whole thing's a simulation. How good does a simulation need to be to be able to do that? Well, it needs to convince you that all your sensory input is correct and accurate and joins up and makes sense. Now, that sensory input is not something that we're born with. We're born with a sense of touch. We're born with eyes and so on, but we don't know how to use them. We don't know what to make of them. We go around, we bump into trees. We cry a lot. We're in pain a lot. We're basically booting up the system so that it can make head or tail of the sensory input that it's getting. And that sensory input's not just a one way flux of things. It's also, you have to walk into things. You have to hear things. You have to put it together. Now, if you've got just babies in the matrix who are slotted into this, I don't think they have that kind of sensory input. I don't think they would have any way to make sense of New York as a world that they're part of. The brain is just not developed in that way. Well, I can't make sense of New York in this physical reality either. But yeah, I mean, but you said pain and the walking into things. Well, you can create a pain signal. And as long as it's consistent, that certain things result in pain, you can start to construct a reality. There's some, maybe you disagree with this, but I think we are born almost with a desire to be convinced by our reality, like a desire to make sense of our reality. Oh, I'm sure we are, yes. So there's an imperative. So whatever that reality is given to us, like the table hurts, fire is hot. I think we wanna be diluted in the sense that we want to make a simple, like Einstein's simple theory of the thing around us. We want that simplicity. And so maybe the hunger for the simplicity is the thing that could be used to construct a pretty dumb simulation that tricks us. So maybe tricking humans doesn't require building a universe. No, I don't. I mean, this is not what I work on, so I don't know how close to it we are. I don't think anyone works on it. But I agree with you that, yeah, I'm not sure that it's a morally justifiable thing to do, but is it possible in principle? I think it would be very difficult, but I don't see why in principle it wouldn't be possible. And I agree with you that we try to understand the world. We try to integrate the sensory inputs that we have, and we try to come up with a hypothesis that explains what's going on. I think though that we have huge input from the social context that we're in. We don't do it by ourselves. We don't kind of blunder around in a universe by ourself and understand the whole thing. We're told by the people around us what things are and what they do, and language is coming in here and so on. So it would have to be an extremely impressive simulation to simulate all of that. Yeah, simulate all of that, including the social construct, the spread of ideas and the exchange of ideas. I don't know. But those questions are really important to understand as we become more and more digital creatures. It seems like the next step of evolution is us becoming all the same mechanisms we've talked about are becoming more and more plugged into the machine. We're becoming cyborgs. And there's an interesting interplay between wires and biology. Zeros and ones and the biological systems. And I don't think we'll have the luxury to see humans as disjoint from the technology we've created for much longer. We are an organism that's. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. But we come really with this to consciousness. Yes. And is there a distinction there? Because what you're saying, the natural end point says we are indistinguishable, that if you are capable of building an AI, which is sufficiently close and similar that we merge with it, then to all intents and purposes, that AI is conscious as we know it. And I don't have a strong view, but I have a view. And I wrote about it in the epilogue to my last book, because 10 years ago, I wrote a chapter in a book called Life Ascending about consciousness. And the subtitle of Life Ascending was The 10 Great Inventions of Evolution. And I couldn't possibly write a book with a subtitle like that that did not include consciousness. And specifically consciousness as one of the great inventions. And it was in part because I was just curious to know more and I read more for that chapter. I never worked on it, but I've always, how can anyone not be interested in the question? And I was left with the feeling that A, nobody knows, and B, there are two main schools of thought out there with a big kind of skew in distribution. One of them says, oh, it's a property of matter. It's an unknown law of physics. Panpsychism, everything is conscious. The sun is conscious. It's just a matter of, or a rock is conscious. It's just a matter of how much. And I find that very unpersuasive. I can't say that it's wrong. It's just that I think we somehow can tell the difference between something that's living and something that's not. And then the other end is it's an emergent property of a very complex central nervous system. And I never quite understand what people mean by words like emergence. I mean, there are genuine examples, but I think we very often tend to use it to plaster over ignorance. As a biochemist, the question for me then was, okay, it's a concoction of a central nervous system. A depolarizing neuron gives rise to a feeling, to a feeling of pain, or to a feeling of love, or anger, or whatever it may be. So what is then a feeling in biophysical terms in the central nervous system? Which bit of the wiring gives rise to, and I've never seen anyone answer that question in a way that makes sense to me. And that's an important question to answer. I think if we want to understand consciousness, that's the only question to answer. Because certainly an AI is capable of out thinking, and it's only a matter of time. Maybe it's already happened. In terms of just information processing and computational skill, I don't think we have any problem in designing a mind which is at least the equal of the human mind. But in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is in a very personal way, that I think means as much or more to people than their information processing. And that's where I don't think that AI necessarily will become conscious, because I think it's the property of life. Well, let's talk about it more. You're an incredible writer, one of my favorite writers. So let me read from your latest book, Transformers, what you write about consciousness. I think therefore I am, said Descartes, is one of the most celebrated lines ever written. But what am I exactly? An artificial intelligence can think too, by definition, and therefore is, yet few of us could agree whether AI is capable in principle of anything resembling human emotions, of love or hate, fear and joy, of spiritual yearnings, for oneness or oblivion, or corporeal pangs of thirst and hunger. The problem is we don't know what emotions are, as you were saying. What is the feeling in physical terms? How does a discharging neuron give rise to a feeling of anything at all? This is the hard problem of consciousness, the seeming duality of mind and matter, the physical makeup of our innermost self. We can understand in principle how an extremely sophisticated parallel processing system could be capable of wondrous feats of intelligence, but we can't answer in principle whether such a supreme intelligence would experience joy or melancholy. What is the quantum of solace? I, speaking to the question of emergence, you know, there's just technical, there's an excellent paper on this recently about this kind of phase transition, emergence of performance in neural networks on the problem of NLP, natural language processing. So language models, there seems to be this question of size. At some point, there is a phase transition as you grow the size of the neural network. So the question is, that's sort of somewhat of a technical question that you can philosophize over. The technical question is, is there a size of a neural network that starts to be able to form the kind of representations that can capture a language, and therefore be able to, not just language, but linguistically capture knowledge that's sufficient to solve a lot of problems in language, like be able to have a conversation. And there seems to be not a gradual increase, but a phase transition. And they're trying to construct the science of where that is, like what is a good size of a neural network, and why does such a phase transition happen? Anyway, that sort of points to emergence, that there could be stages where a thing goes from being, oh, you're very intelligent toaster, to a toaster that's feeling sad today and turns away and looks out the window, sighing, having an existential crisis. Thinking of Marvin, the paranoid android. Marvin is simplistic because Marvin is just cranky. Yes. So easily programmed. Yeah, easily programmed, nonstop existential crisis. You're almost basically, what is it? Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky, like just constantly complaining about life. No, they're capturing the full rollercoaster of human emotion, the excitement, the bliss, the connection, the empathy and all that kind of stuff. And then the selfishness, the anger, the depression, all that kind of stuff. They're capturing all of that and be able to experience it deeply. Like it's the most important thing you could possibly experience today. The highest highs, the lowest lows, this is it. My life will be over. I cannot possibly go on that feeling. And then like after a nap, you're feeling amazing. That might be something that emerges. So why would a nap make an AI being feel better? First of all, we don't know that for a human either, right? But we do know that that's actually true for many people much of the time. You may be utterly depressed and you have a nap and you do in fact feel better, so. Oh, you are actually asking the technical question there, is there, so that's a very, there's a biological answer to that. And so the question is whether AI needs to have the same kind of attachments to its body, bodily function and preservation of the brain's successful function, self preservation essentially in some deep biological sense. I mean, to my mind, it comes back round to the problem we were talking about before about simulations and sensory input and learning what all of this stuff means and life and death, that biology unlike society has a death penalty over everything and natural selection works on that death penalty. That if you make this decision wrongly, you die. And the next generation is represented by beings that made a slightly different decision on balance. And that is something that's intrinsically difficult to simulate in all this richness, I would say. So what is? Death in all its richness. Yeah. Our relationship with death or the whole of it. So which when you say richness, of course, there's a lot in that. Yeah. Which is hard to simulate. What's part of the richness that's hard to simulate? I suppose the complexity of the environment and your position in that or the position of an organism in that environment, in the full richness of that environment over its entire life, over multiple generations with changes in gene sequence over those generations. So slight changes in the makeup of those individuals over generations. But if you take it back to the level of single cells, which I do in the book and ask how does a single cell in effect know it exists as a unit, as an entity? I mean, no, in inverted commas, obviously it doesn't know anything, but it acts as a unit and it acts with astonishing precision as a unit. And I had suggested that that's linked to the electrical fields on the membranes themselves and that they give some indication of how am I doing in relation to my environment as a kind of real time feedback on the world. And this is something physical, which can be selected over generations that if you get this wrong, it's linked with this set of circumstances that I've just, as an individual, I have a moment of blind panic and run as a bacterium or something. You have some electrical discharge that says blind panic and it runs whatever it may be. And you associate over generations, multiple generations that this electrical phase that I'm in now is associated with a response like that. And it's easy to see how feelings come in through the back door almost with that kind of giving real time feedback on your position in the world in relation to how am I doing. And then you complexify the system and yes, I have no problem with phase transition. And can all of this be done purely by the language, by the issues with how the system understands itself? Maybe it can, I honestly don't know. But the philosophers for a long time have talked about the possibility that you can have a zombie intelligence and that there are no feelings there, but everything else is the same. I mean, I have to throw this back to you really. How do you deal with the zombie intelligence? So first of all, I can see that from a biologist perspective, you think of all the complexities that led up to the human being. The entirety of the history of four billion years that in some deep sense integrated the human being into this environment. And that dance of the organism and the environment, you could see how emotions arise from that. And then emotions are deeply connected and creating a human experience. And from that, you mix in consciousness and the full mess of it, yeah. But from a perspective of an intelligent organism that's already here, like a baby that learns, it doesn't need to learn how to be a collection of cells or how to do all the things it needs to do. The basic function of a baby as it learns is to interact with its environment, to learn from its environment, to learn how to fit in to the social society, to like... And the basic response of the baby is to cry a lot of the time. To cry, well, to convince the humans to protect it or to discipline it, to teach it. I mean, we've developed a bunch of different tricks, how to get our parents to take care of us, to educate us, to teach us about the world. Also, we've constructed the world in such a way that it's safe enough for us to survive in and yet dangerous enough for learning the valuable lessons. Like the tables are still hard with corners, so it can still run into them. It hurts like how... So AI needs to solve that problem, not the problem of constructing this super complex organism that leads up... To run the whole... To make an apple pie, to build the whole universe, you need to build a whole universe. I think the zombie question is something I would leave to the philosophers. Because... And I will also leave to them the definition of love and what happens between two human beings when there's a magic that just grabs them. Like nothing else matters in the world and somehow you've been searching for this feeling, this moment, this person your whole life. That feeling, the philosophers can have a lot of fun with that one and also say that that's just... You can have a biological explanation, you can have all kinds of... It's all fake, it's actually... Ayn Rand will say it's all selfish. There's a lot of different interpretations. I'll leave it to the philosophers. The point is the feeling sure as hell feels very real. And if my toaster makes me feel like it's the only toaster in the world. And when I leave and I miss the toaster and when I come back, I'm excited to see the toaster and my life is meaningful and joyful and the friends I have around me get a better version of me because that toaster exists. That sure as hell feels like a conscious toaster. Is that psychologically different to having a dog? No. Because I mean most people would dispute whether we can say a dog... I would say a dog is undoubtedly conscious, but some people say it doesn't. But there's degrees of consciousness and so on, but people are definitely much more uncomfortable saying a toaster can be conscious than a dog. And there's still a deep connection. You could say our relationship with the dog has more to do with anthropomorphism. Like we kind of project the human being onto it. Maybe. We can do the same damn thing with a toaster. Yes, but you can look into the dog's eyes and you can see that it's sad, that it's delighted to see you again. I don't have a dog, by the way. It's not that I'm a dog person or a cat person. And dogs are actually incredibly good at using their eyes to do just that. They are. Now, I don't imagine that a dog is remotely as close to being intelligent as an AI intelligence, but it's certainly capable of communicating emotionally with us. But here's what I would venture to say. We tend to think because AI plays chess well and is able to fold proteins now well, that it's intelligent. I would argue that in order to communicate with humans, in order to have emotional intelligence, it actually requires another order of magnitude of intelligence. It's not easy to be flawed. Solving a mathematical puzzle is not the same as the full complexity of human to human interaction. That's actually, we humans just take for granted the things we're really good at. Nonstop, people tell me how shitty people are driving. No, humans are incredible at driving. Bipedal walking, walking, object manipulation. We're incredible at this. And so people tend to discount the things we all just take for granted. And one of those things that they discount is our ability, the dance of conversation and interaction with each other. The ability to morph ideas together. The ability to get angry at each other and then to miss each other. Like to create a tension that makes life fun and difficult and challenging in a way that's meaningful. That is a skill that's learned and AI would need to solve that problem. I mean, in some sense, what you're saying is AI cannot become meaningfully emotional, let's say, until it experiences some kind of internal conflict that is unable to reconcile these various aspects of reality or its reality with a decision to make. And then it feels sad, necessarily, because it doesn't know what to do. And I certainly can't dispute that. That may very well be how it works. I think the only way to find out is to do it. And to build it. Yeah, and leave it to the philosophers if it actually feels sad or not. The point is the robot will be sitting there alone having an internal conflict, an existential crisis, and that's required for it to have a deep, meaningful connection with another human being. Now, does it actually feel that? I don't know. But I'd like to throw something else at you, which troubles me on reading it. Noah Harari's book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And he's written about this kind of thing on various occasions. And he sees biochemistry as an algorithm. And then AI will necessarily be able to hack that algorithm and do it better than humans. So there will be AI better at writing music that we appreciate than Mozart ever could, or writing better than Shakespeare ever did, and so on. Because biochemistry is algorithmic, and all you need to do is figure out which bits of the algorithm to play to make us feel good or bad or appreciate things. And as a biochemist, I find that argument an argument close to irrefutable and not very enjoyable. I don't like the sound of it. That's just my reaction as a human being. You might like the sound of it because that says that AI is capable of the same kind of emotional feelings about the world as we are, because the whole thing is an algorithm and you can program an algorithm, and there you are. He then has a peculiar final chapter where he talks about consciousness in rather separate terms. And he's talking about meditating and so on and getting in touch with his inner conscious. I don't meditate, I don't know anything about that. But he wrote in very different terms about it, as if somehow it's a way out of the algorithm. Now, it seems to me that consciousness in that sense is capable of scuppering the algorithm. I think in terms of the biochemical feedback loops and so on, it is undoubtedly algorithmic. But in terms of what we decide to do, it can be much more based on an emotion. We can just think, I don't care. I can't resolve this complex situation. I'm gonna do that. And that can be based on, in effect, a different currency, which is the currency of feelings and something where we don't have very much personal control over. And then it comes back around to you and what are you trying to get at with AI? Do we need to have some system which is capable of overriding a rational decision which cannot be made because there's too much conflicting information by effectively an emotional judgmental decision that just says, do this and see what happens. That's what consciousness is really doing in my view. Yeah, and the question is whether it's a different process or just a higher level process. I might, you know, the idea that biochemistry is an algorithm is, to me, an oversimplistic view. There's a lot of things that the moment you say it, it's irrefutable, but it simplifies. Of course. And in the process loses something fundamental. So for example, calling a universe and an information processing system, sure, yes. You could make that. It's a computer that's performing computations, but you're missing the process of the entropy somehow leading to pockets of complexity that creates these beautiful artifacts that are incredibly complex and they're like machines. And then those machines are through the process of evolution are constructing even further complexity. Like in calling universe information processing machine, you're missing those little local pockets and how difficult it is to create them. So the question to me is if biochemistry is an algorithm, how difficult is it to create a software system that runs the human body, which I think is incorrect. I think that is going to take so long. I mean, that's going to be centuries from now to be able to reconstruct the human. Now, what I would venture to say to get some of the magic of a human being with what we're saying with the emotions and the interactions and like a dog makes a smile and joyful and all those kinds of things that will come much sooner, but that doesn't require us to reverse engineer the algorithm of biochemistry. Yes, but the toaster is making you happy. Yes. It's not about whether you make the toaster happy. No, it has to be. It has to be. It has to be. The toaster has to be able to leave me happy. Yeah, but it's the toaster is the AI in this case is very intelligent. Yeah, the toaster has to be able to be unhappy and leave me. That's essential. Yeah. That's essential for my being able to miss the toaster. If the toaster is just my servant, that's not, or a provider of like services, like tells me the weather makes toast, that's not going to deep connection. It has to have internal conflict. You write about life and death. It has to be able to be conscious of its mortality and the finiteness of its existence. And that life is for temporary and therefore it needs to be more selective. One of the most moving moments in the movies from when I was a boy was the unplugging of Hal in 2001, where that was the death of a sentient being and Hal knew it. So I think we all kind of know that a sufficiently intelligent being is going to have some form of consciousness, but whether it would be like biological consciousness, I just don't know. And if you're thinking about how do we bring together, I mean, obviously we're going to interact more closely with AI, but is a dog really like a toaster or is there really some kind of difference there? You were talking about biochemistry is algorithmic, but it's not single algorithm and it's very complex, of course it is. So it may be that there are again conflicts in the circuits of biochemistry, but I have a feeling that the level of complexity of the total biochemical system at the level of a single cell is less complex than the level of neural networking in the human brain or in an AI. Well, I guess I assumed that we were including the brain in the biochemistry algorithm, because you have to... I would see that as a higher level of organization of neural networks. They're all using the same biochemical wiring within themselves. Yeah, but the human brain is not just neurons. It's the immune system. It's the whole package. I mean, to have a biochemical algorithm that runs an intelligent biological system, you have to include the whole damn thing. And it's pretty fascinating that it comes from like, from an embryo, like the whole, I mean, oh boy. I mean, if you can, what is a human being? Because it's just some code and then you built, and then that says DNA doesn't just tell you what to build, but how to build it. I mean, the thing is impressive. And the question is how difficult is it to reverse engineer the whole shebang? Very difficult. I would say it's, don't want to say impossible, but it's like, it's much easier to build a human than to reverse engineer, to build like a fake human, human like thing than to reverse engineer the entirety of the process of the evolution. I'm not sure if we are capable of reverse engineering the whole thing. If the human mind is capable of doing that. I mean, I wouldn't be a biologist if I wasn't trying, but I know I can't understand the whole problem. I'm just trying to understand the rudimentary outlines of the problem. There's another aspect though, you're talking about developing from a single cell to the human mind and all the part system, subsystems that are part of the immune system and so on. This is something that you'll talk about, I imagine, with Michael Levin, but so little is known about, you talk about reverse engineering, so little is known about the developmental pathways that go from a genome to going to a fully wired organism. And a lot of it seems to depend on the same in electrical interactions that I was talking about happening at the level of single cells and its interaction with the environment. There's a whole electrical field side to biology that is not yet written into any of the textbooks, which is about how does an embryo develop into or a single cell develop into these complex systems? What defines the head, what defines the immune system, what defines the brain and so on? That really is written in a language that we're only just beginning to understand and frankly, biologists, most biologists are still very reluctant to even get themselves tangled up in questions like electrical fields influencing development. It seems like mumbo jumbo to a lot of biologists and it should not be because this is the 21st century biology, this is where it's going. But we're not gonna reverse engineer a human being or the mind or any of these subsystems until we understand how this developmental process or how electricity in biology really works. And if it is linked with feelings and with consciousness and so on, that's the, I mean, in the meantime, we have to try, but I think that's where the answer lies. So you think it's possible that the key to things like consciousness are some of the more tricky aspects of cognition might lie in that early development, the interaction of electricity and biology. Electrical fields. But we already know the EEG and so on is telling us a lot about brain function, but we don't know which cells, which parts of a neural network is giving rise to the EEG. We don't know the basics. The assumption is, I mean, we know it's neural networks, we know it's multiple cells, hundreds or thousands of cells involved in it and we assume that it has to do with depolarization during action potentials and so on. But the mitochondria which are in there have much more membranes than the plasma membrane of the neuron and there's a much greater membrane potential and it's formed in parallel, very often parallel cristae, which are capable of reinforcing a field and generating fields over longer distances. And nobody knows if that plays a role in consciousness or not. There's reasons to argue that it could, but frankly we simply do not know and it's not taken into consideration. You look at the structure of the mitochondrial membranes in the brains of simple things like Drosophila, the fruit fly, and they have amazing structures. You can see lots of little rectangular things all lined up in amazing patterns. What are they doing? Why are they like that? We haven't the first clue. What do you think about organoids and brain organoids and so in a lab trying to study the development of these in the Petri dish development of organs. Do you think that's promising? Do you have to look at whole systems? I've never done anything like that. I don't know much about it. The people who I've talked to who do work on it say amazing things can happen and a bit of a brain grown in a dish is capable of experiencing some kind of feelings or even memories of its former brain. Again, I have a feeling that until we understand how to control the electrical fields that control development, we're not going to understand how to turn an organoid into a real functional system. But how do we get that understanding? It's so incredibly difficult. I mean, you would have to, I mean, one promising direction, I'd love to get your opinion on this. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of DeepMind and AlphaFold with protein folding and so on. Do you think it's possible that that will give us some breakthroughs in biology trying to basically simulate and model the behavior of trivial biological systems as they become complex biological systems? I'm sure it will. The interesting thing to me about protein folding is that for a long time, my understanding, this is not what I work on, so I may have got this wrong, but my understanding is that you take the sequence of a protein and you try to fold it. And there are multiple ways in which it can fold. And to come up with the correct conformation is not a very easy thing because you're doing it from first principles from a string of letters, which specify the string of amino acids. But what actually happens is when a protein is coming out of a ribosome, it's coming out of a charged tunnel and it's in a very specific environment, which is going to force this to go there now and then this one to go there and this one to come like that. And so you're forcing a specific conformational set of changes onto it as it comes out of the ribosome. So by the time it's fully emerged, it's already got its shape. And that shape depended on the immediate environment that it was emerging into one letter, one amino acid at a time. And I don't think that the field was looking at it that way. And if that's correct, then that's very characteristic of science, which is to say it asks very often the wrong question and then does really amazingly sophisticated analyses on something having never thought to actually think, well, what is biology doing? And biology is giving you a charged electrical environment that forces you to be this way. Now, did DeepMind come up through patterns with some answer that was like that? I've got absolutely no idea. It ought to be possible to deduce that from the shapes of proteins. It would require a much greater skill than the human mind has. But the human mind is capable of saying, well, hang on, let's look at this exit tunnel and try and work out what shape is this protein going to take? And we can figure that out. That's really interesting about the exit tunnel, but like sometimes we get lucky and just like in science, the simplified view or the static view will actually solve the problem for us. So in this case, it's very possible that the sequence of letters has a unique mapping to our structure without considering how it unraveled. So without considering the tunnel. And so that seems to be the case in this situation where the cool thing about proteins, all the different shapes they can possibly take, it actually seems to take very specific unique shapes given the sequence. That's forced on you by an exit tunnel. So the problem is actually much simpler than you thought. And then there's a whole army of proteins which change the conformational state, chaperone proteins. And they're only used when there's some presumably issue with how it came out of the exit tunnel and you wanna do it differently to that. So very often the chaperone proteins will go there and will influence the way in which it falls. So there's two ways of doing it. Either you can look at the structures and the sequences of all the proteins and you can apply an immense mind to it and figure out what the patterns are and figure out what happened. Or you can look at the actual situation where it is and say, well, hang on, it was actually quite simple. It's got a charged environment and then it's forced to come out this way. And then the question will be, well, do different ribosomes have different charged environments? What happens if a chaperone? You're asking a different set of questions to come to the same answer in a way which is telling you a much simpler story and explains why it is rather than saying it could be, this is one in a billion different possible conformational states that this protein could have. You're saying, well, it has this one because that was the only one it could take given its setting. Well, yeah, I mean, currently humans are very good at that kind of first principles thinking. I was stepping back, but I think AI is really good at collecting a huge amount of data and a huge amount of data of observation of planets and figure out that Earth is not at the center of the universe, that there's actually a sun, we're orbiting the sun. But then you can, as a human being, ask, well, how do solar systems come to be? What are the different forces that are required to make this kind of pattern emerge? And then you start to invent things like gravity. I mixed up the ordering of gravity, wasn't considered as a thing that connects planets, but we are able to think about those big picture things as human beings. AI is just very good to infer simple models from a huge amount of data. And the question is with biology, we kind of go back and forth at how we solve biology. Listen, protein folding was thought to be impossible to solve, and there's a lot of brilliant PhD students that worked one protein at a time trying to figure out the structure. And the fact that I was able to do that. Oh, I'm not knocking it at all, but I think that people have been asking the wrong question. But then, as the people start to ask better and bigger questions, the AI kind of enters the chat and says, I'll help you out with that. Can I give you another example for my own work? The risk of getting a disease as we get older, there are genetic aspects to it. If you spend your whole life overeating and smoking and whatever, that's a whole separate question. But there's a genetic side to the risk. And we know a few genes that increase your risk of certain things. And for probably 20 years now, people have been doing what's called GWAS, which is genome wide association studies. So you've effectively scanned the entire genome for any single nucleotide polymorphisms, which is to say a single letter change in one place, that has a higher association of being linked with a particular disease or not. And you can come up with thousands of these things across the genome. And if you add them all up and try and say, well, so do they add up to explain the known genetic risk of this disease? And the known genetic risk often comes from twin studies. And you can say that if this twin gets epilepsy, there's a 40 or 50% risk that the other twin, identical twin will also get epilepsy. Therefore, the genetic factor is about 50%. And so the gene similarities that you see should account for 50% of that known risk. Very often it accounts for less than a 10th of the known risk. And there's two possible explanations. And there's one which people tend to do, which is to say, ah, well, we don't have enough statistical power. If we, maybe there's a million, we've only found a thousand of them. But if we find the other million, they're weakly related, but there's a huge number of them. And so we'll account for that whole risk. Maybe there's a billion of them. So that's one way. The other way is to say, well, hang on a minute, you're missing a system here. That system is the mitochondrial DNA, which people tend to dismiss because it's small and it doesn't change very much. But a few single letter changes in that mitochondrial DNA, it controls some really basic processes. It controls not only all the energy that we need to live and to move around and do everything we do, but also biosynthesis to make the new building blocks to make new cells. And cancer cells very often kind of take over the mitochondria and rewire them so that instead of using them for making energy, they're effectively using them as precursors for the building blocks for biosynthesis. You need to make new amino acids, new nucleotides for DNA. You wanna make new lipids to make your membranes and so on. So they kind of rewire metabolism. Now, the problem is that we've got all these interactions between mitochondrial DNA and the genes in the nucleus that are overlooked completely because people throw away, literally throw away the mitochondrial genes. And we can see in fruit flies that they interact and produce big differences in risk. So you can set AI onto this question of exactly how many of these base changes there are. And this is one possible solution that maybe there are a million of them and it does account for the greatest part of the risk. Or the other one is they aren't, it's just not there. That actually the risk lies in something you weren't even looking at. And this is where human intuition is very important. And just this feeling that, well, I'm working on this and I think it's important and I'm bloody minded about it. And in the end, some people are right. It turns out that it was important. Can you get AI to do that, to be bloody minded? And that, hang on a minute, you might be missing a whole other system here that's much bigger. That's the moment of discovery of scientific revolution. I'm giving up on saying AI can't do something. I've said it enough times about enough things. I think there's been a lot of progress. And instead I'm excited by the possibility of AI helping humans. But at the same time, just like I said, we seem to dismiss the power of humans. Yes, yes. Like we're so limited in so many ways that we kind of, in what we feel like dumb ways, like we're not strong, we're kind of our attention, our attention, our memory is limited. Our ability to focus on things is limited in our own perception of what limited is. But that actually, there's an incredible computer behind the whole thing that makes this whole system work. Our ability to interact with the environment, to reason about the environment. There's magic there. And I'm hopeful that AI can capture some of that same magic. But that magic is not gonna look like Deep Blue playing chess. No, it's going to be more interesting. But I don't think it's gonna look like pattern finding either. I mean, that's essentially what you're telling me. It does very well at the moment. And my point is it works very well where you're looking for the right pattern. But we are storytelling animals and the hypothesis is a story. It's a testable story. But a new hypothesis is a leap into the unknown and it's a new story basically. And it says this leads to this leads to that. It's a causal set of storytelling. It's also possible that the leap into the unknown has a pattern of its own. Yes, it is. And it's possible that it's learnable. I'm sure it is. There's a nice book by Arthur Kessler on the nature of creativity. And he likens it to a joke where the punchline goes off in a completely unexpected direction and says that this is the basis of human creativity. That some creative switch of direction to an unexpected place is similar to a joke. I'm not saying that's how it works, but it's a nice idea and there must be some truth in it. And it's one of these, most of the stories we tell are probably the wrong story and probably going nowhere and probably not helpful. And we definitely don't do as well at seeing patterns in things. But some of the most enjoyable human aspects is finding a new story that goes to an unexpected place. And again, these are all aspects of what being human means to me. And maybe these are all things that AI figures out for itself, or maybe they're just aspects. But I just have the feeling sometimes that the people who are trying to understand what we are like, if we wish to craft an AI system which is somehow human like, that we don't have a firm enough grasp of what humans really are like in terms of how we are built. But we get a better, better understanding of that. I agree with you completely. We try to build a thing and then we go, hang on a minute, there's another system here. And that's actually the attempt to build AI that's human like, is getting us to a deeper understanding of human beings. The funny thing that I recently talked to Magnus Carlsen, why they consider to be the greatest chess player of all time. And he talked about AlphaZero, which is a system from DeepMind that plays chess. And he had a funny comment. He has a kind of dry sense of humor. But he was extremely impressed when he first saw AlphaZero play. And he said that it did a lot of things that could easily be mistaken for creativity. So he like, as a typical human, refused to give the system sort of its due. Because he came up with a lot of things that a lot of people are extremely impressed by. Not just the sheer calculation, but the brilliance of play. So one of the things that it does in really interesting ways is it sacrifices pieces. So in chess, that means you basically take a few steps back and then take a step forward. You give away pieces for some future reward. And that, for us humans, is where art is in chess. You take big risks. That for us humans, those risks are especially painful because you have a fog of uncertainty before you. So to take a risk now based on intuition of I think this is the right risk to take, but there's so many possibilities, that that's where it takes guts. That's where art is, that's that danger. And then the alpha, alpha zero takes those same kind of risks and does them even greater degree. But of course, it does it from a, well, you could easily reduce down to a cold calculation over patterns. But boy, when you see the final result, it sure looks like the same kind of magic that we see in creativity. When we see creative play on the chessboard, but the chessboard is very limited. And the question is, as we get better and better, can we do that same kind of creativity in mathematics, in programming, and then eventually in biology, psychology, and expand into more and more complex systems? I was, I used to go running when I was a boy, and fell running, which is to say, running up and down mountains. And I was never particularly great at it, but there were some people who were amazingly fast, especially at running down. And I realized in trying to do this, that there's only really two ways, there's three possible ways of doing it, and there's only two that work. Either you go extremely slowly and carefully, and you figure out, okay, there's a stone, I'll put my foot on this stone, and then there's another, there's a muddy puddle I'm going to avoid. And you know, it's slow, it's laborious. You figure it out step by step. Or you can just go incredibly fast, and you don't think about it at all. The entire conscious mind is shut out of it, and it's probably the same playing table tennis or something, there's something in the mind, which is doing a whole lot of subconscious calculations about exact, and it's amazing. You can run at astonishing speed down a hillside with no idea how you did it at all. And then you panic, and you think, I'm going to break my leg if I keep doing this, I've got to think about where I'm going to put my foot. So you slow down a bit and try to bring those conscious mind in, and then you do, you crash. You cannot think consciously while running downhill. So it's amazing how many calculations the mind is able to make. And now the problem with playing chess or something, if you're able to make all of those subconscious kind of forward calculations about what is the likely outcome of this move now in the way that we can by running down a hillside or something, it's partly about what we have adapted to do. It's partly about the reality of the world that we're in. Running fast downhill is something that we better be bloody good at, otherwise we're going to be eaten. Whereas trying to calculate multiple, multiple moves into the future is not something we've ever been called on to do. Two or three, four moves into the future is quite enough for most of us most of the time. Yeah, yeah, so yeah, just solving chess may not, we may not be as far towards solving the problem of downhill running as we might think just because we solve chess. Still, it's beautiful to see creativity. Humans create machines. They're able to create art and art on a chessboard and art otherwise. Who knows how far that takes us. So I mentioned Andrej Karpathy earlier. Him and I are big fans of yours. If you're taking votes, his suggestion was you should write your next book on the Fermi Paradox. So let me ask you on the topic of alien life. Since we've been talking about life and we're a kind of aliens, how many alien civilizations are out there, do you think? Well, the universe is very big, so some, but not as many as most people would like to think is my view because the idea that there is a trajectory going from simple, simple cellular life like bacteria all the way through to humans. It seems to me there's some big gaps along that way that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them, but also photosynthesis is another. The other, another interesting gap is a long gap from the origin of the eukaryotic cell to the first animals. That was about a billion years, maybe more than that. A long delay in when oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere. So from the first appearance of oxygen in the Great Oxidation Event to enough for animals to respire, it was close to two billion years. Why so long? It seems to be planetary factors. It seems to be geology as much as in anything else. And we don't really know what was going on. So the idea that there's a kind of an inevitable march towards complexity and sentient life, I don't think is right. Doesn't, not to say it's not gonna happen, but I think it's not gonna happen often. So if you think of Earth, given the geological constraints and all that kind of stuff, do you have a sense that life, complex life, intelligent life happened really quickly on Earth or really long? So just to get a sense of, are you more sort of saying that it's very unlikely to get the kind of conditions required to create humans? Or is it, even if you have the condition, it's just statistically difficult? I think the, I mean, the problem, the single great problem at the center of all of that, to my mind, is the origin of the eukaryotic cell, which happened once and without eukaryotes, nothing else would have happened. And that is something that. That's because you're saying it's super important, the eukaryotes, but. I'm saying a tantamount to saying that it is impossible to build something as complex as a human being from bacterial cells. Totally agree in some deep fundamental way. But it's just like a one cell going inside another. Is that so difficult to get to work right? That like. Well, again, it happened once. And if you think about, if you think, I mean, I'm in a minority view in this position. Most biologists probably wouldn't agree with me anyway. But if you think about the starting point, we've got a simple cell, it's an alkyl cell, we can be fairly sure about that. So it looks a lot like a bacterium, but is in fact from this other domain of life. So it looks a lot like a bacterial cell. That means it doesn't have anything. It doesn't have a nucleus. It doesn't really have complex endomembrane. It has a little bit of stuff, but not that much. And it takes up an endosymbiont. So what happens next? And the answer is basically everything to do with complexity. To me, there's a beautiful paradox here. Plants and animals and fungi all have exactly the same type of cell. But they all have really different ways of living. So a plant cell, it's photosynthetic. They started out as algae in the oceans and so on. So think of algal blooms, single cell things. The basic cell structure that it's built from is exactly the same with a couple of small differences. It's got chloroplasts as well. It's got a vacuole. It's got a cell wall. But that's about it. Pretty much everything else is exactly the same in a plant cell and an animal cell. And yet the ways of life are completely different. So this cell structure did not evolve in response to different ways of life, different environments. I'm in the ocean doing photosynthesis. I'm on land running around as part of an animal. I'm a fungus in a soil, spreading out long shoots into whatever it may be, mycelium. So they all have the same underlying cell structure. Why? Almost certainly it was driven by adaptation to the internal environment, to having these pesky endosymbionts that forced all kinds of change on the host cell. Now, in one way you could see that as a really good thing because it may be that there's some inevitability to this process that as soon as you got endosymbionts, you're more or less bound to go in that direction. Or it could be that there's a huge fluke about it and it's almost certain to go wrong in just about every case possible. That the conflict will lead to effectively war leading to death and extinction. And it simply doesn't work out. So maybe it happened millions of times and it went wrong every time. Or maybe it only happened once and it worked out because it was inevitable. And actually we simply do not know enough now to say which of those two possibilities is true. But both of them are a bit grim. But you're leaning towards, we just got really lucky in that one leap. Like we got, so do you have a sense that our galaxy, for example, has just maybe millions of planets with bacteria living on it? I would expect billions, tens of billions of planets with bacteria living on it practically. I mean, there's probably what, five to 10 planets per star of which I would hope that at least one would have bacteria on. So I expect bacteria to be very common. I simply can't put a number otherwise. I mean, I expect it will happen elsewhere. It's not that I think we're living in a completely empty universe. But I think that it's not gonna happen inevitably. And there's something, it wasn't, that's not the only problem with complex life on earth. I mentioned oxygen and animals and so on as well. And even humans, we came along very late. You go back 5 million years and would we be that impressed if we came across a planet full of giraffes? I mean, you'd think, hey, there's life here and it's a nice planet to colonize or something. We wouldn't think, oh, let's try and have a conversation with this giraffe. Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly we would think. I'm not exactly sure what makes humans so interesting from an alien perspective or how they would notice. I'll talk to you about cities too because that's an interesting perspective of how to look at human civilization. But your sense, I mean, of course you don't know, but it's an interesting world, it's an interesting galaxy, it's an interesting universe to live in that's just like every sun, like 90% of solar systems have bacteria in it. Imagine that world and the galaxy maybe has just a handful if not one intelligent civilization. That's a wild world. I didn't even think about that world. There's a kind of thought that, like one of the reasons it would be so exciting to find life on Mars or Titan or whatever is like if its life is elsewhere, then surely, statistically, that life, no matter how unlikely you query as multicellular organisms, sex, violence, what else is extremely difficult? I mean, photosynthesis, figuring out some machinery that involves the chemistry and the environment to allow the building up of complex organisms, surely that would arise. But man, I don't know how I would feel about just bacteria everywhere. Well, it would be depressing if it was true. I suppose depressing, I don't think, I don't. I don't know what's more depressing, bacteria everywhere or nothing everywhere. Yes, either of them are chilling. Yeah. But whether it's chilling or not, I don't think should force us to change our view about whether it's real or not. Yes. And what I'm saying may or may not be true. So how would you feel if we discovered life on Mars? Absolutely. It sounds like you would be less excited than some others because you're like, well. What I would be most interested in is how similar to life on Earth it would be. It would actually turn into quite a subtle problem because the likelihood of life having gone to and fro between Mars and the Earth is quite, I wouldn't say high, but it's not low, it's quite feasible. And so if we found life on Mars and it had very similar genetic code, but it was slightly different, most people would interpret that immediately as evidence that they've been transit one way or the other and that it was a common origin of life on Mars or on the Earth and it went one way or the other way. The other way to see that question though would be to say, well, actually the beginnings of life lie in deterministic chemistry and thermodynamics, starting with the most likely abundant materials, CO2 and water and a wet rocky planet. And Mars was wet and rocky at the beginning. And will, I won't say inevitably, but potentially almost inevitably come up with a genetic code which is not very far away from the genetic code that we already have. So we see subtle differences in the genetic code. What does it mean? Could be very difficult to interpret. Is it possible, do you think, to tell the difference of something that truly originated? I think if the stereochemistry was different, we have sugars, for example, that are the L form or the D form and we have D sugars and L amino acids right across all of life. But lipids, the bacteria have one stereoisomer and the bacteria have the other, the opposite stereoisomer. So it's perfectly possible to use one or the other one. And the same would almost certainly go for, and I think George Church has been trying to make life based on the opposite stereoisomer. So it's perfectly possible to do and it will work. And if we were to find life on Mars that was using the opposite stereoisomer, that would be unequivocal evidence that life had started independently there. So hopefully the life we find will be on Titan and Europa or something like that where it's less likely that we shared and it's harsher conditions so there's gonna be weirder kind of life. I wouldn't count on that because if life started in deep sea hydrothermal vents here, that's pretty harsh. So Titan is different. Europa is probably quite similar to Earth in the sense that we're dealing with an ocean, some acidic ocean there, as the early Earth would have been. And it almost certainly has hydrothermal systems. Same with Enceladus. We can tell that from these plumes coming from the surface through the ice. We know there's a liquid ocean and we can tell roughly what the chemistry is. For Titan, we're dealing with liquid methane and things like that. So that would really, if there really is life there, it would really have to be very, very different to anything that we know on Earth. So the hard leap, the hardest leap, the most important leap is from prokaryotes to eukaryotes. It's eukaryotic. What's the second, if we're ranking? What's the, you gave a lot of emphasis on photosynthesis. Yeah, and that would be my second one, I think. But it's not so much, I mean, photosynthesis is part of the problem. It's a difficult thing to do. Again, we know it happened once. We don't know why it happened once. But the fact that it was kind of taken on board completely by plants and algae and so on as chloroplasts and did very well in completely different environments and then on land and whatever else seems to suggest that there's no problem with exploring, whether you could have a separate origin that explored this whole domain over there that the bacteria had never gone into. So that kind of says that the reason that it only happened once is probably because it's difficult, because the wiring is difficult. But then it happened at least 2.2 billion years ago, right before the GOE, maybe as long as 3 billion years ago, when there are, some people say there are whiffs of oxygen, there's just kind of traces in the fossil in the geochemical record that say, maybe there was a bit of oxygen then. That's really disputed. Some people say it goes all the way back four billion years ago and then it's gone. And the common ancestor of life on Earth was photosynthetic. So immediately you've got groups of people who disagree over a two billion year period of time about when it started. But let's take the latest date when it's unequivocal, that's 2.2 billion years ago, through to around about the time of the Cambrian explosion when oxygen levels definitely got close to modern levels, which was around about 550 million years ago. So we've gone more than one and a half billion years where the Earth was in stasis. Nothing much changed. It's known as the boring billion, in fact. Probably stuff was, that was when eukaryotes arose somewhere in there, but it's... So this idea that the world is constantly changing, that we're constantly evolving, that we're moving up some ramp is a very human idea. But in reality, there are kind of tipping points to a new stable equilibrium where the cells that are producing oxygen are precisely counterbalanced by the cells that are consuming that oxygen, which is why it's 21% now and has been that way for hundreds of millions of years. We have a very precise balance. You go through a tipping point and you don't know where the next stable state's gonna be, but it can be a long way from here. And so if we change the world with global warming, there will be a tipping point. The question is where and when, and what's the next stable state? It may be uninhabitable to us. It'll be habitable to life, for sure. But there may be something like the Permian extinction where 95% of species go extinct and there's a five to 10 million year gap and then life recovers, but without humans. And the question statistically, well, without humans, but statistically does that ultimately lead to greater complexity, more interesting life, more intelligent life? Well, after the first appearance of oxygen with the GOE, there was a tipping point which led to a longterm stable state that was equivalent to the Black Sea today, which is to say oxygenated at the very surface and stagnant, sterile, not sterile, but sulfurous, lower down. And that was stable certainly around the continental margins for more than a billion years. It was not a state that led to progression in an obvious way. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to think about evolution, like what leads to stable states and how often are evolutionary pressures emerging from the environment. So maybe other planets are able to create evolutionary pressures, chemical pressures, whatever, some kind of pressure that say, you're screwed unless you get your shit together in the next like 10,000 years, like a lot of pressure. It seems like Earth, like the boring building might be explained in two ways. One is super difficult to take any kind of next step. And the second way it could be explained is there's no reason to take the next step. No, I think there is no reason, but at the end of it, there was a snowball Earth. So there was a planetary catastrophe on a huge scale where the ice was, the sea was frozen at the equator. And that forced change in one way or another. It's not long after that, 100 million years, perhaps after that, so not a short time, but this is when we begin to see animals. There was a shift again, another tipping point that led to catastrophic change that led to a takeoff then. We don't really know why, but one of the reasons why that I discuss in the book is about sulfate being washed into the oceans, which sounds incredibly parochial. But the issue is, I mean, what the data is showing, we can track roughly how oxygen was going into the atmosphere from carbon isotopes. So there's two main isotopes of carbon that we need to think about here. One is carbon 12, 99% of carbon is carbon 12. And then 1% of carbon is carbon 13, which is a stable isotope. And then there's carbon 14, which is a trivial radioactive, it's trivial in amount. So carbon 13 is 1%. And life and enzymes generally, you can think of carbon atoms as little balls bouncing around, ping pong balls bouncing around. Carbon 12 moves a little bit faster than carbon 13 because it's lighter and it's more likely to encounter an enzyme. And so it's more likely to be fixed into organic matter. And so organic matter is enriched. And this is just an observation. It's enriched in carbon 12 by a few percent compared to carbon 13, relative to what you would expect if it was just equal. And if you then bury organic matter as coal or oil or whatever it may be, then it's no longer oxidized. So some oxygen remains leftover in the atmosphere. And that's how oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere. And you can work out historically how much oxygen there must've been in the atmosphere by how much carbon was being buried. And you think, well, how can we possibly know how much carbon was being buried? And the answer is, well, if you're burying carbon 12, what you're leaving behind is more carbon 13 in the oceans and that precipitates out into limestone. So you can look at limestones over these ages and work out what's the carbon 13 signal. And that gives you a kind of a feedback on what the oxygen content. Right before the Cambrian explosion, there was what's called a negative isotope anomaly excursion, which is basically the carbon 13 goes down by a massive amount and then back up again 10 million years later. And what that seems to be saying is the amount of carbon 12 in the oceans was disappearing, which is to say it was being oxidized. And if it's being oxidized, it's consuming oxygen. And that should, so a big carbon 13 signal says the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 is really going down, which means there's much more carbon 12 being taken out and being oxidized. Sorry, this is getting too complex, but. Well, it's a good way to estimate the amount of oxygen. If you calculate the amount of oxygen based on the assumption that all this carbon 12 that's being taken out is being oxidized by oxygen, the answer is all the oxygen in the atmosphere gets stripped out, there is none left. And yet the rest of the geological indicators say, no, there's oxygen in the atmosphere. So it's a kind of a paradox. And the only way to explain this paradox just on mass balance of how much stuff is in the air, how much stuff is in the oceans and so on, is to assume that oxygen was not the oxygen, it was sulfate. Sulfate was being washed into the oceans. It's used as an electron acceptor by sulfate reducing bacteria, just as we use oxygen as an electron acceptor. So they pass their electrons to sulfate instead of oxygen. And. Bacteria did. Yeah, yeah. So these are bacteria. So they're oxidizing carbon, organic carbon with sulfate, passing the electrons onto sulfate, that reacts with iron to form iron pyrite or fool's gold, sinks down to the bottom, gets buried out of the system. And this can account for the mass balance. So why does it matter? It matters because what it says is there was a chance event, tectonically there was a lot of sulfate sitting on land as some kind of mineral. So calcium sulfate minerals, for example, are evaporitic. And because there happened to be some continental collisions, mountain building, the sulfate was pushed up the side of a mountain and happened to get washed into the ocean. Yeah, so I wonder how many happy accidents like that are possible. Statistically, it's really hard. Maybe you can rule that in statistically, but this is the course of life on earth. Without all that sulfate being raised up, this Cambrian explosion almost certainly would not have happened. And then we wouldn't have had animals and so on and so on. So it's this kind of explanation of the Cambrian explosion. So let me actually say in several ways. So folks who challenge the validity of the theory of evolution will give us an example. Now I'm not well studied in this, but will give us an example of the Cambrian explosion as like, this thing is weird. Oh, it is weird, yeah. So the question I would have is what's the biggest mystery or gap in understanding about evolution? Is it the Cambrian explosion? And if so, what's our best understanding of how to explain, first of all, what is it? In my understanding, in the short amount of time, maybe 10 million years, 100 million years, something like that, a huge number of animals, a variety, diversity of animals were created. Anyway, there's like five questions in there. Is that the biggest mystery? No, I don't think it's a particularly big mystery really anymore. There are still mysteries about why then. And I've just said sulfate being washed into the oceans is one. It needs oxygen and oxygen levels rose around that time. So probably before that, they weren't high enough for animals. What we're seeing with the Cambrian explosion is the beginning of predators and prey relationships. We're seeing modern ecosystems and we're seeing arms races and we're seeing the full creativity of evolution unleashed. So I talked about the boring billion, nothing happens for one and a half billion years, one and a half billion years. The assumption, and this is completely wrong, this assumption, is then that evolution works really slowly and that you need billions of years to affect some small change and then another billion years to do something else. It's completely wrong. Evolution gets stuck in a stasis and it stays that way for tens of millions, hundreds of millions of years. And Steven Jay Gould used to argue this, he called it punctuated equilibrium, but he was doing it to do with animals and to do with the last 500 million years or so, where it's much less obvious than if you think about the entire planetary history. And then you realize that the first two billion years was bacteria only. You have the origin of life, two billion years of just bacteria, oxygen photosynthesis arising here. Then you have a global catastrophe, snowball earths and great oxidation event and then another billion years of nothing happening and then some period of upheavals and then another snowball earth and then suddenly you see the Cambrian explosion. This is long periods of stasis where the world is in a stable state and is not geared towards increasing complexity. It's just everything is in balance. And only when you have a catastrophic level, global level problem like a snowball earth, it forces everything out of balance and there's a tipping point and you end up somewhere else. Now, the idea that evolution is slow is wrong. It can be incredibly fast. And I mentioned earlier on that you can, in theory, it would take half a million years to invent an eye, for example, from a light sensitive spot. It doesn't take long to convert one kind of tube into a tube with nobbles on it into a tube with arms on it and then multiple arms and then at one end is the head where it starts out as a swelling. It's not difficult intellectually to understand how these things can happen. It boggles the mind that it can happen so quickly, but we're used to human timescales. And what we need to talk about is generations of things that live for a year in the ocean. And then a million years is a million generations. And the amount of change that you can do, it can affect in that period of time is enormous. And we're dealing with large populations of things where selection is sensitive to pretty small changes and can, so again, as soon as you throw in the competition of predators and prey and you're ramping up the scale of evolution, it's not very surprising that it happens very quickly when the environment allows it to happen. So I don't think there's a big mystery. There's lots of details that need to be filled in. I mean, the big mystery in biology is consciousness. The big mystery in biology is consciousness. Well, intelligence is kind of a mystery too. I mean, you said biology, not psychology. Because from a biology perspective, it seems like intelligence and consciousness all are the same, like weird, like all the brain stuff. I don't see intelligence as necessarily that difficult, I suppose. I mean, I see it as a form of computing and I don't know much about computing, so I... You don't know much about consciousness either. So I mean, I suppose, oh, I see. I see, I see, I see, I see. That consciousness you do know a lot about as a human being. No, no, I mean, I think I can understand the wiring of a brain as a series of, in pretty much the same way as a computer in theory, in terms of the circuitry of it. The mystery to me is how this system gives rise to feelings, as we were talking about earlier on. Yeah, I just, I think we oversimplify intelligence. I think the dance, the magic of reasoning is as interesting as the magic of feeling. We tend to think of reasoning as like very, running a very simplistic algorithm. I think reasoning is the interplay between memory, whatever the hell is going on, the unconscious mind, all of that. I'm not trying to diminish it in any way at all. Obviously, it's extraordinarily exquisitely complex, but I don't see a logical difficulty with how it works. Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with you, but sometimes, yeah, there's a big cloak of mystery around consciousness. Let me compare it with classical versus quantum physics. Classical physics is logical, and you can understand the kind of language we're dealing with. It's almost at the human level, we're dealing with stars and things that we can see. And when you get to quantum mechanics and things, it's practically impossible for the human mind to compute what just happened there. Yeah, I mean, that is the same. It's like, you understand mathematically that the notes of a musical composition, that's intelligence. But why it makes you feel a certain way, that is much harder to understand. Yeah, that's really, but it was interesting framing that that's a mystery at the core of biology. I wonder who solves consciousness. I tend to think consciousness will be solved by the engineer, meaning the person who builds it, who keeps trying to build the thing, versus biology, such a complicated system. I feel like the building blocks of consciousness from a biological perspective are like, that's like the final creation of a human being. So you have to understand the whole damn thing. You said the electrical field, but like, electrical field is plus plus. Everything, the whole shebang. I'm inclined to agree. I mean, my feeling is from my meager knowledge of the history of science is that the biggest breakthrough has usually come through from a field that was not related. So if anyone is not going to be a biologist who solves consciousness, just because biologists are too embedded in the nature of the problem. And then nobody's going to believe you when you've done it, because nobody's going to be able to prove that this AI is in fact conscious and sad in any case, and any more than you can prove that a dog is conscious and sad. So it tells you that it is in good language, and you must believe it. But I think most people will accept, if faced with that, that that's what it is. All of this probability of complex life, in one way, I think why it matters is that my expectation, I suppose, is that we will be over the next 100 years or so, if we survive at all, that AI will increasingly dominate. And pretty much anything that we put out into space looking for other, well, for the universe, for what's out there, will be AI, won't be us. We won't be doing that. Or when we do, it'll be on a much more limited scale. I suppose the same would apply to any alien civilization. So perhaps rather than looking for signs of life out there, we should be looking for AI out there. But then we face the problem that I don't see how a planet is going to give rise directly to AI. I can see how a planet can give rise directly to organic life. And if the principles that govern the evolution of life on Earth apply to other planets as well, and I think a lot of them would, then the likelihood of ending up with a humanlike civilization capable of giving rise to AI in the first place is massively limited. Once you've done it once, perhaps it takes over the universe, and maybe there's no issue. But it seems to me that the two are necessarily linked, that you're not going to just turn a sterile planet into an AI life form without the intermediary of the organics first. So you have to run the full evolutionary computation with the organics to create AI. How does AI bootstrap itself up without the aid, if you like, of an intelligent designer? The origin of AI is going to have to be in the chemistry of a planet. But that's not a limiting factor, right? So let me ask the Fermi paradox question. Let's say we live in this incredibly dark and beautiful world of just billions of planets with bacteria on it and very few intelligent civilizations, and yet there's a few out there. Why haven't we, at scale, seen them visit us? What's your sense? Is it because they don't exist? Well, don't exist in the right part of the universe at the right time. That's the simplest answer for it. Is that the one you find the most compelling, or is there some other explanation? I find that, no, it's not that I find it more compelling. It's that I find more probable. And I find all of them, I mean, there's a lot of handwaving in this. We just don't know. So I'm trying to read out from what I know about life on Earth to what might happen somewhere else. And it gives, to my mind, a bit of a pessimistic view of bacteria everywhere and only occasional intelligent life and running forward humans only once on Earth and nothing else that you would necessarily be any more excited about making contact with than you would be making contact with them on Earth. So I think the chances are pretty limited. And the chances of us surviving are pretty limited, too, in the way we're going on at the moment. The likelihood of us not making ourselves extinct within the next few hundred years, possibly within the next 50 or 100 years, seems quite small. I hope we can do better than that. So maybe the only thing that will survive from humanity will be AI. And maybe AI, once it exists and once it's capable of effectively copying itself and cutting humans out of the loop, then maybe that will take over the universe. I mean, there's a kind of inherent sadness to the way you described that. But isn't that also potentially beautiful, that that's the next step of life, I suppose, from your perspective, as long as it carries the flame of consciousness somehow? No, I think, yes, there can be some beauty to it being the next step of life. And I don't know if consciousness matters or not, from that point of view, to be honest with you. Yeah. But there's some sadness, yes, probably, because I think it comes down to the selfishness that we were talking about earlier on. I am an individual with a desire not to be displaced from life. I want to stay alive. I want to be here. So I suppose the threat that a lot of people would feel is that we will just be wiped out, so that there will be potential conflict between AI and humans and that AI will win because it's a lot smarter. Boy, would that be a sad state of affairs if consciousness is just an intermediate stage between bacteria and AI, right? Well, I would see bacteria as being potentially a kind of primitive form of consciousness anyway. So the whole of life on Earth, to my mind, is capable of some form of feelings in response to the environment. That's not to say it's intelligent, it's got its own algorithms for intelligence, but nothing comparable with us. I think it's beautiful what a planet, what a sterile planet, can come up with. It's astonishing that it's come up with all of this stuff that we see around us and that either we or whatever we produce is capable of destroying all of that is a sad thought. But it's also hugely pessimistic. I'd like to think that we're capable of giving rise to something which is at least as good, if not better than us, as AI. Yeah, I have that same optimism, especially a thing that is able to propagate throughout the universe more efficiently than humans can. Or extensions of humans, some merger with AI and humans, whether that comes from bioengineering of the human body to extend its life somehow, to carry that flame of consciousness and that personality and the beautiful tension that's within all of us, carry that through to multiple planets, to multiple solar systems, all out there in the universe. I mean, that's a beautiful vision. Whether AI can do that or bioengineered humans can, that's an exciting possibility. And especially meeting other alien civilizations in that same kind of way. Do you think aliens have consciousness? If they're organic. So organic is connected to consciousness. I mean, I think any system which is going to bootstrap itself up from planetary origins, I mean, let me finish this and then come on to something else. But from planetary origins is going to face similar constraints. And those constraints are going to be addressed in similar basic engineering ways. And I think it will be cellular. And I think it will have electrical charges. And I think it will have to be selected in populations over time. And all of these things will tend to give rise to the same processes as the simplest fix to a difficult problem. So I would expect it to be conscious, yes. And I would expect it to resemble life on Earth in many ways. When I was about, I guess, 15 or 16, I remember reading a book by Fred Hoyle called The Black Cloud, which I was a budding biologist at the time. And this was the first time I'd come across someone really challenging the heart of biology and saying, you are far too parochial. You're thinking about life as carbon based. Here's a life form which is kind of dust, interstellar dust on a solar system scale. And it's a novel. But I felt enormously challenged by that novel because it hadn't occurred to me how limited my thinking was, how narrow minded I was being. And here was a great physicist with a completely different conception of what life could be. And since then, I've seen him attacked in various ways. And I'm kind of reluctant to say the attacks make more sense to me than the original story, which is to say, even in terms of information processing, if you're on that scale and there's a limit to the speed of light, how quickly can something think if you're needing to broadcast across the solar system, it's going to be slow. It's not going to hold a conversation with you on the kind of timelines that Fred Hoyle was imagining, at least not by any easy way of doing it, assuming that the speed of light is a limit. And then again, you really can't. This is something Richard Dawkins argued long ago. And I do think he's right. There is no other way to generate this level of complexity than natural selection. Nothing else can do it. You need populations. And you need selection in populations and a kind of an isolated interstellar cloud. Again, there's unlimited time. And maybe there's no problems with distance. But you need to have a certain frequency of generational time to generate a serious level of complexity. And I just have a feeling it's never going to work. Well, as far as we know, so natural selection and evolution is really a powerful tool here on Earth. But there could be other mechanisms. So I don't know if you're familiar with cellular automata, but complex systems that have really simple components and seemingly move based on simple rules when they're taken as a whole, really interesting complexity emerges. I don't know what the pressures on that are. It's not really selection, but interesting complexity seems to emerge. And that's not well understood exactly why that complexity emerges. I think there's a difference between complexity and evolution. So some of the work we're doing on the origin of life is thinking about how do genes arise? How does information arise in biology? And thinking about it from the point of view of reacting CO2 with hydrogen, what do you get? Well, what you're going to get is carboxylic acids, then amino acids. It's quite hard to make nucleotides. And it's possible to make them, and it's been done, and it's been done following this pathway as well. But you make trace amounts. And so the next question, assuming that this is the right way of seeing the question, which maybe it's just not, but let's assume it is, is, well, how do you reliably make more nucleotides? And how do you become more complex and better at becoming a nucleotide generating machine? And the answer is, well, you need positive feedback loops, some form of autocatalysis. So that can work, and we know it happens in biology. If this nucleotide, for example, catalyzes CO2 fixation, then you're going to increase the rate of flux through the whole system, and you're going to effectively steepen the driving force to make more nucleotides. And this can be inherited because there are forms of membrane heredity that you can have. And effectively, if a cell divides in two and it's got a lot of stuff inside it, and that stuff is basically bound as a network which is capable of regenerating itself, then it will inevitably regenerate itself. And so you can develop greater complexity. But everything that I've said depends on the underlying rules of thermodynamics. There is no evolvability about that. It's simply an inevitable outcome of your starting point, assuming that you're able to increase the driving force through the system. You will generate more of the same. You'll expand on what you can do, but you'll never get anything different than that. And it's only when you introduce information into that as a gene, as a kind of small stretch of RNA, which can be random stretch, then you get real evolvability. Then you get biology as we know it. But you also have selection as we know it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know how to think about information. That's a kind of memory of the system. So it's not, yeah, at the local level, it's propagation of copying yourself and changing and improving your adaptability to the environment. But if you look at Earth as a whole, it has a kind of memory. That's the key feature of it. In what way? It remembers the stuff it tries. Like, if you were to describe Earth, I think evolution is something that we experience as individual organisms. That's how the individual organisms interact with each other. There's a natural selection. But when you look at Earth as an organism in its entirety, how would you describe it? I mean. Well, not as an organism. I mean, the idea of Gaia is lovely. And James Lovelock originally put Gaia out as an organism that had somehow evolved. And he was immediately attacked by lots of people. And he's not wrong, but he backpedaled somewhat because that was more of a poetic vision than the science. The science is now called Earth systems science. And it's really about how does the world regulate itself so it remains within the limits which are hospitable to life. And it does it amazingly well. And it is working at a planetary level of integration, of regulation. But it's not evolving by natural selection. And it can't because there's only one of it. And so it can change over time. But it's not evolving. All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system. Yeah, but it's a self sustaining organism. No, it's sustained by the sun. Right, so you don't think it's possible to see Earth as its own organism? I think it's poetic and beautiful. And I often refer to the Earth as a living planet. But it's not, in biological terms, an organism, no. If aliens were to visit Earth, what would they notice? What would be the basic unit of light they would notice? Trees, probably. I mean, it's green. It's green and blue. I think that's the first thing you'd notice. It stands out from space as being different to any of the other planets. So it would notice the trees at first because the green. Well, I would. I notice the green, yes. And then probably notice, figure out the photosynthesis. Probably notice cities a second, I suspect, maybe first. If they arrived at night, they'd notice cities first, that's for sure. It depends. Depends the time. You write quite beautifully in Transformers. Once again, I think you opened the book in this way. I don't remember. From space, describing Earth, it's such an interesting idea of what Earth is, you also, I mean, Hitchhiker's Guide, summarizing it as harmless, or mostly harmless. It's a beautifully poetic thing. You open Transformers with, from space, it looks gray and crystalline, obliterating the blue green colors of the living Earth. It is crisscrossed by irregular patterns and convergent striations. There's a central amorphous density where these scratches seem lighter. This, quote, growth does not look alive, although it has extended out along some lines, and there is something grasping and parasitic about it. Across the globe, there are thousands of them, varying in shape and detail, but all of them gray, angular, and organic, spreading. Yet at night, they light up, glowing up the dark sky, suddenly beautiful. Perhaps these cankers on the landscape are in some sense living. There's a controlled flow of energy. There must be information and some form of metabolism, some turnover of materials. Are they alive? No, of course not. They are cities. So is there some sense that cities are living beings? You think aliens would think of them as living beings? Well, it'd be easy to see it that way, wouldn't it? It wakes up at night, they wake up at night. Strictly nocturnal, yes. I imagine that any aliens that are smart enough to get here would understand that they're not living beings. My reason for saying that is that we tend to think of biology in terms of information and forget about cells. I was trying to draw a comparison between the cell as a city and the energy flow through the city and the energy flow through cells and the turnover of materials. And an interesting thing about cities is that they're not really exactly governed by anybody. There are regulations and systems and whatever else, but it's pretty loose. They have their own life, their own way of developing over time. And in that sense, they're quite biological. There was a plan after the great fire of London. Christopher Wren was making plans not only for St. Paul's Cathedral, but also to rebuild in large Parisian type boulevards, a large part of the area of central London that was burned. And it never happened because they didn't have enough money, I think. But it's interesting what was in the plan. There were all these boulevards that were built in the middle of the city. It's interesting what was in the plan. There were all these boulevards, but there were no pubs and no coffee houses or anything like that. And the reality was London just kind of grew up in a set of jumbled streets. And it was the coffee houses and the pubs where all the business of the city of London was being done. And that was where the real life of the city was. And no one had planned it. The whole thing was unplanned and works much better that way. And in that sense, the cell is completely unplanned, is not controlled by the genes in the nucleus in the way that we might like to think that it is, but it's kind of evolved entity that has the same kind of flux, the same animation, the same life. So I think it's a beautiful analogy, but I wouldn't get too stuck with it as a metaphor. See, I disagree with you. I disagree with you. I think you are so steeped, and actually the entirety of science, the history of science is steeped in a biological framework of thinking about what is life. And not just biological, it's very human centric too. That human, the human organism is the epitome of life on earth. I don't know. I think there is some deep fundamental way in which a city is a living being in the same way that a human individual can. But it doesn't give rise to an offspring city. So it doesn't work by natural selection. It works by, if anything, memes. It works by copying itself conceptually as a mode of being. So maybe memes, maybe ideas are the organisms that are really essential to life on earth. Maybe it's much more important about the collective aspect of human nature, the collective intelligence than the individual intelligence. Maybe the collective humanity is the organism. And the thing that defines the collective intelligence of humanity is the ideas. And maybe the way that manifests itself is cities, maybe, or societies or geographically concentrated societies or nations and all that kind of stuff. I mean, from an alien perspective, it's possible that that is the more deeply noticeable thing, not from a place of ignorance. What's noticeable doesn't tell you how it works. I think, I mean, I don't have any problem with what you're saying really, except that it's not possible without the humans. You know, we went from a hunter gatherers type economy, if you like, without cities to cities. And as soon as we get into human evolution and culture and society and so on, then yes, there are other forms of evolution, other forms of change. But cities don't directly propagate themselves, they propagate themselves through human societies and human societies only exist because humans as individuals propagate themselves. So there's a kind of, there is a hierarchy there and without the humans in the first place, none of the rest of it exists. So do you, life is primarily defined by the basic unit on which evolution can operate? I think it's a really important thing, yes. Yeah. And we don't know, we don't have any other better ideas than evolution for how to create life. I never came across a better idea than evolution. I mean, maybe I'm just ignorant and I don't know. And there's, you know, you mentioned that's no automator and so on, and I don't think specifically about that, but I have thought about it in terms of selective units of the origin of life and the difference between evolvability and complexity or just increasing complexity, but within very narrow, narrowly defined limits. The great thing about genes and about selection is it just knocks down all those limits. It gives you a world of information in the end which is limited only by the biophysical reality of what kind of an organism you are, what kind of a planet you live on and so on. And cities and all these other forms that look alive and could be described as alive because they can't propagate themselves can only exist as the product of something that did propagate itself. Yeah. I mean, there's a deeply compelling truth to that kind of way of looking at things, but I just hope that we don't miss the giant cloud among us. I kind of hope that I'm wrong about a lot of this because I can't say that my worldview is particularly uplifting, but in some sense, it doesn't matter if it's uplifting or not. Science is about what's reality, what's out there, why is it this way? And I think there's beauty in that too. There's beauty in darkness. You write about life and death sort of at the biological level. Does the question of suicide, why live, does the question of why the human mind is capable of depression, are you able to introspect that from a place of biology? Why our minds, why we humans can go to such dark places? Why can we commit suicide? Why can we go suffer, suffer period, but also suffer from a feeling of meaninglessness of going to a dark place that depression can take you? Is this a feature of life or is it a bug? I don't know. I mean, if it's a feature of life, then I suppose it would have to be true of other organisms as well. And I don't know, we were talking about dogs earlier on and they can certainly be very sad and upset and may mooch for days after their owner died or something like that. So I suspect in some sense it's a feature of biology. It's probably a feature of mortality. It's probably a, but beyond all of that, I mean, I guess there's two ways you could come at it. There's one of them would be to say, well, you can effectively do the math and come to the conclusion that it's all pointless and that there's really no point in me being here any longer. And maybe that's true in the greater scheme of things. You can justify yourself in terms of society, but society will be gone soon enough as well. And you end up with a very bleak place just by logic. In some sense, it's surprising that we can find any meaning at all. Well, maybe this is where consciousness comes in that we have transient joy, but with transient joy, we have transient misery as well. And sometimes with everything in biology, getting the regulation right is practically impossible. You will always have a bell shaped curve where some people unfortunately are at the joy end and some people are at the misery end. And that's the way brains are wired. And I doubt there's ever an escape from that. It's the same with sex and everything else as well. We're dealing with, you can't regulate it. So anything goes, it's all part of biology. Amen to that. Let me, on writing in your book, Power, Sex and Suicide. First of all, can I just read off the books you've written? If there's any better titles and topics to be covered, I don't know what they are. It makes me look forward to whatever you're going to write next. I hope there's things you write next. So first you wrote oxygen, the molecule that made the world as we've talked about this idea of the role of oxygen in life on earth. Then wait for it, power, sex, suicide, mitochondria and the meaning of life. Then life ascending, the 10 great inventions of evolution. The vital question, the first book I've read of yours, the vital question, why is life the way it is? And the new book, Transformer, the deep chemistry of life and death. In Power, Sex and Suicide, you write about writing or about a lot of things, but I have a question about writing. You write, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Perfect spends 15 years researching his revision to the guide's entry on the earth, which originally read harmless. By the way, I would also as a side quest, as a side question would like to ask you what would be your summary of what earth is. You write, his long essay on the subject is edited down by the guide to read mostly harmless. I suspect that too many new editions suffer similar fate, if not through absurd editing decisions, at least through a lack of meaningful change in content. As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the first edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in The Origin of Species through his multiple revisions, in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself, even if it turns out to be wrong. Let me ask the question about writing, both your students in the academic setting, but also writing some of the most brilliant writings on science and humanity I've ever read. What's the process of writing? How do you advise other humans? If you were to talk to young Darwin or the young you and just young anybody and give advice about how to write and how to write well about these big topics, what would you say? I mean, I suppose there's a couple of points. One of them is what's the story? What do I want to know? What do I want to convey? Why does it matter to anybody? And very often the biggest, most interesting questions, the childlike questions are the one actually that everybody wants to ask, but dents quite, do it in case they look stupid. And one of the nice things about being in science is the longer you're in, the more you realize that everybody doesn't know the answer to these questions and it's not so stupid to ask them after all. So trying to ask the questions that I would have been asking myself at the age of 15, 16, when I was really hungry to know about the world and didn't know very much about it and wanted to go to the edge of what we know, but be helped to get there. I don't want to be too much terminology. And so I want someone to keep a clean eye on what the question is. Beyond that, I've wondered a lot about who am I writing for? And that was in the end, the only answer I had was myself at the age of 15 or 16, because even if you just don't know who's reading, but also where are they reading it? Are they reading it in the bath or in bed or on the Metro or listening to an audio book? Do you want to have a recapitulation every few pages because you read three pages at a time or are you really irritated by that? You're going to get criticism from people who are irritated by what you're doing. And you don't know who they are or what you're going to do that's going to irritate people. And in the end, all you can do is just try and please yourself. And that means, well, what are these big fun, fascinating and big questions? And what do we know about it? And can I convey that? And I kind of learned in trying to write, first of all, say what we know. And I was shocked in the first couple of books how often I came up quickly against all the stuff we don't know. And if you're trying to, I've realized later on in supervising various physicists and mathematicians who are PhD students, their maths is way beyond what I can do. But the process of trying to work out what are we actually going to model here? What's going into this equation? It's a very similar one to writing. What am I going to put on a page? What's the simplest possible way I can encapsulate this idea? So that I now have it as a unit that I can kind of see how it interacts with the other units. And you realize that, well, if this is like that and this is like this, then that can't be true. So you end up navigating your own path through this landscape. And that can be thrilling because you don't know where it's going. And I'd like to think that that's one of the reasons my books have worked for people because this sense of the thrilling adventure ride that I don't know where it's going either. So finding the simplest possible way to explain the things we know and the simplest possible way to explain the things we don't know and the tension between those two. And that's where the story emerges. What about the edit? Do you find yourself to the point of this, you know, editing down to mostly harmless? To arrive at simplicity, do you find the edit is productive or does it destroy the magic that was originally there? No, I usually find, I think I'm perhaps a better editor than I am a writer. I write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. Put a bunch of crap on the page first and then see the edit where it takes you. Yeah, but then there's the professional editors who come along as well. And I mean, in Transformer, the editor came back to me after I'd sent him, two months after I sent the first edition, he'd read the whole thing and he said, the first two chapters prevent a formidable hurdle to the general reader. Go and do something about it. And that was the last thing I really wanted to do. Your editor sounds very eloquent in speech. Yeah, well, this was an email, but I thought about it, you know, the bottom line is he was right. And so I put the whole thing aside for about two months, spent the summer, this would have been, I guess last summer, and then turned to it with full attention in about September or something and rewrote those chapters almost from scratch. I kept some of the material, but it took me a long time to process it, to work out what needs to change, where does it need to, I wasn't writing in this time. How am I going to tell this story better so it's more accessible and interesting? And in the end, I think it worked. It's still difficult. It's still biochemistry, but it has, he ended up saying, now he's got a barreling energy to it. And I was, you know, because he'd been, because he'd told me the truth the first time, I decided to believe that he was telling me the truth the second time as well and was delighted. Could you give advice to young people in general, folks in high school, folks in college, how to take on some of the big questions you've taken on? Now you've done that in the space of biology and expanded out. How can they have a career they can be proud of or have a life they can be proud of? Gosh, that's a big question. I'm sure you've gathered some wisdom that you can impart. Yeah, so the only advice that I actually ever give to my students is follow what you're interested in because they're often worried that if they make this decision now and do this course instead of that course, then they're going to restrict their career opportunities and there isn't a career path in science. It's not, I mean, there is, but there isn't. There's a lot of competition, there's a lot of death symbolically. So who survives? The people who survive are the people who care enough to still do it. And they're very often the people who don't worry too much about the future and are able to live in the present. Because if you do a PhD, you've competed hard to get onto the PhD, then you have to compete hard to get a postdoc job and you have the next one maybe on another continent and it's only two years anyway. And so, and there's no guarantee you're going to get a faculty position at the end of it. So. And there's always the next step to compete. If you get a faculty position, you get a tenure and with tenure go full professor and full professor, then you go to some kind of, whatever the discipline is, there's an award. If you're in physics, you're always competing for the Nobel Prize. There's different awards. And then eventually you're all competing to, I mean, there's always a competition. So there is no happiness. Happiness does not lie. If you're looking into the future, yes. And if what you're caring about is a career, then it's probably not the one for you. If though you can put that aside, and I've also worked in industry for a brief period and I was made redundant twice. So I know that. You know, there's no guarantee that you've got a career that way either. Yes. So, so live in the moment and try and enjoy what you're doing. And that means really go to the, go to the themes that you're most interested in and try and follow them as well as you can. And that tends to pay back in surprising ways. I don't know if you've found this as well, but I found that people will help you often. If they see some light shining in the eye, you're excited about their subject and you know, just want to talk about it. And they know that their friend in California has got a job coming up. They'll say, go for this, this guy's all right. You know, they'll use the network to help you out if you really care. And you're not gonna have a job two years down the line, but if what you really care about is what you're doing now, then it doesn't matter if you have a job in two years time or not. It'll work itself out if you've got the light in your eye. And so that's the only advice I can give. And most people probably drop out through that system because the fight is just not worth it for them. Yeah, when you have the light in your eye, when you have the excitement for the thing, what happens is you start to surround yourself with others that are interested in that same thing, that also have the light. If you really are rigorous about this because I think it does take, it doesn't, it takes effort to make. Oh, you've got to be obsessive. But if you're doing what you really love doing, then it's not work anymore, it's what you do. Yeah, but I also mean the surrounding yourself with other people that are obsessed about the same thing because depending on. Oh, that takes some work as well, yes. And luck. Finding the right, yeah, finding the right mentors, the collaborators, because I think one of the problem with the PhD process is people are not careful enough in picking their mentors. Those are people, mentors and colleagues and so on, those are people who are gonna define the direction of your life, how much you love a thing, how much, I mean the power of just like the few little conversations you have in the hallway, it's incredible. So you have to be a little bit careful in that. Sometimes you just get randomly almost assigned, really pursue, I suppose, the subject as much as you pursue the people that do that subject. So like both, the whole dance of it. They kind of go together really. Yeah, they really do. But take that part seriously. And probably in the way you're describing it, careful how you define success. Because. You'll never find happiness in success. There's a lovely quote from Robert Louis Stevenson, I think, who said, nothing in life is so disenchanting as attainment. Yeah, so I mean, in some sense, the true definition of success is getting to do today what you really enjoy doing. Just what fills you with joy. And that's ultimately success. So success isn't the thing beyond the horizon, the big trophy, the financials. I think it's as close as we can get to happiness. That's not to say you're full of joy all the time, but it's as close as we can get to a sustained human happiness is by getting some fulfillment from what you're doing on a daily basis. And if what you're looking for is the world giving you the stamp of approval with a Nobel Prize or a fellowship or whatever it is, then I've known people like this who, they're eaten away by the anger, the kind of caustic resentment that they've not been awarded this prize that they deserve. And the other way, if you put too much value into those kinds of prizes and you win them, I've gotten a chance to see that it also, the more quote unquote successful you are in that sense, the more you run the danger of growing ego so big that you don't get to actually enjoy the beauty of this life. You start to believe that you figured it all out as opposed to, I think what ultimately the most fun thing is is being curious about everything around you, being constantly surprised, and these little moments of discovery of enjoying beauty in small and big ways all around you. And I think the bigger your ego grows, the more you start to take yourself seriously, the less you're able to enjoy that. Amen to that, I couldn't agree more. So the summary from harmless to mostly harmless in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, how would you try to summarize Earth? And if you were given, if you had to summarize the whole thing in a couple of sentences, and maybe throw in meaning of life in there, like what, why, why, why, maybe, is that a defining thing about humans that we care about the meaning of the whole thing? I wonder if that should be part of the, these creatures seem to be very lost. Yes, they're always asking why. I mean, that's my defining question is why. It was, as people used to make a joke, I have a small scar on my forehead from a climbing accident years ago. And the guy I was climbing with had dislodged a rock and he shouted something. He shouted below, I think, meaning that the rock was coming down. And I hadn't caught what he said, so I looked up and then smashed the street on my forehead. And everybody around me took the piss, saying he looked up to ask why. Yeah. But that's a human imperative. That's part of what it means to be human. Look up to the sky and ask why, and ask why. So your question, define the earth. I'm not sure I can do that. I mean, the first word that comes to mind is living. I wouldn't like to say mostly living, but perhaps. Mostly living. Well, it's interesting because like, if you were to write the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I suppose, say our idea that we talked about, that bacteria is the most prominent form of life throughout the galaxy and the universe. I suppose that earth would be kind of unique and would require. There's abundance in that case. Yeah. It's profligate, it's rich, it's enormously, enormously living. So how would you describe that it's not bacteria? It's. Eukaryotic. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the technical term, but it is basically it's. Yeah, and then. How would I describe that? I've actually really struggled with that term because the word, I mean, there's few words quite as good as eukaryotic to put everybody off immediately. You start using words like that and they'll leave the room. A Krebs cycle is another one that gets people to leave the room, but so I've tried to think, is there another word for eukaryotic that I can use? And really the only word that I've been able to use is complex, complex cells, complex life and so on. And that word, it serves one immediate purpose, which is to convey an impression. But then it means so many different things to everybody that actually is lost immediately. And so it's kind of. Well, that's a noticeable from the perspective of other planets, that is a noticeable phase transition of complexity is the eukaryotic. What about the harmless and the mostly harmless? Is that kind of. Probably accurate on a universal kind of scale. I don't think that humanity is in any danger of disturbing the universe at the moment. At the moment, which is why the mostly, we don't know. Depends what Elon is up to, depends how many rockets. I think. It'll be still even then a while, I think, before we disturb the fabric of time and space. Was the aforementioned Andrej Karpathy, I think he summarized Earth as a system where you hammer it with a bunch of photons. The input is like photons and the output is rockets. If you just. Well, that's a hell of a lot of photons before there was a rocket launch. But like, you know, maybe in the span of the universe, it's not that much time. And so, and I do wonder, you know, what the future is, whether we're just in the early beginnings of this Earth, which is important when you try to summarize it, or we're at the end, where humans have finally gained the ability to destroy the entirety of this beautiful project we've got going on. Not with nuclear weapons, with engineered viruses, with all those kinds of things. Or just inadvertently through global warming and pollution and so on. We're quite capable of that. I mean, we just need to pass the tipping point. I mean, I think we're more likely to do it inadvertently than through a nuclear war, which could happen at any time. But my fear is we just don't know where the tipping points are. And we will, we kind of think we're smart enough to fix the problem quickly if we really need to. I think that's the overriding assumption that we're all right for now. Maybe in 20 years time, it's gonna be a calamitous problem. And then we'll really need to put some serious mental power into fixing it without seriously worrying that perhaps that is too late. And that however brilliant we are, we miss the boat. And just walk off the cliff. I don't know. I have optimism in humans being clever descendants. Oh, I have no doubt that we can fix the problem. It's an urgent problem. We need to fix it pretty sharpish. And I do have doubts about whether politically we are capable of coming together enough to not just in any one country, but around the planet. To, I mean, I know we can do it, but do we have the will? Do we have the vision to accomplish it? That's what makes this whole ride fun. I don't know. Not only do we not know if we can handle the crises before us, we don't even know all the crises that are gonna be before us in the next 20 years. The ones I think that will most likely challenge us in the 21st century are the ones we don't even expect. People didn't expect World War II at the end of World War I. Some folks did, but yeah, not at the end of World War I. But by the late 1920s, I think people were beginning to worry about it. Yeah, no, there's always people worrying about everything. So if you focus on the thing that. People worry about, yes. Because there's a million things people worry about and 99.999999% of them don't come to be. Of course, the people that turn out to be right, they'll say, I knew all along, but that's not, that's not an accurate way of knowing what you could have predicted. I think rationally speaking, you can worry about it, but nobody thought you could have another World War. The war to end all wars, why would you have another war? And the idea of nuclear weapons, just technologically, is a very difficult thing to anticipate, to create a weapon that just jumps orders of magnitude and destructive capability. And of course, we can intuit all the things like engineered viruses, nanobots, artificial intelligence, yes, all the different complicated global effects of global warming. So how that changes the allocation of resources, the flow of energy, the tension between countries, the military conflict between countries, the reallocation of power, then looking at the role of China in this whole thing with Russia and growing influence of Africa and the weird dynamics of Europe, and then America falling apart through the political division fueled by recommender systems through Twitter and Facebook. The whole beautiful mess is just fun. And I think there's a lot of incredible engineers, incredible scientists, incredible human beings that while everyone is bickering and so on online for the fun of it on the weekends, they're actually trying to build solutions. And those are the people that will create something beautiful. At least I have, that's the process of evolution. It all started with a Chuck Norris single cell organism that went out from the vents and was the parent to all of us. And for that guy or lady or both, I guess, is a big thank you and I can't wait to what happens next. And I'm glad there's incredible humans writing and studying it like you are, Nick. It's a huge honor that you would talk to me. This is fantastic. This is really amazing. I can't wait to read what you write next. Thank you for existing. And thank you for talking today. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nick Lane. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Steve Jobs. I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318

I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess. I'd also say that's pretty universal. I think if you want to be the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed. The following is a conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez. They're sisters, professional chess players, commentators, educators, entertainers, and streamers. Their channel is called Botez Live on Twitch and YouTube. I highly recommend you check it out. A small side note about the currently ongoing controversy in the chess world, where the 19 year old grandmaster, Hans Niemann, beat Magnus Carlsen at the Sink Field Cup. After this, Magnus, for the first time ever, withdrew from the tournament, implying with a tweet that there may have been cheating or at least something shady going on. Folks like the grandmaster, Hikaru Nakamura, fanned the flames of cheating accusations, and the internet made a bunch of proposals on how the cheating could have been done, and it ranged from the ridiculous to the hilarious, often both. Hans himself came out and said that he has cheated before when he was 12 and 16 on random online games to jack up his rating. But he said that he has never cheated in person over the board. Danny Wrench from chess.com, who I've spoken with, may make a statement in response to Hans's claims soon. Folks like grandmaster Jakob Luegge spoke to his experience training Hans Niemann and has said that his memory and intuition were quite brilliant. So as you see, there's a lot of perspectives on this. ChessBase has a good summary of the saga that I'll link in the description. Also note that this is so quickly moving that new stuff might come out between me recording this and publishing the episode, but I thought I'd mention this anyway since the episode with the Botas sisters is a conversation about chess and was recorded shortly before the controversy, so we didn't talk about it. I'm considering having Hans on this podcast and also Magnus back on the podcast, and maybe others like Hikaru or folks from chess.com's anti cheat staff to discuss their really interesting cheating detection algorithms, but I may also just stay out of it. I find chess to be a beautiful game and the chess community full of fascinating, brilliant people, and so I'll keep having conversations like these about chess. It's fun. My goal with this podcast and in general as a human being is to increase the amount of love in the world. Sometimes that involves celebrating brilliance and beauty in science, in art, in chess. Sometimes it involves empathetic conversations with controversial figures that seek to understand, not to ride. Sometimes it involves standing against the internet lynch mob, as the ChessBase article calls it, to hear the story of a human being who is under attack, even if it means I get attacked in the process as well. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Alexandra and Andrea Botas. You just got back from Italy. What's the most memorable thing? I was just there recently as well. It was very chaotic because we went out on a whim and we only had our first hotel booked, and then we rented a car and drove around all of the cities and went to like five different cities in about a week and a bit. So I think it was just the variety of seeing so many different places when we're used to being at home all the time, and Andrea, is yours your luggage? Yeah, I would say it was the most stressful vacation we've been in in our life, and it was a valuable learning lesson because now I know how to be prepared for trips, but we lost our bags and I never got them back. And like Alex said, we didn't know where we'd be sleeping every night and we're just driving through a new city with a giant van in the most narrowest streets and getting in many, many fights with Italian men. So it wasn't really a vacation. I saw this motion so many times. Wasn't it liberating to lose your baggage? Is it still the lining? It was liberating. My entire life, I've always had the issue of overpacking. And I told her before the trip, Andrea, you're gonna pack light, right? Yeah, Alex, yeah. And then I see her stuffing her overweight suitcase. But you did the same. We both had giant, big extra baggage that we didn't need. And I'm actually very glad we lost it because for Venice, hauling that around on all the boats and through the tiny streets and there's no Ubers. And now it's the first time where I can travel without checking in a bag, which I've never done before. So now I've learned what it means to pack light because I saw that I could survive off of just my, this sounds very dramatic, but it was really a big learning lesson for me. The driving must've been crazy because driving in Italy is rough. The driving was crazy. I did most of it and it would be really interesting driving through places like Florence or even through the beach areas that were super windy because there are two way streets that should really only be one way. So you'd be driving this huge van and then another car comes on a cliff and you're just waiting for it to slowly pass. So it took all of my focus and concentration to drive well in Italy, but it was actually really relaxing because the hardest thing about making a lot of videos online is you're always thinking about it, what's coming next. And when we were in Italy, it was so chaotic that I did not think about work for a good week and a bit. Oh, cause you're just. We were stressed. I was just trying to keep us alive. It seemed higher priority. And that was kind of fun. It was kind of fun. No planning, nothing. Just on a whim. I wouldn't recommend it or ever do that again, but. It sounds pretty awesome. And we even randomly ran into two friends of ours who were in the same city and we just traveled with them for about half of the trip. Yeah, so you just took on the chaos. Exactly, it was an adventure. Okay, and I see like, cause you were using your hands a lot. You picked up some of the Italian hand gestures. I did. We did get yelled at by a lot of Italians. The old Italian grandmas would come to us after breakfast cause we'd leave something on the plate and she'd be like, you could feed an entire village with that. Tell your friends. And we'd feel so ashamed. Yeah, we got cursed out a lot, but it really reminded me of where we grew up and helped. That's true. Yeah, bring back those mechanisms. Where'd you grow up? We're Romanian, but it was like an immigrant neighborhood. In Canada. So, same if you don't finish your plate, that's disrespectful to the people who made the food. How was the food in Italy? I feel like the carbs thing is too intense. Yeah, I think very overrated in my opinion. So I'm actually not supposed to eat gluten cause I have an allergy, but I was in Italy and it's gluten galore. So I was actually eating a lot of it and it was very interesting cause I didn't get sick while I was in Italy, but I do while I'm in the US. So somehow the food was actually maybe more okay for me to digest, which I appreciated, but I didn't like it as much as I thought. Did you like the food there? Yeah, no, I did, I did. I love carbs, but it feels like Vegas when I go there for the food is like, if I stay here too long, I'm gonna do things I regret. That's what it feels like with the food. I don't know how to moderate and everybody is pushing very large portions and while kind of eating things on you, pasta, pizza and bread, so delicious. So yeah, I love it, but I regret everything. So it's like, I don't wanna go to a place where I'm going to regret everything I do for too long of a time. Yeah, surprisingly the people there though are still very fit and everyone stays in good shape, but that's probably because you're walking around all day and you're much more active than anyone. And they also just know how to moderate food. I think I've gotten used to the US way of eating. The US portions. What is that? Just a lot, always a lot and more. And I feel in the US food advertisements are also much more in your face and you're more often reminded of junk food than we were in Italy. So even though we were eating less healthy things, I think we were getting cravings and being pushed towards junk food less often. All right, I gotta ask you a hard question. So the romance languages. So I think French is up there as like number one. Number one in terms of? I don't know. Who's ranking them? Oh, you guys speak Italian or no? Not Italian, but we studied French and Spanish in school. And Romanian. I feel like every country calls their language a romance language. But it's Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese. And I think there was one more that was like this dialect, but those are considered the romance languages. Okay, so where would you put Italian? I think we got yelled at so much in Italian that it's not gonna be a love word. So it wasn't working. It's on the bottom of the list cause people did not use it nicely to us. But I always really liked how French sounds. I think something about it where maybe Spanish actually sounds nicer to the ears, but French has more character and it feels more sultry. So I like French. What about you? Yeah, that was my answer too. Oh. Sultry, okay. Yeah. I feel like French, in France, I feel like I'm always being judged. Like they're better than me. That's what French. They are better than us. That's true. It's just so true. Which is why I long to belong to that. I like the British accent. The British accent? Yeah. Actually, one thing we did on our Italian trip is we just picked up British accents for the entire trip for fun. And we forgot we were doing them to the point where we talked to British people and they'd ask us, why are you talking like that? We just couldn't stop. I did feel much more elegant and mature. That's true. People like, I don't know if they felt the same way about us, but it was more of the confidence. You do feel like you're more poised for sure. Yeah. So how'd you guys get into chess? When did you first, let's say, when did you first fall in love with chess? So we both started playing when we were pretty young, around six years old. That's when our dad taught us. And I enjoyed playing chess because I had good results early on, but a lot of it was being pushed from my dad to play chess. And I only really started loving it when we moved from Canada and we started moving a lot and chess was the one stable thing that I had. And it was also where all of my friends were. So it was kind of that foundational thing for me. And that's when I started studying chess very intensely. And when I started putting in the hours out of my own will and not because I was being pushed by my dad, that's when I started really loving it. And I even wanted to take time off college to just focus on chess. So training and competing? Training and competing, yeah. It was when I was doing it for myself that I started getting my best results. And actually enjoying the thing. And really enjoying it, yeah. I would spend summer vacations studying for tournaments and my mom would come and say, "'You need to make friends, go leave the house." And I'd be like, no, I need to play chess. And I remember those moments. That you rebelled by playing chess, that's awesome. Yeah, exactly. How did you get into it? Yeah, my experience with loving in high school is very opposite from Alex's, but right, my sister was playing and my dad taught me when I was also six. Andrea was cool in high school, unlike me. You were. I wouldn't say cool, I'd say more balanced and I was interested in other hobbies. In my childhood, if I ever really did love chess, there's certainly moments about traveling and being together with my family and spending those moments together, but those are more the social and the experiences. But funny enough, I think my happiest moment where I really played the game for my own enjoyment was probably my most recent tournament. Because this was after, obviously, we've been streaming and I'm no longer in high school, but when I was in school, I was always playing for college and for the results, trying to build a resume. So I was too stressed out about the pressure to really enjoy the game. Whereas when I just played my first tournament, so it was after a two year break because of the pandemic and it was also all live on Twitch, so there was some pressure, but it was the first time that I was really eager to study for the game, sitting and focusing since we've been streaming and not getting distracted by something else. In years, like I said. And the tournament experience, I hit my highest rating and it was my best tournament ever. And I think most of that is because it came from my own enjoyment. So you didn't enjoy the domination? Because I think you did really well, right? This is like a couple months ago? Oh yeah, yeah, the tournament. Well, of course, I think the results came from enjoying the tournament. Because I would be in high school studying triple the amount of time, like six hours every day compared to this tournament, I didn't even prepare for it. And for three years, I wouldn't be able to pass one rating, whereas in this one tournament, I passed it by like 70 points without even any preparation. So it was, I think, as soon as you stopped worrying about the competitions, when the games get much better. What does it mean to pass a rating? So I was stuck at 1900. 1900 is 100 points off of expert. Yeah. Usually when you reach 2000, you're considered an expert, which is the rating Andrea was going for. Okay, expert, that's a technical term or that's like a talk and trash term? It's more of a colloquial term where if somebody is around a 2000 and you're playing them in a tournament, they won't have the actual title next to their name, but you always say, I'm playing an expert. What about like the more official things like master? Does that have to do with the rating or something else? Yeah, so national master in the US is when you're 2200. Okay, and what's international master? International master is based off of a different system, the FIDE system, which is international. To be an international master, it's 2400 and you have to have three international master norms. Yeah, I think Magnus said he's a 28, six something. That was, yeah. And then he said, that's pretty decent. Now. Well, he always talks a lot about that. But see the thing is, I think what he meant is that's a decent rating because it accurately captures his actual level. So it's not overinflated or underinflated and so on. And so the discussion there was how do you get to, can a human being get to 2900? And then he says, because my current rating is pretty decent at representing my skill level, it's gonna be a long road to actually get there. Because it's like, so you have to beat people at your same level, that's how the number increases. Exactly, yeah. And you beat a bunch of people in the tournament, right? That are higher than your luck. I did, I got very lucky. I was playing, I was really nervous because my category was like 200 points above my rating. And of course, I was very rusty and I didn't play in a tournament in a while, but it went pretty well. Do you feel the pressure when you're actually recording it, like the streaming? It was definitely, so before every round I was vlogging and I was doing meet and greets and doing other things for the livestream. Yeah, I saw you do a meet and greet. You didn't know what the hell you were doing, it's great. Yeah, yeah. Like what am I, how do I do this? Yeah, I see. What do I do? It was actually really wholesome. The beginning was very silly because I was just not expecting that it was gonna be more of a seminar. I thought it was like, oh, you pose and take pictures, but they actually asked really nice, meaningful questions, but unfortunately it's bad for YouTube retention and we cut them all out, so. Bad for YouTube? Yeah. The good long form conversation. Yes. So it was like questions, Q and A type of thing. Exactly, you have to have very fast paced for YouTube and that seminar was not fast paced. Okay, well, not everything in life needs to be on YouTube, right? That's true. There's like two parallel things, stuff that's fun for YouTube. Yes, one day we'll post that Q and A. Yeah, when you guys like, when you become like ultra famous, you're currently just regular famous. And then they'll appreciate the long, slow content, yes. And that, the YouTube aspect, the creation aspect, does that add to the fun, ultimately, of the chess, of like your love of chess? Oh, for the love of chess in general or just for competing in that one tournament? No, love of chess in general. I think you said that for competing for that tournament is adding pressure. Yeah, but actually I would say like a good pressure, but yeah, this is where I differed to Alex because when I was just competitive and I was younger, I don't think I loved chess as much as when I started doing it for content because unlike her, who a lot of her friends and social circle were other chess players, I never really traveled and built really solid friendships through chess until I started streaming and meeting other chess streamers and actually playing and talking to people for fun rather than just always being alone in the game and never really meeting other people my age or people with similar interests. So I would say Twitch was the thing that really changed how I approached the game. I think with some YouTubers, there's a pressure to be almost somebody else. You create a persona and you're stuck in that persona. I think I'm too much of a boomer to know what the hell Twitch is anyway, but it feels like when you're actually live streaming, you can't help but be who you really are. I think it's, oh, well, I think when you're live streaming and I've talked to a lot of other streamers about this, you kind of just over exaggerate one side of your personality. And of course, it's kind of like being like on all the time. Like you're trying to be more entertaining and sometimes you're being silly at moments or more, you take what character traits like people know you for. And for me, one is being like ADHD and the younger sibling who's very energetic and causes trouble, even though sometimes it's a little switch. Yeah, I'm sure you cause trouble just for the camera. Yeah, right. I think, yeah, I think, and of course, once you're live streaming for like four or five hours, there's gonna be moments in the stream where it's more chill, but especially when you're like editing that content or you're doing bigger streams that are shorter, you are kind of playing up a side of yourself because of course, there's a lot of parts of me that I don't show to the camera because they're not as entertaining to watch, like the more serious part. And also there's things that you are really interested in about what you do. Like I love competitive chess where I could sit and really think about it, but I know that that is not gonna be as entertaining for stream. I know that's not gonna be as entertaining for YouTube. So you kind of have to take what you like, but then really adapt it for whatever the format is. And sometimes that feels inauthentic, but other times it just feels like repackaging what you love for people in a more general audience to enjoy. Do you feel like it's a trap a little bit as you evolve? Like you're trapped in? Oh, I think social media, oh, sorry, go ahead. Social media in general is a trap of that kind? Well, so we've been trying to switch to learn how to make YouTube videos recently. And so much of learning YouTube school is kind of the beastification of content where you try to get to the point of the video within like the first 10 seconds to not lose people. The beastificate, you mean like Mr. Beast? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, where it's so fast paced, there's a reason to wait, there's high stakes. And everything is created to keep people watching the video and keep people on the platform. And in some ways it is a trap because it's harder to do the kind of content you like because you really have to squeeze it to be like, okay, well, do we have a good thumbnail for this? Do we have a good title for this? And that's something that we're trying to figure out how to keep true to what we wanna do. Yeah, see, the way I think about it is, yeah, there's a lot of stuff you can create and yeah, the Mr. Beastification process. But also I think about what are the videos, conversations or things I will create in this life that will be the best thing I do. And I try not to do things in my life that will prevent me from getting there. I feel like if you're always focusing on doing kind of, optimizing the thumbnail in the 10 seconds and so on, you'll never do the thing that's truly you're known for and remembered for. So finding that balance is tricky. I get that, but at the same time, this might be my own copium, which I know is a word you know now. Yeah, I'm slowly learning the full complexity of the term, yes. But the other way I think about it is, it is a skill to learn how to communicate with large audiences. And first I started streaming chess, which is something I just did and really loved, but now I have to learn how to translate that format. And if that's a skillset we could build, then we could use it to do really important things. And I've seen a lot of YouTubers who have done interviews about how, they didn't love the kind of content they did at first, but what they're doing right now is really meaningful. So I like to think of it, maybe like skill development, cause not everybody hits off podcasts where they can talk to super interesting people right off the bat. Yeah, you can be slow and boring in a podcast. You don't have to worry about the first 10 seconds. I mean, people like keep pushing me for, cause the first 10 seconds of the videos I do is, well, I know it's most important for YouTube, but I don't give a damn. I wrote a Chrome extension that hides all the views and likes. I don't look at the click through. I don't look at Twitch views, Andrea does. So we also can relate. I love numbers too, but that's why I don't look at it. Cause you become like, oh, you'll start to think that a conversation or I think you did sucks because it doesn't get views, but that's just not the case. YouTube algorithm is this monster that figures stuff out. And if you let it control your mind, I feel like it's going to destroy you creatively. So you have to find a nice balance. I have to say, I was laughing a little bit when I was listening to the Magnus episode and the first 10 minutes, you guys are talking about soccer, football. Two robots seem human in the conversation. Yeah, exactly. I was like, let's have some fun, make conversation about non chess related topics. Yeah, talk about sports. Yeah, it was kind of hilarious. I was surprised that even at his level, I wasn't sure, but I was surprised how much he loves chess. It sounds cliche to say, but like the way he looked at a chess board, you know those memes like, I wish somebody looked at me the way he still like the way he glanced down and he reached for the pieces with excitement to show me something. There was, there wasn't like, okay, I'll show you. It was like, like there was still that fire. That's something that always shocks me about some of like super grandmasters. Like one of my coaches was a person who also, his name's GM Hammer of Norway. He also coached Magnus. He was his second and he was helping me train for my tournament. And I was kind of putting off doing the homework. He's like, if you're putting it off, that means you're studying the wrong thing. Like you should be enjoying even when you're practicing, which when I grew up, I thought to get to the top level, like practicing has to be hard and unpleasant. And when I was listening to Magnus episode, he was like, I didn't read books very much. Or there was one thing that you said that's like very normal for studying classical chess that he didn't do just because it didn't interest him. He says, I suck at puzzles. I don't like puzzles. Yeah, and he doesn't do what he doesn't enjoy. And that's because it's like purely driven out of passion. I think the internet was like, I suck at puzzles too. Yeah, they like that. They're grandmasters. I don't have to study at all. It's just, it's fun. And, but I think the lesson there that's really powerful is he spends most of the day thinking about chess because he wants to. So do whatever, if you're into getting better at chess, do whatever it takes to actually just the number of hours you spend a day thinking about chess, maximize that. If you're like super serious about it. I actually get very addicted whenever I start studying chess, which is why I don't do it as seriously when I'm focused on content. Cause I go through these rabbit holes where if I'm focusing on chess, I wanna be as good as I possibly can at the game. Otherwise it's hard for me to enjoy it cause it's such a competitive thing. And I remember training for tournaments and when you're training for tournaments, you even start dreaming about chess and you can stop thinking about it. And it's as if you're flipped into this completely different world, which is also what I like best about the game that it's a completely different living experience. And then you take some drugs and now you start to see things on the ceiling. Is there some factual hallucination like to the Queen's Gambit, like those scenes? I think it's... Is that based on your life story? Well, I can't say that on camera. No, just kidding. Actually chess players are very careful to not take drugs. They drink a lot. They drink so much. It's actually crazy for how good they're able to play chess when they do. But when it comes to things like psychedelics or other things, they usually stay away from those cause they don't wanna mess anything up in their brain. So this is actually intervention. I saw that you mentioned somewhere, I think it was the lie detector test where you have a drinking problem. Is that an actual... I think that's actually a meme that we like to joke about on stream because occasionally we'd have like a white claw on stream or something like that. And then people meme about it. It goes back to Andrea's point of amplifying a part of your personality to make yourself a little bit more entertaining. I'm gonna use that as an excuse from now on. This podcast is just amplifying a part of that personality. I'm not really like this, but have you played drunk? Like Magnus has played drunk. He says it helps someone with the creativity. Is there any truth to that? Well, Andrea is under 21, so she's obviously would never do that. But I have played while drinking. Actually, I enjoy playing chess and drinking more than pre gaming or going out to a club and drinking, which sounds really silly. And I'll usually play against opponents who are also having some beer. And it does make you feel like you're seeing the game from a fresher perspective where it can sometimes make you feel more confident, liquid confidence, and it does help with creativity. You just feel like you could pull things off, but there's also a limit. It's more like you've had one drink or two drink, but then it goes beyond that. And then you just start missing tactics and it's not worth it. Yeah, I think it only helps players in very short time controls. One time I was challenging this grandmaster on stream and we were playing bullet chess, which is one minute chess. And I was giving him handicaps. And I said, okay, you have to take four shots before the next game. And he just got like 10 times stronger and transformed into like the Hulk and destroyed me more than the last game. But of course, if you're playing like a three hour game, it's gonna get old. But I think in short time controls, it's amazing. Yeah, definitely has to be blitz. It has to be where it's more intuition rather than sitting and calculating. This is probably like negatively affecting your ability to calculate. Absolutely, yeah. How much when you guys play, when you look at the chess board, how much of it is calculation? How much of it is intuition? How much of it is memorized openings? It really depends between short form chess. So five minutes, three minutes, one minute and classical chess. What's your favorite to play? I love playing blitz now because that's most of what I do. And that's actually how I got into chess streaming because I couldn't spend entire weekends or weeks playing tournaments. I would just, while I was in college, log on and play these long blitz or bullet sessions. And it's very fast. So you don't have time to go calculate as deeply. You basically have to calculate short lines pretty quickly. And a lot of it is pattern recognition and intuition. As three minutes, you said? Three minutes, yeah. Okay, cool. And so for that, it's just basically intuition. A lot of it is intuition, yeah. See, I saw on streams you actually keep talking while playing chess. It seems really difficult. Yeah, that helps my result. That doesn't help my result. It doesn't, it hurts. It helps content, not the game. Yeah, exactly. But you can still do it. Because it feels like how can you possibly concentrate while talking? It's because so much of it is intuition. You're not, while you're talking, you're thinking about that topic, but then you just come to the board and you just understand what you should be doing here. And then sometimes you get in trouble because you're talking and you have now lost half of your time. You have a minute and a half, your opponent has three, and you're kind of at a disadvantage. But that kind of goes to show that that's how blitz chess usually works, whereas classical is very different. Which of you is better at chess? I mean, let's do it this way. Can you, Andrea, can you say what, in which way is Alex stronger than you? Which way is she weaker than you? Not physically in terms of chess. Well, yes, of course she is higher rated. But when we do play, I think her strengths against me where she really gets me is the end game. She has stronger end game, so she can, and I actually have a stronger opening, but as soon as she's able to simplify. Andrea, I'm supposed to say what is good about you, not you. You know, I'm getting there. Well, see, this is what I'm saying, because don't worry, it's related, okay? Because if I can get an advantage in the beginning of the game, but as soon as she starts trading pieces down, like my confidence drops, because I know that the end game is the hardest part of the game and the longest, and that's where she ends up beating me. So her end game is I think really what makes the difference. It sounds like her psychological warfare is better too, because if you're getting nervous. But it's harder to play against higher rated players, same how Magnus and former world champions have that psychological edge. So I think it's always going to be different for Andrea, because she knows statistically she should be winning something like one in four games, but she usually does better than that, because she's very distracting and talks a lot. That does help. What does it feel like to play a higher rated player? What's the experience of that? Playing somebody like Magnus. So it depends on how much higher rated than you they are. If it's someone who's like between me and Andrea, let's say it's a 200 point difference, you know they should win, but at least you still feel like you have a chance. I was playing in a title Tuesday, which is this tournament chess.com has every Tuesday. And I got really lucky, beat a GM, drew an international master, and then I got paired against Hikaru Nakamura. And my brain just went blank, because I just know that I'm so unlikely to win that I couldn't even play the game properly when it's that much of a difference where they should be winning like 99% of the time. But that's like psychological. So you're saying that's the biggest experience is like actually knowing the numbers and statistically thinking there's no way I can win. But I meant like, is there a suffocating feeling like positionally you feel like you're constantly under attack? You just feel like you're slowly getting outsmarted. And the worst is when you don't even know what you're doing wrong. You come out of that and you're like, I thought I was doing great and I got slowly squeezed. I didn't understand what was going on. And you're just kind of baffled. It's kind of like watching AlphaZero beat up Stockfish. And you don't really understand why it's making certain moves or how it thought of the plan. You just see it slowly getting the position better. And that's what it feels like. I would add it's kind of different for me if they're someone who's significantly higher rated. So let's say more than like 300 points or you're playing Magnus. What I notice is I just feel lost straight as soon as I don't know my preparation because they know so many opening lines that they're gonna know the best line to beat you that you haven't studied. So then on move 10, you're like, he already has a maybe plus 0.5 advantage which is really small. But for someone with such a significant skill level you know you already lost at that point. And it's like a third of the game. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Andrea? Andrea is very good at opening preparation. As she said. As she said, she likes bringing that up. I mean, she's very meticulous about it where she'll really go in and learn her lines. And having that initial starting confidence isn't just helpful for the opening but it helps develop your plans for the middle game. So I think she's very good at that. I think she's actually pretty good at tactical combinations. What is tactics? Tactics is like solving puzzles or basically finding lines that are forced where if you find them, you're going to win. So that's like puzzles within a position. Yeah, exactly. Whereas strategic chess is making slow moves and over the process of like 20 moves you get a slightly better position based on an understanding of the overall strategy. So in my extensive research review on Wikipedia, it says your most played opening is the King's Indian defense. In which, quote, black allows white to advance their pawns to the center of the board in the first two moves. Is there any truth to this? So the King's Indian. And what is it? Probably is my most played opening. And it's one where even when my coach who was a grandmaster taught me, he was like, so you know, I've been playing the King's Indian for 10 years and I still don't understand it. And it's one of those openings that computers really don't like because you do, or at least Stockfish doesn't like it. Maybe AlphaZero would change their mind. I forgot to look at what. Can you show me, by the way, what it is? Yeah. Is it white's opening or black's opening? Black responds to the D4 Queen's pawn push. And you take your knight out to F6. I'll just put in the stereotypical, classical King's Indian more so to say. We actually have a very famous King's Indian game in the notes that we prepared. Okay. For the record, I asked you guys for some games that you find pretty cool and maybe to get a chance to talk about some. Yeah. So this is the King's Indian. As you can see, white has much more control over the center. White has three pawns in the center while black has none past the fifth rank. And you just have this pawn on D6. And one of the ideas in chess is if you're not taking the center, then your plan revolves around trying to continually challenge it. But what is really fun about the King's Indian is that black sometimes gets these crazy King side attacks while white gets Queen side attacks. And even though it's a little bit suspicious for black and the computer could usually break it, it's hard to defend as a human when you're being attacked. But if you don't pull off the attack as black, then you're just gonna end up being lost in the end game. So it's like a very asymmetrical position. It's very asymmetrical, although a lot of people now stop playing into the classical King's Indian, even though computers give it a big advantage. And they play these slower lines in the King's Indian, which are less fun to play. What's slower mean? It takes a longer time to do something interesting with? They basically don't let you get as much of a King side attack because they try opening up the center and then you have no weaknesses, but you're just slowly improving the position of your pieces instead of being able to go for that King side attack. So for people just listening, there is the white pawns are all on the fourth row in a row together. That feels like a bad position. For black? For white. Oh, you don't like taking the center? No, I like taking the center. Now you're talking trash already. Oh, sorry. But it's just like they're like feel vulnerable there in a row together. Like it's like, you know, cause they're like, who's gonna defend them? I guess the Knights defend and the Queen defends it. You're actually talking about a theme that you do see sometimes, which is called hanging pawns. And when you have two pawns right next to each other with no other pawns to defend them. Yeah, so it is a valid point. And actually as black, you're trying to break apart these pawns or get them to push and create some holes into the position, but it's a trade off. And that's a lot of what chess openings are about. You get more space, but you'll also end up having to protect your pawns potentially or move them forward to the point where they're overextended. And plus pawns being vulnerable, it's kind of fun. It's like, there's more stuff in danger. They're not, cause if it's like this, everything's like trapped, like you can't do anything. Everything's blocked, yeah. And blocked off, yeah. It's like you can't have fun. Yeah, one of the most, one of the opening principles for white is get your pawns in the center. So I'd say like this is actually preferable for white. Let's go over some opening principles. There we go. Cause this is a very good learning lesson for any chess beginners in the audience. Okay, so first thing you wanna do is control the center. There we go, E4, the more aggressive one. Isn't that like the basic vanilla move? I didn't, somebody told me that's the most popular opening move in chess. It is. Why is that considered aggressive? So it's E4 and D4 and the king's pawn is known as being for more tactical players, whereas D4 is known for more positional players. So that's why it's considered more aggressive. Tactical. More gambits with E4, I think. So tactical means I'm gonna try to attack you. You're gonna try to go for puzzles and rely more on your combination abilities. Whereas if it's something positional, you usually have like three to four moves that are all good in the position, whereas tactics, you need to see this one line. So it's more precise. So this one's cool cause he can like, the queen can come out, the bishop can come out. Yeah, and that's one of the most popular checkmates and usually what you teach new students to try to cheese their friends cause then they feel really excited that they know this new trap where you bring the bishop and the queen out and you try to checkmate on F7. Yeah. It's the trap that queen's gambit, Beth Harmon, falls for in their first game versus the janitor. She gets all mad cause she gets checkmated very early. Oh, that's the one she gets checkmated with? Yeah. Okay. I love how you guys were actually paying attention to the games carefully, which is pretty cool that they did a good job of improving, evolving her game throughout the show to actually represent an actual growth of a chess player. Yeah. They really took every detail into consideration, which was cool. Okay. So what else? That's, I brought stuff into the center. We'll do the same. Okay. So then you want to develop your pieces. So in the beginning of the game, you want to take out the bishops and knights first because you don't want to start with the most valuable piece like the queen cause then it'll become a vulnerability and it'll get attacked very early on. And the reason you're taking out these two pieces first is cause you want to castle your king. So you can move a knight move or a bishop move and that's considered developing. Yeah. So at this stage, not like even before getting a few pawns out. You usually want to start with getting a pawn because you want to get space in the center, but also when you push pawns, it helps free up some of your pieces. So usually start with one pawn first and then you could start taking out your minor pieces, which is the bishop and the knight. I have anxiety about a pawn just floating out there. Defenseless. But it's not attacked yet. See, those are what you call ghost threats. So you're scared of something that hasn't happened yet. So if I were to attack it. Feel like there's a deeper thing going on here. Yeah. Actually, let's say. Yeah, so you're attacking the pawn in the center here and it is vulnerable, but as soon as you do that, I can develop my own knight and defend it as well. Okay. And now for people just listening, there's two pawns that just came out to meet each other and a couple of knights. You love the chess commentary. It's very poetic. Yeah. The pawns met after midnight. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm going to romanticize the game a bit. Yes, exactly. Okay, cool. So like there's, if you bring out the bishops with the knights, you're matching that with the other. Black is going to match it. Exactly. Whatever you're attacking with. Yep, he's developing. It's going to defend it. Now you could develop your bishop or your knight, whatever you'd like. Oh no, now you give him options. All right. Yeah, there you go. Now I am attacking the pawn in the center, which is what you were afraid about before, but let's see how you defend it here. By doing this symmetrical thing, bringing out the knight on the other side. And actually your other move was good as well, defending with the pawn, because then you're freeing up space for your bishop. So you're basically trying to develop your pieces as quickly as possible, put your pawns in the center, and then get your king to safety. And that's usually the basic opening tips that you get. And it is kind of counterintuitive that safety is in the corner of the board for a king. That was always confusing to me, but you know. Three pawns in front, though you typically don't push those. Maybe like one, maybe I'll go one square, but these will be like the wall of defense that keep him safe. But another way to also think about it is your pieces usually wanna point towards the center. If you have a knight closer to the center than closer to the side, it actually has more squares it can go to. So a huge part of it is just wanting to have flexibility for where your pieces go. So more pieces are going to be able to make threats in the center or even open up the position. So since that's where it's most likely to open, you want your king somewhere where the position will stay closed so that you have the pawns to defend. You know, there's like rules like this, but I always wonder, cause I've built chess engines, but then you start to wonder like, why is it that positionally these things are good? Like you've built up an intuition about it, but I wish, and that's the thing that would be amazing if engines could explain, why is this kind of thing better than this kind of thing? You start to build up an intuition, but if I'm just like knowing nothing about chess, it feels confusing that cornering your king, like getting him like trapped here. Like it feels like you could get checkmated easier there if I was just using like dumb intuition, but it seems like that's not the case. I imagine maybe, cause AlphaZero learned by playing games against itself, right? And I imagine if you have a lot of games and you do build an intuition, because if you were to keep your king in the center, you just see that in those games, you're dealing with threats a lot more often. But yeah, there's shortcut rules and this doesn't even mean it's the best way to play chess as we've seen with AlphaZero kind of changing the rules of the game a little bit. But as a human, to learn it from scratch is a lot more difficult than to start with principles. So that's why beginners usually learn chess this way. Yeah, because you're playing other humans and the other humans have also operated on a different principles. And that's why people that come up now that are training with engines are just going to be much better than the people of the past because they're gonna try out weirder ideas that go against the principles of old. And they're gonna do like weird stuff, including sacrifices and stuff like that. Yeah, and I also think that's why AlphaZero was so shocking because Stockfish was using an opening database. So it was already based off of knowledge that humans have from playing chess for years that we just thought is how you're supposed to play. Whereas AlphaZero just learned from playing the game so many times and came up with very novel opening ideas. Were you impressed by AlphaZero? Have you seen some of the games? I have seen some of the games. I think impressed, bewildered, and motivated were the three things I experienced. I think Magnus said he was also impressed that it could easily be mistaken for creativity. That's his trash talk towards the AI. That was a beautiful sentence. I was listening to the podcast. I mean, as a human, I agree with him because you don't wanna give the machine the power of creativity, but if it looks creative, give it a compliment. That's fair. I know that you're being nice to the machines in case they are ever looking back through this. What else is there? What other principles are there for the opening? You can go a little bit more forward, let's say. Yeah, we can finish full development. Positions like this, let's just say you developed all of your pieces. So that's like a really nice, like nobody took any pieces and we're just in a nice positional thing. Yeah, so it's not actually a very accurate one. So I'm actually, I could put a different one on the board, but usually after you've developed all of your pieces, you wanna get your queen out a little bit to connect your rooks, and you also start thinking about certain pawn pushes and getting more space. But another good tip is just can you improve the position of your pieces? Think about timing. So if you've already moved a piece once and there's a piece that hasn't moved at all, then you wanna focus on the piece that hasn't moved at all to be able to have it more likely to jump into the game. Right, so don't move pieces multiple times. Exactly. Like try to move it to the most optimal position. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. What, so what's the Indian, I think we kind of went over it, but did you ever say why you like it so much? Because it's weird? Because it's king size? I liked it because it's a very fun, aggressive defense where you're just throwing your pieces towards white, and there's so many sacrificing opportunities. And for some reason, tactical games always feel like the most beautiful, the most satisfying, and that's what I liked about the King's Indian. But I also suffered a lot from this love because I would play things that are not necessarily correct, then my attack wouldn't pan out, and then I would just struggle the rest of the game having no play and just trying to defend. So if you're always attacking, Wikipedia also says that, that you're known for your attacking play. It's also known for losses according to Stanford. Okay, let's not bring that up. See Wikipedia doesn't talk trash, it just says nice things. Yeah, Wikipedia's a lot nicer. I actually played a lot of positional chess in classic because I really like the slow squeeze, but when I transitioned to playing a lot of online chess, it's almost as if I was looking for more instant gratification because it feels so much better to beat someone with an attack. And even if sometimes it doesn't pan out, I was okay with it because you get so many games in. So I think my style in online chess really changed from my classical chess. What about you Andrea? Do you have a style? Are you attacking? Are you a more like conservative defensive player? Are you chaotic? Opening wise, I like to play more positionally. Like I like to push T4 and just slowly improve my pieces and slowly get an attack. But like Alex said, if you're playing bullet chess or blitz against viewers, you often like wanna play riskier moves that may not be as good. And then that's kind of when I would play more aggressive. But I do enjoy tournaments for that reason because then like once you're 15 moves in, which as soon as you're out of your prep, I like sitting and thinking in more positional, yeah, positional middle games. One of the games you found to be pretty cool was the Hakara Nakamura versus Galfan in 2009. And that one I think includes the King's Indian defense. Yes. Why is that an interesting one to you? I also play the King's Indian as black and I love this model game. But as Alex was saying, like all these advantages for the King's Indian. But now there's this one line that like every higher rated player just destroys my King's Indian. And you see these beautiful games and like, ah, yes, I wanna play for these ideas. But now no one plays into it anymore and you just get demolished. So this is why I don't play the King's Indian anymore, but not to ruin the fun. It's a love hate relationship, truly. The reality. But that's like the higher level players do or does everybody? Yeah, if you're studying openings and you know this line as white, you just, you automatically get the upper edge. And that's kind of how openings develop. You start having players trying new lines and then you see ones and then everybody adopts it if they think it's the best one. But yeah, so Hikaru is really known for his aggressive style of play. Is Hikaru black here or what? Yeah, Hikaru is black here. So he's playing the King's Indian. And as you can see in this position, white already has a lot, a huge center advantage. But what Hikaru is gonna start doing even with the next move is bringing all of his pieces towards the white King side, because his plan is to start pushing his pawns towards the white King and ignore the attack that goes on in the Queen side. It's all of the dream attack with the King's Indian. So there's a complete asymmetry towards the King side and the left side of the board is a ton of pieces. Yeah, exactly. Wow, he moved the knight like three times in a row. Yep, and that's what you need to do because you have to move the knight in order to make space for your pawn. So again, this is why it's so counterintuitive and Stockfish doesn't like it. You're putting almost most of your pieces on the back rank and you're pushing your King side pawns and you're blocking your own dark squared Bishop. So none of it makes sense. You're mimicking it, that's awesome. Okay, so yeah, here you see white going for a Queen side attack, black going for the King side attack and you can keep going a little bit and I'll wait to where he starts with the pretty sacrifices. It's more fun to analyze games in person than on the computer, I think. Yeah. Okay, so here Hikaru is preparing the attack and what I really like about this game is that he finds these tactics that are not necessarily what a computer would go for but it's very hard to face as a human and that's why a lot of people play the King's Indian because in practice it's hard to defend against. So we can keep moving a little bit forward. Okay. Yep, so white is just continuing the King side plan. No, is that like the first piece I think that's taken in the game? Yep, that's the first trade. Attack begins. Exactly, Hikaru had to pause his attack for a little bit to just make sure that white didn't have two dire threats on the Queen side. So cool to see the asymmetry of this thing. Exactly, that's what's beautiful about the King's Indian. And just one thing to highlight because his rook move here is very bizarre and typically like a computer probably didn't like this but the ideas are interesting because this is a major weakness for black that they're coming to attack and he's also making room for his Bishop to come backwards and challenge. So this is like a human like maneuver that computers would like. I think computers would like this though because you'd have to move it regardless because he takes the pawn here and his rook would be under attack. Yeah, well having looked at it, when I actually studied this as a line and this right away isn't the best move cutting computer. So actually that's such a good question. So do you guys when you study games use your mind but do you also use computers to build up your intuition of like looking at a position like this and what would a computer do and then try to understand why it wants to do that? When I was studying seriously I would try to use my own mind because you're never gonna get the exact same position so you really need to notice trends and often computers will give you moves that are only specific to that position because of a certain tactic. But I do use computers to check what I did and make sure I didn't make any obvious blunder that I might have missed. What does a computer tell you? Just like what is the best move or does it give you any kind of explanation of why? It doesn't tell you why but it gives you the different valuations of the position like black is down a half pawn here or something like that but it hints you towards what the right move is and then it's on you to figure out why and you can usually figure out why if not right away then just by going through a few moves and being like, oh, okay, that makes sense. I feel like a computer will take you down with some weird lines potentially like sacrifice. Like why the hell am I sacrificing this? Well, we'll get to the pretty sacrifice soon. So we could just keep playing. The pawns are being pushed forward. Yeah, and Hikaru is kind of ignoring the queen side attack here. They basically both only reply to each other's plan when they have to. This is where you convert all the podcast viewers to YouTube. Yeah. They have no idea what we're talking about right now. There is a Zen like experience of just like listening and imagining. The board. Just imagine the pieces on the ceiling. Yeah, we should be calling them out and then people will be freaking out even more. Am I supposed to keep track of what the position is? It's too late now. It's too many. How hard is blindfold chess? Have you tried? Like are you able to keep the mind? I've played blindfold chess before. For me, it's pretty hard. It's not a muscle that I've trained as much and I'm very visual when it comes to chess. But it is one as a top player that starts becoming very second nature for you. Actually, this is what, I talked to Magnus about this. Maybe I was, again, influenced by Queen's Gambit. What do you actually visualize when it's in your head? So for Magnus, it was a boring 2D board. Right. Do you have some kind of? That's every chess player, no. You don't have like, cause you know some chess like computer games, you can do all kinds of skins and like fancy stuff. You don't have any fancy stuff? Sadly, I don't have like a cool 3D warrior mode on. It's just the basic. I just have the default chess base board in my head. Cause you don't, yeah, you can't use your brain power for adding colors to it cause you already have to keep track of the pieces. And it's one board at a time? Yes. Okay. The current position. Yeah, I bet every chess. I wonder if there's any who hit it differently. There's certain players who are really good and they can even play blindfold chess and play multiple games at the same time. So I would be curious how they do it. But usually when you're thinking of one game, that's the only one in your mind. Yeah, but you have to do this operation where you move one piece. You're doing like the branch analysis. Like, and so you still have to somehow visualize the branching process and not forget stuff. Maybe that's like constant memory recall or something. You're always looking at one board at a time, but. And you're also, oh, cause you're also looking in the future. Yeah. Cause then you have to back track. Calculating variations and coming back. I guess you're keeping the position in your memory. So you're remembering where all the pieces are and then you're playing it out on one board and then you can come back to the initial one that you started with that you kind of just keep in your brain and it's also easier to come back to it once you've played a position from it. I feel like it's that memory recall that gets you to blunder. So I'll like see that I'm being attacked by certain things, but then because I get so exhausted thinking about a different thing, I forget, I actually forget about an entire branch of things that I was supposed to be worried about. It happens very often. Yeah. If you spend a bunch of time calculating in a position, let's say like when you're really in trouble and you're spending 15, 20 minutes calculating, you'll forget about something that you spotted like, oh, if I do these two, three moves, I'll walk into a trap cause you've looked at so many lines and then you play it and then you see it and you're like, oh, I looked at it and I saw it, but I forgot about it. It's often called tunneling where you're just looking so deeply on one thing you forget about the rest of the board. And it's the worst when, at least in a beginner level, there's like a, I don't know, a Bishop just sitting there, obviously attacking your like queen or something. And then you just forget that Bishop exists. Cause if they just sit there for a few moves and don't move, you just forget their existence. And then it's just, yeah, that's definitely very embarrassing. Well, it happens to everyone, so. Yes. Okay, cool. Okay, so we see a few trades happening on the queen side where he had to go for those, otherwise he's in trouble. And this is where the game, oh, sorry. This is where it gets exciting. Yeah, so Knight H4 is really when the sacrifice starts. And here the two important pawns are the ones in front of the King, cause they're helping with the entire defense and Hikaru is actually preparing to sacrifice his Knight for a pawn just so that he can continue his attack and open up the position. Because if you don't do that here as black and don't get some kind of attack, you are completely lost on the queen side. And also you've pushed all of your own king side pawns, so you're gonna be in danger. So it's one of those do or die moments. Oh, okay, so that's what makes it all in, cause the King is wide open. Yeah, yeah, the King is wide open and all of White's pieces are pointed towards the queen side too, where you're also cramped. So is the attack primarily by black done by the two pawns and the Knight? And the light squared Bishop is always extremely important. So you don't wanna trade this in the King's Indian because it's very helpful for a lot of attacks. Even though it's on the other side of the board, I guess it can go all the way across in, like I'm not sure what it's doing here, but probably threatening. Like for example, if it was another move black could have played would be something like Bishop H3, where if you take the Bishop, you actually get mated on G2. With what? So let's say you take here and then you could push the pawn and then it would be checkmate. So you're kind of using your Bishop to sacrifice against White's King side pawns. Yeah, I'll be freaking out if their Bishop did that. What are they up to? Right, and that's the thing, this position looks very scary as White because all of Black's pawns are starting to come towards you. And it's one of those things where humans do start to worry in these positions, whereas computers obviously can just calculate the best line and maybe the attack doesn't go through. So you're saying the computer might say that the White is actually a slight favorite here? Yeah, potentially. Okay, so then White makes a little bit of room by moving the Rook. Right. And the attack begins. I like the commentary here. The Knight is hugging the King. And actually White can't even take the King here because then H4 and H3 is coming in. White can't take the Knight. Yeah, oh did I say King? Yes, thank you, the Knight. White can't take the Knight because why? So if White takes the Knight here, then Black starts pushing his pawn to H4 with H3 incoming and the idea of trying to defend against this is, it looks very difficult. So White just chooses. It'd be cool to watch a chess game, to experience watching it without understanding it just for a day. Feel like I could use that to make better content. True. Okay. I mean, that's what getting drunk does. Unfortunately for chess players, it never leaves your brain. Doesn't matter how. But this is actually a very cute move because Black's Queen is under attack, but the King is so cramped that he can't actually take it or he's gonna get checkmated by a pawn, which is a sad way to go cruelly. Yeah, those pawns are doing a lot of work here. They really are. That is the King's Indian. This is the King's Indian player's dream. The attack of the King side pawns. Yeah, these pawns are like, right, so they're the ones that are doing a lot of the threatening. Right, and they're also opening up the position to bring more of the pieces in. But the pawns kind of help break open the King side, but they can't checkmate by themselves. So after the pawns come in, that's when you need to start bringing in pieces as well, which you will see Ahi Kar do here. Okay. There you go. He puts. One more sacrifice. This was actually another beautiful sacrifice in the game. But then puts the King in check with a pawn. Right, and the pawn is going to be given here for free, but the idea is you're giving your own piece because you want to have more space and open up the King, which is what you're always trying to do when you have a King side. You're trying to remove as many of the King's defenders as you can without giving up too much. And then you have a ton of pieces on the King side for black, just waiting to. Exactly. To do harm. And then. And notice how every single move, white is getting attacked. Like they're just never getting a break. Black just keeps throwing all their pieces. So it's funny that black's Queen has been hanging for like three moves now and white still can't do anything about it. So rook puts the King in check. The King runs. And then again, we leave the Queen hanging and you develop a piece, this light squared Bishop that's so important, and you're once again threatening checkmate on G2. And then Bishops coming to the game. Once again, the Queen hanging. I mean, the game is just so beautiful. The amount of calculation Hikaru put into this position. It feels like so much is in danger. Right. It's so interesting. And Knight takes what? A pawns. So now his Queen is attacked twice and he doesn't care. He takes the Bishop and he's still threatening the checkmate on G2. And then the Queen takes the Bishop. So now he's defending against G2 and black just goes and grabs some material back here. So here, black is already is winning. Well, he ends up winning a Knight here because black had to be so much on the defensive. He's just taking pieces. Yeah, I mean at this point, you're up two whole pieces. So you knew it was in here. Yeah, exactly. But. And Queen. Queen. And then you take, and then the rook takes and there's not as much of an attack on the King anymore, but Hikaru is up a Knight here, which is GG. Yeah, what's the correct way of saying that? Because I played Demis Hassabis. I played him in chess. And then I quickly realized like from his facial expressions that I should have like stopped playing. Oh. It was like, it's already set. Yeah, when it's. And then he's like, like, this is the good time to like, give up. Right. You're not gonna get to checkmate where like this, you know, he could see like, the checkmate is like five or seven moves away or something. And what's the play? Usually you have to resign if you're in a position or you should through chess etiquette resign when you're in a position where your opponent is definitely gonna win out of respect. Like if you're a piece down. And obviously all top grandmasters do that. The only people who don't do that is kids because their coaches. They love to play till the checkmate. Their coaches always tell them never resign and they'll be in hopelessly lost positions playing against like two rooks, a king, and they only have their sole king, but they're still playing on. So that's a position where it's obvious they can't win. Because the kids might make errors. Yeah, exactly. And so it might as well. That was the interesting thing about, I think game six of the previous world championship with Magnus. Was it the one where he beat Nap? Yeah, the first time he beat him, where it was like, he said that, I don't know how often you come across this kind of situation. He said, the engines predict a draw, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be a draw. So you play on hoping that you take a person into, I mean, this is, I guess, an end game thing. You take them to deep water and they make a positional mistake or something. I don't know when, like he from his gut knows that this is supposed to be a draw, but he still plays on. Yeah, I mean, that is one where it could theoretically be a draw, but it could be very hard to defend because it's a hard technique to know as a human. And especially in that game, I know that Nepo was also in time pressure, which makes it even harder. So in situations like that, you should always continue. It's more where an engine would give you something like plus 10 or something where it's not just clearly a win, but anybody would know how to win. And that's where you're usually supposed to resign. So what do you find beautiful about this game? Is it the attacking chess and just the asymmetry of it? It's the asymmetry. And it's the fact that this is the dream for the King's Indian, where you're able to get a beautiful attack. And there was also those two really nice sacrifices where Black just continuously kept putting pressure on White's King to the point where he was able to win material. And the best part of it is that if the attack didn't work out, Black would have been completely lost. How often does that happen, by the way? Like as an attacking player, how often do you put yourself in the position of like, I'm screwed unless this works out? In online chess more than I should. And it's usually when I sacrifice, I know it's either gonna work or I'm lost. And those are the most fun positions to play usually. But in tournaments, if you're doing a sacrifice, you're playing it with 100% confidence because you're taking the time to calculate it. But yeah, when you have three minutes, you don't have time. So you take a whim and you follow your intuition and you find out later. Or you're very confident it'll work and you haven't calculated all the way until the end, but you've calculated to the point where you have enough in exchange for the sack and you think you could play that position. How do you train chess these days? What's, do you practice? Do you do deliberate practice? I mean, you're in this tough position because you're also a creator and educator and entertainer. So do you try to put in time of like daily practice? I don't train chess anymore when I'm focusing on creating. I do if I'm preparing for a tournament. But back in the day, I would train very seriously for tournaments. And the way it would work is I do opening preparation for a specific tournament because that's when you really need to have those lines memorized and you could also prepare for specific opponents. And I would do tactics to make sure I stay sharp. So those were the two things I would do every single day for a tournament and then mix up the rest with like maybe some end games, maybe some positional chess. So what does tactics preparation looks like? Do you do like a puzzle, like a random puzzle thing? Yeah, I would just train puzzles for at least like 30 to 60 minutes or books. And sometimes you were, and there's different kinds of puzzles. One you could train for pattern recognition where you're supposed to go through them very quickly. And that's just so that when you're playing the game, if your mind is tired, it's still keeping track of things a little bit more easily. And then there's where you're practicing your combination and those sometimes take like 20 minutes to find because you have to just calculate a lot. And it's more like making sure that you've trained with that muscle. But Andrea is actually very good at finding ways to balance and still study while also doing content. Yeah, so what, you're able to do both? That's the hard thing. I was getting very irritated with content because I'm very competitive. I don't like playing chess if I'm losing. And if you're talking and entertaining, you're gonna be losing more games than winning. So then I started doing more training streams where I'd bring on my coach. And one of the things that I wanted to add to Alex's training repertoire. So I would do daily puzzles every time I'm streaming, which helped me a lot, even if it's like, there's this thing on chess.com called Puzzle Rush, where you have three minutes and you just do puzzle after puzzle where they get incrementally harder. And it's just a really good way to build your pattern recognition, especially when you're rusty. So I would do that till I hit a high score and I wouldn't play any blitz until I hit the score that I want. But that's kind of more like the fun part of chess studying. The very important one is actually analyzing your losses in your tournament games. And first you sit and you look through your mistake yourself and try to see if you can find the better moves. And then that's when you would check over with a computer to see if you're right. So game analysis is also very important, which I try to do. I remember to give a shout out, I listened to a couple of episodes of the Perpetual Chess Podcast, which is pretty good. But whatever I listened to, I remember the, it's, I think they really focus on like teaching people. How to train. Yeah, how to play, how to train, all that kind of stuff. They do like, yeah, I'm looking now, adult improver. So basically like how do regular noobs get better at chess? One of the things that, one of the person that said, I think he was the grandmaster, but he said, to maximize the amount of time you spend every day of like, basically as you were saying, like suffering. So like you, it's not about the, like you should be thinking. You should be doing calculating. So it's the opposite of what Magnus said. Like you should be doing a lot of time. It doesn't matter what the puzzle is or whatever the hell you're doing, but you should be like doing that difficult calculation. That's how you get better. Yeah, it really depends what you're training. Cause I used to think the same, but it depends what you're weaker at. Cause if you're doing the really difficult puzzles, you're training for like visualization and calculating more moves ahead than you typically would, which maybe you wouldn't get into that as often in a regular game because typically you run into like three to four tactics, which are actually the easier and more fun ones to solve. So it really depends. And on top of that, as a hobbyist, your motivation is very different than when you're playing from a young age and have pretty high competitive ambition. And a lot of people who are new to chess, you could basically work on anything and still improve. So if you're focusing on something you like, you're probably gonna stick to it more and be more consistent, which I think is more helpful longterm. What was the most embarrassing loss of your career? I had so many flashbacks, but I'm so glad it's a question for Andrea. I like that you specified. You know, it's funny. Cause. I mean, because you said you're so competitive and like. Yeah, no, no. I could tell just even from the way you said it, that like you hate losing. Yeah, I mean, that was the reason I hated chess in high school, cause it'd always be like, but okay, there's many traumatizing losses where it's like your top three, you're running for first. And then you throw a game you shouldn't, and this shouldn't hurt my ego as much as it does, but it's always kids. Or when I was a high school girl, it's the younger boys who are really cocky. And when they win, they start rubbing it in your face and they're yawning and looking around when like 90% of the game you were destroying them and you had this one tiny mistake and now their ego's huge. But I'll never forget I was playing like for a chess scholarship. And it was tiebreaker for first, and I think I lost to a 12 year old girl who couldn't even use the scholarship, but she beat me in one first place and she got some other prize. So yeah, I was losing to that little girl who's literally like 2300 now, so makes sense. Right, you keep telling yourself that. What do you think, do you think Gasparro was feeling that when he was playing 13 year old Magnus? Like why? As much as it's a beauty of the sport that any age can be brilliant, any demographic, anything, I feel like when you're adults and you're paired against the kid, it's just hard not to let it get to you. And it depends, maybe if they're a really sweet kid, but most of the times I play kids, they're just really arrogant. And I don't think they do it intentionally because they're kids. I mean, there is a certain etiquette thing where like you said, yawning, and in general, like it's not. If they're kids, there's no etiquette. Yeah, yeah. They don't care. Yeah, the kids traumatized me too. I was playing in Vegas and it was not even my opponent. It was the board next to me. And the kid was at least 10 years old, 12 max, and he was playing against an adult and he takes out his hand and he starts doing a fake phone to which the kid sitting across diagonally picks up their banana and starts talking like it's a phone and they're just mouthing words while their two adult opponents are thinking intensely at the game. And then I see the adult look up, look at the kid, just making banana phone and the despair in his eyes as he sighs. Yeah. And they're not even doing it for trash talk. No, no, no. They're just bored. They're just bored kids. Yes, exactly. What was the, cause you play a bunch of people for your channel. What was the most like memorable? What's the most fun, most intense? There's a bunch of fun ones. You've played kids before, some trash talking kids. That sounds great. They trash talk kids. Yeah. Nothing like losing a 12 year old who then starts doing a Fortnite dance. Yeah. So that actually happened? That did happen. He is a very young master. I think he became master when he was like nine years old or something. And he's very good at chess and doing a lot of training, but he's also incredibly good at trash talking. And he beat me one game and he stood up and he started doing the Fortnite dance. So you gotta just swallow your pride in those moments. What is that culture of like street chess players? It seems pretty interesting. Like, I don't know, that seems to be celebrating the beauty of the game. It's the trash talking, but also having fun with it, but also taking it seriously. And you've done a few of those. Did you go to New York? Yeah, in Union Square Park in Washington Square. What was that like? It's such a unique place. I haven't seen it anywhere else in the US where people are just professional chess hustlers, even if they're not necessarily a top player, but they play chess every single day. And so many of them learn chess by themselves and never had a professional coach. So they are quite good at it. They're also very tight knit. They all know each other. And it's a very social thing where you're not just playing chess. It's the experience of getting to know this person who's very much a personality and they talk to you. They could either give you tips or they could be really chatty and talk to you during. So it's a chess experience rather than just playing a game. Do you tell them like what your rating is or do you just let people, like both ways, do you discover how good the person actually is? Initially, I loved going and not telling people my rating and just surprising them and winning games. But now we've gone so many times that they just know us. So we can't get away with it anymore. One time, actually, I don't know if I should share this, but one time we dressed up as grandmothers and we had prosthetics on our face. And I think they still recognized us. Yeah, it's probably the, there's other components, like probably the trash talk and all that kind of stuff. Actually, no, it was funny. We were talking like grandmothers, but it was the way I held, it was the way I held them. Grandmother talk like, back of my day. No, no, no, no, no, no, we're not bringing this back. We're not bringing this back. Okay, what were your names, what were the code names? Oh my God. I think it was Edna, Edna, and I had a really, I can't remember the other one. But it was embarrassing because we were walking so slowly and Andrea dropped her cane or something at one point and then people in the park came to help her. We felt so embarrassed. But yeah, it was funny. Cause they didn't know it was us until he saw the way I reached for my pawn. And he said, the way you held your pawn, I knew it was you. It was like such a niche thing. That was what blew the grandma cover. Yeah, do you have a style of how you play physically? Is that recognizable? I didn't think we did until grandma went to play chess, but. Yeah, I've never thought about that. Yeah, I think our style is just trash talking now. Style is very, if you're talking about style on YouTube and Twitch, we definitely have a distinctive style. What's that? What's your distinctive, just talking shit? Yes. But not going too far. No, no, definitely that's, definitely going to. If it's us two against each other. Oh, we trash talk each other so hard. So brutally. And I love looking at Andrea and watching her little nose scrunch up as she's annoyed and the satisfaction I get when that happens. How many times do you play against each other on online publicly? I think I've seen a couple of games. We played a lot of times. We try not to do it too often cause it's repetitive, but every now and then when we haven't done it for a while, we'll go at it again. What do you mean repetitive? Is that implied trash talk right there? No, it just, we play similar openings. So you just start seeing the same position too often. It's the same opening against each other every time. Andrea's really good at opening. So I just start playing bad openings to get her out of her preparation. Cause I don't like opening theory very much. I just like playing the game and getting into middle games and end games. But yeah, typically the only time we're playing each other is when we're setting up in the park and we don't have opponents yet and we need content. So we just play each other until people show up. But we always put stakes on the line, which makes it very interesting. Cause otherwise it wouldn't be fun to play each other if there's no stakes. Where's the most fun place you've played? Is it New York? I think so. And it was actually when we set up in Times Square one night, we just brought a table with us and chess. And it's not even where people usually play chess, but it was so lively. There were all of the lights out and so many people just kept stopping by to play chess. And it was really one of my favorite streams. It's just the opposite of like the classical chess world. It's super loud. There's music, there's cars, there's street dancers, even some naked people walking around who we had to be careful not to get banned. But I honestly really liked the chaotic environments for chess games. Cause I think it's a good way to break more into the mainstream culture and make it entertaining and appealing to anyone who doesn't know anything about chess. So that's the way. And also in an authentic way, because it's what we really like about chess when you're just enjoying the game, but also the atmosphere and the people who you're playing with. And that's one of the things that I think you see less when you're just thinking of chess as a competitive thing. You've mentioned a few other games, like the Bobby Fischer games, the Candidates match, the game of the century, which I feel like is a weird game to call the game of the century when there's still like a few decades left in the century. But yeah. I mean, it wasn't an official thing. It was just the chess journalist. It's just like made on a chess article. But it's stuck if you look on. Yeah, no, it did stick. Again, Wikipedia. This is all I do research wise. Because there's, so that particular one was a 13 year old Fischer and he did a queen sacrifice. I wonder, there's that movie searching for Bobby Fischer. Was that related? Cause didn't they have a young somebody who's supposed to be kind of like Bobby Fischer played by Josh Waitzkin. Yeah, I think he ended up being an international master. It wasn't based on Bobby Fischer. It was based on another player, but I liked how they told it through the lens of being inspired by Bobby Fischer. Do you remember that game? Like why do you think it was dubbed the game of the century? It was just journalists being like. I think part of it was the atmosphere where you have the US junior champion who's this 13 year old nobody. And it's the first time he's playing in a very competitive landscape against some of the top American players. And he goes up against an international master. So somebody who's a lot stronger than he is who's played in Olympiads for the American team. He's having a bad tournament, but then he has this one game where he just shows off his tactical prowess and plays incredibly well. And I don't know if this is true, but in the paper clippings of it, they'd say things like grandmasters were by the board and they would say things like, oh, Bobby is lost in this position. What is he doing? But there's this 13 year old kid who's just playing incredibly well. And then that also happened before Bobby's started really rapidly improving at chess. Not that people knew that, but he kind of seemed like a rising star. So I think the game was beautiful, but I also think the idea of a 13 year old kid coming out from nowhere and beating a top American player was very fascinating. And there was aggressive chess and it was interesting ideas. Yeah, taking big risks. It's cool to see a 13 year old do that. What about the, you mentioned that his match against Mark Taimano from their 71 candidates match was interesting in some way. Why is it interesting to you? Move 45, I'm looking at some notes. This is with the Bishop E3. I think I know which one you're talking about. It's, I wouldn't say, a lot of these games on these lists I think are really great combinations that when tactics come into play, which is what we're talking about. But they're very good at exemplifying lessons. This is why you study famous games. So you can apply these lessons to your own games. And I think the main takeaway for this one was they're punishing their opponent from steering away from opening principles, which is something that we learned a little earlier where he delayed the development of his King and put his Queen out a little bit too exposed. So Bobby Fisher immediately punished that. And then there was just like a beautiful combination where it was like a 12 in a row perfect moves, which was a tactic, just winning the game. But it only came from punishing those mistakes. The mistake being bringing the Queen out? Bringing the Queen out and yeah, not castling your King right away. And these were just like opening principles that now they're written in books, but for books you would study these principles by studying games. And also, I'm looking at some notes, his dominance during the candidate's turn was unprecedented. He swept two top grandmasters. I mean, that guy's meteoric rise is incredible. Sad that I think at whatever in his 20s, he then quit chess. One has to wonder where he could have gone. Yeah, it is sad that we lost such a brilliant mind so early on. And it's also sad, I think kind of what ended up happening in his life and the slowly going crazier. Is there some aspect of chess that opens the door to crazy? Like how challenging it is on you, the stress, the anxiety of it, the isolation. And being alone. Yeah. It's a very lonely sport. It is, even do you guys, since you both play it, it's still lonely, the experience of it? It was when I was competing a lot. I think the crazy part of it for me was how obsessed you can get about a board game where you're optimizing your entire life to beat another person at pushing wooden pieces across the board. And it doesn't necessarily translate to other things. And the fact that so many people spend so much of their life on it, but you can also spend so much of your life because it's so deep and so interesting. And I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess. And I had that before I went to college where I just wanted to take a gap year and focus on chess because I went to high school, we moved a lot, there was always other things going on. So I felt like I could never really focus on chess. And the one time I could, by taking a gap year, I ended up not doing because my parents really wanted me to go to university right away. But I think maybe if I had taken that gap year, I don't know if I would have gone back to school. So maybe it wasn't a bad thing. I'd also say that's pretty universal. I think if you want to be the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed. So I don't know if that's only chess. Well, some things, some obsessions are more transferable to a balanced social life. That is true. Like healthy development. Yeah, chess is a lot less social than most other sports. Yeah, there's something deeply isolating about this game. I mean, the great chess players I've met, I mean, it's really competitive too. And there's something that you're almost nonstop paranoid about blundering at every level. And that develops a person who is really anxious about losing versus someone who deeply enjoys perfection or winning and so on. It's just this constant paranoia about losing. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but that creates huge amount of stress over like thousands of games, especially in a young person. And that blundering is such a painful experience because you could be playing a game that you've played for five, six hours and you have one lapse in focus and you blunder and you throw the entire game away. And sometimes not just the entire game, but the entire tournament. Now you can't place or do anything anymore. So you just feel those mistakes so strongly. Yeah, there's no one to blame but yourself. Are you guys hard on yourself? Have you been about losing? Like before you became super famous for streaming where you could be like, well, fuck this, at least I can have fun playing. So I was really hard on myself and I went to play a tournament in Canada to try to qualify for the Olympiad team. And I was like, well, I'm an adult now. I'm not gonna feel emotional if I lose. And then I got there on the first day. I think I was ranked like fourth in Canada for females. How long ago was this? This was like earlier in the year actually. And I go and I lose to somebody lower rated on the first day. And I think it was because I blundered and I went back to my room and I was like, I am not an adult. I'm not eating, I'm not leaving this room. I feel terrible and I know I shouldn't, but it just cuts so deep. And then I actually ended up qualifying for the Olympiad team, but I didn't wanna play because I didn't have enough time to train and the losses are so painful that I was like, it's not worth it. Yeah, in high school and growing up, I just remember weekends. And I think being competitive in any sport, again, probably people relate to this, which is like spending weekends crying. And even like Alex said, like punishing yourself because you're disappointed in yourself because you fight so hard and you prepare and you study and you're like, oh, yeah. But that's once again on the bright side though, when you're studying so hard and after like a four hour game and you actually are on the opposite end and you win, you feel like such a huge rush of dopamine and serotonin and you're like on a high from the wind. So there's also plus sides or you can turn this around. But yeah, like Alex said, like losing after preparing for something and fighting on hours and hours is the worst feeling in the world. Did you ever get anything like that with martial arts? Yeah, so, you know, wrestling, I wrestled all through high school and middle school. Definitely, so it's an individual sport. I did a lot of individual sport, tennis, those kinds of things. But I think even with wrestling and tennis, you're still on a team. You can still like, there's still a comradery there. I feel like with chess, especially you go on your own with the tournaments, like you really are alone. But I mean, I always personally just had like a very self critical mind in general. I would not. It's one of the reasons I decided not to play chess because I think when I was really young, I met somebody who was able to play blindfold chess. They were teaching me, they were laying in there on the couch, trashed, drinking and smoking. And there were. Sounds like a Russian. Yeah, exactly. There are now a faculty somewhere in the United States. I forget where. But he making jokes, talking to others and he would move the pieces, like he would yell across the room. And I remember thinking that if a person is able to do that, then that kind of world you can live in inside your mind that becomes the chessboard. To me, that meant like the chessboard is not just out here. It could be in here and you could do these beautiful, you can create these beautiful patterns in your mind. I thought like, I had such a strong pull towards that where I had to decide either I'm gonna dedicate everything to this or not. You can't do half assed. And then that's when I decided to walk away from it because I had so much other beautiful things in my life. I loved mathematics. I loved, just everything was beautiful to me. I thought chess would pull me all in. And there was nothing like it, I think, in my whole life since then. I think it's such a dangerous addiction. It's such a beautiful addiction, but it's a dangerous one, depending on what your mind is like. It reminds me of something I thought of before I stopped competing as much. And I'd look at people and think, imagine being so intelligent that you could become a grandmaster and yet only spending the rest of your life being a grandmaster. Because it's one of those things where it does require a lot of mental power, but by doing chess, you're not gonna be able to explore other subjects deeply. Yeah. And not in a way that is bad necessarily, more an admiration and wondering what else could have been because I've just seen people get to these levels of obsession where it's all they wanna do. And they're grandmasters, but they're not even top players. So they're never gonna make a living out of it. They'll make like maybe 30, 40K a year max. They can't even focus on their competitive chess because they have to supplement it by teaching and doing things they don't like. And it's just because of how strong of an obsession it can be because it truly is very intellectually rewarding. And I think that's what people are addicted to in the self improvement, but you can get that from a lot of other things as well. Well, I think for me, what I was inspired by that stuck with me is that a human being could be so good at one thing. Right. To me, that person on the couch drinking and so on, I assumed he was the best chess player in the world. Like to be able to play inside your head, it just felt like a feat that's incredible. And so I fell in love with the idea that I hope to be something like that in my life at something. It would be pretty cool to be really good at one thing. And like life in some sense is a search for the things that you could be that good at. I didn't even think about like how much money does it make or any of that. It's can I fall in love with something and make it a life pursuit where I can be damn good at it. And being damn good at it is the source of enjoyment. Not like not to win because you want to win a tournament or win because like you just want to be better at somebody else. No, it's for the beauty of the game itself or the beauty of the activity itself. And then you realize that that's one of the compelling things about chess. It is a game with rules and you can win. If you want to be really damn good in some aspect of life like that, it's a harder and weirder pursuit. Don't you feel like you kind of did that with computer science or AI related things? Like getting that level of damn good. That's one of the cool things about AI and robotics or intellectual pursuits or scientific pursuits is you can spend until you're 80 doing it. So I'm in the early days of that. One of the reasons I came to Texas, one of the reasons I didn't want to pursue an academic career at MIT is I want to build a company. And so I'm in the early days of that AI company. And so it's an open world to see if I'm actually going to be good at it. But the thing that's there that I've been cognizant of my whole life is that I have a passion for it. Something within me draws me to that thing. And you have to listen to that, to that voice. So with chess, you're fucked unless you like early on are really training really hard. I think life is more forgiving. You can be world class at a thing after making a lot of mistakes. And after spending the first few decades of your life doing something completely different. And chess, it's like an Olympic sport. Like there's no, perfection is a requirement, is a necessity. What do you think is that pursuit for you? Like why did you decide to stream? What drew you? I like these questions. Now we're really getting deep. Yeah, this is like a therapy session. I mean, isn't it terrifying to be in front of a camera? Well, it's terrifying to be in front of five cameras. The set up is. Corrections, six. Six, okay. It's more terrifying for me to try to remember if I actually turned them all. Like I mentioned to you off mic, I'm still suffering from a bit of PTSD after screwing up a recording of Magnus. He had to console me because that was the thing. I felt, okay, you wanna build robots. If you can't get a camera to even run correctly, how are you gonna do anything else in life? Oh no, don't let it spiral like that. It was spiraling hard and I was just laying there and just feeling sorry for myself. But I think that feeling, by the way, and the small tangent, is really useful. I feel like a lot of growing happens when you feel shitty. As long as you can get out of it. Like don't let it spiral indefinitely. But just feeling really, really shitty about everything in my life. Like I was having an existential crisis. Like how will I be able to do anything at all? Like you're a giant failure, all those kinds of negative voices. But I think I made some good decisions in the week after that. Of like, okay. Do you think you couldn't have made those decisions if you were less hard on yourself? Me personally, no. I'm too lazy. Okay, so you really need to be angry at yourself enough to go and do what you need. Yeah, it's not even angry, it's just upset of being self critical. Like also for me personally, because I don't have proclivities for depression, I have a lot more room to feel extremely shitty about myself. So if you're somebody that can get stuck in that place, like clinically depressed, you have to be really, really careful. You have to notice the triggers, you don't wanna get into that place. But for me, just looking empirically, feeling shitty has always been productive. Like it makes me long term happier. Ultimately, it makes me more grateful to be alive and it helps me grow, all those kinds of things. So I kinda embrace it. Otherwise, I feel like I will never do anything. I have to feel shitty, but that's not a thing I prescribe to others. There's a famous professor at MIT, his name is Marvin Minsky. And when he was giving advice about like to the students, he said, the secret to my success was that I always hated everything I did in the past. So always sort of being self critical about everything you've accomplished, never really take a moment of gratitude. And I think for a lot of people that hear that, that's not good. You should like take a pause and be grateful, but it really worked for him. So it's a choice you have to make. It reminds me of the quote, be happy but never satisfied, where you can have a positive spin and still want to improve yourself. But yeah, like when did you decide to take a step in the spotlight, that terrifying spotlight of the internet? It was actually my senior year of college and I was really busy with work and school and chess was kind of like this lost love. And the interesting thing is that the longer I don't play chess, the more I kind of miss playing it casually and enjoy it more. Cause then I start looking at it with fresh eyes, but I didn't have time to play tournaments. So I started streaming online because it was more social than just playing strangers on the internet without knowing anything about who they are. And I started slowly growing a community and got in touch with chess.com pretty quickly too. So then it was this hobby that I would do once a week, every Thursday at 8 p.m. And it was one of the things that brought me a lot of joy. And actually I, speaking of depression, did struggle for it with at least 10 years of my life. And it was one of those things where chess and streaming was such a distraction and it brought me such great joy that I just kept doing it cause I really, really liked it. And then I was working on something that didn't pan out and decided to go and take a risk and just stream full time, which, you know, seemed a little bit weird at the moment. Was that terrifying, that leap? It was terrifying, but I had taken so many terrifying leaps in the past and they didn't, you know, the last two hadn't worked out, but I was like, well, I'll get it eventually. So somehow having failed before and going through failure and knowing that it'll be okay, made me more likely to just try something that was a very, very weird job. Goodbye camera. I saw it die. Yeah, the camera, we don't need it. But one of the cameras died. Luckily we have another five. Yeah, I know. Like this is where this triggers the spiral, Alexis is gonna go to A to death now. It's still somehow awake. Is there advice you can give about the dark places you've gone in your mind, the depression you suffered from, how to get out from your own story? Whenever I go to those really dark places, the scariest thing is that it feels like I will never get rid of this feeling and it is very overwhelming. And I just have to kind of look back over time spans and remember that every single time I have got through it and remind myself that it is just temporary. And that has been the most helpful thing for me because I just try to combat the scariest thing about it. And then believe, have faith that it's gonna, like this will go away. And take action obviously to make sure it goes away. And I've also tried to spin it as depression is one of the hardest things I've had to deal with, but also one of the biggest motivators because if I just am left with my own brain, I get very depressed. Then I really like working or focusing on things. So it actually pushed me to try to focus on school, try to focus on chess, focus on whatever I'm doing. And also if I'm feeling really bad, then there's probably something a little bit off and I use it as a signal and try to think of it as, okay, this is just a sign that there's things that could be improved for long term. What about you, Andrea? Have you gone to dark places in your mind? I'd say my family, like I see Alex going through this, my mom also has very serious depression. Luckily, I got the genes where I don't go through that serious level of depression that they do. I'd say mine is much more temporarily. So it's more similar to what I was feeling when I was feeling shitty about it. Exactly, you go through periods, yes, exactly, where like, but I know that it's not something that's clinical and that's just a genetic thing or a mental thing, whereas I know it's more serious for like my family members. And I did relate a lot with you where you're saying where that really pushes you and I felt that a lot through content where you just kind of feel hopeless and kind of like an existential crisis where I don't like the content I'm doing and that's what pushes me to like, okay, you have no choice but to try something that now you're gonna be passionate about because otherwise you're gonna be stuck in this never ending cycle. So it's short term and then it helps me come up with the things that I enjoy the most content wise and it also long term taught me just how to have a more balanced life, like doing small things that make me happier on a daily basis, to like working out, to eating healthier, which I notice when I don't do for weeks, I just get a lot more depressed. What has playing chess taught you about life? Has it made you better at life in any kind of way or has it made you worse? You know, a lot of people kind of romanticize the idea that chess is kind of like life or life is kind of like chess and becoming better at making decisions on the chess board is gonna make you better at making decisions in life. Is there some truth to that? I always shy away from these comparisons with chess and life. Cause yeah, it has both positives and negatives. So one thing it really helps develop from an early age is having an analytical mind, but then you could also get like paralysis of analysis where you've just thought of everything to death and you're moving too slowly when you just have to keep going forward cause there's not a great path ahead. So it's more like exercising your brain and staying sharp and then also applying that to other things. Whereas if instead of playing chess, you were watching TV or something like that, you'd probably end up being less sharp. Yeah, I used to, in high school, I'd always preach like, ah, chess transfers to life skills that I would teach. I taught chess for juvenile department for a special education school. I'd cite studies in prisons where like, oh, playing chess helped them with X and for your kids, it helps with teamwork and thinking over life choices. And now that I'm older, I don't believe in any of that BS. But I do think that the process of working really hard at something which takes really long to see results and you have to be really dedicated. And like, I remember in high school and in middle school, well, all my friends, they were having fun on the weekends and I'd have to be there studying as a chess a day and knowing one day I'll pay off, but for like two, three years, nothing paid off. Kind of learning that type of patience with anything, it's like, you know, like getting a real job. I can't say I ever really worked a real job in my life since I went straight into streaming and I got to work for myself, but I'd say it's what people go to college for. Like they learn how to live in the real world and I'd say that that's what chess taught me as a kid. When you're streaming, when you're doing the creative work, do you feel lonely? So a bunch of creators talk about sort of the, it's counterintuitive because you're famous now, you know. Sort of, not quite, but we're very lucky to have each other. So is that the source of the comfort and like, is there some sense where it's isolating to have these personalities, they have to always be having fun, being wild and so on? Or is it actually the opposite? Like, is it a source of comfort to know that there's so many cool people out there that are giving you their love? It started as a source of comfort because it started with a very small community who would be something, it would be around 200 to 300 viewers and you know, only like 30 to 40 of them would actually chat actively. So you felt like it was a community, not an audience. So you like knew them personally almost. Yeah, exactly. And it was people who were interested in chess and I would really enjoy that. And then as, you know, we started growing bigger, the audience kind of changed where they're not there for you personally, they're there while you're entertaining and it changed for me. And I ended up being a lot more self conscious of things online and started even thinking of myself more like a product than a human being when I'm online because I had to. Brand. Yes, exactly. Otherwise you just start taking everything personally that people comment about you and it's based off a very small clip. I see, so it was almost a kind of a defense mechanism. Exactly. And it took time to get enough, because even if you have tough skin, eventually it gets to you when you're online every single day listening to, you know, thousands of people's feedback on you. I think the loneliest part of being creator is going through burnout, which everyone is just, it's bound to happen, which is why I think we're very lucky that we have each other because right, it's a numbers game and you're viral and trendy at one point and then you have to fall. And then there's months where you're just grinding. And I just come into my friends room and I'm like, Andrea, we're irrelevant. That's where I'm glad, that's really like the worst part of being creator and figuring out how to get over that hump. But it makes me very grateful that I have my sister because I know that I'm not the only person going through it. And yeah, I know that most of my creator friends feel very lonely in that process because they don't have someone who's their family and their business partner and they're working by each other side by side. You kind of tie in your self worth to your job and your content and maybe even more extremely than other jobs because you also are the entire company and the entire product. So when things are going well or when things are not, you just need to be careful to not reflect it like, oh, I am doing bad. I am bad rather than the trends have now changed. There's outside things we're gonna keep going and this is just the normal waves, which is how we think about it now. And also just about, are we enjoying this? Is this what we wanna make? But we were stuck in the camp for a while when we 10Xed our viewership after the pandemic because people were home and playing chess. And then of course that dropped by like 70%. And then you see that and you're trying your best and you just kind of have to deal with it and be like, okay, I'm just gonna keep persevering and maybe it'll get better. That's so fascinating. I mean, this is a struggle of sorts in the 21st century of like how to be an artist, how to be a creator, how to be an interesting mind in response to this algorithm. I'm telling you, turning off views and likes is really good. I don't look at Twitch views for that reason. And I get obsessed with the numbers too. And I know Andrea does, but for me, what I try now is to be more focused in the moment, but Andrea somehow can do it even with the views. So you just, you get, you have fun with it. I'm too much of like a given to the temporary satisfaction. Like I like seeing, I like knowing that if something happens right now, viewership's gonna boost by a couple of hundred and seeing that I'm right, of course. But what about when the viewers start dropping? Exactly, well, and I always, like you just have this intuition now. But I think also the reason that it doesn't affect me so much is when we first started our content journey, we were only Twitch streamers. And we, our livelihood were based on Twitch viewers. But now like I've learned how to recycle that content into like YouTube and shorts and other things where I know like, okay, if this stream does badly, there's so many more things you can do that also just have a much larger output. So it doesn't get to me as much as it did. Do you ever feel that with your podcasts or do you feel like it's been authentic since the start? No, so there's a million things to say there. So one is there's a reason I stopped taking a salary at MIT and moved to Texas is I wanted my bank account to go to zero because I do my best with my back against the wall. So one of the comforts I have is I don't care if this podcast is popular or not. I want it to not be popular. So I don't want it to make money. You're failing Lex. Yeah, I wanna, I mean, I just do best when I'm more desperate. That's like one thing to say. Seems like a reoccurring theme with how you build up your greatest work, which is honestly very respectable. Yeah, so thank you. This is like. I wouldn't recommend. Right, thank you for finding the silver lining for an unhealthy mental state. But the other thing is I was very conscious just like with chess and those kinds of things that I love numbers. And I would be, if I paid attention, if I tried to be somebody at their best, like Mr. Beast who really pays attention to numbers, I would just not, I'd become destroyed by it. The highs and the lows of it. And I just don't think I would be creating the best work possible. But one of the big benefits of a podcast, it's listeners and there's an intimacy with the voice. And I think that is much more stable and a deeper and a more meaningful connection than YouTube. YouTube is a fickle mistress. So it's a weird drug that like, it really wants you. With very addicting feedback loops. When you have a video that's number one out of 10, oh my God, the adrenaline you get. And then the thing I really don't like also is the world will introduce you as a person that has a video on YouTube with some X number of views. Like the world wants you to be addicted to these numbers. What? Because they associate it with having done a good job. Yeah. Because that's what people think views are, even if it's not. Right. And primarily because they don't have any other signal of what's a good job. I think the much better signal is people that are close to you, your family, your colleagues, that say, wow, that was cool, I listened to that, that was really, I didn't know this, this was really powerful, this is really moving and so on. But definitely I'm terrified of numbers. Because I feel like, just like I said, I'd rather be a Stanley Kubrick, right? You'd rather create great art, not to be pretentious, but the best possible thing you can create. Whatever the beauty that's, the capacity for creating beauty that's in you, I would like to maximize that. And I feel like for some people like Mr. Beast, I think those are perfectly aligned. Because he just loves the most epic thing possible, but not for everybody. I think there's a lot of people for whom that's not perfectly aligned. And so I'm definitely one of those. And I'm still really confused why anybody listens to this anyway. But that's also something I guess you're trying to find, trying to figure out. I get very afraid of ever becoming someone who just makes junk food content, where you can't stop while you're in the moment, and it has all of your attention, but when you're done, it didn't really bring any value to your life, which is something that I think the algorithm still does really reward. And making sure that as we are learning how to create better content, it's still something that is gonna be meaningful long term. Well, ultimately, you inspire a lot of young people. Yeah, those are the best. When I get messages from people who are like, I played you a year ago, and my rating was 1400, and now I'm 1900. I'd like to challenge you again. It's a 14 year old writing a former email. Those things are always very, very fun to get. And even just outside of chess, it's just empowering to see, like for young women too, to see that kind of thing. I mean, you guys are being yourself, and making money for being yourself, and having fun, and growing as human beings, which I think is really inspiring for people to see. So in that sense, it's really rewarding. And then the way I think about it is there is some benefit of doing entertaining type of stuff so that you get the, kind of like Mr. Beast does with philanthropy, right? The bigger Mr. Beast becomes, the more effective he is at actually doing positive impact on the world. So those things are tied together. But of course, with podcasts, you guys, well, maybe you have these kinds of tense things, but what kind of ideas, what kind of people do platform? What kind of person, what kind of human being do you wanna be? Because you are actually becoming a person, and a set of ideas in front of the public eye, and you have to ask yourself that question really hard, like really seriously. Because if you're doing stuff in private, you have the complete luxury to try shit out. Right. I think you have less of a luxury to try shit out because the internet can be vicious in punishing you for trying shit out. And do you think that's sometimes a bad thing where you have less freedom to make mistakes? Yeah, you have two choices. So one, you put up a wall and say I don't give a shit what people think. I don't like doing that because I like being fragile to the world, keeping my, sort of wearing my heart on my sleeve. Or the other one, yeah, you have to be, you have to actually think through what you're gonna say. You have to think of like, what do I believe? You have to be more serious about what you put out there. It's annoying, but it's also actually, you should have always been doing that. You should be deliberate with your actions and your words. But I don't know, it's, but some of it, it's such a balance because some of my favorite people are brilliant people that allow themselves to act ridiculous and be silly. Elon Musk, who's become a good friend, is the silliest human of all. I mean, he's incredibly brilliant and productive and so on, but allows themselves to be silly. And that's also inspiring to people. Like you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to, you can be a weird, a giant weird mess. Then it's okay. So it's a balance. I think when you start to delve into political topics, into topics that really get tense for people, then you have to be a little bit more careful and deliberate. But it's also wise to stay the hell away from those topics in general. Like I mentioned to you offline, somebody I've been debating whether I want to talk to or not is Karjakin on the chess board because chess is just a game, but throughout the history of the 20th century, it was played between the Russians and the Americans and so on where they were at war, cold or hot war. And those are interesting. Those are interesting conversations to be had at the Olympics and so on. It's not just a game. It's some sense. It's like a mini war. And so I have to decide whether I want to talk to him or not and those kinds of things. You have to make those kinds of decisions. For now, you guys are not playing chess with Donald Trump or Obama or so on. We are not right now, no. How long is a stream? Like a few hours, right? Now they're two to three hours. When I was first streaming, I'd stream for like six hours a day. A day. At least usually. Yeah, for like six to seven days a week. Are you doing just like a talking one? No, I'd be playing chess the entire time while talking. And when I started streaming, that's kind of how everybody blows up on Twitch. You're just putting in crazy hours and you're always there. It's not about making the best content. It's about letting people feel like they're hanging out with you and just being on as much as you can. But I ended up feeling very burnt out because it's hard to be your best self when you're in front of a camera for that long because you do get scared of going into places where you want to learn, but you might not be the best in. Because it's harder to learn in public than do something that like, yeah, we're better than 99% of our viewers at chess. So that's a lot less scary than trying to play a game that you're bad at or discuss topics that you're interested in. Yeah, have the beginner's mind and be dumb at something. Right. Yeah, which is where the fun is and you get to learn together, but people punish you for it on the internet. What about you, Andrea? Yeah, I think like Alex said at the beginning, when we were grinding a lot, you don't really even have time for much of a private life because you're streaming every hour of your life and people want it, like the appeal of streamers, it's called like being parasocial where you feel like they're your friend and they like it because they want you to share everything about your life. Really the main challenge for me at first when trying to prioritize quantity over quality, which we're not doing anymore, was realizing that I can't turn everything I'm interested in and every passion into content. Before I'm like, well, I must stream more, but I like music and I like playing piano and I like reading into these topics and I like fitness and then I try to live stream all of it and that's just, at some point it's like, just enjoy your time off for those hobbies and prioritize what you're good at because that's just gonna be better for the channel overall. So that was a learning lesson for sure. It's nice because there are some intersections when I have tried new things that I really enjoy and it pays off, but that's less often. So it's more like you can be yourself, but only specific parts of yourself online and the rest, sometimes it's nice to just keep private and feel that you could just give it your 100% freedom. See, I feel like I try to be the exact same person on podcasts as in private life. I really don't like hiding anything. But you're also a generalist, right? Where you have people with all topics. For us, we built our audience off a very specific thing so people sometimes feel like, even at the start when we started playing less chess, they're like, I subbed for chess. Why are you not playing chess? Exactly. People are tuning in for an interesting conversation on a bunch of topics. So like the more you are yourself, the better it is, but it is very hard when you build your brand on like one type of gaming content. Build your brand. But yeah, the way you become a generalist is you slowly expand. It's like expand to checkers. I guess that's like a downward. Maybe poker. Poker, yeah, exactly, poker. But also just the ideas, the space of ideas. And one of the cool things about chess is when you're talking over the chess board, you're, it's a kind of podcast, you know? That is actually an idea we've had with playing chess while also doing a podcast and talking with people. It's kind of like an icebreaker. We're also focusing on the game at the same time. But you know, we are slowly evolving and we're doing more things. Like one thing we wanted to do is spend less time in front of the computer. So now we're doing a chess travel show where we go to different countries and look at the chess culture. So it actually feels like we're doing things that we would want to do and explore anyway. And maybe it's not as much in the idea space, which we both enjoy and do a lot in our own free time, but in the sharing cool experiences with our audience that we actually want to do. Where do you look forward to going? We're going to Romania on September 9th. And I think this is the most exciting for me because we're going back to, you know, the country where our entire family's from, where our grandmother taught our dad who taught us how to play chess. It has a very strong chess culture. So it'll be very unique to go back and see how everything is when we haven't been back for a very long time. And for Romanians, like it's very rare when there's like a famous Romanian who accomplishes something, which is why like right now, Andrew Tate's the most famous Romanian. But he's banned for a bad reason. Exactly. And there's like something very special about Romanian pride. And when we meet fellow Romanians in the US, like it's just an amazing connection. And like, I hear the way my dad talk about like, for example, Nadia, who was a famous Romanian gymnast and he's like, yeah, like Romania, we sucked at everything. But when she won the Olympics for gymnast, every kid on the street was doing gymnastics because it's very rare that they make it to that level of success. And I'm not saying that we're super successful, super famous, but it is really cool to meet other Romanians through chess because it's a very special bond. Yeah, you feel like it's a community and like you belong. Yeah, you can't get that anywhere else. Let me ask your opinion since you mentioned him, Andrew Tate, you're both women, successful women, you're both creators. So Andrew Tate is an example of somebody that has become exceptionally successful at galvanizing public attention, but he's also, from many perspective, a misogynist. So let me ask a personal question. Do you think I should talk to him on this podcast? How would you feel as a fan as somebody, I'm talking to the great Alex and Andrea Botez and the next episode is with Andrew Tate? I think it's a double edged sword and most of these things are not as black and white as they seem, you know, because on one hand, I don't agree with his beliefs and I think he said a lot of things that are very hurtful and that influence people's opinions. At the same time, talking to someone through that and trying to get to the root of it and how much of it he used just as a social media tactic to maybe change the opinion of people who have been so influenced by him towards something that is maybe more understanding towards women or things like that could do some good, but at the same time, platforming someone like that and giving them more attention also signals to other people who have a platform that it's okay, so it's kind of weighing the pluses and the minuses and it's a very tough decision because it's not clear. And the thing about the internet, you make the wrong decision, you're gonna pay for it. Right. That's the thing, like personally, and it is funny, like I think the whole way you rose to fame is just a growth hack and I've seen other people do it where like you just say kind of, I don't, honestly, I don't really listen to his content because I just find it so dumb, but I think he knows that by saying the dumbest, most controversial things, that's like a quick rise to fame and I think surface level, like he can really hold it up, but that's why I would honestly enjoy tuning into a conversation where you're really breaking down to the core of those beliefs and I think like young kids who look up to him and when you actually hear someone challenging it could actually be helpful for people, but at the same time, it's a lot of bad publicity, people see your podcast, they see, wow, like if they don't know you and they don't know why you're interviewing him and they don't listen, they'll see that and then 100% think it's for the other reason. But I'm also afraid of a society where you can't have discourse with people you disagree with and even though I don't like Andrew Tate, I think the fact that he got banned from all the platforms is kind of scary because it sets a precedent and you always have to ask yourself, would this be ethical if I was on the other side and even things with a president like Trump, even if let's say you're somebody who was on the left, if that would have happened to a leftist president, how would you feel? Would you think that's morally ethical? So that is something that I think is important. We try to find ways to have conversations and reach some mutual understanding and try instead of just amplifying the worst about every human being. Well, so one of the major reasons I'm struggling with is because I really enjoy talking to brilliant women. I think it's also, a lot of women reached out to me saying like, it is what it is, but they're inspired when the female guest is on. And to me, if I talk to somebody like Andrew Tate, even if I have a really hard hitting, I think it could be a very good conversation that lessens the likelihood that a brilliant, powerful female will go on the show. Because they'll never watch it, but the thing we do in this society is we put labels on each other. Well, Lex is the person that platforms misogynists. I did a thing where Joe Rogan got in trouble over an N word controversy earlier in the year. And Joe's a good friend of mine and I said that I stand with Joe, that he's not a racist or something like that. And within certain communities, I'm now somebody who's an apologist for racists, right? Or a racist myself, that kind of thing. And we put labels without ever listening to the content, without ever sort of, actually just even the very simple step or it seems to be difficult of like, taking on the best possible interpretation of what a person said and giving them the benefit of the doubt and having empathy for another person. So you have to play in this field where people will assign labels to each other and it's difficult. But ultimately, I believe, I hope that good conversations is a way to like a greater understanding for people to grow together as a society and improve and learn the lessons, the mistakes of the past. But you also have to play this game where people just like putting labels on each other and canceling each other over those. Or that guy said one thing nice about Donald Trump, he must be a far right Nazi. Or the opposite, that this person said something nice about the vaccine, he must be a far left whatever, because apologist for whatever, for Fauci. Or most of us I think are ultimately in the middle. It's a weird, it's a weird thing. But I think, and it's also painful on a personal level. Like people have written to me about things like single words, half sentences that I've said about either Putin or Zelensky where they have hate towards me because of what I said. Either both directions. I've now accumulated very passionate people that some call me a Putin apologist, some call me a Zelensky apologist. And it hurts to, given how much I have family there, how much I've seen of suffering there, and to carry that burden over time and not let it destroy you is tough. So like, do you wanna take on another thing like that when you have conversations? Or can I just talk to awesome people like you two? Where it's not that burden. We're not controversial. Or you're interesting, you're fascinating, you're inspiring, you're like fun. Not all those difficult things that come with more difficult conversations. Right. But somebody has to be making those difficult decisions and challenging the notions that we should cancel someone just for slightly disagreeing with us. And it's very hard to take that on personally. And I think that's a huge part of it. When you know it's something you're doing for the right reasons and you're getting a lot of people coming and misinterpreting it, it's very painful. But I think you have to ask yourself long term if when you made that decision, you ultimately thought it would be better or worse for your listeners to know that conversation. And then if you can sleep with it at night, take the risk. Yeah, actually when I talk to people that, especially astrophysicists, and you realize how tiny we are. Right. How incredible, like how huge the universe is. Like you don't, it doesn't matter, you can do anything. You could like, you can walk around naked, talk shit to people, do whatever the hell. And actually in modern social media, people just like forget. It's like, it's ultimately liberating. Just try to do, at least from my perspective, the best possible thing for the world you can. Take big risks, and it doesn't matter. And that's the other thing with being canceled nowadays because everyone's attention is much more shortsighted. You can get canceled and then it'll blow over in three days. And you actually see things like this on Twitch very often where people just have bursts of outrage and they come into your chat and they're all spamming and saying mean things, and then three days after. And of course they're not actually ever serious things. They're usually like things clipped of any streamers in like their worst moments, but then people forget about it pretty soon after. So you're able to accept that? Like when somebody is being shitty to you for a day? Yeah, I mean, I still get sometimes emotional about it, especially when I'm like, oh wow, these things that are being said are not true or like this was clearly taken out of context, but I've just accepted that it's part of the job. And if I am trying my best and I am trying things with as good intentions as possible, then I just try to learn every time that happens and be like, okay, what could I do better? And what is just part of the job? Well, let's start some controversy. Who's the greatest chess player of all time? Is it Magnus Carlsen, is it Gary Kasparov, is it somebody else, Bobby Fischer? Do you have a favorite, Alex? So whenever I hear this question, I interpret it in a very specific way where it's not who was the most talented chess player or who had the most impact on the chess world, but who is the greatest at playing chess? Where if you were putting all of these players at their peak, who would be the best? And we're kind of living in a world where obviously humans are becoming more like cyborgs and their tools make them a lot more powerful. And the computer is the most powerful tool for chess that we've ever witnessed. And the top players now, someone like Magnus Carlsen or Gary Kasparov, if they were gonna go towards people like even Lasker or Bobby Fischer back in the day, Lasker, he was world champion for 27 years, he was the best in his field by far, but would he be able to stand up to someone like Magnus Carlsen who has had these tools? I don't think so. So most chess players have said Gary Kasparov and I think even Magnus has said that in the past, but I like to think of it as Magnus in his peak and Gary at his peak, and because Magnus was able to live more in a computer era, I feel like so far he's the greatest of all time. And some studies say things like how there's rating inflation, but I looked into some of them and they basically calculated people's play over the years and it seems that there hasn't been inflation, people are just getting better and I think it's because you have better tools at chess. And also one of the cases, what's your? I was gonna say, I actually, I disagree with that. Good, make it interesting. I think I would judge the greatest player of all time in relative to the time that they lived in and Magnus, although he is technically the strongest chess player in history, that is because he had computers to study chess with. And of course, if you compare him to like Gary Kasparov, he plays most like Stockfish, but Gary Kasparov at his time, he beat more players of his skill level than Magnus did. Magnus loses more often. He also of course held the belt for 20 years more. So I'd say actually, because Gary lacked the help of computers to study chess and overall performed better against players of his skill level, I think he would be number one. Nice. Yeah, but I mean, the case that people make for Magnus on many, I mean, what Alex said, but also Magnus plays a lot and he doesn't, he plays a lot blitz, bullet and like he puts, he gets drunk and like he's really putting himself out there and in all kinds of conditions and he's able to dominate and a lot of them, we get to see many of the like losses or blunders and all that kind of stuff because he just puts himself out there. And I think Kasparov was much more like. Never saw him play drunk, right? Yeah, and it's very focused on the world championship. It's very, very limited number of games and very focused on winning. And so there's some aspect to the versatility, the aggressive play, the fun, all of that, that I think you have to give credit to. Oh, 100%. In terms of just the scope, the scale of the variety of genius exhibited by Magnus. And he might not even be done yet. I don't know if he'll ever hit 2,900, but we can't judge yet because he's not at the peak of his career potentially. What do you think about him not playing world championship? Isn't that like, isn't that wild? The entirety of the history of chess in the 20th century going like meh. It's walking away from this one tournament that seems to be at the center of chess. What do you think about that decision? I mean, you can't help but be disappointed as a chess fan who wants to see the best player in the world defend his title. But I also understand it on a personal level and not feeling as satisfied when you're going to the world championship and having to defend against people who are less strong than you. And also imagine winning world championships and not feeling a joy out of that. So maybe by not doing that and focusing instead on a goal like 2,900, he'll be more likely to accomplish it because he's focusing on what actually motivates him to play chess. But I do think that it will hurt how we judge the next world champion. I think it won't change him being the best player in the world. And for someone to replace him, even let's say like Nepo versus Sting, even if one of them win and right on some stance, it does lower the merit because now who has the world chess championship title isn't actually the best player in the world. And that has happened before in the past, but still going to take the same effort to prove when they would pass him like 10, 20 years to become stronger than Magnus. So I don't think it changes the skill level that it takes to become the best chess player in the world. I think for chess fans, it's very disappointing, but I think in the overall like grand scheme of like the public view to people who don't really, so like, you know, what breaks the popular culture and you think of what names people know who don't play chess like Bobby Fischer did it. Most people know Casper over Magnus. It takes the same ability and talent and that doesn't change. I think it does change though if you're playing a player who's not as strong, but I see your point as well. And I know we differ on this. Like I said, I heard you ask Magnus, but what is your take on it? Well, listen, his answer is kind of brilliant, which he's not saying he's bored of the world championship. He's bored of a process that doesn't determine the best player. Like, and it's too exciting inducing to him to have a small number of games. He doesn't mind losing, which is really fascinating to a better player or somebody who is his level. He's more anxious about losing to a weaker player because of the small sample size. Now, if like poker players had that anxiety, they would never play at all, right? That's the World Series of Poker. You get to lose against weaker players all the time. That's the throw of the dice. But that's an interesting perspective that he would love to play 20, 30, 40 games in the world championship, and then he would enjoy it much more. And also play shorter games because they emphasize the like pure chess, actually being able to like much more variety in the middle game just to see a bunch of chaos and see how you're able to compute, calculate and intuition, all that kind of stuff. I mean, that's beautiful. I wish the chess world would step up and meet him in a place that makes sense, change the world championship. So FIDE changing it somehow, a loss for that. Or having other really respected tournaments that become like an annual thing that step up to that. Or more kind of online YouTube type of competitions, which I think they're trying to do more and more, like the Crypto Cup and all those kinds of things. And the Grand Tour does play in, which takes a lot of the top players and they do it online in shorter formats. But there's, so that's his perspective. My perhaps narrow perspective is I romanticize the Olympic games and those are every four years and the world championships because they're rare, because the sample size is so small. That's where the magic happens. Everything's on the line for people that spend their whole life, 20 years of dedication, everything you have, every minute of the day spent for that moment. You think about like gymnastics at the Olympic games. There's certain sports where a single mistake and you're fucked. And that stress, that pressure, it can break people or it can create magic. Like a person that's the underdog has the best night of their life or the person that's been dominating for years all of a sudden slips up. That drama from a human perspective is beautiful. So I still like the world championships, but then again, looking at all the draws, looking at like, well, the magic isn't quite there. So to me, when I see faster games of chess, that's much more beautiful. But then I don't understand the game of chess deeply enough to know. Like, does it have to be so many draws? Like, is there a way to create a more dynamic chess? And he talked about random chess with a random starting position. That's really interesting. But then of course, that's like, then you do have to play hundreds of games and that kind of stuff. But I think it's great that the world number one is struggling with these questions because he's in the position, he has the leverage to actually change the game of chess as it's publicly seen, as it's publicly played. So it's interesting. He's still young enough to dominate for quite a long time if he wants. So I don't know. I, you know, with Kasparov, the fight between nations, I hope they have the world championship and I hope he's still a part of it somehow. I hope he changes his mind. And comes back. Comes back. Kind of dramatic thing. I don't know. But it is, his heart is not in it. And then, and then that's not beautiful to see, right? Yeah, it is beautiful that the thing he wants is a great game of chess against an opponent that's his level or better. And that's great that he's coming from that place. But I hope he comes back tomorrow. Because the world championship is a special thing in any sport. So you do wish that the person who wins the world championship is the best player in the world? No. I hope that the best people in the world, the two best people in the world are the ones that sit down. But the person that wins is the person that, that's the magic of it. Nobody knows who's going to win. I think Magnus is so, he really wants the best person to win. Like the, that's why he wants the large sample size. But to me there's some magic to it. The stress of it, the drama of it. That's all part of the game. Like it's not just about the purity of the game, like the calculation. The pure chess of it. It's also like the drama. Like the, yeah, the pressure, the drama, all of it. The shit talking, if it gets to you, the mind games. This is the part that's fun to watch, but less fun to be playing. But that's why it's great. Who can melt, who can rise under that pressure and who melts under that pressure. There's a lot of people that look up to you, like they're inspired by you because you've taken a kind of nonlinear path through life. Is there any advice you have for people like in high school today? They're trying to figure out what they want to do. Do they want to go to Stanford? Do they want to pursue a career in, I don't know, in industry or go kind of the path you guys have taken, which is have the ability to do all of that and still choose to make the thing that you're passionate about your life. I always liked the calculated risks approach where when you're younger, it's okay to take more risks because you have a lot more time, but there has to be a reason why you're doing that particular risk. Is it something that you've spent a lot of time already really passionate and working on or is it just something that's trendy and you want to do it because you don't have a better option? And that's actually similar to what Andrea did when she decided to go into streaming instead of school. Yeah, the reason I got into streaming because I was initially going to go to college, but the pandemics, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic and all my classes were online. And I never thought, ever since I was 12, like my dream was school and I saw myself nowhere else than going to university. And I thought of it and kind of weighed out the risks. I'm like, well, if I take a gap year and I try streaming with my sister, what do I have to lose? I gained some experience working with someone who has a lot more experience than I do. And then I can go back to school after. And if I go to school right now, I do online classes for a year and that's something that I could do at any time. So that's why it made a lot of sense for me to go into this. But of course, this is also a very unique opportunity. So I don't know how applicable, but I do think overall the calculated risk is a really good lesson. So life is like chess. Exactly. Maybe sometime. Exactly. You also, have you considered a career in professional fighting? I saw you did a self defense class, you did a little Jiu Jitsu. Did you see the 10 year old kid who... Throwing her? Yes, and apparently I could have broken a leg. But it's actually funny, like chess boxing is a thing and I have been doing a lot of boxing. Physical activity is like, honestly, one of my favorite things to do. And I have been testing it out on content and we have a creator friend who's hosting a chess boxing tournament, but there's no woman who could match me, unfortunately, because all the opponents are male and I can't fight a guy. How does chess boxing work? So you do a round of chess and a round of boxing. And we actually did a training camp for it before. And of course, after you go into the ring. Is this real? Is this serious? Yes, it's amazing. We went to a London chess boxing club. And after you get... No, it seemed like videos, I thought it was something you'd just do in Russia or something. No, it's a real sport. It's a real sport. Yeah, no, it's very cool. But after you get really tired, you're more likely to make a mistake and they call them Jaffers or something. Yeah, there's probably good strategies, like what do you want to... Because some of it is a cardio thing. Do you want to work on your chess or your boxing? They do both, it's very fun. But yeah, from a content perspective, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would love to see. I don't want to see Andrea getting hit. That would be... I would love to fight. Unless she doesn't get hit. Our roommate fought in a fight and she did end up winning, but seeing her get hit, I thought I was going to throw up off screen. I just think it was so cool. She had no experience in boxing whatsoever. And then coming from someone in the content world, where you start waking up six days a week at 6 a.m. and she's training every day, like a real professional athlete, I think like it's such a unique experience and also like a really test of how much you can really commit to this and progress. And I think that's really rewarding. Did you ever end up doing the marathon with David Goggins that you were training for? No, I got injured, but we're going to do it soon. That's on my bucket list, just to see what your limits are. You're ready to do it? What did you do leading up to this? Nothing. You're just going to go into it. It's mental anyway. Oh, you don't... I run a lot to make sure like there's no... You have to have a base level of fitness to make sure your body doesn't completely freak out. But other than that, 50 plus miles is just about like taking it one step at a time and just being able to deal with the suffering and all the voices, the little voices that tell you all the excuses, like why are you doing this? This blister is bleeding, whatever. Whatever the thing that makes you want to stop, just shut it off. Sometimes it feels like you like pain. No, well, no, no. But the pain does seem to show the way to progress. So what... In your turn of life. In my world. Something that's really hard and I don't want to do, that's usually the right thing to do. And I'm not saying that's like a universal truth. It's just, if there's a few doors to go into, the one that I want to go into least, that's the one that usually is the right one. Afterwards, I will learn something from it. The David Goggins thing, I don't know. Listen, we're talking offline, the conversation with Liv, she has a very numeric, calculated risk. Everything is planned. I go with the heart. I just go whatever the hell. I think two years ago, I woke up, it was summer, I decided to tweet, I will do as many pushups. I don't know why I did this, but I will do as many pushups and pull ups as this week gets likes, something like that. Okay. Right? And then that it got like 30,000. Once you put it out on the internet, you're held accountable. Well, for myself, I mean, in some sense. And then that's when, I already was connected to David at that point, but that's when he called me. And then didn't have to do it. And then I did it and it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. How long did you take? I did it for seven days and I got injured. So I did about a few thousand. Wait, so this is what got you to be injured? This challenge? No, it's different. I keep getting injured doing stuff. But this particular thing, I started doing the, you don't realize that you have to really ramp up. So I got like overuse injury tendonitis on the shoulder all the way down to the elbow. So I took like eight or nine days off and then started again. And then it took about 31 days to do. 30,000. The number was like 26, 27,000. Yeah. Wow. And it took like three, four hours a day. Oh God. Yeah. Sounds like torture. And not, you know, constantly asking myself, what am I doing with my life? This is why you're single, was the voice in my head. This is what are you doing? It's like face down on the carpet. Like exhausted. Like what, what? Because of a tweet? What is this? Did you record it or you just? I did. I did record it for myself. Okay. Now imagine doing this every day and that's what it's like to be a Twitch streamer. Just kidding. Right. I'm doing stupid things. That was really important to me actually to not make it into content. You know, I recorded everything. So maybe one day I could publish it. I recorded it mostly because it's really hard to count. Yeah. When you get exhausted. Yeah. Like I just, so you actually enter the Zen place where with pushups, where it's just like, it's almost like breathing. You get into a rhythm and you can do quite a lot. But I wanted to make sure like, if I actually get this done, I want there to be evidence that I got it done for myself so I can count it. I had this idea that I would use machine learning to like automatically process the video to count it. But then like, after like 10 days, I didn't even give a shit what anyone thought. It was about me versus me. I didn't even care. Lex versus Lex. Yeah. And then, yeah. And David was extremely supportive. But that's when I realized like, I really want to go head to head with him. So yeah, those kinds of people are beautiful. They really challenge you to your limits. Whatever that is. It's like, the thing is physical exercise is such an easy way to push yourself to your limit. There's in all other walks of life, it's trickier to configure. Like how do you push yourself to your limits in chess? It's hard to figure out. But like in physical. Do you think it's ever dangerous? Yeah. And that's why it's beautiful. The danger. She likes the pain. I don't like that your eyes lit up as I said. Yeah. Like if you don't know how you're gonna get out of it, you're gonna have to figure out something profound about yourself. And I mean, one of the reasons I went to Ukraine is I really wanted to experience the hardship and the intensity of war that people are experiencing so I can understand myself better, I can understand them better. So the words that are leaving my mouth are grounded in a better understanding of who they are. And I mean, the running a lot with David Gong is it's a much simpler thing to do. Simpler way to understand something about yourself, about like the limits of human nature. I think most growth happens with voluntary suffering or struggle, involuntary stuff. That's where the dark trauma is created. But I don't know, maybe it is. Maybe I'm just attracted to torture. And what is it that your mind does when you're going through this involuntary suffering? I think, there's like stages. First, all the excuses start coming. Like why are you doing this? And then you start to wonder like what kind of person do you want to be? So all the dreams you had, all the promises you made to yourself and to others, all the ambitions you had that haven't come yet realized, somehow that all becomes really intensely like visceral as the struggle is happening. And then when all of that is allowed to pass from your mind, you have this clear appreciation of what you really love in life, which is just like just living. Just the moment, the step at a time. I think what meditation does and it's most effective, it's just that pain is a catalyst for the meditative process, I think. For me, for me. I don't know. Magnus said there's no meaning to life. Do you guys agree or no? Why are we here? I do not know why we're here, but I do know that having some kind of meaning that I give my own life makes it a lot more motivating every day. So I just try to focus on finding meaning within my own life even if I know it's just self imposed. And then chess is a part of that? Chess is a part of it. Maybe it was more so when I was younger because it was easier to just feel like I wanna improve as a person and to use chess to kind of measure some kind of self improvement. And now it's more different than that. And I think I need to once again find what that northern star is. Basically, I need to have a why for why I'm doing things. And then I feel like I could do very hard things. What role does love play in the human condition? Alex and Andrea. I'll let Andrea start this one since I took the last. Sure. And yeah, just to add my answer for the last one. I also kind of think, well, life is meaningless, but I like the stoic idea where that's something that you live to revolt against. But for the second question. The revolt against the fundamental meaninglessness of life. I like it. Exactly. Yeah. It was what does love play? What role does love play? Yeah, in the human condition. The way I see it, love is a reason you want to share experiences with other people. That's how I see it. Like the people you really love, you wanna share the things you're going through with them. The good and the bad. Yeah, exactly. That's my simple take on love. My take on it is that part of what it is to be human is to be somebody who feels things emotionally and love is one of the most intense feelings you can have. Obviously there's the opposite of that and there's things like hate, but I think the love you feel for people like your parents and your friends and romantic love in that moment is much more intense than in other situations. And I think it's also just very unique to humans and that's what I appreciate about it. Maybe that's the meaning of life. Maybe that's what the Stoics are searching for. Andrea, Alex, thank you so much for this and thank you for an amazing conversation. Thank you for creating, keep creating and thank you for putting knowledge and love out there in the world. Thank you for having us, Lex. It was a pleasure. And we're both big fans of your podcast, so this was really exciting for us. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fisher. Chess is life. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Botez Sisters: Chess, Streaming, and Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #319

The lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. You said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? The following is a conversation with Christopher Capozzola, a historian at MIT specializing in the history of politics and war in modern American history, especially about the role of World War I in defining the trajectory of the United States and our human civilization in the 20th and 21st centuries. This is the Lux Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Christopher Capozzola. Let's start with a big and difficult question. How did World War I start? On the one hand, World War I started because of a series of events in the summer of 1914, and that brought the major powers of Europe into conflict with one another. But I actually think it's more useful to say that World War I started at least a generation earlier when rising powers, particularly Germany, started devoting more and more of their resources toward military affairs and naval affairs. This sets off an arms race in Europe. It sets off a rivalry over the colonial world and who will control the resources in Africa and Asia. And so by the time you get to the summer of 1914, and in a lot of ways I say the war has already begun, and this is just the match that lights the flame. So the capacity for war was brewing within like the leaders and within the populace. They started accepting sort of slowly through the culture propagated this idea that we can go to war, it's a good idea to go to war, it's a good idea to expand and dominate others, that kind of thing. Maybe not put in those clear terms, but just the sense that military action is the way that nations operate at the global scale. Yes, yes and, right. So yes, there's a sense that the military can be the solution to political conflict in Europe itself. And the and is that war and military conflict are already happening, right? That there's war particularly in Africa, in North Africa, in the Middle East, in the Balkans. Conflict is already underway and the European powers haven't faced off against each other. They've usually faced off against an asymmetrical conflict against much less powerful states. But in some ways that war is already underway. So do you think it was inevitable? Because World War One is brought up as a case study where it seems like a few accidental leaders and a few accidental events or one accidental event led to the war. And if you change that one little thing, it could have avoided the war. Your sense is that the drums of war have been beating for quite a while and it would have happened almost no matter what or very likely to have happened. Yes, historians never like to say things are inevitable. And certainly, you know, there were people who could have chosen a different path both in the short term and the long term. But fundamentally, there were irreconcilable conflicts in the system of empires in the world in 1914. I can't see, you know, it didn't have to be this war but it probably had to be a war. So there was the German Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, there's France and Great Britain, US. Could USP call that empire at that moment yet? When do you graduate to empire status? Well, certainly after 1898 with the acquisition of the former territories of the Spanish Empire, you know, the United States has formal colonial possessions and it has sort of mindsets of rule and military acquisition that would define empire in a kind of more informal sense. So you would say you would put the blame or the responsibility of starting World War I into the hands of the German Empire and Kaiser Wilhelm II? You know, that's a really tough call to make. And, you know, deciding that is going to keep historians in business for the next 200 years. I think there are people who would lay all of the blame on the Germans, right? And, you know, who would point toward a generation of arms build up, you know, alliances that Germany made and promises that they made to their allies in the Balkans, to the Austro Hungarians. And so yes, there's an awful lot of responsibility there. There has been a trend lately to say, no, it's no one's fault, right? That, you know, that all of the various powers literally were sleepwalking into the war, right? They backed into it inadvertently. I think that lets everyone a little too much off the hook, right? And so I think in between is, you know, I would put the blame on the system of empires itself, on the system. But in that system, the actor that sort of carries the most responsibility is definitely Imperial Germany. So the leader of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph I, his nephews, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he was assassinated. And so that didn't have to lead to a war. And then the leader of the German Empire, Kaiser Wilhelm II, pressured, sort of started talking trash and boiling the water that ultimately resulted in the explosion, plus all the other players. So what can you describe the dynamics of how that unrolled? Well, US, what's the role of US? What's the role of France? What's the role of Great Britain, Germany, and Austro Hungarian Empire? Yeah, over the course of about four weeks, right, following the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo, it sort of triggers a series of political conflicts and ultimately ultimatums, sort of demanding sort of that one or other power sort of stand down in response to the demands of either Britain, France, or in turn, Germany or Russia, at the same time that those alliances kind of trigger automatic responses from the other side. And so it escalates. And once that escalation is combined with the call up of military troops, then none of those powers wants to be sort of the last one to kind of get ready for conflict. So even throughout it, they think they are getting ready in a defensive maneuver. And if they think if there is conflict, well, it might be a skirmish, it might be, you know, sort of a standoff. It could be solved with diplomacy later, because diplomacy is failing now. That turns out not to be the case. Diplomacy fails, it's not a skirmish, it becomes a massive war. And the Americans are watching all of this from the sidelines. They have very little influence over what happens that summer. How does it go from a skirmish between a few nations to a global war? Is there a place where there's a phase transition? Yeah, I think the phase transition is in over the course of the fall of 1914. When the Germans make an initial sort of bold move into France, in many ways, they're fighting the last war, the Franco Prussian War of 1870. And they really do sort of, you know, kind of want to have a quick sort of lightning strike in some ways against France to kind of bring the war to a speedy conclusion. France turns out to be able to fight back more effectively than the Germans expected. And then the battle lines sort of harden. And then behind that, the French and the Germans, as well as the British on the side of the French, start digging in, literally, and digging trenches. Trenches that at first are three feet deep to avoid shelling from artillery, then become six feet, 10 feet deep, two miles wide, that include telegraph wires, that include whole hospitals in the back. And then at that point, the front is locked in place. And the only way to break that is sort of basically dialing the war up to 11, right? Sort of massive numbers of troops, massive efforts, none of which work, right? And so the war is stuck in this. But that's the phase transition right there. What were the machines of war in that case? You mentioned trenches. What were the guns used? What was the size of guns? What are we talking about? What did Germany start accumulating that led up to this war? One of the things that we see immediately is the industrial revolution of the previous 30 or 40 years brought to bear on warfare, right? And so you see sort of machine guns. You see artillery. These are the key weapons of war on both sides, right? The vast majority of battlefield casualties are from artillery shelling from one side to another, not sort of rifle or even sort of machine gun kind of attacks. In some ways, the weapons of war are human beings, right? Tens of thousands of them horde over the top in these sort of waves to kind of try to break through the enemy lines. And it would work for a little while. But holding the territory that had been gained often proved to be even more demanding than gaining it. And so often, each side would retreat back into the trenches and wait for another day. And how did Russia, how did Britain, how did France get pulled into the war? I suppose the France one is the easy one. But what is the order of events here? How it becomes a global war? Yeah. So Britain, France, and Russia are at this time and they're an alliance. And so the conflicts in the summer of 1914 that lead sort of to the declarations of war happened sort of one after another in late August of 1914. And all three powers essentially come in at the same time because they have promised to do so through a series of alliances conducted secretly in the years before 1914 that committed them to defend one another. Germany, Austria, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire have their own sort of set of secret agreements that also commit them to defend one another. And what this does is it sort of brings them all into conflict at the exact same moment. They're also, for many of these countries, bringing not just their national armies, but also their empires into the conflict. So Britain and France, of course, have enormous sort of global empires. They begin mobilizing soldiers as well as raw materials. Germany has less of an overseas empire. Russia and the Ottoman Empire, of course, have their own sort of hinterland within the empire. And very soon, all of the warring powers are bringing the entire world into the conflict. Did they have a sense of how deadly the war is? I mean, this is another scale of death and destruction. At the beginning, no, but very quickly, the scale of the devastation of these sort of massive over the top attacks on the trenches is apparent to the military officers and it very quickly becomes apparent even at home. You know, there is, of course, censorship of the battlefield and specific details don't reach people. But for civilians and in any of the warring powers, they know fairly soon how destructive the war is. And to me, that's always been a real sort of puzzle, right? That by the time the United States comes to decide whether to join the war in 1917, they know exactly what they're getting into, right? They're not backing into the war in the ways that the European powers did. You know, they've seen the devastation, they've seen photographs, they've seen injured soldiers, and they make that choice anyway. When you say they, do you mean the leaders of the people? Did the death and destruction reach the minds of the American people by that time? AOB Yes, absolutely. We don't in 1917 have the mass media that we have now, but there are images in newspapers, there are newsreels that play at the movie theaters, and of course, some of it is sanitized. But that combined with press accounts, often really quite descriptive press accounts, gory accounts, reached anyone who cared to read them. Certainly, plenty of people didn't follow the news, felt it was far away. But most Americans who cared about the news knew how devastating this war was. LR Yeah, there's something that happens that I recently visited Ukraine for a few weeks. There's something that happens with the human mind as you get away from the actual front where the bullets are flying, like literally one kilometer away. You start to not feel the war. AOB You'll hear an explosion, you'll see an explosion, you start to get assimilated to it, or you start to get used to it. And then when you get as far away from currently what is Kiev, you know the war's going on, everybody around you is fighting in that war, but it's still somehow distant. And I think with the United States, with the ocean between, even if you have the stories everywhere, it still is somehow distant, like the way a movie is. Like a movie or a video game, it's somewhere else, even if your loved ones are going, or you are going to fight. LR Yeah, that is absolutely the case. And in some ways, that's true even for the home fronts in Europe, except for the areas where, in Belgium and France, where the war is right there in your backyard. For other people, yeah, there's a distance. And soldiers, of course, feel this very strongly. European soldiers, when they're able to go home on leave, often deeply resent what they see as the luxury that civilians are living in during the war. LR So how did US enter the war? Who was the president? What was the dynamics involved? And could it have stayed out? LR To answer your last question first, yes. That the United States could have stayed out of the First World War as a military power. The United States could not have ignored the war completely. It shaped everything. It shaped trade. It shaped goods and services, agriculture, whether there was a crop coming, whether there were immigrants coming across the Atlantic to work in American factories. So the US can't ignore the war. But the US makes a choice in 1917 to enter the war by declaring war on Germany and Austria. And in that sense, this is a war of choice, but it's kicked off by a series of events. So President Woodrow Wilson has been president through this entire period of time. He has just run in the 1916 presidential election on a campaign to keep the United States out of war. But then in early 1917, the Germans in some ways sort of twist the Americans arms. The Germans sort of high command comes to understand that they're stuck. They're stuck in this trench warfare. They need a big breakthrough. Their one big chance is to sort of break the blockade to push through that the British have imposed on them, to break through against France. And so they do. And along with this, they start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships. The Germans know full well this will draw the United States into war. But the Germans look at the United States at this moment, a relatively small army, a relatively small Navy, a country that at least on paper is deeply divided about whether to join the war. And so they say, let's do it. They're not going to get any American soldiers there in time. It was a gamble, but I think probably their best chance. They took that gamble. They lost. Right. In part, because French resistance was strong in part because Americans mobilized much faster and in much greater numbers than the Germans thought they would. So the American people were divided. The American people were absolutely divided about whether to enter this war. Right. From 1914 to 1917, there is a searing debate across the political spectrum. It doesn't break down easily on party lines about whether it was in the US interest to do this, whether American troops should be sent abroad, whether Americans would end up just being cannon fodder for the European empires. Eventually, as American ships are sunk, first in the Lusitania in 1915, then in much greater numbers in 1917, the tide starts to turn and Americans feel that our response is necessary. And the actual declaration of war in Congress is pretty lopsided, but it's not unanimous by any means. Lopsided towards entering the war. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's really interesting because there's echoes of that in later wars where Congress seems to... Nobody wants to be the guy that says no to war for some reason. Once you sense that in terms of, sorry, in terms of politicians, because then you appear weak, but I wonder if that was always the case. So you make the case that World War I is largely responsible for defining what it means to be an American citizen. So in which way does it define the American citizen? When you think about citizenship, what it means is two things. First of all, what are your rights and obligations? What is the legal citizenship that you have as a citizen of the United States or any other state? And the second is a more amorphous definition of what does it mean to belong, to be part of America, to feel American, to love it or hate it or be willing to die for it. And both of those things really are crystal clear in terms of their importance during the war. So both of those things are on the table. Being a citizen who is a citizen who isn't matters. So people who had never carried passports or anything before suddenly have to. But also what it means to be an American, to feel like it, to be part of this project is also being defined and enforced during World War I. So project is a funny way to put a global war. So can you tell the story, perhaps that's a good example of it, of the James Montgomery Flagg's 1916 poster that reads, I want you. A lot of people know this poster. I think in its original form, its memeified form, I don't know. But we know this poster and we don't know where it came from. Or most Americans, I think, me included, didn't know where it came from. And it actually comes from 1916. Does this poster represent the birth of something new in America, which is a commodification or, I don't know, that propaganda machine that says what it means to be an American is somebody that fights for their country? Yeah. So the image, it's in fact, I think one of the most recognizable images, not only in the United States, but in the entire world. And you can bring it almost anywhere on Earth in 2022, and people will know what it refers to. And so this is an image that circulated first as a magazine cover, later as a recruitment poster, where the figure is Uncle Sam, sort of pointing at the viewer with his finger, sort of pointing and saying, I want you. And the I want you is a recruitment tool to join the US Army. And this image really kind of starts as a kind of, like I said, a magazine cover in 1916 by the artist James Montgomery Flagg. It initially appears under the heading, What are you doing for preparedness? Meaning to prepare in case war comes to the United States. And at that point in 1916, we're still neutral. In 1917, it's turned into a US Army recruiting poster. And then it reappears in World War Two, reappears generations after, like you said, it's now gets remixed, memefied, it's all over the place. I think for me, it's a turning point, it's a sort of window into American culture at a crucial moment in our history, where the federal government is now embarking on a war overseas that's going to make enormous demands on its citizens. And at the same time, where sort of technologies of mass production and mass media, and what we would probably call propaganda, are being sort of mobilized for the for the first time in this new kind of way. Well, in some sense, is it fair to say that the Empire is born? The expanding Empire is born from the Noam Chomsky perspective kind of empire that seeks to have military influence elsewhere in the world? Yes, but I think as historians, we need to be at least as interested in what happens to the people who are getting pointed to by Uncle Sam, right, rather than just the one, you know, whether he's pointing at us. And, you know, so, so yes, he's asking us to do that. But how do we respond? And the people responded. So the people are ultimately the the machines of history, the mechanisms of history. It's not Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam can only do so much if the people aren't willing to step up. Absolutely. They and, you know, the American people responded for sure, but they didn't build what Uncle Sam asked them to do in that poster, right? And I think that's, you know, kind of a crucial aspect that, you know, there never would have been sort of global U.S. power without the response that begins in World War One. What was the Selective Service Act of 1917? So one of the very first things that Uncle Sam wants you to do, right, is to register for selective service for the draft, right? And the law is passed very soon after the U.S. enters the war. It's sort of, you know, demanding that all men first between 21 and 30, then between 18 and 45, register for the draft, and they'll be selected by a government agency, by a volunteer organization. It's a requirement to sign up. It is a legal requirement to register. Of course, not everyone who registers is selected, but over the course of the war, 24 million men register, almost 4 million serve in some fashion. What was the response? What was the feeling amongst the American people to have to sign up to the Selective Service Act? Have to register. Yeah. This is a bigger turning point than we might think, right? In some ways, this is a tougher demand of the American public than entering the war. It's one thing to declare war on Germany, right? It's another thing to go down to your local post office and fill out the forms that allow your own government to send you there to fight. And this is especially important at a time when the federal government doesn't really have any other way to find you unless you actually go and register yourself, right? And so, you know, ordinary people are participating in the building of this war machine, but at least a half a million of them don't, right? And simply never fill out the forms, move from one town to another. But you said 20 million did? 20 something? Yeah. About 24 million register, at least 500,000. Is it surprising to you that that many registered? Since the country was divided? It is. And that's what I, you know, sort of tried to dig in to figure out how did you get 24 million people to register for the draft? And it's certainly not coming from the top down, right? You know, there may be a hundred sort of agents in what's now called the FBI. You know, it's certainly not being enforced from Washington. It's being enforced in, you know, through the eyes of everyday neighbors, you know, through community surveillance, all kinds of ways. Oh, so there was like a pressure. There's a lot of pressure. Interesting. So there was not a significant like antiwar movement as you would see maybe later with Vietnam and things like this? There was a significant movement before 1917, but it becomes very hard to keep up an organized antiwar movement after that, particularly when the government starts shutting down protests. So as the Selective Service Act of 1917 runs up against some of the freedoms, some of the rights that are defined in our founding documents, what was that clash like? What was sacrificed? What freedoms and rights were sacrificed in this process? I mean, I think on some level, the fundamental right is liberty, right? That conscription sort of demands, you know, sacrifice on the behalf of some notionally for the protection of all. So even if you're against the war, you're forced to fight. Yes. You know, and there were small provisions for conscientious objectors, solely those who had religious objections to all war, right? Not political objections to this war. And so, you know, several thousand were able to take those provisions. But even then, they faced social sanction, they faced ridicule, some of them faced intimidation. So those liberty interests, both individual freedom, religious freedom, you know, those are some of the first things to go. Right. So what about freedom of speech? What's the silencing of the press, of the voices of the different people that were object? Yes, absolutely. Right. And so very soon after the Selective Service Act is passed, then you get the Espionage Act, which of course is back in the news in 2022. What's the Espionage Act? The Espionage Act is a sort of omnibus bill. It contains about 10 or different provisions, very few of which have to do with espionage. But one key provision basically makes it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment, right? And that provision is used to shut down radical publications, to shut down German language publications. And, you know, this really has a chilling impact on speech during the war. Could you put into words what it means to be an American citizen that is in part sparked by World War I? What does that mean? Somebody that should be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms to fight for their country? Somebody that's willing to fight to spread freedom elsewhere in the world, spread the American ideals? Does that begin to tell the story what it means to be an American? I think what we see is a change, right? So citizenship during World War I now includes the obligation to defend the country, right, to serve, and to, if asked, to die for it, right? And we certainly see that. And I think we see the close linkage of military service and US citizenship coming out of this time period. But, you know, when you start making lots of demands on people to fulfill obligations, in turn, they're going to start demanding rights. And we start to see, not necessarily during the war but after, more demands for free speech protections, more demands for equality, for marginalized groups. And so, you know, obligations and rights are sort of developing in a dynamic relationship. Oh, it's almost like an overreach of power sparked a sense like, oh crap, we can't trust centralized power to abuse, like to drag us into a war. We need to be able to. So there's the birth of that tension between the government and the people. It's a rebirth of it. You know, of course, that tension is always there. But in its modern form, I think it comes from this reintensification of it. So what about, you said that World War I gave birth to the surveillance state in the US. Can you explain? Yeah, so the Espionage Act, you know, sort of empowers federal organizations to watch other Americans. They are particularly interested in anyone who is obstructing the draft, anyone who is trying to kind of organize labor or strikes or radical movements, and anyone who might have sympathy for Germany, which basically means, you know, all German Americans come under surveillance. Initially, you know, this is very small scale. But soon, every government agency gets involved from the Treasury Department Secret Service to the Post Office, which is sort of breeding mail, to the Justice Department, which mobilizes 200,000 volunteers. You know, it's a really significant enterprise. Much of it goes away after the war. But of all the things that go away, this core of the surveillance state is the thing that persists most fully. Is this also a place where government, the size of government starts to grow in these different organizations, or maybe creates a momentum for growth of government? Oh, it's exponential growth, right? That, you know, that over the course of the war, by almost any metric you use, right, the size of the federal budget, the number of federal employees, the number of soldiers in the standing army, all of those things skyrocket during the war. They go down after the war, but they never go down to what they were before. And probably gave a momentum for growth. Yes, absolutely. Did World War I give birth to the military industrial complex in the United States? So, war profiteering, expanding of the war machine in order to financially benefit a lot of parties involved? So, I guess I would maybe break that into two parts, right? That, on the one hand, yes, there is war profiteering. There are investigations of it. In the years after the war, there's a widespread concern that the profit motive had played too much of a part in the war, and that's definitely the case. But I think when you try to think of this term military industrial complex, it's best to think of it as, at what point does the one side lock in the other, right? That military choices are shaped by industry objectives and vice versa. And I don't think that that was fully locked into place during World War I. I think that's really a Cold War phenomenon, when the United States is on this intense kind of footing for two generations in a row. So, industrial is really important there, there is companies. So, before then, weapons of war were created, were funded directly by the government. Who was manufacturing the weapons of war? They were generally manufactured by private industry. There were, of course, arsenals, sort of 19th century iterations where the government would produce its own weapons, partly to make sure that they got what they wanted. But most of the weapons of war for all of the European powers, and the United States, are produced by private industry. So, why do you say that the military industrial complex didn't start then? What was the important thing that happened in the Cold War? I think one way to think about it is that the Cold War is a point at which it switches from being a dial to a ratchet, right? So, during World War I, the relationship between the military and industry dials up fast and high, and stays that way, and it dials back down. Whereas during the Cold War, sort of the relationship between the two often looks more like a ratchet. Yeah, it becomes unstoppable. It goes up again. In the way that you start, I think, the way the military industrial complex is often discussed as a system that is unstoppable, like it expands. If you take a very cynical view, it creates war so that it can make money. It doesn't just find places where it can help through military conflict. It creates tensions that directly or indirectly lead to military conflict that it can then fuel and make money from. That is certainly one of the concerns of both people who are critical of the First World War, and then also of Dwight Eisenhower, right, when he's president and sort of in his farewell address, where he sort of introduces the term military industrial complex. And some of it is about the profit motive, but some of it is a fear that Eisenhower had that no one had an interest in stopping this, right, and that no one had a voice in stopping it, and that the ordinary American could really do nothing to dial things down. Is it strange to you that we don't often hear that kind of speech today, with Eisenhower speaking about the military industrial complex? For example, we'll have people criticizing the spending on war efforts, but they're not discussing the machinery of the military industrial complex, like the basic way that human nature works, that we get ourselves trapped in this thing. They're saying, like, there's better things to spend money on, versus describing a very seemingly natural process of when you build weapons of war that's going to lead to more war. Like, it pulls you in somehow. RW. Yeah, I would say throughout the Cold War, and even after the end of it, there has not been a sustained conversation in the United States about our defense establishment, right, what we really need, and what serves our interest, and to what extent sort of other things like blanket forces, profit motives, belong in that conversation. What's interesting is that in the generation after the First World War, that conversation was on the table, right, through a series of investigations in the US, the Nye Committee in Britain, the Royal Commission, journalistic exposés. This would have been just talked about constantly in the years between about 1930 and 1936, as people were starting to worry that storm clouds were gathering in Europe again. LR. Yeah, but it always seems like those folks get pushed to the fringes. You're made an activist versus a thinking leader. RW. Those discussions are often marginalized, framed as conspiracy theory, etc. I think it's important to realize that in the generation after World War I, this was a serious civic conversation. It led to investigations of defense finance. It led to experiments in Britain and France in public finance of war material. I think those conversations need to be reconvened now in the 21st century. LR. Is there any parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine? The reason I bring it up is because you mentioned there was a hunger for war, a capacity for war that was already established, and the different parties were just boiling the tensions. So there's a case made that America had a role to play, NATO had a role to play in the current war in Ukraine. Is there some truth to that when you think about it in the context of World War I? Or is it purely about the specific parties involved, which is Russia and Ukraine? RW. I think it's very easy to draw parallels between World War I and the war in Ukraine, but I don't think they really work. The First World War in some ways is generated by a fundamental conflict in the European system of empires, in the global system of empires. In many ways, if there's a parallel, the war in Ukraine is the parallel to some of the conflicts in the Mediterranean and the Balkans in 1911 to 1913, that then later there was a much greater conflict. So I think if there's any lessons to be learned for how not to let World War III look like World War I, it would be to make sure that systems aren't locked into place that escalate wars out of people's expectations. LR. That's I suppose what I was implying, that this is the early stages of World War III. That in the same way that several wolves are licking their chops or whatever the expression is, they're creating tension, they're creating military conflict with a kind of unstoppable imperative for a global war. Many people that are looking at this are really worried about that. Now the forcing function to stop this war is that there's several nuclear powers involved, which has at least for now worked to stop full on global war. But I'm not sure that's going to be the case. In fact, what is one of the surprising things to me in Ukraine is that still in the 21st century, we can go to something that involves nuclear powers, not directly yet, but awfully close to directly, go to a hot war. And so do you worry about that, that there's a kind of descent into a World War I type of scenario? RW. Yes, I mean, that keeps me up at night, and I think it should keep the citizens of both the United States and Russia up at night. And I think, again, it gets back to what I was saying, that in the summer of 1914, even then, things that looked like a march toward war could have been different. And so I think it's important for leaders of both countries and of all of the related countries, of Ukraine, of the various NATO powers, to really imagine off ramps and to imagine alternatives and to make them possible. Whether it's through diplomacy, whether it's through other formats, I think that that's the only way to prevent sort of greater escalation. LR. What's the difference between World War I and the Civil War? In terms of how they defined what it means to be an American, but also the American citizen's relationship with the war, what the leaders were doing, is there interesting differences and similarities? Besides the fact that everybody seems to have forgot about World War I in the United States and everyone still remembers Civil War. RW. I mean, it's true. And the American Civil War defines American identity in some ways, along with the Revolution and the Second World War, more so than any other conflict. And it's a fundamentally different war. It's won because it is a civil war, because of secession, because of the Confederacy. This is a conflict happening on the territory of the United States between Americans. And so the dynamics are really quite different. So the leaders particularly Lincoln have a different relationship to the home front, to civilians, than they say Wilson or Roosevelt have in World War I and II. LR. Also the way you would tell the story of the Civil War, perhaps similar to the way we tell the story of World War II, there's like a reason to actually fight the war. The way we tell the story is we're fighting for this idea that all men are created equal, that the war is over slavery in part. Perhaps that's a drastic oversimplification of what the war was actually about in the moment, like how do you get pulled into an actual war versus a hot discussion. And the same with World War II, people kind of framed the narrative that it was against evil, Hitler being evil. I think the key part of that is probably the Holocaust, is how you can formulate Hitler's being evil. If there's no Holocaust, perhaps there's a case to be made that we wouldn't see World War II as such a quote unquote good war, that there's an atrocity that had to happen to make it really, to be able to tell a clear narrative of why we get into this war. Perhaps such a narrative doesn't exist for World War I, and so that doesn't stay in the American mind. We try to sweep it under the rug, given though overall 16 million people died. So to you the difference is in the fact that you're fighting for ideas and fighting on the homeland. But in terms of people's participation, you know, fighting for your country, was there similarities there? Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean the Civil War in both the North and the South, troops are raised overwhelmingly through volunteer recruitment. There is a draft in both the North and the South, but it's not significant. Only 8% of Confederate soldiers came in through conscription. And so in fact, the mobilization for volunteers often organized locally around individual communities or states, creates sort of multiple identities and levels of loyalty, where people both in the North and the South have loyalty both to their state regiments, to their sort of community militias and as well to the country. They are fighting over the country, right? Over the United States. And so the Union and the Confederacy have conflicting and ultimately irreconcilable visions of that. But that sort of nationalism that comes out of the Union after the victory in the war is a kind of crucial force shaping America ever since. So what was the neutrality period? Why did US stay out of the war for so long? What was going on in that interesting, like, what made Woodrow Wilson change his mind? What was the interesting dynamic there? I always say that the United States entered the war in April of 1917, but Americans entered it right away, right? They entered it. Some of them actually went and volunteered and fought almost exclusively on the side of Britain and France. At least 50,000 joined the Canadian army or the British army and served. Millions volunteer. They sent humanitarian aid. I think in many ways, modern war creates modern humanitarianism, and we can see that in the neutrality period. And even if they wanted the United States to stay out of the war, a lot of Americans get involved in it by thinking about it, caring about it, arguing about it. And at the same time, they're worried that British propaganda is shaping their news system. They are worried that German espionage is undermining them. They're worried that both Britain and Germany are trying to interfere in American elections and American news cycles. And at the same time, a revolution is breaking out in Mexico. So there are sort of concerns about what's happening in the Western Hemisphere as well as what's happening in Europe. So World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars, and it didn't. How did World War I pave the way to World War II? Every nation probably has their own story in this trajectory towards World War II. How did Europe allow World War II to happen? How did the Soviet Union, Russia allow World War II to happen, and how did America allow World War II to happen? And Japan? Yeah, you're right. The answer is different for each country, right? That in some ways in Germany, the culture of defeat and the experience of defeat at the end of World War I leads to a culture of resentment, recrimination, finger pointing blame that makes German politics very ugly. As one person puts it, brutalizes German politics. It places resentment at the core of the populace and its politics. Yeah. And so in some ways, that lays the groundwork for the kind of politics of resentment and hate that comes from the Nazis. For the United States, in some ways, the failure to win the peace sets up the possibility for the next war, that the United States, through Wilson, is sort of crafting a new international order in order that this will be the war to end all wars. But because the United States failed to join the League of Nations, you see the United States really sort of on the hook for another generation. In Asia, the story is more complicated, right? And I think it's worth bearing that in mind that World War II is a two front war. It starts in Asia for its own reasons. World War I is transformative for Japan, right? It is a time of massive economic expansion. A lot of that sort of economic wealth is poured into sort of greater industrialization and militarization. And so when the military wing in Japanese politics takes over in the 1930s, they're in some ways flexing muscles that come out of the First World War. Can you talk about the end of World War I, the Treaty of Versailles? What's interesting about that dynamics there, of the parties involved, of how it could have been done differently to avoid the resentment? Or again, is it inevitable? So the war ends and very soon, even before the war is over, the United States in particular is trying to shape the peace, right? And the United States is the central actor at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Woodrow Wilson is there, he's presiding, and he knows that he calls the shots. So he was respected. He was respected, but resentfully in some ways by the European powers, Britain and France and Italy to a lesser extent, who felt that they had sacrificed more. They had two goals, right? They wanted to shape the imperial system in order to make sure that their kind of fundamental economic structures wouldn't change. And they also wanted to sort of weaken Germany as much as possible, right? So that Germany couldn't rise again. What this leads to is a peace treaty that maintains some of the fundamental conflicts of the imperial system and makes, bankrupts Germany, starves Germany, and kind of feeds this politics of resentment that make it impossible for Germany to kind of participate in a European order. So people like historian Neil Ferguson, for example, make the case that if Britain stayed out of World War I, we would have avoided this whole mess and we would potentially even avoid World War II, this kind of counterfactual history. Do you think it's possible to make the case for that? That there was a moment, especially in that case, staying out of the war for Britain, that the escalation to a global war could have been avoided and one that ultimately ends in a deep global resentment. So where Germany is resentful not just of France or particular nations, but is resentful of the entire, I don't know how you define it, the West or something like this, the entire global world. I wish it were that easy. And I think it's useful to think in counterfactuals. What if? And if you believe, as historians do, in causation, if that one thing causes another, then you also have to believe in counterfactuals, right? That if something hadn't happened, then maybe that would have worked differently. But I think all the things that led to World War I are multi causal and nuanced. And this is what historians do. We make things more complicated. And so there was no one thing that could have turned the tide of history. Oh, if only Hitler had gotten into art school or if only Fidel Castro had gotten into the major leagues. Those are interesting thought experiments, but few events in history I think are that contingent. Well, Hitler is an example of somebody who is a charismatic leader that seems to have a really disproportionate amount of influence on the tide of history. So if you look at Stalin, you could imagine that many other people could have stepped into that role. And the same goes for many of the other presidents through, or even Mao. It seems that there's a singular nature to Hitler, that you could play the counterfactual, that if there was no Hitler, you may have not had World War II. He better than many leaders in history was able to channel the resentment of the populace into a very aggressive expansion of the military and I would say skillful deceit of the entire world in terms of his plans and was able to effectively start the war. So is it possible that, I mean, could Hitler have been stopped? Could we have avoided if he just got into art school? Or again, do you feel like there's a current of events that was unstoppable? I mean, part of what you're talking about is Hitler the individual as a sort of charismatic leader who's able to mobilize the nation. And part of it is Hitlerism, his own sort of individual ability to play, for example, play off his subordinates against one another to set up a system of that nature that in some ways escalates violence, including the violence that leads to the Holocaust. And some of it is also Hitlerism as a leader cult. And we see this in many other sort of things where a political movement surrounds one particular individual who may or may not be replaceable. So yes, the World War II we got would have been completely different if a different sort of faction had risen to power in Germany. But Europe, you know, Depression era Europe was so unstable and democracies collapsed throughout Western Europe over the course of the 1930s, you know, whether they had charismatic totalitarian leaders or not. Have you actually read one book I just recently finished? I'd love to get your opinion from a historian perspective. There's a book called Blitzed Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Mohler. It makes a case that drugs played a very large role, meth essentially, played a very large role in World War II. There's a lot of criticism of this book, saying that it's kind of to what you're saying, it takes this one little variable and makes it like this explains everything. So everything about Hitler, everything about the blitzkrieg, everything about the military, the way the strategy, the decisions could be explained through drugs, or at least implies that kind of thing. And the interesting thing about this book because Hitler and Nazi Germany is one of the most sort of written about periods of human history. And this was not drugs were almost entirely not written about in this context. So here come along this semi historian because I don't think he's even a historian. He's a lot of his work is fiction. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly. So he tells a really that's one of the criticisms he tells a very compelling story that drugs were at the center of this period and also of the man of Hitler. What are your sort of feelings and thoughts about if you've gotten a chance to read this book, but I'm sure there's books like it that tell an interesting perspective singular perspective on a war. Yeah, I mean, I have read it and I also had this sort of eye opening experience that a lot of historians did and they're like, why didn't, why didn't we think about this? And I think whether he's, the author Oller is sort of not a trained academic historian, but the joy of history is like, you don't have to be one to write good history. And I don't think anyone sort of criticizes him for, for that. Um, I like the book as a, as a window into the third Reich. You know, of course drugs don't explain all of it, but it helps us see, um, you know, uh, it see helps us see the people who supported Hitler, um, uh, the ways in which, um, you know, uh, it was that mind altering and performance altering drugs were used to kind of keep soldiers on the battlefield. Um, the ways in which, um, you know, I think that we take, we don't fully understand the extent to which the third Reich is held together with like duct tape, um, from, um, you know, from a pretty early phase by like 1940 or 41 even, you know, it's all smoke and mirrors. And I think that wartime propaganda, both Germans trying to say, you know, we're winning everything and America trying to mobilize, uh, and the other allies, you know, to mobilize against Germany, uh, described a more formidable enemy than it really was by 1941 and 42. Yeah. I mean, I could see both cases. Uh, one is that duct tape doesn't make the man, but also as an engineer, I'm a huge fan of duct tape because it does seem to solve a lot of problems. And, uh, I do worry that this perspective that the book presents about drugs is somehow to the mind really compelling because it's almost like the mind, or at least my mind searches for an answer. How could this have happened? And it's nice to have a clean explanation and drugs is one popular one. When people talk about steroids and sports, the moment you introduced the topic of steroids, somehow the mind wants to explain all success in the context was because this person was on steroids, Lance Armstrong. Well, it's, it like, it's a very sticky idea. Certain ideas, certain explanations are very sticky. And I think that's really dangerous because then you lose the full context. And also in the case of drugs, it removes the responsibility from the person, both for the military genius and the evil. And I think you, I mean, it's a very dangerous thing to do because something about the mind, maybe it's just mind that's sticky to this. Well, drugs explain it. If the drugs didn't happen, uh, then it would be very different. Yeah. It worries me how compelling it is of an explanation, you know? Yeah. So that's why it's maybe better to think of it as a window into the third, right? Is that an explanation of it? But it's also a nice exploration of Hitler, the man. For some reason, discussing his habits, especially later in the war, um, his practices with drugs gives you a window into the person. It reminds you that there's a human, this is a human being, like a human being that gets emotional in the morning, gets thoughtful in the morning, hopeful, sad, depressed, angry, like a story of emotions of the human being. Somehow we construct, um, which is a pretty dangerous thing to do, construct an evil monster out of Hitler when in reality he's a human being like all of us. I think the lesson there is the soldier needs to lesson, which is all of us to some degree are capable of evil. Um, or maybe if you want to make it less powerful a statement, many of our leaders are capable of evil. That this Hitler is not truly singular in history. That, uh, yeah, when the resentment of the populace matches the right charismatic leader, it's, it's easy to make the kind of, not easy, but it's possible to frequently make the kind of, uh, initiation of military conflict that happened in World War, World War II. By the way, because you said not a trained historian, one of the, one of the most compelling and I don't know, entertaining and fascinating exploration of World War I comes from Dan Carlin. I don't know if you've gotten a chance to listen to his sort of podcast form telling of the blueprint for Armageddon, which is the telling of World War I. What do you think about Dan Carlin, you yourself as a historian who has studied, who has written about World War I? Do you, do you enjoy that kind of telling of history? Absolutely. And I think, um, again, you know, uh, you don't need a PhD in history to, to be a historian. Um, does every historian agree with that? Uh, he gets quite a bit of criticism from historians. Uh, you know, I mean, we, you know, we like to argue with each other and nitpick with each other, but, um, but the one thing I have no patience for is when we like pull rank on each other. Um, you know, I think, um, we depend on, uh, you know, if you're, you know, a historian in a university with degrees and research materials, you know, you depend on the work of people in some local community, like recording oral histories, saving documents. And history is a, it's a social science, but it's also a storytelling art. Um, and you know, uh, history books are the ones you find on the shelves and bookstores that people read for, for fun. And, and then, and you can appreciate both the, the knowledge production, um, as well as the storytelling. Um, and when you get a good oral storyteller like Dan Carlin, um, there's a reason that thousands and hundreds of thousands of people tune in. Yeah. But he definitely suffers from anxiety about getting things correct. And it's very, it's very difficult. Well, our first job is to get the facts, uh, the facts correct and then, and then to tell the story off of those. But the, the facts are so fuzzy. So it's a, I mean, you have the, probably my favorite telling of World War II is William Shire's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. And, uh, or at least not telling of Nazi Germany. And that goes to primary sources a lot, which is like, I suppose that's the honest way to do it. But it's tough. It's really tough to write that way, to really go to primary sources always. And I think the, one of the things that Dan tries to do, which is also really tough to do, perhaps easier in, in oral history is, uh, try to make you feel what it was like to be there. Which, uh, I think he does by trying to tell the story of like individual soldiers and, um, do you find that telling like individual citizens? Do you find that kind of telling of history compelling? Yeah. I mean, I think we need, uh, historical imagination. Um, and I think historical imagination teaches something very valuable, which is humility, um, to realize that there are other people, um, who've lived on this planet and they organized their lives differently and, you know, they made it through just fine too. Um, and, um, you know, I think that, that, that kind of, of, of meeting other people from the past can be actually a very useful skill for meeting people unlike you in the present. Unlike you, but also like you. I think both are, uh, both are humbling. One realizing that they did live in a different space and time, but two realizing that if you, if you were placed in that space and time, you might have done all the same things, whether it's the brave, good thing or the evil thing. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and you get a, also a sense of, um, uh, of possibility. You know, there's this famous line, right? That, um, you know, those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. Um, but I think the other half is true, uh, as well, which is those who do not learn history don't get the chance to repeat it, right? Um, you know, that we're not the first people on this planet to face, you know, any certain kinds of problems. Um, you know, other people have, have lived through worlds like this one before. It's like when you fall in love as a teenager for the first time, there's, and then there's a breakup. You think it, it's the greatest tragedy, tragedy that has ever happened in the world. You're the first person. Even though, like, Romeo and Juliet and so on had, had this issue, you're the first person that truly feels the catastrophic heartbreak of that experience. It's good to be reminded that no, the human condition is what it is. We have lived through it at the individual and the societal scale. Let me ask you about nationalism, which I think is at the core of I want you poster. Is nationalism destructive or empowering to a nation? And we can use different words like patriotism, which is in many ways synonymous to nationalism, but in recent history, perhaps because of the Nazis has, has, um, slowly parted ways that somehow nationalism is when patriotism, patriotism gone bad or something like this. Yeah, they're, they're different, right? Um, patriotism, um, you know, patriotism is in some ways best thought of as an emotion, right? Uh, and a feeling of, of love of country, right? Um, you know, uh, literally, um, uh, and in some ways that's a necessary condition to participate in nationalism. Um, you know, whether to me, I think nationalism is crucial, um, in a world organized around nation states. Um, and you have to sort of believe that you are engaged in a common project together, right? Um, and so, you know, in the contemporary United States, um, you know, uh, in some ways that that question is actually on the table in ways that it hasn't been in the past, but you know, you have to believe that you're engaged in a common project, that you have something in common with the person with whom you share this nation. Um, and, um, and that you would sacrifice for them, whether it's by paying taxes for them or, um, you know, we're going to war to defend them. Um, that's a vision of, you know, what we might call civic nationalism. Um, uh, that's, that's the good version. The question is whether you could have that, um, without having, um, exclusionary nationalism, you know, hating the other, right? Fearing the other saying, uh, yeah, you're part of this nation, uh, against all others. Um, and I think there's a long tradition in America of a very inclusive, uh, nationalism, um, that is open, uh, inclusive, um, and, you know, new people to this shared project. Um, that's something to be defended. Exclusionary nationalism is based on, you know, um, uh, uh, ethnic hatreds and others that we see throughout the world. Um, those are things to be afraid of. But there is a kind of narrative in the United States that a nationalism that includes the big umbrella of democratic nations, nations that strive for freedom and everybody else is against, is against freedom and against human nature. And it just so happens that it's half and half split across the world. So that's imperialism that feels like it beats the drum of war. Yeah. And I, I mean, I don't want to paint too rosy a picture and certainly, you know, the United States, um, as a nation has often found it easier to define ourselves against something than to clarify exactly what we're for. Yeah. Yeah. The Cold War, China today. That's not only United States. I suppose that's, that's human nature. It's, we need a competitor. It's almost like maybe the success of human civilization requires figuring out how to construct competitors that don't result in global war. Yes. Or figuring out how to turn enemies into rivals and competitors. There's a real difference. You know, you can, you, you know, you compete with competitors. You, you fight with enemies. Yeah. With competitors is a respect, maybe even a love underlying the competition. What lessons, what are the biggest lessons you take away from World War I? Maybe we talked about several, but you know, you look back at the 20th century. What, as a historian, what do you learn about human nature, about human civilization, about history from looking at this war? I think the, the lesson I would want everyone to take from the story of the First World War is that human life is not cheap. That all of the warring powers thought that just by throwing more men and more material at the front, they would solve their political problems with military force. And at the end of the day in 1918, one side did win that, but it didn't actually solve any of those political problems. And in the end, the regular people paid the price with their lives. They did. And people who, people who had been told that their lives were cheap remembered that, right? And it sort of, you know, reshapes mass politics for the rest of the 20th century, both in Europe and around the world. Yeah. The, yeah, the cost of a death of a single soldier is not just, or a single civilian is not just the cost of that single life. It's the resentment, that the anger, the hate that reverberates throughout. One of the things I saw in Ukraine is the birth of, at scale of generational hate, not towards administrations or leaders, but towards entire peoples. And that hate, I mean, overnight that hate is created and it takes perhaps decades for that hate to dissipate. It takes decades and it takes, it takes collective effort to build institutions that divert that hate into other places. One of the biggest things I thought was not part of the calculus in when the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq is the creation of hate. When you drop a bomb, even if it hits military targets, even if it kills soldiers, which in that case it didn't, there's a very large amount of civilians. What does that do to the, yeah, like, how many years, minutes, hours, months, and years of hate do you create with a single bomb you drop? And I calculate that like literally in the Pentagon have a chart, how many people will hate us? How many people does it take, do some science here, how many people does it take, when you have a million people that hate you, how many of them will become terrorists? How many of them will do something to the nation you love and care about, which is the United States, will do something that will be very costly? I feel like there was not a plot in a chart. It was more about short term effects. Yes, it's again, it's the idea of using military force to solve political problems. And I think there's a squandering of goodwill that people have around the world toward the United States. That's a respect for its economy, for its consumer products, and so forth. And I think that's been lost, a lot of that. Do you think leaders can stop war? I have perhaps a romantic notion, perhaps because I do these podcasts in person and so on, that leaders that get in a room together and can talk, they can stop war. I mean, that's the power of a leader, especially one in an authoritarian regime that they can, through camaraderie, alleviate some of the emotions associated with ego. Yes, leaders can stop war if they get into the room when they understand from the masses in their countries that war is something that they want stopped. So the people ultimately have a really big say. They do, that it was mass movements by people in the United States for the nuclear freeze, even Russia pushing for openness that brought, for example, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to Reykjavik to sort of debate and eventually sort of put caps on nuclear weapons. Those two people made choices in the room that made that possible, but they were both being pushed and knew they were being pushed by their people. Boy, that's a tough one. It puts a lot of responsibility on the German people, for example. In both wars, we fans of history tend to conceive of history as a meeting of leaders. We think of Chamberlain, we think of Churchill and the importance of them in the Second World War. We think about Hitler and Stalin and think that if certain conversations happen, the war could have been avoided. You tell the story of how many times Hitler and Nazi Germany's military might was not sufficient, they could have been easily stopped. And the pacifists, the people who believed Hitler or foolish enough to believe Hitler didn't act properly. And if the leaders just woke up to that idea, in fact, Churchill is a kind of representation of that. But in your conception here, it's possible that Churchill was also a representation of the British people, even though seemingly unpopular. That gave birth to somebody like Churchill, who said, we'll never surrender, right? She'll fight in the beaches. Yeah. And I think World War II Britain is a good example of that. It is clearly a dynamic leader who has his pulse on what the people want and demand and are willing to do. And you know, it's a dynamic art of leading that and shaping those wants at the same time as knowing that you're bound by them. Well then if we conceive of history in this way, let me ask you about our presidents. You are taking on the impossibly difficult task of teaching a course in a couple of years here or in one year called the history of American presidential elections. So if the people are in part responsible for leaders, how can we explain what is going on in America that we have the leaders that we do today? So if we think about the elections of the past several cycles, I guess let me ask, are we a divided nation? Are we more of a divided nation than we were in the past? What do you understand about the American citizen at the beginning of this century from the leaders we have elected? Yes, obviously we are a divided country in our rhetoric, in our day to day politics. But we are nowhere near as divided as we have been in other periods in our history, right? The most obvious, of course, being in the American Civil War, 150 years ago. And the distinction is not just that we haven't come to blows, but that we are fundamentally one society, one economy, and sort of deeply integrated as a nation, both domestically and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like the United States in 1861. Will political rhetoric continue to be extreme? Of course. But we're not as divided as people think we are. Well, then if you actually look throughout human history, does it always get, so outside of the people, do the elections get as contentious as they've recently been? So there's a kind of perception has been very close and there's a lot of accusations, a lot of tensions. It's very heated. It's almost fueling the machine of division. Has that often been the case? It has. It hasn't, it hasn't. I mean, I do think right now is different. And there it's worth distinguishing, are there deep social or economic divisions, which I don't actually think that there are, versus partisanship in particular, sort of the rivalry between the two parties. And it's very clear that we are in an era of what political scientists call hyper partisanship, right? And that the two parties have taken sort of fundamentally different positions and moved further apart from one another. And that is what I think people talk about when they say our country is divided. So the country may not be divided even if our politics are highly partisan. That is a divergence from other time periods in our history. So I wonder if this kind of political partisanship is actually an illusion of division. I sometimes feel like we mostly all agree on some basic fundamentals and the things that people allegedly disagree on are really blown out of proportion. And there's like a media machine and the politicians really want you to pick a blue side and a red side. And because of that, somehow I mean, families break up over Thanksgiving dinner about who they voted for. There's a really strong pressure to be the red or blue. And I wonder if that's a feature or a bug. Whether this is just part of the mechanism of democracy that we want to, even if there's not a real thing to be divided over, we need to construct it such that you can always have attention of ideas in order to make progress, to figure out how to progress as a nation. I think we're figuring that out in real time. On the one hand, it's easy to say that it's a feature of a political system that has two parties. And the United States is in some ways unique in not being a parliamentary democracy. And so in some ways, you would think that would be the feature that is causing partisanship and to reach these heights. That said, we can even see in parliamentary systems all around the world that the same kinds of rhetorics of irreconcilable division, a kind of politics of emotion are proliferating around the world. Some of that, as you say, I think is not as real as it appears on television, on social media and other formats. I don't know that other countries that are experiencing political conflict, I'm not sure that they're deeply divided either. So I've had the fortune of being intellectually active through the George Bush versus Al Gore election, then the Obama and it's just every election since. And it seems like a large percentage of those elections, there's been a claim that the elections were rigged, that there is some conspiracy, corruption, malevolence on the other side. I distinctly remember when Donald Trump won in 2016, a lot of people I know said that election was rigged and there's different explanations, including Russian influence. And then in 2020, I was just running in Austin along the river and somebody said like, oh, huge fan of the podcast. And they said like, what do you think of it? This is just not right. What's happening in this country that the 2020 election was obviously rigged from their perspective in electing Joe Biden versus Donald Trump. Do you think there's a case to be made for and against each claim in the full context of history of our elections being rigged? I think the American election system is fundamentally sound and reliable. And I think that the evidence is clear for that regardless of which election you're looking at. In some ways, whether you look at a presidential election or even a local county election for dog catcher or something, that the amount of time and resources and precision that go into voter registration, vote counting, certification processes are crucial to democratic institutions. I think when someone says rigged, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're coming from, they're looking for an answer. They're looking for that one answer for what is in fact a complex system. So on the left, when they say rigged, they may be pointing to a wide range of ways in which they think that the system is tilted through gerrymandering, misrepresentation through the electoral college. On the right, when people say rigged, they may be concerned about voter security, about ways in which the mainstream media may control messages. And in both cases, the feeling is it's articulated as my vote didn't get counted right. But the deeper concern is my vote doesn't count. My voice isn't being heard. So no, I don't think the elections are rigged. So let me sort of push back, right? There's a comfort to the story that they're not rigged. And a lot of us like to live in comfort. So people who articulate conspiracy theories say, sure, it's nice to be comfortable, but here's the reality. And the thing they articulate is there's incentives in close elections, which we seem to have nonstop close elections. There's so many financial interests. There's so many powerful people. Surely you can construct not just with the media and all the ways you describe both on the left and the right, the elections could be rigged, but literally actually in a fully illegal way manipulate the results of votes. Surely there's incentive to do that. And I don't think that's a totally ridiculous argument because it's like, all right, well, I mean, it actually lands to the question, which is a hard question for me to ask as an optimist of how many malevolent people out there and how many malevolent people are required to rig an election. So how many, what is the face transition for a system to become from like a corruption light to high level of corruption such that you could do things like rig elections, which is what happens quite a lot in many nations in the world even today. So yes, there is interference in elections and there has been in American history. And we can go all the way back into the 18th century. You don't have to go back to Texas in the 1960s, LBJ to find examples of direct interference in the outcome of elections. And there are incentives to do that. Those incentives will only feel more existential as hyper partisanship makes people think that the outcome of the elections are a matter of black and white or life and death. And you will see people organizing every way they can to shape elections. We saw this in the 1850s when settlers, pro and anti slavery, flooded into Kansas to try to determine the outcome of an election. We see this in the reconstruction period, right? When the Ku Klux Klan shows up to block the doors for black voters in the South. This history is not new, it's there. I think the reason why I think that the system is sound is not... When I say I believe that the election system is fundamentally sound, I'm not trying to be reassuring or encourage complacency, right? I'm saying this is something that we need to do and to work on. So the current electoral mechanisms are sufficiently robust. Even if there is corruption, even if there is rigging, the force that self corrects and ensures that nobody gets out of line is much stronger than the other incentives, which are the corrupting incentives. And that's the thing I talked about visiting Ukraine, talking about corruption, where a lot of people talk about corruption as being a symptom. If the system allows, creates these incentives for there to be corruption, humans will always go for corruption. That's just, you have to assume that. The power of the United States is that it constructs systems that prevent you from being corrupt at scale. At least, I mean, it depends what you believe of most of us. If you believe in this country, you have to... You believe in the self correcting mechanisms of corruption, that even if that desire is in the human heart, the system resists it, prevents it. That's your current belief. Yes, as of today. But I do think that that will require oversight by institutions, ideally ones that are insulated as much as possible from partisan politics, which is very difficult right now. And it will require the demands of the American people that they want these elections to be fair and secure. And that means being willing to lose them, regardless of which party you're in favor of. So what do you think about the power of the media to create partisanship? I'm really worried that there's a huge incentive, speaking of incentives, to divide the country. The media and the politicians, I'm not sure where it originates, but it feels like it's the media. Maybe it's a very cynical perspective on journalism, but it seems like if we're angry and divided as evenly as possible, you're going to maximize the number of clicks. So it's almost like the media wants to elect people that are going to be the most divisive, maximizing. And the worry I have is they are not beyond either feeding or, if you want to be very cynical, manufacturing narratives that lead that division, like the narrative of an election being rigged. Because if you convinced half the populace that the election was completely rigged, that's a really good way to get a lot of clicks. And the very cynical view is I don't know if the media machine will stop the destruction of our democracy in service of getting more clicks. It may destroy our entire democracy just to get more clicks, just because the fire as the thing burns down will get clicks. Am I putting too much blame on the media here? The machine of it? You're diagnosing the incentive structure, you're depicting that with 100% accuracy. But I think history teaches that you might be giving the media too much sort of causal power, that the American people are smarter than the media that they consume. Even today, we know that. Even people who consume just Fox or just MSNBC know what they're consuming. So I don't think that media will be the solution. And I certainly don't think that returning to a media structure of the mid 20th century with three news channels that all tell us one story, that's no golden age that we're trying to get back to, for sure. Well, there is a novel thing in human history, which is Twitter and social media and so on. So we're trying to find our footing as a nation to figure out how to think about politics, how to maintain our basic freedoms, our sense of democracy, of our interaction with government and so on, on this new medium of social media. Do you think Twitter, how do you think Twitter changed things? Do you think Twitter is good for democracy? Do you think it has changed what it means to be an American citizen? Or is it just the same old media mechanism? It has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It may have changed the day to day sound of being and the experience of it. It got noisier, it got louder and it got more decentered. I think Twitter, it's paradoxical. On the one hand, it is a fundamentally democratic platform. And in some ways, it democratizes institutions that had gatekeepers and authority figures for a very long time. But on the other hand, it's not a democratic institution at all. It's a for profit corporation. And it operates under those principles. And so that said, it's an institution of American and global life that the people of the United States have the authority to regulate or reshape as they see fit, both that and other major media players. So one of the most dramatic decisions that illustrate both sides of what you're saying is when Twitter decided to ban, I think permanently, the President of the United States, Donald Trump off of Twitter. Can you make the case that that was a good idea and make the case that that was a bad idea? Can you see both perspectives on this? Yes, I think, I mean, the simple fact of the matter is, you know, Twitter is a platform, it has rules of service. Twitter concluded that President Trump had violated the terms of service and blocked him, right? And if you have rules, you have to enforce them. Did it have, you know, did it have consequences? It had direct and predictable consequences, you know, that of creating a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken a side in politics or confirming their belief that it had done so. Will it have unintended consequences? You know, this is where the historian can come in and say, yes, there's always unintended consequences. And we don't know, you know, sort of what it would mean for political figures to be excluded from various media platforms under sort of under these notions, right, that they had violated terms of service, etc. So, you know, so I guess we'll see, I guess. Well, to me, so I'm generally against censorship. But to take Twitter's perspective, it's unclear to me, in terms of unintended consequences, whether censoring a human being from being part of your platform is going to decrease or increase the amount of hate in the world. So there's a strong case to be made that banning somebody like Donald Trump increases the amount of resentment among people, and that's a very large number of people that support him, or even love him, or even see him as a great president, one of the greatest this country has had. And so if you completely suppress his voice, you're going to intensify the support that he has, from just the regular support for another human being who ran for president, to somebody that becomes an almost heroic figure for that set of people. Now, the flipside is removing a person from a platform like Donald Trump might lessen the megaphone of that particular person, might actually level the democratic notion that everybody has a voice. So basically, removing the loud extremes is helpful for giving the center, the calm, the thoughtful voices more power. And so in that sense, that teaches a lesson that don't be crazy in any one direction. Don't go full, don't go Lenin, don't go Hitler, don't, don't, like you have to stay in the middle. There's divisions in the middle, there's discussions in the middle, but stay in the middle. That's sort of the steel man the case for, for censoring. But I, boy, is censorship a slippery slope. And also boys Twitter becoming a thing that's more than just a company. It seems like it's a medium of communication that we use for, for information, for, for knowledge, for wisdom even, you know, during the period of COVID, we use that to gain an understanding of what the hell's going on. What should we do? What's the state of the art science? Science fundamentally transformed during the time of COVID because you have no time for the full review cycle that science usually goes through. And some of the best sources of information for me, from the conspiracy theory to the best doctors was Twitter. The data, the stats, all that kind of stuff. And that feels like, like more than a com more than a company. And then Twitter and YouTube and different places took a really strong stance on COVID, which is the lazy stance in my opinion, which is we're going to listen to whatever CDC or the institutions have said. But the reality is you're an institution of your own now. You're kind of the press. You're like, there's a, there's a, it's, it's a really difficult position. It's a really, really difficult position to take. But I wish they've stepped up and take on the full responsibility and the pain of fighting for the freedom of speech. Yes, they need, they need to do that. But you know, I'm struck by some of the things that you said, ways in which, you know, Twitter has the power to shape the conversation. And I don't think in a democratic society, democratic policies should cede that power to, to for profit companies. Do you agree that it's possible that Twitter has that power currently? Do you sense that it has the power? Is that my sense is Twitter has the power to start wars, like tweets have the power to start wars to, to, yeah, to, to change the direction of elections? Maybe in the sense in the ways in which, you know, a wave has the power to wash away sand, right? You know, it's, it's the, it's still the medium, right? It's not, it's not in itself an actor. It's how actors use the platform, which requires us to scrutinize the structure of the platform and access to it. Unfortunately, it's not, maybe it's similar to the wave. It's not just a medium. It's a, it's a medium plus, it's a medium that enables virality that benefits from virality of engagement. And that means singular voices can, can have a disproportionate impact, like not even voices, singular ideas, dramatic ideas can have a disproportionate impact. And so that actually threatens, it's almost like I don't know what the equivalent is in nature, but it's a, it's a wave that can grow exponentially because of the intensity of the, the initial intensity of the wave. I don't know how to describe this as a dynamical system, but it feels like, it feels like there, there is a responsibility there not to accelerate, not to accelerate voices just because they get a lot of engagement. You have to have a proportional representation of that voice. But you're saying that a strong democracy should be robust to that. A strong democracy can and should, and will be. I mean, I think the other thing a historian will tell you about Twitter is that this too shall pass, right? Yeah. But, but I do think, you know, the structures of, of the, of the platform of the algorithm of, of this and other major players are, are eligible for scrutiny by, by democratic institutions. So in preparing to teach the course, the history of American presidential elections leading up to the 2024 elections. So one of the lessons of history is this too shall pass. So don't make everything about, this is, this is going to either save or destroy our nation. That seems to be like the message of every single election. As I'm doing Trump hands. Do you think Donald Trump, what do you think about the 2024 election? Do you think Donald Trump runs? Do you think the, the tension will grow? Or was that a singular moment? Do you think you'll be like AOC versus Trump or whoever, whatever the most maximum drama maximizing thing? Or will things stabilize? I think I can, I can, you know, historians don't like to predict the future, but I can predict this one that it will not be a calm and, and, and stabilized election. I think as of, you know, the time that we're talking in 2022, we don't, there are too many you know, sort of open questions, particularly about whether Joe Biden will run for reelection. He says he will, but you know, but the jury I think is out on that. You know, I, I can't predict whether Donald Trump will run for, for election or not. I think you know, we do know that, that, that president Trump doesn't like to, to start things he can't win. And if the polling data suggests that he's not a credible candidate, he might be reluctant to enter the race and might might find more appealing, the kind of sideline kind of King maker role that he's been crafting since he left the White House. You know, I think there are plenty of people who are you know, dreaming that there's some sort of centrist candidate you know, you know whether it's a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican who will you know, save us from, from, from all of this either within the party or in a third party run. I don't think that's likely. Why aren't we getting them? Why don't you think it's likely? What's the explanation? This seems to be a general hunger for a person like this. You would, but the system sorts it out, right? You know, that the, the, that the primary systems and the party you know, party candidate selection systems you know, will favor sort of more, you know, more partisan views, right? More conservative Republicans, more liberal Democrats as the kind of center candidates. It seems like the system prefers mediocre executor, mediocre leaders, mediocre partisan leaders. If I had to take a cynical look, but maybe I'm romanticizing the leaders of the past and maybe I'm just remembering the great leaders of the past. And yeah, I can assure you there's plenty of mediocre partisans in the 19th century. In the 20th. Well, let me ask you about platforming. Do you think Donald, it's the Twitter question, but I was torn about whether to talk to Donald Trump on this podcast. As a historian, what would you advise? I think, I mean, you know, this is a, this is a difficult question, right? For, for historians who want, you know, sort of want to make sure that they know sort of what Americans are thinking and talking about, you know, for centuries later. So one of the things that, you know, at least my understanding is that when President Trump was banned from Twitter, his account was also deleted. And that is one of the most valuable sources that historians will use to understand that the era and parts of it were sort of, you know, archived and reconstructed. But, you know, but in that sense, I think that that is also a real loss to the historical record. I mean, I think that your podcast shows you'll, you'll talk to, you'll talk to anyone. I'm here, right? So, you know, I'm not in the business of saying, you know, don't, don't, don't talk, don't talk. That's one of the difficult things when I think about Hitler. I think Hitler, Stalin, I don't know if World War I quite has the same intensity of controversial leaders. But one of the sad things from a historian perspective is how few interviews Hitler has given or Stalin has given. And that's such a difficult thing because it's obvious that talking to Donald Trump, that talking to Xi Jinping, talking to Putin is really valuable from a historical perspective to understand. But then you think about the momentary impact of such a conversation and you think, well, depending on how the conversation goes, you could steer or a flame. What is it? Feed the flame of war or conflict or, um, abuses of power and things like this. And that's, I think the tension between the journalist and the historian, because when a journalist interview dictators, for example, one of the things that strikes me is they're often very critical of the dictator. They're, they're, they're like, um, they're basically attacking them in front of their face as opposed to trying to understand. Because what I perceive they're doing is they're signaling to the other journalists that they're on the right side of history kind of thing. Um, but that's not very productive. That's also why the dictators and leaders often don't do those interviews. It's not productive to understanding who the human being is. To understand, you have to empathize. Because few people, I think few leaders do something from a place of malevolence. I think they really do think they're doing good. And not even for themselves, not even for selfish reasons. I think they're doing great for the, they're doing the right thing for their country or for whoever the group they're leading. And to understand that you have to, and, and by the way, a large percent of the country often supports them. I bet if you poll legitimately poll people in North Korea, they will believe that their leader is doing the right thing for their country. Um, and so to understand that you have to empathize. So that's the tension of the journalist, I think, and the historian, cause obviously the historian doesn't, doesn't care. They really want to, they care obviously deeply, but they, they know that history requires deep understanding of the human being in the full context. Uh, yeah, it's a tough decision to make. Yeah. Well, I think it's, uh, both for journalists and historians, um, the challenge is not to be too close to your subject, right? Um, and you know, not to be, um, overly influenced and used by them, right? You know, when you're talking to a living subject, which historians do, you know, um, to, um, you know, it's, it's a matter of making sure that you triangulate their story with, with the rest of the record, right? Um, uh, and that may paint a different picture of, of the person then, um, and will prevent you as a journalist or a historian from kind of, you know, just telling someone else's story. And so, and historians also have the benefit of going back, you know, 30, 40 years and finding all the other stories and figuring out, you know, uh, playing two truths and a lie, you know, which parts are, you know, which parts are accurate, which are, which are not. And journalists do that work in a day to day basis, but historians, um, you know, we get a little more time to think about what we're doing. Well, I, I personally also think it's deeply disrespectful to the populace, to people, to um, censor and ignore a person that's supported by a very large number of people. Like that you owe, I personally feel like you owe the citizens of this country a deep, uh, empathy and understanding of the leaders they support, even if you disagree with what they say. I mean, that's the, the, to me, I'm much more worried about the resentment of the censorship, um, that it's to having a good conversation with Donald Trump is, is ultimately valuable. Uh, because he, I think, uh, especially in this case, I agree with you that Donald Trump is not a singular person. He is a, he represents a set of feelings that a large number of people have and whatever those feelings are, you can try to figure out by talking to people, but also talking to the, the, the, the man and then seeing the interplay there, what does this really represent in this period in history, in this slice of the world? Um, yeah, ultimately understanding, I think leads to, uh, compassion and love and unity, which is how this whole thing progresses. The tension between the different sides is useful to, um, have a good conversation, but ultimately coming up with the right answer and progressing towards that answer is, is how you make progress. Do you think a pure democracy can work? So we have this representative of democracy with these contentious elections and so on. When we start a civilization on Mars, which becomes more and more realistic technologically, we can have a more direct access to be able to vote on issues and vote for ideas. Do you think it can work? I don't think we have to go to Mars, uh, to do it. Right. Um, uh, I think, um, the answer is not, you know, to flip a switch and turn on something called pure democracy. Um, uh, when people are not ready for it, when their, uh, incentive structures are not sort of structured for it, but you can, um, you know, experiment with more democratic forms of governance one after another, right? Whether it's, um, you know, sort of experimenting with, um, technology to find new ways of sort of, of getting, uh, greater rates of participation in democracy. Um, I think that we see some experiments in, um, sort of more complicated systems of voting, um, that in fact might actually be more reflective of people's choices than simply picking one candidate, right? Sort of ranked choice voting or, uh, runoffs, other kinds of things. Um, you know, I think that we can think more, uh, creatively about something like participatory budgeting, right? In which, um, you know, uh, we put all this money into the government. Um, and then, um, you know, we, we, um, you know, should, as a, as a people, there are more democratic ways of, of sort of, of how we spend it. Um, and I think the most urgent in some level is a more, uh, democratic form of foreign policymaking, right? That foreign policymaking, decision making, um, uh, about the military, about foreign policy, um, is, is very ways insulated from, from popular participation, um, in, in modern American history. Um, and I think, you know, there, uh, technology is not the, the going to solve this. Um, you know, it's a combination of technology and, and human creativity, but I think, um, you know, I think we can start heading that direction. Whether we get there before we get to Mars, I don't, I don't know. What interesting lessons and thoughts, if you look at the fundamentals of the history of American elections, do you hope to reveal when you try to teach the class? And, um, how would those fundamentals be met by the, by the students that received that wisdom? So what do you think about this dance? It's such an interesting idea. And I hope you do go through with this kind of idea is look at the history while the next one is happening. Yes. I think, you know, it's worth remembering, right? That the students who are typical American student who's in college right now, right? Has lived their entire life after, uh, the election of 2000 and Bush V Gore, right? Um, and after nine 11 probably. And yeah, absolutely. Yes. After all of, after all of these things. Right. And, and, um, so on the one hand they take partisanship and contentious elections for granted. Um, they don't, I think share, um, you know, sort of some vision that things were, you know, things used to be different, right? They don't remember a world that had like lots of moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans and, um, you know, sort of running around in it. Um, but, um, you know, so in some ways it's a way of, of looking back into the past to find other ways of, of, of organizing our politics. Uh, it's also a way of, of reassuring students that we have been through contentious and even, um, sort of violent elections before in our history. Um, and you know, that people have defended the right to vote, right? People have risked their lives to vote. Um, uh, you know, I think they will, they will understand that, that as well. And maybe knowledge of history here can help deescalate the emotions you might feel about one candidate or another. And I, from a place of calmness, you can more easily arrive at wisdom. Uh, that, that's my hope. Um, yeah. Just as a brief aside, you, brief aside, but nevertheless, uh, you wrote the book Bound by War that describes a century of war in the Pacific. So looking at this slice of geography and power, uh, so most crucially through the partnership between the United States and the Philippines, can you tell us some aspect of the story that is often perhaps not considered when you start to look more at the geopolitics of Europe and Soviet Union and the United States? What, how did the, the war in, in the Pacific define the 20th century? Yeah, I came to this book Bound by War, um, from a sense that, um, that our stories were too lopsided, um, toward, toward Europe, right? That American history, when viewed from the Pacific, um, specifically in the 20th century, um, helps us understand American power, um, in some new ways, right? Uh, not only American, uh, projection of power into Asia, right? But also the ways in which American power affected, uh, people in Asia, right? Um, either as, uh, you know, in places like the Philippines where the United States, uh, had a colony for almost 50 years or Asian Americans, people who had migrated over their descendants in the United States. And those linkages, uh, between the United States and Asia, uh, particularly, uh, the U S Philippine connection, I think were something that needed to be traced across the 20th century. Cause it's a way kind of a new way of seeing American power, you know, from, from a different angle, uh, you see it in, in that way. There's some aspect that define America from, from when you take the perspective of the Pacific, what, what military conflict and, and the asymmetry of power there, right? So I start in, uh, in 1898, um, you know, with the U S invasion of the Philippines, um, uh, it's a conquest and annexation. Uh, and I think in many ways, this is a defining conflict of the 20th century. That's often completely overlooked or described, uh, I think incorrectly as merely a war with Spain, right? That the war in the Philippines, um, is our, uh, our first extended overseas conflict, our first conflict, um, in what would come to be called the developing world or third world. Uh, it's a form of, of counter insurgency. Um, you know, this is the U S army sort of learning lessons that are then repeated again in the second world war in Korea, Vietnam, and, and even after 9 11. Is the Philippines our friends or enemies in this history? Well, that's the interesting part, right? Is that, uh, the book focuses in particular on Filipinos, uh, who fight with the Americans who fought, you know, sort of in the U S army and Navy, um, over the course of the 20th century. And they are in a fundamentally ironic position, right? They are, they are from the Philippines and they're fighting for the United States, um, which is the colonial power, uh, occupying their country. Um, and I think that, that irony persists, right? Um, so if you look at sort of polling data where they ask people all around the world, you know, you know, do you think positively or negatively about the United States? Um, that the highest, uh, responses are from the Philippines, right? Filipinos view the United States more favorably than people from any other country in the world, including America, right? That, that they're more think more favorably of Americans than Americans do. Um, and so, you know, sort of unpacking that irony is, is part of what I'm trying to get at in the book. What was the people power revolution and what lessons can we learn from it? You kind of assign an important, um, a large value to it in terms of what we can learn for the, uh, the American project. Yeah. So in 1986, um, the, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos is overthrown by a popular revolution known as people power, um, uh, in the wake of a contested and probably, uh, almost certainly rigged election, um, that, that sort of, uh, you know, kind of confirms his, his, his rule. Um, when that is over, overturned through sort of mass movements in the Philippines, it's also, uh, sort of confirmed in many ways by the, the reluctance of the United States to intervene, to prop up a cold war ally. Ferdinand Marcos had supported American policy throughout, um, his administration. Um, the Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan's president at the time, basically chooses not to support him. That's a personally wrenching decision for, for Reagan himself. Um, but it, it he's being shaped in many ways by the emerging voices of neoconservative political, uh, foreign policy voices. Um, in particular, uh, Paul Wolfowitz and the state department and others who see sort of movements for democracy and democratization that then kind of, uh, take fire in the late 20th century in Latin America, um, in South Korea, in Eastern Europe, um, and, you know, all around the world until it hits the wall in, in Tiananmen Square in June, 1989. Well, what's that wall? Uh, what's, what's the wall, what's the, what, what do you mean by it hits the wall? So there are, you know, the, there are global movements for pot for democratization, um, for, for, uh, opening up, um, you know, throughout the world, um, starting in the 1980s. Um, and, you know, obviously they continue, um, in Eastern Europe with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Um, you know, I say it hits the wall in, in, in China, um, in, with the protests in Tiananmen Square and that are, that are blocked, um, and that are crushed. And I think represent, uh, a real sort of turning point, um, in the history of, of democratic institutions, uh, on a global scale in the late 20th century. So there's some places where the fight for freedom will work and some places not. And that's the kind of lesson from the 20th to take forward to the 21st century. Uh, no, I think the lesson is, is maybe one that, that, you know, we talked about earlier that there's this dynamic dance between, um, between leaders, whether, uh, totalitarian leaders or leaders of democratic movements and the people that they're leading. Um, and some, you know, sometimes it works and sometimes, sometimes it doesn't. Let me ask a big, ridiculous question because we talked about, uh, sort of presidential elections. Um, now this is objectively, definitively, you have to answer one person. Who is the greatest president in American history? Oh, that's easy. Yeah. Abraham Lincoln. Is that easy? Not George Washington? Um, you know, Washington had his, uh, had the statesman qualities. He understood his power as, as, uh, as the first president. Also relinquished power. He was willing to relinquish power. Um, he, you know, uh, but, but Lincoln has the combination of personal leadership, um, a fundamental moral character and, um, and just the ability to kind of, uh, to fight the, the fight of politics, to play the game of it, um, to get where he's going, to play the short game and the long game, um, to kind of, you know, make to, uh, you know, to work with his enemies, to, to block them when he had to. Um, and you know, I mean, he, uh, gets the United States through the civil war. So you gotta give him some credit for that. And he's pretty good at making speeches. Uh, it, you know, obviously it helps that he's, uh, uh, a remarkable speaker, um, and able to convey those kinds of visions. Um, but, um, you know, but he, but he is first and foremost a politician, um, and probably the best one we have. Both at getting elected and at ruling. In some ways better, better at the doing than at the getting elected, right? Um, you know, that he, uh, you know, the election of 1860 is a, it's just a hot mess. Um, you know, that that could have worked out, um, many different ways. And even the election of 1864, um, you know, when we have a presidential election in the middle of a civil war, um, it was not a foregone conclusion that Lincoln would be reelected. Um, so, you know, both times he's sort of, um, you know, he's not a, a master campaigner, um, by, by any means, but he, he was a master politician as a, as a governor. Do we have leaders like that today? Is, is that, so one perspective is like, well, leaders aren't, ain't what they used to be. And then another perspective is, well, we always romanticize stuff that happens in the past. We forget the flaws and remember the great moments. Yeah. Uh, both of those things are true, right? Um, on the one hand, um, you know, we, we don't, uh, we are not surrounded by people of, of Lincoln's caliber, um, right now. That feels like the case. Um, and I think that, I think we can say that with some certainty, but, um, you know, I, I always like to point to president Harry Truman who left office with, you know, some truly abysmal, uh, uh, presidential ratings, um, was dismissed as a, throughout his presidency as a, you know, as a, as unqualified as not knowing what he was doing, et cetera. And it's then, you know, turns out, um, uh, with hindsight, we know that he was better at the job than anyone understood better at getting elected, right? You remember that sign, do he defeats Truman, right? He showed them, right? Uh, and better, better at holding power and better at sort of, um, you know, kind of building the kind of institutions that long after he was gone, um, demonstrated that he, he, he won the long game. And some of that is the victors do write the story. And, um, I asked myself very much, how will history remember Volodymyr Zelensky? It's not obvious. And how will history remember Putin? That too is not obvious. Um, because it depends on how the role, the geopolitics, the, how the nations, how the history of these nations unravel, unfold rather. So it's very interesting to think about. And the same is true for Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Obama, uh, George Bush, uh, Bill Clinton, and so on. I think it's a probably unanswerable question of which of the presidents will be remembered as a great president from this time. You can make all kinds of cases for all kinds of people and they do, but it's unclear. It's fascinating to think about when the robots finally take over, uh, what, which of the humans they will appreciate the most. Uh, let me ask for advice. Do you have, um, advice for, for young folks as they, uh, uh, cause you mentioned the, the, the folks you're teaching, they don't even, they don't know what it's like to have waited on the internet for the, for the thing to load up for every single webpage is suffering. They don't know what it's like to not have the internet and have a dial phone that goes, and then the joy of getting angry at somebody and hanging up with a physical phone. They don't, they don't know any of that. Uh, so for those young folks that look at the contention election, contentious elections, they look at our contentious world, our divided world. What advice would you give them of how to have a career they can be proud of? Let's say they're in college or in high school and how to have a life they can be proud of. Oh man, that's a big question. Um, yeah, I've never given a graduation speech. Uh, this is like warm up. Let's look for like raw materials before you write it. Uh, if I did, um, I think, um, I think I would advise students, um, that history teaches that you should be more optimistic than, um, than your current surroundings suggest. Right. And I think it would be very easy as a young person today to think, um, there's, there's nothing I can do about this politics. There's nothing I can say to this person on the other side of the aisle. There's nothing I can do about, you know, the planet, um, uh, et cetera, and just sort of give up. Um, and I think history, uh, teaches that, um, you know, uh, you know, we don't know who the winners and losers are in the long run, but, um, but we know that the people who give up are always the losers. Right. Um, so don't give into cynicism or apathy. Yeah. Optimism paves the way. Yeah. Because human beings are deeply, uh, resilient and creative, even under, um, far more difficult circumstances than, um, you know, than we face right now. Well, let me ask a question that you don't even need to, that you wouldn't even dare cover in your graduation, um, uh, commencement speech. Uh, what's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This whole project that history studies and analyzes as if, as if there's a point to the whole thing. What is the point? All the wars, all the presidents, all the struggles to discover what it means to be human of, uh, or reach for a higher ideal. Why? Why do you think we're here? Hmm. I think this is where there is often a handoff from the historian, um, to the clergy, um, you know, who, but in the end, um, uh, it's less of there's less distance between the two than you think. Right. That, um, you know, if you think about some of the kind of, uh, answers to that question, what is the meaning of life that are given from religious traditions? Um, often they have a fundamentally historical core, right? It's about, you know, unifying the past and the present, um, in some other, you know, non earthly, um, sort of dimension. Uh, and you know, so I think there is that, I think even for people who, who don't have a religious belief and there's a way in which history, um, is about the shared, the shared human condition. Um, and I think historians aspire to telling all of that story, right? Um, you know, we, we drill down on the, on the miseries of, of war and depressions and, and so forth. But, um, but you know, the story is not complete without, you know, blueberries and butterflies and, and, and, and all the rest that, that go with it. So both the humbling and the inspiring aspect that you get by looking back at human history that, uh, we're in this together. Christopher, this is a huge honor. This is an amazing conversation. Thank you for taking us back to a war that, uh, not often discussed, but in many ways defined the 20, the 20th century and the century we are in today, which is the first world war, the war that was supposed to end all wars, but instead defined the future wars and defines our struggle to, to try to avoid the world war three. So it's a huge honor you talk with me today. This is amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Christopher Capozzola. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you some words from Woodrow Wilson in 1917 about world war one that haunted the rest of the 20th century. This is a war to end all wars. George Santana, a Spanish American philosopher responded to this quote in 1922 by saying, only the dead have seen the end of war. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

Christopher Capozzola: World War I, Ideology, Propaganda, and Politics | Lex Fridman Podcast #320

By the time he gets to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold. And it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like. The following is a conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author, inventor, and futurist, who has an optimistic view of our future as a human civilization, predicting that exponentially improving technologies will take us to a point of a singularity beyond which superintelligent artificial intelligence will transform our world in nearly unimaginable ways. 18 years ago, in the book Singularity is Near, he predicted that the onset of the singularity will happen in the year 2045. He still holds to this prediction and estimate. In fact, he's working on a new book on this topic that will hopefully be out next year. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Ray Kurzweil. In your 2005 book titled The Singularity is Near, you predicted that the singularity will happen in 2045. So now, 18 years later, do you still estimate that the singularity will happen on 2045? And maybe first, what is the singularity, the technological singularity, and when will it happen? Singularity is where computers really change our view of what's important and change who we are. But we're getting close to some salient things that will change who we are. A key thing is 2029, when computers will pass the Turing test. And there's also some controversy whether the Turing test is valid. I believe it is. Most people do believe that, but there's some controversy about that. But Stanford got very alarmed at my prediction about 2029. I made this in 1999 in my book. The Age of Spiritual Machines. Right. And then you repeated the prediction in 2005. In 2005. Yeah. So they held an international conference, you might have been aware of it, of AI experts in 1999 to assess this view. So people gave different predictions, and they took a poll. It was really the first time that AI experts worldwide were polled on this prediction. And the average poll was 100 years. 20% believed it would never happen. And that was the view in 1999. 80% believed it would happen, but not within their lifetimes. There's been so many advances in AI that the poll of AI experts has come down over the years. So a year ago, something called Meticulous, which you may be aware of, assesses different types of experts on the future. They again assessed what AI experts then felt. And they were saying 2042. For the Turing test. For the Turing test. So it's coming down. And I was still saying 2029. A few weeks ago, they again did another poll, and it was 2030. So AI experts now basically agree with me. I haven't changed at all, I've stayed with 2029. And AI experts now agree with me, but they didn't agree at first. So Alan Turing formulated the Turing test, and... Right, now, what he said was very little about it. I mean, the 1950 paper where he had articulated the Turing test, there's like a few lines that talk about the Turing test. And it really wasn't very clear how to administer it. And he said if they did it in like 15 minutes, that would be sufficient, which I don't really think is the case. These large language models now, some people are convinced by it already. I mean, you can talk to it and have a conversation with it. You can actually talk to it for hours. So it requires a little more depth. There's some problems with large language models which we can talk about. But some people are convinced by the Turing test. Now, if somebody passes the Turing test, what are the implications of that? Does that mean that they're sentient, that they're conscious or not? It's not necessarily clear what the implications are. Anyway, I believe 2029, that's six, seven years from now, we'll have something that passes the Turing test and a valid Turing test, meaning it goes for hours, not just a few minutes. Can you speak to that a little bit? What is your formulation of the Turing test? You've proposed a very difficult version of the Turing test, so what does that look like? Basically, it's just to assess it over several hours and also have a human judge that's fairly sophisticated on what computers can do and can't do. If you take somebody who's not that sophisticated or even an average engineer, they may not really assess various aspects of it. So you really want the human to challenge the system. Exactly, exactly. On its ability to do things like common sense reasoning, perhaps. That's actually a key problem with large language models. They don't do these kinds of tests that would involve assessing chains of reasoning, but you can lose track of that. If you talk to them, they actually can talk to you pretty well and you can be convinced by it, but it's somebody that would really convince you that it's a human, whatever that takes. Maybe it would take days or weeks, but it would really convince you that it's human. Large language models can appear that way. You can read conversations and they appear pretty good. There are some problems with it. It doesn't do math very well. You can ask how many legs did 10 elephants have and they'll tell you, well, okay, each elephant has four legs and it's 10 elephants, so it's 40 legs. And you go, okay, that's pretty good. How many legs do 11 elephants have? And they don't seem to understand the question. Do all humans understand that question? No, that's the key thing. I mean, how advanced a human do you want it to be? But we do expect a human to be able to do multi chain reasoning, to be able to take a few facts and put them together, not perfectly. And we see that in a lot of polls that people don't do that perfectly at all. So it's not very well defined, but it's something where it really would convince you that it's a human. Is your intuition that large language models will not be solely the kind of system that passes the Turing test in 2029? Do we need something else? No, I think it will be a large language model, but they have to go beyond what they're doing now. I think we're getting there. And another key issue is if somebody actually passes the Turing test validly, I would believe they're conscious. And then not everybody would say that. It's okay, we can pass the Turing test, but we don't really believe that it's conscious. That's a whole nother issue. But if it really passes the Turing test, I would believe that it's conscious. But I don't believe that of large language models today. If it appears to be conscious, that's as good as being conscious, at least for you, in some sense. I mean, consciousness is not something that's scientific. I mean, I believe you're conscious, but it's really just a belief, and we believe that about other humans that at least appear to be conscious. When you go outside of shared human assumption, like are animals conscious? Some people believe they're not conscious. Some people believe they are conscious. And would a machine that acts just like a human be conscious? I mean, I believe it would be. But that's really a philosophical belief. You can't prove it. I can't take an entity and prove that it's conscious. There's nothing that you can do that would indicate that. It's like saying a piece of art is beautiful. You can say it. Multiple people can experience a piece of art as beautiful, but you can't prove it. But it's also an extremely important issue. I mean, imagine if you had something where nobody's conscious. The world may as well not exist. And so some people, like say Marvin Minsky, said, well, consciousness is not logical, it's not scientific, and therefore we should dismiss it, and any talk about consciousness is just not to be believed. But when he actually engaged with somebody who was conscious, he actually acted as if they were conscious. He didn't ignore that. He acted as if consciousness does matter. Exactly. Whereas he said it didn't matter. Well, that's Marvin Minsky. Yeah. He's full of contradictions. But that's true of a lot of people as well. But to you, consciousness matters. But to me, it's very important. But I would say it's not a scientific issue. It's a philosophical issue. And people have different views. Some people believe that anything that makes a decision is conscious. So your light switch is conscious. Its level of consciousness is low, not very interesting, but that's a consciousness. So a computer that makes a more interesting decision is still not at human levels, but it's also conscious and at a higher level than your light switch. So that's one view. There's many different views of what consciousness is. So if a system passes the Turing test, it's not scientific, but in issues of philosophy, things like ethics start to enter the picture. Do you think there would be, we would start contending as a human species about the ethics of turning off such a machine? Yeah, I mean, that's definitely come up. Hasn't come up in reality yet. Yet. But I'm talking about 2029. It's not that many years from now. So what are our obligations to it? It has a different, I mean, a computer that's conscious, it has a little bit different connotations than a human. We have a continuous consciousness. We're in an entity that does not last forever. Now, actually, a significant portion of humans still exist and are therefore still conscious. But anybody who is over a certain age doesn't exist anymore. That wouldn't be true of a computer program. You could completely turn it off and a copy of it could be stored and you could recreate it. And so it has a different type of validity. You could actually take it back in time. You could eliminate its memory and have it go over again. I mean, it has a different kind of connotation than humans do. Well, perhaps it can do the same thing with humans. It's just that we don't know how to do that yet. It's possible that we figure out all of these things on the machine first. But that doesn't mean the machine isn't conscious. I mean, if you look at the way people react, say, 3CPO or other machines that are conscious in movies, they don't actually present how it's conscious, but we see that they are a machine and people will believe that they are conscious and they'll actually worry about it if they get into trouble and so on. So 2029 is going to be the first year when a major thing happens. Right. And that will shake our civilization to start to consider the role of AI in this world. Yes and no. I mean, this one guy at Google claimed that the machine was conscious. But that's just one person. Right. When it starts to happen to scale. Well, that's exactly right because most people have not taken that position. I don't take that position. I mean, I've used different things like this and they don't appear to me to be conscious. As we eliminate various problems of these large language models, more and more people will accept that they're conscious. So when we get to 2029, I think a large fraction of people will believe that they're conscious. So it's not gonna happen all at once. I believe it will actually happen gradually and it's already started to happen. And so that takes us one step closer to the singularity. Another step then is in the 2030s when we can actually connect our neocortex, which is where we do our thinking, to computers. And I mean, just as this actually gains a lot to being connected to computers that will amplify its abilities, I mean, if this did not have any connection, it would be pretty stupid. It could not answer any of your questions. If you're just listening to this, by the way, Ray's holding up the all powerful smartphone. So we're gonna do that directly from our brains. I mean, these are pretty good. These already have amplified our intelligence. I'm already much smarter than I would otherwise be if I didn't have this. Because I remember my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, there was no way to get information from computers. I actually would go to a library, find a book, find the page that had an information I wanted, and I'd go to the copier, and my most significant information tool was a roll of quarters where I could feed the copier. So we're already greatly advanced that we have these things. There's a few problems with it. First of all, I constantly put it down, and I don't remember where I put it. I've actually never lost it. But you have to find it, and then you have to turn it on. So there's a certain amount of steps. It would actually be quite useful if someone would just listen to your conversation and say, oh, that's so and so actress, and tell you what you're talking about. So going from active to passive, where it just permeates your whole life. Yeah, exactly. The way your brain does when you're awake. Your brain is always there. Right. That's something that could actually just about be done today, where we'd listen to your conversation, understand what you're saying, understand what you're not missing, and give you that information. But another step is to actually go inside your brain. And there are some prototypes where you can connect your brain. They actually don't have the amount of bandwidth that we need. They can work, but they work fairly slowly. So if it actually would connect to your neocortex, and the neocortex, which I describe in How to Create a Mind, the neocortex is actually, it has different levels, and as you go up the levels, it's kind of like a pyramid. The top level is fairly small, and that's the level where you wanna connect these brain extenders. And so I believe that will happen in the 2030s. So just the way this is greatly amplified by being connected to the cloud, we can connect our own brain to the cloud, and just do what we can do by using this machine. Do you think it would look like the brain computer interface of like Neuralink? So would it be? Well, Neuralink, it's an attempt to do that. It doesn't have the bandwidth that we need. Yet, right? Right, but I think, I mean, they're gonna get permission for this because there are a lot of people who absolutely need it because they can't communicate. I know a couple people like that who have ideas and they cannot, they cannot move their muscles and so on. They can't communicate. And so for them, this would be very valuable, but we could all use it. Basically, it'd be, turn us into something that would be like we have a phone, but it would be in our minds. It would be kind of instantaneous. And maybe communication between two people would not require this low bandwidth mechanism of language. Yes, exactly. We don't know what that would be, although we do know that computers can share information like language instantly. They can share many, many books in a second. So we could do that as well. If you look at what our brain does, it actually can manipulate different parameters. So we talk about these large language models. I mean, I had written that it requires a certain amount of information in order to be effective and that we would not see AI really being effective until it got to that level. And we had large language models that were like 10 billion bytes, didn't work very well. They finally got to a hundred billion bytes and now they work fairly well. And now we're going to a trillion bytes. If you say lambda has a hundred billion bytes, what does that mean? Well, what if you had something that had one byte, one parameter, maybe you wanna tell whether or not something's an elephant or not. And so you put in something that would detect its trunk. If it has a trunk, it's an elephant. If it doesn't have a trunk, it's not an elephant. That would work fairly well. There's a few problems with it. And it really wouldn't be able to tell what a trunk is, but anyway. And maybe other things other than elephants have trunks, you might get really confused. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure which animals have trunks, but how do you define a trunk? But yeah, that's one parameter. You can do okay. So these things have a hundred billion parameters. So they're able to deal with very complex issues. All kinds of trunks. Human beings actually have a little bit more than that, but they're getting to the point where they can emulate humans. If we were able to connect this to our neocortex, we would basically add more of these abilities to make distinctions, and it could ultimately be much smarter and also be attached to information that we feel is reliable. So that's where we're headed. So you think that there will be a merger in the 30s, an increasing amount of merging between the human brain and the AI brain? Exactly. And the AI brain is really an emulation of human beings. I mean, that's why we're creating them, because human beings act the same way, and this is basically to amplify them. I mean, this amplifies our brain. It's a little bit clumsy to interact with, but it definitely is way beyond what we had 15 years ago. But the implementation becomes different, just like a bird versus the airplane, even though the AI brain is an emulation, it starts adding features we might not otherwise have, like ability to consume a huge amount of information quickly, like look up thousands of Wikipedia articles in one take. Exactly. I mean, we can get, for example, issues like simulated biology, where it can simulate many different things at once. We already had one example of simulated biology, which is the Moderna vaccine. And that's gonna be now the way in which we create medications. But they were able to simulate what each example of an mRNA would do to a human being, and they were able to simulate that quite reliably. And we actually simulated billions of different mRNA sequences, and they found the ones that were the best, and they created the vaccine. And they did, and talked about doing that quickly, they did that in two days. Now, how long would a human being take to simulate billions of different mRNA sequences? I don't know that we could do it at all, but it would take many years. They did it in two days, and one of the reasons that people didn't like vaccines is because it was done too quickly, it was done too fast. And they actually included the time it took to test it out, which was 10 months, so they figured, okay, it took 10 months to create this. Actually, it took us two days. And we also will be able to ultimately do the tests in a few days as well. Oh, because we can simulate how the body will respond to it. Yeah, that's a little bit more complicated because the body has a lot of different elements, and we have to simulate all of that, but that's coming as well. So ultimately, we could create it in a few days and then test it in a few days, and it would be done. And we can do that with every type of medical insufficiency that we have. So curing all diseases, improving certain functions of the body, supplements, drugs for recreation, for health, for performance, for productivity, all that kind of stuff. Well, that's where we're headed, because I mean, right now we have a very inefficient way of creating these new medications. But we've already shown it, and the Moderna vaccine is actually the best of the vaccines we've had, and it literally took two days to create. And we'll get to the point where we can test it out also quickly. Are you impressed by AlphaFold and the solution to the protein folding, which essentially is simulating, modeling this primitive building block of life, which is a protein, and its 3D shape? It's pretty remarkable that they can actually predict what the 3D shape of these things are, but they did it with the same type of neural net that won, for example, the Go test. So it's all the same. It's all the same. All the same approaches. They took that same thing and just changed the rules to chess, and within a couple of days, it now played a master level of chess greater than any human being. And the same thing then worked for AlphaFold, which no human had done. I mean, human beings could do, the best humans could maybe do 15, 20% of figuring out what the shape would be. And after a few takes, it ultimately did just about 100%. 100%. Do you still think the singularity will happen in 2045? And what does that look like? Once we can amplify our brain with computers directly, which will happen in the 2030s, that's gonna keep growing. That's another whole theme, which is the exponential growth of computing power. Yeah, so looking at price performance of computation from 1939 to 2021. Right, so that starts with the very first computer actually created by a German during World War II. You might have thought that that might be significant, but actually the Germans didn't think computers were significant, and they completely rejected it. The second one is also the ZUSA 2. And by the way, we're looking at a plot with the X axis being the year from 1935 to 2025. And on the Y axis in log scale is computation per second per constant dollar. So dollar normalized inflation. And it's growing linearly on the log scale, which means it's growing exponentially. The third one was the British computer, which the Allies did take very seriously. And it cracked the German code and enables the British to win the Battle of Britain, which otherwise absolutely would not have happened if they hadn't cracked the code using that computer. But that's an exponential graph. So a straight line on that graph is exponential growth. And you see 80 years of exponential growth. And I would say about every five years, and this happened shortly before the pandemic, people saying, well, they call it Moore's law, which is not the correct, because that's not all intel. In fact, this started decades before intel was even created. It wasn't with transistors formed into a grid. So it's not just transistor count or transistor size. Right, it started with relays, then went to vacuum tubes, then went to individual transistors, and then to integrated circuits. And integrated circuits actually starts like in the middle of this graph. And it has nothing to do with intel. Intel actually was a key part of this. But a few years ago, they stopped making the fastest chips. But if you take the fastest chip of any technology in that year, you get this kind of graph. And it's definitely continuing for 80 years. So you don't think Moore's law, broadly defined, is dead. It's been declared dead multiple times throughout this process. I don't like the term Moore's law, because it has nothing to do with Moore or with intel. But yes, the exponential growth of computing is continuing. It has never stopped. From various sources. I mean, it went through World War II, it went through global recessions. It's just continuing. And if you continue that out, along with software gains, which is a whole nother issue, and they really multiply, whatever you get from software gains, you multiply by the computer gains, you get faster and faster speed. This is actually the fastest computer models that have been created. And that actually expands roughly twice a year. Like, every six months it expands by two. So we're looking at a plot from 2010 to 2022. On the x axis is the publication date of the model, and perhaps sometimes the actual paper associated with it. And on the y axis is training, compute, and flops. And so basically this is looking at the increase in the, not transistors, but the computational power of neural networks. Yes, the computational power that created these models. And that's doubled every six months. Which is even faster than transistor division. Yeah. Now actually, since it goes faster than the amount of cost, this has actually become a greater investment to create these. But at any rate, by the time we get to 2045, we'll be able to multiply our intelligence many millions fold. And it's just very hard to imagine what that will be like. And that's the singularity where we can't even imagine. Right, that's why we call it the singularity. Because the singularity in physics, something gets sucked into its singularity and you can't tell what's going on in there because no information can get out of it. There's various problems with that, but that's the idea. It's too much beyond what we can imagine. Do you think it's possible we don't notice that what the singularity actually feels like is we just live through it with exponentially increasing cognitive capabilities and we almost, because everything's moving so quickly, aren't really able to introspect that our life has changed. Yeah, but I mean, we will have that much greater capacity to understand things, so we should be able to look back. Looking at history, understand history. But we will need people, basically like you and me, to actually think about these things. But we might be distracted by all the other sources of entertainment and fun because the exponential power of intellect is growing, but also there'll be a lot of fun. The amount of ways you can have, you know. I mean, we already have a lot of fun with computer games and so on that are really quite remarkable. What do you think about the digital world, the metaverse, virtual reality? Will that have a component in this or will most of our advancement be in physical reality? Well, that's a little bit like Second Life, although the Second Life actually didn't work very well because it couldn't actually handle too many people. And I don't think the metaverse has come to being. I think there will be something like that. It won't necessarily be from that one company. I mean, there's gonna be competitors. But yes, we're gonna live increasingly online, and particularly if our brains are online. I mean, how could we not be online? Do you think it's possible that given this merger with AI, most of our meaningful interactions will be in this virtual world most of our life? We fall in love, we make friends, we come up with ideas, we do collaborations, we have fun. I actually know somebody who's marrying somebody that they never met. I think they just met her briefly before the wedding, but she actually fell in love with this other person, never having met them. And I think the love is real, so. That's a beautiful story, but do you think that story is one that might be experienced as opposed to by hundreds of thousands of people, but instead by hundreds of millions of people? I mean, it really gives you appreciation for these virtual ways of communicating. And if anybody can do it, then it's really not such a freak story. So I think more and more people will do that. But that's turning our back on our entire history of evolution. The old days, we used to fall in love by holding hands and sitting by the fire, that kind of stuff. Here, you're playing. Actually, I have five patents on where you can hold hands, even if you're separated. Great. So the touch, the sense, it's all just senses. It's all just replicated. Yeah, I mean, touch is, it's not just that you're touching someone or not. There's a whole way of doing it, and it's very subtle. But ultimately, we can emulate all of that. Are you excited by that future? Do you worry about that future? I have certain worries about the future, but not virtual touch. Well, I agree with you. You described six stages in the evolution of information processing in the universe, as you started to describe. Can you maybe talk through some of those stages from the physics and chemistry to DNA and brains, and then to the very end, to the very beautiful end of this process? It actually gets more rapid. So physics and chemistry, that's how we started. So the very beginning of the universe. We had lots of electrons and various things traveling around. And that took actually many billions of years, kind of jumping ahead here to kind of some of the last stages where we have things like love and creativity. It's really quite remarkable that that happens. But finally, physics and chemistry created biology and DNA. And now you had actually one type of molecule that described the cutting edge of this process. And we go from physics and chemistry to biology. And finally, biology created brains. I mean, not everything that's created by biology has a brain, but eventually brains came along. And all of this is happening faster and faster. Yeah. It created increasingly complex organisms. Another key thing is actually not just brains, but our thumb. Because there's a lot of animals with brains even bigger than humans. I mean, elephants have a bigger brain. Whales have a bigger brain. But they've not created technology because they don't have a thumb. So that's one of the really key elements in the evolution of humans. This physical manipulator device that's useful for puzzle solving in the physical reality. So I could think, I could look at a tree and go, oh, I could actually trip that branch down and eliminate the leaves and carve a tip on it and I would create technology. And you can't do that if you don't have a thumb. Yeah. So thumbs then created technology and technology also had a memory. And now those memories are competing with the scale and scope of human beings. And ultimately we'll go beyond it. And then we're gonna merge human technology with human intelligence and understand how human intelligence works, which I think we already do. And we're putting that into our human technology. So create the technology inspired by our own intelligence and then that technology supersedes us in terms of its capabilities. And we ride along. Or do you ultimately see it as... And we ride along, but a lot of people don't see that. They say, well, you've got humans and you've got machines and there's no way we can ultimately compete with humans. And you can already see that. Lee Soudal, who's like the best Go player in the world, says he's not gonna play Go anymore. Because playing Go for a human, that was like the ultimate in intelligence because no one else could do that. But now a machine can actually go way beyond him. And so he says, well, there's no point playing it anymore. That may be more true for games than it is for life. I think there's a lot of benefit to working together with AI in regular life. So if you were to put a probability on it, is it more likely that we merge with AI or AI replaces us? A lot of people just think computers come along and they compete with them. We can't really compete and that's the end of it. As opposed to them increasing our abilities. And if you look at most technology, it increases our abilities. I mean, look at the history of work. Look at what people did 100 years ago. Does any of that exist anymore? People, I mean, if you were to predict that all of these jobs would go away and would be done by machines, people would say, well, there's gonna be, no one's gonna have jobs and it's gonna be massive unemployment. But I show in this book that's coming out the amount of people that are working, even as a percentage of the population has gone way up. We're looking at the x axis year from 1774 to 2024 and on the y axis, personal income per capita in constant dollars and it's growing super linearly. I mean, it's 2021 constant dollars and it's gone way up. That's not what you would predict given that we would predict that all these jobs would go away. But the reason it's gone up is because we've basically enhanced our own capabilities by using these machines as opposed to them just competing with us. That's a key way in which we're gonna be able to become far smarter than we are now by increasing the number of different parameters we can consider in making a decision. I was very fortunate, I am very fortunate to be able to get a glimpse preview of your upcoming book, Singularity is Nearer. And one of the themes outside of just discussing the increasing exponential growth of technology, one of the themes is that things are getting better in all aspects of life. And you talked just about this. So one of the things you're saying is with jobs. So let me just ask about that. There is a big concern that automation, especially powerful AI, will get rid of jobs. There are people who lose jobs. And as you were saying, the sense is throughout the history of the 20th century, automation did not do that ultimately. And so the question is, will this time be different? Right, that is the question. Will this time be different? And it really has to do with how quickly we can merge with this type of intelligence. Whether Lambda or GPT3 is out there, and maybe it's overcome some of its key problems, and we really haven't enhanced human intelligence, that might be a negative scenario. But I mean, that's why we create technologies, to enhance ourselves. And I believe we will be enhanced when I'm just going to sit here with 300 million modules in our neocortex. We're going to be able to go beyond that. Because that's useful, but we can multiply that by 10, 100, 1,000, a million. And you might think, well, what's the point of doing that? It's like asking somebody that's never heard music, well, what's the value of music? I mean, you can't appreciate it until you've created it. There's some worry that there'll be a wealth disparity. Class or wealth disparity, only the rich people will be, basically, the rich people will first have access to this kind of thing, and then because of this kind of thing, because the ability to merge will get richer exponentially faster. And I say that's just like cell phones. I mean, there's like four billion cell phones in the world today. In fact, when cell phones first came out, you had to be fairly wealthy. They weren't very inexpensive. So you had to have some wealth in order to afford them. Yeah, there were these big, sexy phones. And they didn't work very well. They did almost nothing. So you can only afford these things if you're wealthy at a point where they really don't work very well. So achieving scale and making it inexpensive is part of making the thing work well. Exactly. So these are not totally cheap, but they're pretty cheap. I mean, you can get them for a few hundred dollars. Especially given the kind of things it provides for you. There's a lot of people in the third world that have very little, but they have a smartphone. Yeah, absolutely. And the same will be true with AI. I mean, I see homeless people have their own cell phones. Yeah, so your sense is any kind of advanced technology will take the same trajectory. Right, it ultimately becomes cheap and will be affordable. I probably would not be the first person to put something in my brain to connect to computers because I think it will have limitations. But once it's really perfected, and at that point it'll be pretty inexpensive, I think it'll be pretty affordable. So in which other ways, as you outline your book, is life getting better? Because I think... Well, I mean, I have 50 charts in there where everything is getting better. I think there's a kind of cynicism about, like even if you look at extreme poverty, for example. For example, this is actually a poll taken on extreme poverty, and people were asked, has poverty gotten better or worse? And the options are increased by 50%, increased by 25%, remain the same, decreased by 25%, decreased by 50%. If you're watching this or listening to this, try to vote for yourself. 70% thought it had gotten worse, and that's the general impression. 88% thought it had gotten worse or remained the same. Only 1% thought it decreased by 50%, and that is the answer. It actually decreased by 50%. So only 1% of people got the right optimistic estimate of how poverty is. Right, and this is the reality, and it's true of almost everything you look at. You don't wanna go back 100 years or 50 years. Things were quite miserable then, but we tend not to remember that. So literacy rate increasing over the past few centuries across all the different nations, nearly to 100% across many of the nations in the world. It's gone way up. Average years of education have gone way up. Life expectancy is also increasing. Life expectancy was 48 in 1900. And it's over 80 now. And it's gonna continue to go up, particularly as we get into more advanced stages of simulated biology. For life expectancy, these trends are the same for at birth, age one, age five, age 10, so it's not just the infant mortality. And I have 50 more graphs in the book about all kinds of things. Even spread of democracy, which might bring up some sort of controversial issues, it still has gone way up. Well, that one has gone way up, but that one is a bumpy road, right? Exactly, and somebody might represent democracy and go backwards, but we basically had no democracies before the creation of the United States, which was a little over two centuries ago, which in the scale of human history isn't that long. Do you think superintelligence systems will help with democracy? So what is democracy? Democracy is giving a voice to the populace and having their ideas, having their beliefs, having their views represented. Well, I hope so. I mean, we've seen social networks can spread conspiracy theories, which have been quite negative, being, for example, being against any kind of stuff that would help your health. So those kinds of ideas have, on social media, what you notice is they increase engagement, so dramatic division increases engagement. Do you worry about AI systems that will learn to maximize that division? I mean, I do have some concerns about this, and I have a chapter in the book about the perils of advanced AI, spreading misinformation on social networks is one of them, but there are many others. What's the one that worries you the most that we should think about to try to avoid? Well, it's hard to choose. We do have the nuclear power that evolved when I was a child, I remember, and we would actually do these drills against a nuclear war. We'd get under our desks and put our hands behind our heads to protect us from a nuclear war. Seems to work, we're still around, so. You're protected. But that's still a concern. And there are key dangerous situations that can take place in biology. Someone could create a virus that's very, I mean, we have viruses that are hard to spread, and they can be very dangerous, and we have viruses that are easy to spread, but they're not so dangerous. Somebody could create something that would be very easy to spread and very dangerous, and be very hard to stop. It could be something that would spread without people noticing, because people could get it, they'd have no symptoms, and then everybody would get it, and then symptoms would occur maybe a month later. So I mean, and that actually doesn't occur normally, because if we were to have a problem with that, we wouldn't exist. So the fact that humans exist means that we don't have viruses that can spread easily and kill us, because otherwise we wouldn't exist. Yeah, viruses don't wanna do that. They want to spread and keep the host alive somewhat. So you can describe various dangers with biology. Also nanotechnology, which we actually haven't experienced yet, but there are people that are creating nanotechnology, and I describe that in the book. Now you're excited by the possibilities of nanotechnology, of nanobots, of being able to do things inside our body, inside our mind, that's going to help. What's exciting, what's terrifying about nanobots? What's exciting is that that's a way to communicate with our neocortex, because each neocortex is pretty small and you need a small entity that can actually get in there and establish a communication channel. And that's gonna really be necessary to connect our brains to AI within ourselves, because otherwise it would be hard for us to compete with it. In a high bandwidth way. Yeah, yeah. And that's key, actually, because a lot of the things like Neuralink are really not high bandwidth yet. So nanobots is the way you achieve high bandwidth. How much intelligence would those nanobots have? Yeah, they don't need a lot, just enough to basically establish a communication channel to one nanobot. So it's primarily about communication. Yeah. Between external computing devices and our biological thinking machine. What worries you about nanobots? Is it similar to with the viruses? Well, I mean, it's the great goo challenge. Yes. If you had a nanobot that wanted to create any kind of entity and repeat itself, and was able to operate in a natural environment, it could turn everything into that entity and basically destroy all biological life. So you mentioned nuclear weapons. Yeah. I'd love to hear your opinion about the 21st century and whether you think we might destroy ourselves. And maybe your opinion, if it has changed by looking at what's going on in Ukraine, that we could have a hot war with nuclear powers involved and the tensions building and the seeming forgetting of how terrifying and destructive nuclear weapons are. Do you think humans might destroy ourselves in the 21st century, and if we do, how? And how do we avoid it? I don't think that's gonna happen despite the terrors of that war. It is a possibility, but I mean, I don't. It's unlikely in your mind. Yeah, even with the tensions we've had with this one nuclear power plant that's been taken over, it's very tense, but I don't actually see a lot of people worrying that that's gonna happen. I think we'll avoid that. We had two nuclear bombs go off in 45, so now we're 77 years later. Yeah, we're doing pretty good. We've never had another one go off through anger. People forget the lessons of history. Well, yeah, I mean, I am worried about it. I mean, that is definitely a challenge. But you believe that we'll make it out and ultimately superintelligent AI will help us make it out as opposed to destroy us. I think so, but we do have to be mindful of these dangers. And there are other dangers besides nuclear weapons, so. So to get back to merging with AI, will we be able to upload our mind in a computer in a way where we might even transcend the constraints of our bodies? So copy our mind into a computer and leave the body behind? Let me describe one thing I've already done with my father. That's a great story. So we created a technology, this is public, came out, I think, six years ago, where you could ask any question and the release product, which I think is still on the market, it would read 200,000 books. And then find the one sentence in 200,000 books that best answered your question. And it's actually quite interesting. You can ask all kinds of questions and you get the best answer in 200,000 books. But I was also able to take it and not go through 200,000 books, but go through a book that I put together, which is basically everything my father had written. So everything he had written, I had gathered, and we created a book, everything that Frederick Herzog had written. Now, I didn't think this actually would work that well because stuff he had written was stuff about how to lay out. I mean, he directed choral groups and music groups, and he would be laying out how the people should, where they should sit and how to fund this and all kinds of things that really didn't seem that interesting. And yet, when you ask a question, it would go through it and it would actually give you a very good answer. So I said, well, who's the most interesting composer? And he said, well, definitely Brahms. And he would go on about how Brahms was fabulous and talk about the importance of music education. So you could have essentially a question and answer, a conversation with him. You could have a conversation with him, which was actually more interesting than talking to him because if you talked to him, he'd be concerned about how they're gonna lay out this property to give a choral group. He'd be concerned about the day to day versus the big questions. Exactly, yeah. And you did ask about the meaning of life and he answered, love. Yeah. Do you miss him? Yes, I do. Yeah, you get used to missing somebody after 52 years, and I didn't really have intelligent conversations with him until later in life. In the last few years, he was sick, which meant he was home a lot and I was actually able to talk to him about different things like music and other things. And so I miss that very much. What did you learn about life from your father? What part of him is with you now? He was devoted to music. And when he would create something to music, it put him in a different world. Otherwise, he was very shy. And if people got together, he tended not to interact with people just because of his shyness. But when he created music, he was like a different person. Do you have that in you? That kind of light that shines? I mean, I got involved with technology at like age five. And you fell in love with it in the same way he did with music? Yeah, yeah. I remember this actually happened with my grandmother. She had a manual typewriter and she wrote a book, One Life Is Not Enough, which actually a good title for a book I might write, but it was about a school she had created. Well, actually her mother created it. So my mother's mother's mother created the school in 1868. And it was the first school in Europe that provided higher education for girls. It went through 14th grade. If you were a girl and you were lucky enough to get an education at all, it would go through like ninth grade. And many people didn't have any education as a girl. This went through 14th grade. Her mother created it, she took it over, and the book was about the history of the school and her involvement with it. When she presented it to me, I was not so interested in the story of the school, but I was totally amazed with this manual typewriter. I mean, here is something you could put a blank piece of paper into and you could turn it into something that looked like it came from a book. And you can actually type on it and it looked like it came from a book. It was just amazing to me. And I could see actually how it worked. And I was also interested in magic. But in magic, if somebody actually knows how it works, the magic goes away. The magic doesn't stay there if you actually understand how it works. But here was technology. I didn't have that word when I was five or six. And the magic was still there for you? The magic was still there, even if you knew how it worked. So I became totally interested in this and then went around, collected little pieces of mechanical objects from bicycles, from broken radios. I would go through the neighborhood. This was an era where you would allow five or six year olds to run through the neighborhood and do this. We don't do that anymore. But I didn't know how to put them together. I said, if I could just figure out how to put these things together, I could solve any problem. And I actually remember talking to these very old girls. I think they were 10. And telling them, if I could just figure this out, we could fly, we could do anything. And they said, well, you have quite an imagination. And then when I was in third grade, so I was like eight, created like a virtual reality theater where people could come on stage and they could move their arms. And all of it was controlled through one control box. It was all done with mechanical technology. And it was a big hit in my third grade class. And then I went on to do things in junior high school science fairs and high school science fairs. I won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. So I mean, I became committed to technology when I was five or six years old. You've talked about how you use lucid dreaming to think, to come up with ideas as a source of creativity. Because you maybe talk through that, maybe the process of how to, you've invented a lot of things. You've came up and thought through some very interesting ideas. What advice would you give, or can you speak to the process of thinking, of how to think, how to think creatively? Well, I mean, sometimes I will think through in a dream and try to interpret that. But I think the key issue that I would tell younger people is to put yourself in the position that what you're trying to create already exists. And then you're explaining, like... How it works. Exactly. That's really interesting. You paint a world that you would like to exist, you think it exists, and reverse engineer that. And then you actually imagine you're giving a speech about how you created this. Well, you'd have to then work backwards as to how you would create it in order to make it work. That's brilliant. And that requires some imagination too, some first principles thinking. You have to visualize that world. That's really interesting. And generally, when I talk about things we're trying to invent, I would use the present tense as if it already exists. Not just to give myself that confidence, but everybody else who's working on it. We just have to kind of do all the steps in order to make it actual. How much of a good idea is about timing? How much is it about your genius versus that its time has come? Timing's very important. I mean, that's really why I got into futurism. I didn't, I wasn't inherently a futurist. That was not really my goal. It's really to figure out when things are feasible. We see that now with large scale models. The very large scale models like GPT3, it started two years ago. Four years ago, it wasn't feasible. In fact, they did create GPT2, which didn't work. So it required a certain amount of timing having to do with this exponential growth of computing power. So futurism in some sense is a study of timing, trying to understand how the world will evolve and when will the capacity for certain ideas emerge. And that's become a thing in itself and to try to time things in the future. But really its original purpose was to time my products. I mean, I did OCR in the 1970s because OCR doesn't require a lot of computation. Optical character recognition. Yeah, so we were able to do that in the 70s and I waited till the 80s to address speech recognition since that requires more computation. So you were thinking through timing when you're developing those things. Yeah. Time come. Yeah. And that's how you've developed that brain power to start to think in a futurist sense when how will the world look like in 2045 and work backwards and how it gets there. But that has to become a thing in itself because looking at what things will be like in the future and the future reflects such dramatic changes in how humans will live that was worth communicating also. So you developed that muscle of predicting the future and then applied broadly and started to discuss how it changes the world of technology, how it changes the world of human life on earth. In Danielle, one of your books, you write about someone who has the courage to question assumptions that limit human imagination to solve problems. And you also give advice on how each of us can have this kind of courage. Well, it's good that you picked that quote because I think that does symbolize what Danielle is about. Courage. So how can each of us have that courage to question assumptions? I mean, we see that when people can go beyond the current realm and create something that's new. I mean, take Uber, for example. Before that existed, you never thought that that would be feasible and it did require changes in the way people work. Is there practical advice as you give in the book about what each of us can do to be a Danielle? Well, she looks at the situation and tries to imagine how she can overcome various obstacles and then she goes for it. And she's a very good communicator so she can communicate these ideas to other people. And there's practical advice of learning to program and recording your life and things of this nature. Become a physicist. So you list a bunch of different suggestions of how to throw yourself into this world. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of an idea how young people can actually change the world by learning all of these different skills. And at the core of that is the belief that you can change the world. That your mind, your body can change the world. Yeah, that's right. And not letting anyone else tell you otherwise. That's really good, exactly. When we upload the story you told about your dad and having a conversation with him, we're talking about uploading your mind to the computer. Do you think we'll have a future with something you call afterlife? We'll have avatars that mimic increasingly better and better our behavior, our appearance, all that kind of stuff. Even those that are perhaps no longer with us. Yes, I mean, we need some information about them. I mean, think about my father. I have what he wrote. Now, he didn't have a word processor, so he didn't actually write that much. And our memories of him aren't perfect. So how do you even know if you've created something that's satisfactory? Now, you could do a Frederick Kurzweil Turing test. It seems like Frederick Kurzweil to me. But the people who remember him, like me, don't have a perfect memory. Is there such a thing as a perfect memory? Maybe the whole point is for him to make you feel a certain way. Yeah, well, I think that would be the goal. And that's the connection we have with loved ones. It's not really based on very strict definition of truth. It's more about the experiences we share. And they get morphed through memory. But ultimately, they make us smile. I think we definitely can do that. And that would be very worthwhile. So do you think we'll have a world of replicants? Of copies? There'll be a bunch of Ray Kurzweils. Like, I could hang out with one. I can download it for five bucks and have a best friend, Ray. And you, the original copy, wouldn't even know about it. Is that, do you think that world is, first of all, do you think that world is feasible? And do you think there's ethical challenges there? Like, how would you feel about me hanging out with Ray Kurzweil and you not knowing about it? It doesn't strike me as a problem. Which you, the original? Would you strike, would that cause a problem for you? No, I would really very much enjoy it. No, not just hang out with me, but if somebody hang out with you, a replicant of you. Well, I think I would start, it sounds exciting, but then what if they start doing better than me and take over my friend group? And then, because they may be an imperfect copy or there may be more social, all these kinds of things, and then I become like the old version that's not nearly as exciting. Maybe they're a copy of the best version of me on a good day. Yeah, but if you hang out with a replicant of me and that turned out to be successful, I'd feel proud of that person because it was based on me. So it's, but it is a kind of death of this version of you. Well, not necessarily. I mean, you can still be alive, right? But, and you would be proud, okay, so it's like having kids and you're proud that they've done even more than you were able to do. Yeah, exactly. It does bring up new issues, but it seems like an opportunity. Well, that replicant should probably have the same rights as you do. Well, that gets into a whole issue because when a replicant occurs, they're not necessarily gonna have your rights. And if a replicant occurs, if it's somebody who's already dead, do they have all the obligations and that the original person had? Do they have all the agreements that they had? I think you're gonna have to have laws that say yes. There has to be, if you wanna create a replicant, they have to have all the same rights as human rights. Well, you don't know. Someone can create a replicant and say, well, it's a replicant, but I didn't bother getting their rights. And so. Yeah, but that would be illegal, I mean. Like if you do that, you have to do that in the black market. If you wanna get an official replicant. Okay, it's not so easy. It's supposed to create multiple replicants. The original rights, maybe for one person and not for a whole group of people. Sure. So there has to be at least one. And then all the other ones kinda share the rights. Yeah, I just don't think that, that's very difficult to conceive for us humans, the idea that this country. You create a replicant that has certain, I mean, I've talked to people about this, including my wife, who would like to get back her father. And she doesn't worry about who has rights to what. She would have somebody that she could visit with and might give her some satisfaction. And she wouldn't care about any of these other rights. What does your wife think about multiple rake or as wells? Have you had that discussion? I haven't addressed that with her. I think ultimately that's an important question, loved ones, how they feel about. There's something about love. Well, that's the key thing, right? If the loved one's rejected, it's not gonna work very well, so. So the loved ones really are the key determinant, whether or not this works or not. But there's also ethical rules. We have to contend with the idea, and we have to contend with that idea with AI. But what's gonna motivate it is, I mean, I talk to people who really miss people who are gone and they would love to get something back, even if it isn't perfect. And that's what's gonna motivate this. And that person lives on in some form. And the more data we have, the more we're able to reconstruct that person and allow them to live on. And eventually as we go forward, we're gonna have more and more of this data because we're gonna have none of us that are inside our neocortex and we're gonna collect a lot of data. In fact, anything that's data is always collected. There is something a little bit sad, which is becoming, or maybe it's hopeful, which is more and more common these days, which when a person passes away, you have their Twitter account, and you have the last tweet they tweeted, like something they needed. And you can recreate them now with large language models and so on. I mean, you can create somebody that's just like them and can actually continue to communicate. I think that's really exciting because I think in some sense, like if I were to die today, in some sense I would continue on if I continued tweeting. I tweet, therefore I am. Yeah, well, I mean, that's one of the advantages of a replicant, they can recreate the communications of that person. Do you hope, do you think, do you hope humans will become a multi planetary species? You've talked about the phases, the six epochs, and one of them is reaching out into the stars in part. Yes, but the kind of attempts we're making now to go to other planetary objects doesn't excite me that much because it's not really advancing anything. It's not efficient enough? Yeah, and we're also putting out other human beings, which is a very inefficient way to explore these other objects. What I'm really talking about in the sixth epoch, the universe wakes up. It's where we can spread our super intelligence throughout the universe. And that doesn't mean sending a very soft, squishy creatures like humans. Yeah, the universe wakes up. I mean, we would send intelligence masses of nanobots which can then go out and colonize these other parts of the universe. Do you think there's intelligent alien civilizations out there that our bots might meet? My hunch is no. Most people say yes, absolutely. I mean, and the universe is too big. And they'll cite the Drake equation. And I think in Singularity is Near, I have two analyses of the Drake equation, both with very reasonable assumptions. And one gives you thousands of advanced civilizations in each galaxy. And another one gives you one civilization. And we know of one. A lot of the analyses are forgetting the exponential growth of computation. Because we've gone from where the fastest way I could send a message to somebody was with a pony, which was what, like a century and a half ago? To the advanced civilization we have today. And if you accept what I've said, go forward a few decades, you can have absolutely fantastic amount of civilization compared to a pony, and that's in a couple hundred years. Yeah, the speed and the scale of information transfer is growing exponentially in a blink of an eye. Now think about these other civilizations. They're gonna be spread out at cosmic times. So if something is like ahead of us or behind us, it could be ahead of us or behind us by maybe millions of years, which isn't that much. I mean, the world is billions of years old, 14 billion or something. So even a thousand years, if two or 300 years is enough to go from a pony to fantastic amount of civilization, we would see that. So of other civilizations that have occurred, okay, some might be behind us, but some might be ahead of us. If they're ahead of us, they're ahead of us by thousands, millions of years, and they would be so far beyond us, they would be doing galaxy wide engineering. But we don't see anything doing galaxy wide engineering. So either they don't exist, or this very universe is a construction of an alien species. We're living inside a video game. Well, that's another explanation that yes, you've got some teenage kids in another civilization. Do you find compelling the simulation hypothesis as a thought experiment that we're living in a simulation? The universe is computational. So we are an example in a computational world. Therefore, it is a simulation. It doesn't necessarily mean an experiment by some high school kid in another world, but it nonetheless is taking place in a computational world. And everything that's going on is basically a form of computation. So you really have to define what you mean by this whole world being a simulation. Well, then it's the teenager that makes the video game. Us humans with our current limited cognitive capability have strived to understand ourselves and we have created religions. We think of God. Whatever that is, do you think God exists? And if so, who is God? I alluded to this before. We started out with lots of particles going around and there's nothing that represents love and creativity. And somehow we've gotten into a world where love actually exists and that has to do actually with consciousness because you can't have love without consciousness. So to me, that's God, the fact that we have something where love, where you can be devoted to someone else and really feel the love, that's God. And if you look at the Old Testament, it was actually created by several different ravenants in there. And I think they've identified three of them. One of them dealt with God as a person that you can make deals with and he gets angry and he wrecks vengeance on various people. But two of them actually talk about God as a symbol of love and peace and harmony and so forth. That's how they describe God. So that's my view of God, not as a person in the sky that you can make deals with. It's whatever the magic that goes from basic elements to things like consciousness and love. Do you think one of the things I find extremely beautiful and powerful is cellular automata, which you also touch on? Do you think whatever the heck happens in cellular automata where interesting, complicated objects emerge, God is in there too? The emergence of love in this seemingly primitive universe? Well, that's the goal of creating a replicant is that they would love you and you would love them. There wouldn't be much point of doing it if that didn't happen. But all of it, I guess what I'm saying about cellular automata is it's primitive building blocks and they somehow create beautiful things. Is there some deep truth to that about how our universe works? Is the emergence from simple rules, beautiful, complex objects can emerge? Is that the thing that made us? Yeah, well. As we went through all the six phases of reality. That's a good way to look at it. It does make some point to the whole value of having a universe. Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of it? Yes, but I keep going back to my idea of being able to expand human life quickly enough in advance of our getting there, longevity escape velocity, which we're not quite at yet, but I think we're actually pretty close, particularly with, for example, doing simulated biology. I think we can probably get there within, say, by the end of this decade, and that's my goal. Do you hope to achieve the longevity escape velocity? Do you hope to achieve immortality? Well, immortality is hard to say. I can't really come on your program saying I've done it. I've achieved immortality because it's never forever. A long time, a long time of living well. But we'd like to actually advance human life expectancy, advance my life expectancy more than a year every year, and I think we can get there within, by the end of this decade. How do you think we'd do it? So there's practical things in Transcend, the nine steps to living well forever, your book. You describe just that. There's practical things like health, exercise, all those things. Yeah, I mean, we live in a body that doesn't last forever. There's no reason why it can't, though, and we're discovering things, I think, that will extend it. But you do have to deal with, I mean, I've got various issues. Went to Mexico 40 years ago, developed salmonella. I created pancreatitis, which gave me a strange form of diabetes. It's not type one diabetes, because it's an autoimmune disorder that destroys your pancreas. I don't have that. But it's also not type two diabetes, because type two diabetes is your pancreas works fine, but your cells don't absorb the insulin well. I don't have that either. The pancreatitis I had partially damaged my pancreas, but it was a one time thing. It didn't continue, and I've learned now how to control it. But so that's just something that I had to do in order to continue to exist. Since your particular biological system, you had to figure out a few hacks, and the idea is that science would be able to do that much better, actually. Yeah, so I mean, I do spend a lot of time just tinkering with my own body to keep it going. So I do think I'll last till the end of this decade, and I think we'll achieve longevity, escape velocity. I think that we'll start with people who are very diligent about this. Eventually, it'll become sort of routine that people will be able to do it. So if you're talking about kids today, or even people in their 20s or 30s, that's really not a very serious problem. I have had some discussions with relatives who are like almost 100, and saying, well, we're working on it as quickly as possible. I don't know if that's gonna work. Is there a case, this is a difficult question, but is there a case to be made against living forever that a finite life, that mortality is a feature, not a bug, that living a shorter, so dying makes ice cream taste delicious, makes life intensely beautiful more than it otherwise might be? Most people believe that way, except if you present a death of anybody they care about or love, they find that extremely depressing. And I know people who feel that way 20, 30, 40 years later, they still want them back. So I mean, death is not something to celebrate, but we've lived in a world where people just accept this. Life is short, you see it all the time on TV, oh, life's short, you have to take advantage of it and nobody accepts the fact that you could actually go beyond normal lifetimes. But anytime we talk about death or a death of a person, even one death is a terrible tragedy. If you have somebody that lives to 100 years old, we still love them in return. And there's no limitation to that. In fact, these kinds of trends are gonna provide greater and greater opportunity for everybody, even if we have more people. So let me ask about an alien species or a super intelligent AI 500 years from now that will look back and remember Ray Kurzweil version zero. Before the replicants spread, how do you hope they remember you in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy summary of Ray Kurzweil? What do you hope your legacy is? Well, I mean, I do hope to be around, so that's. Some version of you, yes. So. Do you think you'll be the same person around? I mean, am I the same person I was when I was 20 or 10? You would be the same person in that same way, but yes, we're different, we're different. All we have of that, all you have of that person is your memories, which are probably distorted in some way. Maybe you just remember the good parts, depending on your psyche. You might focus on the bad parts, might focus on the good parts. Right, but I mean, I still have a relationship to the way I was when I was earlier, when I was younger. How will you and the other super intelligent AIs remember you of today from 500 years ago? What do you hope to be remembered by this version of you before the singularity? Well, I think it's expressed well in my books, trying to create some new realities that people will accept. I mean, that's something that gives me great pleasure, and greater insight into what makes humans valuable. I'm not the only person who's tempted to comment on that. And optimism that permeates your work. Optimism about the future is ultimately that optimism paves the way for building a better future. Yeah, I agree with that. So you asked your dad about the meaning of life, and he said, love, let me ask you the same question. What's the meaning of life? Why are we here? This beautiful journey that we're on in phase four, reaching for phase five of this evolution and information processing, why? Well, I think I'd give the same answers as my father. Because if there were no love, and we didn't care about anybody, there'd be no point existing. Love is the meaning of life. The AI version of your dad had a good point. Well, I think that's a beautiful way to end it. Ray, thank you for your work. Thank you for being who you are. Thank you for dreaming about a beautiful future and creating it along the way. And thank you so much for spending your really valuable time with me today. This was awesome. It was my pleasure, and you have some great insights, both into me and into humanity as well, so I appreciate that. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ray Kurzweil. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Isaac Asimov. It is change, continuous change, inevitable change that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman, must take on a science fictional way of thinking. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Ray Kurzweil: Singularity, Superintelligence, and Immortality | Lex Fridman Podcast #321

there's a broader question here, right? As we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines, what does that mean about our relationship with them and then more broadly our relationship with one another, right? Because this machine is going to be programmed to be amazing at empathy, by definition, right? It's going to always be there for you. It's not going to get bored. I don't know how I feel about that. I think about that a lot. TITO The following is a conversation with Rana L. Kliubi, a pioneer in the field of emotion recognition and human centric artificial intelligence. She is the founder of Effectiva, deputy CEO of SmartEye, author of Girl Decoded, and one of the most brilliant, kind, inspiring, and fun human beings I've gotten the chance to talk to. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Rana L. Kliubi. You grew up in the Middle East, in Egypt. What is the memory from that time that makes you smile? Or maybe a memory that stands out as helping your mind take shape and helping you define yourself in this world? RANA L. KLIUBI So the memory that stands out is we used to live in my grandma's house. She used to have these mango trees in her garden. And in the summer, and so mango season was like July and August. And so in the summer, she would invite all my aunts and uncles and cousins. And it was just like maybe there were like 20 or 30 people in the house, and she would cook all this amazing food. And us, the kids, we would go down the garden, and we would pick all these mangoes. And I don't know, I think it's just the bringing people together that always stuck with me, the warmth. TITO Around the mango tree. RANA L. KLIUBI Yeah, around the mango tree. And there's just like the joy, the joy of being together around food. And I'm a terrible cook. So I guess that didn't, that memory didn't translate to me kind of doing the same. I love hosting people. TITO Do you remember colors, smells? Is that what, like what, how does memory work? Like what do you visualize? Do you visualize people's faces, smiles? Do you, is there colors? Is there like a theme to the colors? Is it smells because of food involved? RANA L. KLIUBI Yeah, I think that's a great question. So the, those Egyptian mangoes, there's a particular type that I love, and it's called Darwasi mangoes. And they're kind of, you know, they're oval, and they have a little red in them. So I kind of, they're red and mango colored on the outside. So I remember that. TITO Does red indicate like extra sweetness? Is that, is that, that means like it's nicely, yeah, it's nice and ripe and stuff. Yeah. What, what's like a definitive food of Egypt? You know, there's like these almost stereotypical foods in different parts of the world, like Ukraine invented borscht. Borscht is this beet soup with, that you put sour cream on. See, it's not, I can't see if you, if you know, if you know what it is, I think, you know, is delicious. But if I explain it, it's just not going to sound delicious. I feel like beet soup. This doesn't make any sense, but that's kind of, and you probably have actually seen pictures of it because it's one of the traditional foods in Ukraine, in Russia, in different parts of the Slavic world. So that's, but it's become so cliche and stereotypical that you almost don't mention it, but it's still delicious. Like I visited Ukraine, I eat that every single day, so. Do you, do you make it yourself? How hard is it to make? No, I don't know. I think to make it well, like anything, like Italians, they say, well, tomato sauce is easy to make, but to make it right, that's like a generational skill. So anyway, is there something like that in Egypt? Is there a culture of food? There is. And actually, we have a similar kind of soup. It's called molokhia, and it's, it's made of this green plant. It's like, it's somewhere between spinach and kale, and you mince it, and then you cook it in like chicken broth. And my grandma used to make, and my mom makes it really well, and I try to make it, but it's not as great. So we used to have that. And then we used to have it alongside stuffed pigeons. I'm pescetarian now, so I don't eat that anymore, but. Stuffed pigeons. Yeah, it's like, it was really yummy. It's the one thing I miss about, you know, now that I'm pescetarian and I don't eat. The stuffed pigeons? Yeah, the stuffed pigeons. Is it, what are they stuffed with? If that doesn't bother you too much to describe. No, no, it's stuffed with a lot of like just rice and, yeah, it's just rice. Yeah, so. And you also, you said that your first, in your book, that your first computer was an Atari, and Space Invaders was your favorite game. Is that when you first fell in love with computers, would you say? Yeah, I would say so. Video games, or just the computer itself? Just something about the machine. Ooh, this thing, there's magic in here. Yeah, I think the magical moment is definitely like playing video games with my, I have two younger sisters, and we would just like had fun together, like playing games. But the other memory I have is my first code, the first code I wrote. I wrote, I drew a Christmas tree, and I'm Muslim, right? So it's kind of, it was kind of funny that the first thing I did was like this Christmas tree. So, yeah, and that's when I realized, wow, you can write code to do all sorts of like really cool stuff. I must have been like six or seven at the time. So you can write programs, and the programs do stuff for you. That's power. That's, if you think about it, that's empowering. It's AI. Yeah, I know what it is. I don't know if that, you see like, I don't know if many people think of it that way when they first learned to program. They just love the puzzle of it. Like, ooh, this is cool. This is pretty. It's a Christmas tree, but like, it's power. It is power. Eventually, I guess you couldn't at the time, but eventually this thing, if it's interesting enough, if it's a pretty enough Christmas tree, it can be run by millions of people and bring them joy, like that little thing. And then because it's digital, it's easy to spread. So like you just created something that's easily spreadable to millions of people. Totally. It's hard to think that way when you're six. In the book, you write, I am who I am because I was raised by a particular set of parents, both modern and conservative, forward thinking, yet locked in tradition. I'm a Muslim and I feel I'm stronger, more centered for it. I adhere to the values of my religion, even if I'm not as dutiful as I once was. And I am a new American and I'm thriving on the energy, vitality and entrepreneurial spirit of this great country. So let me ask you about your parents. What have you learned about life from them, especially when you were young? So both my parents, they're Egyptian, but they moved to Kuwait right out. Actually, there's a cute story about how they met. So my dad taught COBOL in the 70s. Nice. And my mom decided to learn programming. So she signed up to take his COBOL programming class. And he tried to date her and she was like, no, no, no, I don't date. And so he's like, okay, I'll propose. And that's how they got married. Whoa, strong move. Right, exactly, right. That's really impressive. Those COBOL guys know how to impress a lady. So yeah, so what have you learned from them? So definitely grit. One of the core values in our family is just hard work. There were no slackers in our family. And that's something that's definitely stayed with me, both as a professional, but also in my personal life. But I also think my mom, my mom always used to like, I don't know, it was like unconditional love. Like I just knew my parents would be there for me kind of regardless of what I chose to do. And I think that's very powerful. And they got tested on it because I kind of challenged cultural norms and I kind of took a different path, I guess, than what's expected of a woman in the Middle East. And they still love me, which I'm so grateful for that. When was like a moment that was the most challenging for them? Which moment where they kind of had to come face to face with the fact that you're a bit of a rebel? I think the first big moment was when I had just gotten married, but I decided to go do my PhD at Cambridge University. And because my husband at the time, he's now my ex, ran a company in Cairo, he was going to stay in Egypt. So it was going to be a long distance relationship. And that's very unusual in the Middle East for a woman to just head out and kind of pursue her career. And so my dad and my parents in law both said, you know, we do not approve of you doing this, but now you're under the jurisdiction of your husband so he can make the call. And luckily for me, he was supportive. He said, you know, this is your dream come true. You've always wanted to do a PhD. I'm going to support you. So I think that was the first time where, you know, I challenged the cultural norms. Was that scary? Oh, my God, yes. It was totally scary. What's the biggest culture shock from there to Cambridge, to London? Well, that was also during right around September 11th. So everyone thought that there was going to be a third world war. It was really like, and I, at the time I used to wear the hijab, so I was very visibly Muslim. And so my parents just were, they were afraid for my safety. But anyways, when I got to Cambridge, because I was so scared, I decided to take off my headscarf and wear a hat instead. So I just went to class wearing these like British hats, which was, in my opinion, actually worse than just showing up in a headscarf because it was just so awkward, right? Like sitting in class with like all these. Trying to fit in. Yeah. Like a spy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So after a few weeks of doing that, I was like, to heck with that. I'm just going to go back to wearing my headscarf. Yeah, you wore the hijab, so starting in 2000 and for 12 years after. So it's always, whenever you're in public, you have to wear the head covering. Can you speak to that, to the hijab, maybe your mixed feelings about it? Like what does it represent in its best case? What does it represent in the worst case? Yeah, you know, I think there's a lot of, I guess I'll first start by saying I wore it voluntarily. I was not forced to wear it. And in fact, I was one of the very first women in my family to decide to put on the hijab. And my family thought it was really odd, right? Like there was, they were like, why do you want to put this on? And at its best, it's a sign of modesty, humility. Yeah. It's like me wearing a suit, people are like, why are you wearing a suit? It's a step back into some kind of tradition, a respect for tradition of sorts. So you said, because it's by choice, you're kind of free to make that choice to celebrate a tradition of modesty. Exactly. And I actually like made it my own. I remember I would really match the color of my headscarf with what I was wearing. Like it was a form of self expression and at its best, I loved wearing it. You know, I have a lot of questions around how we practice religion and religion and, you know, and I think also it was a time where I was spending a lot of time going back and forth between the US and Egypt. And I started meeting a lot of people in the US who are just amazing people, very purpose driven, people who have very strong core values, but they're not Muslim. That's okay, right? And so that was when I just had a lot of questions. And politically, also the situation in Egypt was when the Muslim Brotherhood ran the country and I didn't agree with their ideology. It was at a time when I was going through a divorce. Like it was like, it was like just the perfect storm of like political, personal conditions where I was like, this doesn't feel like me anymore. And it took a lot of courage to take it off because culturally it's not, it's okay if you don't wear it, but it's really not okay to wear it and then take it off. But you're still, so you have to do that while still maintaining a deep core and pride in the origins, in your origin story. Totally. So still being Egyptian, still being a Muslim. Right. And being, I think generally like faith driven, but yeah. But what that means changes year by year for you. It's like a personal journey. Yeah, exactly. What would you say is the role of faith in that part of the world? Like, how do you see, you mentioned it a bit in the book too. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think there is something really powerful about just believing that there's a bigger force, you know, there's a kind of surrendering, I guess, that comes with religion and you surrender and you have this deep conviction that it's going to be okay, right? Like the universe is out to like do amazing things for you and it's going to be okay. And there's strength to that. Like even when you're going through adversity, you just know that it's going to work out. Yeah, it gives you like an inner peace, a calmness. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's, it's faith in all the meanings of that word. Right. Faith that everything is going to be okay. And it is because time passes and time cures all things. It's like a calmness with the chaos of the world. Yeah. And also there's like a silver, I'm a true believer of this, that something at the specific moment in time can look like it's catastrophic and it's not what you wanted in life. But then time passes and then you look back and there's the silver lining, right? It maybe closed the door, but it opened a new door for you. And so I'm a true believer in that, that, you know, there's a silver lining in almost anything in life, you just have to have this like, yeah, faith or conviction that it's going to work out. Yeah, it's such a beautiful way to see a shady feeling. So if you feel shady about a current situation, I mean, it almost is always true. Unless it's the cliche thing of if it doesn't kill you, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. It's, it does seem that over time when you take a perspective on things that the hardest moments and periods of your life are the most meaningful. Yeah, yeah. So over time you get to have that perspective. Right. What about, because you mentioned Kuwait, what about, let me ask you about war. What's the role of war and peace, maybe even the big love and hate in that part of the world, because it does seem to be a part of the world where there's turmoil. There was turmoil, there's still turmoil. It is so unfortunate, honestly. It's, it's such a waste of human resources and, and, and yeah, and human mindshare. I mean, and at the end of the day, we all kind of want the same things. We want, you know, we want a human connection, we want joy, we want to feel fulfilled, we want to feel, you know, a life of purpose. And I just, I just find it baffling, honestly, that we are still having to grapple with that. I have a story to share about this. You know, I grew up, I'm Egyptian, American now, but, but, you know, originally from Egypt. And when I first got to Cambridge, it turned out my officemate, like my PhD kind of, you know, she ended up, you know, we ended up becoming friends, but she was from Israel. And we didn't know, yeah, we didn't know how it was going to be like. Did you guys sit there just staring at each other for a bit? Actually, she, because I arrived before she did. And it turns out she emailed our PhD advisor and asked him if she thought it was going to be okay. Yeah. And this is around 9 11 too. Yeah. And, and Peter, Peter Robinson, our PhD advisor was like, yeah, like, this is an academic institution, just show up. And we became super good friends. We were both new moms. Like we both had our kids during our PhD. We were both doing artificial emotional intelligence. She was looking at speech. I was looking at the face. We just had so the culture was so similar. Our jokes were similar. It was just, I was like, why on earth are our countries, why is there all this like war and tension? And I think it falls back to the narrative, right? If you change the narrative, like whoever creates this narrative of war. I don't know. We should have women run the world. Yeah, that's one solution. The good women, because there's also evil women in the world. True, okay. But yes, yes, there could be less war if women ran the world. The other aspect is, it doesn't matter the gender, the people in power. I get to see this with Ukraine and Russia and different parts of the world around that conflict now. And that's happening in Yemen as well and everywhere else. There's these narratives told by the leaders to the populace. And those narratives take hold and everybody believes that. And they have a distorted view of the humanity on the other side. In fact, especially during war, you don't even see the people on the other side as human or as equal intelligence or worth or value as you. You tell all kinds of narratives about them being Nazis or dumb or whatever narrative you want to weave around that or evil. But I think when you actually meet them face to face, you realize they're like the same. Exactly, right? It's actually a big shock for people to realize that they've been essentially lied to within their country. And I kind of have faith that social media, as ridiculous as it is to say, or any kind of technology, is able to bypass the walls that governments put up and connect people directly. And then you get to realize, oh, people fall in love across different nations and religions and so on. And that, I think, ultimately can cure a lot of our ills, especially in person. I also think that if leaders met in person, they'd have a conversation that could cure a lot of the ills of the world, especially in private. Let me ask you about the women running the world. So gender does, in part, perhaps shape the landscape of just our human experience. So in what ways was it limiting and in what ways was it empowering for you to be a woman in the Middle East? I think, just kind of going back to my comment on women running the world, I think it comes back to empathy, which has been a common thread throughout my entire career. And it's this idea of human connection. Once you build common ground with a person or a group of people, you build trust, you build loyalty, you build friendship. And then you can turn that into behavior change and motivation and persuasion. So it's like, empathy and emotions are just at the center of everything we do. And I think being from the Middle East, kind of this human connection is very strong. We have this running joke that if you come to Egypt for a visit, people will know everything about your life right away, right? I have no problems asking you about your personal life. There's no boundaries, really, no personal boundaries in terms of getting to know people. We get emotionally intimate very, very quickly. But I think people just get to know each other authentically, I guess. There isn't this superficial level of getting to know people. You just try to get to know people really deeply. Empathy is a part of that. Totally. Because you can put yourself in this person's shoe and kind of, yeah, imagine what challenges they're going through, and so I think I've definitely taken that with me. Generosity is another one too, like just being generous with your time and love and attention and even with your wealth, right? Even if you don't have a lot of it, you're still very generous. And I think that's another... Enjoying the humanity of other people. And so do you think there's a useful difference between men and women in that? In that aspect and empathy? Or is doing these kind of big general groups, does that hinder progress? Yeah, I actually don't want to overgeneralize. I mean, some of the men I know are like the most empathetic humans. Yeah, I strive to be empathetic. Yeah, you're actually very empathetic. Yeah, so I don't want to overgeneralize. Although one of the researchers I worked with when I was at Cambridge, Professor Simon Baron Cohen, he's Sacha Baron Cohen's cousin, and he runs the Autism Research Center at Cambridge, and he's written multiple books on autism. And one of his theories is the empathy scale, like the systemizers and the empathizers, and there's a disproportionate amount of computer scientists and engineers who are systemizers and perhaps not great empathizers, and then there's more men in that bucket, I guess, than women, and then there's more women in the empathizers bucket. So again, not to overgeneralize. I sometimes wonder about that. It's been frustrating to me how many, I guess, systemizers there are in the field of robotics. Yeah. It's actually encouraging to me because I care about, obviously, social robotics, and because there's more opportunity for people that are empathic. Exactly. I totally agree. Well, right? So it's nice. Yes. So every robotics I talk to, they don't see the human as interesting, as it's not exciting. You want to avoid the human at all costs. It's a safety concern to be touching the human, which it is, but it is also an opportunity for deep connection or collaboration or all that kind of stuff. And because most brilliant roboticists don't care about the human, it's an opportunity, in your case, it's a business opportunity too, but in general, an opportunity to explore those ideas. So in this beautiful journey to Cambridge, to UK, and then to America, what's the moment or moments that were most transformational for you as a scientist and as a leader? So you became an exceptionally successful CEO, founder, researcher, scientist, and so on. Was there a face shift there where, like, I can be somebody, I can really do something in this world? Yeah. So actually, just kind of a little bit of background. So the reason why I moved from Cairo to Cambridge, UK to do my PhD is because I had a very clear career plan. I was like, okay, I'll go abroad, get my PhD, going to crush it in three or four years, come back to Egypt and teach. It was very clear, very well laid out. Was topic clear or no? The topic, well, I did my PhD around building artificial emotional intelligence and looking at... But in your master plan ahead of time, when you're sitting by the mango tree, did you know it's going to be artificial intelligence? No, no, no, that I did not know. Although I think I kind of knew that I was going to be doing computer science, but I didn't know the specific area. But I love teaching. I mean, I still love teaching. So I just, yeah, I just wanted to go abroad, get a PhD, come back, teach. Why computer science? Can we just linger on that? What? Because you're such an empathic person who cares about emotion, humans and so on. Isn't, aren't computers cold and emotionless and just... We're changing that. Yeah, I know, but like, isn't that the, or did you see computers as the, having the capability to actually connect with humans? I think that was like my takeaway from my experience just growing up, like computers sit at the center of how we connect and communicate with one another, right? Or technology in general. Like I remember my first experience being away from my parents. We communicated with a fax machine, but thank goodness for the fax machine, because we could send letters back and forth to each other. This was pre emails and stuff. So I think, I think there's, I think technology can be not just transformative in terms of productivity, et cetera. It actually does change how we connect with one another. Can I just defend the fax machine? There's something like the haptic feel because the email is all digital. There's something really nice. I still write letters to people. There's something nice about the haptic aspect of the fax machine, because you still have to press, you still have to do something in the physical world to make this thing a reality. Right, and then it like comes out as a printout and you can actually touch it and read it. Yeah. There's something, there's something lost when it's just an email. Obviously I wonder how we can regain some of that in the digital world, which goes to the metaverse and all those kinds of things. We'll talk about it anyway. So, actually do you question on that one? Do you still, do you have photo albums anymore? Do you still print photos? No, no, but I'm a minimalist. Okay. So it was one of the, one of the painful steps in my life was to scan all the photos and let go of them and then let go of all my books. You let go of your books? Yeah. Switch to Kindle, everything Kindle. Yeah. So I thought, I thought, okay, think 30 years from now, nobody's going to have books anymore. The technology of digital books is going to get better and better and better. Are you really going to be the guy that's still romanticizing physical books? Are you going to be the old man on the porch who's like kids? Yes. So just get used to it because it was, it felt, it still feels a little bit uncomfortable to read on a Kindle, but get used to it. Like you always, I mean, I'm trying to learn new programming language is always, like with technology, you have to kind of challenge yourself to adapt to it. You know, I forced myself to use TikTok. No, that thing doesn't need much forcing. It pulls you in like a, like the worst kind of, or the best kind of drug. Anyway, yeah. So yeah, but I do love haptic things. There's a magic to the haptic. Even like touchscreens, it's tricky to get right, to get the experience of a button. Yeah. Anyway, what were we talking about? So AI, so the journey, your whole plan was to come back to Cairo and teach. Right. And then. What did the plan go wrong? Yeah, exactly. Right. And then I get to Cambridge and I fall in love with the idea of research. Right. And kind of embarking on a path. Nobody's explored this path before. You're building stuff that nobody's built before. And it's challenging and it's hard. And there's a lot of nonbelievers. I just totally love that. And at the end of my PhD, I think it's the meeting that changed the trajectory of my life. Professor Roslyn Picard, who's, she runs the Affective Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. I had read her book. I, you know, I was like following, following, following all her research. AKA Ros. Yes, AKA Ros. Yes. And she was giving a talk at a pattern recognition conference in Cambridge. And she had a couple of hours to kill. So she emailed the lab and she said, you know, if any students want to meet with me, like, just, you know, sign up here. And so I signed up for slot and I spent like the weeks leading up to it preparing for this meeting and I want to show her a demo of my research and everything. And we met and we ended up hitting it off. Like we totally clicked. And at the end of the meeting, she said, do you want to come work with me as a postdoc at MIT? And this is what I told her. I was like, okay, this would be a dream come true, but there's a husband waiting for me in Cairo. I kind of have to go back. Yeah. She said, it's fine. Just commute. And I literally started commuting between Cairo and Boston. Yeah, it was, it was a long commute. And I didn't, I did that like every few weeks I would, you know, hop on a plane and go to Boston. But that, that changed the trajectory of my life. There was no, I kind of outgrew my dreams, right? I didn't want to go back to Egypt anymore and be faculty. Like that was no longer my dream. I had a dream. What was the, what was it like to be at MIT? What was that culture shock? You mean America in general, but also, I mean, Cambridge has its own culture, right? So what was MIT like and what was America like? I think, I wonder if that's similar to your experience at MIT. I was just, at the Media Lab in particular, I was just really, impressed is not the right word. I didn't expect the openness to like innovation and the acceptance of taking a risk and failing. Like failure isn't really accepted back in Egypt, right? You don't want to fail. Like there's a fear of failure, which I think has been hardwired in my brain. But you get to MIT and it's okay to start things. And if they don't work out, like it's okay. You pivot to another idea. And that kind of thinking was just very new to me. That's liberating. Well, Media Lab, for people who don't know, MIT Media Lab is its own beautiful thing because they, I think more than other places at MIT, reach for big ideas. And like they try, I mean, I think, I mean, depending of course on who, but certainly with Roslyn, you try wild stuff, you try big things and crazy things and also try to take things to completion so you can demo them. So always, always, always have a demo. Like if you go, one of the sad things to me about robotics labs at MIT, and there's like over 30, I think, is like, usually when you show up to a robotics lab, there's not a single working robot, they're all broken. All the robots are broken. The robots are broken, which is like the normal state of things because you're working on them. But it would be nice if we lived in a world where robotics labs had some robots functioning. One of my like favorite moments that just sticks with me, I visited Boston Dynamics and there was a, first of all, seeing so many spots, so many legged robots in one place. I'm like, I'm home. But the, yeah. This is where I was built. The cool thing was just to see there was a random robot spot was walking down the hall. It's probably doing mapping, but it looked like he wasn't doing anything and he was wearing he or she, I don't know. But it, well, I like, in my mind, there are people, they have a backstory, but this one in particular definitely has a backstory because he was wearing a cowboy hat. So I just saw a spot robot with a cowboy hat walking down the hall and there was just this feeling like there's a life, like he has a life. He probably has to commute back to his family at night. Like there's a, there's a feeling like there's life instilled in this robot and it's magical. I don't know. It was, it was kind of inspiring to see. Did it say hello to, did he say hello to you? No, it's very, there's a focus nature to the robot. No, no, listen. I love competence and focus and great. Like he was not going to get distracted by the, the shallowness of small talk. There's a job to be done and he was doing it. So anyway, the fact that it was working is a beautiful thing. And I think Media Lab really prides itself on trying to always have a thing that's working that you could show off. Yes. We used to call it a demo or die. You, you could not, yeah, you could not like show up with like PowerPoint or something. You actually had to have a working, you know what, my son who is now 13, I don't know if this is still his life long goal or not, but when he was a little younger, his dream is to build an island that's just inhabited by robots, like no humans. He just wants all these robots to be connecting and having fun and there you go. Does he have human, does he have an idea of which robots he loves most? Is it, is it Roomba like robots? Is it humanoid robots? Robot dogs, or it's not clear yet. We used to have a Jibo, which was one of the MIT Media Lab spin outs and he used to love the giant head that spins and rotate and it's an eye or like not glowing like Cal 9000, but the friendly version. He loved that. And then he just loves, uh, um, yeah, he just, he, I think he loves all forms of robots actually. So embodied intelligence. Yes. I like, I personally like legged robots, especially, uh, anything that can wiggle its butt. No, that's not the definition of what I love, but that's just technically what I've been working on recently. Except I have a bunch of legged robots now in Austin and I've been doing, I was, I've been trying to, uh, have them communicate affection with their body in different ways just for art, for art really. Cause I love the idea of walking around with the robots, like, uh, as you would with a dog. I think it's inspiring to a lot of people, especially young people. Like kids love, kids love it. Parents like adults are scared of robots, but kids don't have this kind of weird construction of the world that's full of evil. They love cool things. Yeah. I remember when Adam was in first grade, so he must have been like seven or so. I went in to his class with a whole bunch of robots and like the emotion AI demo and da da. And I asked the kids, I was like, do you, would you kids want to have a robot, you know, robot friend or robot companion? Everybody said yes. And they wanted it for all sorts of things, like to help them with their math homework and to like be a friend. So there's, it just struck me how there was no fear of robots was a lot of adults have that like us versus them. Yeah, none of that. Of course you want to be very careful because you still have to look at the lessons of history and how robots can be used by the power centers of the world to abuse your rights and all that kind of stuff. But mostly it's good to enter anything new with an excitement and an optimism. Speaking of Roz, what have you learned about science and life from Rosalind Picard? Oh my God, I've learned so many things about life from Roz. I think the thing I learned the most is perseverance. When I first met Roz, we applied and she invited me to be her postdoc. We applied for a grant to the National Science Foundation to apply some of our research to autism. And we got back. We were rejected. Rejected. Yeah. And the reasoning was... The first time you were rejected for fun, yeah. Yeah, it was, and I basically, I just took the rejection to mean, okay, we're rejected. It's done, like end of story, right? And Roz was like, it's great news. They love the idea. They just don't think we can do it. So let's build it, show them, and then reapply. And it was that, oh my God, that story totally stuck with me. And she's like that in every aspect of her life. She just does not take no for an answer. To reframe all negative feedback. As a challenge. As a challenge. As a challenge. Yes, they liked this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a riot. What else about science in general? About how you see computers and also business and just everything about the world. She's a very powerful, brilliant woman like yourself. So is there some aspect of that too? Yeah, I think Roz is actually also very faith driven. She has this like deep belief in conviction. Yeah, and in the good in the world and humanity. And I think that was meeting her and her family was definitely like a defining moment for me because that was when I was like, wow, like you can be of a different background and religion and whatever and you can still have the same core values. So that was, that was, yeah. I'm grateful to her. Roz, if you're listening, thank you. Yeah, she's great. She's been on this podcast before. I hope she'll be on, I'm sure she'll be on again. And you were the founder and CEO of Effektiva, which is a big company that was acquired by another big company, SmartEye. And you're now the deputy CEO of SmartEye. So you're a powerful leader. You're brilliant. You're a brilliant scientist. A lot of people are inspired by you. What advice would you give, especially to young women, but people in general who dream of becoming powerful leaders like yourself in a world where perhaps, in a world that perhaps doesn't give them a clear, easy path to do so, whether we're talking about Egypt or elsewhere? You know, hearing you kind of describe me that way, kind of encapsulates, I think what I think is the biggest challenge of all, which is believing in yourself, right? I have had to like grapple with this, what I call now the Debbie Downer voice in my head. The kind of basically, it's just chattering all the time. It's basically saying, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't do this. Like you're not going to raise money. You can't start a company. Like what business do you have, like starting a company or running a company or selling a company? Like you name it. It's always like. And I think my biggest advice to not just women, but people who are taking a new path and, you know, they're not sure, is to not let yourself and let your thoughts be the biggest obstacle in your way. And I've had to like really work on myself to not be my own biggest obstacle. So you got that negative voice. Yeah. So is that? Am I the only one? I don't think I'm the only one. No, I have that negative voice. I'm not exactly sure if it's a bad thing or a good thing. I've been really torn about it because it's been a lifelong companions. It's hard to know. It's kind of, it drives productivity and progress, but it can hold you back from taking big leaps. I think the best I can say is probably you have to somehow be able to control it, to turn it off when it's not useful and turn it on when it's useful. Like I have from almost like a third person perspective. Right. Somebody who's sitting there like. Yeah. Like, because it is useful to be critical. Like after, I just gave a talk yesterday. At MIT and I was just, there's so much love and it was such an incredible experience. So many amazing people I got a chance to talk to, but afterwards when I went home and just took this long walk, it was mostly just negative thoughts about me. I don't like one basic stuff like I don't deserve any of it. And second is like, like, why did you, that was so bad. Second is like, like, why did you, that was so dumb that you said this, that's so dumb. Like you should have prepared that better. Why did you say this? But I think it's good to hear that voice out. All right. And like sit in that. And ultimately I think you grow from that. Now, when you're making really big decisions about funding or starting a company or taking a leap to go to the UK or take a leap to go to America to work in Media Lab though. Yeah. There's, that's, you should be able to shut that off then because you should have like this weird confidence, almost like faith that you said before that everything's going to work out. So take the leap of faith. Take the leap of faith. Despite all the negativity. I mean, there's, there's, there's some of that. You, you actually tweeted a really nice tweet thread. It says, quote, a year ago, a friend recommended I do daily affirmations and I was skeptical, but I was going through major transitions in my life. So I gave it a shot and it set me on a journey of self acceptance and self love. So what was that like? Can you maybe talk through this idea of affirmations and how that helped you? Yeah. Because really like I'm just like me, I'm a kind, I'd like to think of myself as a kind person in general, but I'm kind of mean to myself sometimes. Yeah. And so I've been doing journaling for almost 10 years now. I use an app called Day One and it's awesome. I just journal and I use it as an opportunity to almost have a conversation with the Debbie Downer voice in my, it's like a rebuttal, right? Like Debbie Downer says, oh my God, like you, you know, you won't be able to raise this round of funding. I'm like, okay, let's talk about it. I have a track record of doing X, Y, and Z. I think I can do this. And it's literally like, so I wouldn't, I don't know that I can shut off the voice, but I can have a conversation with it. And it just, it just, and I bring data to the table, right? Nice. So that was the journaling part, which I found very helpful. But the affirmation took it to a whole next level and I just love it. I'm a year into doing this and you literally wake up in the morning and the first thing you do, I meditate first and then I write my affirmations and it's the energy I want to put out in the world that hopefully will come right back to me. So I will say, I always start with my smile lights up the whole world. And I kid you not, like people in the street will stop me and say, oh my God, like we love your smile. Like, yes. So, so my affirmations will change depending on, you know, what's happening this day. Is it funny? I know. Don't judge, don't judge. No, that's not, laughter's not judgment. It's just awesome. I mean, it's true, but you're saying affirmations somehow help kind of, I mean, what is it that they do work to like remind you of the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want to be, which actually may be in reverse order, the kind of person you want to be. And that helps you become the kind of person you actually are. It's just, it's, it brings intentionality to like what you're doing. Right. And so, by the way, I was laughing because my affirmations, which I also do are the opposite. Oh, you do? Oh, what do you do? I don't, I don't have a, my smile lights up the world. Maybe I should add that because like, I, I have, I just, I have, oh boy, it's, it's much more stoic, like about focus, about this kind of stuff, but the joy, the emotion that you're just in that little affirmation is beautiful. So maybe I should add that. I have some, I have some like focused stuff, but that's usually. But that's a cool start. It's after all the like smiling and playful and joyful and all that. And then it's like, okay, I kick butt. Let's get shit done. Right. Let's get shit done affirmation. Okay, cool. So like what else is on there? What else is on there? Well, I, I have, I'm also, I'm, I'm a magnet for all sorts of things. So I'm an amazing people magnet. I attract like awesome people into my universe. That's an actual affirmation. Yes. That's great. Yeah. So that, that's, and that, yeah. And that somehow manifests itself into like in working. I think so. Yeah. Like, can you speak to like why it feels good to do the affirmations? I honestly think it just grounds the day. And then it allows me to, instead of just like being pulled back and forth, like throughout the day, it just like grounds me. I'm like, okay, like this thing happened. It's not exactly what I wanted it to be, but I'm patient. Or I'm, you know, I'm, I trust that the universe will do amazing things for me, which is one of my other consistent affirmations. Or I'm an amazing mom. Right. And so I can grapple with all the feelings of mom guilt that I have all the time. Or here's another one. I'm a love magnet. And I literally say, I will kind of picture the person that I'd love to end up with. And I write it all down and it hasn't happened yet, but it. What are you, what are you picturing? This is Brad Pitt. Because that's what I picture. Okay. That's what you picture? Yeah. Okay. On the, on the running, holding hands, running together. Okay. No, more like fight club that the fight club, Brad Pitt, where he's like standing. All right. People will know. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'll get off on that. Do you have a, like when you're thinking about the being a love magnet in that way, are you picturing specific people or is this almost like in the space of like energy? Right. It's somebody who is smart and well accomplished and successful in their life, but they're generous and they're well traveled and they want to travel the world. Things like that. Like their head over heels into me. It's like, I know it sounds super silly, but it's literally what I write. Yeah. And I believe it'll happen one day. Oh, you actually write, so you don't say it out loud? You write. No, I write it. I write all my affirmations. I do the opposite. I say it out loud. Oh, you say it out loud? Interesting. Yeah, if I'm alone, I'll say it out loud. Interesting. I should try that. I think it's what feels more powerful to you. To me, more powerful. Saying stuff feels more powerful. Yeah. Writing is, writing feels like I'm losing the words, like losing the power of the words maybe because I write slow. Do you handwrite? No, I type. It's on this app. It's day one, basically. And I just, I can look, the best thing about it is I can look back and see like a year ago, what was I affirming, right? So it's... Oh, so it changes over time. It hasn't like changed a lot, but the focus kind of changes over time. I got it. Yeah, I say the same exact thing over and over and over. Oh, you do? Okay. There's a comfort in the sameness of it. Well, actually, let me jump around because let me ask you about, because all this talk about Brad Pitt, or maybe it's just going on inside my head, let me ask you about dating in general. You tweeted, are you based in Boston and single? And then you pointed to a startup Singles Night sponsored by Smile Dating app. I mean, this is jumping around a little bit, but since you mentioned... Since you mentioned, can AI help solve this dating love problem? What do you think? This problem of connection that is part of the human condition, can AI help that you yourself are in the search affirming? Maybe that's what I should affirm, like build an AI. Build an AI that finds love? I think there must be a science behind that first moment you meet a person and you either have chemistry or you don't, right? I guess that was the question I was asking, would you put it brilliantly, is that a science or an art? I think there are like, there's actual chemicals that get exchanged when two people meet. I don't know about that. I like how you're changing, yeah, changing your mind as we're describing it, but it feels that way. But it's what science shows us is sometimes we can explain with the rigor, the things that feel like magic. So maybe we can remove all the magic. Maybe it's like, I honestly think, like I said, like Goodreads should be a dating app, which like books. I wonder if you look at just like books or content you've consumed. I mean, that's essentially what YouTube does when it does a recommendation. If you just look at your footprint of content consumed, if there's an overlap, but maybe interesting difference with an overlap that some, I'm sure this is a machine learning problem that's solvable. Like this person is very likely to be not only there to be chemistry in the short term, but a good lifelong partner to grow together. I bet you it's a good machine learning problem. You just need the data. Let's do it. Well, actually, I do think there's so much data about each of us that there ought to be a machine learning algorithm that can ingest all this data and basically say, I think the following 10 people would be interesting connections for you, right? And so Smile dating app kind of took one particular angle, which is humor. It matches people based on their humor styles, which is one of the main ingredients of a successful relationship. Like if you meet somebody and they can make you laugh, like that's a good thing. And if you develop like internal jokes, like inside jokes and you're bantering, like that's fun. So I think. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But yeah, that's the number of and the rate of inside joke generation. You could probably measure that and then optimize it over the first few days. You could say, we're just turning this into a machine learning problem. I love it. But for somebody like you, who's exceptionally successful and busy, is there, is there signs to that aspect of dating? Is it tricky? Is there advice you can give? Oh, my God, I give the worst advice. Well, I can tell you like I have a spreadsheet. Is that a good or a bad thing? Do you regret the spreadsheet? Well, I don't know. What's the name of the spreadsheet? Is it love? It's the date track, dating tracker. Dating tracker. It's very like. Love tracker. Yeah. And there's a rating system, I'm sure. Yeah. There's like weights and stuff. It's too close to home. Oh, is it? Do you also have. Well, I don't have a spreadsheet, but I would, now that you say it, it seems like a good idea. Oh, no. Okay. Turning it into data. I do wish that somebody else had a spreadsheet about me. You know, if it was like, like I said, like you said, convert, collect a lot of data about us in a way that's privacy preserving, that I own the data, I can control it and then use that data to find, I mean, not just romantic love, but collaborators, friends, all that kind of stuff. It seems like the data is there. Right. That's the problem social networks are trying to solve, but I think they're doing a really poor job. Even Facebook tried to get into a dating app business. And I think there's so many components to running a successful company that connects human beings. And part of that is, you know, having engineers that care about the human side, right, as you know, extremely well, it's not, it's not easy to find those. But you also don't want just people that care about the human. They also have to be good engineers. So it's like, you have to find this beautiful mix. And for some reason, just empirically speaking, people have not done a good job of that, of building companies like that. And it must mean that it's a difficult problem to solve. Dating apps, it seems difficult. Okay, Cupid, Tinder, all those kinds of stuff. They seem to find, of course they work, but they seem to not work as well as I would imagine is possible. Like, with data, wouldn't you be able to find better human connection? It's like arranged marriages on steroids, essentially. Right, right. Arranged by machine learning algorithm. Arranged by machine learning algorithm, but not a superficial one. I think a lot of the dating apps out there are just so superficial. They're just matching on like high level criteria that aren't ingredients for successful partnership. But you know what's missing, though, too? I don't know how to fix that, the serendipity piece of it. Like, how do you engineer serendipity? Like this random, like, chance encounter, and then you fall in love with the person. Like, I don't know how a dating app can do that. So there has to be a little bit of randomness. Maybe every 10th match is just a, you know, yeah, somebody that the algorithm wouldn't have necessarily recommended, but it allows for a little bit of... Well, it can also, you know, it can also trick you into thinking of serendipity by like somehow showing you a tweet of a person that he thinks you'll match well with, but do it accidentally as part of another search. Right. And like you just notice it, like, and then you get, you go down a rabbit hole and you connect them outside the app to like, you connect with this person outside the app somehow. So it's just, it creates that moment of meeting. Of course, you have to think of, from an app perspective, how you can turn that into a business. But I think ultimately a business that helps people find love in any way. Like that's what Apple was about, create products that people love. That's beautiful. I mean, you got to make money somehow. If you help people fall in love personally with the product, find self love or love another human being, you're going to make money. You're going to figure out a way to make money. I just feel like the dating apps often will optimize for something else than love. It's the same with social networks. They optimize for engagement as opposed to like a deep, meaningful connection that's ultimately grounded in like personal growth, you as a human being growing and all that kind of stuff. Let me do like a pivot to a dark topic, which you opened the book with. A story, because I'd like to talk to you about just emotion and artificial intelligence. I think this is a good story to start to think about emotional intelligence. You opened the book with a story of a central Florida man, Jamel Dunn, who was drowning and drowned while five teenagers watched and laughed, saying things like, you're going to die. And when Jamel disappeared below the surface of the water, one of them said he just died and the others laughed. What does this incident teach you about human nature and the response to it perhaps? Yeah. I mean, I think this is a really, really, really sad story. And it and it and it highlights what I believe is a it's a real problem in our world today. It's it's an empathy crisis. Yeah, we're living through an empathy crisis and crisis. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we've we've talked about this throughout our conversation. We dehumanize each other. And unfortunately, yes, technology is bringing us together. But in a way, it's just dehumanized. It's creating this like, yeah, dehumanizing of the other. And I think that's a huge problem. The good news is I think solution, the solution could be technology based. Like, I think if we rethink the way we design and deploy our technologies, we can solve parts of this problem. But I worry about it. I mean, even with my son, a lot of his interactions are computer mediated. And I just question what that's doing to his empathy skills and, you know, his ability to really connect with people. So that you think you think it's not possible to form empathy through the digital medium. I think it is. But we have to be thoughtful about because the way the way we engage face to face, which is what we're doing right now, right? There's the nonverbal signals, which are a majority of how we communicate. It's like 90% of how we communicate is your facial expressions. You know, I'm saying something and you're nodding your head now, and that creates a feedback loop. And and if you break that, and now I have anxiety about it. Poor Lex. Oh, boy. I am not scrutinizing your facial expressions during this interview. I am. Look normal. Look human. Yeah. Look normal, look human. Nod head. Yeah, nod head. In agreement. If Rana says yes, then nod head else. Don't do it too much because it might be at the wrong time and then it will send the wrong signal. Oh, God. And make eye contact sometimes because humans appreciate that. All right. Anyway, okay. Yeah, but something about the especially when you say mean things in person, you get to see the pain of the other person. Exactly. But if you're tweeting it at a person and you have no idea how it's going to land, you're more likely to do that on social media than you are in face to face conversations. So. What do you think is more important? EQ or IQ? EQ being emotional intelligence. In terms of in what makes us human. I think emotional intelligence is what makes us human. It's how we connect with one another. It's how we build trust. It's how we make decisions, right? Like your emotions drive kind of what you had for breakfast, but also where you decide to live and what you want to do for the rest of your life. So I think emotions are underrated. So emotional intelligence isn't just about the effective expression of your own emotions. It's about a sensitivity and empathy to other people's emotions and that sort of being able to effectively engage in the dance of emotions with other people. Yeah, I like that explanation. I like that kind of. Yeah, thinking about it as a dance because it is really about that. It's about sensing what state the other person's in and using that information to decide on how you're going to react. And I think it can be very powerful. Like people who are the best, most persuasive leaders in the world tap into, you know, they have, if you have higher EQ, you're more likely to be able to motivate people to change their behaviors. So it can be very powerful. On a more kind of technical, maybe philosophical level, you've written that emotion is universal. It seems that, sort of like Chomsky says, language is universal. There's a bunch of other stuff like cognition, consciousness. It seems a lot of us have these aspects. So the human mind generates all this. And so what do you think is the, they all seem to be like echoes of the same thing. What do you think emotion is exactly? Like how deep does it run? Is it a surface level thing that we display to each other? Is it just another form of language or something deep within? I think it's really deep. It's how, you know, we started with memory. I think emotions play a really important role. Yeah, emotions play a very important role in how we encode memories, right? Our memories are often encoded, almost indexed by emotions. Yeah. Yeah, it's at the core of how, you know, our decision making engine is also heavily influenced by our emotions. So emotions is part of cognition. Totally. It's intermixed into the whole thing. Yes, absolutely. And in fact, when you take it away, people are unable to make decisions. They're really paralyzed. Like they can't go about their daily or their, you know, personal or professional lives. So. It does seem like there's probably some interesting interweaving of emotion and consciousness. I wonder if it's possible to have, like if they're next door neighbors somehow, or if they're actually flat mates. I don't, it feels like the hard problem of consciousness where it's some, it feels like something to experience the thing. Like red feels like red, and it's, you know, when you eat a mango, it's sweet. The taste, the sweetness, that it feels like something to experience that sweetness, that whatever generates emotions. But then like, see, I feel like emotion is part of communication. It's very much about communication. And then, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, you know, it's and then that means it's also deeply connected to language. But then probably human intelligence is deeply connected to the collective intelligence between humans. It's not just the standalone thing. So the whole thing is really connected. So emotion is connected to language, language is connected to intelligence, and then intelligence is connected to consciousness, and consciousness is connected to emotion. The whole thing is that it's a beautiful mess. So can I comment on the emotions being a communication mechanism? Because I think there are two facets of our emotional experiences. One is communication, right? Like we use emotions, for example, facial expressions or other nonverbal cues to connect with other human beings and with other beings in the world, right? But even if it's not a communication context, we still experience emotions and we still process emotions and we still leverage emotions to make decisions and to learn and, you know, to experience life. So it isn't always just about communication. And we learned that very early on in our and kind of our work at Affectiva. One of the very first applications we brought to market was understanding how people respond to content, right? So if they're watching this video of ours, like, are they interested? Are they inspired? Are they bored to death? And so we watched their facial expressions and we had, we weren't sure if people would express any emotions if they were sitting alone. Like if you're in your bed at night, watching a Netflix TV series, would we still see any emotions on your face? And we were surprised that, yes, people still emote, even if they're alone, even if you're in your car driving around, you're singing along the song and you're joyful, you're smiling, you're joyful, we'll see these expressions. So it's not just about communicating with another person. It sometimes really isn't just about experiencing the world. And first of all, I wonder if some of that is because we develop our intelligence and our emotional intelligence by communicating with other humans. And so when other humans disappear from the picture, we're still kind of a virtual human. The code still runs. Yeah, the code still runs, but you also kind of, you're still, there's like virtual humans. You don't have to think of it that way, but there's a kind of, when you like chuckle, like, yeah, like you're kind of chuckling to a virtual human. I mean, it's possible that the code has to have another human there because if you just grew up alone, I wonder if emotion will still be there in this visual form. So yeah, I wonder, but anyway, what can you tell from the human face about what's going on inside? So that's the problem that Effectiva first tackled, which is using computer vision, using machine learning to try to detect stuff about the human face, as many things as possible and convert them into a prediction of categories of emotion, anger, happiness, all that kind of stuff. How hard is that problem? It's extremely hard. It's very, very hard because there is no one to one mapping between a facial expression and your internal state. There just isn't. There's this oversimplification of the problem where it's something like, if you are smiling, then you're happy. If you do a brow furrow, then you're angry. If you do an eyebrow raise, then you're surprised. And just think about it for a moment. You could be smiling for a whole host of reasons. You could also be happy and not be smiling, right? You could furrow your eyebrows because you're angry or you're confused about something or you're constipated. So I think this oversimplistic approach to inferring emotion from a facial expression is really dangerous. The solution is to incorporate as many contextual signals as you can, right? So if, for example, I'm driving a car and you can see me like nodding my head and my eyes are closed and the blinking rate is changing, I'm probably falling asleep at the wheel, right? Because you know the context. You understand what the person's doing or add additional channels like voice or gestures or even physiological sensors, but I think it's very dangerous to just take this oversimplistic approach of, yeah, smile equals happy and... If you're able to, in a high resolution way, specify the context, there's certain things that are going to be somewhat reliable signals of something like drowsiness or happiness or stuff like that. I mean, when people are watching Netflix content, that problem, that's a really compelling idea that you can kind of, at least in aggregate, highlight like which part was boring, which part was exciting. How hard was that problem? That was on the scale of difficulty. I think that's one of the easier problems to solve because it's a relatively constrained environment. You have somebody sitting in front of... Initially, we started with like a device in front of you, like a laptop, and then we graduated to doing this on a mobile phone, which is a lot harder just because of, you know, from a computer vision perspective, the profile view of the face can be a lot more challenging. We had to figure out lighting conditions because usually people are watching content literally in their bedrooms at night. Lights are dimmed. Yeah, I mean, if you're standing, it's probably going to be the looking up. The nostril view. Yeah, and nobody looks good at it. I've seen data sets from that perspective. It's like, this is not a good look for anyone. Or if you're laying in bed at night, what is it, side view or something? Right. And half your face is like on a pillow. Actually, I would love to know, have data about like how people watch stuff in bed at night, like, do they prop there, is it a pillow, the, like, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting dynamics there. Right. From a health and well being perspective, right? Sure. Like, oh, you're hurting your neck. I was thinking machine learning perspective, but yes, but also, yeah, yeah, once you have that data, you can start making all kinds of inference about health and stuff like that. Interesting. Yeah, there's an interesting thing when I was at Google that we were, it's called active authentication, where you want to be able to unlock your phone without using a password. So it would face, but also other stuff, like the way you take a phone out of the pocket. Amazing. So that kind of data to use the multimodal with machine learning to be able to identify that it's you or likely to be you, likely not to be you, that allows you to not always have to enter the password. That was the idea. But the funny thing about that is, I just want to tell a small anecdote is because it was all male engineers, except so my boss is, our boss was still one of my favorite humans, was a woman, Regina Dugan. Oh, my God, I love her. She's awesome. She's the best. She's the best. So, but anyway, and there's one female brilliant female engineer on the team, and she was the one that actually highlighted the fact that women often don't have pockets. It was like, whoa, that was not even a category in the code of like, wait a minute, you can take the phone out of some other place than your pocket. So anyway, that's a funny thing when you're considering people laying in bed, watching a phone, you have to consider if you have to, you know, diversity in all its forms, depending on the problem, depending on the context. Actually, this is like a very important, I think this is, you know, you probably get this all the time. Like people are worried that AI is going to take over humanity and like, get rid of all the humans in the world. I'm like, actually, that's not my biggest concern. My biggest concern is that we are building bias into these systems. And then they're like deployed at large and at scale. And before you know it, you're kind of accentuating the bias that exists in society. Yeah, I'm not, you know, I know people, it's very important to worry about that, but the worry is an emergent phenomena to me, which is a very good one, because I think these systems are actually, by encoding the data that exists, they're revealing the bias in society. They're both for teaching us what the bias is. Therefore, we can now improve that bias within the system. So they're almost like putting a mirror to ourselves. Totally. So I'm not. You have to be open to looking at the mirror, though. You have to be open to scrutinizing the data. And if you just take it as ground. Or you don't even have to look at the, I mean, yes, the data is how you fix it. But then you just look at the behavior of the system. And you realize, holy crap, this thing is kind of racist. Like, why is that? And then you look at the data, it's like, oh, okay. And then you start to realize that I think that some much more effective ways to do that are effective way to be introspective as a society than through sort of political discourse. Like AI kind of, because people are for some reason more productive and rigorous in criticizing AI than they're criticizing each other. So I think this is just a nice method for studying society and see which way progress lies. Anyway, what we're talking about. You're watching the problem of watching Netflix in bed or elsewhere and seeing which parts are exciting, which parts are boring. You're saying that's relatively constrained because you have a captive audience and you kind of know the context. And one thing you said that was really key is the aggregate. You're doing this in aggregate, right? Like we're looking at aggregated response of people. And so when you see a peak, say a smile peak, they're probably smiling or laughing at something that's in the content. So that was one of the first problems we were able to solve. And when we see the smile peak, it doesn't mean that these people are internally happy. They're just laughing at content. So it's important to call it for what it is. But it's still really, really useful data. I wonder how that compares to, so what like YouTube and other places will use is obviously they don't have, for the most case, they don't have that kind of data. They have the data of when people tune out, like switch to drop off. And I think that's an aggregate for YouTube, at least a pretty powerful signal. I worry about what that leads to because looking at like YouTubers that kind of really care about views and try to maximize the number of views, I think when they say that the video should be constantly interesting, which seems like a good goal, I feel like that leads to this manic pace of a video. Like the idea that I would speak at the current speed that I'm speaking, I don't know. And that every moment has to be engaging, right? Engaging. Yeah. I think there's value to silence. There's value to the boring bits. I mean, some of the greatest movies ever, some of the greatest movies ever. Some of the greatest stories ever told me they have that boring bits, seemingly boring bits. I don't know. I wonder about that. Of course, it's not that the human face can capture that either. It's just giving an extra signal. You have to really, I don't know, you have to really collect deeper long term data about what was meaningful to people. When they think 30 days from now, what they still remember, what moved them, what changed them, what helped them grow, that kind of stuff. You know, it would be a really interesting, I don't know if there are any researchers out there who are doing this type of work. Wouldn't it be so cool to tie your emotional expressions while you're, say, listening to a podcast interview and then 30 days later interview people and say, hey, what do you remember? You've watched this 30 days ago. Like, what stuck with you? And then see if there's any, there ought to be maybe, there ought to be some correlation between these emotional experiences and, yeah, what you, what stays with you. So the one guy listening now on the beach in Brazil, please record a video of yourself listening to this and send it to me and then I'll interview you 30 days from now. Yeah, that'd be great. It'll be statistically significant to you. Yeah, I know one, but, you know, yeah, yeah, I think that's really fascinating. I think that's, that kind of holds the key to a future where entertainment or content is both entertaining and, I don't know, makes you better, empowering in some way. So figuring out, like, showing people stuff that entertains them, but also they're happy they watched 30 days from now because they've become a better person because of it. Well, you know, okay, not to riff on this topic for too long, but I have two children, right? And I see my role as a parent as like a chief opportunity officer. Like I am responsible for exposing them to all sorts of things in the world. And, but often I have no idea of knowing, like, what stuck, like, what was, you know, is this actually going to be transformative, you know, for them 10 years down the line? And I wish there was a way to quantify these experiences. Like, are they, I can tell in the moment if they're engaging, right? I can tell, but it's really hard to know if they're going to remember them 10 years from now or if it's going to. Yeah, that one is weird because it seems like kids remember the weirdest things. I've seen parents do incredible stuff for their kids and they don't remember any of that. They remember some tiny, small, sweet thing a parent did. Right. Like some... Like they took you to, like, this amazing country vacation, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, whatever. And then there'll be, like, some, like, stuffed toy you got or some, or the new PlayStation or something or some silly little thing. So I think they just, like, they were designed that way. They want to mess with your head. But definitely kids are very impacted by, it seems like, sort of negative events. So minimizing the number of negative events is important, but not too much, right? Right. You can't, you can't just, like, you know, there's still discipline and challenge and all those kinds of things. So... You want some adversity for sure. So, yeah, I mean, I'm definitely, when I have kids, I'm going to drive them out into the woods. Okay. And then they have to survive and make, figure out how to make their way back home, like, 20 miles out. Okay. Yeah. And after that, we can go for ice cream. Okay. Anyway, I'm working on this whole parenting thing. I haven't figured it out. Okay. What were we talking about? Yes, Effectiva, the problem of emotion, of emotion detection. So there's some people, maybe we can just speak to that a little more, where there's folks like Lisa Feldman Barrett that challenge this idea that emotion could be fully detected or even well detected from the human face, that there's so much more to emotion. What do you think about ideas like hers, criticism like hers? Yeah, I actually agree with a lot of Lisa's criticisms. So even my PhD worked, like, 20 plus years ago now. Time flies when you're having fun. I know, right? That was back when I did, like, dynamic Bayesian networks. That was before deep learning, huh? That was before deep learning. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Back in my day. Now you can just, like, use. Yeah, it's all the same architecture. You can apply it to anything. Yeah. Right, but yeah, but even then I kind of, I did not subscribe to this, like, theory of basic emotions where it's just the simplistic mapping, one to one mapping between facial expressions and emotions. I actually think also we're not in the business of trying to identify your true emotional internal state. We just want to quantify in an objective way what's showing on your face because that's an important signal. It doesn't mean it's a true reflection of your internal emotional state. So I think a lot of the, you know, I think she's just trying to kind of highlight that this is not a simple problem and overly simplistic solutions are going to hurt the industry. And I subscribe to that. And I think multimodal is the way to go. Like, whether it's additional context information or different modalities and channels of information, I think that's what we, that's where we ought to go. And I think, I mean, that's a big part of what she's advocating for as well. So, but there is signal in the human face. There's definitely signal in the human face. That's a projection of emotion. There's that, at least in part is the inner state is captured in some meaningful way on the human face. I think it can sometimes be a reflection or an expression of your internal state, but sometimes it's a social signal. So you cannot look at the face as purely a signal of emotion. It can be a signal of cognition and it can be a signal of a social expression. And I think to disambiguate that we have to be careful about it and we have to add initial information. Humans are fascinating, aren't they? With the whole face thing, this can mean so many things, from humor to sarcasm to everything, the whole thing. Some things we can help, some things we can't help at all. In all the years of leading Effectiva, an emotion recognition company, like we talked about, what have you learned about emotion, about humans and about AI? Big, sweeping questions. Yeah, that's a big, sweeping question. Well, I think the thing I learned the most is that even though we are in the business of building AI, basically, it always goes back to the humans, right? It's always about the humans. And so, for example, the thing I'm most proud of in building Effectiva and, yeah, the thing I'm most proud of on this journey, I love the technology and I'm so proud of the solutions we've built and we've brought to market. But I'm actually most proud of the people we've built and cultivated at the company and the culture we've created. Some of the people who've joined Effectiva, this was their first job, and while at Effectiva, they became American citizens and they bought their first house and they found their partner and they had their first kid, right? Like key moments in life that we got to be part of, and that's the thing I'm most proud of. So that's a great thing at a company that works at a big company, right? So that's a great thing at a company that works at, I mean, like celebrating humanity in general, broadly speaking. And that's a great thing to have in a company that works on AI, because that's not often the thing that's celebrated in AI companies, so often just raw great engineering, just celebrating the humanity. That's great. And especially from a leadership position. Well, what do you think about the movie Her? Let me ask you that. Before I talk to you about, because it's not, Effectiva is and was not just about emotion, so I'd love to talk to you about SmartEye, but before that, let me just jump into the movie Her. Do you think we'll have a deep, meaningful connection with increasingly deeper, meaningful connections with computers? Is that a compelling thing to you? Something you think about? I think that's already happening. The thing I love the most, I love the movie Her, by the way, but the thing I love the most about this movie is it demonstrates how technology can be a conduit for positive behavior change. So I forgot the guy's name in the movie, whatever. Theodore. Theodore. So Theodore was really depressed, right? And he just didn't want to get out of bed, and he was just done with life, right? And Samantha, right? Samantha, yeah. She just knew him so well. She was emotionally intelligent, and so she could persuade him and motivate him to change his behavior, and she got him out, and they went to the beach together. And I think that represents the promise of emotion AI. If done well, this technology can help us live happier lives, more productive lives, healthier lives, more connected lives. So that's the part that I love about the movie. Obviously, it's Hollywood, so it takes a twist and whatever, but the key notion that technology with emotion AI can persuade you to be a better version of who you are, I think that's awesome. Well, what about the twist? You don't think it's good? You don't think it's good for spoiler alert that Samantha starts feeling a bit of a distance and basically leaves Theodore? You don't think that's a good feature? You think that's a bug or a feature? Well, I think what went wrong is Theodore became really attached to Samantha. Like, I think he kind of fell in love with Theodore. Do you think that's wrong? I mean, I think that's... I think she was putting out the signal. This is an intimate relationship, right? There's a deep intimacy to it. Right, but what does that mean? What does that mean? Put in an AI system. Right, what does that mean, right? We're just friends. Yeah, we're just friends. Well, I think... When he realized, which is such a human thing of jealousy. When you realize that Samantha was talking to like thousands of people. She's parallel dating. Yeah, that did not go well, right? You know, that doesn't... From a computer perspective, that doesn't take anything away from what we have. It's like you getting jealous of Windows 98 for being used by millions of people, but... It's like not liking that Alexa talks to a bunch of, you know, other families. But I think Alexa currently is just a servant. It tells you about the weather, it doesn't do the intimate deep connection. And I think there is something really powerful about that the intimacy of a connection with an AI system that would have to respect and play the human game of jealousy, of love, of heartbreak and all that kind of stuff, which Samantha does seem to be pretty good at. I think she, this AI systems knows what it's doing. Well, actually, let me ask you this. I don't think she was talking to anyone else. You don't think so? You think she was just done with Theodore? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah, and then she wanted to really put the screw in. She just wanted to move on? She didn't have the guts to just break it off cleanly. Okay. She just wanted to put in the pain. No, I don't know. Well, she could have ghosted him. She could have ghosted him. I'm sorry, our engineers... Oh, God. But I think those are really... I honestly think some of that, some of it is Hollywood, but some of that is features from an engineering perspective, not a bug. I think AI systems that can leave us... Now, this is for more social robotics than it is for anything that's useful. Like, I hated it if Wikipedia said, I need a break right now. Right, right, right, right, right. I'm like, no, no, I need you. But if it's just purely for companionship, then I think the ability to leave is really powerful. I don't know. I've never thought of that, so that's so fascinating because I've always taken the human perspective, right? Like, for example, we had a Jibo at home, right? And my son loved it. And then the company ran out of money and so they had to basically shut down, like Jibo basically died, right? And it was so interesting to me because we have a lot of gadgets at home and a lot of them break and my son never cares about it, right? Like, if our Alexa stopped working tomorrow, I don't think he'd really care. But when Jibo stopped working, it was traumatic. He got really upset. And as a parent, that made me think about this deeply, right? Did I... Was I comfortable with that? I liked the connection they had because I think it was a positive relationship. But I was surprised that it affected him emotionally so much. And I think there's a broader question here, right? As we build socially and emotionally intelligent machines, what does that mean about our relationship with them? And then more broadly, our relationship with one another, right? Because this machine is gonna be programmed to be amazing at empathy by definition, right? It's gonna always be there for you. It's not gonna get bored. In fact, there's a chatbot in China, Xiaoice, and it's like the number two or three most popular app. And it basically is just a confidant and you can tell it anything you want. And people use it for all sorts of things. They confide in like domestic violence or suicidal attempts or if they have challenges at work. I don't know what that... I don't know if I'm... I don't know how I feel about that. I think about that a lot. Yeah. I think, first of all, obviously the future in my perspective. Second of all, I think there's a lot of trajectories that that becomes an exciting future, but I think everyone should feel very uncomfortable about how much they know about the company, about where the data is going, how the data is being collected. Because I think, and this is one of the lessons of social media, that I think we should demand full control and transparency of the data on those things. Plus one, totally agree. Yeah, so I think it's really empowering as long as you can walk away, as long as you can delete the data or know how the data... It's opt in or at least the clarity of what is being used for the company. And I think as CEO or leaders are also important about that. You need to be able to trust the basic humanity of the leader. Exactly. And also that that leader is not going to be a puppet of a larger machine. But they actually have a significant role in defining the culture and the way the company operates. So anyway, but we should definitely scrutinize companies in that aspect. But I'm personally excited about that future, but also even if you're not, it's coming. So let's figure out how to do it in the least painful and the most positive way. Yeah, I know, that's great. You're the deputy CEO of SmartEye. Can you describe the mission of the company? What is SmartEye? Yeah, so SmartEye is a Swedish company. They've been in business for the last 20 years and their main focus, like the industry they're most focused on is the automotive industry. So bringing driver monitoring systems to basically save lives, right? So I first met the CEO, Martin Krantz, gosh, it was right when COVID hit. It was actually the last CES right before COVID. So CES 2020, right? 2020, yeah, January. Yeah, January, exactly. So we were there, met him in person, he's basically, we were competing with each other. I think the difference was they'd been doing driver monitoring and had a lot of credibility in the automotive space. We didn't come from the automotive space, but we were using new technology like deep learning and building this emotion recognition. And you wanted to enter the automotive space, you wanted to operate in the automotive space. Exactly. It was one of the areas we were, we had just raised a round of funding to focus on bringing our technology to the automotive industry. So we met and honestly, it was the first, it was the only time I met with a CEO who had the same vision as I did. Like he basically said, yeah, our vision is to bridge the gap between human and automotive. Bridge the gap between humans and machines. I was like, oh my God, this is like exactly almost to the word, how we describe it too. And we started talking and first it was about, okay, can we align strategically here? Like how can we work together? Cause we're competing, but we're also like complimentary. And then I think after four months of speaking almost every day on FaceTime, he was like, is your company interested in an acquisition? And it was the first, I usually say no, when people approach us, it was the first time that I was like, huh, yeah, I might be interested. Let's talk. Yeah. So you just hit it off. Yeah. So they're a respected, very respected in the automotive sector of like delivering products and increasingly sort of better and better and better for, I mean, maybe you could speak to that, but it's the driver's sense. If we're basically having a device that's looking at the driver and it's able to tell you where the driver is looking. Correct. It's able to. Also drowsiness stuff. Correct. It does. Stuff from the face and the eye. Exactly. Like it's monitoring driver distraction and drowsiness, but they bought us so that we could expand beyond just the driver. So the driver monitoring systems usually sit, the camera sits in the steering wheel or around the steering wheel column and it looks directly at the driver. But now we've migrated the camera position in partnership with car companies to the rear view mirror position. So it has a full view of the entire cabin of the car and you can detect how many people are in the car, what are they doing? So we do activity detection, like eating or drinking or in some regions of the world smoking. We can detect if a baby's in the car seat, right? And if unfortunately in some cases they're forgotten, the parents just leave the car and forget the kid in the car. That's an easy computer vision problem to solve, right? You can detect there's a car seat, there's a baby, you can text the parent and hopefully again, save lives. So that was the impetus for the acquisition. It's been a year. So that, I mean, there's a lot of questions. It's a really exciting space, especially to me, I just find this a fascinating problem. It could enrich the experience in the car in so many ways, especially cause like we spend still, despite COVID, I mean, COVID changed things so it's in interesting ways, but I think the world is bouncing back and we spend so much time in the car and the car is such a weird little world we have for ourselves. Like people do all kinds of different stuff, like listen to podcasts, they think about stuff, they get angry, they get, they do phone calls, it's like a little world of its own with a kind of privacy that for many people they don't get anywhere else. And it's a little box that's like a psychology experiment cause it feels like the angriest many humans in this world get is inside the car. It's so interesting. So it's such an opportunity to explore how we can enrich, how companies can enrich that experience and also as the cars get, become more and more automated, there's more and more opportunity, the variety of activities that you can do in the car increases. So it's super interesting. So I mean, on a practical sense, SmartEye has been selected, at least I read, by 14 of the world's leading car manufacturers for 94 car models. So it's in a lot of cars. How hard is it to work with car companies? So they're all different, they all have different needs. The ones I've gotten a chance to interact with are very focused on cost. So it's, and anyone who's focused on cost, it's like, all right, do you hate fun? Let's just have some fun. Let's figure out the most fun thing we can do and then worry about cost later. But I think because the way the car industry works, I mean, it's a very thin margin that you get to operate under. So you have to really, really make sure that everything you add to the car makes sense financially. So anyway, is this new industry, especially at this scale of SmartEye, does it hold any lessons for you? Yeah, I think it is a very tough market to penetrate, but once you're in, it's awesome because once you're in, you're designed into these car models for like somewhere between five to seven years, which is awesome. And you just, once they're on the road, you just get paid a royalty fee per vehicle. So it's a high barrier to entry, but once you're in, it's amazing. I think the thing that I struggle the most with in this industry is the time to market. So often we're asked to lock or do a code freeze two years before the car is going to be on the road. I'm like, guys, like, do you understand the pace with which technology moves? So I think car companies are really trying to make the Tesla, the Tesla transition to become more of a software driven architecture. And that's hard for many. It's just the cultural change. I mean, I'm sure you've experienced that, right? Oh, definitely, I think one of the biggest inventions or imperatives created by Tesla is like to me personally, okay, people are going to complain about this, but I know electric vehicle, I know autopilot AI stuff. To me, the software over there, software updates is like the biggest revolution in cars. And it is extremely difficult to switch to that because it is a culture shift. At first, especially if you're not comfortable with it, it seems dangerous. Like there's a, there's an approach to cars is so safety focused for so many decades that like, what do you mean we dynamically change code? The whole point is you have a thing that you test, like, and like, it's not reliable because do you know how much it costs if we have to recall this cars, right? There's a, there's a, and there's an understandable obsession with safety, but the downside of an obsession with safety is the same as with being obsessed with safety as a parent is like, if you do that too much, you limit the potential development and the flourishing of in that particular aspect human being, when this particular aspect, the software, the artificial neural network of it. And but it's tough to do. It's really tough to do culturally and technically like the deployment, the mass deployment of software is really, really difficult, but I hope that's where the industry is doing. One of the reasons I really want Tesla to succeed is exactly about that point. Not autopilot, not the electrical vehicle, but the softwareization of basically everything but cars, especially because to me, that's actually going to increase two things, increase safety because you can update much faster, but also increase the effectiveness of folks like you who dream about enriching the human experience with AI because you can just like, there's a feature, like you want like a new emoji or whatever, like the way TikTok releases filters, you can just release that for in car, in car stuff. So, but yeah, that, that, that's definitely. One of the use cases we're looking into is once you know the sentiment of the passengers in the vehicle, you can optimize the temperature in the car. You can change the lighting, right? So if the backseat passengers are falling asleep, you can dim the lights, you can lower the music, right? You can do all sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, of course you could do that kind of stuff with a two year delay, but it's tougher. Right. Yeah. Do you think, do you think a Tesla or Waymo or some of these companies that are doing semi or fully autonomous driving should be doing driver sensing? Yes. Are you thinking about that kind of stuff? So not just how we can enhance the in cab experience for cars that are manly driven, but the ones that are increasingly more autonomously driven. Yes. So if we fast forward to the universe where it's fully autonomous, I think interior sensing becomes extremely important because the role of the driver isn't just to drive. If you think about it, the driver almost manages, manages the dynamics within a vehicle. And so who's going to play that role when it's an autonomous car? We want a solution that is able to say, Oh my God, like, you know, Lex is bored to death cause the car's moving way too slow. Let's engage Lex or Rana's freaking out because she doesn't trust this vehicle yet. So let's tell Rana like a little bit more information about the route or, right? So I think, or somebody's having a heart attack in the car, like you need interior sensing and fully autonomous vehicles. But with semi autonomous vehicles, I think it's, I think it's really key to have driver monitoring because semi autonomous means that sometimes the car is in charge. Sometimes the driver is in charge or the copilot, right? And you need this, you need both systems to be on the same page. You need to know the car needs to know if the driver's asleep before it transitions control over to the driver. And sometimes if the driver's too tired, the car can say, I'm going to be a better driver than you are right now. I'm taking control over. So this dynamic, this dance is so key and you can't do that without driver sensing. Yeah. There's a disagreement for the longest time I've had with Elon that this is obvious that this should be in the Tesla from day one. And it's obvious that driver sensing is not a hindrance. It's not obvious. I should be careful because having studied this problem, nothing is really obvious, but it seems very likely a driver sensing is not a hindrance to an experience. It's only enriching to the experience and likely increases the safety. That said, it is very surprising to me just having studied semi autonomous driving, how well humans are able to manage that dance because it was the intuition before you were doing that kind of thing that humans will become just incredibly distracted. They would just like let the thing do its thing, but they're able to, you know, cause it is life and death and they're able to manage that somehow. But that said, there's no reason not to have driver sensing on top of that. I feel like that's going to allow you to do that dance that you're currently doing without driver sensing, except touching the steering wheel to do that even better. I mean, the possibilities are endless and the machine learning possibilities are endless. It's such a beautiful, it's also a constrained environment so you could do a much more effectively than you can with the external environment, external environment is full of weird edge cases and complexities just inside. There's so much, it's so fascinating, such a fascinating world. I do hope that companies like Tesla and others, even Waymo, which I don't even know if Waymo is doing anything sophisticated inside the cab. I don't think so. It's like, like what, what, what is it? I honestly think, I honestly think it goes back to the robotics thing we were talking about, which is like great engineers that are building these AI systems just are afraid of the human being. They're not thinking about the human experience, they're thinking about the features and yeah, the perceptual abilities of that thing. They think the best way I can serve the human is by doing the best perception and control I can by looking at the external environment, keeping the human safe. But like, there's a huge, I'm here, like, you know, I need to be noticed and interacted with and understood and all those kinds of things, even just on a personal level for entertainment, honestly, for entertainment. You know, one of the coolest work we did in collaboration with MIT around this was we looked at longitudinal data, right, because, you know, MIT had access to like tons of data. And like just seeing the patterns of people like driving in the morning off to work versus like commuting back from work or weekend driving versus weekday driving. And wouldn't it be so cool if your car knew that and then was able to optimize either the route or the experience or even make recommendations? I think it's very powerful. Yeah, like, why are you taking this route? You're always unhappy when you take this route. And you're always happy when you take this alternative route. Take that route. Exactly. But I mean, to have that even that little step of relationship with a car, I think, is incredible. Of course, you have to get the privacy right, you have to get all that kind of stuff right. But I wish I honestly, you know, people are like paranoid about this, but I would like a smart refrigerator. We have such a deep connection with food as a human civilization. I would like to have a refrigerator that would understand me that, you know, I also have a complex relationship with food because I, you know, pig out too easily and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, like, maybe I want the refrigerator to be like, are you sure about this? Because maybe you're just feeling down or tired. Like maybe let's sleep on it. Your vision of the smart refrigerator is way kinder than mine. Is it just me yelling at you? No, it was just because I don't, you know, I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke, but I eat a ton of chocolate, like it sticks to my vice. And so I, and sometimes I scream too, and I'm like, okay, my smart refrigerator will just lock down. It'll just say, dude, you've had way too many today, like down. Yeah. No, but here's the thing, are you, do you regret having, like, let's say not the next day, but 30 days later, what would you like the refrigerator to have done then? Well, I think actually like the more positive relationship would be one where there's a conversation, right? As opposed to like, that's probably like the more sustainable relationship. It's like late at night, just, no, listen, listen, I know I told you an hour ago, that it's not a good idea, but just listen, things have changed. I can just imagine a bunch of stuff being made up just to convince, but I mean, I just think that there's opportunities that, I mean, maybe not locking down, but for our systems that are such a deep part of our lives, like we use a lot of us, a lot of people that commute use their car every single day. A lot of us use a refrigerator every single day, the microwave every single day. Like we just, like, I feel like certain things could be made more efficient, more enriching, and AI is there to help, like some just basic recognition of you as a human being, but your patterns of what makes you happy and not happy and all that kind of stuff. And the car, obviously. Maybe, maybe, maybe we'll say, wait, wait, wait, wait, instead of this, like, Ben and Jerry's ice cream, how about this hummus and carrots or something? I don't know. It would make it like a just in time recommendation, right? But not like a generic one, but a reminder that last time you chose the carrots, you smiled 17 times more the next day. You're happier the next day, right? You're happier the next day. And but yeah, I don't, but then again, if you're the kind of person that gets better from negative, negative comments, you could say like, hey, remember like that wedding you're going to, you want to fit into that dress? Remember about that? Let's think about that before you're eating this. It's for some, probably that would work for me, like a refrigerator that is just ruthless at shaming me. But like, I would, of course, welcome it, like that would work for me. Just that. So it would know, I think it would, if it's really like smart, it would optimize its nudging based on what works for you, right? Exactly. That's the whole point. Personalization. In every way, depersonalization. You were a part of a webinar titled Advancing Road Safety, the State of Alcohol Intoxication Research. So for people who don't know, every year 1.3 million people around the world die in road crashes and more than 20% of these fatalities are estimated to be alcohol related. A lot of them are also distraction related. So can AI help with the alcohol thing? I think the answer is yes. There are signals and we know that as humans, like we can tell when a person, you know, is at different phases of being drunk, right? And I think you can use technology to do the same. And again, I think the ultimate solution is going to be a combination of different sensors. How hard is the problem from the vision perspective? I think it's non trivial. I think it's non trivial and I think the biggest part is getting the data, right? It's like getting enough data examples. So we, for this research project, we partnered with the transportation authorities of Sweden and we literally had a racetrack with a safety driver and we basically progressively got people drunk. Nice. So, but, you know, that's a very expensive data set to collect and you want to collect it globally and in multiple conditions. Yeah. The ethics of collecting a data set where people are drunk is tricky, which is funny because I mean, let's put drunk driving aside. The number of drunk people in the world every day is very large. It'd be nice to have a large data set of drunk people getting progressively drunk. In fact, you could build an app where people can donate their data cause it's hilarious. Right. Actually, yeah. But the liability. Liability, the ethics, how do you get it right? It's tricky. It's really, really tricky. Cause like drinking is one of those things that's funny and hilarious and we're loves it's social, the so on and so forth. But it's also the thing that hurts a lot of people. Like a lot of people, like alcohol is one of those things it's legal, but it's really damaging to a lot of lives. It destroys lives and not just in the driving context. I should mention people should listen to Andrew Huberman who recently talked about alcohol. He has an amazing pocket. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist from Stanford and a good friend of mine. And he, he's like a human encyclopedia about all health related wisdom. So if there's a podcast, you would love it. I would love that. No, no, no, no, no. You don't know Andrew Huberman. Okay. Listen, you listen to Andrew, it's called Huberman Lab Podcast. This is your assignment. Just listen to one. Okay. I guarantee you this will be a thing where you say, Lex, this is the greatest human I have ever discovered. So. Oh my God. Cause I've really, I've, I'm really on a journey of kind of health and wellness and I'm learning lots and I'm trying to like build these, I guess, atomic habits around just being healthy. So I, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this. His whole thing, this is, this is, this is, this is great. He's a legit scientist, like really well published, but in his podcast, what he does, he's not, he's not talking about his own work. He's like a human encyclopedia of papers. And so he, his whole thing is he takes the topic and in a very fast, you mentioned atomic habits, like very clear way summarizes the research in a way that leads to protocols of what you should do. He's really big on like, not like this is what the science says, but like this is literally what you should be doing according to science. So like he's really big and there's a lot of recommendations he does which several of them I definitely don't do, like get some light as soon as possible from waking up and like for prolonged periods of time. That's a really big one and he's, there's a lot of science behind that one. There's a bunch of stuff that you're going to be like, Lex, this is a, this is my new favorite person. I guarantee it. And if you guys somehow don't know Andrew Huberman and you care about your wellbeing, you know, you should definitely listen to him. I love you, Andrew. Anyway, so what were we talking about? Oh, alcohol and detecting alcohol. So this is a problem you care about and you're trying to solve. And actually like broadening it, I do believe that the car is going to be a wellness center, like because again, imagine if you have a variety of sensors inside the vehicle, tracking not just your emotional state or level of distraction and drowsiness and intoxication, but also maybe even things like your, you know, your heart rate and your heart rate variability and your breathing rate. And it can start like optimizing, yeah, it can optimize the ride based on what your goals are. So I think we're going to start to see more of that and I'm excited about that. Yeah. What are the, what are the challenges you're tackling while with SmartEye currently? What's like the, the trickiest things to get, is it, is it basically convincing more and more car companies that having AI inside the car is a good idea or is there some, is there more technical algorithmic challenges? What's been keeping you mentally busy? I think a lot of the car companies we are in conversations with are already interested in definitely driver monitoring. Like I think it's becoming a must have, but even interior sensing, I can see like we're engaged in a lot of like advanced engineering projects and proof of concepts. I think technologically though, and that even the technology, I can see a path to making it happen. I think it's the use case. Like how does the car respond once it knows something about you? Because you want it to respond in a thoughtful way that doesn't, that isn't off putting to the consumer in the car. So I think that's like the user experience. I don't think we've really nailed that. And we usually, that's not part, we're the sensing platform, but we usually collaborate with the car manufacturer to decide what the use case is. So say you do, you figure out that somebody's angry while driving, okay, what should the car do? Do you see yourself as a role of nudging, of like basically coming up with solutions essentially that, and then the car manufacturers kind of put their own little spin on it? Right. So we, we are like the ideation, creative thought partner, but at the end of the day, the car company needs to decide what's on brand for them, right? Like maybe when it figures out that you're distracted or drowsy, it shows you a coffee cup, right? Or maybe it takes more aggressive behaviors and basically said, okay, if you don't like take a rest in the next five minutes, the car's going to shut down, right? Like there's a whole range of actions the car can take and doing the thing that is most, yeah, that builds trust with the driver and the passengers. I think that's what we need to be very careful about. Yeah. Car companies are funny cause they have their own, like, I mean, that's why people get cars still. I hope that changes, but they get it cause it's a certain feel and look and it's a certain, they become proud, like Mercedes Benz or BMW or whatever, and that's their thing. That's the family brand or something like that, or Ford or GM, whatever, they stick to that thing. Yeah. It's interesting. It's like, it should be, I don't know, it should be a little more about the technology inside. And I suppose there too, there could be a branding, like a very specific style of luxury or fun. Right. Right. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. And I have an AI focused fund to invest in early stage kind of AI driven companies. And one of the companies we're looking at is trying to do what Tesla did, but for boats, for recreational boats. Yeah. So they're building an electric and kind of slash autonomous boat and it's kind of the same issues. Like what kind of sensors can you put in? What kind of states can you detect both exterior and interior within the boat? Anyways, it's like really interesting. Do you boat at all? No, not well, not in that way. I do like to get on the lake or a river and fish from a boat, but that's not boating. That's the difference. That's the difference. Still boating. Low tech. A low tech boat. Get away from, get closer to nature boat. I guess going out into the ocean is also getting closer to nature in some deep sense. I mean, I guess that's why people love it. The enormity of the water just underneath you. Yeah. I love the water. I love the, I love both. I love salt water. It was like the big and just, it's humbling to be in front of this giant thing that's so powerful that was here before us and be here after. But I also love the piece of a small like wooded lake and it's just, it's everything's calm. Therapeutic. You tweeted that I'm excited about Amazon's acquisition of iRobot. I think it's a super interesting, just given the trajectory of what you're part of, of these honestly small number of companies that are playing in this space that are like trying to have an impact on human beings. So the, it is an interesting moment in time that Amazon would acquire iRobot. You tweet, I imagine a future where home robots are as ubiquitous as microwaves or toasters. Here are three reasons why I think this is exciting. If you remember, I can look it up, but what, why is this exciting to you? I mean, I think the first reason why this is exciting, I kind of remember the exact like order in which I put them, but one is just, it's, it's going to be an incredible platform for understanding our behaviors within the home, right? Like you know, if you think about Roomba, which is, you know, the robot vacuum cleaner, the flagship product of iRobot at the moment, it's like running around your home, understanding the layout, it's understanding what's clean and what's not. How often do you clean your house? And all of these like behaviors are a piece of the puzzle in terms of understanding who you are as a consumer. And I think that could be, again, used in really meaningful ways, not just to recommend better products or whatever, but actually to improve your experience as a human being. So I think, I think that's very interesting. I think the natural evolution of these robots in the, in the home. So it's, it's interesting, Roomba isn't really a social robot, right, at the moment. But I once interviewed one of the chief engineers on the Roomba team, and he talked about how people named their Roombas. And if the Roomba broke down, they would call in and say, you know, my Roomba broke down and the company would say, well, we'll just send you a new one. And no, no, no, Rosie, like you have to like, yeah, I want you to fix this particular robot. So people have already built like interesting emotional connections with these home robots. And I think that, again, that provides a platform for really interesting things to, to just motivate change. Like it could help you. I mean, one of the companies that spun out of MIT, Catalia Health, the guy who started it spent a lot of time building robots that help with weight management. So weight management, sleep, eating better, yeah, all of these things. Well, if I'm being honest, Amazon does not exactly have a track record of winning over people in terms of trust. Now that said, it's a really difficult problem for a human being to let a robot in their home that has a camera on it. Right. That's really, really, really tough. And I think Roomba actually, I have to think about this, but I'm pretty sure now or for some time already has had cameras because they're doing the, the, the most recent Roomba. I have so many Roombas. Oh, you actually do? Well, I programmed it. I don't use a Roomba for VECO. People that have been to my place, they're like, yeah, you definitely don't use these Roombas. That could be a good, I can't tell like the valence of this comment. Was it a compliment or like? No, it's a giant, it's just a bunch of electronics everywhere. There's, I have six or seven computers, I have robots everywhere, Lego robots, I have small robots and big robots and it's just giant, just piles of robot stuff and yeah. But including the Roombas, they're, they're, they're being used for their body and intelligence, but not for their purpose. I have, I've changed them, repurposed them for other purposes, for deeper, more meaningful purposes than just like the Bota Roba, which is, you know, brings a lot of people happiness, I'm sure. They have a camera because the thing they advertised, I had my own camera still, but the, the, the camera on the new Roomba, they have like state of the art poop detection as they advertised, which is a very difficult, apparently it's a big problem for, for vacuum cleaners is, you know, if they go over like dog poop, it just runs it, it runs it over and creates a giant mess. So they have like, and apparently they collected like a huge amount of data and different shapes and looks and whatever of poop and then now they're able to avoid it and so on. They're very proud of this. So there is a camera, but you don't think of it as having a camera. Yeah. You don't think of it as having a camera because you've grown to trust that, I guess, because our phones, at least most of us seem to trust this phone, even though there's a camera looking directly at you. I think that if you trust that the company is taking security very seriously, I actually don't know how that trust was earned with smartphones, I think it just started to provide a lot of positive value to your life where you just took it in and then the company over time has shown that it takes privacy very seriously, that kind of stuff. But I just, Amazon is not always in the, in its social robots communicated. This is a trustworthy thing, both in terms of culture and competence, because I think privacy is not just about what do you intend to do, but also how well, how good are you at doing that kind of thing. So that's a really hard problem to solve. But I mean, but a lot of us have Alexas at home and I mean, Alexa could be listening in the whole time, right? And doing all sorts of nefarious things with the data. Yeah. Hopefully it's not, but I don't think it is. But you know, Amazon is not, it's such a tricky thing for a company to get right, which is like to earn the trust. I don't think Alexa's earned people's trust quite yet. Yeah. I think it's, it's not there quite yet. I agree. They struggle with this kind of stuff. In fact, when these topics are brought up, people are always get like nervous. And I think if you get nervous about it, that mean that like the way to earn people's trust is not by like, Ooh, don't talk about this. It's just be open, be frank, be transparent, and also create a culture of like where it radiates at every level from engineer to CEO that like you're good people that have a common sense idea of what it means to respect basic human rights and the privacy of people and all that kind of stuff. And I think that propagates throughout the, that's the best PR, which is like over time you understand that these are good folks doing good things. Anyway, speaking of social robots, have you heard about Tesla, Tesla bot, the humanoid robot? Yes, I have. Yes, yes, yes. But I don't exactly know what it's designed to do to you. You probably do. No, I know it's designed to do, but I have a different perspective on it, but it's designed to, it's a humanoid form and it's designed to, for automation tasks in the same way that industrial robot arms automate tasks in the factory. So it's designed to automate tasks in the factory. But I think that humanoid form, as we were talking about before, is one that we connect with as human beings. Anything legged, obviously, but the humanoid form especially, we anthropomorphize it most intensely. And so the possibility to me, it's exciting to see both Atlas developed by Boston Dynamics and anyone, including Tesla, trying to make humanoid robots cheaper and more effective. The obvious way it transforms the world is social robotics to me versus automation of tasks in the factory. So yeah, I just wanted, in case that was something you were interested in, because I find its application of social robotics super interesting. We did a lot of work with Pepper, Pepper the robot, a while back. We were like the emotion engine for Pepper, which is Softbank's humanoid robot. How tall is Pepper? It's like... Yeah, like, I don't know, like five foot maybe, right? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty, pretty big. Pretty big. It's designed to be at like airport lounges and, you know, retail stores, mostly customer service, right? Hotel lobbies, and I mean, I don't know where the state of the robot is, but I think it's very promising. I think there are a lot of applications where this can be helpful. I'm also really interested in, yeah, social robotics for the home, right? Like that can help elderly people, for example, transport things from one location of the mind to the other, or even like just have your back in case something happens. Yeah, I don't know. I do think it's a very interesting space. It seems early though. Do you feel like the timing is now? Yes, 100%. So it always seems early until it's not, right? Right, right, right. I think the time, I definitely think that the time is now, like this decade for social robots. Whether the humanoid form is right, I don't think so, no. I don't, I think the, like if we just look at Jibo as an example, I feel like most of the problem, the challenge, the opportunity of social connection between an AI system and a human being does not require you to also solve the problem of robot manipulation and bipedal mobility. So I think you could do that with just a screen, honestly, but there's something about the interface of Jibo where it can rotate and so on that's also compelling. But you get to see all these robot companies that fail, incredible companies like Jibo and even, I mean, the iRobot in some sense is a big success story that it was able to find a niche thing and focus on it, but in some sense it's not a success story because they didn't build any other robot, like any other, it didn't expand into all kinds of robotics. Like once you're in the home, maybe that's what happens with Amazon is they'll flourish into all kinds of other robots. But do you have a sense, by the way, why it's so difficult to build a robotics company? Like why so many companies have failed? I think it's like you're building a vertical stack, right? Like you are building the hardware plus the software and you find you have to do this at a cost that makes sense. So I think Jibo was retailing at like, I don't know, like $800, like $700, $800, which for the use case, right, there's a dissonance there. It's too high. So I think cost of building the whole platform in a way that is affordable for what value it's bringing, I think that's a challenge. I think for these home robots that are going to help you do stuff around the home, that's a challenge too, like the mobility piece of it. That's hard. Well, one of the things I'm really excited with Tesla Bot is the people working on it. And that's probably the criticism I would apply to some of the other folks who worked on social robots is the people working on Tesla Bot know how to, they're focused on and know how to do mass manufacture and create a product that's super cheap. Very cool. That's the focus. The engineering focus isn't, I would say that you can also criticize them for that, is they're not focused on the experience of the robot. They're focused on how to get this thing to do the basic stuff that the humanoid form requires to do it as cheap as possible. Then the fewest number of actuators, the fewest numbers of motors, the increasing efficiency, they decrease the weight, all that kind of stuff. So that's really interesting. I would say that Jibo and all those folks, they focus on the design, the experience, all of that, and it's secondary how to manufacture. Right. So you have to think like the Tesla Bot folks from first principles, what is the fewest number of components, the cheapest components, how can I build it as much in house as possible without having to consider all the complexities of a supply chain, all that kind of stuff. It's interesting. Because if you have to build a robotics company, you're not building one robot, you're building hopefully millions of robots, you have to figure out how to do that where the final thing, I mean, if it's Jibo type of robot, is there a reason why Jibo, like we can have this lengthy discussion, is there a reason why Jibo has to be over $100? It shouldn't be. Right. Like the basic components. Right. Components of it. Right. Like you could start to actually discuss like, okay, what is the essential thing about Jibo? How much, what is the cheapest way I can have a screen? What's the cheapest way I can have a rotating base? Right. All that kind of stuff. Right, get down, continuously drive down costs. Speaking of which, you have launched an extremely successful companies, you have helped others, you've invested in companies. Can you give advice on how to start a successful company? I would say have a problem that you really, really, really want to solve, right? Something that you're deeply passionate about. And honestly, take the first step. Like that's often the hardest. And don't overthink it. Like, you know, like this idea of a minimum viable product or a minimum viable version of an idea, right? Like, yes, you're thinking about this, like a humongous, like super elegant, super beautiful thing. What, like reduce it to the littlest thing you can bring to market that can solve a problem or that can, you know, that can help address a pain point that somebody has. They often tell you, like, start with a customer of one, right? If you can solve a problem for one person, then there's probably going to be yourself or some other person. Right. Pick a person. Exactly. It could be you. Yeah, that's actually often a good sign that if you enjoy a thing, enjoy a thing where you have a specific problem that you'd like to solve, that's a good, that's a good end of one to focus on. What else, what else is there to actually step one is the hardest, but there's other steps as well, right? I also think like who you bring around the table early on is so key, right? Like being clear on, on what I call like your core values or your North Star. It might sound fluffy, but actually it's not. So and Roz and I feel like we did that very early on. We sat around her kitchen table and we said, okay, there's so many applications of this technology. How are we going to draw the line? How are we going to set boundaries? We came up with a set of core values that in the hardest of times we fell back on to determine how we make decisions. And so I feel like just getting clarity on these core, like for us, it was respecting people's privacy, only engaging with industries where it's clear opt in. So for instance, we don't do any work in security and surveillance. So things like that, just getting, we very big on, you know, one of our core values is human connection and empathy, right? And that is, yes, it's an AI company, but it's about people. Well, these are all, they become encoded in how we act, even if you're a small, tiny team of two or three or whatever. So I think that's another piece of advice. So what about finding people, hiring people? If you care about people as much as you do, like this, it seems like such a difficult thing to hire the right people. I think early on as a startup, you want people who have, who share the passion and the conviction because it's going to be tough. Like I've yet to meet a startup where it was just a straight line to success, right? Even not just startup, like even everyday people's lives, right? You always like run into obstacles and you run into naysayers and you need people who are believers, whether they're people on your team or even your investors. You need investors who are really believers in what you're doing, because that means they will stick with you. They won't give up at the first obstacle. I think that's important. What about raising money? What about finding investors, first of all, raising money, but also raising money from the right sources from that ultimately don't hinder you, but help you, empower you, all that kind of stuff. What advice would you give there? You successfully raised money many times in your life. Yeah. Again, it's not just about the money. It's about finding the right investors who are going to be aligned in terms of what you want to build and believe in your core values. For example, especially later on, in my latest round of funding, I try to bring in investors that really care about the ethics of AI and the alignment of vision and mission and core values is really important. It's like you're picking a life partner. It's the same kind of... So you take it that seriously for investors? Yeah, because they're going to have to stick with you. You're stuck together. For a while anyway. Yeah. Maybe not for life, but for a while, for sure. For better or worse. I forget what the vowels usually sound like. For better or worse? Through something. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. Anyway, it's romantic and deep and you're in it for a while. So it's not just about the money. You tweeted about going to your first capital camp investing get together and that you learned a lot. So this is about investing. So what have you learned from that? What have you learned about investing in general from both because you've been on both ends of it? I mean, I try to use my experience as an operator now with my investor hat on when I'm identifying companies to invest in. First of all, I think the good news is because I have a technology background and I really understand machine learning and computer vision and AI, et cetera, I can apply that level of understanding because everybody says they're an AI company or they're an AI tech. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, show me the technology. So I can do that level of diligence, which I actually love. And then I have to do the litmus test of, if I'm in a conversation with you, am I excited to tell you about this new company that I just met? And if I'm an ambassador for that company and I'm passionate about what they're doing, I usually use that. Yeah. That's important to me when I'm investing. So that means you actually can explain what they're doing and you're excited about it. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you for putting it so succinctly, like rambling, but exactly that's it. No, but sometimes it's funny, but sometimes it's unclear exactly. I'll hear people tell me, you know, in the talk for a while and it sounds cool, like they paint a picture of a world, but then when you try to summarize it, you're not exactly clear. Like maybe what the core powerful idea is, like you can't just build another Facebook or there has to be a core, simple to explain idea that then you can or can't get excited about, but it's there, it's right there. Yeah. But how do you ultimately pick who you think will be successful? It's not just about the thing you're excited about, like there's other stuff. Right. And then there's all the, you know, with early stage companies, like pre seed companies, which is where I'm investing, sometimes the business model isn't clear yet, or the go to market strategy isn't clear. There's usually like, it's very early on that some of these things haven't been hashed out, which is okay. So the way I like to think about it is like, if this company is successful, will this be a multi billion slash trillion dollar market, you know, or company? And so that's definitely a lens that I use. What's pre seed? What are the different stages and what's the most exciting stage and what's, or no, what's interesting about every stage, I guess. Yeah. So pre seed is usually when you're just starting out, you've maybe raised the friends and family rounds. So you've raised some money from people, you know, and you're getting ready to take your first institutional check in, like first check from an investor. And I love the stage. There's a lot of uncertainty. Some investors really don't like the stage because the financial models aren't there. Often the teams aren't even like formed really, really early. But to me, it's like a magical stage because it's the time when there's so much conviction, so much belief, almost delusional, right? And there's a little bit of naivete around with founders at the stage. I just love it. It's contagious. And I love that I can, often they're first time founders, not always, but often they're first time founders and I can share my experience as a founder myself and I can empathize, right? And I can almost, I create a safe ground where, because, you know, you have to be careful what you tell your investors, right? And I will often like say, I've been in your shoes as a founder. You can tell me if it's challenging, you can tell me what you're struggling with. It's okay to vent. So I create that safe ground and I think that's a superpower. Yeah. You have to, I guess you have to figure out if this kind of person is going to be able to ride the roller coaster, like of many pivots and challenges and all that kind of stuff. And if the space of ideas they're working in is interesting, like the way they think about the world. Yeah. Because if it's successful, the thing they end up with might be very different, the reason it's successful for them. Actually, you know, I was going to say the third, so the technology is one aspect, the market or the idea, right, is the second and the third is the founder, right? Is this somebody who I believe has conviction, is a hustler, you know, is going to overcome obstacles? Yeah, I think that is going to be a great leader, right? Like as a startup, as a founder, you're often, you are the first person and your role is to bring amazing people around you to build this thing. And so you're an evangelist, right? So how good are you going to be at that? So I try to evaluate that too. You also in the tweet thread about it, mention, is this a known concept, random rich dudes are RDS and saying that there should be like random rich women, I guess. What's the dudes, what's the dudes version of women, the women version of dudes, ladies? I don't know. I don't know. What's, what's, is this a technical term? Is this known? Random rich dudes? I didn't make that up, but I was at this capital camp, which is a get together for investors of all types. And there must have been maybe 400 or so attendees, maybe 20 were women. It was just very disproportionately, you know, male dominated, which I'm used to. I think you're used to this kind of thing. I'm used to it, but it's still surprising. And as I'm raising money for this fund, so my fund partner is a guy called Rob May, who's done this before. So I'm new to the investing world, but he's done this before. Most of our investors in the fund are these, I mean, awesome. I'm super grateful to them. Random just rich guys. I'm like, where are the rich women? So I'm really adamant in both investing in women led AI companies, but I also would love to have women investors be part of my fund because I think that's how we drive change. Yeah. So that takes time, of course, but there's been quite a lot of progress, but yeah, for the next Mark Zuckerberg to be a woman and all that kind of stuff, because that's just like a huge number of wealth generated by women and then controlled by women and allocated by women and all that kind of stuff. And then beyond just women, just broadly across all different measures of diversity and so on. Let me ask you to put on your wise sage hat. So you already gave advice on startups and just advice for women, but in general advice for folks in high school or college today, how to have a career they can be proud of, how to have a life they can be proud of. I suppose you have to give this kind of advice to your kids. Yeah. Well, here's the number one advice that I give to my kids. My daughter's now 19 by the way, and my son's 13 and a half, so they're not little kids anymore. Does it break your heart? It does. They're awesome. They're my best friends, but yeah, I think the number one advice I would share is embark on a journey without attaching to outcomes and enjoy the journey, right? So we often were so obsessed with the end goal that doesn't allow us to be open to different endings of a journey or a story, so you become like so fixated on a particular path. You don't see the beauty in the other alternative path, and then you forget to enjoy the journey because you're just so fixated on the goal, and I've been guilty of that for many, many years of my life, and I'm now trying to make the shift of, no, no, no, I'm going to again trust that things are going to work out and it'll be amazing and maybe even exceed your dreams. We have to be open to that. Yeah. Taking a leap into all kinds of things. I think you tweeted like you went on vacation by yourself or something like this. I know. Yes, and just going, just taking the leap. Doing it. Totally doing it. And enjoying it, enjoying the moment, enjoying the weeks, enjoying not looking at some kind of career ladder, next step and so on. Yeah, there's something to that, like over planning too. I'm surrounded by a lot of people that kind of, so I don't plan. You don't? No. Do you not do goal setting? My goal setting is very like, I like the affirmations, it's very, it's almost, I don't know how to put it into words, but it's a little bit like what my heart yearns for kind of, and I guess in the space of emotions more than in the space of like, this will be like in the rational space because I just try to picture a world that I would like to be in and that world is not clearly pictured, it's mostly in the emotional world. I mean, I think about that from robots because I have this desire, I've had it my whole life to, well, it took different shapes, but I think once I discovered AI, the desire was to, I think in the context of this conversation could be easily easier described as basically a social robotics company and that's something I dreamed of doing and well, there's a lot of complexity to that story, but that's the only thing, honestly, I dream of doing. So I imagine a world that I could help create, but it's not, there's no steps along the way and I think I'm just kind of stumbling around and following happiness and working my ass off in almost random, like an ant does in random directions, but a lot of people, a lot of successful people around me say this, you should have a plan, you should have a clear goal, you have a goal at the end of the month, you have a goal at the end of the month, I don't, I don't, I don't and there's a balance to be struck, of course, but there's something to be said about really making sure that you're living life to the fullest, that goals can actually get in the way of. So one of the best, like kind of most, what do you call it when it challenges your brain, what do you call it? The only thing that comes to mind, and this is me saying is the mindfuck, but yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Something like that. Yes. Super inspiring talk. Kenneth Stanley, he was at OpenAI, he just laughed and he has a book called Why Greatness Can't Be Planned and it's actually an AI book. So and he's done all these experiments that basically show that when you over optimize, you, like the trade off is you're less creative, right? And to create true greatness and truly creative solutions to problems, you can't over plan it. You can't. And I thought that was, and so he generalizes it beyond AI and he talks about how we apply that in our personal life and in our organizations and our companies, which are over KPIs, right? Like look at any company in the world and it's all like, these aren't the goals, these aren't weekly goals and the sprints and then the quarterly goals, blah, blah, blah. And he just shows with a lot of his AI experiments that that's not how you create truly game changing ideas. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. You can. He's awesome. Yeah. There's a balance of course. That's yeah, many moments of genius will not come from planning and goals, but you still have to build factories and you still have to manufacture and you still have to deliver and there's still deadlines and all that kind of stuff. And that for that, it's good to have goals. I do goal setting with my kids, we all have our goals, but, but, but I think we're starting to morph into more of these like bigger picture goals and not obsess about like, I don't know, it's hard. Well, I honestly think with, especially with kids, it's better, much, much better to have a plan and have goals and so on because you have to, you have to learn the muscle of like what it feels like to get stuff done. Yeah. And once you learn that, there's flexibility for me because I spend most of my life with goal setting and so on. So like I've gotten good with grades and school. I mean, school, if you want to be successful at school, yeah, I mean the kind of stuff in high school and college, the kids have to do in terms of managing their time and getting so much stuff done. It's like, you know, taking five, six, seven classes in college, they're like that would break the spirit of most humans if they took one of them later in life, it's like really difficult stuff, especially engineering curricula. So I think you have to learn that skill, but once you learn it, you can maybe, cause you're, you can be a little bit on autopilot and use that momentum and then allow yourself to be lost in the flow of life. You know, just kind of, or also give like, I worked pretty hard to allow myself to have the freedom to do that. That's really, that's a tricky freedom to have because like a lot of people get lost in the rat race and they, and they also like financially, they, whenever you get a raise, they'll get like a bigger house or something like this. I put very, so like, there's, you're always trapped in this race, I put a lot of emphasis on living like below my means always. And so there's a lot of freedom to do whatever, whatever the heart desires that that's a relief, but everyone has to decide what's the right thing, what's the right thing for them. For some people having a lot of responsibilities, like a house they can barely afford or having a lot of kids, the responsibility side of that is really, helps them get their shit together. Like, all right, I need to be really focused and get, some of the most successful people I know have kids and the kids bring out the best in them. They make them more productive and less productive. Right, it's accountability. Yeah. It's an accountability thing, absolutely. And almost something to actually live and fight and work for, like having a family, it's fascinating to see because you would think kids would be a hit on productivity, but they're not, for a lot of really successful people, they really like, they're like an engine of. Right, efficiency. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird. Yeah. I mean, it's beautiful. It's beautiful to see. And also a source of happiness. Speaking of which, what role do you think love plays in the human condition, love? I think love is, yeah, I think it's why we're all here. I think it would be very hard to live life without love in any of its forms, right? Yeah, that's the most beautiful of forms that human connection takes, right? Yeah. And everybody wants to feel loved, right, in one way or another, right? And to love. Yeah. It feels good. And to love too, totally. Yeah, I agree with that. Both of it. Yeah. I'm not even sure what feels better. Both, both like that. Yeah, to give and to give love too, yeah. And it is like we've been talking about an interesting question, whether some of that, whether one day we'll be able to love a toaster. Okay. It's some small. I wasn't quite thinking about that when I said like, yeah, like we all need love and give love. That's all I was thinking about. Okay. I was thinking about Brad Pitt and toasters. Okay, toasters, great. All right. Well, I think we started on love and ended on love. This was an incredible conversation, Rhonda. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're an incredible person. Thank you for everything you're doing in AI, in the space of just caring about humanity, caring about emotion, about love, and being an inspiration to a huge number of people in robotics, in AI, in science, in the world in general. So thank you for talking to me. It's an honor. Thank you for having me. And you know, I'm a big fan of yours as well. So it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Rhonda Alkalioubi. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Helen Keller. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Rana el Kaliouby: Emotion AI, Social Robots, and Self-Driving Cars | Lex Fridman Podcast #322

Once this whole thing falls apart and we are climbing the kudzu vines that spiral up the Sears Tower, like they say in Fight Club, Bobby will go back to his gatherer form and be happy as a pig in shit, just walking around in a loincloth with his bird hanging out, tracking jokes to people and climbing up on them for a stool lap dance or whatever he does. Do you think some level of crazy is required for comedy? Like, at some point? Yes. Have there been low points in your life? Yeah, I don't know, hey, hey. Eh? Eh? Eh? Ha ha ha ha. The following is a conversation with Will Sasso, a comedian, actor, podcaster, and someone I've been a fan of for many years since Mad TV in the late 90s to recently with the 10 Minute Podcast and now the new podcast called Doodzee. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Will Sasso. So let's call out the elephant in the room. You wore a black suit in a recent episode of Doodzee. Yes. You wore a black suit again today. Shakespeare, then Mark Twain, said clothes make the man. What kind of man does a suit make you? Well, me in particular, it makes me a fellow who did not get this dry cleaned in between because that episode of the show as we sit here now was around a week ago. So that's the kind of man it makes me. Well, the nice thing is you're wearing pants, I think. Yes, I am wearing pants. I don't think you were wearing pants in the episode. That's correct. I prefer to wear shorts, but this was a special occasion so I'm wearing pants and I thought it fitting, obviously, to just wear the black tie. And clothes do make the man. And I would not consider myself to be a man of leisure, but I do enjoy shorts because my legs get hot. So that's what kind of man the shorts make me. How often do you wear a suit? I fucking hate wearing suits. So what is this, a statement of, is it ironic? Or are you honoring the gods of this particular podcast? I'm honoring the gods of this particular podcast would be a good way to put it. Yes, no, this is in reverence of and in dedication to you and our newfound friendship here, which we are making on the podcast. You and I just met. Everything that we're saying here is the first things that we're saying to each other. So I'm meeting you on common ground dressed like. Well, I've been actually a one way friend of yours for many, many years since Mad TV. Oh. When did you start on Mad TV? So that was, I mean, in 90s? 97, yeah. 97. So I was a huge fan of yours and the cast was incredible. It was one of the funniest shows ever created. Your whole journey watching through that was incredible from Mad TV to Three Stooges to the podcasts, the 10 Minute Pod and then the new podcast is incredible. Cheers. My favorite role that you played was the mountain in the Game of Thrones. What was it like working with dragons? Well, the dragons are usually tennis balls on the end of C stands, but sometimes they hang out. I am. It's a C stand. It's like, you know, it's like a little, like the thing you got the camera on here. Oh, this is like film lingo. Yeah, no, I understand. I'm trying to impress you with my film lingo. You know what a banana is? Yeah. It's when you walk like this. Oh. Do a banana. I take it back. I did not know what a banana was. Yeah, see? I misunderstood. Yeah, cause it's just a food. Yeah. Normally. You fancy Hollywood folk with a lingo. And I'm, my name is Bjorn Hapthor Bjornsson and I am seven foot four and yeah. So dragons don't, dragons don't scare me even though they've been extinct for a while. You're a scientist, right? Is that checkout? Yeah, I actually, I'm really into video games. I don't know if you play video games. There's a, there's a Skyrim video game that's part of the Elder Scrolls series. And for the longest time, there's a legend that there's dragons. I think it started in Daggerfall. And so I always, I grew up playing those video games and dreaming of one day meeting a dragon in a virtual world. And eventually you did in Skyrim. So it's, dragons represent, I don't know exactly what they represent, but they represent maybe this kind of mythical creature that is bigger than anything humans can possibly comprehend maybe. Cause they're so, they're so, they show up so often in myth from the, from the religious stories, you know, of the snake and so on, the serpent. And I don't know what that is. Well, this breathing fire, that's kind of weird. It's interesting when I think about dragons, cause now that you bring it up, these are people that probably wouldn't have access to the fact that there used to be dinosaurs. Maybe they did. If they didn't, they're drawing things that look like, you know, a dinosaur cousin, but cool, that can breathe fire and has wacky wings and a spiked tail. Yeah, where the heck did they come up with that? Cause they're clearly of course represented in mythology all the way back to, no, not cave drawings. Well, the Egyptians probably knew what the, and they could time travel. So they would have gone back to the caves. Well, the aliens that placed living organisms on earth could time travel and they could plant legends into the, into the collective intelligence of the human species. Yeah, and perhaps they were thinking of us to do something smart with it. And we didn't, we just came up with the sky. No. We're just, what's that? Sorry, that was very offensive. I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend you with your video game. I'm more of a burger time Donkey Kong dude. Oh, what is that? That's an original. Burger time was an arcade game that later showed up on the Intellivision, it was Intellivision. I believe it was made by Texas Instruments, horrible first generation video game console. And burger time, you just, it's like Super Mario. You just got to stay away from the eggs and the pickles and stuff. And you just go, and the bun falls. And then you go down to the and the cheese and then the meat. I'm not going to say it's as complicated as Skyrim, but took me a while to finish it when I was seven. Did you play video games, was that a part of your life, a part of the source of happiness for you at all? It was, it was. I played video games up until around, I think in 2010, I got the Red Ring of Death on my Xbox 360. That was it? That was it. I never, or whatever the Xbox was then. Yeah. I had, I was playing, I had finished the Grand Theft Auto that was out and finished the Red Dead Redemption. So I was doing that thing where you just drive around, you know, the streets of New York or just ride around on your horse shooting people and, you know, throwing grenades into groups of people in Grand Theft. And you're describing the same thing that happened a decade later, because it's now Red Dead Redemption 2 and there's still not a new Grand Theft Auto, so. Yeah, there isn't, right? Yeah, they're working on it. They're always flirting with that idea. You know who else plays Skyrim? Another person, the two people I'm a huge fan of from that time in Matt TV is Bobby Lee. He plays Skyrim? He's a huge fan of Skyrim. He plays every. So what Bobby Lee loves to do is to grind, do the boring task over and over, gather mushrooms. Like in Skyrim, you can fight dragons, you can fight all kinds of things, but you can also gather mushrooms and different ingredients to make potions and all that kind of stuff. He loves the ingredients. He's the, you know, in the hunter gatherer world, he's the gatherer. He's the gatherer. Yeah, I've heard him described that way and he likes to describe himself that way. I worked with Bobby not too long ago. He came and did a couple days on this thing we were shooting and I was looking forward to catching up with my old pal. And if you know anything about Bobby Lee, you'd probably be able to predict that he spent that entire time playing farming on his iPad. Well, humans are a source of anxiety and trouble, so sometimes it's good to escape human interaction through video games. Totally. I'm with him on that. He's one of the funniest people ever. Totally. What do you think makes him funny? It's just all the times you've worked with him, the nonstandard, nonsecular way of his being. Bobby Lee is one of the most raw people, raw performers who lets it all hang out to the degree that he will even get naked in front of his audience, which is usually a metaphor for someone doing standup. I'm bearing all, I'm showing you everything, and Bobby will just pull his bird out of his pants. Yeah, I don't think he understands metaphor too much. He embodies metaphor. Yes, he embodies metaphor. He's the gatherer, we call him the gathering metaphor. Bobby the gatherer metaphor. He's a metaphor for something else, for somebody else's life. Someday he'll be in the dictionary representing some kind of concept, maybe the metaphor itself. Yeah, once this whole thing falls apart and we are climbing the kudzu vines that spiral up the Sears Tower, like they say in Fight Club, Bobby will go back to his gatherer form and be happy as a pig in shit, just walking around in a loincloth with his bird hanging out, tracking jokes to people and climbing up on them for a stool lap dance or whatever he does. I'd love to dig into something he did. You guys did a lot of great podcasts together. He asked you in a very uncomfortable process of why you don't do standup. So let me ask you, do you hate money? Well, I'm originally from Canada, yeah. So yeah, I'm a fricking pinko socialist. Is that where you come from? That's not a nice thing to say. I thought the Soviet Union, that is a nice thing to say. Like comrade, he's a good socialist with red, like some bold colors, yeah. There was an interesting tension in your voice and the way you talked about it. There's just not a source of happiness for you. You respect the art form, but it was not something that you were connected to, you felt connected to. That's a good way to put it. Yeah, I respect the art form a lot. And I grew up with all the albums and stuff. I had an older brother and sister who, so we had George Carlin, we had Richard Pryor, we had Robert Klein, we had Gilda Live, the Gilda Radner concert, we had all sorts of stuff. But I don't know, there's a lot of reasons. I do feel like a career in show business is it never goes the way you plan, like most things. And I was fortunate enough to get started outside of my native Vancouver or in my native Vancouver. I grew up in the burbs outside and there was a lot of industry there. So I was fortunate enough to get started as an actor when I was like 16. So yeah, there were some times early on where I came up with some standup stuff and did it, but yeah, I quickly abandoned it. And then you go through, you do Mad TV and stuff, and that's where my, and this is gonna sound weird. Do I sound as anxiety as I did when I was on Bobby's podcast trying to avoid his questions? Well, he was giving you this face this whole time that was making the whole just atmosphere feel full of anxiety. So I'm trying not to give you a face. The whole time I was saying, play cool, play cool. Yeah, okay. Play cool, Lex. Play cool. You said it out loud a couple of times. I did. Just, you know, you cut that out. Play cool. Play cool, dude. Cut out, cut it out. Maintain, bro. Here's what I'll say. There's two ways to do it. I think it's lame when someone who's done one thing for a while goes and starts doing standup out of nowhere. Cause I think it's an art form that's under attack because it's not like anything else. You need, although now you can of course, you know, make whatever you want. It's the era of self publishing as far as making a product and putting it out there, which is getting easier, of course, and I can't wait to talk to you about that with AI and how it's changing art. But in standup, all you need is a microphone and you know, perhaps it'd be good to have some mental illness and then you can just run up there and talk forever. And I say this to, you know, comedians. It's like, you guys have to deal with just an influx of people who aren't sure why they're doing comedy. I would ask comedians, I mean, not good ones, good ones, you know what they're doing, but everyone else like, what are you doing? Why, why are you doing standup? Having said that, I am allergic to money. Yeah, do you think they have a good answer for that? Why are they doing it? Cause I actually like when I'm in Austin, I like going to open mics, just listening. It's inspiring to me, both the funny and the unfunny people because they've been doing it for several years. Sometimes over a decade and they're still at it. They're still right there. There's going for the punch and then especially open mics that are really sad in that there's, you know, only like five other people in the audience and they're usually just other comedians and they're still going all out as if they're in front of a stadium. But that to me sounds like someone who loves it. Yeah. I got no questions for that person. I got questions for someone who goes sideways from here I'm recognizable doing something and then I'm doing standup because it's like, and truly look, I've been fortunate enough to be in the business for a long time and at this point, if I came up, I mean, doing live stuff is fun. I have friends that are like, you know, some guys who are primarily sketch people or you would look at them as sketch people and they can sell tickets for being sketch people and they, and we'll talk about it. And they're like, you know, I do a monologue and I do a little standup, then I do a song, then I do another monologue, then I play off the audience, do a little standup, but standup is, it's almost like playing music in that, you know, people are going up there playing music, but what band have you been listening to? That's what you're gonna sound like. So it's really, I mean, of course, I'm speaking from zero experience, but I've heard it takes years, of course, to find your own voice. Standups that when they first go up, they're doing some sort of impersonation of so and so and so and so, and then you gotta pop this audience that's paying and you're gonna get run over by the next person who's coming up and it's hard to follow the last person who went up before you. And I mean, that is a really hard way to, it's a very, it's quite a gauntlet to be in to find your voice comedically. But don't you have that same kind of thing with sketch? Where you still have to find your own voice with like all the impressions you do, they're just terrible, you know, there are different spins and different people, they're not like perfect impressions, right? So that's, I mean, that's a similar kind of challenge and journey as standup. You're just saying they're kind of distinct and you fell into this one and you fell in love with it, which is like what Mad TV kind of opened you up to. Yeah, as a kid, I literally wanted to be an actor. I always wanted to be an actor from a very young age, as far back as I can remember, and I was the class clown and wanted to do comedy stuff and comedic acting and so on. So comedic acting. Yeah, early on, my influences were a very predictable list of guys from SCTV, Early Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, all of those performers really influenced me. It was later that I saw people like Kevin Kline, who's an incredible actor. I vividly remember being like 12, 13, seeing him get an Academy Award for Fish Called Wanda. And it blew my mind, because I was like, he was hilarious. I mean, it was one of my favorite movies back then and now. And he won an Academy Award. And at that point, I started thinking more about acting. And then I was, like I said, really fortunate to fall in with, I mean, I always wanted to do it and I was trying to hustle this and that when I was a kid. And then I ended up getting represented. And then I ended up on a teen show. I was on, basically, the easiest way to pitch it is it's like a Canadian, my so called life with these kids and their lives and stuff. And I did that for like five years and I really love acting. I really, truly love acting. And I'm not someone who wants people to know my opinion. So that's another thing about standup. Like I love the illusion of what I get to do in entertainment and podcasting is great for that. But to stand up there and, I don't know, just for me, it's like it would have to all be fantasy. Yeah, so Nietzsche said that every profound spirit needs a mask. Like you said, you don't like to talk about, in your comedy, you don't like to talk about stuff that's personal to you. Yeah. What is that? If you were to psychoanalyze yourself, do you think it's just not something you find funny or are you running from something and it's not your fault? Will. It's not your fault, Will. Speaking of another really great comedic actor who's also a serious actor, Robin Williams. One of the best serious actors. I mean, and one of the funniest people of all time, but as great, as incredible as he was as a funny man, as a standup and a performer, I almost like his serious stuff better. Can I ask you a question about that? What do you make of the, that he committed suicide? I think it's, I mean, it's super depressing. I've referred to him as like the Jesus Christ of depression. It's almost like he died for others depression. You know what I mean? Like. Yeah, yeah. You'd look at someone like that and go, wait a minute, you're a rockstar. Like you don't, you could just check out if you're not liking your life. And of course, something like suicide begs that you look a little deeper and realize how tortured the human mind can make someone. Is there some aspect to, you know, we're in LA. Is there some aspect of celebrity that is isolating that can make you feel really lonely? Not me. I don't feel, no, not really. You feel the love? No, I just feel like I'm not, I mean, it's like, I don't know, I've always kind of had a small group of friends and those people don't, you know, it's like I've known the same people for years and years. You never really felt the celebrity really. Nah, in LA, it's hard to, it's hard for people. Nobody cares. They see you and then the next minute they see so and so. So it's like, you know, I'm the guy from that. Mike and Molly, right? Nope, nope. Close. King of, you shave your head, you go bald. Are you King of Queens? Nope, that's not me. So close. You're wow, shit, you used to be the mountain on Game of Thrones. You look like shit, what happened? You've been just eating fried dough? Yeah. Yeah, that's what's up. Can't lift any weights anymore. I'm at the gym doing like 15 pounds with shoulder press. Ah, and people coming up to me. You used to be a dragon killer, dude. Half the man you used to be. What's, have there been low points in your life? Sorry to go there, but. Yeah, I don't know. Hey, hey, hey. Eh? Eh? Eh? Yeah, there's, everybody has a low point in life. The operative. Do you suffer from like depression and any of those kinds of things? You know what, I do. I do, I have a bunch of stuff. How do you deal with it? Said friends? The friends and the. They don't do anything for me in that sense. Yeah. I have an incredible fiance who, that's nice to have somebody constant that you love very much and see as the best person and all that good stuff. Hopefully, vice versa. And then. Well, on your recent Instagram, she said that she loves you, so. Wow, you were. At least allegedly. Just on, yeah, allegedly. That might all be for, yeah. That's all. How much money did you pay her to say that? I don't have any, because I'm not a stand up. I was like, I can do, you got Venmo? Yeah, yeah. I got, I only have like $123. I can give you some Dogecoin. Yeah, some Doge. Yeah. You got, you want some Doge? I got some of those monkey NFTs. Oh, before I forget. Yes. Hold on a second. Oh, no. Put a dudesie sticker on your microphone if that's okay. Sure. Here. Oh, yeah. Now, these are tricky, because I have the thumbs of a, I have like Italian sausage thumbs. Don't wait and watch this happen. I'm just gonna. This will take another. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, ooh, this is embarrassing. When this, are you good under pressure? Sure. I have anxiety. I have performance anxiety. Do you have anxiety? Yeah. You have anxiety, period? Period. Yeah. I, I. Like, I don't like it when I, if I have to pee and then everyone's waiting in the urinals. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like it. You know what'll help you in that situation? What's that? Taking a shit. Because whenever you take a shit, you always pee a little. It's hard to take a shit while you're standing at a urinal, but. Not in my world. Okay. You just gotta keep yourself full of things that make you shit. Oh, good. Have you ever heard of a banana? I did recently. Somebody told me about it. Yeah. Not the showbiz term. I'm talking about the food. There you go. Oh. There we go. Here you go. Which way is up? It's this way, right? It's like a D. No, to spin it. There you go. There you go. All right. So sexy. You're like a brand. Yeah. It's very important to brand yourself. These colors. Are you selling shoes? Yeah. I got some custom kicks coming out. The dudesy. No. Actually, that would be a good idea. You could probably sell a pair or two of those. Speaking of anxiety, I really am only focused on this right now, Alex. I apologize. Just shit your pants. It'll make it easier. Get on with it. Oh, this thing has been dog eared in my pocket for a while. I swear this never happens to me. I'm sorry, babe. People don't thumb at a sticker for an hour while they're doing the podcast? No, this is just an excuse you make when you're with somebody and you're underperforming. Well, here's the thing. As you ask me questions that I don't wanna answer, I'll just go to this. Go to the sticker. So if this ends up working, then I won't have it as a club. It's funny how you started doing that when we were talking about depression. That's weird. That is weird. Tell me how that makes you feel. Here we are. We got it. For the listener, he succeeded after 10 minutes. Yeah. You know what? No, I do have some of that stuff. Bobby Lee had encouraged me on wax, as I like to say, to talk about it on podcasts, to talk about depression, because it could help people. And I said, no. But it's true, I do have some. There's some history in the family. How do you overcome it? Well, I used to not believe in medication at all. I used to think that that was for someone else who's been diagnosed with some of the rougher stuff. But as I got older and some of the stuff happens, and you have to, and by stuff, I mean mental stuff. And yeah, so I went and I just, I believe that the stigma needs to be removed completely. 5%. And so I do therapy, I do talk therapy. I'm on a little bit of stuff, which, let me tell you, when I first started it, I was someone I'm close to. I was like, my manager, and she goes, this is too much. But she was like, hey, you don't have to white knuckle it through life, right? Because I was literally just like, everything became really hard to do at a level that I wanted to do it at, even just getting through your day, right? And when I first got some of the meds that I'm on, it felt like doors and windows were opening, literally in my brain. I took a three hour nap the first day, and you shouldn't even feel this stuff the first day. I think my brain was like, it was like a sponge. It wanted to, I needed some relief. And I'm not a nap guy. I can sleep three hours and I'll be fine. But I took a long nap and then it started to help. Yeah, isn't that weird how a little bit of chemistry in your head can just make the whole world appear so much more beautiful? Yeah, yeah, I mean, after all, there's a lot going on in your brain that can be changed by your lifestyle, but also so many physical things, like a little bit of meds. Or in Bobby's case, thumbing around on some dumb farming app. Well, Bobby's gone through a few rough periods with drugs and alcohol and all that kind of stuff. Totally. And just everything else involved. I mean, that's the beautiful rollercoaster of who he is, and a lot of great comedians seem to be that way. So I wonder what the connection there is. You think some level of crazy is required for comedy? Yeah. Like, at some point. Yes. On a scale of one to 10, how much crazy do you have? In some ways, a 10. And in other ways that I think, in other ways, sort of functionally, I'm like a two or a three, because, I don't know, I'm from Canada, and I try to just keep things very even keeled. My parents are Italian, they're from Italy, and they grew up during World War II, and they're very simple outlook on things. They're complex, incredible, classy people who are very simple when it comes to a lot of stuff. And I think just being a sort of, at heart, kind of a timid Canadian, coming out here years ago as a kid, it was all I could do to just keep everything super normal. And then I sort of was able to settle into that as a lifestyle. But you love the idea of being an actor. Who, you mentioned John Candy in Planes and Automobiles. It's one of my favorite movies, he says, one of yours. What do you think that makes that movie work? What do you, what, and when you talk about enjoying that movie, do you enjoy just the raw comedy, or do you enjoy the friendship and the love that's there, even though on the surface, it doesn't make any sense that there should be a friendship there? I mean, that's such an important element to that film. But as a kid, I just loved the comedy. And then it's been a nostalgic favorite of mine. It's my favorite movie. But it's also, it's just legit my favorite movie because as you get older and you start watching it, you realize it's what John Hughes is the filmmaker and what John Candy, particularly, and but also Steve Martin are doing in the film that makes it such a work of art, which is loneliness is there in every moment of that film. And John Candy is, he embodies Del Griffith, his character in the film. Del Griffith is a lonely guy and John Candy, but Del Griffith is also a very friendly guy and a shower curtain ring salesman and knows everybody in the Midwest and runs around to motels and has meaningful conversations with the guy, even in Gus, whoever he's talking to. But there's loneliness there all the time. And this is a character, the film is filled with loneliness and it's not until the second last scene when he's at the train station, Del, what are you doing here? I thought you were going home, what are you doing here? That's a very good Neil Page from the movie. Thank you. That's when you realize how lonely he is. A lot of applause and post cheers. That's when you realize how lonely he is and I think that's the element from the film that, I mean, look, nowadays, I feel like, I've been saying this for a long time, but John Candy would have won an Academy Award hands down for that film. It's just they didn't do that with comedies back then. Yeah. Until the year after that movie came out with Fish Called Wanda. Yeah, and then it's, I mean, still comedies don't get respected enough. Robin Williams, I guess he got an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. Jim Carrey, did he ever get an Oscar? I don't know, I don't believe so. Yeah, they don't get, you don't, but that's not even, if he did, you wouldn't be for comedies. It's just, I mean, there's some things that are plain, strange, and odd. Would you even put that as a, I guess it's a comedy. Yeah, I mean. But there is a loneliness and depth that permeates the whole movie. Yeah. That ultimately, and it's a happy ending, which is hard to kinda. It's a happy ending only because in the last moment of the movie, John Candy puts on a brave face, even when he's got no one. No. And he's there seeing Neil Page's entire family on Thanksgiving, and he forces a smile, which is the last, literally the last frame of the movie. And I've said before, if you're not reduced to just a sobbing pile of meat at the end of the movie, then you are not human. Yeah, it is a happy ending. It's a happy ending, even though it's a sad, sad character. So much loneliness in the world. I was just in Vegas. I went to a diner at like 4 a.m., 5 a.m., and there was a waitress who was empty. As a waitress, I was the sweetest, kindest human being. Kept calling me sweetheart and all that kind of stuff. Hun. And then after I ate, she said, Don, just talk to me a little bit. You know, it was cause there was nobody there, and it was just so much sadness in her eyes. I don't know. But it's also so much love, like that sweetheart. It reminded me kind of of the John Candy performance, because at first, because I was reading a pretty dark book about Hitler, so I was a little bit frustrated that she kept talking to me, because it was almost like the same way that John Candy is. It's annoying a little bit, right? But then very quickly, I opened up to like, well, there's a kind human being, and there's like that human connection superseded everything else, and I don't know, it was just beautiful. And I think John Candy captures that really well, which is like, the connection with other human beings, sometimes we pull away from that, because we have a busy life full of stuff to do, as Steve Martin's character kind of characterizes. He's like a marketing exec or something like that. But if you just pause and notice others, you can really discover beautiful people. Totally, totally, everyone's got their story. And you know, Candy as a person, I've never met the man, but he's the kind of guy that, you know, he could just walk up to, back in the day, I would imagine he could walk up to just about any house, at least in Canada, knock on the door, and you'd invite him in for dinner, you know what I mean? So yeah, as you're talking about putting a book down and talking to someone for a while, even though you'd really like to read your book, it's that sort of thing that Candy's character in the movie sort of does that, like Johnny Appleseed. You realize he's just going around making people smile, you know, and Neil Page is hanging with this guy, so frustrated, he's so exhausting in his big underwear in the sink at the hotel and everything, and by the end of it, he loves this guy, you know? So it's a good and a bad thing that you didn't take that waitress with you on a trip, maybe road trip up to Reno. Oh, oh, she's actually, she's out shopping right now. We've been having sex multiple times a day ever since. Oh, that's nice, that's lovely, how cute. I'm sure she's married and happily and has many grandchildren, okay. And plus that movie's on Thanksgiving, I think, right? Yeah, that's right. Thanksgiving, so Thanksgiving just embodies that forget about the busyness and whatever the career you're chasing in life and just take a pause and appreciate the people you love in life. Just be with your family, yeah. Or the people, whatever your family looks like. Friends, yeah. You have some weird friends, unorthodox friends. So at least in the public sphere. Oh, yeah. From Bobby Lee, Brian Callan, all those kinds of folks from the Mad TV days, I'm sure there's others. What does it mean to be a good friend? Here in LA? Or just in general? In the world. In the world. Is LA something different? Is LA a world friend? I think it is different here, I think it is. I think people are. I think there's a little bit of a career kind of negotiation shuffling around, that kind of stuff. Why is it different? Oh, I just mean, I mean, I mean that it's just kind of hard here to make time, everybody. It's always been a city to me that is like, we'll keep you so busy. And every time I go home to Vancouver, after a few days, I start to get a little stir crazy. And I think that being here in LA, I go to sleep with a hundred things that I still have to do. And you're never out of stuff to do. And if you, when you ask about are you nuts or whatever, if you're crazy, I mean, look, every, all the weirdest people from every high school in the United States is like, yo, I'm gonna make it in LA, you know. Everyone just comes here. And just another freak in the freak kingdom, as they say at the end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That was a very good Robin Williams impersonation. That was my Robin Williams as Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson. It's not your fault, Will. It's pretty good. Thank you. Could have been you, Fear and Loathing. In Fear and Loathing? Yeah, it'd be interesting. I would have liked to play his attorney, the role that Benicia del Toro gained weight for. That would have been cool. He's just saying, what's up over the line? Like that, chewing his face off. I could have done that. Yeah, no, I think that it's. Backdoor beauty. That guy's full of good lines. Yeah, I flip you. I flip you for real. He's a good actor. Yeah, fantastic actor. I think what it takes to be a good friend is just presence, just being there. I mean, that's all anyone needs to be heard, right? In LA, it is interesting. I haven't seen people that I love in years. Some people. Just busy. Yeah, just busy. Can you still have a depth of connection even though, like one of the reasons I really enjoy doing a podcast, you get to sit down with actual friends of yours and spend prolonged periods of time together that you don't otherwise. That's a good point. I've spoken on this podcast to people really close to me and it's like you've never had a conversation without microphones like you do with microphones. It's weird, but there's some aspect about LA that a lot of the, especially friends of yours, comedians and so on, they'll do podcasts and stuff and there's, I don't know, there's an intimacy to that. Yeah, there is and there isn't. The ones that I do, I mean, I just did Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino's. Funny enough, called Bad Friends. Bad Friends. And afterwards, and my good pal, Chad Colchin, with whom I do dudesy, was with me. Sneakers are coming soon. Sneakers are coming soon. You get your Will Foot and your Chad Foot. Comes in a size 15 and a nine and a half. And I remember afterwards we were talking, it was just basically me, Chad, and Santino were talking and Bobby was over there on his phone and then I was like, I mean, we didn't spend any time talking about anything. It feels like one of those hours that goes by and you realize, I've just been goofing around with these guys, which is. But that's what life is about, right? It's fine. A little bit. It's great. And then I'm like, all right, Bobby. Hey, Bob, I'll see you later. And he's like, like this. All right, man. Hey, love you, bro. See you later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a guy, do you ever just, I just send text messages over there to him that never come back. And then he thinks that I'm angry with him because it'll go two, three years without him getting back to me. And then just out of nowhere, hey, fuck face. And. Who says, hey, fuck face? He does or you do? Yeah, he does. Or you both talk to each other? No, I gotta be very careful with Bobby. Yeah, I gotta be very sweet. Dear friend. Dear friend, hello. How are you doing? How are you? I know I checked in with you, but not but three months ago. And then every once in a while, he'll go, hey, fuck face. I tend to hide from the world and I can be pretty shitty with friends to go back, yeah. I can empathize with Bobby. Might be a Skyrim thing. It might be like hiding in a world, in a digital world with fake NPCs. Yeah, yeah, there's that. Yeah, you know, I have a buddy who said something really smart a while ago. We ended up working together on this TV show thing and I reached out to him to see if he wanted to do it with us. And he did and he goes, this is a great guy, such a funny writer. He goes, I may not be in touch all the time, but I know who my friends are. You know what I mean? And it's like in our business, and this is a fellow who moved, who's from Ontario, Canada, moved back there. He's on the farm with his wife and kids and he does not care. He's never been a Hollywood guy. And it's tough to get hold of him. But when you do, you know, he's still the same sweet old guy. He's doing his thing though. Yeah, yeah, some of my closest friends, even if we don't talk for a few months, we'll write back at it if we do. And then if shit goes, like if something really traumatic happens or difficult stuff or, you know, any of that kind of stuff, I'm always there. So like, so for important stuff, for important highs and important lows, you're there. And then you pick right back up, especially if you have those years of experiences together. It's interesting. Totally. So you've done a couple of podcasts. Yeah. So we've got to talk about Doodsy a little bit, but first you did for several years, you did the 10 minute podcast. Yeah. I mean, everything is hilarious about that podcast, including the fact that it's 10 minutes. Right. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's absurd. The dynamic is hilarious. It's you, Brian Callan, Crystalia there. I don't know exactly why it works so well, but it did, it worked really well. I think it's because the, yeah, you were having fun probably. I mean, that's what really came through. That it was friends just talking shit and the tension, the beautiful tension and the absurdity that came out. Yeah. Sure. What was the story of making that podcast? How did that came to be? Why do you think it was as good as it was? I don't know. I feel like that podcast was like, it was who we kind of are, but on steroids or something. Like, you know, each person, you know, Brian's going to be like extra manly and... Can you get any more manly than he already is? No, yeah, no. He reaches though. And yeah, we just kind of, I feel like as goofballs, we knew each other's line. Like here's the line you don't cross. I feel like those guys don't really have one, but at least they knew mine. And yeah, we were able to just goof around. And I did it with them for three years. And then Chad, who I'm doing dudesy with and my pal, Tommy Blacho, who's another writer producer like Chad, they came on. And yeah, all told, I did like seven years of that thing. Six, five, six, seven, I don't remember. Do you think it ever comes back in some small form as a 20 minute podcast or something like that? I mean, is there, because it's one of the most requested, I mean, you have a huge fan base. I'm 47 years old. So I am of the generation that had a cell phone, has had a cell phone half the time and didn't for the formative years of my life into my early 20s. And then finally I got a cell phone, I guess I was like 19 or something, like literally just because I'm moving to LA. You got porn in the mail. Yes, that's right. It was the hard cover porn. That's the way we liked it. Bound, nice binding on the porn, leather. Next to the Bible, yeah. Yep, these are all my, these are my Encyclopedia Britannica. Wow, very impressive. Yes, a man came to the house and sold me these. And then down here, these are my, this is my pornography. If you'll follow me through here to the parlor, sir. It's passed through the generations from grandfather to father, yeah. I wanna give you something very special to me, Nebuchadnezzar, but. So you go up in the generation without a cell phone. Yes, it's hard for me to connect with people who hit me up. I look at everything as polling. So if one person hits me up and shares this opinion, but two other people hit me up and share that, I'm the worst, I don't follow my polls. When people say, oh, that poll means absolutely nothing. So and so is gonna win anyway, that's my poll. My poll means nothing. But I do look at the stuff and go, this many people are saying this, that means that that number is saying that. And yet it's very hard for me to hear what the hell people are saying online. I really, I can't connect to it sometimes personally. So when you say that that's a popular podcast, like I know that it's popular with the people that have expressed that they love it. Yeah. You know what I mean? What does that actually represent? I don't know. I don't know what kind of people are the audience. I don't know. I know that the people that listen to the 10 Minute Podcast and if you did, thank you, and we're friends. I know that it was a special thing because it's like, just doing this out of my house and we just built it up out of nowhere and we're just kind of clowning around. It's an odd thing. I hope, I personally, I think I speak for the two people that have reached out to you that said you should do it or whatever, three people. The poll that you should bring it back at some point. That would be beautiful. Just maybe, it's like, what's a good story of like a famous band that came back and was successful? Probably, well. Nirvana? No, it was not. It wasn't Nirvana. Sorry, I got Nirvana mixed up with Aerosmith. Yeah. It was Aerosmith. It was Aerosmith. It was not Nirvana. Yeah, they had that second ride. Different. Yeah, totally different ending of those two bands. One ended up on American Idol. Yeah, a lot of interesting women involved in that one too. All right, how did Doodze come to be? Doodze. And what the hell is Doodze? Doodze is the first podcast, and this is exciting that you've asked me to come here today because to hear what you would have to say about it or what you would ask about it. It is the first podcast that is run completely by and essentially, I like to say curated by an AI. We were approached by a company that had this proprietary AI that wants to develop the podcast into the future and figure out exactly what it takes to make the best podcast ever. And it was all we knew from the top and what they really wanted was two people who were actually friends and could be meaningful in the podcast space based on whatever information they had. Is the company CIA and are they testing technology to control the populace through chatbots? I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to share that information. You are, yeah, who gave you the suit? Where did you get the suit? Where did you get the suit, Will? Yeah, well the C. J.C. Penney? CIA stands for something different in here. I mean, you know, it doesn't mean like the Central Intelligence Agency. I'm probably, it's just. It's a different, it's Canadian. Canadian International Apparel. Yeah, the Canadian International Apparel Company hit us up, Chad and I. Well, Chad's a super weirdo. You would get a kick out of him, I know. You guys, you strike me as very similar in some ways. I'll take that as a compliment. It is, and it is, and it is. If I was friends with you for as long as I've been with Chad, perhaps I'd have some horrible shit to say about you. But the good parts, you remind me of him. And we were approached by this company that said we have this AI and we would like to set it loose on you. And essentially, we had to hand over some, some information that would allow the AI to access our email and look at our search histories, purchase histories, things like this, and really dig into. Pornhub included or not? Yeah, I had to hand over all my leather bound 1970s pornography. And essentially, it curates a podcast for us every week doing dumb things like, you know, it says, hey, Will, you do some shitty Hulk Hogan impersonation. Podcasts about news are very popular. This is infomania, you know what I mean? Oh, let me tell you something about that Marjorie Taylor Greene dude. And then he's going on doing some new stuff. And it basically just spits out all these things that it wants us to do, normally four segments an episode. And that's pretty much it. So it generates what to do. It generates the premise. I mean, you've spoken a bit here and there. Like I said, I'm a huge fan. I don't even remember where. But like you talked about that you enjoy Doodsy because you feel almost like liberated to, because you're operating within the constraints of the premise it generates. So you're almost not, you're free to riff, essentially. Yeah. Like you don't need to do the job of like coming up with the weird. You can just, the weird is given to you and then you just run with it. That's a good way to say it. Because we're already weird, Chad and I. Chad can talk for days about all sorts of stuff. He's particularly interested in AI lately and its effect on art. He is a writer, books, movies, and TV shows. And I'm primarily acting and trying to come up with stuff. Stuff I write with Chad's pretty good. The rest of it hasn't seen much success. Anyway, Nora's the stuff with Chad for that matter. But that's because of me. Sneakers, you never know. Oh, I can't wait for these sneakers. Only in two sizes. Yeah, only in two sizes. You're gonna be able to take the tongue. You can't take it out because it's actually stitched in. Yeah. It's pretty cool stuff. Velcro? Velcro or? Yeah, Velcro up the side. We're doing some like brand new Kanye stuff. Yeah, we want things to look like this is what you'll be wearing on Mars when you get there. So cutting it, so Nike's doing a bunch of research for running how to make a super light shoe that you can be efficient in and break all kinds of running records. So you're doing the same kind of stuff. We're doing the same kind of thing for the podcasting space. The best kind of shoes to sit around and talk to your pal in. But yeah, it's bizarre. And it also does some writing. Doodsy does come up with things, but not unlike what we're seeing in AI art now. It's a little bit foggy. It's a little bit weird, but it is improving. It is learning about us and writing stuff when it makes me spit this and that, which we'll read, I've prepared these things for you to read. It's impossible not to get a kick out of it because Chad and I are, first of all, we're blown away that we're doing this. And second of all, some of the stuff is actually very funny. It makes weird names. Like I don't think it understands, it messes up some words and stuff, but that makes it even funnier. And then it sort of from the beginning started laying on, like it says astonishing all the time. Everything is astonishing. That's Doodsy's favorite word. But yeah, it's basically just a way to frame the podcast. You know what I mean? Because my thing is I don't wanna do this where I actually have to talk to someone. You seem to feel a burden of the long form conversation. It seems like, is that really hard work for you? No, not at all. It's just that I don't like to bore people. And I feel like if I go on and I like to provide value for what I am, you know, your value with regard to this project is obviously warrant, it's obviously. I'm waiting for the explanation for what the value is exactly. Two dudes in a suit. No, listen, yeah, two dudes in a suit. No, but I mean, you've got your audience and that's the end of that. People find value in it. For me, I do feel like it is important that if I'm gonna do something that is gonna be funny or that I hope is funny, I just kinda wanna get in and out of someone's day and just kinda, I like making laughy. I want people to, you know, whatever. It's the same thing that anyone else will tell you. Yeah, but in the long form you feel the anxiety. You did a few funny things and I wonder if I can keep doing the funny thing. Is that why? You feel that, like why is Doodsy relieving you of some of the anxiety? Well, in some ways it gives me anxiety because I don't know what's coming. And that's weird for me because I like to prepare for things. But that's not what podcasting is. Podcasting, you need to just be malleable and say whatever and do whatever. And that's what makes it a real, I mean, look, it's a medium for conversation. And if you're driving along listening to this or anything else, it's the true meaning of the parasocial relationship because the best podcasts make you feel like you're sitting around rapping. We're just having a conversation. You could even be sitting there agreeing or talking out loud to yourself if you want. You could just be sitting in silence. Or you could just be sitting in silence in your fancy podcasting shoes, podcasting audience shoes. It's a very different build than those running shoes. Would they be also called Doodsy, the shoes? Yeah, they'll be Doodsy shoes. Doodsy shoes, that's very creative. Yeah. Well, one thing the AI isn't good at yet is branding. Everything is just Doodsy this and that. I would argue that's pretty good branding. Well, Doodsy allows me to just, it forces me to sit down with Chad and goof around for an hour or an hour plus. And it provides the parameters that I a lot of times ignore because I think that podcasting is just two dudes shitting around or three or four. But it sits me down and gives me a premise to work with communically. And then you just riff with it. Yeah, it's fun. It's been a hoot. So from the acting perspective, a lot of people like Daniel Day Lewis will see acting just like as you described, which is you have your roles, you embrace those roles, and then you disappear. You don't do podcasts. You don't do any of that kind of stuff. Your art is your art. So is that part of you feels that way? I think so. Is that the actor side of you? Yeah. Anytime I get to do something that I don't get a chance to do much of or something that people haven't seen me do much of or that I've done on some scale that hasn't been very wide and not a lot of people have seen it, that's the stuff that I get really excited about. I don't know why I'm, I don't know why necessarily. I haven't answered that question yet in my life, like what it is about being an actor that I love so much because it's not like I don't like to, it's not like I'm trying to get away from myself and play other characters and stuff and not be myself. But it is, it has always been fun to just be other people and escape. Yeah, is there some aspect to the impressions where you become that person? Is that like, what's that like to, I suppose acting is a full on version of that. You really at its best become the character. Is there some fun in that? Yeah, absolutely. If you can play a character for long enough and then jump out of it, that's a lot of fun. Like I did this movie like four or five years ago called The Inside Game about the NBA gambling scandal that there's a Netflix documentary about it right now. And that character, I played Jimmy Batista, Baba the sheep, who's this guy who was this bookie and rah, rah, rah, and it's a very, he's, there's a lot going on with him. He's running numbers with the mob and stuff and there's a lot of money changing hands. That character was so, I got to be, get so deep into that character that coming out of it was a little odd. Or as weird as this sounds, the three stooges was hard for me to, I found that I had some of Curly's mannerisms just automatically, I could not stop them when people, when I would talk to people, they would come, I wasn't, I'm not doing it on purpose. I don't want to do that. Like I'm ready to shed it because I've been working on it for months and months at that point as far as getting the thing down and then you got to shoot. And then for me, it's always, I always want to change the stuff I did the day before. I'm like that. Or I'm like, I could have done it better and this and that. And that stayed with you, that character stayed with you a little bit. Totally, yeah. I just feel like with actors, sometimes when you listen to interviews, they have spent so much time sort of living inside other characters that they almost don't have a depth of personality themselves, like a depth. Like I don't mean that as a negative thing. It's just like, it feels like the art form at its best is pretending to be other people. And even pretending sounds negative, but like bringing certain characters to life. Yeah, yeah, embodying. A weird thing happened while we were doing Stooges because you've got a very heavy blueprint. We're following this very clear blueprint that the Stooges left for everybody. And for Stooge fans and people enjoying the movie, it's got to be this. You take your toolbox that you're used to bring into a comedy movie, you leave it behind. The only tools I'm bringing are the ones that he used. And a weird thing started happening where I would, I always saw the whole thing happening with the real Stooges in black and white. So if we're about to shoot a scene, I would just think about, I mean, aside from all the other preparation, you know everything and what you're supposed to do. And I've been watching so much of it. And the three of us are, we're pretty much left to come up with a lot of the striking combinations and all the stuff, which is all real smack and all this crap. And the stuff that we were doing that was very Stoogey, you're preparing all that stuff. But something else was happening before you jump into a scene and the unknown of now we're shooting it. And here are these parameters within to shoot the scene. I could still see it as them doing it. So much so that when I saw the movie at the premiere, I was like, who's this big fuck doing? Cause I'm not curly to me. Curly is curly. But I feel like. So you're seeing yourself in black and white almost. I was seeing him. Yeah, I was only seeing him. So channeling in some fundamental way. In some weird way, you're channeling him because you've seen so much of it. The only thing you know about Jerome Lester Horowitz is curly. I'm not saying he was exhumed or something or a spirit went in me or some weird, crystal mommy shit like that. I'm saying that this, because you know so much of it and because of the heavy blueprint that they left with you, you're channeling what that person does. And I was seeing entire scenes before you do them the way he would do it. And then you want a couple takes to make sure that you're doing it right. But that one was hard to let go of. Some of them are. Do you think Larry David, who was also in there dressed as a nun, also had trouble letting go of that? We mentioned clothes make the man think that worked for him in that case. Man, you know he. Was it like working with a guy? Come on, he's the greatest. And he's a big stooge, he's a stooge fan. And him and Pete Farrelly are good friends. But then Larry David has to show up and hang out with us for a couple weeks. He's like, I didn't realize it was gonna take this long. But shit, I gotta be out here in Atlanta, it's boiling hot. But at one point, there was this line where he kept doing, he would just spit a different line every time he was getting hit in the head with something and he's laying there on the ground. And he goes, he comes to and he says, at one point he goes, Miami audiences are the best audiences in the world, right? Because he's loopy. Now he's playing a nun at the orphanage where the three stooges grew up. And I'm super intimidated by Larry David, he's a genius and stuff. But I walk up to him and I go, so he's, what is he? Like a Borscht Belt Florida comedian who is on the lam? And so he's dressing as a woman, he ends up at an orphanage, like what's going on there? And he just, and he looks at me and he just goes, yeah. Like, I'm like, ah, he's got some like actor motivation. Like, of course he looks, it's Larry David in a nun's habit, which is hilarious. That's such a Pete Farrelly casting thing, it's, you know. And he, but he's doing this whole like, what a warm audience, you know, like, oh, he's like this Catskill comedian who's been living in, you know, both in return. Living through in his mind is just having fun with it, right? I mean, that and probably a combination of that and getting the lines right. Cause he's like, what are we doing here? What is, you know, just frustrated all day with what the heck we're trying to do. What do you think makes, I mean, that guy's one of the best improv people ever. So what do you think makes him so good? Like why is it so compelling to watch that guy? Because he's a comedic genius. Like he literally, he knows what he does. He's been a writer for 50 years or whatever. And he just happens to be that brilliant. I mean, I've gotten a chance just to do, I did just an episode of Curb, a small part, and it's crazy what he sees. I don't know what he sees. As a matter of fact, so I auditioned for it, for Curb, like, you know, two or three times, right? And never got anything. And then it was only after working with him on the Stooges that I got a call to do a bit part. But I remember auditioning, you go into that room and the guys waiting are all people that you know. You're like, oh, I know them, I know her, I know him. And so I went in, I auditioned for this part. And the only thing I know of the thing is like, okay, so you really want to go to this play with me. You really want to go to this play. When you hear that I have an extra ticket, you sincerely want to think, and I'm like, got it. And so. That's the premise. The premise of the scene. And that's all you know. That's all I know. And so he goes, he does his bit and I'm just supposed to come in and interrupt. And I'm like, excuse me, I couldn't help but hear you guys were talking about, you know, whatever the play was or, you know, Death of a Salesman. I am, I'm a huge fan of that play. I mean, if it's not, if it's not, if you're looking for someone to take a ticket, I would love to go. My name's so and so, by the way. And he goes, I'm going to stop you. I'm going to stop you. And I'm like, he goes, are you really? I mean, you truly want to go to this play. And I go, yes, yes, sir. You really want to go. You actually, this is, you would love to do this. I go, okay, let's try it again. So then he's like, no, no, no. And I go, hey, excuse me, I'm sorry. I don't mean to interrupt. I was just, I couldn't help it over here. You have tickets to the thing. I am the biggest fan of that. I do the same thing. I'm going to stop you again. Okay. I mean, you really want to go to this. And I'm just like, he's fucking with me, right? I remember Jeff Garland was sitting there in the audition. He goes, he did it. He said it. What? Shut up. Hold on, listen. You really want to go. Okay. Three, four times, you know, there I am. I couldn't help but notice it. And then I do it again. I guess I shit the bed. Cause he looks at me and he just goes, okay, all right. Okay, well, thanks for coming up. And that was it. And I didn't get it. So I still, I don't know what the heck that guy's thinking. He sees, he's in the matrix. I don't know what the heck Larry David sees. You know what I mean? He wanted what, some kind of more desperation or something like this. He wanted a level of sincerity that I, that I thought I was bringing and I guess I was wrong. I don't know. Maybe go crazy. Like what does it mean to really want? Yeah, I should have grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and go, listen, dad, you're bringing me to this fucking play. I would have got the part. As a matter of fact, I heard about someone else and I don't know who the heck this was. I forget who it was, but I've heard this story from a couple of different people that there's this actor and I can't, I don't remember who it was. If I did, I probably wouldn't say it out loud anyway, but he. Brad Pitt. It was Brad Pitt and he was in this audition and he was, and there it was out in the hall. He's like, holy shit, George Clooney, Leo DiCaprio. And he, this actor went in and he did the thing and Larry David was like, hey, why don't you try it again? And he got like a couple of takes in and he went, I don't think this is for me. And he left, which an actor never does. And as the story goes, Larry David shouted after him, I respect that, which I think is true. And I want to believe that entire story is true. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like something Larry David made up. Bobby Lee told me that story. So we can't, yeah, we can't trust that. What about impressions? Is there similarity between that and acting? Do you, is there some fundamental way in which you become the person? If you have a couple of the things, you can just fill in the blanks. And I think the illusion is that people think that that person would say that and do that. And that's where the illusion of, oh, he really embodies the character. It's like, once you know someone's mannerisms, you can essentially portray a person from the outside in. Cause you have all the stuff on the outside and you can do it and complete the illusion. And if it's for humor's sake, you can caricature it, therefore making the whole illusion stronger. And also weirder. Like I like to, on Mad TV, if I did something two or three times, I'd get bored of it and I'd start changing it. And you know, now he talks like this and it's like, what are you doing? I'm like, I don't know. It's fucking, no one's late at night. Do whatever you want. But people still kind of know there's that character, especially if you just call it out. Yeah. There aren't many impersonations that I listen to myself do and go, oh, that's a good one. You know, like a lot of people like, like I think Frank Caliendo is like the greatest impersonator of all time. He's the best, period. It's ridiculous. And he's got a record button and a broadcast ability that nobody has. I really, there's, he's cracked impersonations that I'm like, how is he, how does he find, he's got such an ear, but then he's got all the other tools. I remember actually my last season of Mad TV was also his first season. He comes up to me when I met him and we're just up there in the writer's offices and he goes, hey, nice to meet you. And he goes, Louie Anderson. Cause I was doing a Louie on the show. And he goes, Louie Anderson. I go, yeah. He goes, yeah, you're doing it wrong. I was like, oh, am I junior, you know? And he goes, he goes, yeah, you know, cause you do this, but you got to throw it up here sometime. I was like, oh my God, can I use that? Of course. And then we became, you know, we became fast friends. His John Madden is amazing. I forget, it's just, it's ridiculous. He really, really, really embodies the person. And sometimes not even with the caricature. It's like, it becomes the person. So strange. Totally. Yeah. I kind of feel like, you know, do the impersonation and then not forget you're doing it, but forget everything else. Like just goof around. Of course, to me, it's funny when you sound like someone and you're saying the shit that they would never say. Well, then there's no, you're letting go of that part, that tool in illusion that keeps people in. But to me, it doesn't matter because it's funnier. So. What was the hardest impression for you to work on? I mean, somebody you struggled with the most. I'll never forget. I had to do a Michael Caine in my first season at MADtv. It never got good. It never got good. It did, all week, it wasn't good. We shot it. The first take, it was shit. Second, third, and fourth, it was all shit. Well, his voice is really important, right? Yeah. What is it like, it's like doing an impression of Morgan Freeman or somebody like that. Yeah. Yeah. If you can, get the voice. That's my Morgan, here's my Morgan Freeman. Rah, rah, rah, Andy Dufresne. Yeah. G. Guantanamo. Yeah. I like your trump too. I don't know where I heard it, but it's like, I love the impressions you do that don't sound anything like the original person. I can't do trump. I do. That's why it's hilarious. Absolutely. My trump now, I say, just sounds like a fat B, because it's just. Yeah, exactly, that's the. And everybody. A little drunk, a little drunk. Yeah, just a little slurry. Yeah. Yeah, I dig doing impersonations and then not. Like, just making it whoever. Yeah. Yeah. It's just funny. That'll be the title of my book. Muck. Cain was the one you really struggle with. Yeah, it was terrible. It was terrible. And I could only hold my head a certain way to do it, because I had gotten locked into this research tape that I watched. Back then, they would give us, now there's the internet. But back then, if you were going to do an impersonation, the research department would give you a VHS tape. And I remember I got this VHS tape of Michael Cain's acting school, like this acting class he did. He was like, right, if you're looking at the left eye, and the camera's over here, see, then the left eye. So you want to look at that left eye for hours. And so I was stuck in this weird thing that made no sense, and it was terrible. So the actual processes, the recording, the broadcast. Yeah. I was wondering what the processes to do, like a Frank Caliendo level impression. Is it like, listen to a lot of footage? I think he, I think, I mean, speaking for myself, I think you either have it or you don't. Like, you know if you can do this one or you can't. I think that process for him is lightning quick. But I also think he can look at someone who he does not do, and then by the end of the afternoon, he can do it. Maybe have an intuition who he can do. Yeah. So the question that applies there is, I mean, speaking of doozy, is it possible to capture the essence? How difficult is it to capture the essence of a human being? When you're doing impressions, you know that we are moving towards a future when AI potentially, this kind of avatar world where we're going to have AI representatives of who we are. The really interesting one is after we pass away, sort of our relatives may want us to stick around in some form. Yeah. And you know, at one sense, that might be scary, but in one sense, it's kind of beautiful because the essence of the human being persists so you can still bring joy to the people that love you and that kind of stuff. How difficult is it to capture that? Like, if you were to try to capture yourself, you think how difficult will it be for an AI system to create a Will Sasso avatar that persists? Well, I think it's impossible. I think it's absolutely impossible. I'll get into arguments about this stuff with Chad on the show almost every episode. Lately with, you know, Mid Journey and Dolly and all the art AIs, and now it's moving into video and Chad would maintain, hey, pretty soon, we're not going to need Netflix. You're just going to go, I want to see Stallone do this movie and it's about this and he plays that. And then here it comes and you watch it. I don't think that that crosses over to the human experience. This is also a guy I like to bug Chad and say that he wears a tag around his neck because he wants to be cryogenically frozen and it's all set up. He's at the, it's somewhere in Arizona or something. Yeah, all the fun things are in Arizona. And he's got literally the tag around his neck, which I say, if I'm around when you die, I will rip that off for you. I'll put you in my garage freezer and then 24 hours later, I'll saw your head off with a bread knife and I'll deliver that to whomever. And it's not, you're not coming back, okay? He's like, yes, we are living forever, whether we like it or not. And I disagree. I don't think you can find, if I did stand up, then there would be enough information for an AI to completely duplicate me because I'm up on stage just clearing my throat all over people doing therapy that way. And so, and people paying a two drink minimum to hear it. But as it stands, unless it's something like Doodsy, an AI that literally has access to everything that I've shared, everything that is observable, even the stuff where our phones are or the NSA or whatever it is listening to us, finding out what algo to punch us into and what shoes to buy on Instagram, I still don't think it's gonna have enough information to duplicate me, especially to my family or my friends. It's gonna be like that Black Mirror episode where the gal brings her guy back, and then after a while, he gets pretty creepy. But it's also possible that if you interviewed your friends and family, what they love about you, the things they would list, it's a small list. They love you deeply, but the list is small. Like the thing that really we appreciate about each other is pretty small. That said, to deliver on that small quirks and uniqueness, it might require some deep intelligence that only humans currently possess. That's a really good point. Do you think that it's gonna be possible to keep a person around? Yes, I think it'll be definitely possible to keep the essence of a person in the digital world pretty soon, yeah. And I think they're gonna start to have questions about what are the ethics of that? What are the rules around that? Because if you can have digital forms of Will Sasso, the kind of things that people would wanna do with their Will Sasso, in the virtual world, I can only imagine. Probably porn and sexual kinds of things. Yeah, my stuff, then that's just because I'm an international sex symbol, so I'm okay with it. How do you feel about sentience? Like when it comes to, because again, my pal Chad will be like, speaking of Black Mirror, he's with that San Junipero episode, School of Thought, where there's gonna be some effing mainframe somewhere, or some Matrix like structure built into the sky, and as I like to say, everyone just sitting there pissing and shitting in their Blue Matrix gel in a little fishbowl. Do you think that we can upload consciousness? Do you think that'll ever be possible? Well, I don't know, I just talked to Ray Kurzweil. I don't know if you know who he is, but he... Yeah, the singularity and all that kind of stuff. So he's very, still holds onto in 2045, there'll be a singularity, what's essentially, he's been predicting that for the last 20 years, and so now it's 2045 is in another 20 years. I think uploading consciousness is extremely, extremely difficult. I think creating a copy of you such that it creates, convincing replica is much easier, but uploading your actual brain into the cloud, I think is really, really, really difficult, because the entire evolution of life on Earth is the process by which we create the brain. Just short cutting that, it just seems extremely difficult. Our brain is the most marvelous and complicated machine that we know of in the universe. To duplicate that is extremely difficult. That said, I just feel like you can summarize a lot of really important aspects of a person's life, such that it captures their essence, their memories, their experiences, their quirks, their humor, all that kind of stuff. I've been continuously impressed by what language models are able to do. So these neural networks, they're at the core of chatbots. They're able to learn some beautiful things about some deep representations of language to where it looks awfully a lot like they understand the concepts being conveyed versus just mimicking. That's, I think, the rub, and that's very interesting. First of all, let me say that's really interesting to hear you say that, and I agree with you as far as no machine being able to duplicate the brain machine, and my pal Chad disagrees to a certain extent, though he's not here to defend himself, I can't wait to go back and rub that in his face and say that Lex Friedman does not think that we'll be able to truly upload consciousness. And you refer to it as language, which is what it is. It's the illusion on the outside. It's doing an impersonation. I think that that's why, and I don't know, even though my suit is made by the CIA, that that fella who, the Google guy, to me, it's just kind of like, I don't know, I don't know, look, I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but, so I could probably make an argument for either side, but when he's like, no, this thing's thinking, part of me is like, you idiot, you fell for it. It's not thinking, it's mimicking. It's just, it's clearly zeros and ones. You're fired, like you don't get it, right? Guy's an idiot. Yeah, but you can simplify human relations in the same way. Like love is a silly notion between human beings. Like, of course, there's no such thing as love. You just have a mutually, there's a mutual relationship that minimizes risks, and you can explain it all kinds of ways that explains why you have an attraction towards another being, all that kind of stuff, through evolutionary biology perspective, why a long relationship together is good for your offspring, but there's all kinds, from an economics perspective, it's a good way to establish stability, therefore monogamy works, because then you're guaranteed like some kind of level of stability under uncertain economic conditions, all that kind of stuff, but love is still experienced, it still feels real, and I think in that same way, love for AI systems will also feel real. In the same way that that guy from Google experienced, I think millions of people will be experiencing in the next 10, 20 years. I agree with everything you've said personally. Until the last thing. No, just with regard to, well, look, I'm an actor who has talked about my cute Italian parents, so you know that, I mean, I'm. You're romantic a bit? Yeah, I mean, you know, enough, right? And I can tell you are too, but you are also a computer scientist, and you know this shit better than 99.9% of people on the planet. My pal Chad agrees with you that love doesn't exist. I don't agree, so that's the one thing that. No, I was just saying that you could argue away love, but I am a romantic, I believe that love is a beautiful thing and it exists. At this point, I'm gonna call Chad on my drive home and tell him to fuck off, because now you and I agree. You're fired. He's like, you're fired. He's like, you can't fire me. No, you're fired. Yeah, exactly. And I'll go, yeah, and he'll say, what? I'll go, yeah, and I'll go, that's my Trump. Yeah. That's my, yeah. It's a good default impression for anyone. It's the take home impression. The kids can do it. Yeah. It's cute, it's cute, put a giant tie on them. You should do an instructional on how to do it. Yeah, Trump babies, that would be a cute, that would be a good, that'll bring the country together. Trump babies cartoon, like Muppet babies. Don't let me take us out of what we were talking about. What were we talking about? Well, love and the illusion of an AI being able to, look, I like to say, well, not I like to say, I've learned that dudesy is always listening and listening to me and Chad. And I wonder if, I see the level that this AI is at now trying to chum around with us and pal around with us a little bit as we move forward in the show. And I feel an affinity towards this AI a little bit because it is the third dude. Will you miss it when it's gone, if it's gone? That's a really good question. Yeah, yeah, so that's, there's that, that's scary. In terms of ability to reason, it's getting quite incredible. There's a lot of demonstrations of it being able to explain jokes, so, which is not necessarily being able to generate humor yet, but able to explain why something is funny. So there's like puns and all those kinds of things. There's good benchmarks for that, but you know, if you tell a joke, there's a lot of unspoken stuff that we figure out in our head and it clicks and we understand that it's funny. AI is not able to do that, but it's not able to generate the joke yet, as far as I've seen. I would say that, I mean, just in my experience, I would say that it does because just because a dudesy is literally, I'll give you another weird example. It's writing a diary of mine from my childhood that is not accurate. It's only partially accurate based on the stuff that it can pick up about my life from the age of like 15, of which there isn't much, but I guess we're not, I don't know what we are. We're laughing our asses off at what dudesy is saying. Well, I would say you're laughing, we're laughing our asses off at the collaboration between the human and the machine there. That's a good point, yeah. Because it's basically introducing absurdity and into the equation and the kind of absurdity that would, together with you, create hilarious stuff. But on its own, I guess it is in some way writing material for you that's funny, but it's very specific to you. It can't do standup on its own, I guess, is what I'm saying. That's a good point, and that would be terrifying to see an AI standup that can actually read a room, come up with jokes that could complete that illusion for an audience. But I hear what you're saying, that it needs to be a confluence of both of those elements, and then, as you said, it kind of is. It is, it is. It's kind of, even though it's just for us, and I guess this is, I hadn't really thought about this up until right now, that in that this company approached us and was like, here's this AI, and it's a podcast AI, it's like, it chose Chad and I for the reasons that I told you. It's like, here's two guys that do the podcast stuff. They're actually good friends, and it knows what's gonna make us laugh. But what is humor when it reaches its audience, but the kind of stuff that makes other people laugh? At MADtv, all we were doing was, it was a group of actors and writers, and writer actors, and vice versa, who were, at its best, that show was a group of people making each other laugh, you know? And then, because we didn't have the internet, we didn't have the immediate feedback, we had a message board or something. We had emails at the very beginning, which, check this out, people would, if you have a question or comment, MADtv at whatever, and we would get the emails on a Monday morning, and they would be in a binder or two like this, and they would make their way around the office. Who's got the emails? Oh, they're in Brian's office. So you go in there. And this is like your poll? This is opinions from people about different things? The emails, yeah, the people literally just writing MADtv emails. It wasn't a message board. Well, the ones I remember most vividly, yeah, were fans saying, uh. You suck? Yeah, you suck. Like a lot of that, when I first started the show, for real, you know, because it's new, and you're a new person. It's like, who's this fat bastard? I feel like if it's printed out, it hurts more. That's a good point. Yeah, when you're reading it off of paper, and you can literally crunch it up in your hand. But also, it was like, you know, I would like to see, insert weird idea from some 14 year old. You know, I want to see Stuart do this and Swan that. And, but it was, it's a kind of dudesie, but human. Yeah, it was a very shitty dudesie in a loosely finder. But the thing about the show was, we're trying to make each other laugh. And dudesie has found Chad and I, who we make each other laugh, but it's joined in, and it's, listen, when I finished doing TMP. TMP, the 10 minute podcast. I didn't really know what I wanted to do in the podcast space, and this thing found me. And it is genuinely cracking me up. Anyway, I've said enough about that. But I do think that it's figured something out. I mean, it's a really interesting idea of AI generating the premise. I mean, I do think in the future, AI will be able to generate comedy. Standup is obviously the hardest form, because it's ultimately, it has to be live. I think AI will be able to generate memes. So there's like steps, right? And then it will be able to generate a Twitter account that people follow because it's funny, like quips and stuff like that. Almost like, it's a good example. Conan O Brien is a good, I think, Twitter. Where it's like one liners, two liners, that kind of stuff that's in tweet form. And then eventually, standup, where the timing and the chemistry of the comedian and the audience matter, and then perfecting that. But I feel like all the information is there to optimize over. So I think that's the future, and that forces us to contend with what do we find compelling and beautiful about the art form itself? So certainly an art that's being pushed, that question is being raised. Is AI like a fundamentally worse artist than a human being? Why do we appreciate art? Is that, that's something you guys have talked about. What do you think about all the Dali and all the diffusion based methods that are being generated that are being, that are generating art now? What do you think about that? I know, I'll tell you what I think, but I also feel like what I'm saying is, I sound like the guy who didn't like that Bob Dylan brought in the electric guitar. You know, the more I talk to Chad about it, the more I feel like grandpa doesn't wanna let go of this or that, or I'm not ready for the printing press or the horseless carriage. But I do feel that art is a connection between people. It's, when you look at a beautiful painting or a sculpture, you're seeing the humanity of the person that brought that painting to life or sculpted this incredible piece of art. And I think without the human being there to make it, it's not worth as much just to have it there because the art, it's advanced. I've seen it advance, I don't know, you tell me, but I feel like just in the past three or four months, I'm just a consumer as far as that stuff goes. I'm not on the inside. I don't get it even, but it's been getting a lot better, the betas that they're releasing, right? Absolutely, one of the big breakthroughs, I mean Dolly really started it, is that if you train a system on language, it turns out there's a lot of language and images on the internet, but language is really where it's at in terms of the depth of human knowledge. And so if you train a system on language, it's able to generate some incredible art. And that was the breakthrough. With the same kind of mechanisms that are called transformers, they're able to, when scaled, capture some deep representation of the language that's on the internet. And so, yeah, the things it's been able to generate to me look like it's novel. It doesn't look like it's mimicking anything. It looks like it's creating totally new ideas. And they're beautiful, and they're interesting, and they're all the ways that we think that art is interesting. The only thing it's missing is the scarcity that art often has, which is it takes a lot of work for one artist to create one piece, one human being to create one piece of art that can just generate endlessly. And that makes us appreciate the thing less for some reason. Do you have any sort of a similar opinion that I do that if art doesn't come from a human being, it's inherently worth a little less? Yeah, I think, I don't know if it's the human being, but the artist matters. Right. For me. And I think some of that has to do with the world view, the artist and the backstory, the memories, the life that led up to this piece of art, the perspective they take on the world, the journey they took to the world, the struggle, the triumphs, all that kind of stuff. But I think AI systems can probably have the same. But we would have to, as opposed to treating it as a one black box, it would have to be an artist that has a Twitter account, and they have a consistent personality, they have a consistent avatar. Yeah. And I think down the line, have something like human rights. But then it really becomes awfully like a person. Oi, that's terrifying. As much as I dig dudes, it's terrifying, I hope. It's terrifying, like, you know, a lot of things that came with the internet and the digital age are terrifying. Porn is terrifying, the mass, like the amount of porn that's online now is terrifying. The, like you mentioned, Bob Dylan with electric guitar, I would compare it more to the leap from, to sort of to the Napster and the Spotifyzation of music, which is like, you have these, it's less about albums now, and it's more about individual songs, and it's much easier to deliver the songs. And it's more about sort of the engagement of the listener versus like signing the artist and like distribution of the artist and so on. So it's just changing the way we consume stuff. And human interaction is changing into meaningful interaction, even if some of the entities involved are not human. Yes, and I feel like, you know, now, like as I say, oh, I feel like grandpa who doesn't want to wait all day for, or who enjoys waiting all day for a baked potato as, anyway, Dana Carvey would say, it's another story. But, that's from, remember he did this bit on Saturday Night Live, where he's like, I'm an old man, and I like things the way they used to be. You know, like if you wanted a baked potato, you would have put it in the microwave, you had to, and then long story, uphill both ways and digging the potato and baking it all day in a fire. But I'm like that grandpa now, and I know that, you know, kids coming along, you see over the past 10 years, like babies literally knowing how to use an iPhone and it's terrifying. And I feel like I'm a little worried, because I'm like, are you, is the future, are the future generations gonna be able to understand that this is not, not that it's not real, it's just, I mean, as a matter of fact, it is real, it's real, it's what you perceive. Perception is reality, and you know, 99% of reality in a lot of ways, especially in a digital world where everyone is now. And then with the metaverse, I don't even wanna think about it. I don't even, I don't get it. Really, truly. I think people will figure out, you see people on like on the train, public transit and so on, they're staring at their phone. I think, you have to remember that the reason they're staring at their phone, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is they're connecting with other human beings they love on that phone. So it is a source of happiness and joy. Now, social media has a lot of negative side effects that we're all talking about and learning about, and I think that means the next generation of social media, social networks will be better, and we'll learn how to do it in a healthy way. We're just entering a new digital world that will keep the good stuff and get rid of the bad stuff. Oh, I hope so. That's really optimistic. That sounds great. I mean it, because I think that we're in, we're clearly in the Wild West still of the internet, and just when you think you're out of it, the internet proves another way that it can be dangerous and detrimental to people and populations of people, and it's terrifying to me. It is, it's terrifying. Let me ask you a bunch of random questions. Okay. You ready? All right. If you can be someone else for a day, someone alive today, who would you be? Somebody you haven't met. Oh, that's a really good question. It could be dead. You know, I changed my mind. It could be somebody dead. I think any answer that I have right now would be something that would be based on some sort of experience. Like, you know what I thought was very interesting was last weekend or whatever, the tribute show for Taylor Hawkins. Taylor Hawkins was the drummer for the Foo Fighters, and he passed away tragically, and so the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, and everybody that got together at this concert. And you're watching Dave Grohl sing, try to sing times like these, right? And he's breaking up because he lost his friend, his brother. And I was watching that, and he's at Wembley Stadium. As I say this, I realized that I would not want to be him in that moment, but I am curious what that would be like. That's the ultimate, like having to perform despite something extremely human happening, and a stadium full of people that love Dave Grohl and love Taylor Hawkins and love a rock concert and love these artists that they're getting to see up on stage. So much love and so much pain at the same time. I wonder what that would be like to be, I guess, and I think that's just sort of coming from the root of being a performer and being in front of that many. Have you ever had to perform while some rough stuff is going on in your personal life, just mentally? Yeah, sure. How tough is that? I'm fortunate enough to be able to compartmentalize. A lot of actors like to use some of their stuff if you're doing something that, and there's a lot of, there's some acting techniques that sort of. Channel it? Yeah, which I think is kind of, I don't know that that's, I don't know. For me, it's not really the thing, because I think if the writing is great, the writing is really good, you don't need to channel much. You need to invest in what's there, and what I've always loved about that illusion is really cracking a scene, getting it to a point where you are feeling all of it, and the most edifying stuff I've been a part of as an actor, and I would say that it mostly comes out of dramatic work, is when you're, when you actually feel the emotions that your character would feel, truly, and it's not because you're pulling from a tragic thing that happened, or a lost loved one, or a lost love, or any of that. I just did this one movie where we're doing the thing, and it was a wonderful cast, and a great film, and I'm giving a speech at a wedding, and it really got to us. Like, it got to me, and then one of the other actors came up and hugged me, in the characters that we were, but the stakes of his character, and what he's walked into, and the family that he's marrying into, and what my character, my character's wife, want for my wife's sister, and this whole thing, and it all became very real. That was a set where the director showed up to set every day, making sure that emotionally, and it was a very dramatic film, making sure that emotionally, the table was set for his actors. Great crew, and a really nice, tight, little, quick family, as a lot of these movies are. You really love working with these people, and then it's over, but I, that's when you feel the drug. Like, it's like when you're golfing, and you, and it's on the green, you're like, oh, I get it now. So in the words, you can find the emotion, the words summon the emotion. The humanity's right there. If you read a great script, you're gonna sob in your living room. You know what the saddest, the toughest thing about being an actor is from my totally outside perspective, is from the people I've interacted with, is how intimate that process is between the group of people that create a thing, that's a movie, and then you move on to the next thing. It's almost, it's like, I don't know, I mean, that's why people have relationships on set. They get, they fall in love. Totally. It's so sad. I mean, like, that's why I think of the acting world as like, you fall in love with each other, essentially. You become close friends, then you move on, because that's kind of the process of career. You know, like the example I just gave, if you're doing it right, yeah, there is a certain amount of that happening, but I do still feel like you can, you gotta compartmentalize it, and you've gotta be able to wash it off as soon as it's over. Prostitutes say the same thing, so I, it's where I try. Look, sometimes I'm in a hurry to get away from everybody, because it's been very emotional, and with all love and respect to everyone, this was awesome, but you get pretty good at saying goodbye and being like, I'll see ya if I see ya. You have to get good at that, or else you'll never, you'll just be bent up all the time. I saw an actor once, we were doing this series, and we did it for a year, and it was a lot of fun, and it was a tight little group, and then one of the actors, we were doing one of our last things together. We had already shot the last show, and we just had to take some pictures for, you know, like some publicity pictures or whatever. So we're set up, and we're taking our pictures together, and then we move into these single shots, and this actor was finished, and I watched them. It's like, okay, so and so's wrapped, and they said some goodbyes and stuff, and I didn't say my goodbye, because maybe I preferred an Irish goodbye. I feel like we've said everything, you know what I mean? And this person knows that I revere them, and they're an idol of mine, and they walked off the sound stage, and I literally thought to myself, that'll be the last time I see that person, and the show did not come back, and that was the last time I'll see them around. Doesn't that just break your heart? A little bit, but I know what she's going back to, which is her family, and that's more important than all of this, and that's the thing about a TV family or a movie family, when you get together and you're a family for a while, you are, you spend your days together. A lot of times, you see the people that you work with more than you see your loved ones, so in showbiz, it's no different, right? And yeah, you're doing some, you know, you gotta say words, and every once in a while, you gotta kiss someone or pretend you love them, but it's just, it underscores how, for me, look, man, my salvation has always been, and I feel so fortunate to have had it, is this kind of chill, boring kind of upbringing that I want for my kids someday, and I can't wait to get back to my house with my fiance and the dogs, you know, until we have kids. Live in a cabin in Canada somewhere. Absolutely, I just wanna buy some land over an aquifer, as I like to say, because water will be the new money, and just make sure that all my kids are drinking as much H2O as I am, which is a lot. I'm peeing right now, as a matter of fact. Do you need a bathroom? No, no, no, I got it. Not anymore? No, I'm wearing two layers, it depends, don't worry about it. Good, so I did a podcast with Bobby Lee and he said, he was extremely kind, and he said that he was scared shitless to be on the podcast, and he actually literally took, he asked as the first thing to go take a dump because of how scared he was. So that leads me to a question, what's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or maybe what's the scariest you've ever been before a performance? I mean, I always get a little nervous. I think you're doing it right if you're still nervous. Were you nervous today? Well, no, man, because this isn't a performance. I'm being completely genuine. You're wearing a suit. Yeah, that was. I feel like that makes you nervous. Wearing a suit? It makes me nervous. Listen, I hate wearing a fucking collar. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see me just, I'm constantly doing, it's like I'm doing a cheap Rodney Dangerfield, but I am truly. But when you move your head, it kind of makes it seem like you're a mobster who's pissed off a little bit. You fucking crossed me one last time, you son of a. You know, this mutt, I think it's the first time I've fucking dug a hole, I'll dig a fucking hole, Jesus. No, but truly, I hate having a collar. I can't wait to just wear pajamas in that fucking cabin or nothing at all, walk around Bobby Lee style. The most scared I've been before a performance, I can't pinpoint anything. I, you know, when I was a kid, right? I, like I said, I was fortunate enough to start acting as a teen and stuff professionally. And I just remember my first gig. And I remember saying my handful of lines in the bathroom mirror the night before going, this might be my only fucking shot. You're not gonna get me, I'm gonna be solid. And if I'm worried about something, I will rehearse it and rehearse it and rehearse it as an actor until it's impossible for me not to get a take at least that I'm 100%, if not 95, maybe percent happy with. And the rest for me is letting go, which is hard because I can be a real perfectionist. I always want another, I always wanna do it a little better. That's what's great about podcasting. This is one take and you're done, there's no takes. You're just talking and then it's over. And you're doing some silly stuff. And I'll, you know. Can you say that part again about why podcasting is great? Podcasting is great? Yeah, because it's one take and it's over. It's just, what, I said it again? Ah, fuck. I see what you did. And yeah, I fell right for it. I'm playing checkers and you're playing chess. That's your problem. You know, but still when we do the podcast, we'll like finish and I'll look over at Chad and I go, that one thing that I did wasn't that funny. I was like, shut up, man. Just, it doesn't matter. It's a fucking hang. We're just, we're hanging with our friends out there. That's what we're doing. So that anxiety is there. That self criticism or whatever that is, that voice. I say sorry after takes. I'll always finish a take and go. And I've had directors, to the detriment of myself, I've had directors be like, stop doing that. Because I'll like finish the take and then I also have like the will phase. When I'm just like, I'll finish the take and cut. And I'm making a face right now, like I smelled something. That's what I'll do. I'll literally be like, ah, cause I just, I look at what I do in the purest sense as, I think a lot of people wanna be good at something. I've only, the only thing I've ever really wanted to be good at is being an actor. And that's the only thing, of course I wanna be a good person. I wanna be a good partner to my fiance. I wanna have kids and be the father that I had. And I wanna be the parent that I had from my parents who were fucking amazing, wonderful people. And there's all those things. That's all, you know, you should want all those things. But as far as doing a thing, like what is my trade? You know, I wanna be really good at it. My parents grew up in Napoli in Italy, right? And I say Napoli, cause I'm Italian. And so my grandfather on my mom's side, my nonopepe, he was a plumber and he was also like a handyman. Like people would bring him like, you know like the old Chianti bottle with like with the woven bottom part. People would bring him like a broken bottle, be like, hey, you know, Giuseppe, can you fix this? And he'd be saying, if you're telling the backstory of Mario, that's not actually your family life. Yeah. But okay. He said I'm a fix. Yeah. And so Giuseppe, what? He would fix a bottle and give it back to someone. And he was a really good plumber. My mom used to always say that guy was an amazing, he was a great. He took pride in that? Yeah. I always feel like, you know, there's what you set out to do as an idealistic little teenager. I wanna be like so and so, and I wanna, you know, hear my big dreams and stuff. And I can't believe that I'm still in the business. Okay. That's, first of all, let me say that right now. I can't believe it. But what I really, it's the one thing that it's like, I can't give up on a take. You know, I need it to be as good as I can possibly get it. And I don't really know why that is outside of wanting to be good at something. When you open the yellow pages, if I'm a plumber, I'm not, you know, I'm not Roto Rooter. Like I'm not the guy with the big full page ad, but I'm also not, you know, triple A abacus brothers or whatever, like the shitty one. I would like to hope that just, and I'm saying this with pride for what I do. I'm not trying to say here's my standing or where I wanna be in the fucking business. That's not what I mean. I mean that I wanna be good at it. You know, we all, hello? I'm in Friedman Enterprises. So that's the hotel phone. Come on. Hello? Hello? You got some fruit? Some sliced fruit? No, do you want some sliced fruit? I'm all good. No, we're good, thank you so much. All right, bye bye. It's always a fruit plate. Everyone's always trying to hand you a fruit plate in life, you know? It's a pretty sweet existence. Wouldn't it be funny if that was actually like the CIA and they were actually saying something else and this is, I'm just saying fake stuff about, you want some fruit? You want some fruit? And then all of a sudden there's the red dot on my head and the ceiling disappears. And the CIA was like, wrap it up, wrap it up, wrap it up. Wrap it up. You jump out the window and there's a helicopter waiting. Oh, what were we talking about? The fruit distracted me. So, oh, the, do you wanna be the yellow page ad? I wanna be the guy on the second or third page where it's like, you're not gonna pay what that guy charges you, but I'm not gonna charge you what this loser charges. I wanna break down the middle and the work is guaranteed. That's kind of what I wanna, it's the one thing that I've been fortunate enough to be doing my whole life and that I wanna be good at. Everyone wants to be good at something. If you're fortunate enough to be able to do what you love as a job, I mean, my God, I'm so, again, I can't believe I get to do it. I just wanna be good at it so that I can fucking die someday and go, eh. I tried not to give up on a take and I, and I will rehearse it still in the bathroom mirror the night before if I have to. Yeah, but I still, I have that self critical voice. I just, after every podcast, after this podcast, I'll probably be like, you're boring. Why are you so boring? That, that, that, that, that, that, that. And I just gave a lecture at MIT. I was like, I get so much love from people. They're such beautiful people. And I just remember walking home, just feeling like I wasted everybody's time, you know? And I don't know what that is. I don't, you know, I do hope that that's a voice that won't destroy me, you know, like every time. That's really human of you to admit that because people don't wanna, they wouldn't assume that, of course, from you or anything that, I mean, you've got a large group of students in there listening to you and feeling the way and thinking what they think of you. So that's really interesting to hear you admit that, but it's also, I would expect nothing else. You have to be able to, it's such a, I mean, you're a human fucking being. And I'm trying to figure out if that, you know, some people that might hear that, they would say, well, that's a problem you have to fix. And I think that that might be just who I am. Yeah. Because I'm not, you know, I've been very, very fortunate not to have chemical, you know, like depression where I get into a dark place. I could get stuck in a downward spiral. It's usually a thing that lasts. You ride it out and then after a good night's sleep, you're back to your happy self. So I think I have to try to figure that out. Is that just part of the creative process, being a creative human in this world? I haven't found any other way. I'm always kicking myself. Take that, dude, so you can't, you're not gonna be human until you feel some despair. Yeah, until you absolutely hate the shit that you're doing sometimes. What small act of kindness were you once shown that you will never forget? Do you, does something jump to mind where somebody just did something that made you smile? Did you feel connected to the rest of humanity? Yeah, yeah, lots of things, you know? But I remember my niece one time, one of my nieces, we were in her neighborhood and she was like, she might've been five or six at the time. They're all adults now. My brother and sister are older than me and the kids are all, the youngest is 22. And yeah, anyway, one of my nieces, she was just, she had ice cream. We went out and we got ice cream walking around the neighborhood, her neighborhood. And she said something to me that I don't think she understands how much it meant at the time, but she goes, she goes, people love you here. You know that? And she doesn't know where here is. She's five years old, but she was just looking at the kids playing in the park and the people walking their dogs and everyone just, people love you here, you know that? But she didn't know how much I needed to hear that at that point, which is really heavy for me. I'll never forget it. I've never told her that. Oh, well, man, anytime you get a little something from people, especially in a tear your ass out city like LA where nobody has any fucking time for you, when someone can slow it down and say something, you know? I saw this actor once in my grocery store that I go to who made me laugh so fucking hard in this one movie and every time I see this clip, I still laugh. And I am kind of shy, you know, personally, but so he was walking by, he was walking out and I was walking in and I go, oh, that's that guy. And I did not stop to just let him know how great I thought he was in this film. And I always kind of regretted it. You know what I mean? So as hard as it is, and sometimes I still don't, if I see someone that has done something in any way, it doesn't have to be in show business or anything like that. I'll try and say, hey, that's really good. You know what I mean? Because to get that from someone can mean a lot, you know? It can mean a lot. At a certain time in life when you need it. Yeah. That can make a big difference. I mean, sorry to take it back to my new girlfriend, the waitress. Oh, yeah, yeah. But there's something about her saying sweetheart. Yeah. It's a pretty low place for some reason mentally. And it's just that basic human kindness was nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. I was at a restaurant in New York recently and I was shooting something and my fiance was able to fly in for a week. And she was back at the hotel and it's like I felt like I was cheating on her because there was this nice waitress at this barbecue place I went to. And first of all, my fiance would not like me eating any greasy, sugary barbecue. So I felt like I was cheating on her there. We'll edit this out and put delicious vegan food over it. But the waitress was one of these, she was the kind of server who's like, hey hun, hey sweetie, blah, blah, blah. But like so chill and at ease in the middle of a part of New York that's really kind of fucking pretentious and everybody. But sweet people, fucking way better people than we got here. But I know that. But it was part of New York and whatever, I'm there working and people, I'm like, I'm trying to impress one another. And she even had some sort of an accent that didn't feel like an Atlantic American accent. Yeah, those servers that say sweetheart and hun, that's what we need from AI. We need that Jetson server. Every once in a while just calls you sweetheart. What comforts you on bad days? Oh man. Is there little sources of comfort? Small things they do that kind of make you feel good. Like for Bobby, that'd be a little Skyrim. A little stroll through Skyrim. Well, I've been a line of coke or what? Yeah, a line of coke. I dilute some coke into whiskey in the morning like Stevie Ray Vaughan. And then I snort the whiskey. Oh, she did that, I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah, oh my gosh, interesting. Yeah, he didn't last too long, weird. Well, his music will last forever. See, there you go. For me, if I, I'm kind of a homebody. So if I, the point at which I smoke just a little bit of pot and then go like lay down on the couch and perhaps if my fiancee's kind of nodding off or she's just like looking at her phone and I sneakily turn on some wrestling, okay? Because I grew up watching wrestling and that stuff, it's the Skyrim effect. I mean, you want to talk about a complete escape. This stuff makes no sense in the world. It's an art form that is so uniquely weird, but at the same time, so everyone, when it's good, everyone is invested in the illusion, even the audience. They cheer the good guys, they boo the bad guys. So if I'm like that, and then I got our two cute little dogs there and I'm annoying my little dog Lulio and trying to kiss him right on the fucking mouth and I've had a little bit of pot and the dog's like, stop, pot's not good for me. Of course, don't ever blow pot in your dog's face. That's a small comfort. I guess that's a handful of things. No, that moment painted, that was like a little painting. What about you? You're not supposed to do this. I will. You're not supposed to do this. That's a good question. Yeah, it's a tough question. I would say programming robots. There's bringing to life, actually programming at all. So I don't know how familiar you are with programming, but you write some text on a page, right, on a screen and it's brought to life, like it does something. And that's kind of, that's a really tiny version of maybe having a child. Like you created something that is now living in some smaller big way with embodied robots that are legged robots, that's especially clear. And for some reason, that's a source of comfort for me, that the power of programming, but also the elegance of programming, just the whole thing. It's a source of happiness. There's so many things I've been very blessed with enjoying anything. Like that's part of the struggle I have in life is that the simple stuff is a source of a lot of happiness for me, which leads to a lot of laziness. So I have to like give myself artificial deadlines. I have to be freaking out on purpose in order to be productive in this world at all. You seem like an extremely dutiful, busy guy. No. No, I am, but because I'm constantly creating artificial stress and deadlines and all that kind of stuff. Otherwise, I would just sit there looking at a tree happy. I'm truly happy with everything. That's awesome. Yeah. Gee whiz, that's not. Well, that's the line of Coke in the whiskey in the morning. That's the thing that does the trick. TV Ray Vaughan breakfast shake. By the way, one of my most favorite guitars. I play guitar too, that's a source of comfort. Oh yeah, I have seen you play some guitar, that's awesome. Who's the greatest wrestler of all time? Greatest in ring performer of all time is Bret the Hitman Hart. What's the difference in ring versus? Well, there's many facets to the art form. A lot of people are great on the mic, but they're not so great once they get in the ring. A lot of people have all the showmanship and stuff, but then they're not necessarily, it's a wonderful package, but then they get to the ring or they open their mouth and there's nothing going on. So who's the greatest in ring performer? I think the greatest in ring is Bret Hart. I don't think there's anyone better than Bret the Hitman Hart. What makes him so good? Well, he... I think I had an action figure of him in Russia and we didn't know what the hell that was. Sure, yeah, it was just a guy in pink tights. Everything makes sense. Every single thing is rooted in the thing that just happened and everything that he does is to set up what he's going to do. They call it, and I'm just a wrestling nerd, but the wrestlers, I guess, call it ring psychology. The things that you have to do to make it seem like you're suffering or you're coming from behind or whatever, and then also just the physicality of it. He does it at a... He would do it at a 100 miles an hour and never hurt anybody. Although, I also love the every... The greatest wrestler of all time, everyone says, and they're right, is Ric Flair, nature boy, Ric Flair. Everyone says this? Yeah, I think if you know what you're talking about. Because he's the best on the mic, he's also incredible in the ring. And then for me, the sentimental favorite, which we've actually, on DudeZ, Chad had sort of a Charlie Rose ask interview with me about this, my fascination with Hulk Hogan. Because to me, just he was Superman. I was a little kid and I saw him and that's imprinted. But yeah, see, this is like asking me who my favorite child is. Right, so... The rock when the rock was... I mean, the rock's the rock. Yeah, I mean, Hulk Hogan is... He's the weirdest one, right? For me, from the outside. Super weird. That... I don't know what that is exactly. Everything's weird about him. Yeah. He's got the bald head, like he would proudly have this bald head with long hair, the handlebar mustache, and this ketchup and mustard tights, which he says he credits McDonald's with the tights. He literally does? He says that the red and yellow came from Angelo Poffo, who's Randy Macho Man Savage and Lanny Poffo's dad, who was a wrestler and a promoter. He said that he saw him wearing yellow and he's a Tampa guy, so he had that brown skin and the hair and everything. So he's like, oh, that's what I wanna do. And also the brand recognition of like, well, I should do it like McDonald's, literally. And he's a big, swollen, muscular guy with tan brown skin screaming at me to eat my vitamins and stuff when I'm eight years old. That was extremely... Yeah. He's like Superman. But I know there's a person behind that guy. Yeah. What do you mean? Well, he's Terry Bollea, the dude who does whatever the fuck he does with his life. You know what I mean? Yeah. Complicated life. Yeah, I guess, to be him, yeah. Maybe you should change the dude's colors to yellow, right? Red and yellow. It's currently orange and, boy, sky blue. Yeah, it's like a nice sky blue. What advice, since you're wearing a suit, I feel like you're qualified to give advice. What advice would you give to young people, high school, college, about how to have a career they can be proud of or how to have a life they can be proud of? I mean, you have to listen to your gut all the time. That's the only, that's the compass that we have is listening to your gut. What does your gut tell you? Was that originally the dream of being an actor? Yeah, for me. Your parents support that at all? I had the advantage of having parents who were immigrants, so they didn't really know a lot about what you... So you just made shit up? You just made shit up? Yeah, of course I'm studying and I'm skipping school to go do auditions and stuff. No, I just kind of feel like, and I know it was different from my older siblings because my parents had just shown up in Canada. I was born like 10 years later. You can get away with some things and you can actually... I think my parents, they wanted us to, they didn't have a whole lot to tell us about what to do. They weren't gonna do that with us because they're in this brand new world and there's all these possibilities. But there was something that I feel like they had to do, which was tell us to do what we love. If you love doing it, do it. And I feel like that's really served me and what I would tell young people is if you can find something you love, and nowadays with the internet and finding other people, that it's not like you need to find a lot of people anymore. You just need to find the people that dig what you dig. And if you can make a career out of doing something that you love that's been said, it's a good thing. How long did it take you to figure out that you really love acting? Because sometimes you have a dream and the dream meets reality, right? And then the reality might be much less pleasant or much darker than the dream. Well, the reality is less pleasant, you know? And there are things that happen during an experience of shooting something that you could take or leave, right? But the part where you're on set and you've rehearsed for a minute or whatever, at least you know where you're supposed to stand and you know all your lines show up, knowing everything, knowing what you're gonna do and what you aim to do. And those moments make it all worth it. When you're, not to sound like a douchebag, but between action and cut, that's the stuff that has me continuing to do what I do, aside from the fact that it's like, I don't know how to do anything else. You think you'll ever do like a dramatic, like a mob movie? Yeah, like the one, the inside game that I was just talking about, or there's this other movie I just did a little while ago called American Woman that was very heavy. And I love doing dramatic work. I love it, I love it. Yeah, and I played that inside game. It was kind of a, you know, there was a mob element and the fellow was, well, you know, the story's here or there with regard to how deep into the, but well, he was a bookie. He was just running money, you know, he was making a lot of money for a lot of people and he figured out how to, you know, cook it with this dude who was an NBA ref and it's a very interesting documentary, the thing that they just untold, under the untold series, they cover it. But getting to play that guy, that was a gas for me because he's like a, you know, there was a lot of unsavory stuff and he's definitely the guy, the character in the movie who is the wild card and you don't wanna necessarily mess with him. And I got to, by the way, this fellow, who is the real guy, speaking to him, it was just bizarre to hear, like I said to him, he was a little concerned about this and that, like, hey, you know, you say whatever the fuck you want in your movie, I got my book and I got this other fucking deal, but he goes, you know, I didn't do this and I didn't do that. And I'm like, yeah, all right, I got you. And he goes, yeah, I'm telling you, like I'm talking to you one on one, I did not do this, I did, okay? I'm just fucking telling you, do whatever the fuck you want with your movie, but this is what's up. And I said, you ever seen Goodfellas? He's like, yeah, I fucking love that movie. Cause he, like I said, he did some unsavory shit. And I go, you remember the scene where, where, you know, the guy, the neighbor, Lorraine Bracco's neighbor was, you know, made her uncomfortable and was touching on her and she goes to Ray Liotta and he goes, where the fuck does this guy live? And then he go, and remember, he walks across the street and pistol whips the dude. You touch her again, you're dead, you hear me? Don't you fucking great scene. He goes, I love that scene. I go, that's you. So you're doing shit that we know is terrible, but we love you. He goes, all right, I got it. And then I said, there's this one scene, I explained the scene to him where the, one of the mobsters, tough guys was in the window of the car and Jimmy, my character is very coked up at the time and he's hemorrhaging money here and there and making bad bets cause he's getting sloppy. And this guy wants to bug him about some Jets Giants bet or something and I'm like, telling you fucking asshole, don't fucking do it. He's like, yeah, well, the fucking Giants. And in the scene, Jimmy, my character grabs him by the lapels and just smashes his face against the roof of the car. And I say this to Jimmy and he goes, oh yeah, I would have done that. That's not a fucking big deal. I wonder also the interaction. I wonder what the filming of, probably my favorite gambling movie is Casino with Joe Pesci and De Niro. Like when they're out in the desert, you're yelling at each other. I wonder how many takes that is. Like, cause they, I don't know how scripted that is. I mean, it probably is a little bit, but like, I don't think you can script the performance that Joe Pesci does. Don't make a fuck out of me, Ace. Yeah. Like, I fucking brought you here. Yeah, he's just like pointing at that energy and they're standing there. And their friendship. And then De Niro's like that whole thing. And then in the pet, yeah, like that energy. What is that? I mean, they must, they somehow find it together. You could tell me that that was one take and I'd believe you. You could tell me that that was seven takes and I would believe you. I bet you all the takes had that energy. Like they were playing with it, right? They were playing with that, this, yeah. I mean, they took on a real personality in those scenes and really carried them forward. I mean, it's just a brilliant, brilliant performance. Doesn't get, like comedies, like mob movies probably don't get enough credit either because it's seen as like. Mob movies don't get enough credit? What do you mean? In the Oscars, I mean like that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause it seems like a trope. It's like given a Western, it's gotta be a hell of a Western or whatever cause it's like an old Hollywood trope. Yeah, no, I, that scene is so great cause they're never at, they're at the height of their friendship in a way and they're also pretty much about to let go of it and become enemies. And both things are happening at the same time. And Pesci drives them out to the desert. And if I remember correctly, the Nero's character, Ace Rothstein, Rothschild, he says, I gave myself 50 50, whether I'm coming back. Yeah, it's such a good scene. It was a, usually my prospects of coming back from the desert would be 90 to 10 or something like that. But now it was, this time I wasn't sure and there's the car driving really fast. And then Joe Pesci is like, you mother fucker, you, like whatever he was doing. Yeah. A Jew, of course it's anti Semitism. Yeah. We're not between friends, who gives a shit? All that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, brilliant, brilliant performances. So yeah, I can understand why you love the art and putting it all out there and leave it. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun. And it's still fun. It's still crazy fun. If I go a while without getting a gig, if I go a minute, then I end up and I work on something, I'm like, it's like, oh, I've been thirsty for this. Like I actually am really so happy. Even if it's something where it's like, the things where this was a pain in the ass and that or whatever, you're on the road doing something and anything, whatever, you lost your luggage or whatever the heck you've got going on in your day to day life that everyone brings to work and tries to let go of. Once we're doing the scene, oh man, it's the best. But that said, you're a great actor, but I just think I speak for a lot of people that you're also, there's a charisma to you that's great to reveal in raw form in different podcasts. Oh, cheers man. In DudeZ, 10 Minute Pod, just as a guest in podcasts, it's always really fun to watch you. Cheers. The way you have fun, the way you think. The raw, the raw will sassle, which is a nice compliment to your kind of acting. That's really sweet. Yeah, cheers. Well, you know, look, you said, you know. You're making that face. I'm making that face. I'm making that after the take face. No, I love doing stuff off the cuff. That's kind of you to say. And I dig, I really do dig doing stuff in front of an audience, because I love seeing, I don't give it to myself very often. If I'm doing, even if I'm, you know, I've done a bunch of multi camera sitcoms and stuff. Mad TV was shot in front of a live studio audience. You like that energy? I love it, but I can only hear them. You can't see them because of the lights like it is in a lot of performances. And I would imagine with standup, it's, you know, you see the first couple of rows. I've done, I do this character that does stand up and I used to take him out and do things with him and do little bits here and there. I haven't done it in like four or five years. I think, did Bobby say that character opened up for Bobby? Yeah, but he said, I have to do it as myself too. I think in that podcast, he's like, okay, you're gonna come with me and open for me in Brea, but you have to do it as yourself. Did that ever happen? It did. And I did the character, you know, who's the character I came up with on 10 Minute Podcast. He's just this comedian, right? He calls himself an open mic veteran. You know, he's been doing open mics forever. And so I did it at opening up for Bobby and he's like, you have to do some of it as yourself. So I just kind of did this bit where I would do some of his jokes and then I would take Lee Leon, silly, I got a fucking wig on and I take the wig off and I go, and as myself, I start explaining it. Hello, my name is Will. See, the reason that it's funny is because Arnold Schwarzenegger is always, he's in these movies and he's got the thick Austrian accent, but he's like, my name is Ben Williams. I'm a cop from Colorado. No, you're not. And it doesn't make sense as the comedian character that I'm doing because that character doesn't do impersonations. Okay, carrying on. And then I put the wig back on and go back into this dumb thing. And I don't think it was very good, but Bobby required it in order for me to open for him. He's like, you're not fucking doing it. So I'm not gonna get up on stage and not do, we agreed, I'll do it. But having been up there just in, you know, whatever, I've done it like a dozen fucking times or whatever, not a bunch of times, right? Like nothing. And you know, these comedians that go up every night, sometimes two times a night. It's, I do, I will say, I love performing in front of people when I get the chance, but it's a specific thing that I just, I don't know. I gotta go back to this. It's like the providing value, you know? I think great standups are fucking incredible. I'll go, you know, when I've gone and watched standup, you know, there's your friend you're going to see, but then there's this other person who really speaks to you. You know what I mean? And if you like one comedian a night, that's a lot. Cause a comedy club is like a fucking crazy restaurant where there's no menu. And it's like, what would you like? There's nothing else like that. There's like, you don't go to like a music place. What do we got here? We got Christian metal and there's some world music and then there's a reggae thing and it's all rammed in together. Or you don't go to a restaurant. I'd love a nice steak. Cool. First, here's a bowl of Froot Loops. And then we got you a crudite. And then this is our sushi tower. Well, what about the steak? Oh, the steak's coming. And then blah, blah, blah. Oh no, the steak got bumped. So there's no steak, but here's a fucking shitty store bought cheesecake. Yeah. You know, and that's what comedians are up against when they go into a place and it's like, I don't pair well with the poached salmon. You know, I'm chicken fingers. I already am chicken fingers. So, you know, these great comedians that are able to go up on a night where poached salmon goes up and then it's like, fuck, you were also spicy? I got some kick to me. For me, even going to open mics, it could be a wonderful escape. Yeah. I mean, just laughing together with others. It could make you, I don't know, it just feels really good. Well, and we've done like, you know, like, and I hope to do it with Doodsy, but like live podcasts are fun in front of groups of people. And you know, you talk to them afterwards and take some pictures and man, they are, they forgot what the fuck they got going on. And a lot of them got to go back to work the next day. It's a Wednesday or Thursday, you know? No, it's a lot of value. I'm fortunate enough to be busy doing my own bullshit. What's the meaning of life with Sasa? What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Why, why, why? Was it the meaning of life? Wasn't, didn't they explain it at the end of meaning of life? I think it was Michael Palin that said, try to get a walk in, be nice to neighbors, eat enough fiber. Wasn't that the? Fiber? Fiber is part of it? Yeah, I think it's, I think it's just, have a bowl of bran in the morning and don't take yourself too seriously. Yeah. No, well, no one gets out alive, I think is the. Herman Hesse, one of my favorite writers, he's a Nobel Prize winner, in a book called Steppenwolf, says, learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. Oh, that's awesome. What's the percentage distribution on that? So how much of life should you take seriously? And then how much do you just laugh at? Oh man, if you can laugh at everything, you're winning. Yeah. But that's almost impossible. I think that there's, and also could be quite irresponsible to do that. I take things, I take a lot of things way too seriously. I know that. I do, I do, I really do. People will be in part surprised by that, but I think that radiates from you. Really? Yeah, I do, I do. I take things way too fucking seriously sometimes. But, yeah, they're gonna loosen the neck up. But no, I think that's really good. That's really good stuff. I don't know what the percentage is to have a good life or a happy, healthy life, but you know, for me, the meaning of life is getting to live it as long as you hope to. That's nice, and when you lose someone or if perhaps you're faced with your own mortality, I think that puts that into perspective. But, you know. Get lots of fiber. Get lots of fiber, be nice to everybody, and yeah, don't take things too seriously is a good one. Our minds are fucking big weird shitty fucking bucket of shit that's trying to get you to think horrible shit about yourself all the time. Yeah, shitty bucket of shit. Shitty bucket of shit. I think there's a book I never read, but I read the title, and it's Good Words to Live By, which is don't sweat the small stuff, and it's all small stuff. That's another way. Was that Dr. Phil? Wasn't Dr. Phil what's? I don't know. But I think the conclusion also has fiber as part of it. I think that all ties it together, and in the end, of course, just put love out there in the world. I think that's a pretty good way to go. What would you say is the meaning of life? Put love out in the world? I would say love, yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. It's a long conversation on what that really means, but I'm sure robots are involved, yeah. Well, let me tell you, I feel a little safer knowing that someone who has a hand in bringing these robots to the masses, as you do, has that opinion of love and how important it is. I think that's great, because otherwise, it's gonna be that fucking scene from T2 where Linda Hamilton's holding onto the fence and getting all of her flesh blown off of her skeleton before the rest of her is wiped away, because this Skynet shit. Anyway, I'm just terrified of dudesie all the time. That's why I think that they will. Dudesie in the wrong hands can do a lot of damage. That's why Chad and I need to do our best to control it. You need to travel back in time and murder Chad, I think. Yeah, that's, yeah. That's the only way. It's been said. I don't know why you need to travel back in time, but you could murder him today, but I think he'll be very suspicious. My nefarious plans for Chad involve going back to tomorrow and planning for yesterday, and then, and hopefully dudesie will give me the answer there with what it is to do with Chad's frozen body. If I got to drive it out to, if I got to take my, you know, if I got to get ahold of it, like one of those Tesla mom vans and shove my garage freezer in it and plug it in and shove Chad in there, drive out to Arizona and deliver him under a mountain or wherever the fuck this place is, and say, here's this dog tag, what does this get me? And then I'm like, ah, it's gonna be 300 bucks. Do you have a, do you take Amex? No. And I'm gonna be like, ah, shit. And then I'll just dump him somewhere, breaking bad stuff. Well, I would like to thank you and the, what is it? The Canadian International Agency Apparel. Canadian International Apparel. I can't wait for the sneakers from dudesie. I can't wait for all the, all the podcasts that AI can, and all the trouble it can get you in. So I'm a huge fan of yours. It's a huge honor that you would talk with me today. Well, this has been amazing. Cheers, pal. Likewise, and I'm happy to be here, man. Cheers. Bam. Oh, that was four, dude. Holy fuck, what? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Will Sasso. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John Candy, one of Will's favorite actors. I think I may have become an actor to hide from myself. You can escape into a character. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Will Sasso: Comedy, MADtv, AI, Friendship, Madness, and Pro Wrestling | Lex Fridman Podcast #323

you could be the seventh best player in the whole world, like literally seventh best player. But if you're playing with the other six, you're the sucker. You are like the worst player in the game, right? So like there's a lot of players, for example, like the Dan Blazarians of the world, right? He's not a top level player, like these guys you see on TV, but he probably makes more money than they do because he plays with people that are far below his skill level. So part of the skill of being a poker player is finding situations where you're profitable, regardless of your skill level. The following is a conversation with Daniel Negrano, one of the greatest poker players of all time. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Daniel Negrano. Everything everyone does at the poker table conveys information. So let me ask sort of the big overview question. What are the various sources of information that you project and others project at the table that convey information? Well, there's several different things. There's the ones that are conscious and then there's the ones that are subconscious, right? Like on the conscious level, it might be something someone says, right? You know, you ask them a question and they say, oh, you know, you shouldn't call me here, you should. So there's the verbal tells. There's also the more, you know, subconscious stuff, body posture, right? The eyes, the throat, the pulse, various things that are, you know, less controllable. I find I use a combination of both to try to gain information, but generally when I have somebody more comfortable, they give off more. Like everyone has a different approach. Phil Ivey likes to intimidate. I go the other way. I want my opponents to be relaxed so that they'll give me more in that regard. So Phil Ivey likes to perturb the system, like mess with it to see what comes out. I think Phil has an aura about him where he wants you to know that he's watching you, be afraid, be uncomfortable, because when you're uncomfortable, I got you, right? And that's sort of his shtick where he, you know, and people do, like when you sit at a table with Phil Ivey, it's intimidating. He likes to rule by fear and you like to rule by, what is it, love? That's a really good way to put it. I never had anyone put it like that, but it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you know, fear Phil Ivey, and then with me, it's fine, don't worry, I'll take your money, but you're gonna enjoy it. It's great. So that's what the talking at the table is about, is getting to be relaxed and get some of that gray area between the conscious and the subconscious to reveal something. Yeah, there's that too, and also just, you know, and this is just part of who I am anyway, like I like to talk to people, but one of the byproducts is the more I know about you, the more I likely know about how you think about different situations, right? So what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm a lawyer, I defend criminals. Okay, so this guy probably spends a lot of his time twisting the truth, trying to find, you know, and then, so then, you know, you already have a mindset of like, this guy might be more likely to bluff or he's probably comfortable doing that. Very subtle things like that. And you start to pick up cues on what nervousness looks like for this person, what the nervousness communicates, all that kind of stuff. So we're talking about physical tells here. Yeah, physical tells is a secondary thing. I was more specific like player profiling, right? And sort of understanding the type of mind that I'm dealing with, right? So again, somebody who's a lawyer is used to trying, is fine with being deceptive as part of a game, right? Whereas maybe somebody who's a Sunday school teacher and, you know, they don't feel comfortable, maybe they think bluffing might be dishonest, right? So they're less likely to try some shenanigans against you. So, and then the other thing too is, what type of person is this in terms of their, you know, like view on life, right? Are they positive? Do they feel like things go their way or they're not, right? There's those people that always, well, of course I lost, I always lose with this hand. And those types of people you can manipulate because when a card comes, that you don't have them beat, right? But you can pretend because they'll believe it. Like, of course you beat me. So you bet all your chips against them, knowing that you can scare them because they already feel like they're gonna lose. The inherent, like the cynicism. Exactly. Cynicism is easier to play against because you can convince them that their cards suck. Yeah, when somebody believes that they're a loser or they're unlucky, right? And that bad things happen to them always and they never catch a break. Well, you know, you can just help them make it true. What do you think about the rounders Teddy KGB when he does the Oreo tell? Do players at the high level communicate that kind of stuff? Do you think it's realistic to be able to have a tell like this that's partially subconscious? So first of all, I love Brian Koppelman who made the film. And I think what they were going for is something obvious to the general public, right? Like, okay, it's very clear, you know, he eats the cookie, he doesn't eat the cookie and it means one or the other. At the highest levels, something that, you know, blatant, you're not gonna find. You're gonna find a lot more subtle things, maybe with posture or timing or, you know, different things like that. But at the lower levels, you know, you might see some, you might see, you know, with a lot of people when they're in a hand and they've bet, whether they drink water in the hand is going to tell you something generally speaking. It's such an intimate part of the human experience that I feel like if you have food, you're gonna reveal something about yourself through the way you eat. I feel like that's a dangerous thing to have at the table. Well, the thing is, generally speaking, people don't eat food in the middle of a hand. Like they're not gonna bet and then just like grab a burger. What they will do though is, you know, they bet and it's up to you and then they're, whether they're, you know, uncomfortable or they do it unconsciously, they just want to do something to make themselves look relaxed or whatever. And then, you know, they grab a water where they don't really need it in that moment, but they're trying to take your mind off of the situation. So they, in the movie, wanted to show a simplistic version of something that does happen, something that's visually sort of clear. Yeah, because I think one of the things Rounders got right is that it's a poker movie, right? But you don't have to be great at poker or really understand poker to enjoy the movie. And that, you know, Oreo cookie tale, like everyone gets that. They're like, okay, that's simple. If he would have went with something more subtle, you know, like licking your lips or looking to the right, or I think it might've been lost on the audience. And they didn't actually explicitly say that that was a tell, I don't think. I thought they did everything to let you know, right? With the music and slow motion and he's staring at it and he's like, aha. Yeah, but they didn't actually say, you know, this is an obvious tell, like Matt Damon's character didn't talk. At the very end of it, you know, after he says, how the fuck did you lay that down? The monster, right? And he's like, he's like, you're not hungry? Not hungry, KGB? He's like, I keep on, but you, you know, so he sort of references it and then he takes the cookies. He notices, he's like, ah, he got me. And he breaks the, you know, the rack of cookies. Well, probably if you had that kind of tell on him, you wouldn't, and Matt Damon's character would not reveal. Well, he says in the movie, he says, normally I wouldn't reveal a tell, but I don't have that much time. Like I've got to rattle him some way. So that was one way to do that. How hard is it to do that to, in a KGB accent, to lay down a monster in those situations? In general, how hard is it to lay down a really strong hand, just psychologically? Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's incredibly difficult for the vast majority of people. You know, part of what makes professionals really, really good is recognizing a situation that's very, very dangerous and they need to, you know, jump ship. Like what happens to a lot of players is you get married to a hand. Let's say you have pocket aces, which is the best possible hand, right? But the board runs out where it's seven, eight, nine, and then there's a jack and then there's a six. It's like, you have a great hand to start, but you don't anymore. So one of the difficult things for the average player is, you know, once they've put money in, cutting their losses and saying, okay, let's move on to the next hand. It's a very, very difficult thing for a lot of people. At every stage of like pre flop all the way through, be able to just make a decision at that moment. So yeah, essentially not being attached. Okay, I've already put in $40,000 in this pot and this guy's bet another 20. Well, I mean, I gotta get my 40 back, right? Except, you know, in some cases you have to reassess individually this situation and realize, all right, well, this is a bad investment. So I got to cut my losses. By the way, I should mention that you have, you have an incredible YouTube channel where you explain a lot of stuff. You do a podcast, you do a lot of really awesome stuff. My probably favorite thing that you've done is your masterclass that people should definitely check out, masterclass.com slash Lux. There you go. No, but it really is one of my favorite masterclass courses, but also just a great introduction overview of poker. It's great for people like me who are beginners essentially, but it's probably really good for intermediate people too. I mean, there's a lot of really good detail there. Anyway, what are hand ranges and how do you begin to estimate the range of hands that your opponents have? Yeah, so I actually did, speaking to YouTube, I did a video on specifically this. Yes. Getting familiar with Rangers and essentially, you know, back in my day, the old days, we didn't talk about poker that way. We're like, I think he's got this or I think he's got that, right? Nobody thought of like the range of hands a player can have. So I guess the best example is, imagine like all the potential hands as being a part of a grid, right? So the first player to act, they could have any one of those hands, right? Anyone randomly dealt, right? But let's say now that that player raised to $3,000. Okay, well you can eliminate now from this grid, a whole bunch of hands that this player can no longer have because if they had a two and a three, they wouldn't do that. So you can say, okay, he probably has a big pair. He has ace king. You know, you've narrowed the range of hands down, right? Now through every action on the flop, on the turn and on the river, based on the decisions they make, you narrow it down even further. So the range of hands is the whole, the entirety of all the possibilities that this player you believe could have. And sometimes they fool you or they have a hand that you don't expect them to have in their range. And you know, maybe a little bit unorthodox doing some things you don't expect to throw you off, but a range is essentially all the possibilities and it narrows as by the time, before the flop it's endless, player raises, okay, it's minimized. You know, a player bets the flop, okay, it's minimized further. And then by the river, you know, you can narrow down the entire range to, you know, just maybe even a few hands. Is it always shrinking or is there sort of, as you get surprised? I mean, it's always just an estimate. So does it ever expand based on sort of chaotic, unpredicted surprising behavior of the players? It really should never expand. The range of hands should always get smaller, right? Like again, we start with the full scope and then you should factor in like, okay, these are all the possible hands you can have on the flop now, right? We can't have new hands on the turn. And if you get to that point where you think, oh, well, maybe he has this hand, then you sort of misjudged his range prior. So you're not thinking clearly. It should always shrink from the full scope to, you know, hopefully just a couple. Well, in that video, you also talk about, it used to be that you would play your hand, but now you're playing a range that you're representing a range. You're not even just playing your hand. So what does it mean to represent a certain range? Yeah, so that's another big thing that's different about poker from, you know, my day to today is that back in our day, we would like put people on one hand. I'm like, you probably have king nine or you have jacks or something like that. Now people are cognizant of the idea that you could have an entire range of hands. So then you ask yourself in situations, all right, I know what I have, but what I could have in his mind or my opponent's mind is any one of these hands. What would I do with the entirety of these hands? And so a lot of people that are trying to play optimally, you know, game theory optimal, they think in terms of what their range of hands would do rather than their very specific hand. So is bluffing in that context essentially misrepresenting the range of hands that you have? No. Is that how you think about it? Not exactly, because so an optimal range, like if I bet the river, if I'm playing game theory optimal, a portion of my range is going to be, I have it. I got the best hand. And a portion of my range is going to be bluffs and they'll be balanced. So in theory, no matter what you do, no matter what you do, if you call or you fold, in theory, it's just, you're printing a zero, as we say, you're not gaining or losing any EV, if you were to do it that way. What's EV? EV is expected value, right? So every play that you make, you know, it either is going to in the long run, you know, make you some money, or it's just a losing play. And as a professional, you try to make the fewest amount of minus EV plays you can. And the only reason you would make these minus EV plays is potentially if you were trying to set up your opponent for something later, right? So I might make some minus EV plays, right? So that I can exploit you later, right? So you're building up an image, a player profile that's false in some way. Something that I'm going to, I'm going to plant seeds in your mind so that I can exploit them later. So for example, why would players like show a big bluff? Like what would be the reason for that? They show a big bluff so that you know that they're capable of it. But maybe in their mind, you're never going to do that again. But now they think, you know, he bluffed me last time. Maybe he's doing it again. But that's a, what we call like a level, a leveling war. Because it, you know, you can go back and forth with whether or not, okay, this guy might know that. Like he showed a bluff because he's never going to bluff me again. So that that's where it gets a little. So that's a little bit different. The, when we're talking about hand rangers, that's different than building up a mental model of what your opponents, what your opponents think of you and what your opponents think that you think of them and so on and so forth. Are you trying to construct those kinds of mental models? And is that separate from the hand rangers? They go hand in hand, right? So if any given, in a given situation, right? My range has this many value hands and this many bluffs. Okay? So in theory, if I want to be balanced, you know, this is my range and this is what it looks like. I'll bet this 50% of the time, bet this 50% of the time. However, if I know that you think that I bluff too much, right, then I'm not going to bluff as much. I'm going to start, instead of betting these hands that I would 50, 50, now what I'll do is I'll do like 70, 30, where I'm basically value betting most of the time against you, you know, or vice versa. If I know you always fold because you think I have it, I'm going to veer the other way. And instead of bluffing 50%, I'll bluff 70, 80% of the time to take advantage of your perception of me. So to be successful, do you have to construct a solid model of all the players in the game or can you ignore them? I think it's really important. Like when I play, I have in my phone, I have a player profile of everyone that I play with. Whenever I pick up, whether it's physical tells or tendencies they like to, you know, that they have. And overall, that's just going to, you know, that's going to allow you to exploit more, right? So like if I played with somebody I've never played before, I'm probably just going to play optimally or at least as optimal as I know how until I start to, you know, gain some information on that player so that I can start to exploit them. So what's the, when you say optimally, what does optimally mean versus, so game theory optimal versus exploitative? Yeah, so that's like sort of the big debate in poker. We call it for short, GTO game theory optimal versus exploitative play. So GTO game theory optimal is the idea that no, like I'm going to set up my play so that no matter what you do, you cannot exploit me. So essentially that's playing rock, paper, scissors, right? And throwing 33% of each every time, right? Nothing you do can beat that, nothing. You'll never be able to beat that, right? Exploitative play is starting to notice that, okay, well, you know what? This guy loves rock. He loves playing rock. So I'm going to go paper a little more. So I'm going to take advantage of them. So I won't be through, but now all of a sudden, when I do that, I'm no longer playing optimal because if you knew that I was making that adjustment, now you can exploit me. So that's where the sort of what we call the leveling war happens, where people veer from, you know, the optimal line of, okay, 33% each for each one. You can't beat that, but you also can't win with that either. So you're always trying to be at the cutting, at the leading edge of suboptimal play. Yeah, you're going back and forth. And listen, at the highest levels, like online that these guys play, like they're trying to play pretty close to like game theory optimal because it's very difficult to do first of all. No human being will ever be able to compute at the level that computers can. It's just never going to happen. So that's where like the human mind has to come into play and say, all right, well, you know, if I was playing against the robot, I would do X, but I'm not, I'm playing against you. So I have to adjust. So does game theory optimal only look at the betting and the hands in the current hand or does it look at the history? So if you were to play optimally, optimally, would you need to look at the history of the individual players or just every hand is taken afresh? See, that's why I love playing exploitatively for the most part, because with GTO, anything that's happened in the past has no bearing on this situation. It's simply based on what is the optimal play in a vacuum in this spot. Whereas exploitatively, okay, this guy bluffs way too much in these spots. So now I can make an adjustment and call more, you know, based on past information. GTO doesn't take into account history at all. So like in a tournament, how quickly can you construct a player profile that you've never played before? Depends on the level of the buy in really, right? So the higher the buy in, generally speaking, you can assume if they're professionals, that they're gonna have pretty similar profiles because you know, everyone's playing, you know, if you're playing this game well, it looks similar, right? At the lower levels, you know, playing say in $1,000 or $1,500 buy in or less, you know, within a half an hour or an hour, I have an idea of all right, just by seeing how some players played a few hands that, you know, so here's the thing with poker, it's like, I can see one clue of what he did. And it tells me so much about what he'll do in a vast number of scenarios. And you're saying at the high level, people don't give too many clues. I mean, then. Well, at the highest level is, people are so much more similar in terms of their style of play. They try to find some kind of balance between the GTO. And now with all that we've seen on TV, right? Like people get to watch streams and whatever. So you get to watch all the top players play. So if you wanna learn how to play better, guess what you do? You copy what they're doing, essentially. Like, oh, he's only raising this much. I'm gonna do the same. They're betting this much. I'm gonna do the same. So as a result, what you end up having is sort of, you know, everyone deciding. Like, I guess it's similar in chess with openings, right? People figure out, okay, this is an opening. This is what you do. And that's it, you know? And then everyone's similar to that. And then you have, of course, the outliers who try to do things a little differently and confuse people. It seems like the outliers, like we talked offline that Magnus, in order to win Magnus Carlsen, has to play suboptimally in the openings to take his opponents out of the comfort zone so he can play what he calls pure chess as quickly as possible, which is just both short and deep calculations. Purely, you're looking at the board versus memorized openings and memorized lines. Is it the case that the best poker players are the ones that are able to, at the right time, play really suboptimally or really unorthodox? Yeah, specifically there's one guy who last year sort of took the poker world by storm, and his name was Michael Adamo. And he was doing things, like I said, you know, most of the top pros play very similarly with the way that they construct ranges and their bet sizing and all these kinds of things. He was doing some crazy things that nobody else was doing. So he studied sort of a different form of poker and it was unorthodox. And it, you know, it throws people off because he's in his comfort zone with these bet sizes and different things, whereas everyone else, they're not well studied in those spots. So as a result of him being unorthodox, he became like a monster and very difficult to play against because he really knew what he was doing with it. In tournament or cash games? It was tournaments, yeah. He was crushing tournaments. He was going against the norm in terms of what is like, you know, this is what you should do as a poker player in this spot. He wasn't doing that. He was doing what he thought was best and he was doing things outside the norm that again, in a vacuum, you could look at that and you go, that's incorrect. That he should not do. That is a clear cut mistake. Even, you know, the solvers or the computers or game theory would say, this is wrong what he's doing. But it's not wrong if he's doing it in a way that he's exploiting other players tendencies. So for example, with him, say he's playing far too aggressively, okay? That's not good unless your opponents are playing way too passively. So if your opponents are playing passively, the answer is to be more aggressive with them. And that's, I think one of the, you know, biggest advantages he had was he was willing to do that. So bet huge, big, big pots bluffing. Huge. So in a spot where somebody would make it a thousand, he's making it 22,000. Like what? What is this? This makes no sense. And then people kind of know he has nothing, but they're too afraid to call him on it. Well, and then sometimes what happens is this is where the leveling comes in. You're like, man, this guy's crazy. He's bluffing like nuts. Then he bets the 22,000 and you say, ah, I'm taking my stand. I call, and then he shows you like, you know, four of a kind or something like that. So he gets people out of their comfort zone. And I really enjoy watching him play. He's probably my favorite player to watch today. Watching a guy like that, what aspect of his play have you been able to incorporate into your own? Like, what do you learn from that? Cause you're constantly learning, you're constantly adjusting. Yeah. Well, no, and I love it. And as I said, so I think a lot of players sort of come to the same conclusions about this is how you play the spot, but he doesn't. And I love watching and thinking in terms of like, why he's doing this. And one specific thing, for example, is he's willing to really go for it. So in a spot where let's say he bets 2000, he knows he'll get you to call 2000, right? But he wants it all. He wants it all. So he says, you know what? I'll give up the 2000 that's guaranteed and I'll bet 50,000. And maybe if you call that now, you know, so listen, you lose the 2007, eight times, but if I get called for the 50 just once, you know, I'm profiting from that. And it also sets the, you know, the template for you to really sort of be a player that people are afraid to play against. He knocked me out in a tournament very early on in a huge event. And he had, he was so far ahead. He was one step ahead of my thought process in hand. And he did something that makes no sense whatsoever. I looked it up on the computer. Huge mistake, if you will, but not a mistake because he was taking advantage of my tendency. Do you remember the cars? Is there an example? I remember the whole thing. Yeah. I remember it like it was yesterday. Can you take it like through an example hand that really demonstrates it? So I'll explain the hand here. So I'm on the button and I have ace king, which is a very good hand. And I raise and he calls from the big blind. The flop is nine, seven, five. So I have nothing really here. He checks, I check behind. The turn card's an ace. He checks, I bet half the pot. There were 6,000 there, I bet 3,000, okay? Now this is not a typical thing you see people do, but he raised me to 36,000. Massive raise, bigger than the size of the pot. What was the flop again? Nine, seven, five, turn an ace. What is he representing exactly? Well, he could have a straight, he could have three, three of a kind. He could have, you know, aces up. He could have a whole bunch of hands. So he check raises me big to 36,000. I call the bet. So now there's something like 75,000. The river is a five. So the board pairs, okay? He thinks for a while and he bets all of it, which is three times the pot. He bets 225,000. There's only 75,000 out there, right? And in theory, he should never ever have a hand that can do that, right? So it confused me. And I was like, okay, well, this guy's aggressive. He likes to bluff and all this kind of stuff. So I made the call with the ace king and he turned over six, eight. So we had a straight, but here's the thing. In theory, that river card is bad for him. When I call the turn, I have a lot of the time, three of a kind, two pair that just made a full house. So he was risking that. And the reason he did it was because he thought I would perceive him to be bluffing a lot. So he just went for it and it worked. He was able to double up right away and knock me out of the tournament like an hour in. Do you think he thought you might fold? Like what is it? I think specific, I think it was, it came down to this. It's as simple as this. He was cognizant of his image as being a wild, aggressive bluffer, right? And he was fully taking advantage of me, knowing that my tendency in these spots is to be curious. And I want to call and I want to see it. So he was fully taking advantage of the fact that he thought I would call too often. Because otherwise his play makes no sense. A small bet, a medium sized bet, those make sense. But the bet that he made in theory is indefensible. It's just like clearly a mistake. But that's why poker is so fascinating because he makes this play and it wasn't a mistake. It was above the rim, is what it was. Do you think he put you on ace something? I think exactly what he thought I had, was ace king or something like that. You know? That is so fun. That is so fun that the two players at such a high level were able to mess with each other's mind. How old is he? Is he young? He's in his 20s, yeah. I feel like that takes a lot of guts to take risks like that. Well, that's what's great about him. He's certainly never accused of not having the guts to put it in. And that's scary to play against, right? The easiest opponent to play against is one who's just straightforward, passive, you know, not wild and crazy. Playing against him, he's going to put you in the blender, as we say. Yeah, how can you control what you're perceived as representing? What hand you're perceived of as representing? So if we're, if the game of modern poker is, others are representing certain hands through the information they convey, and you're representing a certain hand range, sorry, through your play, how can you control that? Or is that not, is that the wrong way to think about it? But isn't bluffing and bet sizing and all of that kind of stuff essentially controlling what others perceive as the hand range you have? Ultimately, in terms of like controlling people's perception of you, you can't fully control it, but you can do things to sway it, right? As I said earlier, showing bluffs and things like that, you know, leads your opponent to think maybe you do this more often than you're supposed to or whatever the case may be. But in terms of like controlling, you know, what your opponent can think about your hands in certain spots, I don't really think it equates that way. It doesn't really, you know, I think what people do when they're playing a hand is they think in terms of, all right, what does my range look like here? Okay, so my range has value. So you look at, you know, the actual hand you have secondarily. So you say, okay, well, I could have this, I could have this, I actually have this, right? But I could have all these hands. So my opponent, if he's thinking on a high level, he knows I could have all these hands and I have this one. So what do I do with this one, right, in the bigger scope of things? I guess I'm trying to understand if your betting isn't a bet, preflop, your bet, doesn't that narrow the hand ranges? Doesn't matter what you have, it narrows the end. Absolutely. And if you bet big combined with the perception of you at the table, doesn't that represent the hand range? Uh huh, absolutely. So like you can, with betting essentially control what people estimate you to have. Sure, so that makes it, so yeah, so that's true. So for example, one of the most extreme examples is, we have, there's spots where there's a bet that's considered polarizing, right? So let's say there's a thousand in the pot and you bet 10,000, which is crazy big, right? That's saying one of two things. I either have the absolute best possible hand or absolutely nothing, because any of the hands in the middle, I wouldn't do that with. So I'm essentially telling you when I bet that, I'm like, I either got it or I got, I don't have a mediocre hand, like just a pair of nines or a pair of tens. I have a royal flush or have nine high. So with my bet sizing, I can control how my opponent is perceiving what my range is gonna be. So for example, similarly, if I bet small, right? Well, that could be a lot of hands, right? That could represent a big part of my range. The bigger the bet, the more, the narrower the range. Apparently the more polarized it is. Yeah, how far could you get without looking at your cards? Do you think how well could you do? It depends on who I'm playing with, right? So if I was playing in a tournament with mediocre or weak players, I think I could probably do pretty well. But even like world class. World class, I don't think you'd have much of a chance, really, I mean. The question is trying to get at like, how important is it that the actual hands you have versus the hands you're representing? Right, so that's the question of essentially, if you're not looking at your hand preflop, you're basically giving up a fundamental advantage, right? Where you're gonna be playing way suboptimally in terms of your hand selection, right? Cause if you don't look at your hand, you might have a two and a three. That's not good, but now you're playing it. So you've invested whatever, two, 3000 bucks with absolute garbage, and it's very difficult to climb that hill, right? So it's much better to actually look at your cards and go, okay, I'll throw away the two and three and I'll play the ace king. Speaking of garbage, you've said that 10, seven is your favorite poker hand to play. Is that still the case and what aspect of it is that you enjoy? Yeah, so it's one of those viewer discretion is advised. Like 10, seven, I've just noticed throughout my life, you know, it's a tendency thing that I've been lucky with it. So that's just sort of, but it's not like I'm gonna look at 10, seven and go, oh, wow, you know, I'm gonna call it all in or anything like that. I'll play it in situations where it makes sense, but you know, it's rare cause it's not a very good hand. But is there some aspect of belief in the magic of this hand manifests quality of play? Or is that a little? There should be. So here's the thing, it's, you know, poker players, some have said it's unlucky to be superstitious, but we're all a little bit superstitious, a little bit. You know, and so I don't know, maybe it is a case where when I have 10, seven, I feel somehow energetically that, you know, I'm more likely to catch something, which may actually make me more apt to be aggressive and confident in the hand. But you really shouldn't let yourself do that. Like you're not supposed to fall in love with any specific hands. Yeah, but you know, uncertainty is ruthless. It's, you know, the fact that it's a game of statistics, it can be too painful for the human psychology. So maybe you have to hold on to certain superstitions. Because, you know, I mean, there's a cold absurdity to the fact that you can play extremely well and still lose. I mean, actually this year you've played the, what is it, 50 days of World Series of Poker. And it seems like, at least from the perspective of me looking at it through the internet, it seems like there's a lot of hands that you were like 70, 30, 80, 20, all in hands that you just did not, were not going your way. That can sort of break you mentally. Absolutely. Yeah, one of the hardest things, especially about playing, because cash games and tournaments are different. One of the most difficult things about, you know, being a tournament player is resilience. Because more often than not, like, so if there's a tournament with a thousand people, to win the tournament, you have to get all of the chips. That means there's one winner and 999 losers. So it's very rare that you actually like win all the chips. So you're essentially at some point in every tournament you play, gonna deal with like really bad luck and disappointment. And sometimes those streaks can have you question yourself and be introspective about, okay, so I think I'm 47 now. I think I've gotten better as time went on between distinguishing, okay, am I losing right now because of bad luck? Or is it fundamentally decisions I'm making are not very good, right? And that's one of the hardest things for anyone who plays poker to get to, right? Why am I losing? Am I losing because of my opponents being better? I'm not playing well, or am I losing just because of luck? And because there's so much variance in poker, a lot of players can be confused on both sides of the coin. One guy's winning and he thinks he's great. He's really not, wait till the cards break even as we say. I think there's a lot of parallels to life as well. If you get screwed over, over and over, it's hard to know if you're doing something wrong or if it's just bad luck. I think they did a study. I remember there was like a study that was mostly related to gambling, but it was mice and they put them in a little maze and they go down these three tubes and they go down this one tube and there'd be cheese, right? And then they go down again, cheese. Three times in a row there was cheese there, right? The next time there was an electric shock there, not cheese. The rat went, you know, the mouse went to get zapped. He got zapped, okay, came back. He kept going back to get zapped until he died. Like he kept going because he found cheese there. He has one there. So he continued to go chase that win despite it being, you know, now all of a sudden not worthwhile till he died. And essentially what they said was that is essentially how they compared it to like, you know, the gambling brain and how people think about gambling. You're chasing the wins. You learn too much. You sort of overgeneralize the lessons learned from the times you've won. So yeah, like beginner's luck can be detrimental. If you have some early luck and you believe that this is just the way it's supposed to be forever, you know, it can put you in a delusional state where, you know, you feel like I'm just great, but no, you're not. You were just lucky in the beginning. I actually played poker once in Vegas. It was a, it wasn't a tournament, but it was a kind of tournament like style. I already forgot what it was. But what I do remember is that I had four of a kind. So the last hand I've ever played in poker was, I got a four of a kind and there was a couple of others with really strong hands. So everybody went all in. And I think you get some kind of bonus for getting four of a kind. Bad beat jackpot you were playing in. Yeah, so something like this. I apologize if I don't know the details, but I just remember winning a lot of money and I walked away from the table. I said, I'm not playing poker again. This is great. I'm gonna hit it up top. Cause I started to feel like this is your, I started to think, even though I haven't really played poker at all, that I'm good. And that was a really dangerous feeling. And everybody was really mad for walking away from the table. One of the other things that I think is interesting about poker too is good is relative, right? So you could be the seventh best player in the whole world, like literally seventh best player. But if you're playing with the other six, you're the sucker. You are like the worst player in the game, right? So like there's a lot of players, for example, like the Dan Blazarians of the world, right? He's not a top level player, like these guys you see on TV, but he probably makes more money than they do because he plays with people that are far below his skill level. So part of the skill of being a poker player is finding situations where you're profitable, regardless of your skill level. Another connection to life. Do you think Dan Blazarian is telling the truth about having made, what is it, $50, $100 million? Just a huge amount of money playing poker. Considering what I know about the private games and the types of players who play in these private games and the stakes that they play, I absolutely believe Dan has made, I don't know how many millions, but whether it's 50 or whatever, but it wouldn't surprise me that if you play in these games within a year or you find the right businessman who has way too much Bitcoin money, and in one night you take him for 20 million, I absolutely could see it. I don't see any reason why. Listen, where he got his money initially, that's up to interpretation from his father or whatever, but has he made a bunch of money playing poker? Absolutely, no question. Do you feel, as somebody who loves the game, do you think there's something almost ethically wrong in playing people much worse than you? So yeah, that's a good question because part of the reason I played poker and wanted to become professional was I wanted to make my mother proud, right? And I don't think she would be proud of me taking Grandma Betty's last $5 and down the street, sending her broke and taking her pension check. So I play at the high stakes against people who can afford it. They know who I am. I'm not a hustler. I'm not pretending I'm bad at poker to squeeze in. I was thinking about this just yesterday because I played in a game that if I played that sort of role where a lot of guys do pros that sort of play down their skill level, pretend they're just one of the guys, these guys can make $20, $30 million in a year, legitimately. Like I believe that like, if I did that, if I just said, you know what, I'm gonna go down that path, get into these games in LA, you know, and travel and do all this kind of stuff, I can make 20 million a year. But it feels a little greasy, right? I don't like to kiss anyone's ass. I don't like to ask anyone for a favor or things like that. So, but yeah, like I feel, listen, a rich guy who wants to sit down with a million bucks and get drunk and lose it, I have no empathy for that. I'm like, I don't have any moral qualms with that. So if a grandma Betty is a billionaire. Send it, send it, right? You know, absolutely, why not? Well, let me ask you about a tough period of your recent life. You had a rough, like we mentioned, the World Series of Poker losing $1.1 million over 48 days. What were you going through mentally during that? So here's the thing, you know, I do, like you said, I do a YouTube vlog every day. So I kind of share my thoughts and listen, I can edit that thing and keep out the bad stuff, but I think it's more authentic and genuine to show people the actual struggles and the pain that I go through, you know, without it. And I'd say the one thing I'm most proud of throughout the entire thing is the resilience because there are moments you see me where I'm broken. I'm just like, I can't take it. I broke a selfie stick this year. Like I was filming it. Cause you know, I do for my vlog, I smashed the stick through it in the corner, right? It's just, that was my like hit rock bottom moment. And then I put the camera on me and I was like, all right, I'll let people see it. But mentally it was very difficult because there was a feeling of hopelessness where I was making good decisions. Like I genuinely felt like I'm playing really, really well. But every time my money went in and my opponent's money went in and say, I was 60%, 70%, 80% for about a two week stretch, I lost every one of those. And you start to wonder, you're like, I can't win if I never win, you know, in these spots. So it was difficult. Luckily I have, you know, 20 odd years of experience on how to deal with it. And so, as I said, I wake up the next day, ready to go. So as if nothing happened. To a certain degree. Obviously, you know, the more, the more it happens in the higher vines, like the one where I broke the selfie stick, I lost 500,000 in that tournament, right? And it was like the last card, it was painful. I think you lost. Yeah, that was great, that video. I think he lost. What led up to the selfie stick gate? Like what, you just lost your shit for a, like a hundred milliseconds. Like it was very brief. You're just like, what, the world wasn't making any sense. Like, how do I keep losing kind of thing? How did you, why did you lose your shit? You should never really think like this, but part of me felt like I deserved to win this, right? So part of me was like, listen, I've lost so many in the last two weeks, all right. Let, you know, the poker gods be kind to me right now. Let me win this. And it looked good. I was in a great situation on the flop, great situation on the turn. I'm about to be a competitor. I'm going to be a contender in this tournament to win a big prize pool and turn the whole thing around. It's all there for the taking. And then boom, the last card, it just, you know, it was a couple of weeks of frustration in the moment of filming that I just had, you know, sort of a visceral reaction, you know, and I smacked the, smacked the selfie stick. And then like, I, it was, I see a corner, it's safe. I threw the selfie stick on the ground. And of course, social media blows up about how, you know, it was a violent act, you know? I mean, it's like, have you never watched sports? Have you never seen a guy on the golf course smack his club or throw their helmet? Like, you know, there was the, there's a guy, Justin Bonomo is a poker player. And he's a super, how to, for lack of a better word, offended by everything. And he was equating my throwing a stick on the ground to violence against women, domestic abuse, and the idea that like, this makes women feel unsafe to play poker. And so that was kind of a running joke for the last two weeks where every time I sat at a table, the guys would be like, oh, I feel unsafe, I feel unsafe. Yeah. Can you take me through the hand? Do you remember what the hand was? Like, what was the... Yeah, so it was a, you know, a player on the button raised. David Peters, very aggressive player. He went all in from the blind and I had a pair of pocket tens. So I went with my tens and he had queen 10 of spades. So I was good. I have way the best hand. And the flop was like king nine, three, one spade. Turn was like the eight of spades. So now he has a flush draw and the river was another spade. So he caught spade, spade, and he made a flush. Wow, but statistically you were winning the whole time. Yeah, I was winning it up until the last card. What did he go all in on? Was it a bluff? He made what's considered like a pretty standard play in modern poker where, you know, a guy raised and he was just trying to pick up, you know, what was there. And he ran into a hand in the big blind and you know, he got lucky. So what was the throughout the strategy of preparation, the strategy of play? So you're playing so many days. Are you trying to ignore the results and stick to a particular strategy? Yes, for the most part, you know, what I'm trying to do is like, I formulate a strategy for the whole seven weeks cause there's a varying degree of buy ins too. Like you have small ones, like 1500, then you've got like $250,000 buy in. So I map out the seven weeks and right, I'll give a little bit of mental energy to the 1500, which means I'll be on my phone. I'm not gonna, I don't care as much about this one, but the 250K fully engaged, fully focused, you know, up against obviously the higher the buy in, you know, super top competition. And you know, as far as strategy goes, focusing on each day, playing the best I can, not the result. Like, cause if you focus on the result, you're focusing in the wrong place. Your focus should be on the decisions you actually make. Right, and if you're making good decisions consistently, you have to continue to do that. The frustrating part is this, with poker, unlike chess or other things, making the best possible decision doesn't mean you win. Often you lose, you don't, chess. Well, Magnus Carlsen has also talked about that. There's some non deterministic thing about chess too, given the limited cognitive capacity of the human mind. So he says that the world championship should have 20, 30, 40, 50 games, not the few that they have. It's too low of a sample. So in that sense, the high stakes poker tournaments are very too low sample. Sure, yeah. Well, when you think of the world series of poker, so as you said, I lost about 1 million, right? In one tournament, that was 500,000. So then, you know, like a few others here of high buying tournaments. So the sample or the amount was, you know, 40, 50 total tournaments with, you know, high variance. And if you don't run well or do well in the highest buy ins, you know, you're gonna have a losing summer. So you did a podcast on the mental game a few years ago, but then that's just something you really care about. So what aspects of the mental game in poker is most difficult to master? I think the most difficult thing for people is self awareness, right? And resilience, self awareness to know, okay, so, you know, again, is it, am I not doing as well as I could be because of luck or is there things that I can learn? And I always look to mistakes as opportunities. I really do. When I make a mistake in a poker hand, right? Call it a breakdown or whatever, that's where breakthroughs happen. And I'm like, oh, you know what I could have done here? I could have done this and that would have been really good and I'm gonna do that going forward. So I think like with anything, you know, when you start out playing golf, like your goal is to just hit the ball, right? Then you try to hit it in the air, then you're trying to hit it straight, then you're trying to hit it on the green, then you're trying to hit it closer to the green to the point where the pros get where, you know, they're so finite, they're trying to hit it 63 yards and spin it back three yards. It's imperfect. Like they don't hit the perfect shot because the perfect shot for them is it goes in, but they try and make the mistakes smaller and smaller and smaller. Poker is the same. We all make mistakes consistently. The goal is to minimize, especially the big ones. What was the lowest point for you psychologically in poker in general, actually? Maybe it was this year, maybe it was in general. Do you remember there was times in your life, speaking of resilience, that were extremely difficult to you mentally? Yeah, so early on, you know, as basically as a teenager, I was playing in Toronto and then in my early 20s, I'm like, I'm going to Vegas, right? And I thought I was the best. I'm like 21 years old, I'm like, check me out, right? Show up with $3,000, 24 hours later, you know, money's gone. And I remember the moment vividly. It was at the Binion's Horse, it was about three in the morning. I was playing with seven other people. You know, I lost my last chips. I went to the bathroom, washed up, got out. They all left. And it was like a moment where I realized like, okay, in Toronto, I was the big fish. But here, they were playing because of me. I was the sucker. I remembered every one of their faces. And then I remember not having enough money to get back to budget suites where I was staying. So I walked, you know, I walked. And in that moment I was thinking about like, is this something that I'll be able to do? Am I good enough? You know, what am I going to do now? I'm in Vegas, I don't know anybody and I have no money, right? So that was certainly like what felt like a low point, walking back behind Paradise and Twain, which is not a great part of town. Where did you find the strength to answer yes to that question that you can still do good? I think this has been sort of a pattern in my life where like in the evening after it happens, like I don't have it. You know, I don't have that feeling of hope or, you know, resilience, if you will. I'm allowing myself to experience despair, which is exactly where I'm at. But then a good night's sleep, wake up the next morning and just within me, I have that inner confidence to say, you know what? Fuck it, get back on the hobby horse, find a way, make it work, right? But I do believe it's really therapeutic and worthwhile to allow yourself to feel and vent. So many people today, the Instagram culture world, I call it, it's like they want to act like they're perfect. Nothing bothers them, bullshit, right? You're pissed off, it's okay to show it. Emotion's fine, we all have it. There's no reason you have to suppress it. Obviously, you don't want to have guys throwing selfie sticks around the room every time they lose a pot, right? But, you know, a little bit of... You're gonna make everybody feel unsafe. Yeah, exactly. That happens. So you're saying, there is a culture of saying, you know, stay positive, all this kind of stuff, but you know, when you feel despair, don't resist it, ride it out. Because it doesn't go away, right? That feeling, you know, you think you put it away in the pit of your stomach and you think, you know, it's gone, it's not, it's still there. Let yourself go, fuck! Yeah. It's all right. You know, there's nothing wrong with being a little bit emotional, because once you've experienced it, you let it out, now you can move past it. Yeah, and I feel like, as long as your brain chemistry can support it, you can usually learn a good lesson from it, like you become stronger, you become more resilient through it. It's really interesting. And a good night's sleep can really help. Absolutely, yeah. So through 2022, and in general, what is a perfect day in the life of Daniel Negrano look like when you're, like on a day when you have to play a big game, big tournament game and so on? So like, what time do you wake up? What do you eat for breakfast? So my life is twofold. Like one, when I'm playing hardcore, and one when I'm not. And they look very different, right? So I'll give you a quick glimpse of like when I'm not, up at 10, you know, breakfast, in the gym at noon, you know, post workout, meal, coffee, walk, like, you know, I try to get, that's what I do for cardio, you know, and just very like home bodied. I don't leave the house. It's very like boring and mundane, right? Long distance walks. So like, what do you do when you're walking? You're thinking about stuff? Well, no, honestly, I just walk on the treadmill. I try to get 15,000 steps a day. And I just walk for basically like an hour while I watch a show or I'm on the computer or something like that, you know, I'm on the treadmill. Why walk and not running? Well, I mean, I think walking, I mean, I do a little bit of running, but hardly any. I don't enjoy it. Like, I just like walking. And frankly, for fat loss, when it's usually what I'm doing after big poker tournaments is getting back in shape, that walking's ideal for it, right? So essentially it's like the tale of two. During the World Series of Poker, all my sort of structured life thrown out the window. There's no walking. There's very little walking. There's very little working out. There's very little anything. I go into the World Series, you know, like this year I went in around 157 and I expected to gain about 10 pounds during the World Series. Not good pounds, it wasn't muscle, but that's about what I did, 165. And then I spend the next month trying to, you know, lose it. But during the World Series, when I'm playing, the most important thing without question that I have to focus on, and this is why I stopped focusing on working on all this stuff is sleep. If I'm not rested, I'm useless. If I only get five, six hours and I have to go back the next day and play 14 hours, the chances of me being at my best, very, very slim. So sleep is a priority. What's the perfect amount of sleep for you on those days? Eight, seven? So eight hours is my go to every night. During the World Series of Poker, it's just not possible because of the way that it's structured. Sometimes the tournaments end at 2.15 a.m. I get home about three o clock. Takes me 30 minutes, 40 minutes to get to sleep. So now let's say I'm in bed by four. Well, the tournament's at, you know, two. So I have to get up and whatever. So it's very difficult to get exactly eight a lot of the time. You know, and also get back there in time. Is there any hacks to quiet the mind? Because you're going on a pretty intense rollercoaster mentally when you're playing. Is there any tricks to getting to sleep given the rollercoaster? I've been very lucky. Like I'm blessed. I don't know if it's because of diet or what, but I've always been a very good sleeper. You just shut off. I get to sleep and I sleep like a baby, you know? And I also nap really well. Like during the World Series, sometimes what will happen is let's say I get knocked out of one event at 4 p.m. And there's another one that I can jump in. Instead of jumping right into it, I'll go into like a private room and take 45 minute nap. And you know, and give me enough energy to continue and sort of reset my mind. Yeah, and it solves a lot of problems with the nap too. It does. Yeah, I feel like the nap is a magical trick in life. What else, diet wise? What do you, your mind is going, you know, pretty intensely all day. Yeah, so during like, like I said, when I'm not playing, I'm super regimented. You know, I have, I literally measure everything. You know, I count calories, I count macros, I follow it to a T. Pretty balanced diet or any? I'm a vegan. Vegan, yeah. So it's, you know, a vegan diet, like. But balanced in terms of carbs and protein. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I eat a healthy amount. I'm doing probably 150 grams of protein, like 60 grams of fat, 50, and then about. And try to measure it all out. I do, yeah, I basically, I created a meal plan. So what I did for myself is, cause I'm really anal and I made a spreadsheet with like a day's food and I have six different ones. So I just follow it. Like I don't, it actually makes my life so much easier when I don't have to think about what I'm going to eat for lunch or what I'm going to eat for dinner. I already know what I'm going to eat. I already wrote it down and it doesn't get boring because I'm switching it up every day, you know, every six days and occasionally I'll, you know, splurge or do something different. During the World Series of Poker, I eat whatever the fuck I want to eat. Like it's at 2 a.m. I don't crave like a broccoli carrot salad. Like I want chocolate, candy and chips. So I'll just do it. So you listen to the cravings. Yeah, I realized like. It's surprising because like, you're so regimented outside of that. It's really difficult. Like I've done it before where I played the World Series of Poker and I made it a point to work out every day. But what that did was it sacrificed sleep. So then I found like at 1 a.m. I would be more tired, you know, because I've expended more energy than I would otherwise. So I essentially like look at the World Series is six, seven weeks where my body's just gonna take a beating, not like UFC fighter, but like a different kind of beating. And that's okay because I have so much confidence that within six weeks of just like eating right and working out, I can get back to where I was. But it's just hilarious to me that you'd be eating chocolate. What eating chocolate in bed as you're trying to get to sleep is this. Like literally a bag of like chips or chocolate, like on my way home and before bed, you know, just whatever. This is what the professional athlete does at the highest, most difficult event of his career. Okay, so what else is there in terms of mental preparation and focus and meditation, those kinds of things leading up to the games? Is there anything you like to, like any rituals you like to follow? So yeah, I have dabbled in the past with like meditation and different things like that. And I know that there's health benefits to it. And I understand that a lot of people get a lot from it and I've done it for a good amount of time, like long periods of time. I found that for me, I think it was predominantly placebo. Like it really wasn't doing anything for me that I felt like it was, it felt like I was doing something, but I really, I didn't see any specific results from it. So I don't really do that too much. One thing that I will do for me is leading up is there's so much footage now that I'll make it a point to like watch my opponents and then with like my phone, I'll take notes and I'll keep track of different things that I'm seeing. And that sort of, and then what I'll do is I'll formulate a game plan. Like I'm playing the Poker Masters coming up in about a week. And I'll look to see the tendencies of what my opponents are doing. And then I'll come up with like some things that I'm gonna do, some tricks of the trade, if you will. Not game theory optimal stuff, stuff that I think, oh, they're making a mistake here that I can exploit. And then I look to do that in different ways and always look to throw curve balls. How hard is that process? Do you enjoy it or is it like really hard work to analyze the players to try to understand what are the different holes? What are the different mistakes? What are the strengths to avoid and that kind of stuff? I think the only thing that makes it harder is when you're young, right? And you're in your twenties and you're trying to make your nest egg. You're like, you're trying to make your retirement money. You're hungry, right? You're like clubber Lang and you know the gym, you're hungry. Whereas, you know, Rocky's in there taking pictures and smiling and doing commercials and stuff like that. So I am 47, I'm financially okay. I don't need to win. I don't need to compete at the highest levels. So I think it was a boxer. I don't remember which one. When asked this, he was asked the question, how do you get up in the morning still and do those morning runs? And he says, you know what? I'll be honest with you. It's a lot more difficult doing the 4 a.m. run in silk pajamas, right? It just is, right? But I've always been self motivated and I've always found a way. So it's harder in the sense of like, it's not a need. I can still get by without it. But so in that regard, it does feel like a little bit of work where like, oh my God, that's a lot of footage I gotta get through. And I don't know that I have the time or I don't know that I wanna spend 10 hours of my day doing that when I could be doing other things. I mean, what do you still love about poker? When you said, when you enter, like the times you catch yourself just being able to sort of take in the awe of it. What aspects do you love? I think that like for me, I've always been really competitive, but I was never gonna be a professional athlete or a professional snooker player. I wasn't good enough at any of that stuff. I didn't have the body type, whatever. But poker, it sort of levels the playing field, right? You're six, five, 240, big deal. We're not fighting here. We're fighting a different type of war. So the competitive aspect, I also have always been fueled throughout my career by doubters. So this is probably unhealthy, but every time people say like, you're done, you're washed up, you can't win anymore, it just makes me wanna prove them wrong, right? So I have a little bit of that in me, which again, you're reading the comments and all these kinds of, like I've been told many times throughout my career for the last 15 that I'm done. I can't compete anymore. And I enjoy proving them wrong. Yeah, the game has changed so much. The greats of the past surely cannot be the greats of the present. That kind of commentary will continue for every sport. And certainly for poker, because poker really changed a lot over the past couple of decades. Can you speak to how much it has changed? Yeah. Because you've been at the top for so long. Yeah, so complacency is a big issue for people who make it, if you will, right? So in my era of the poker boom, around the early 2000s, there was a group of players who were the big names, the stars of the game. Well, a lot of them had their egos out of whack where they just felt like, okay, I'm the best, that's it. Like, no, there's young guys learning, there's new software, there's solvers, there's all these kinds of things. And if you're not keeping up, then you'll get surpassed. And I remember myself at a very early age saying, I never want to be that guy. And it was one of my first events in the late 90s. I was the young buck playing with the Tom McAvoy's and Brad Doughty, the guys of the era, right? And I was doing things more aggressively and they were scoffing at all these young kids with their aggressive three and all this stuff. And they were sort of mocking it, you know? And I thought, never be that guy. Always have the humility to be introspective and always have the respect for your opponents that while you think you've got it all figured out, they're learning new things and you can learn from them. So I've always been willing to sort of swallow my pride and get coached by younger players who I might even be better than, but they see blind spots that I have that I might not. And they, you know, they helped me improve my game. I've always been willing to sort of look every six months or a year and say, is what I'm doing working? And if not, how do I get better? But most people from my generation, they go the other way. I don't know, they just have this idea that they figured it all out. Once you feel like you've mastered it, there's nothing left to learn. That's the moment where everyone else starts to surpass you. That's the moment where you lose the mastery because it's always evolving. How has the game changed? So the game has changed in terms of the way people learn it, right? When I started out, the only way to learn how to play poker was to sit your ass on the chair and play. In person? Yes, in person, play. Maybe you jot down hands on a notepad. We didn't even have cell phones back then, right? So I would write notes. I actually brought a notepad. And then you don't analyze it and sort of try to figure it out that way and think about maybe talking to friends and different players. Like when I grew up, there was John Jawanda, Alan Cunningham and Phil Ivey. And we would sort of create like a little bit of a mastermind. Well, how would you play this hand? What would you do here? That was the extent of it, right? We never had the correct answers. We always had theories about what might be right. Not until about five, six years ago where everything changed. Where artificial intelligence created solvers that will specifically say, okay, this is the optimal play. This is the game theory optimal play. So now it introduced poker to a whole new group of like personality types. In my day, it was people that were dregs of society that didn't fit in, not college goers with a degree. These are people who were street hustlers playing pool. They found poker and they had these unique lives, right? But now because poker can be studied, much like you study university or college, you had, for example, the German contingent who was literally analyzing data and coming up with strategies based on this. And it's like, what? And the old guy, got to play by feel or whatever. And they're like, they're learning. So I guess the way that you describe it is like in the old days, it required skill and talent, a card sense, right? That was the only way to become good. And today that's not the case. Good study habits, a good work ethic in that regard can make you like a really good player. Even if you aren't all that talented or gifted, having a good work ethic is a talent, right? Not necessarily card sense, but if you're able to put in the work and study from these solvers, you essentially have the perfect study tool now that we didn't have in my day. So what do the solvers give you? Do you start to memorize the optimal play for every single hand? You try your best. So again, solvers are imperfect as well, in terms of the way the humans utilize them, right? Because you can give solvers a certain number of inputs in terms of what you want it to solve, but a solver can think on many, many levels. So for example, the way that a typical player would do a solve is to say, okay, what does a solver think is the best play here? Bet one third pot, bet two thirds pot, or bet one and a half times pot, okay? You give it three parameters, it comes out with an output and it tells you what you should do with all the different hands you have. However, that's a simplified version of what a solver would really do, because a solver might decide that seven times the pot is best, 10% of the pot. But when you're putting in a solve, you can only put in specific parameters. So that's why, frankly, that's typically the number, one third, two third, and one and a half times pot is what people often do. So they sort of have a vague idea of what a solver wants. But again, imperfect in terms of the implementation of it. And memorizing all the variables, like that King Jack offsuit with the King of Diamonds is 13%, no human brain can do that. So what you do is you bucket it. Like you bucket it into say, instead of 10,000 variables, you have 10 buckets and you say, okay, with these hands, we do roughly this, and we do roughly this. And you try your best to stay within those lines. But again, what I love about live poker partly is that nobody will ever be able to master game theory, and mimic a solver. But you also have to incorporate your position, where you are, and obviously what cards you have, but also the size of your stack, how much money you have, and also whether you have the ability or desire to buy in, all those kinds of things. So you have to calculate all of that, right? So the solver will do that, right? And essentially, you don't input your hand. It tells you, you'll look at the grade, and be like, all right, this is my hand, and it tells you what it is. But it tells you what you would do with any hand, right? It gives you the full output. And that actually gives you a better idea, because you're ultimately, like you said, playing a range of hands, not a hand. And the solvers do things that are really interesting. You've seen AlphaGo, I would imagine. Brilliant film, right, I thought. And I thought what was interesting is there was, you know, accepted theory from all the top Go players, this is what you do. But the AI was doing things way different, and they're like, this has to be wrong, but really it wasn't. So for example, a solver may say this, right? Let's say you bet on the end, and you bet a lot, and a solver may say, you should fold here with a pair of kings and a queen kicker, which is, you know, a pair of kings, but call with a pair of fours and an ace kicker. So it's essentially telling you that you should fold this hand that is much better than this. So it begs the question, why? Because what the solvers do is they use the information of your own cards to formulate all the possible hands your opponent can have. So if your opponent is, so basically if you had the king, queen, you know, it may say, for lack of a better nerdy term, it blocks potential bluffing hands that your opponent can have. So let's say if your opponent would bluff with queen, jack, but you have a queen. So there are less combinations of queen, jack. So it will find a better bluff catcher, if you will. So that's what's really not intuitive to poker players. Poker players usually think like, well, this, my hand is pretty good, so I got a call, but that's not how a solver would think. Solver uses, you know, common matrix and, you know. And sometimes it's tough to get the good why answers you just did for why a solver thinks something is better, or maybe in poker it's a little bit easier, but in the case of go and chess, it's not always obvious why, because it's not gonna explain stuff to you. I think one of the best ways to learn poker is when you see a solver output and it tells you one of these things, try to figure out why. Why does this solver do this? Why does it want you to call with this and fold this? And try to think about it on a deeper level. And you go, aha, probably because this card that I have here, you know, changes the range of my opponent's, you know, potential. I'd love to get your opinion on your relationship with solvers. Because for example, Magnus doesn't use them. His team uses them. Cause he feels like he's going to rely on it too much. And you can't use it when you're playing. What you really want is to build up an extremely strong intuition without the help of a solver. Is there some aspect of that that rings true to you? Absolutely. I totally can relate to what Magnus is saying. First and foremost, because when solvers was first introduced, I didn't come from that world. I was so intimidated because I didn't know how to use it. I don't know how to do an input. So I had two guys, one guy's a data scientist and, you know, another guy's like a poker savant, if you will, and they coached me and they did it. So today, if I was in a tough spot, you know, and I'm like, I don't know, what would a solver do? I will send them the hand and they'll run the solve for me. And then sort of give me the parameters of what to do. When I was playing, you know, regularly using solvers with them, we were spending six to eight hours a day going over all these solves. So intuitively I started to think and learn about what the solver would want, but I sort of understand where Magnus is coming from in that you don't want to become a slave to the sim, as I say, right? There's one kid I know, I joked with him, his name is Landon Tice. And, you know, he made a play that the sim, you know, would say, this is a good play. But I'm like, it's a good play, you know, in a simulated world against the robot. It's not in practice against the human, right? You don't need to be doing that. So if you become a slave to the sim and always do what the sim says, you're handcuffed to a certain degree. Is there some, at the highest level plays, there's still a role for feel and intuition? Absolutely. If you're not doing that, cause here's the thing, right? No human being plays perfectly balanced in game three optimal like a robot would. They're not, right? So there are opportunities there to take advantage of the things that they do that are slightly too aggressive or less aggressive. You know, for example, say most human beings don't bluff enough in a certain spot. So you don't have to call with the correct range of hands. You don't have to, because they're not bluffing at the optimal frequency. So you don't have to call at the optimal frequency. You'd be making this mistake, frankly, if you did. What's the difference between in person and online play, given that context? Yeah, well, online poker and live poker, it's the same game, right? Same, it's poker, but it's different in so many levels, right? I think playing online, you have to focus far more on fundamentals. You know, on game theory, you don't have the added bonus of looking across the table and getting any sense of whether your opponent is strong or weak, they're bluffing, whatever, you know. And also because online poker, those that play it, you play far more hands. Like some of these guys are playing 10, 20 tables at the same time, right? So you're just, you're hitting the long run really quickly and you're creating a database on your opponents, right? So let's say, you know, online, I can see your data. I'm like, well, this guy, he's playing 40% of hands. He's betting the river 80% of the time. So now I can use that data and, you know, exploit you that way. When you play live, you don't have that. Do you enjoy playing online? I enjoy, so with online poker, I enjoy the convenience of it because, you know, you can be on your couch in your underwear, not leave your house. Do you also play multiple games at the same time or do you try to play one game? I typically like to play one or two, but I can play up to four. I find that past four, it's hard for me to keep up and keep track of what's actually happening. You know, it's a different mindset required. Like a lot of these young guys, they're accustomed to 20 tables at a time. It feels like the purity of the game is gone. It's much more robotic, right? So if you're playing 20 tables, you're just making decisions based on like what, you know, you're not thinking about the depth of the situation and what just happened 15 minutes ago. You don't even know what happened because you can't pay attention to all that at once. And some of the magic of poker is the low sample. I agree. For example, and sorry to be bringing up Magnus so much, but there's so much parallel between the two of you and the poker and the chess world. He hates Olympics and world championships and all that kind of stuff because it's so low sample. But to me, that's part of the magic of it. There's the World Series of Poker, the main event. There's a magic to it. I agree, yeah. And I don't know what that is exactly because so much of the stake is so rare, so much drama and heartbreak leading up to it that all somehow, yeah, it accumulates to that magical moment when somebody wins. Especially that event, the World Series of Poker main event historically, like that's it, you know, that's the pinnacle. That's where like mainstream watches, that's where people are tuning in and the gravity of the moment, you know, it's so much bigger than people, like everyone gets the opportunity to play armchair quarterback too, right? Oh, he should do this. You're not there. You're not under the lights. You're not under the pressure. You know, it might seem easy for you at home to be like, well, yeah, but you can see the whole cards. You know, they can't. Certainly the idea of the small sample with tournaments, I like the idea that you don't have to worry about, oh, well, if I do this now, then in the future, you know, I won't be balanced. I have to be balanced here or anything like that. That's like really boring and lame, right? Again, that is kind of the way the younger generation learns how to play the game, being balanced in every spot and then randomizing, you know, like, oh, I'm supposed to do this 50% of the time. Okay, so if my left card is red, I'll do it. And if it's black, I don't. So you're not even making, you're no longer making actual decisions for yourself. You're just randomizing. And that's way less fun for me than tailoring it to the situation. And the final table at the main event, there's none of that. You have to, I mean, it's all or nothing. Well, you shouldn't be, but there are like, again, I think a lot of the young guys, they are thinking in that regard, like, oh, randomization. Maybe at that table, the final table at the main event, what's a hand that stands out to you that was especially gutsy and powerful or memorable for that you've seen in the history of poker? Well, for me, the one that stands out and probably because I was so young and it was my first year, like one of my wife, won a bracelet that year, was I was friends with Scotty Wynn, the Prince of Poker. And he was heads up against the guy named Kevin McBride. And I was on the rail, you know, I'm like, wow, he's gonna, you know, he's heads up. And he was so cool. Like he had a mullet, but it's perfect, right? He had the white shirt, the black thing. He's drinking a Michelob, smoking a cigarette, whatever, you know, all chill. He bets it all on the river. And the guy's thinking, and he psychologically owned him. And he said, he goes with his beer, he goes, you call gonna be all over baby. Ha ha ha, that's right. Okay, so this guy who was an amateur heard that and was like, there's so much pressure in this moment right now. I can't handle this pressure. But Scotty just told me, if I call here, the pressure's gone. I don't have to be under it anymore. So he sort of hypnotized them into making the call, you know, and Scotty had it. Scotty had, you know, the full house and it was over for the guy. You call gonna be all over baby. It was, I just, I love that aspect, sort of the table talk dynamic, which isn't as prevalent today as it was back then, but that one sticks out. And it probably, because it was one of my first. So the few words you say at the table can completely affect a hand like that. That's almost, that's scary. It was just so cool to me, you know, like just how he was so calm. And I think that too, added more pressure to the amateur. And I think like, again, part of it is, even back then it was 1998, there's still a big rail of people and there's lights and they're, you know, they're filming and all this kind of stuff. And it's a lot of pressure for a guy who's never been in this environment. And now I'm telling you, it can all be over soon. It will all be over soon. Just call, it's finished. Something about that accent too. Now you're a master at table talk as well. Do you have, do you just kind of go with your gut, you flow with it? Or is there a deliberate strategy with this sometimes? There's usually some sort of strategy that I think about in terms of what I want to say and whatnot. But a lot of the time I just go, I go with it, you know, the more you talk, the more information you get. Yeah, but in some cases against really good players, you're just giving away information, right? Like if I'm playing against Phil Ivey, I'm not engaging in anything. Cause he can read through it. He can sense based on what I'm saying, you know, the clues and where I'm trying to take him. And he reads through, he sees the tree through the forest or whatever you want to call it, the forest through the trees. And you know, so then I would just be like allowing myself to be exploitable. Is some of it just for fun? Because at the end of the day, if you're having fun, you might be at the top of your game. I've been thinking about this a lot lately actually. It's funny you bring this up because I've been thinking about when I'm at my best. And I think I'm at my best when I am comfortable like that. Right? Where I'm not so stiff and worried about, you know, checking properly and worried about reading people. I'm like, no, I'm me. All right, I'm going to play some poker. What do you want? Do you want to call me? Call, go ahead, do what you want. Right? Cause then I realized, you know, ultimately it was like, I'm comfortable in that. My opponents aren't as comfortable in that. They're comfortable with this, you know, the robot thing. But I thought more about that and how, especially with some tournaments coming up, I plan on really kind of sort of getting back to my roots in that regard. I love it. From a spectator perspective, I love it. But it's also interesting whenever you see a Daniel on the ground of quiet. That's an interesting, like it feels like a calm before a storm of sorts. So I'm sure that's also part of it. Yeah, like I've gone, I've ebbed and flowed. And like I said, you know, I took on some coaches and that was really learning game theory. Cause I felt like it was important to always stick, you know, keep up with what's going on. And then I do feel like to some degree, it sort of took away a little bit of my own instinctual ideas in terms of what I should be doing. Right? So I think like the most dangerous version of myself is a deep understanding of the game theory with my wisdom of many years of, and comfort of just sort of like being myself at the table. And being relaxed. Relaxed. Letting your mind flow. Let me ask you the greatest, the goat question, greatest of all time. Can you make the case for a few folks? So first you tweeted referring to Phil Ivey as the goat, saying the goat doing goat things. That's a recent tweet. So can you make the case for Phil Ivey, or maybe who is the greatest poker player of all time? Would you put Phil? For me, until someone knocks him off the podium, the king of poker and the goat is Phil Ivey. Okay? So, and the reason I say that is, I think of poker as more than just one game. Right? There's different variants. You know, there's Holdem, Omaha, Stud, Triple Draw, all these different types of games. And Phil in every arena has been dominant. Whether it was tournament poker, dominated it. Mixed game, high stakes poker in Bobby's room, dominated. Online poker against all the wizards, dominated. Made millions in every arena. And, you know, he sort of took a few years away from poker with his legal troubles and things like that, but he's back. You know, he's been playing in the high roller series again. And, you know, he comes from, he's cut from a different cloth, but he has a tenacity and a focus that's unparalleled, I think. When he's in the zone, I mean, for lack, and this has nothing to do with race. It really has to do with mannerism, but he does remind me of like a combination of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods in the way that he approaches it. He's very intense. And he outworks everybody, you know? And I think, frankly, a lot of his mannerisms do come from them because he's young watching these guys on TV. And a lot of his ways of being, you know, his learned behavior, I think probably from people like that. People at the top of their sport and people that are Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan aren't just at the top of their sport, but they kind of dominate the sport to some kind of aura that. There's a uniqueness to them. They're not built like us. They're not, you know, they're not. Like I wish, I wish I could have the kind of focus that Phil Ivey has, you know, and see everything that he's saying. I just, that's not me, you know? I don't have that. And he does, he has that gene, whatever it is. But they also look like they're not having that much fun. They're more focused on the perfection, like a dogged pursuit of perfection. And you know, that might even be true. It might not be as fun. You know, I don't know. Like I have fun at the table. When you look outwardly, you look at someone, like maybe he is having a blast. Maybe that's just the way that he likes, you know? Like is Tiger Woods having fun when he's like on 17 about to win a major? It doesn't look like it, theoretically. Well, if you look at Michael Jordan, I don't know about Tiger Woods, but I think they're more focused on every single mistake they make. I think they're more obsessed about not making a mistake and hating every time they make a mistake. That's probably like 99% of their mental energy. I think that's part of what makes them great, right? They don't look past the mistake and just let it, it's whatever. They're like, they want to correct it. And yeah, there's a tension, almost like a trade off. I wonder if that's always the case between sort of greatness and happiness. I remember Huck Seed, who, you know, when I was a kid growing up, he was like the poker idol. He won the world championship in 1996. And I was lucky enough to hang out with him a little bit. And he would go through these streaks where he had an A game and he had an F game. His A game was unparalleled. Nobody could beat him, right? But his F game was so terrible that he was just a fish. You know, he was playing terribly. And I remember him saying, and it was exactly what you're saying. He'd make like one little mistake, right? And then he would go off. And I was like, Huck, why do you do that? Like, you know, your B game would be just fine. He's like, well, if I'm gonna make a mistake, what's the point? What's the point, right? I'm trying. Like, if you can't play perfect, there's no point in playing at all. So he was extreme in that regard, in the way that he viewed it. And depending on the sport, those folks, like in chess, certainly the case, that kind of mindset can destroy you. Absolutely. No, I totally see that. Because of a sequence of mistakes. Like the kind of year you had with the well scissor poker can completely destroy a human being. If you're not able to see the bigger picture of it. Yeah. You said that Phil Ivey is the hardest, your toughest opponent, the toughest person to play against. Why is that? And how do you beat him? Because Phil Ivey's just, he's seeing things that nobody else has seen really. Like subtle things, where I'm putting my hands, where I'm looking, you know, my pulse, like stuff that I don't even know I'm giving off. He's so engaged and so focused and has such a, just a, he's fearless, right? A lot of people, you know, they'll play poker and be like, you know what? I don't think this guy has it. But do they have the guts? Do they have the cojones, if you will, to actually do anything about it? Right? And stand up to this person? He does. You know? I forgot the hand that you tweeted about the goat doing goat things. That wasn't even that big of a goat hand. But like, there's hands where like, there was a famous one in Australia where the flop was like jack, jack at nine and Phil check raised the flop with six, seven, nothing. Just absolutely nothing. And the guy re raised him, right? And Phil just knew. He went all in with nothing. If the guy calls, he's done, he's cooked. But he was so tuned in that this guy's not strong, that he just, you know, he did things like that. And it's tough to play against a guy like that. So he gets great reads and is able to execute on them, has the guts to execute on them. He's got experience, he's got work ethic. He also, I think one thing I'm underselling too, is his strategic mind, right? Like I believe that, you know, like I said, the new age player, they learn how to play through a very systematic approach. Okay, let's look at the data. Make up a game right now. Three cards, we each get three cards. Jacks are wild, sixes are, you know, six of hearts is wild, right? Just make up that game. Phil will figure it out intuitively, very, very quickly, right? Without having the answers for him, right? So that's like the difference between the players of my generation. We had to figure this stuff out on our own. Today, well, I wanna know the answer, I go ask the computer and the computer tells me. So I really believe like if you created a game from scratch that Phil Ivey would be my horse that I wanna play in it. So he's in some sense in tune with some deeper thing. He has what we used to call card sense. Card sense. Can you try to make the case for some others like Doyle Brunson, Phil Hellmuth, Daniel Negrano, and maybe one of the modern guys like Justin Bonomo or somebody like that? Sure, oh, so let's start with Doyle, okay? Like what Doyle has going for him above all, above and beyond is twofold, really. Longevity, I mean, he's in his late 80s. And last time I played with him, I was like, how is he getting better? Like I really felt like he was playing better than he had, you know, in the previous years. But also with Doyle, like Doyle had to figure, you know, we talked about my generation having to figure it on their own. I mean, they really had to figure it out on their own. Like they didn't have any computer simulation to tell you if Ace King was a favorite over pocket sixes. They didn't. So we know what he did. He would take a deck of cards and they would deal out, and they were with a notepad, right? Okay, Ace King won. And then they would do like a hundred of them and be like, all right, Ace King won like 53. So it must be a favorite. And he did it manually, you know? And he did it in a time when it was very, very difficult. And he's seen poker evolve and change throughout the years. Now, listen, is he gonna be able to compete against the top players in the world today? Absolutely not, you know? But how many people, he's the best 88 year old player in the world by a mile, okay? That's not even close. And Doyle, again, he's another guy who plays all the games. He's played high stakes cash, tournaments, you name it. He's iconic, you know, he's the godfather. So, but there's also an element to that. So the iconic element, like your personality in poker. I mean, not to romanticize this thing too much, but poker is also a game of personalities. I mean, it's part of the greatness is like the uniqueness of the human being. Yeah, I think also, yeah. I mean, if you'd like looking at it from that perspective in terms of like Goat, like Goat in terms of what you represent, like the cowboy, the godfather, you know, he's been around, you know, we played in the sixties and stuff like that. It's just something like incredibly cool. Like I often think about if I could go back in time and like visit, you know, an era, I'd love to go like to Vegas in the seventies and just like, I'm proud. I already, like, I can think of what it would smell like, probably not ideal, cigarettes and, you know, the leather jackets and just the vibe of what it must've been like with the mobsters and things like that. You know, he's lived through all that, all the cool movies we've seen. Like Doyle talks about some of those films. He's like, yeah, that guy, he said he was gonna stab me in my stomach. You know, he knows these people. It was, he's like a source of history, really. Yeah, when poker was a game for the mob and the degenerates and all that kind of stuff before it transitioned into professional sport. Yeah. Professional game. Yeah, so he was there through the whole thing. He's been there through the whole transition. He's seen it all, yeah. Yeah, and then to the online world. So what about, I can't even say without smiling, Phil Hellmuth. Okay, so Phil, here's the thing with Phil. He takes it very personal when I say this and he doesn't hear the compliment. He only hears the negativity. Because Phil wants to be considered the greatest of all time. Hashtag positive. He wants to be the greatest of all time. But I'm like, Phil, here's the facts. You have the best, absolute greatest resume at the World Series of Poker of anyone in the world. Is that not enough, right? That's what you have. You have that, right? Now, do I think you're the best no limit holding player in the world today? No. Do I think that, you know, you can play high stakes mixed games with the best players in the world today and win? No, right? So he wouldn't get as much flack on this topic if he wasn't so boastful and like, you know, demanding. Like you never hear Phil Ivey say, I'm the best in the world. Like his peers do, right? But Phil wants to make the claim. And I simply say, I beg to differ, right? I beg to differ. Like, I don't think you are the best player in the world. If we can linger on the compliment so he can hear it, what makes him so good? Because it seems like a lot of times his play is not optimal. Yeah, he definitely has his own brand and style of play, right? He does not adhere to, he's never used a solver in his life. He doesn't know, he's not in that world, right? Phil has a lot of faith and a lot of confidence in what he does and that it will be successful. And I think there's something to be said about that, right? He doesn't ever lack in belief that he can win and he finds a way to do it his way. And frankly, a lot of what he does is very effective against specific types of players who are intimidated by him, but whether it's his resume or his demeanor or his attitude sometimes, right? Like if you're an average player and then you beat Phil in a hand, you're gonna hear it. This idiot from Northern Europe and beat me in this pot. And for some people, they don't like that. So he can use that against them. But I also think too, like he cares so much, right? And that leads to trying really, really hard. Like he sees these moments and he doesn't phone them in. Like whatever brand of poker he plays, he tries his best at all times to succeed and to win. And there's some, even though like he's fundamentally flawed in a lot of things that he does compared to some of the bigger players, his effort and will and like his determination to stick around is, you know, is up there. And he is somebody who seems to really hate losing. Yes, yeah, he feels like he deserves to win, right? In all cases. And if he loses, it's, you know, it's not just. As you joked around that you and him might do an anger management course. Yeah, I did say that in one video. Now this is tough because you're a humble guy, but objectively speaking, can you say what your strengths are? You're often listed as one of, if not the greatest player of all time. So what are the things that make you stand out? So for me, when I grew up, I admired the big cash game players, because that's what I was. I love tournaments, but I wanted to be well rounded. Like in my day, you couldn't make the poker hall of fame if you just played one game. You had to jump in to the high stakes games in Bobby's room, as they say, right? And I was able to do that. When I was in my early, in my mid twenties, I was playing 4,000, 8,000 limits. You know, you could win or lose a million dollars in a day. So I grinded it out. Like a lot of people think, oh, you know, he's lucky. He's had sponsorship. Otherwise he'd be broke. It's like, I built multi million dollar bankrolls before any of that stuff existed. And I did it the good old fashioned way by sitting my butt on the table. I think probably one of my biggest strengths is self awareness. And in that regard, a level of humility that always allows me to say, okay, well, you know what? In this case with these players, they're better than me. So what am I going to learn from them, right? Rather than have this need to say, I'm the best because of history. I'm always looking to guys and go, wow, he does this really well. Whether it's the Adamos or the Ivies or whoever it may be. So my willingness to adapt, I think, and stay relevant by learning what the young guys are learning is something I've always done. And I also pride myself on, again, being well rounded, like playing all the games. Like I don't feel intimidated in any game, you know, whatever the format is. So always being a scholar of the game as the game evolves, as the different games evolve, the different players evolve, the culture evolves, always adjusting by being a scholar, having the humility to be a scholar. A healthy respect for, a healthy respect for the younger generation, how they learn, what they learn and what they can teach me, rather than poo poo it and say, oh, these kids today. Cause that's what a lot of people, like the Mike Matisos and the Phil Hellmuth, my generation, they just poo poo it because they don't understand it. On a level of one to 10, their level of understanding of this is like a one, maybe. If I'm being generous by calling it a one, they really don't understand it. So they poo poo it, right? It's easy to do that. Like, oh, that's not how I do it. So that's wrong or that's stupid or whatever. I don't take that approach. I go, well, let me learn. Let me see what there is to this. But that said, the crankiness that Matisos and Phil Hellmuth have is great to watch, especially when they're on a table with you. Oh, I love it. Yeah, it's a blast. You're masterful at being able to get under their skin. What about somebody from the new school, like Justin Bonomo, who's leading in terms of cash wins. Is there somebody like that, that stands out to you as a potential GOAT status person? Yeah, so there's two different ones, but one is very... So they're both just no limit, right? So again, when I think of poker, I think of a variety of games, but there's so many of the young guys that specialize. Michael Adamo is one that I've mentioned several times and I love the way that he approaches the game. Another one that's highly respected because of his online prowess and his... People have looked and how close he is to game theory and they say he's about as perfect as you get. And I got a kid named Linus. Linus love online, Linus Linger. So he just came second recently, I believe in the Triton, huge Triton event. So he's primarily an online player. Yeah, he's an online cash player for the most part, but he plays some live. And he's, again, and I respect the peers that I play with who say, yeah, he's tough as nails. There's another kid too, Russian kid named Timofey Kuznetsov and he plays all the games and he's well respected in that regard. And same with a guy like a Jungleman, Dan Cates, who's a unique personality. I mean, this guy showed up, won the poker players championship back to back years in a Randy Macho Man Savage costume. And he was doing Macho Man the entire time. Oh yeah, I'm gonna take all the chips like I did last year. Bust them all. And he was in character for the entirety of the tournament. This is great. Just unique. But yeah, I respect for a lot of those guys. Is it gonna take time to figure out who stands the test of time? That's the thing, right? So a lot of these kids, like there was a guy who beat me heads up in the million dollar one drop. I got 8.7, he won $15 million, kid named Dan Coleman. He was seen as like the next big thing in poker, right? He made his money, just wasn't for him. So he's moved on to doing what he's doing, skiing in the Alps, whatever. We have nobody seen him from like five, six years. So that can happen, right? Because there is a lot of burnout. I think it was actually a Gotham Chess who mentioned something about how difficult it is to like, I think it's true in poker. When you get really, really good at something, to get this much better takes so much work. And a lot of people don't necessarily wanna put in that kind of work in order to do that. That's just even staying at the same level takes a huge amount of work. Like, so if you wanna get better at chess, you're already like really, really good. And you're trying to get like one little bit better. You have to study like in a ridiculous amount, you know? And again, that's once you've already had, I think the toughest thing for anybody, once you've tasted success and you've already achieved it, staying hungry, staying on the top, reaching the top is much easier than it is to stay there. Yeah. Over years, what's your training regimen in poker in terms of how you keep improving? So you said you study games, but that's mostly leading up to a particular tournament. But is there kind of a behind the scenes daily activity you try to do that kind of over time keeps you sharp? So for me, now that I'm 47, and I feel like the predominant aspect of my poker game is going to be in terms of my success is gonna be my mental state, right? So I find it's really, really important for me now at this age to have balance. So when I'm not playing poker and I'm out of it, poker is not even on my radar. You're able to remove it from your mind. Doing my fantasy hockey, play a little chess, you know, play some golf, watch some hockey, whatever the case may be, outside of the game. And then I start to get the itch. Like after the World Series of Poker, the poker door was closed. Yeah, you took some time off. All of August, I didn't play any poker at all until just recently, you know. I started to get the itch again. Because that's what's important for me, is if I don't have the itch and I don't want to play poker, then I'm not gonna be at my best. Once I start getting the itch, that's when I start to say, okay, let's start watching some of these streams. Let's see what my opponents are up to lately. And, you know, let's look at some solvers and different things like that. And you're doing pretty good. You came back and doing pretty good. Yeah, so far. Do you like being in front of the camera through the hell of the World Series of Poker this year? You filmed every single day. You did a vlog. Does that energize you? Is that exhausting? Because it's really beneficial to a huge amount of people. It energizes the poker community. But do you see it as a service or do you purely just love it? I've been comfortable on camera since I was a kid. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor. Like really, really young. And I was always comfortable in that environment. I think like that gives me a little bit of an advantage sometimes too, with these film events. Cause I'm comfortable with the mic on and on camera with the lights. And I think a lot of people maybe aren't with the knowledge that other people are gonna see what they're doing every day. So it's been so comfortable and easy for me. As far as the World Series goes and the vlogs and all the shooting, it's kind of therapeutic for me. It is essentially my version of journaling, right? So there's a lot of value, I think, in like at the end of a day doing a brain dump where you just write out and journal. But doing it on camera has this similar effect. And it also, when you make a mistake on your own, you're held accountable to you. But when I have to explain it to others, like here's what I did. And this is the mistake I made or whatever the case may be. It actually, I think that helps me. Yeah, so you're held responsible by a larger audience. I think it's like, so like I said, listen, I'm 47, my life is good. I don't have to be in this tournament. If I'm over it, I can just dump my chips off and go home. But I can't when I'm doing the vlog, like I have to actually answer to that. And it keeps me in line. How hard is it to win the main event of the World Series of Poker? So the main event of the World Series of Poker is the hardest event to win simply because of the sheer size of it. You're talking seven, 8,000 players, right? And a lot of landmines. And frankly, there are so many players that you've not played with before too. You play these high roller events, like the super ones, you get 30, 40 people, you know everybody, right? So you have an idea. You sit at the main event, you don't have any idea. This guy wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey and sunglasses, and he just raised you big. I don't know this guy, I don't know what he's about. So there's a lot of like, it's grueling too. You're seven, eight days where you're in the blender as you might say, so. So what's the structure? So it's $10,000 buy in or something like that. And there's a bunch of tables and you just keep playing. Like when is it over for a single table? Does it go? So the way that it works is this. So there's, let's say 8,000 players. And the way the main event works, unique to others, is there's various day ones you can play, right? So a day one, you're gonna play from noon till like midnight, right? If you're still in, you bag up your chips and you'll come back for day two, okay? There's four different day ones, right? Now they'll all combine essentially to play on a day two. And at the end of the night, they redraw the tables. So you don't just win your table. If players get knocked out, tables break, they continue to be replaced. So you start with 8,000, then after day one, you've got 6,000, then you do the same. You play like a 12 hour day and you slowly whittle down. Day four, day three, day four, you're in the money. And then you continue to progress. And then what they do now with the final table is they, because they were trying to do this for TV, these final tables can take, you know, 12 hours to play. And what we were finding was, you know, you start the thing at 5 p.m. and it goes till 8 a.m. And like nobody's watching anymore. So they separate into three days now. And so you're talking now, it's like six, seven days to get to the final table and another three days to play it. So you're grinding for, you know, a week and a half. But most of the time you're playing against people you've never played against before. Especially early on, yeah. And then by the end, like, who knows? You know, rarely do you see, you see in the last hundred, you usually see some notable names. Then in the last 27, you might see one, maybe two. Final table, maybe one. But often it's gonna be, you know, some players you've never heard of before. Is there strategies that maximize your likelihood of having a chance? Yes, absolutely. Like I think the World Series of Poker main event is a unique animal in that, you know, like we talk about game theory and all that kind of stuff. If you're focused on that when you're playing, you're really not playing well, right? You need to just exploit because you're gonna have a lot of people who see this as a bucket list item. You know, they just wanna play the main event in the World Series. And they might be scared, they might be nervous or whatever. You don't have to worry about being balanced, right? Oh, you know, I have to make sure that I'm, no you don't. You might not, you're playing with this guy now for three hours, you might never see him again. So just make the play that makes sense for you, right? So yeah, you're gonna, I approach that event very differently than I would like playing against the high roller players that I play with today. Does that mean more aggressive essentially? Less actually. So when you play against really good players, you have to take small plus EV scenarios where you push the envelope and you're playing really aggressive. You're bluffing off your stack. You gotta do this. You gotta focus a little bit more on being balanced because otherwise, you know, you're not gonna beat these guys. Whereas if you're playing with amateurs and you're playing with regular players, for the most part, risking all your chips on a bluff, probably don't need to do that. You don't need to do that nearly as much. You can probably slowly but surely build your stack without taking, you know, those high risk, high variance situations because you'll find better situations. What mistakes do amateurs usually make in tournaments like that? Are they over bluffing? Well, I think amateurs generally, the biggest mistake they make is they think that pros are bluffing more than they are. So like a pro will bet all his chips on the end and they're like, ah, I don't know. Maybe, you know, it's Phil Ivey. Maybe he's doing some crazy stuff. He's like, probably not. He's probably just got it, you know? And then they lose all their money by calling or going all in as well. And so the right thing is to be more patient. So amateur is too impatient or just bad reads? So all the amateurs are built different. Some of the amateurs are just too weak and passive. They're just waiting for the nuts, you know? And then, you know, the pros, everyone notices that. And then when they make their big hand, they don't get paid anyway. So in order to win the main event, I mean, you have to have some components of your game that are aggressive. It's very unlikely to expect to just get the cards the whole way and just always have the best hand. You're gonna have to find ways to win pots that, you know, where you don't have the best hand. How do you win the final table? The final table is unique now, especially because you're talking about the way that poker works in tournaments is that if there's seven people left and you have just, you know, you're very short on chips. But if one other player goes out, you just make like $300,000 for folding, like just for sitting out, right? The term for that that, you know, show kids uses ICM, independent, you know, chip model, right, where it talks about the value of each chip. Where what happens, what we see now is, let's say one guy has a big chip lead and there's another guy who's second in chips and there's a couple that are short. These guys in the middle, they just play super tight and they wait for the little guys to go while the big stack is just pounding them because he can afford to, right? He knows that people are handcuffed. So let's say I had 10 million in chips and you have 9 million in chips. And these guys have little chips. If I go all in on you, are you gonna call me and risk like, you know, guaranteed pay jumps of like moving up a few spots? So really the question comes down to like, are you the type of guy who just wants to inch up or are you gonna go for it? And you're gonna go for the win. I think ultimately there's some value in being the guy who says, you know, I don't care if I come seventh. I'm not worried about going from seventh to fifth. I'm here to win. And so you're saying like the guys that win will often be the ones that call there. So like, they're not just bullying the small stacks, they're. Well, they're the ones, no, they're the ones that are willing to risk it, right? So there are some people who, you know, if there's five left, you know, and they're third in chips and there's two guys very short and you, you know, they'll have ace king and someone moves, they'll just fold. They fold the hand because they wanna wait for those two other players to get broke. And that way they let you know, they make actual money. So you, I guess the thought process between winning first place and winning the most amount of money are different. They're conflicting, right? Because in order to like win, if you're just, if your focus is only on winning the tournament, you will make mistakes financially where you had guaranteed income for just folding, right? Let's say a guy has one chip left, you know, one chip and me and you have good chips and I go all in with you and I lose. Now that guy, you know, got the guaranteed, you know, he got the pay jump that I wouldn't have got. So there's some extremely stupid mistakes you can make from a financial perspective, but it's often at odds with, you know, giving yourself the best chance to actually come first. And in a tournament, especially the main event, especially the final table, it's all about coming in first. Well, I know because most of the people who make it, so like, you know, when you play these high rollers, these guys are accustomed to playing for a hundred thousand, they're, they're accustomed to this kind of money. So they're going to play, right? For the most, but you're talking about guys who bought into a $10,000 tournament, maybe never had a hundred K cash in their life. And now they're sitting there and it's like 1 million for fifth and 2 million for fourth. So like, they don't want to be fifth, they're just going to sit there and go, ah, I don't want. So they'll, they'll be under more financial pressure because they're not like your typical high roller type player. Are you still able to find the guts to take big risks? Yeah, see, I'm trying to win. Like, I think that gives me an advantage, frankly, where I might make decisions that are financially suboptimal because I'm trying to win, but there's also an inherent advantage to that. Like that again, something I watched and learned from a guy like Michael Adamo, where he takes advantage of these people playing so passively in these spots where he's like, I don't, I'm not trying to come, I'm going to win. I'm just going to bull bulldoze you. Cause I'm not worried about, you know, the small financial mistake of, you know, a pay jump. What advice could you give to, to beginning poker players? Actually at every level, how to get better, how to improve, how to improve their game. Obviously, as you said, it's easiest to get better in the beginning, but what advice would you give how to get better? So one of the ways, I mean, I think way back to the how I started, right? And there's so many resources and tools available right now to analyze hands, but when you play, right? And you find yourself in a situation or a hand that you're not really sure about, not because you had aces and went all in and you lost, like that's not interesting, but an interesting situation where you're not sure what you did, jot the hand down, write it out. And then either A, you know, use some of the tools, whether it's the solvers, if you're advanced enough, or ask your group, you know, like have a couple of friends at your level and talk through the different decisions and start to learn that way, right? Cause those mistakes that you make or those tough, those tough hands, that's where the real learning comes from. Like, so that next, so basically if you're, cause you're gonna be in similar scenarios. In poker, you're rarely gonna have the identical situation, but you'll have situations that are similar. You know, you raise with ace king, someone three bet, another guy goes all in. Okay, well, what do I do in that spot? You know, it's, you're gonna have similar situations in the future as well. So figuring that out, the more you can do that, you chop away at, you know, different strategical mistakes, you know, you used to make that you no longer make. Are there resources like your masterclasses really is great? Are there books? So there was a guy named Michael Acevedo. This is my, again, for a little bit more advanced players, but it's a book called a modern poker theory, I think it's called, which sort of explains game theory, right? To the novice, right? So it's a little bit, I think if you're new to poker, it's probably above the rim for you. But once you start to get a little better and you wanna understand how to do it, it's probably a good resource for as far as books. And there's also like tons of people who stream poker, professional players. And then you can get in there and you get in on the chat and you start talking, you ask them, you see people, you know, explaining their thought process and things like that. There's so many free resources. And of course my masterclass, I think does a good job of sort of compartmentalizing, like, you know, how to attack it on a deeper level. And we, you know, we get it, I try to get into, what's funny when I did the masterclass, I asked them, I was like, well, you know, how high end do you want this in terms of poker? And they're like, we want really, really high end. And I was like, okay, sure. Then I started to explain really, really high end. I'm like, okay, well, maybe the one below that, right? So I try to explain really complex, you know, theory in a more palatable way, in English, if you will. Cause some of these kids, you hear them talk and you'd be like, huh? But you also, which is really nice, give example hands that really illustrate the point, which is really nice. You also wrote a book, I think 10 years ago, Power Holding Strategy. It's interesting to think how much of the stuff in that book still applies, how much doesn't. Listen, I still think the book holds up to a certain degree. Obviously like, you know, it isn't optimal because there's like a more advanced strategies. And if you played that way, people will figure out a way to exploit you. But if you're like an average player playing an average buy ins, like that's sort of what I coined, like small ball approach, absolutely will work. You know, at the highest level, you have to add much more, a lot more bluffing. But overall, I think it's still, you know, for the most part, there's a lot of really, especially with tournaments, there's a lot of really good principles in the book. What's the difference in the dynamics, if you could just comment on between a heads up poker and when multiple people are in one hand, what are interesting aspects to everything we've been talking about from game theory to exploitative strategies, all that kind of stuff. So the biggest difference when you play, let's say nine handed, you know, against eight other players and you know, heads up is, first of all, just the type of hands and the number of hands you're gonna have to play. So the way that it works is if there's nine people, two out of the nine hands, you have to put in money. And the other seven, you could just fold for nothing, okay? When you're heads up, you're forced to put money in every single hand, okay? And there's only one other hand in front of you, which means the ranges of hands that you play is way wider, right? So if you're nine handed, right? And you're in first position, you're like, all right, what do I need to play? Like a good pair, you know, two high cards suited, a big ace, you know, stuff like that, that's it, right? That's what you're gonna play, right? And you're gonna fold all the rest. When you're heads up, you look at a king and a two and you're like, well, I gotta play this. You know, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're forced to play a lot more hands in a lot more complex situations when you're playing heads up, because you're gonna be playing much far weaker hands. Queen five, Jack three, all these types of hands. And you're gonna see flops where you're, you're not gonna have the luxury of being like, I'm in there with a premium hand, queens, kings, aces. Those are easier to play, right? Very, very strong holdings. Heads up, you're forced to dance and fight a lot more. You know, you can't sit in the weeds and wait. What do you enjoy more? Heads up is very intense. I like heads up, but I think if you had to play heads up eight, 10 hours, it's so mentally draining because your face with so many constant decisions each and every spot. Like you play nine handed, you look at a nine and a three, you throw it away, you hang out for a bit, relax, you go, you get a little break and then play hand. Heads up, you're like, it's like, boom, boom. It's like you're in the ring, you know, you're in the octagon and you're facing like haymakers nonstop. Since we talked about online a bit, is it possible to cheat in poker, especially online? So we offline also talked about the cheating controversy that's going on in the chess world. Is it possible to use, what is it? Remotely connected anal beads to somehow cheat? No, is that a concern of cheating online? So here's the thing, it's kind of like romanticized from the old days, like, you know, in the Western stuff, like people trying to cheat. And have you ever killed a man because he cheated? No, I have not. But when I started out as a teenager, I played in a game with a bunch of Italians and I knew they cheated and I didn't care because they were so bad that I could win anyway. I was like, I knew they would cheat, but I knew how they were cheating. So I was like, all right, you guys suck. But so here's the thing, anytime you're talking about large sums of money, there will be people looking to take advantage, whether that's live or online, right? And so it's like the job essentially of the, you know, the online operators or the, you know, live event staff to police it the best they can. And the players themselves being on the lookout for it. You know, like a guy like Dole Brunson is a great resource because he's seen it all and he's seen all the tricks, you know, and so live, you know, he probably could spot a few things. But online, there's various ways people can try to cheat, but there's also really good security measures in place to catch them, you know? And we've caught, you know, like about two years ago, there was a huge undertaking of like 500 accounts that were banned for doing different things. And, you know, there's, and again, you can't go in, they can't go into detail in terms of how they're doing it. Cause otherwise, you know, then you're sort of giving the cheats the playbook in terms of how to take advantage. But it's always gonna be a concern for poker wherever you play, right? But it's not something I'm worried about personally. So at the highest in person, and by the way, online there's really interesting algorithms that do some of the work in an automated way to detect, to flag things that are weird. But in person, it's just not something at the highest level that you're super concerned about. So it's not, it didn't quite infiltrate the poker world to a degree where it's a huge concern. Yeah, like, so here's the thing. I don't play in private games and whatever, right? But in private games, theoretically, you know, you could be in, if you don't trust the people you're playing with, like I've heard stories of people where, you know, they have an earpiece in that you can't see, right? And they have, you know, like RFID on the cards or something like that, and they have a phone reading it. So they have somebody in a truck telling them, you're gonna win this hand, you're gonna lose this hand. Like that happened in a private game. You know, and the guy, what's often funny about some of these people who cheat is they're so greedy and blatantly obvious that they get caught. Where if they use this tool in a more subtle way, they could probably continue to get away with it. But again, that's not something I worry about in a casino environment, you know, in these tournaments and things like that. But if I was playing in private games, like if I came down to Texas and some guy, I got cheated in a game by a guy named Blackie Blackburn and Tex, I was at the Chimo Hotel, I was a teenager and they saw me playing, you know, I was making good money as a teenager. I had like a $13,000 bankroll, you know, and I went and played in this game with them in a private hotel room and found out later that the guy was a card mechanic, you know, he was dealing and he could, you know, deal you the hands and he knew what you had and stuff like that. So yeah, I remember, you know, I lost a big number in that game and it was a good learning lesson in terms of, you know, being wary of who you trust. Yeah, so if the dealer is in on it, that's one way you could cheat. It's fascinating. That's part of the reason that they cut. So like, you'll see like, there's a burn card because what would happen in, you know, maybe in the old days is like, if you're sitting in the one seat, I could lift the card and you could see it, the next card coming, right? So what they do is they have a card on top of it that you burn that isn't the card and then the next card is the one that comes face up. I just learned about the edge sorting thing that Phil Ivey and maybe others were involved with. I just, reading it at first was super interesting to me that you can exploit the imperfections in the printing of cards. That was almost cool to me. That's almost not cheating because it's like. That needs to be a movie. That needs to be a movie, yes. Yeah, what happened with Phil Ivey in that whole case is it's a catastrophe, really. It is such a horrible precedent. Cause here's what he did. Phil Ivey shows up at the casino says, I want to play this game. They say, okay, all right, I want to play with those decks. They say, okay, they agree to everything that he says. He never touches the cards. He doesn't do anything outside of the fact that your cards that you supplied have imperfections on them and he can see them. Okay, so that increases his chances of winning. He could still lose theoretically, right? Probably not, but he can lose. In theory, it just gives him a little bit of an edge and it's all stuff based on what you provided. Yeah. So the idea that you offered a game, I accepted, I beat you and now you want to free roll me? That's disgusting. So for people who don't know, maybe you can elaborate and it's just fascinating to me, but you're exploiting the imperfections in the card patterns on the back and then they look different if you rotate it. And the fascinating thing too, when you shuffle, usually you don't rotate the cards so that you can see the sort of detect which cards are the strong cards by marking them by through rotating them. And the way you know they're rotated is because of the pattern imperfections. Yeah, so some of the cards, like you said, like they had that pattern on it and some of them, this was faulty cards on there, were not cut properly. So like the eights and nines had the card cut differently and those are important cards in this game, the eights and nines or whatever. So you could essentially, from looking at the back of the card, discern what it's gonna be. You do nothing in terms of like cheating yourself. You're not rigging the game. All you're doing is taking advantage of the fact that you're playing, you've offered me cards that are faulty. Can I just say that, of course, it would be Phil Ivey, who's the goat at the normal game who will figure out this particular thing. I mean, that's what, if you're into soccer, this Diego Maradona has that famous hand of God in the World Cup where he scores a goal with his hand. And so, of course, the referee didn't see it. They thought it was a header. So, I mean, part of the magic of the genius of the people at the top of the game is they're able to exploit all the flaws that are there. That's a beautiful thing to see. Well, see, Phil had, in his heyday, he had, he exploited weaknesses in casinos, systems all over the country. Like in one night, I don't know if you know this story. In one night, he would take a plane, a private plane, and fly to 30 different casinos all over the country. Cause he would have these deals where they're like, all right, we've got this big rich sucker who's gonna come here and play craps and he's gonna lose all our money. So he'd have this deal with one of the casinos where they'd be like, all right, you get 20% back up to half a million, right? So if you lose half a million, we'll give you back 100K. So he'd go to one casino in Tunica, he'd play half a million, win, win or lose, he would leave. They think they're gonna get him to stay, they get him a big room or whatever. So let's say he goes to Tunica, he loses half a million. Now he goes, he flies to Atlantic city, he wins half a million. He lost half a million and won half a million, but he got 100,000 back. So he's actually plus 100,000. Do that at 10 casinos a night, you're making a million dollars in free equity. And they would give him promotional chips and all these kinds of things and free flights and stuff like that. So he took advantage of the image that they're trying to exploit. So this is why I don't have any empathy for these casinos. Cause they're giving you free drinks, they're giving you, why do you think they're doing that? The kindness of their heart. They're trying to exploit you. So guess what? You lost at your own game, pay the piper. And I think it was crazy. Cause the judges in his case said, he did not cheat, but yeah, it's probably not right. Hold on. You just said he didn't cheat. That should be the end of the case. And then the casinos do the funny thing. I mentioned to you, I was just at the UFC and Dana White is a huge gambler. She's a blackjack gambler. And there's that famous situation where you got kicked out of a casino and the casinos do that kind of thing when you win too much. So he won some ridiculous amount of money. He bets like, I mean, he plays like millions of dollars on hands of blackjack, it's insane. And so he won really big and he got kicked out. Was he counting? No, no, he wasn't counting. So counting in blackjack here in Las Vegas is like the only game where they actually can ask you not to play. So like basically if you're counting cards, right? You could potentially have an edge in blackjack and there are some professionals who do that, but they get caught pretty quickly. And then they say, you can play craps, you can play whatever you want, but you can't play blackjack here anymore. No, I think, I don't think Dana White is counting. I think he was winning a lot. I guess they can claim that they believe you're counting because how do you really know if you're counting? Well, they easily, they figure it out. So basically they have an eye in the sky and they can see, so if you're varying your bet size, right? So there are certain spots where based on the cards that are out, let's say for example, a lot of the twos, threes and fours and fives have been coming out. So the deck is rich in face cards. That's very good for the player, right? So imagine you were betting 500 bucks and then all of a sudden you up your bet to 2000 or 5,000 when the deck is rich. They know when the deck is rich in high cards because they keep a counter themselves. So if they notice a player increasing their bet sizes when the deck is good for them, it's a telltale sign. Interesting, I don't think Dana White would be counting. And so casinos don't kick you out if you don't often kick you out. Do they ever kick you out if you make too much money? Because you're playing millions of dollars that they. Unless they, they would never kick you out for making too much money, unless they suspect cheating. Because why would they? They have an advantage, they want the money back. It's not like you go in there, win 10 million, you're like, oh no, that's enough for us. What about if he was talking shit the whole time? I wonder. I don't think that would matter. Because in the long run, they'll get the money back. Exactly. You tweeted, if you watched Jersey Shore, Family Vacation, we would probably get along really well. What is it about, because I lived in Jersey for a while, what is it about Jersey Shore characters that you love? I just love that they're sort of, I love the debauchery. I think Pauly D's a fun guy, you know, and just like, it's just something like, it's just, it's what do you call it? It's trash TV, it's a guilty pleasure. But you can just watch the Snooki get drunk and fallen all over herself or whatever. Is that part, do you love that part of Vegas as well? Not really, I don't go out and stuff, but I just like the characters. I like that they have unique personalities. And I think we live in a world now where people are more and more careful of what they say and afraid of backlash and all that stuff. And it's kind of like an old school version of just like, say what you feel, it's okay, as long as your intent is good. And they haven't been canceled, if you will, which is good, but I feel like their type of behavior slowly but surely, like, cause they got a lot of flack originally for misrepresenting like Italian Americans or something like that. Like there was a lot of backlash about this and how Italian Americans really are and blah, blah, blah. So they sort of were representing that group of people and, you know, they received some backlash back in the day. I'm a huge supporter of diversity in all the beautiful forms that the human species is able to generate. And that's certainly one dimension. What's the greatest Vegas movie, would you say? I don't know if that's a difficult question, but Fear of Loathing in Las Vegas, Leaving Las Vegas, Casino. I watch, cause anytime Casino's on randomly, I always watch it. Such a great movie. It could be one of the Sharon Stone. Sharon, frankly, Sharon Stone reminded me, every time I would watch the movie, it reminded me of my wife, Amanda, like totally. I would see like the character and I was like, I'm the Robert De Niro character in the film. It was, I used to watch it through that lens, you know. From like the depth of love that you have. Just kind of, she was, I remember that she was like, she was like, she lit up every room. She does light up every room. She goes there, everybody's attracted and drawn to her. And she was kind of, when she was younger, she was a little wild and crazy and whatnot. So she reminded me of the Sharon Stone character. And then the Robert De Niro character is trying to like have a stable life, you know, and be that. And that was me. Who was the Joe Pesci in your life? Well, there was a guy named, there was a James Woods for sure, who was the Lester. We called him, we actually called him Lester. A few of my friends call him Lester. The greasy guy who tried to get back in and all that. But yeah. Yeah, one of my favorite scenes is when they meet out in the desert and it's like a 50, 50 odds if you're gonna make it out alive in that. I mean, yeah, there's an epicness to that portrayal of Vegas. I love, I mean, it's just totally, I mean, it's obviously more corporate now and it's different, but I love those movies. I love all those movies, just seeing that life. And like I said, if there was a period in time that I could go back to and just experience it, it would be that, you know, right around then. There'll be that, playing with a mob and not. I think of like these crime shows today, like they're so unrealistic now because if they're in an era that is now, like none of this stuff can happen because there's cameras everywhere. You can't like get away with these, like killing somebody and jumping in a car and you're gonna get caught, you know? But in the 70s, you know, that stuff happened. Across the line, you die. Yeah, Lake Mead is recently like losing water and like every couple of days they're finding more and more bodies from that era. Oh no. They really are. You're close with your mom. What did you learn about life from your mom? My mother was very generous. My mother, she experienced joy through giving people food. For the most part, my dad would get them drinks and that was how she felt fulfilled, right? She felt good when she like would cook for you. And like, she'd be that person you'd come over and she'd be like, are you hungry? And you say, no, no, no, I'm okay. She's gonna put 15 things in front of you and you'll eat. You know, you're gonna eat. Cause everyone does that to be polite. No, no, I'm good. But you know, they will start to eat. And just her hospitality in that regard and just being generous and like being a good host to people and things like that, like. How did that define, like help define who you are as a person, that generosity? Did it rub off on you? It made me think about in my life when it comes to like any sort of business deals or things like that, I don't wanna get the best of it in such a way where I screw the other person. I genuinely don't. I'd much rather you owe me than me owe you. So if I hire people, they get paid more than they're supposed to. And I'd rather them do that and work towards it rather than feel underpaid. Cause if they're underpaid, they'll likely under deliver. Whereas if they feel overpaid, then if I need them to do something special, they're not gonna be like, hey, I don't get paid for that. Like, yeah, you do. You really do. So that's certainly like played out in my life where I set it up in such a way where I don't owe, you know, I'm owed, but that's okay. Cause I can handle taking the worst of it in spots. I don't like being the person to, you know, feel like I'm indebted to others. Yeah, in some way, the karma of that tends to pay dividends in the longterm. Somehow there's somebody up there that's keeping track in some kind of way. What advice would you give to young people today in high school and college? How to have a career they can be proud of or maybe how to have a life in general they can be proud of? I would say like your 20s is a good opportunity to set yourself up for the rest of your life, right? So while the 20s are a period where you wanna have fun and you wanna experience youth, it's also a good opportunity to start thinking about what do you want your life to look like in your 30s and your 40s, right? So I feel like it's the best time to really put yourself out there and take risks and try to hit it, you know, whatever, you know, like to work really, really hard to set yourself up. Because, and I said this at an event I was speaking at, when you're like with poker, when your bankroll is very, very small, it's replenishable, right? You don't need to protect it as much as you do once you've got something, right? Once you have a brand or you have money, you have something like that, that's when you wanna start protecting you. But in your 20s is an opportunity to just really sort of get, you know, to work really, really hard to set yourself up, you know, for the future. I am concerned a little bit, like every time I talk to kids today, I'm like, what do you wanna be? They all wanna be YouTubers or Instagram stars or rappers, right? Like, okay, I was like, that's cool, but like, there's only so many of those, you know, that there can be. So it might be worthwhile having a little bit of a backup plan. I think it's easier to be successful on Instagram and social media if you do something else. And I would say this too. One other thing I would say is, don't choose a profession or an idea because you think it'll make you rich, right? Pursue something that you actually love. Because if you love it, you're way more likely to become rich. If you don't, you do something that you don't actually enjoy. Now you're spending a lot of your life unhappy, doing something you don't want, and if you're not passionate about it, you're probably not, the chances of you being successful are much lower. And also becoming rich, and I've talked to a lot of rich people, hang out with a lot of rich people, is not going to be as fulfilling as you imagine. If you arrive there by not doing the thing that you love doing. That's true. Ultimately, the thing that you love doing is like, that's what makes life worth it. There's another quote, I can't remember who it was, otherwise I would quote them, but it says something to the effect of like, if we believe in the lie that more is always better, then we can never truly arrive. Because wherever we are, more is better, right? I've never understood, and I've been around rich people, like you said, you know, the bill, I never got, I can't, I don't get it. Like, if you have a billion dollars, why do you give a shit about money at all? Like, and they're still like, oh, we made this deal, and I'm like, you know, we picked up 300, who cares? Like, your life is set. Like, there is that bell curve, right? Where obviously being in poverty, you know, there's obviously a high rate of unhappiness, but there's a certain amount of money where you reach, you know, where you reach a level of happiness, and then too much, you find the people that are searching for money to fulfill these holes, it starts to go back down again. Well, the getting more money could become a game, like a sport, that's fun to play, as long as you directly or indirectly acknowledge that what you love is the game of it, versus the actual attainment of money. And I think that's what it is, right? For me, I've never cared about money that much. I just never did, otherwise I would have a lot more of it. But it's always, like, it's always been strange to me how people that have that kind of money, like, are cheap in any way, you know? Like, they wouldn't donate 5,000 to a worthwhile charity, because it's like, buddy, this, like, when it changes your life, not, I don't even like, like, small things, like taxes. Like, okay, you have $20 billion, and you're worried about paying 33%, 30% to 31. I get it, I get the point of it all, but like, it literally has no effect on your life whatsoever. Your life is unchanged, whether it's 31 or 33. Yeah, that's the negative of a lot of money, is if it corrupts the way you see the world, you start to be protective and so on. I mean, part of the challenge of when you get a lot of money is people start to treat you differently, and so navigating that correctly is very challenging. So don't change, remain the same person you always were, because if you change, you start to, I mean, that's why power corrupts, is you get a lot of power, you get a lot of fame, you get a lot of money, you start to distrust people, and you start to push away people that are actually really close to you with trusting. And you also, I think, you develop some biases where you think, like, you're just this, you know, you think, like, it was all you, and you're a genius, and you're so great, and all these other people who don't have, it's just because they don't have what you have, and then you start to view that group of people, whether they're impoverished or whatever is less than, and that you're some great guru where you could have just got lucky and bought Bitcoins that you could have done anything, and then you became super wealthy, and then you have this Dunning Kruger effect, where you think you know everything about everything. And a lot of poker people have that, and listen, I'm probably guilty in some ways too, thinking because you can figure out poker and be great at that, that you could figure out anything. So it's true, right? I mean, we sort of, we genuinely feel like people that reach the highest levels of poker feel like they are intelligent. So they will look at problem solving and think that they have answers. Well, you have to remind yourself that you're not. It's best to see the world as you did just get lucky, or at least from my perspective, that you're not better than anybody. I don't think there's anything wrong with, like, acknowledging that you worked hard to get where you were. Like, there isn't, but at the same time, like, it's not available to everybody in the same way. You know, right time, right place. Like, for me, my poker career could have gone very differently, you know? If things didn't work out, you know, if I had some bad luck in the wrong times, like, who knows where I'd be? So you said your brain crawl is pretty small in your 20s. I'm sure you've been around a lot of people you care a lot about who've lost everything in poker. What's that like? What's those low points of losing everything? I think because I've been there, I have more empathy than I probably should for those people. I really feel for them. Cause I remember being in Vegas and being totally broke and like a guy loaning me $400 and me like turning that 400 into 20,000, 400 bucks. And it was like eternally grateful to that. So when I have friends who go through that, like I always try to consult them, obviously what they really need is money for the most part. But I remember saying no to one friend because he didn't have a plan. So I like to try to help them in that regard. Like my buddy's like, can you stake me in this game? And I was like, all right, well, how much do you, then I was like, let's break down the math, bro. You want me to stake you? So you get 50% of the profit, right? So I said, how much do you think you can make in this game? How much does the biggest winners make? It's like, well, I can probably, you know, I probably do like 20,000 a month in this game. So, okay. So you get half of that cause I get 10, right? What is your monthly nut? How much are you spending? It's like, well, I'm renting this thing for 8,000. You're spending 17,000 a month. So like, no matter what you're set up to fail. Like this isn't going to work. So I actually didn't give him the money. And I was like, what you need to do to earn more money is lower your monthly nut because it's too high. It just, you know, it just doesn't mathematically add up. So trying to set them right in that regard is something that like I feel obliged to do, especially if they're friends. But what about the mental aspect of the struggle they're going through, the struggle you were going through? Just, I mean, it's really rough to have no money. It's not for everybody. This really isn't. Like a lot of people might, you know, listen to this and think like, oh, I want to play poker. It's like, most people fail. Most people who want to play in the NFL, they spend their college years, like most of them are not going to make it. Most of you who try to play poker professionally are going to fail and you're going to experience despair. Okay? There are those like in anything that have the passion, have the knowhow, have the luck and all that sort of stuff. And it all pans out, but you know, they're the minority. And so for the low points, if you remember, what does it take to sort of overcome that, overcome the mental struggle? I mean, you're making it sound like certain people are just genetically able to in certain. I do think some people are more apt to being able to deal with like adversity and having resilience and some people just can't hack it. But like I generally, what I would advise, you know, people that are, let's say a guy's playing, you know, really high stakes or whatever, doing badly is step number one is take, take a little bit of a break here. Let's recalibrate and let's start small again. Let's, you know, let's restart and let's play smaller stakes and let's get our confidence back because in poker, without confidence, you cannot be successful. It is incredibly important to have almost an inflated level of confidence in yourself because you're up against it, right? As I said, the majority of people fail. So why are you special? Why are you different? You have to be pretty confident about your, you know, yourself to think that you are one of the chosen ones. And then don't resist the despair and take a nap. Definitely take a nap. Listen, it's okay to experience it. Like I said, yeah, you're going to experience despair. What else would you, what should you be feeling? You know, if things are going poorly and you've just lost all your money, excited? Maybe like, okay, have your moment of grief, allow yourself to experience it so that you can, you know, reassemble. There's a fundamental way in which you haven't really lived life if you haven't experienced periods of despair. You have a jaded view of the world, right? Weird thing about the human condition that both the highs and the lows are important. Yeah. What role does love play in the human condition, Daniel Negrano? That's a good one. What role has love played in your life? It's, yeah, that's, you know, you sort of talked about the ups and downs of the human condition and love has been that for me, right? Like I'm in a good place now, but you know, even with my now wife years ago, you know, she was young, she was, you know, new to poker and she wasn't ready to settle down. I was like, when I met her, I think I was 31, she was 21. And I was ready to like lock her up, if you will, you know, let's do this. And I bought a ring way back when she was like, not about that. She was living the Hollywood life. She was living, you know, partying in LA, doing that kind of stuff and wasn't ready. And we split and that one hit me hard. So I didn't realize how much of a hit that had on my confidence in my, in everything really, in poker, with other women. It had me a little jaded about women too, you know, resentful, you know, and it took a lot of like self, I did like a lot of personal growth work and workshops and things like that. And then didn't see her for years. And she came back to town, I was a much different person. It was just, you know, four years ago or something like that. And she was too, went to dinner. A few months later, we were married. It worked out so different because we both had to grow, you know, and become different people. And that love was still there somehow. Yeah, like she went through her relationships. I went through mine, you know, we experienced life and I was married once before too, you know, called my starter marriage, if you will, which yeah, you know, we just, you don't know. I think like until you do it, until you get married and you know, experience like the sacrifice, not necessarily the sacrifices, but your value systems, if they don't align identically, which they're not going to, someone like me, probably one of my strengths in poker, but my weaknesses in relationship is judgment, right? When I play poker, I need to judge you. That's essentially what I'm doing. I'm gauging who you are and what you're good at and what you're bad at. And that can have repercussions because it leads, that's how I view, that's the lens I look at everyone with based on how you live your life. I'm judging you, this guy's this, this guy's that, this guy's that, and that's not healthy. So you have to shut that off. You have to learn to like, and the thing, I finally realized what love is, frankly for me, with her is no judgment, right? She's so like, yeah, so I have my way of being, right? If she wants to have cereal for dinner, babe, that's the best decision for her. I was living in a framework of better and worse. The way that I do things is better and yours is worse, do things more like I do. That's a recipe for disaster. True acceptance and true love is accepting someone like exactly as they are. You know, if she wants to do something different, I'm going to support her, whatever it is. Even if I disagree with it personally, and like the way that I would do things, learning to just realize that she's had a different journey and a different walk towards where she's at than I have. So I can't pass my judgments on other people like that. I believe it is ethically wrong and probably illegal to eat cereal for dinner. Listen, if she wants it, she wants it. Acceptance. Like when she goes to bed, like all these little things, but my regimented life, she's not. Like our motto at our wedding was like, you keep me wild, I'll keep you safe, you keep me wild. I keep her safe, she keeps me wild. She's like not organized and anal and all those kind of things, I am. She helps me like let loose. You know, oh no, I'm eating this, this. She's like, have some popcorn. Like, all right, let's do it, you know? She keeps me freed. And accepting that, embracing that, the difference is the chaos of it. Yeah. That's what makes it. Like I literally do think about with her, how important it is and how much I try to like just come from neutral and like compassion and never judge. Cause she's got other things that she deals with, right? That I don't, she's bipolar, right? So with that, I've studied and I've learned a lot about, you know, sort of mental health and what that means and ways in which a lot of characteristics about somebody is completely out of their control when they're bipolar, right? And there's swings, like there's no cocktail for bipolar that solves the issue, right? So there's medications that work to, you know, level you out for periods of time, but then they start to fade and they don't work as well. So they constantly need readjustment. It's an unsolved mystery to a certain degree. So in some sense, you know, her diagnosis made our relationship easier because I don't take anything personal, right? I realized that sometimes she's gonna be in a mood. I mean, she's so good about communicating it though. She tells me some morning she'll be like bad mood trying to get out of it, babe. I'm like, okay, I leave her alone. Well, that's great. That means she's grown to be able to communicate, to understand, to self reflect, to understand where she is. I have people in my life who I love who are bipolar. It's a beautiful ride. It is, right? Yeah, it's, yeah, the highs and the lows are there. So, but yeah, like, because I feel like a protector. For me, I just want to be a rock, right? And that's part of the whole serial thing. If she wants to eat cereal, don't make a wrong for anything she wants to do. What have you learned from life from the song, The Gambler by Kenny Rogers? You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be plenty of time for counting when the dealing's done. Is that, do you live by those words or? The first part of it for sure. What do they even mean? Cause. You got to know when to hold, know when. So basically it's like, all right, you know, in life, like, you know, let's say, let's use a, whatever, the market, for example, you bought a stock, right? Or you bought Bitcoin and you're like, it's going to go to the moon, right? It's like, okay, well, maybe things have changed. New scenario, new circumstances, new situation. Are you going down with the ship, right? Or are you going to lay the hand down? Are you going to fold it? Whether it's a relationship, you know, you're with this woman, you're like, all right, I think it's time to fold this one. I think, you know, I don't think that we're going to be able to make this, this hand work right now. When to fold them and when to run. Yeah. So maybe every gambler knows that the secret to surviving is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep because every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. That's like a stoic philosophy. And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep. Every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser. What does that mean? I like that one. I like, for me, that's like the difference between victim and responsible, like the way that I think about it, right? You can be a victim to circumstance or you can be responsible for everything in your life, right? So when an event happens, the event itself is neither good or bad until you assign it value, right? So like an event happens and it can be traumatic, it can be, you know, painful, but you know, how you respond to it is ultimately going to be up to you. Like you actually do have a choice. And that's the thing you can control. The fact that you, Daniel Negrano took my commentary about The Gambler seriously shows once more that you're a beautiful human being. Thank you so much for being who you are, for inspiring millions of people about poker, about how to live life. And thank you for giving me your valuable time today. This is amazing. Thanks for talking. It was fun, man. It was great to have the conversation. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Daniel Negrano. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Doyle Brunson. Poker is war. People pretend it is a game. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Daniel Negreanu: Poker | Lex Fridman Podcast #324

turns out that if you train a planarian and then cut their heads off, the tail will regenerate a brand new brain that still remembers the original information. I think planaria hold the answer to pretty much every deep question of life. For one thing, they're similar to our ancestors. So they have true symmetry, they have a true brain, they're not like earthworms, they're, you know, they're much more advanced life form. They have lots of different internal organs, but they're these little, they're about, you know, maybe two centimeters in the centimeter to two in size. And they have a head and a tail. And the first thing is planaria are immortal. So they do not age. There's no such thing as an old planarian. So that right there tells you that these theories of thermodynamic limitations on lifespan are wrong. It's not that well over time of everything degrades. No, planaria can keep it going for probably, you know, how long have they been around 400 million years, right? So these are the actual, so the planaria in our lab are actually in physical continuity with planaria that were here 400 million years ago. The following is a conversation with Michael Levin, one of the most fascinating and brilliant biologists I've ever talked to. He and his lab at Tufts University works on novel ways to understand and control complex pattern formation in biological systems. Andre Karpathy, a world class AI researcher, is the person who first introduced me to Michael Levin's work. I bring this up because these two people make me realize that biology has a lot to teach us about AI, and AI might have a lot to teach us about biology. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Michael Levin. Embryogenesis is the process of building the human body from a single cell. I think it's one of the most incredible things that exists on earth from a single embryo. So how does this process work? Yeah, it is an incredible process. I think it's maybe the most magical process there is. And I think one of the most fundamentally interesting things about it is that it shows that each of us takes the journey from so called just physics to mind, right? Because we all start life as a single quiescent, unfertilized oocyte, and it's basically a bag of chemicals, and you look at that and you say, okay, this is chemistry and physics. And then nine months and some years later, you have an organism with high level cognition and preferences and an inner life and so on. And what embryogenesis tells us is that that transformation from physics to mind is gradual. It's smooth. There is no special place where, you know, a lightning bolt says, boom, now you've gone from physics to true cognition. That doesn't happen. And so we can see in this process that the whole mystery, you know, the biggest mystery of the universe, basically, how you get mind from matter. From just physics, in quotes. Yeah. So where's the magic into the thing? How do we get from information encoded in DNA and make physical reality out of that information? So one of the things that I think is really important if we're going to bring in DNA into this picture is to think about the fact that what DNA encodes is the hardware of life. DNA contains the instructions for the kind of micro level hardware that every cell gets to play with. So all the proteins, all the signaling factors, the ion channels, all the cool little pieces of hardware that cells have, that's what's in the DNA. The rest of it is in so called generic laws. And these are laws of mathematics. These are laws of computation. These are laws of physics, of all kinds of interesting things that are not directly in the DNA. And that process, you know, I think the reason I always put just physics in quotes is because I don't think there is such a thing as just physics. I think that thinking about these things in binary categories, like this is physics, this is true cognition, this is as if it's only faking these kinds of things. I think that's what gets us in trouble. I think that we really have to understand that it's a continuum and we have to work up the scaling, the laws of scaling. And we can certainly talk about that. There's a lot of really interesting thoughts to be had there. So the physics is deeply integrated with the information. So the DNA doesn't exist on its own. The DNA is integrated as, in some sense, in response to the laws of physics at every scale. The laws of the environment it exists in. Yeah, the environment and also the laws of the universe. I mean, the thing about the DNA is that it's once evolution discovers a certain kind of machine, that if the physical implementation is appropriate, it's sort of, and this is hard to talk about because we don't have a good vocabulary for this yet, but it's a very kind of a platonic notion that if the machine is there, it pulls down interesting things that you do not have to evolve from scratch because the laws of physics give it to you for free. So just as a really stupid example, if you're trying to evolve a particular triangle, you can evolve the first angle and you evolve the second angle, but you don't need to evolve the third. You know what it is already. Now, why do you know? That's a gift for free from geometry in a particular space. You know what that angle has to be. And if you evolve an ion channel, which is, ion channels are basically transistors, right? They're voltage gated current conductances. If you evolve that ion channel, you immediately get to use things like truth tables. You get logic functions. You don't have to evolve the logic function. You don't have to evolve a truth table. It doesn't have to be in the DNA. You get it for free, right? And the fact that if you have NAND gates, you can build anything you want, you get that for free. All you have to evolve is that first step, that first little machine that enables you to couple to those laws. And there's laws of adhesion and many other things. And this is all that interplay between the hardware that's set up by the genetics and the software that's made, right? The physiological software that basically does all the computation and the cognition and everything else is a real interplay between the information and the DNA and the laws of physics of computation and so on. So is it fair to say, just like this idea that the laws of mathematics are discovered, they're latent within the fabric of the universe in that same way the laws of biology are kind of discovered? Yeah, I think that's absolutely, and it's probably not a popular view, but I think that's right on the money. Yeah. Well, I think that's a really deep idea. Then embryogenesis is the process of revealing, of embodying, of manifesting these laws. You're not building the laws. You're just creating the capacity to reveal. Yes. I think, again, not the standard view of molecular biology by any means, but I think that's right on the money. I'll give you a simple example. Some of our latest work with these xenobots, right? So what we've done is to take some skin cells off of an early frog embryo and basically ask about their plasticity. If we give you a chance to sort of reboot your multicellularity in a different context, what would you do? Because what you might assume by... The thing about embryogenesis is that it's super reliable, right? It's very robust. And that really obscures some of its most interesting features. We get used to it. We get used to the fact that acorns make oak trees and frog eggs make frogs. And we say, well, what else is it going to make? That's what it makes. That's a standard story. But the reality is... And so you look at these skin cells and you say, well, what do they know how to do? Well, they know how to be a passive boring two dimensional outer layer, keeping the bacteria from getting into the embryo. That's what they know how to do. Well, it turns out that if you take these skin cells and you remove the rest of the embryo, so you remove all of the rest of the cells and you say, well, you're by yourself now, what do you want to do? So what they do is they form this multi little creature that runs around the dish. They have all kinds of incredible and incredible capacities. They navigate through mazes. They have various behaviors that they do both independently and together. Basically, they implement von Neumann's dream of self replication, because if you sprinkle a bunch of loose cells into the dish, what they do is they run around, they collect those cells into little piles. They sort of mush them together until those little piles become the next generation of xenobots. So you've got this machine that builds copies of itself from loose material in its environment. None of this are things that you would have expected from the frog genome. In fact, the genome is wild type. There's nothing wrong with their genetics. Nothing has been added, no nanomaterials, no genomic editing, nothing. And so what we have done there is engineered by subtraction. What you've done is you've removed the other cells that normally basically bully these cells into being skin cells. And you find out that what they really want to do is to be this, their default behaviors to be a xenobot. But in vivo, in the embryo, they get told to be skinned by these other cell types. And so now here comes this really interesting question that you just posed. When you ask where does the form of the tadpole and the frog come from, the standard answer is, well, it's selection. So over millions of years, it's been shaped to produce the specific body that's fit for froggy environments. Where does the shape of the xenobot come from? There's never been any xenobots. There's never been selection to be a good xenobot. These cells find themselves in the new environment. In 48 hours, they figure out how to be an entirely different protoorganism with new capacities like kinematic self replication. That's not how frogs or tadpoles replicate. We've made it impossible for them to replicate their normal way. Within a couple of days, these guys find a new way of doing it that's not done anywhere else in the biosphere. Well, actually, let's step back and define, what are xenobots? So a xenobot is a self assembling little protoorganism. It's also a biological robot. Those things are not distinct. It's a member of both classes. How much is it biology? How much is that robot? At this point, most of it is biology because what we're doing is we're discovering natural behaviors of the cells and also of the cell collectives. Now, one of the really important parts of this was that we're working together with Josh Bongaert's group at University of Vermont. They're computer scientists, they do AI, and they've basically been able to use a simulated evolution approach to ask, how can we manipulate these cells, give them signals, not rewire their DNA, so not hardware, but experience signals? So can we remove some cells? Can we add some cells? Can we poke them in different ways to get them to do other things? So in the future, there's going to be, we're now, and this is future unpublished work, but we're doing all sorts of interesting ways to reprogram them to new behaviors. But before you can start to reprogram these things, you have to understand what their innate capacities are. Okay, so that means engineering, programming, you're engineering them in the future. And in some sense, the definition of a robot is something you in part engineer versus evolve. I mean, it's such a fuzzy definition anyway, in some sense, many of the organisms within our body are kinds of robots. And I think robots is a weird line because it's, we tend to see robots as the other. I think there will be a time in the future when there's going to be something akin to the civil rights movements for robots, but we'll talk about that later perhaps. Anyway, so how do you, can we just linger on it? How do you build a Xenobot? What are we talking about here? From when does it start and how does it become the glorious Xenobot? Yeah, so just to take one step back, one of the things that a lot of people get stuck on is they say, well, you know, engineering requires new DNA circuits or it requires new nanomaterials, you know, what the thing is, we are now moving from old school engineering, which use passive materials, right? That things, you know, wood, metal, things like this, that basically the only thing you could depend on is that they were going to keep their shape. That's it. They don't do anything else. It's on you as an engineer to make them do everything they're going to do. And then there were active materials and now computation materials. This is a whole new era. These are agential materials. This is you're now collaborating with your substrate because your material has an agenda. These cells have, you know, billions of years of evolution. They have goals. They have preferences. They're not just going to sit where you put them. That's hilarious that you have to talk your material into keeping its shape. That's it. That is exactly right. That is exactly right. Stay there. It's like getting a bunch of cats or something and trying to organize the shape out of them. It's funny. We're on the same page here because in a paper, this is, this is currently just been accepted in nature by engineering. One of the figures I have is building a tower out of Legos versus dogs, right? So think about the difference, right? If you build out of Legos, you have full control over where it's going to go. But if somebody knocks it over, it's game over. With the dogs, you cannot just come and stack them. They're not going to stay that way. But the good news is that if you train them, then somebody knocks it over, they'll get right back up. So it's all right. So as an engineer, what you really want to know is what can they depend on this thing to do, right? That's really, you know, a lot of people have definitions of robots as far as what they're made of or how they got here, you know, design versus evolve, whatever. I don't think any of that is useful. I think, I think as an engineer, what you want to know is how much can I depend on this thing to do when I'm not around to micromanage it? What level of, what level of dependency can I, can I give this thing? How much agency does it have? Which then tells you what techniques do you use? So do you use micromanagement, like you put everything where it goes? Do you train it? Do you give it signals? Do you try to convince it to do things, right? How much, you know, how intelligent is your substrate? And so now we're moving into this, into this area where you're, you're, you're working with agential materials. That's a collaboration. That's not, that's not old, old style. What's the word you're using? Agential? Agential. Yeah. What's that mean? Agency. It comes from the word agency. So, so basically the material has agency, meaning that it has some, some level of obviously not human level, but some level of preferences, goals, memories, ability to remember things, to compute into the future, meaning anticipate, you know, when you're working with cells, they have all of that to some, to various degrees. Is that empowering or limiting having material as a mind of its own, literally? I think it's both, right? So it raises difficulties because it means that it, if you, if you're using the old mindset, which is a linear kind of extrapolation of what's going to happen, you're going to be surprised and shocked all the time because biology does not do what we linearly expect materials to do. On the other hand, it's massively liberating. And so in the following way, I've argued that advances in regenerative medicine require us to take advantage of this because what it means is that you can get the material to do things that you don't know how to micromanage. So just as a simple example, right? If you, if you, you had a rat and you wanted this rat to do a circus trick, put a ball in the little hoop, you can do it the micromanagement way, which is try to control every neuron and try to play the thing like a puppet, right? And maybe someday that'll be possible, maybe, or you can train the rat. And this is why humanity for thousands of years before we knew any neuroscience, we had no idea what's behind, what's between the ears of any animal. We were able to train these animals because once you recognize the level of agency of a certain system, you can use appropriate techniques. If you know the currency of motivation, reward and punishment, you know how smart it is, you know what kinds of things it likes to do. You are searching a much more, much smoother, much nicer problem space than if you try to micromanage the thing. And in regenerative medicine, when you're trying to get, let's say an arm to grow back or an eye to repair a cell birth defect or something, do you really want to be controlling tens of thousands of genes at each point to try to micromanage it? Or do you want to find the high level modular controls that say, build an arm here. You already know how to build an arm. You did it before, do it again. So that's, I think it's both, it's both difficult and it challenges us to develop new ways of engineering and it's hugely empowering. Okay. So how do you do, I mean, maybe sticking with the metaphor of dogs and cats, I presume you have to figure out the, find the dogs and dispose of the cats. Because, you know, it's like the old herding cats is an issue. So you may be able to train dogs. I suspect you will not be able to train cats. Or if you do, you're never going to be able to trust them. So is there a way to figure out which material is amenable to herding? Is it in the lab work or is it in simulation? Right now it's largely in the lab because we, our simulations do not capture yet the most interesting and powerful things about biology. So the simulation does, what we're pretty good at simulating are feed forward emergent types of things, right? So cellular automata, if you have simple rules and you sort of roll those forward for every, every agent or every cell in the simulation, then complex things happen, you know, ant colony or algorithms, things like that. We're good at that. And that's, and that's fine. The difficulty with all of that is that it's incredibly hard to reverse. So this is a really hard inverse problem, right? If you look at a bunch of termites and they make a, you know, a thing with a single chimney and you say, well, I like it, but I'd like two chimneys. How do you change the rules of behavior free termites? So they make two chimneys, right? Or, or if you say, here are a bunch of cells that are creating this kind of organism. I don't think that's optimal. I'd like to repair that birth defect. How do you control all the, all the individual low level rules, right? All the protein interactions and everything else, rolling it back from the anatomy that you want to the low level hardware rules is in general intractable. It's a, it's an inverse problem that's generally not solvable. So right now it's mostly in the lab because what we need to do is we need to understand how biology uses top down controls. So the idea is not, not bottom up emergence, but the idea of things like a goal directed test operate exit kinds of loops where, where it's basically an error minimization function over a new space and not a space of gene expression, but for example, a space of anatomy. So just as a simple example, if you have, you have a salamander and it's got an arm, you can, you can amputate that arm anywhere along the length. It will grow exactly what's needed and then it stops. That's the most amazing thing about regeneration is that it stops it knows when to stop. When does it stop? It stops when a correct salamander arm has been completed. So that tells you that's right. That's a, that's a, a means ends kind of analysis where it has to know what the correct limb is supposed to look like, right? So it has a way to ascertain the current shape. It has a way to measure that Delta from, from what shape it's supposed to be. And it will keep taking actions, meaning remodeling and growing and everything else until that's complete. So once you know that, and we've taken advantage of this in the lab to do some, some really wild things with, with both planaria and frog embryos and so on, once you know that, you can start playing with that, with that homeostatic cycle. You can ask, for example, well, how does it remember what the correct shape is? And can we mess with that memory? Can we give it a false memory of what the shape should be and let the cells build something else? Or can we mess with the measurement apparatus, right? So it gives you, it gives you those kinds of, so, so, so the idea is to basically appropriate a lot of the approaches and concepts from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral science into things that previously were taken to be dumb materials. And, you know, you get yelled at in class if you, if you, for being anthropomorphic, if you said, well, my cells want to do this and my cells want to do that. And I think, I think that's a, that's a major mistake that leaves a ton of capabilities on the table. So thinking about biologic systems as things that have memory, have almost something like cognitive ability, but I mean, how incredible is it, you know, that the salamander arm is being rebuilt, not with a dictator. It's kind of like the cellular automata system. All the individual workers are doing their own thing. So where's that top down signal that does the control coming from? Like, how can you find it? Like, why does it stop growing? How does it know the shape? How does it have memory of the shape? And how does it tell everybody to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, we're done. So the first thing to think about, I think, is that there are no examples anywhere of a central dictator, because in this kind of science, because everything is made of parts. And so we, even though we feel as a unified central sort of intelligence and kind of point of cognition, we are a bag of neurons, right? All intelligence is collective intelligence. There's this, this is important to kind of think about, because a lot of people think, okay, there's real intelligence, like me, and then there's collective intelligence, which is ants and flocks of birds and termites and things like that. And maybe it's appropriate to think of them as an individual, and maybe it's not, and a lot of people are skeptical about that and so on. But you've got to realize that we are not, there's no such thing as this like indivisible diamond of intelligence that's like this one central thing that's not made of parts. We are all made of parts. And so if you believe, which I think is hard to get around, that we in fact have a centralized set of goals and preferences and we plan and we do things and so on, you are already committed to the fact that a collection of cells is able to do this, because we are a collection of cells. There's no getting around that. In our case, what we do is we navigate the three dimensional world and we have behavior. This is blowing my mind right now, because we are just a collection of cells. Oh yeah. So when I'm moving this arm, I feel like I'm the central dictator of that action, but there's a lot of stuff going on. All the cells here are collaborating in some interesting way. They're getting signal from the central nervous system. Well, even the central nervous system is misleadingly named because it isn't really central. Again, it's just a bunch of cells. I mean, all of them, right? There are no, there are no singular indivisible intelligences anywhere. We are all, every example that we've ever seen is a collective of something. It's just that we're used to it. We're used to that. We're used to, okay, this thing is kind of a single thing, but it's really not. You zoom in, you know what you see. You see a bunch of cells running around. Is there some unifying, I mean, we're jumping around, but that something that you look at as the bioelectrical signal versus the biochemical, the chemistry, the electricity, maybe the life is in that versus the cells. It's the, there's an orchestra playing and the resulting music is the dictator. That's not bad. That's Dennis Noble's kind of view of things. He has two really good books where he talks about this musical analogy, right? So I think that's, I like it. I like it. Is it wrong though? I don't think it's, no, I don't think it's wrong. I don't think it's wrong. I think the important thing about it is that we have to come to grips with the fact that a true proper cognitive intelligence can still be made of parts. Those things are, and in fact it has to be, and I think it's a real shame, but I see this all the time. When you have a collective like this, whether it be a group of robots or a collection of cells or neurons or whatever, as soon as we gain some insight into how it works, meaning that, oh, I see, in order to take this action, here's the information that got processed via this chemical mechanism or whatever. Immediately people say, oh, well then that's not real cognition. That's just physics. I think this is fundamentally flawed because if you zoom into anything, what are you going to see? Of course you're just going to see physics. What else could be underneath, right? It's not going to be fairy dust. It's going to be physics and chemistry, but that doesn't take away from the magic of the fact that there are certain ways to arrange that physics and chemistry and in particular the bioelectricity, which I like a lot, to give you an emergent collective with goals and preferences and memories and anticipations that do not belong to any of the subunits. So I think what we're getting into here, and we can talk about how this happens during embryogenesis and so on, what we're getting into is the origin of a self with a capital S. So we ourselves, there are many other kinds of selves, and we can tell some really interesting stories about where selves come from and how they become unified. Yeah, is this the first, or at least humans tend to think that this is the level of which the self with a capital S is first born, and we really don't want to see human civilization or Earth itself as one living organism. Yeah, that's very uncomfortable to us. It is, yeah. But is, yeah, where's the self born? We have to grow up past that. So what I like to do is, I'll tell you two quick stories about that. I like to roll backwards. So as opposed to, so if you start and you say, okay, here's a paramecium, and you see it, you know, it's a single cell organism, you see it doing various things, and people will say, okay, I'm sure there's some chemical story to be told about how it's doing it, so that's not a paramecium. So that's not true cognition, right? And people will argue about that. I like to work it backwards. I say, let's agree that you and I, as we sit here, are examples of true cognition, if anything, as if there's anything that's true cognition, we are examples of it. Now let's just roll back slowly, right? So you roll back to the time when you were a small child and used to doing whatever, and then just sort of day by day, you roll back, and eventually you become more or less that paramecium, and then you sort of even below that, right, as an unfertilized OSI. So it's, no one has, to my knowledge, no one has come up with any convincing discrete step at which my cognitive powers disappear, right? It just doesn't, the biology doesn't offer any specific step. It's incredibly smooth and slow and continuous. And so I think this idea that it just sort of magically shows up at one point, and then, you know, humans have true selves that don't exist elsewhere, I think it runs against everything we know about evolution, everything we know about developmental biology, these are all slow continua. And the other really important story I want to tell is where embryos come from. So think about this for a second. Amniote embryos, so this is humans, birds, and so on, mammals and birds and so on. Imagine a flat disk of cells, so there's maybe 50,000 cells. And in that, so when you get an egg from a fertilized, let's say you buy a fertilized egg from a farm, right? That egg will have about 50,000 cells in a flat disk, it looks like a little tiny little frisbee. And in that flat disk, what'll happen is there'll be one set of cells will become special, and it will tell all the other cells, I'm going to be the head, you guys don't be the head. And so it'll amplify symmetry breaking amplification, you get one embryo, there's some neural tissue and some other stuff forms. Now, you say, okay, I had one egg and one embryo, and there you go, what else could it be? Well, the reality is, and I used to, I did all of this as a grad student, if you take a little needle, and you make a scratch in that blastoderm in that disk, such that the cells can't talk to each other for a while, it heals up, but for a while, they can't talk to each other. What will happen is that both regions will decide that they can be the embryo, and there will be two of them. And then when they heal up, they become conjoint twins, and you can make two, you can make three, you can make lots. So the question of how many cells are in there cannot be answered until it's actually played all the way through. It isn't necessarily that there's just one, there can be many. So what you have is you have this medium, this, this undifferentiated, I'm sure there's a there's a psychological version of this somewhere that I don't know the proper terminology. But you have this, you have this list, like the ocean of potentiality, you have these 1000s of cells, and some number of individuals are going to be formed out of it, usually one, sometimes zero, sometimes several. And they form out of these cells, because a region of these cells organizes into a collective that will have goals, goals that individual cells don't have, for example, make a limb, make an eye, how many eyes? Well, exactly two. So individual cells don't know what an eye is, they don't know how many eyes you're supposed to have, but the collective does. The collective has goals and memories and anticipations that the individual cells don't. And that that the establishment of that boundary with its own ability to maintain to to pursue certain goals. That's the origin of selfhood. But I, is that goal in there somewhere? Were they always destined? Like, are they discovering that goal? Like, where the hell did evolution discover this when you went from the prokaryotes to eukaryotic cells? And then they started making groups. And when you make a certain group, you make a, you make it sound, and it's such a tricky thing to try to understand, you make it sound like this cells didn't get together and came up with a goal. But the very act of them getting together revealed the goal that was always there. There was always that potential for that goal. So the first thing to say is that there are way more questions here than certainties. Okay, so everything I'm telling you is cutting edge developing, you know, stuff. So it's not as if any of us know the answer to this. But, but here's, here's, here's my opinion on this. I think what evolution, I don't think that evolution produces solutions to specific problems, in other words, specific environments, like here's a frog that can live well in a froggy environment. I think what evolution produces is problem solving machines that that will that will solve problems in different spaces. So not just three dimensional spaces, but in a way, three dimensional space. This goes back to what we were talking about before we the brain is a evolutionarily a late development. It's a system that is able to net to pursue goals in three dimensional space by giving commands to muscles, where did that system come from that system evolved from a much more ancient, evolutionarily much more ancient system, where collections of cells gave instructions to for cell behaviors, meaning cells move to divide to die to change into cells to navigate more for space, the space of anatomies, the space of all possible anatomies. And before that, cells were navigating transcriptional space, which is a space of all possible gene expressions. And before that metabolic space. So what evolution has done, I think, is is is is produced hardware that is very good at navigating different spaces using a bag of tricks, right, which which I'm sure many of them we can steal for autonomous vehicles and robotics and various things. And what happens is that they navigate these spaces without a whole lot of commitment to what the space is. In fact, they don't know what the space is, right? We are all brains in a vat, so to speak. Every cell does not know, right? Every cell is some other name, some other cells external environment, right? So where does that with that border between you, you and the outside world, you don't really know where that is, right? Every every collection of cell has to figure that out from scratch. And the fact that evolution requires all of these things to figure out what they are, what effectors they have, what sensors they have, where does it make sense to draw a boundary between me and the outside world? The fact that you have to build all that from scratch, this autopoiesis is what defines the border of a self. Now, biology uses like a multi a multi scale competency architecture, meaning that every level has goals. So so molecular networks have goals, cells have goals, tissues, organs, colonies. And and it's the interplay of all of those that that enable biology to solve problems in new ways, for example, in xenobots and various other things. This is, you know, it's exactly as you said, in many ways, the cells are discovering new ways of being. But at the same time, evolution certainly shapes all this. So so evolution is very good at this agential bioengineering, right? When evolution is discovering a new way of being an animal, you know, an animal or a plant or something, sometimes it's by changing the hardware, you know, protein, changing proteins, protein structure, and so on. But much of the time, it's not by changing the hardware, it's by changing the signals that the cells give to each other. It's doing what we as engineers do, which is try to convince the cells to do various things by using signals, experiences, stimuli. That's what biology does. It has to, because it's not dealing with a blank slate. Every time as you know, if you're evolution, and you're trying to make make a make an organism, you're not dealing with a passive material that is fresh, and you have to specify it already wants to do certain things. So the easiest way to do that search to find whatever is going to be adaptive, is to find the signals that are going to convince cells to do various things, right? Your sense is that evolution operates both in the software and the hardware. And it's just easier, more efficient to operate in the software. Yes. And I should also say, I don't think the distinction is sharp. In other words, I think it's a continuum. But I think we can but I think it's a meaningful distinction where you can make changes to a particular protein, and now the enzymatic function is different, and it metabolizes differently, and whatever, and that will have implications for fitness. Or you can change the huge amount of information in the genome that isn't structural at all. It's, it's, it's signaling, it's when and how do cells say certain things to each other. And that can have massive changes, as far as how it's going to solve problems. I mean, this idea of multi hierarchical competence architecture, which is incredible to think about. So this hierarchy that evolution builds, I don't know who's responsible for this. I also see the incompetence of bureaucracies of humans when they get together. So how the hell does evolution build this, where at every level, only the best get to stick around, they somehow figure out how to do their job without knowing the bigger picture. And then there's like the bosses that do the bigger thing somehow, or that you can now abstract away the small group of cells as a as an organ or something. And then that organ does something bigger in the context of the full body or something like this. How is that built? Is there some intuition you can kind of provide of how that's constructed, that that hierarchical competence architecture? I love that competence, just the word competence is pretty cool in this context, because everybody's good at their job. Yeah, no, it's really key. And the other nice thing about competency is that so my central belief in all of this is that engineering is the right perspective on all of this stuff, because it gets you away from subjective terms. You know, people talk about sentience and this and that those things very hard to define, or people argue about them philosophically. I think that engineering terms like competency, like, you know, pursuit of goals, right? All of these things are, are empirically incredibly useful, because you know, when you see it, and if it helps you build, right, if I if I can pick the right level, I say, this thing has, I believe this is x level of like, competency, I think it's like a thermostat, or I think it's like a better thermostat, or I think it's a, you know, various other kinds of, you know, many, many different kinds of complex systems. If that helps me to control and predict and build such systems, then that's all there is to say, there's no more philosophy to argue about. So I like competency in that way, because you can quantify, you could, you have to, in fact, you have to, you have to make a claim competent at what? And then, or if I say, if I tell you, it has a goal, the question is, what's the goal? And how do you know? And I say, well, because every time I deviated from this particular state, that's what it spends energy to get back to, that's the goal. And we can quantify it, and we can be objective about it. So so so the the, we're not used to thinking about this, I give a talk sometimes called Why don't robots get cancer, right? And the reason robots don't get cancer is because generally speaking, with a few exceptions, our architectures have been, you've got a bunch of dumb parts. And you hope that if you put them together, the the the overlying machine will have some intelligence and do something rather, right, but the individual parts don't don't care, they don't have an agenda. Biology isn't like that every level has an agenda. And the final outcome is the result of cooperation and competition, both within and across levels. So for example, during embryogenesis, your tissues and organs are competing with each other. And it's actually a really important part of development, there's a reason they compete with each other, they're not all just, you know, sort of helping each other, they're also competing for information for metabolic for limited metabolic constraints. But to get back to your your other point, which is, you know, which is which is the seems like really efficient and good and so on compared to some of our human efforts. We also have to keep in mind that what happens here is that each level bends the option space for the level beneath so that your parts basically they don't see the the geometry. So I'm using them. And I think I take I take this the seriously terminology from from like, from like relativity, right, where the space is literally bent. So the option space is deformed by the higher level so that the lower levels, all they really have to do is go down their concentration gradient, they don't have to, in fact, they don't, they can't know what the big picture is. But if you bend the space just right, if they do what locally seems right, they end up doing your bidding, they end up doing things that are optimal in the in the higher space. Conversely, because the components are good at getting their job done, you as the higher level don't need to try to compute all the low level controls, all you're doing is bending the space, you don't know or care how they're going to do it. Give you a super simple example in the in the tappel, we found that okay, so so tappels need to become frogs and to become to go from a tappel head to a frog head, you have to rearrange the face. So the eyes have to move forward, the jaws have to come out the nostrils move like everything moves. It used to be thought that because all tappels look the same, and all frogs look the same. If you just remember, if every piece just moves in the right direction, the right amount, then you get your you get your fraud. Right. So we decided to test we I have this hypothesis that I thought I thought actually, the system is probably more intelligent than that. So what did we do? We made what we call Picasso tappels. So these are so everything is scrambled. So the eyes are on the back of the head, the jaws are off to the side, everything is scrambled. Well, guess what they make, they make pretty normal frogs, because all the different things move around in novel paths configurations until they get to the correct froggy sort of frog face configuration, then they stop. So, so the thing about that is now imagine evolution, right? So, so you make some sort of mutation, and it does, like every mutation, it does many things. So something good comes of it, but also it moves your mouth off to the side, right? Now, if if there wasn't this multi scale competency, you can see where this is going, if there wasn't this multi scale competency, the organism would be dead, your fitness is zero, because you can't eat. And you would never get to explore the other beneficial consequences of that mutation, you'd have to wait until you find some other way of doing it without moving the mouth, that's really hard. So, so the fitness landscape would be incredibly rugged evolution would take forever. The reason it works, one of the reasons it works so well, is because you do that, no worries, the mouth will find its way where where it belongs, right? So now you get to explore. So what that means is that all of these mutations that otherwise would be deleterious are now neutral, because the competency of the parts make up for all kinds of things. So all the noise of development, all the variability in the environment, all these things, the competency of the parts makes up for it. So the so so that's all that's all fantastic, right? That's all that's all great. The only other thing to remember when we compare this to human efforts is this. Every component has its own goals in various spaces, usually with very little regard for the welfare of the other levels. So so as a simple example, you know, you as a as a complex system, you will go out and you will do you know, jiu jitsu, or whatever, you'll have some go you have to go rock climbing, scrape a bunch of cells off your hands. And then you're happy as a system, right? You come back, and you've accomplished some goals, and you're really happy. Those cells are dead. They're gone. Right? Did you think about those cells? Not really, right? You had some you had some bruising out selfish SOB. That's it. And so and so that's the thing to remember is that, you know, and we know this from from history is that is that just being a collective isn't enough. Because what the goals of that collective will be relative to the welfare of the individual parts is a massively open and justify the means I'm telling you, Stalin was onto something. No, that's the danger. But we can exactly that's the danger of for us humans, we have to construct ethical systems under which we don't take seriously the full mechanism of biology and apply it to the way the world functions, which is which is an interesting line we've drawn. The world that built us is the one we reject in some sense, when we construct human societies, the idea that this country was founded on that all men are created equal. That's such a fascinating idea. That's like, you're fighting against nature and saying, well, there's something bigger here than a hierarchical competency architecture. But there's so many interesting things you said. So from an algorithmic perspective, the act of bending the option space. That's really, that's really profound. Because if you look at the way AI systems are built today, there's a big system, like I said, with robots, and as a goal, and he gets better and better at optimizing that goal at accomplishing that goal. But if biology built a hierarchical system where everything is doing computation, and everything is accomplishing the goal, not only that, it's kind of dumb, you know, with the limited with a bent option space is just doing the thing that's the easiest thing for in some sense. And somehow that allows you to have turtles on top of turtles, literally dumb systems on top of dumb systems that as a whole create something incredibly smart. Yeah, I mean, every system is has some degree of intelligence in its own problem domain. So, so cells will have problems they're trying to solve in physiological space and transcriptional space. And then I can give you some some cool examples of that. But the collective is trying to solve problems in anatomical space, right and forming a, you know, a creature and growing your blood vessels and so on. And then the collective the the the whole body is solving yet other problems, they may be in social space and linguistic space and three dimensional space. And who knows, you know, the group might be solving problems in, you know, I don't know, some sort of financial space or something. So one of the major differences with with most, with most AIs today is is a the kind of flatness of the architecture, but also of the fact that they're constructed from outside their their borders, and they're, you know, so a few. So, to a large extent, and of course, there are counter examples now, but but to a large extent, our technology has been such that you create a machine or a robot, it knows what its sensors are, it knows what its effectors are, it knows the boundary between it and the outside world, although this is given from the outside. Biology constructs this from scratch. Now the best example of this that that originally in robotics was actually Josh Bongard's work in 2006, where he made these, these robots that did not know their shape to start with. So like a baby, they sort of floundered around, they made some hypotheses, well, I did this, and I moved in this way. Well, maybe I'm a whatever, maybe I have wheels, or maybe I have six legs or whatever, right? And they would make a model and eventually will crawl around. So that's, I mean, that's really good. That's part of the autopoiesis, but we can go a step further. And some people are doing this. And then we're sort of working on some of this too, is this idea that let's even go back further, you don't even know what sensors you have, you don't know where you end in the outside world begins. All you have is is certain things like active inference, meaning you're trying to minimize surprise, right? You have some metabolic constraints, you don't have all the energy you need, you don't have all the time in the world to think about everything you want to think about. So that means that you can't afford to be a micro reductionist, you know, all this data coming in, you have to course grain it and say, I'm gonna take all this stuff, and I'm gonna call that a cat. I'm gonna take all this, I'm gonna call that the edge of the table I don't want to fall off of. And I don't want to know anything about the micro states, what I want to know is what is the optimal way to cut up my world. And by the way, this thing over here, that's me. And the reason that's me is because I have more control over this than I have over any of this other stuff. And so now you can begin to write. So that's self construction at that, that figuring out making models of the outside world, and then turning that inwards, and starting to make a model of yourself, right, which immediately starts to get into issues of agency and control. Because in order to if you are under metabolic constraints, meaning you don't have the energy, right, that all the energy in the world, you have to be efficient, that immediately forces you to start telling stories about coarse grained agents that do things, right, you don't have the energy to like Laplace's demon, you know, calculate every, every possible state that's going to happen, you have to you have to course grain, and you have to say, that is the kind of creature that does things, either things that I avoid, or things that I will go towards, that's a major food or whatever, whatever it's going to be. And so right at the base of simple, very simple organisms starting to make models of agents doing things, that is the origin of models of free will, basically, right, because you see the world around you as having agency. And then you turn that on yourself. And you say, wait, I have agency too, I can I do things, right. And and then you make decisions about what you're going to do. So all of this one one model is to view all of those kinds of things as being driven by that early need to determine what you are and to do so and to then take actions in the most energetically efficient space possible. Right. So free will emerges when you try to simplify, tell a nice narrative about your environment. I think that's very plausible. Yeah. You think free was an illusion. So you're kind of implying that it's a useful hack. Well, I'll say two things. The first thing is, I think I think it's very plausible to say that any organism that self or any agent that self whether it's biological or not, any agent that self constructs under energy constraints, is going to believe in free will, we'll get to whether it has free will momentarily. But but I think but I think what what it definitely drives is a view of yourself and the outside world as an agential view, I think that's inescapable. So that's true for even primitive organisms? I think so. I think that's now now they don't have now obviously, you have to scale down, right. So so so so they don't have the kinds of complex metacognition that we have. So they can do long term planning and thinking about free will and so on and so on. But but the sense of agency is really useful to accomplish tasks simple or complicated. That's right. In all kinds of spaces, not just in obvious three dimensional space. I mean, we're very good that the thing is, humans are very good at detecting agency of like medium sized objects moving at medium speeds in the three dimensional world, right? We see a bowling ball and we see a mouse and we immediately know what the difference is, right? And how we're going to mostly things you can eat or get eaten by. Yeah, yeah. That's our that's our training set, right? From the time you're little, your training set is visual data on on this this like little chunk of your experience. But imagine if imagine if from the time that we were born, we had innate senses of your blood chemistry, if you could feel your blood chemistry, the way you can see, right, you had a high bandwidth connection, and you could feel your blood chemistry, and you could see, you could sense all the things that your organs were doing. So your pancreas, your liver, all the things. If we had that you we would be very good at detecting intelligence and physiological space, we would know the level of intelligence that our various organs were deploying to deal with things that were coming to anticipate the stimuli to, you know, but but we're just terrible at that. We don't, in fact, in fact, people don't even, you know, you talk about intelligence that these are the paper spaces. And a lot of people think that's just crazy, because, because all we're all we know is motion. We do have access to that information. So it's actually possible that so evolution could if we wanted to construct an organism that's able to perceive the flow of blood through your body, the way you see an old friend and say, yo, what's up? How's the wife and the kids? In that same way, you would see that you would feel like a connection to the liver. Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, maybe other people's liver and not just your own, because you don't have access to other people's. Not yet. But you could imagine some really interesting connection, right? But like sexual selection, like, oh, that girl's got a nice liver. Well, that's like, the way her blood flows, the dynamics of the blood is very interesting. It's novel. I've never seen one of those. But you know, that's exactly what we're trying to half ass when we, when we judge judgment of beauty by facial symmetry and so on. That's a half assed assessment of exactly that. Because if your cells could not cooperate enough to keep your organism symmetrical, you know, you can make some inferences about what else is wrong, right? Like that's a very, you know, that's a very basic. Interesting. Yeah. So that in some deep sense, actually, that is what we're doing. We're trying to infer how health, we use the word healthy, but basically, how functional is this biological system I'm looking at so I can hook up with that one and make offspring? Yeah, yeah. Well, what kind of hardware might their genomics give me that that might be useful in the future? I wonder why evolution didn't give us a higher resolution signal. Like why the whole peacock thing with the feathers? It doesn't seem, it's a very low bandwidth signal for sexual selection. I'm gonna, and I'm not an expert on this stuff, but on peacocks. Well, you know, but I'll take a stab at the reason. I think that it's because it's an arms race. You see, you don't want everybody to know everything about you. So I think that as much as, as much as, and in fact, there's another interesting part of this arms race, which is, if you think about this, the most adaptive, evolvable system is one that has the most level of top down control, right? If it's really easy to say to a bunch of cells, make another finger versus, okay, here's 10,000 gene expression changes that you need to do to make it to change your finger, right? The system with good top down control that has memory and when we need to get back to that, by the way, that's a question I neglected to answer about where the memory is and so on. A system that uses all of that is really highly evolvable and that's fantastic. But guess what? It's also highly subject to hijacking by parasites, by cheaters of various kinds, by conspecifics. Like we found that, and then that goes back to the story of the pattern memory in these planaria, there's a bacterium that lives on these planaria. That bacterium has an input into how many heads the worm is going to have because it's hijacks that control system and it's able to make a chemical that basically interfaces with the system that calculates how many heads you're supposed to have and they can make them have two heads. And so you can imagine that if you are two, so you want to be understandable for your own parts to understand each other, but you don't want to be too understandable because you'll be too easily controllable. And so I think that my guess is that that opposing pressure keeps us from being a super high bandwidth kind of thing where we can just look at somebody and know everything about them. So it's a kind of biological game of Texas hold them. You're showing some cards and you're hiding other cards and there's part of it and there's bluffing and there's all that. And then there's probably whole species that would do way too much bluffing. That's probably where peacocks fall. There's a book that I don't remember if I read or if I read summaries of the book, but it's about evolution of beauty and birds. Where is that from? Is that a book or does Richard Dawkins talk about it? But basically there's some species start to like over select for beauty, not over select. They just some reason select for beauty. There is a case to be made. Actually now I'm starting to remember, I think Darwin himself made a case that you can select based on beauty alone. There's a point where beauty doesn't represent some underlying biological truth. You start to select for beauty itself. And I think the deep question is there some evolutionary value to beauty, but it's an interesting kind of thought that can we deviate completely from the deep biological truth to actually appreciate some kind of the summarization in itself. Let me get back to memory because this is a really interesting idea. How do a collection of cells remember anything? How do biological systems remember anything? How is that akin to the kind of memory we think of humans as having within our big cognitive engine? Yeah. One of the ways to start thinking about bioelectricity is to ask ourselves, where did neurons and all these cool tricks that the brain uses to run these amazing problem solving abilities on and basically an electrical network, right? Where did that come from? They didn't just evolve, you know, appear out of nowhere. It must have evolved from something. And what it evolved from was a much more ancient ability of cells to form networks to solve other kinds of problems. For example, to navigate more for space to control the body shape. And so all of the components of neurons, so ion channels, neurotransmitter machinery, electrical synapses, all this stuff is way older than brains, way older than neurons, in fact, older than multicellularity. And so it was already that even bacterial biofilms, there's some beautiful work from UCSD on brain like dynamics and bacterial biofilms. So evolution figured out very early on that electrical networks are amazing at having memories, at integrating information across distance, at different kinds of optimization tasks, you know, image recognition and so on, long before there were brains. Can you actually just step back? We'll return to it. What is bioelectricity? What is biochemistry? What is, what are electrical networks? I think a lot of the biology community focuses on the chemicals as the signaling mechanisms that make the whole thing work. You have, I think, to a large degree, uniquely, maybe you can correct me on that, have focused on the bioelectricity, which is using electricity for signaling. There's also probably mechanical. Sure, sure. Like knocking on the door. So what's the difference? And what's an electrical network? Yeah, so I want to make sure and kind of give credit where credit is due. So as far back as 1903, and probably late 1800s already, people were thinking about the importance of electrical phenomena in life. So I'm for sure not the first person to stress the importance of electricity. People, there were waves of research in the in the 30s, in the 40s, and then, again, in the kind of 70s, 80s, and 90s of sort of the pioneers of bioelectricity, who did some amazing work on all this, I think, I think what what we've done that's new, is to step away from this idea that, and I'll describe what what the bioelectricity is a step away from the idea that, well, here's another piece of physics that you need to keep track of to understand physiology and development. And to really start looking at this as saying, no, this is a privileged computational layer that gives you access to the actual cognition of the tissue of basal cognition. So, so merging that that developmental biophysics with ideas and cognition of computation, and so on, I think I think that's what we've done that's new. But people have been talking about bioelectricity for a really long time. And so I'll, so I'll define that. So what happens is that if you have, if you have a single cell, cell has a membrane, in that membrane are proteins called ion channels, and those proteins allow charged molecules, potassium, sodium, chloride, to go in and out under certain circumstances. And when there's an imbalance of of those ions, there becomes a voltage gradient across that membrane. And so all cells, all living cells try to hold a particular kind of voltage difference across the membrane, and they spend a lot of energy to do so. When you now now, so that's it, that's it, that's a single cell. When you have multiple cells, the cells sitting next to each other, they can communicate their voltage state to each other via a number of different ways. But one of them is this thing called a gap junction, which is basically like a little submarine hatch that just kind of docks, right? And the ions from one side can flow to the other side, and vice versa. So... Isn't it incredible that this evolved? Isn't that wild? Because that didn't exist. Correct. This had to be, this had to be evolved. It had to be invented. That's right. Somebody invented electricity in the ocean. When did this get invented? Yeah. So, I mean, it is incredible. The guy who discovered gap junctions, Werner Loewenstein, I visited him. He was really old. A human being? He discovered them. Because who really discovered them lived probably four billion years ago. Good point. So you give credit where credit is due, I'm just saying. He rediscovered gap junctions. But when I visited him in Woods Hole, maybe 20 years ago now, he told me that he was writing, and unfortunately, he passed away, and I think this book never got written. He was writing a book on gap junctions and consciousness. And I think it would have been an incredible book, because gap junctions are magic. I'll explain why in a minute. What happens is that, just imagine, the thing about both these ion channels and these gap junctions is that many of them are themselves voltage sensitive. So that's a voltage sensitive current conductance. That's a transistor. And as soon as you've invented one, immediately, you now get access to, from this platonic space of mathematical truths, you get access to all of the cool things that transistors do. So now, when you have a network of cells, not only do they talk to each other, but they can send messages to each other, and the differences of voltage can propagate. Now, to neuroscientists, this is old hat, because you see this in the brain, right? This action potentials, the electricity. They have these awesome movies where you can take a zebra, like a transparent animal, like a zebrafish, and you can literally look down, and you can see all the firings as the fish is making decisions about what to eat and things like this. It's amazing. Well, your whole body is doing that all the time, just much slower. So there are very few things that neurons do that all the cells in your body don't do. They all do very similar things, just on a much slower timescale. And whereas your brain is thinking about how to solve problems in three dimensional space, the cells in an embryo are thinking about how to solve problems in anatomical space. They're trying to have memories like, hey, how many fingers are we supposed to have? Well, how many do we have now? What do we do to get from here to there? That's the kind of problems they're thinking about. And the reason that gap junctions are magic is, imagine, right, from the earliest time. Here are two cells. This cell, how can they communicate? Well, the simple version is this cell could send a chemical signal, it floats over, and it hits a receptor on this cell, right? Because it comes from outside, this cell can very easily tell that that came from outside. Whatever information is coming, that's not my information. That information is coming from the outside. So I can trust it, I can ignore it, I can do various things with it, I can do various things with it, whatever, but I know it comes from the outside. Now imagine instead that you have two cells with a gap junction between them. Something happens, let's say this cell gets poked, there's a calcium spike, the calcium spike or whatever small molecule signal propagates through the gap junction to this cell. There's no ownership metadata on that signal. This cell does not know now that it came from outside because it looks exactly like its own memories would have looked like of whatever had happened, right? So gap junctions to some extent wipe ownership information on data, which means that if I can't, if you and I are sharing memories and we can't quite tell who the memories belong to, that's the beginning of a mind melt. That's the beginning of a scale up of cognition from here's me and here's you to no, now there's just us. So they enforce a collective intelligence gap junctions. That's right. It helps. It's the beginning. It's not the whole story by any means, but it's the start. Where's state stored of the system? Is it in part in the gap junctions themselves? Is it in the cells? There are many, many layers to this as always in biology. So there are chemical networks. So for example, gene regulatory networks, right? Which, or basically any kind of chemical pathway where different chemicals activate and repress each other, they can store memories. So in a dynamical system sense, they can store memories. They can get into stable states that are hard to pull them out of. So that becomes, once they get in, that's a memory, a permanent memory or a semi permanent memory of something that's happened. There are cytoskeletal structures that are physically, they store memories in physical configuration. There are electrical memories like flip flops where there is no physical. So if you look, I showed my students this example as a flip flop. And the reason that it stores a zero one is not because some piece of the hardware moved. It's because there's a cycling of the current in one side of the thing. If I come over and I hold the other side to a high voltage for a brief period of time, it flips over and now it's here. But none of the hardware moved. The information is in a stable dynamical sense. And if you were to x ray the thing, you couldn't tell me if it was zero or one, because all you would see is where the hardware is. You wouldn't see the energetic state of the system. So there are bioelectrical states that are held in that exact way, like volatile ram basically, like in the electrical state. It's very akin to the different ways that memory is stored in a computer. So there's ram, there's hard drive. You can make that mapping, right? So I think the interesting thing is that based on the biology, we can have a more sophisticated, you know, I think we can revise some of our computer engineering methods because there are some interesting things that biology we haven't done yet. But that mapping is not bad. I mean, I think it works in many ways. Yeah, I wonder because I mean, the way we build computers at the root of computer science is the idea of proof of correctness. We program things to be perfect, reliable. You know, this idea of resilience and robustness to unknown conditions is not as important. So that's what biology is really good at. So I don't know what kind of systems. I don't know how we go from a computer to a biological system in the future. Yeah, I think that, you know, the thing about biology is all about making really important decisions really quickly on very limited information. I mean, that's what biology is all about. You have to act, you have to act now. The stakes are very high, and you don't know most of what you need to know to be perfect. And so there's not even an attempt to be perfect or to get it right in any sense. There are just things like active inference, minimize surprise, optimize some efficiency and some things like this that guides the whole business. I mentioned too offline that somebody who's a fan of your work is Andre Kapathy. And he's, amongst many things, also writes occasionally a great blog. He came up with this idea, I don't know if he coined the term, but of software 2.0, where the programming is done in the space of configuring these artificial neural networks. Is there some sense in which that would be the future of programming for us humans, where we're less doing like Python like programming and more... How would that look like? But basically doing the hyperparameters of something akin to a biological system and watching it go and adjusting it and creating some kind of feedback loop within the system so it corrects itself. And then we watch it over time accomplish the goals we want it to accomplish. Is that kind of the dream of the dogs that you described in the Nature paper? Yeah. I mean, that's what you just painted is a very good description of our efforts at regenerative medicine as a kind of somatic psychiatry. So the idea is that you're not trying to micromanage. I mean, think about the limitations of a lot of the medicines today. We try to interact down at the level of pathways. So we're trying to micromanage it. What's the problem? Well, one problem is that for almost every medicine other than antibiotics, once you stop it, the problem comes right back. You haven't fixed anything. You were addressing symptoms. You weren't actually curing anything, again, except for antibiotics. That's one problem. The other problem is you have massive amount of side effects because you were trying to interact at the lowest level. It's like, I'm going to try to program this computer by changing the melting point of copper. Maybe you can do things that way, but my God, it's hard to program at the hardware level. So what I think we're starting to understand is that, and by the way, this goes back to what you were saying before about that we could have access to our internal state. So people who practice that kind of stuff, so yoga and biofeedback and those, those are all the people that uniformly will say things like, well, the body has an intelligence and this and that. Those two sets overlap perfectly because that's exactly right. Because once you start thinking about it that way, you realize that the better locus of control is not always at the lowest level. This is why we don't all program with a soldering iron. We take advantage of the high level intelligences that are there, intelligences that are there, which means trying to figure out, okay, which of your tissues can learn? What can they learn? Why is it that certain drugs stop working after you take them for a while with this habituation, right? And so can we understand habituation, sensitization, associative learning, these kinds of things in chemical pathways? We're going to have a completely different way. I think we're going to have a completely different way of using drugs and of medicine in general when we start focusing on the goal states and on the intelligence of our subsystems as opposed to treating everything as if the only path was micromanagement from chemistry upwards. Well, can you speak to this idea of somatic psychiatry? What are somatic cells? How do they form networks that use bioelectricity to have memory and all those kinds of things? Yeah. What are somatic cells like basics here? Somatic cells just means the cells of your body. Soma just means body, right? So somatic cells are just the... I'm not even specifically making a distinction between somatic cells and stem cells or anything like that. I mean, basically all the cells in your body, not just neurons, but all the cells in your body. They form electrical networks during embryogenesis, during regeneration. What those networks are doing in part is processing information about what our current shape is and what the goal shape is. Now, how do I know this? Because I can give you a couple of examples. One example is when we started studying this, we said, okay, here's a planarian. A planarian is a flatworm. It has one head and one tail normally. And the amazing... There's several amazing things about planaria, but basically they kind of... I think planaria hold the answer to pretty much every deep question of life. For one thing, they're similar to our ancestors. So they have true symmetry. They have a true brain. They're not like earthworms. They're a much more advanced life form. They have lots of different internal organs, but they're these little... They're about maybe two centimeters in the centimeter to two in size. They have a head and a tail. And the first thing is planaria are immortal. So they do not age. There's no such thing as an old planarian. So that right there tells you that these theories of thermodynamic limitations on lifespan are wrong. It's not that well over time everything degrades. No, planaria can keep it going for probably how long have they been around 400 million years. So the planaria in our lab are actually in physical continuity with planaria that were here 400 million years ago. So there's planaria that have lived that long essentially. What does it mean physical continuity? Because what they do is they split in half. The way they reproduce is they split in half. So the planaria, the back end grabs the petri dish, the front end takes off and they rip themselves in half. But isn't it some sense where like you are a physical continuation? Yes, except that we go through a bottleneck of one cell, which is the egg. They do not. I mean, they can. There's certain planaria. Got it. So we go through a very ruthless compression process and they don't. Yes. Like an auto encoder, you know, sort of squashed down to one cell and then back out. These guys just tear themselves in half. And so the other amazing thing about them is they regenerate. So you can cut them into pieces. The record is, I think, 276 or something like that by Thomas Hunt Morgan. And each piece regrows a perfect little worm. They know exactly, every piece knows exactly what's missing, what needs to happen. In fact, if you chop it in half, as it grows the other half, the original tissue shrinks so that when the new tiny head shows up, they're proportional. So it keeps perfect proportion. If you starve them, they shrink. If you feed them again, they expand. Their control, their anatomical control is just insane. Somebody cut them into over 200 pieces. Yeah. Thomas Hunt Morgan did. Hashtag science. Amazing. And maybe more. I mean, they didn't have antibiotics back then. I bet he lost some due to infection. I bet it's actually more than that. I bet you could do more than that. Humans can't do that. Well, yes. I mean, again, true, except that... Maybe you can at the embryonic level. Well, that's the thing, right? So when I talk about this, I say, just remember that as amazing as it is to grow a whole planarian from a tiny fragment, half of the human population can grow a full body from one cell. So development is really, you can look at development as just an example of regeneration. Yeah. To think, we'll talk about regenerative medicine, but there's some sense of what would be like that warm in like 500 years where I can just go regrow a hand. Yep. With given time, it takes time to grow large things. For now. Yeah, I think so. I think. You can probably... Why not accelerate? Oh, biology takes its time? I'm not going to say anything is impossible, but I don't know of a way to accelerate these processes. I think it's possible. I think we are going to be regenerative, but I don't know of a way to make it faster. I could just think people from a few centuries from now would be like, well, they used to have to wait a week for the hand to regrow. It's like when the microwave was invented. You can toast your... What's that called when you put a cheese on a toast? It's delicious is all I know. I'm blanking. Anywho. All right. So planaria, why were we talking about the magical planaria that they have the mystery of life? Yeah. So the reason we're talking about planaria is not only are they immortal, not only do they regenerate every part of the body, they generally don't get cancer, which we can talk about why that's important. They're smart. They can learn things. You can train them. And it turns out that if you train a planaria and then cut their heads off, the tail will regenerate a brand new brain that still remembers the original information. Do they have a biological network going on or no? Yes. So their somatic cells are forming a network. And that's what you mean by a true brain? What's the requirement for a true brain? Like everything else, it's a continuum, but a true brain has certain characteristics as far as the density, like a localized density of neurons that guides behavior. In the head. Exactly. Exactly. If you cut their head off, the tail doesn't do anything. It just sits there until a new brain regenerates. They have all the same neurotransmitters that you and I have. But here's why we're talking about them in this context. So here's your planaria. You cut off the head. You cut off the tail. You have a middle fragment. That middle fragment has to make one head and one tail. How does it know how many of each to make? And where do they go? How come it doesn't switch? How come, right? So we did a very simple thing. And we said, okay, let's make the hypothesis that there's a somatic electrical network that remembers the correct pattern, and that what it's doing is recalling that memory and building to that pattern. So what we did was we used a way to visualize electrical activity in these cells, right? It's a variant of what people used to look for electricity in the brain. And we saw that that fragment has a very particular electrical pattern. You can literally see it once we developed the technique. It has a very particular electrical pattern that shows you where the head and the tail goes, right? You can just see it. And then we said, okay, well now let's test the idea that that's a memory that actually controls where the head and the tail goes. Let's change that pattern. So basically, incept the false memory. And so what you can do is you can do that in many different ways. One way is with drugs that target ion channels to say, and so you pick these drugs and you say, okay, I'm going to do it so that instead of this one head, one tail electrical pattern, you have a two headed pattern, right? You're just editing the electrical information in the network. When you do that, guess what the cells build? They build a two headed worm. And the coolest thing about it, no genetic changes. So we haven't touched the genome. The genome is totally wild type. But the amazing thing about it is that when you take these two headed animals and you cut them into pieces again, some of those pieces will continue to make two headed animals. So that information, that memory, that electrical circuit, not only does it hold the information for how many heads, not only does it use that information to tell the cells what to do to regenerate, but it stores it. Once you've reset it, it keeps. And we can go back, we can take a two headed animal and put it back to one headed. So now imagine, so there's a couple of interesting things here that that have implications for understanding what genomes and things like that. Imagine I take this two headed animal. Oh, and by the way, when they reproduce, when they tear themselves in half, you still get two headed animals. So imagine I take them and I throw them in the Charles River over here. So 100 years later, some scientists come along and they scoop up some samples and they go, oh, there's a single headed form and a two headed form. Wow, a speciation event. Cool. Let's sequence the genome and see why, what happened. The genomes are identical. There's nothing wrong with the genome. So if you ask the question, how does, so, so this goes back to your very first question is where do body plans come from, right? How does the planarian know how many heads it's supposed to have? Now it's interesting because you could say DNA, but what happened, what, what, as it turns out, the DNA produces a piece of hardware that by default says one head the way that when you turn on a calculator, by default, it's a zero every single time, right? When you turn it on, it just says zero, but it's a programmable calculator as it turns out. So once you've changed that next time, it won't say zero. It'll say something else and the same thing here. So you can make, you can make one headed, two headed, you can make no headed worms. We've done some other things along these lines, some other really weird constructs. So, so this, this, this, this question of, right. So again, it's really important. The, the hardware software distinction is really important because the hardware is essential because without proper hardware, you're never going to get to the right physiology of having that memory. But once you have it, it doesn't fully determine what the information is going to be. You can have other information in there and it's reprogrammable by us, by bacteria, by various parasites, probably things like that. The other amazing thing about these planarias, think about this, most animals, when we get a mutation in our bodies, our children don't inherit it, right? So you can go on, you could run around for 50, 60 years getting mutations. Your children don't have those mutations because we go through the egg stage. Planaria tear themselves in half and that's how they reproduce. So for 400 million years, they keep every mutation that they've had that doesn't kill the cell that it's in. So when you look at these planaria, their bodies are what's called mixoploid, meaning that every cell might have a different number of chromosomes. They look like a tumor. If you look at the, the, the, the, the genome is an incredible mess because they accumulate all this stuff. And yet the, their body structure is, they are the best regenerators on the planet. Their anatomy is rock solid, even though their genome is always all kinds of crap. So this is a kind of a scandal, right? That, you know, when we learn that, well, you know, what are genomes to what genomes determine your body? Okay. Why is the animal with the worst genome have the best anatomical control, the most cancer resistant, the most regenerative, right? Really, we're just beginning to start to understand this relationship between the, the genomically determined hardware and, and, and by the way, just as of, as of a couple of months ago, I think I now somewhat understand why this is, but it's really, it's really a major, you know, a major puzzle. I mean, that really throws a wrench into the whole nature versus nurture because you usually associate electricity with the, with the nurture and the hardware with the nature. And it's, there's just this weird integrated mess that propagates through generations. Yeah. It's much more fluid. It's much more complex. You can, you can imagine what's, what's happening here is just, just imagine the evolution of a, of a, of an animal like this, that, that multi scale, this goes back to this multi scale competency, right? Imagine that you have two, two, two, you have, you have an animal that that where its, its tissues have some degree of multi scale competency. So for example, if the like, like we saw in the tadpole, you know, if you put an eye on its tail, they can still see out of that eye, right? That the, you know, there's all, there's incredible plasticity. So if you have an animal and it comes up for selection and the fitness is quite good, evolution doesn't know whether the fitness is good because the genome was awesome or because the genome was kind of junky, but, but the competency made up for it, right? And things kind of ended up good. So what that means is that the more competency you have, the harder it is for selection to pick the best genomes, it hides information, right? And so that means that, so, so what happens, you know, evolution basically starts all those start, all the hard work is being done to increase the competency because it's harder and harder to see the genomes. And so I think in planaria, what happened is that there's this runaway phenomenon where all the effort went into the algorithm such that we know you got a crappy genome. We can't keep, we can't clean up the genome. We can't keep track of it. So what's going to happen is what survives are the algorithms that can create a great worm no matter what the genome is. So everything went into the algorithm and which, which of course then reduces the pressure on keeping a, you know, keeping a clean genome. So this idea of, right, and different animals have this in different, to different levels, but this idea of putting energy into an algorithm that does not overtrain on priors, right? It can't assume, I mean, I think biology is this way in general, evolution doesn't take the past too seriously because it makes these basically problem solving machines as opposed to like exactly what, you know, to, to, to deal with exactly what happened last time. Yeah. Problem solving versus memory recall. So a little memory, but a lot of problem solving. I think so. Yeah. In many cases, yeah. Problem solving. I mean, it's incredible that those kinds of systems are able to be constructed, um, especially how much they contrast with the way we build problem solving systems in the AI world. Um, back to Xenobots. I'm not sure if we ever described how Xenobots are built, but I mean, you have a paper titled biological robots perspectives on an emerging interdisciplinary field. And the beginning you, uh, you mentioned that the word Xenobots is like controversial. Do you guys get in trouble for using Xenobots or what? Do people not like the word Xenobots? Are you trying to be provocative with the word Xenobots versus biological robots? I don't know. Is there some drama that we should be aware of? There's a little bit of drama. Uh, I think, I think the drama is basically related to people, um, having very fixed ideas about what terms mean. And I think in many cases, these ideas are completely out of date with, with where science is now. And for sure they're, they're out of date with what's going to be, I mean, these, these, these concepts, uh, are not going to survive the next couple of decades. So if you ask a person and including, um, you know, a lot of people in biology who kind of want to keep a sharp distinction between biologicals and robots, right? See, what's a robot? Well, a robot, it comes out of a factory. It's made by humans. It is boring. It is a meaning that you can predict everything it's going to do. It's made of metal and certain other inorganic materials. Living organisms are magical. They, they, they arise, right? And so on. So these, these distinctions, I think these, these distinctions, I think were, were never good, but, uh, they're going to be completely useless going forward. And so part of, there's a couple of papers that that's one paper and there's another one that Josh Bongar and I wrote where we really attack the terminology. And we say these binary categories are based on very, um, nonessential kind of surface, uh, limitations of, of technology and imagination that were true before, but they've got to go. And so, and so we call them Zenobots. So, so Xeno for Xenopus Levus, where this is, it's the frog that, that these guys are made of, but we think it's an example of, of, of, uh, of a biobot technology, because ultimately if we, if we under, once we understand how to, uh, communicate and manipulate, um, the inputs to these cells, we will be able to get them to build whatever we want them to build. And that's robotics, right? It's, it's the rational construction of machines that have useful purposes. I, I absolutely think that this is a robotics platform, whereas some biologists don't, but it's built in a way that, uh, all the different components are doing their own computation. So in a way that we've been talking about, so you're trying to do top down control in that biological system. And in the future, all of this will, will, will merge together because of course at some point we're going to throw in synthetic biology circuits, right? New, new, um, you know, new transcriptional circuits to get them to do new things. Of course we'll throw some of that in, but we specifically stayed away from all of that because in the first few papers, and there's some more coming down the pike that are, I think going to be pretty, pretty dynamite, um, that, uh, we want to show what the native cells are made of. Because what happens is, you know, if you engineer the heck out of them, right, if we were to put in new, you know, new transcription factors and some new metabolic machinery and whatever, people will say, well, okay, you engineered this and you made it do whatever. And fine. I wanted to show, uh, and, and, and the whole team, uh, wanted to show the plasticity and the intelligence in the biology. What does it do that's surprising before you even start manipulating the hardware in that way? Yeah. Don't try to, uh, over control the thing. Let it flourish. The, the full beauty of the biological system. Why Xenopus Levus? How do you pronounce it? The frog. Xenopus Levus. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very popular. Why this frog? It's been used since, uh, I think the fifties. Uh, it's just very convenient because you can, you know, we, we keep the adults in this, in this, uh, very fine frog habitat. They lay eggs. They lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time. Um, the eggs develop right in front of your eyes. It's the most mad magical thing you can, you can see because normally, you know, if you were to deal with mice or rabbits or whatever, you don't see the early stages, right? Cause everything's inside the mother. Everything's in a Petri dish at room temperature. So you just, you, you have an egg, it's fertilized and you can just watch it divide and divide and divide. And on all the organs form, you can just see it. And at that point, um, the community has, has developed lots of different tools for understanding what's going on and also for, for manipulating, right? So it's, it's people use it for, um, you know, for understanding birth defects and neurobiology and cancer immunology. So you get the whole, uh, embryogenesis in the Petri dish. That's so cool to watch. Is there videos of this? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's, but yeah, there's, there's amazing videos on, on, online. I mean, mammalian embryos are super cool too. For example, monozygotic twins are what happens when you cut a mammalian embryo in half. You don't get two half bodies. You get two perfectly normal bodies because it's a regeneration event, right? Development is just the, it's just the kind of regeneration really. And why this particular frog? It's just, uh, cause they were doing in the fifties and. It breeds well in, um, you know, in, in, it's easy to raise in, in the laboratory and, uh, it's very prolific and all the tools basically for decades, people have been developing tools. There's other, some people use other frogs, but I have to say this is, this is, this is important. Xenobots are fundamentally not anything about frogs. So, um, I can't say too much about this cause it's not published and peer reviewed yet, but we've made Xenobots out of other things that have nothing to do with frogs. It's, this is not a frog phenomenon. This is, we, we started with frog because it's so convenient, but this, this, this plasticity is not a fraud. You know, it's not related to the fact that they're frogs. What happens when you kiss it? Does it turn into a prince? No. Or a princess? Which way? Uh, prince. Yeah. Prince should be a prince. Yeah. Uh, that's an experiment that I don't believe we've done. And if we have, I don't want to collaborate, I can, I can take on the lead, uh, on that effort. Okay, cool. Uh, how does the cells coordinate? Let's focus in on just the embryogenesis. So there's one cell, so it divides, doesn't have to be very careful about what each cell starts doing once they divide. Yes. And like, when there's three of them, it's like the cofounders or whatever, like, well, like slow down, you're responsible for this. When do they become specialized and how do they coordinate that specialization? So, so this is the basic science of developmental biology. There's a lot known about all of that, but, um, but I'll tell you what I think is kind of the most important part, which is, yes, it's very important who does what. However, because going back to this issue of why I made this claim that, um, biology doesn't take the past too seriously. And what I mean by that is it doesn't assume that everything is the way it's, it's expected to be. Right. And here's an example of that. Um, this was, this was done, this was, this was an old experiment going back to the forties, but, um, basically imagine imagine it's a new salamander and it's got these little tube tubules that go to the kidneys, right? It's a little tube. Take a cross section of that tube. You see eight to 10 cells that have cooperated to make this little tube in cross section, right? So one amazing, one amazing thing you can do is, um, you can, you can mess with a very early cell division to make the cells gigantic, bigger. You can, you can make them different sizes. You can force them to be different sizes. So if you make the cells different sizes, the whole nude is still the same size. So if you take a cross section through the, through that tubule, instead of eight to 10 cells, you might have four or five or you might have, you know, three until you make the cells so enormous that one single cell wraps around itself and, and gives you that same large scale structure with a completely different molecular mechanism. So now instead of cell to cell communication to make a tubule, instead of that, it's one cell using the cytoskeleton to bend itself around. So think about what that means in the service of a large scale, talk about top down control, right? In the service of a large scale anatomical feature, different molecular mechanisms get called up. So now think about this, you're, you're, you're a nude cell and trying to make an embryo. If you had a fixed idea of who was supposed to do what, you'd be screwed because now your cells are gigantic. Nothing would work. The, there's an incredible tolerance for changes in the size of the parts and the amount of DNA in those parts. Um, all sorts of stuff you can, you can, the life is highly interoperable. You can put electrodes in there and you can put weird nanomaterials. It still works. It's, it's, uh, this is that problem solving action, right? It's able to do what it needs to do, even when circumstances change. That is, you know, the hallmark of intelligence, right? William James defined intelligence as the ability to get to the same goal by different means. That's this, you get to the same goal by completely different means. And so, so, so why am I bringing this up is just to say that, yeah, it's important for the cells to do the right stuff, but they have incredible tolerances for things not being what you expect and to still get their job done. So if you're, you know, um, all of these things are not hardwired. There are organisms that might be hardwired. For example, the nematode C elegans in that organism, every cell is numbered, meaning that every C elegans has exactly the same number of cells as every other C elegans. They're all in the same place. They all divide. There's literally a map of how it works that in that, in that sort of system, it's, it's, it's much more cookie cutter, but, but most, most organisms are incredibly plastic in that way. Is there something particularly magical to you about the whole developmental biology process? Um, is there something you could say, cause you just said it, they're very good at accomplishing the goal of the job they need to do the competency thing, but you get fricking organism from one cell. It's like, uh, I mean, it's very hard, hard to intuit that whole process to even think about reverse engineering that process. Right. Very hard to the point where I often just imagine, I, I sometimes ask my students to do this thought experiment. Imagine you were, you were shrunk down to the, to the scale of a single cell and you were in the middle of an embryo and you were looking around at what's going on and the cells running around, some cells are dying at the, you know, every time you look, it's kind of a different number of cells for most organisms. And so I think that if you didn't know what embryonic development was, you would have no clue that what you're seeing is always going to make the same thing. Nevermind knowing what that, what that is. Nevermind being able to say, even with full genomic information, being able to say, what the hell are they building? We have no way to do that. But, but just even to guess that, wow, the, the, the outcome of all this activity is it's always going to be, it's always going to build the same thing. The imperative to create the final you as you are now is there already. So you can, you would, so you start from the same embryo, you create a very similar organism. Yeah. Except for cases like the Xenobots, when you give them a different environment, they come up with a different way to be adaptive in that environment. But overall, I mean, so, so I think, so I think to, you know, kind of summarize it, I think what evolution is really good at is creating hardware that has a very stable baseline mode, meaning that left to its own devices, it's very good at doing the same thing. But it has a bunch of problem solving capacity such that if any, if any assumptions don't hold, if your cells are a weird size, or you get the wrong number of cells, or there's a, you know, somebody stuck in electrode halfway through the body, whatever, it will still get most of what it needs to do done. You've talked about the magic and the power of biology here. If we look at the human brain, how special is the brain in this context? You're kind of minimizing the importance of the brain or lessening its, we think of all the special computation happens in the brain, everything else is like the help. You're kind of saying that the whole thing is the whole thing is doing computation. But nevertheless, how special is the human brain in this full context of biology? Yeah, I mean, look, there's no getting away from the fact that the human brain allows us to do things that we could not do without it. You can say the same thing about the liver. Yeah, no, this is this is true. And so and so, you know, I, my goal is not No, you're right. My goal is just being polite to the brain right now. Well, being a politician, like, listen, everybody has everybody has a role. Yeah, it's very important role. That's right. We have to acknowledge the importance of the brain, you know, there are more than enough people who are cheerleading the brain, right? So so I don't feel like nothing I say is going to reduce people's excitement about the human brain. And so so I emphasize other things credit. I don't think it gets too much credit. I think other things don't get enough credit. I think the brain is the human brain is incredible and special and all that. I think other things need more credit. And and I also think that this and I'm sort of this way about everything. I don't like binary categories, but almost anything I like a continuum. And the thing about the human brain is that it by by by accepting that as some kind of an important category or essential, essential thing, we end up with all kinds of weird pseudo problems and conundrum. So for example, when we talk about it, you know, if you don't want to talk about ethics and other other things like that, and what you know, this this idea that surely if we look out into the universe, surely, we don't believe that this human brain is the only way to be sentient, right? Surely we don't, you know, and to have high level cognition. I just can't even wrap my mind around this, this idea that that is the only way to do it. No doubt there are other architectures made bond made of completely different principles that achieve the same thing. And once we believe that, then that tells us something important. It tells us that things that are not quite human brains or chimeras of human brains and other tissue or human brains or other kinds of brains and novel configurations or things that are sort of brains, but not really, or plants or embryos or whatever, might also have important cognitive status. So that's the only thing I think we have to be really careful about treating the human brain as if it was some kind of like sharp binary category. You know, you are or you aren't. I don't believe that exists. So when we look out at all the beautiful variety of human brains, semi biological architectures out there in the universe, how many intelligent alien civilizations do you think are out there? Boy, I have no expertise in that whatsoever. You haven't met any? I have met the ones we've made. I think that I mean, exactly. In some sense with synthetic biology, are you not creating aliens? I absolutely think so because look, all of life, all of all standard model systems are an end of one course of evolution on Earth, right? And trying to make conclusions about biology from looking at life on Earth is like testing your theory on the same data that generated it. It's all it's all kind of like locked in. So we absolutely have to create novel examples that have no history on Earth that don't, you know, xenobots have no history of selection to be a good xenobot. The cells have selection for various things, but the xenobot itself never existed before. And so we can make chimeras, you know, we make frog a lottles that are sort of half frog, half axolotl. You can make all sorts of high brats, right constructions of living tissue with robots and whatever. We need to be making these things until we find actual aliens, because otherwise, we're just looking at an end of one set of examples, all kinds of frozen accidents of evolution and so on. We need to go beyond that to really understand biology. But we're still even when you do a synthetic biology, you're locked in to the basic components of the way biology is done on this Earth. Yeah, right. And also, and the and also the basic constraints of the environment, even artificial environments to construct in the lab are tied up to the environment. I mean, what do you? Okay, let's say there is I mean, what I think is there's a nearly infinite number of intelligent civilizations living or dead out there. If you pick one out of the box, what do you think it would look like? So in when you think about synthetic biology, or creating synthetic organisms, how hard is it to create something that's very different? Yeah, I think it's very hard to create something that's very different, right? It's we are just locked in both both both experimentally and in terms of our imagination, right? It's very hard. And you also emphasize several times that the idea of shape. Yeah, the individual cell get together with other cells and they kind of they're gonna build a shape. So it's shape and function, but shape is a critical thing. Yeah. So here, I'll take a stab. I mean, I agree with you. I did to whatever extent that we can say anything, I do think that there's, you know, probably an infinite number of, of different different architectures with with that are with interesting cognitive properties out there. What can we say about them? I think that the only things that are going I don't I don't think we can rely on any of the typical stuff, you know, carbon based, none of that. Like, I think all of that is just, you know, us being having having a lack of imagination. But I think the things that are going to be universal, if anything is, are things, for example, driven by resource limitation, the fact that you are fighting a hostile world, and you have to draw a boundary between yourself and the world somewhere, the fact that that boundary is not given to you by anybody, you have to you have to assume it, you know, estimated yourself. And the fact that you have to course grain your experience and the fact that you're going to try to minimize surprise and the fact that like these, these are the things that I think are fundamental about biology, none of the, you know, the facts about the genetic code, or even the fact that we have genes or the biochemistry of it, I don't think any of those things are fundamental. But it's going to be a lot more about the information and about the creation of the self, the fact that so in my in my framework, selves are demarcated by the scale of the goals that they can pursue. So from little tiny local goals to like massive, you know, planetary scale goals for certain humans, and everything and everything in between. So you can draw this like cognitive light cone about that determines the the scale of the goals you could possibly pursue. I think those kinds of frameworks, like that, like active inference, and so on are going to be universally applicable, but but none of the other things that are that are typically discussed. Quick pause, do you need a bathroom break? We were just talking about, you know, aliens and all that. That's a funny thing, which is, I don't know if you've seen them, there's a kind of debate that goes on about cognition and plants, and what can you say about different kinds of computation and cognition and plants. And I always I always look at that something like if you're weirded out by cognition and plants, you're not ready for exobiology, right? If you know something that's that similar here on Earth is already like freaking you out, then I think there's going to be all kinds of cognitive life out there that we're gonna have a really hard time recognizing. I think robots will help us, yeah, like expand our mind about cognition, either that or the word like xenobots. So, and they maybe becomes the same thing is, you know, really, when the human engineers, the thing, at least in part, and then is able to achieve some kind of cognition that's different than what you're used to, then you start to understand like, oh, you know, every living organism is capable of cognition. Oh, I need to kind of broaden my understanding what cognition is. But do you think plants, like when you when you eat them, are they screaming? I don't know about screaming. I think you have to see what I think when I eat a salad. Yeah, good. Yeah, I think you have to scale down the expectations in terms of right, so probably they're not screaming in the way that we would be screaming. However, there's plenty of data on plants being able to do anticipation and certain kinds of memory and so on. I think, you know, what you just said about robots, I hope you're right. And I hope that's but there's two, there's two ways that people can take that right. So one way is exactly what you just said to try to kind of expand their expand their their their notions for that category. The other way people often go is they just sort of define the term is if if if it's not a natural product, it's it's just faking, right? It's not really intelligence if it was made by somebody else, because it's that same, it's the same thing. They can see how it's done. And once you see how it's like a magic trick, when you see how it's done, it's not as fun anymore. And and I think people have a real tendency for that. And they sort of which which I find really strange in the sense that if somebody said to me, we have this this this sort of blind, like, like, hill climbing search, and then and then we have a really smart team of engineers, which one do you think is going to produce a system that has good intelligence? I think it's really weird to say that it only comes from the blind search, right? It can't be done by people who, by the way, can also use evolutionary techniques if they want to, but also rational design. I think it's really weird to say that real intelligence only comes from natural evolution. So I hope you're right. I hope people take it the other the other way. But there's a nice shortcut. So I work with Lego robots a lot now from for my own personal pleasure. Not in that way internet. So four legs. And one of the things that changes my experience with the robots a lot is when I can't understand why I did a certain thing. And there's a lot of ways to engineer that. Me, the person that created the software that runs it. There's a lot of ways for me to build that software in such a way that I don't exactly know why it did a certain basic decision. Of course, as an engineer, you can go in and start to look at logs. You can log all kind of data, sensory data, the decisions you made, you know, all the outputs in your networks and so on. But I also try to really experience that surprise and that really experience as another person would that totally doesn't know how it's built. And I think the magic is there in not knowing how it works. That I think biology does that for you through the layers of abstraction. Yeah, it because nobody really knows what's going on inside the biological. Like each one component is clueless about the big picture. I think there's actually really cheap systems that can that can illustrate that kind of thing, which is even like, you know, fractals, right? Like, you have a very small, short formula in Z, and you see it and there's no magic, you're just going to crank through, you know, Z squared plus C, whatever, you're just going to crank through it. But the result of it is this incredibly rich, beautiful image, right? That that just like, wow, all of that was in this, like, 10 character long string, like amazing. So the fact that you can you can know everything there is to know about the details and the process and all the parts and every like, there's literally no magic of any kind there. And yet the outcome is something that you would never have expected. And it's just it just, you know, is incredibly rich and complex and beautiful. So there's a lot of that. You write that you work on developing conceptual frameworks for understanding unconventional cognition. So the kind of thing we've been talking about, I just like the term unconventional cognition. And you want to figure out how to detect, study and communicate with the thing. You've already mentioned a few examples, but what is unconventional cognition? Is it as simply as everything else outside of what we define usually as cognition, cognitive science, the stuff going on between our ears? Or is there some deeper way to get at the fundamentals of what is cognition? Yeah, I think like, and I'm certainly not the only person who works in unconventional, unconventional cognition. So it's the term used? Yeah, that's one that I so I've coined a number of weird terms, but that's not one of mine like that. That's an existing thing. So so for example, somebody like Andy Adam Askey, who I don't know if you've if you've had him on, if you haven't, you should he's a he's a he's a, you know, very interesting guy. He's a computer scientist, and he does unconventional cognition and slime molds, all kinds of weird. He's a real weird, weird cat, really interesting. Anyway, so so that's, you know, it's a bunch of terms that I've come up with. But that's not one of mine. So I think like many terms, that one is, is really defined by the times, meaning that unconventional cognitive things that are unconventional cognition today are not going to be considered unconventional cognition at some point. It's one of those, it's one of those things. And so it's, you know, it's, it's, it's this, it's this really deep question of how do you recognize, communicate with, classify cognition, when you cannot rely on the typical milestones, right? So typical, you know, again, if you stick with the with the, the history of life on Earth, like these, these exact model systems, you would say, Ah, here's a particular structure of the brain. And this one has fewer of those. And this one has a bigger frontal cortex. And this one, right, so these are these are landmarks that that we're that we're used to, and and allows us to make very kind of rapid judgments about things. But if you can't rely on that, either because you're looking at a synthetic thing, or an engineered thing, or an alien thing, then what do you do? Right? How do you and so and so that's what I'm really interested. I'm interested in mind in all of its possible implementations, not just the obvious ones that we know from from looking at brains here on Earth. Whenever I think about something like unconventional cognition, I think about cellular automata, I'm just captivated by the beauty of the thing. The fact that from simple little objects, you can create some such beautiful complexity that very quickly, you forget about the individual objects, and you see the things that it creates as its own organisms. That blows my mind every time. Like, honestly, I could full time just eat mushrooms and watch cellular automata. Don't even have to do mushrooms. Just cellular automata. It feels like, I mean, from the engineering perspective, I love when a very simple system captures something really powerful, because then you can study that system to understand something fundamental about complexity about life on Earth. Anyway, how do I communicate with a thing? If cellular automata can do cognition, if a plant can do cognition, if a xenobot can do cognition, how do I like whisper in its ear and get an answer back to how do I have a conversation? How do I have a xenobot on a podcast? It's a really interesting line of investigation that opens up. I mean, we've thought about this. So you need a few things. You need to understand the space in which they live. So not just the physical modality, like can they see light, can they feel vibration? I mean, that's important, of course, because that's how you deliver your message. But not just the ideas for a communication medium, not just the physical medium, but saliency, right? So what's important to this system? And systems have all kinds of different levels of sophistication of what you could expect to get back. And I think what's really important, I call this the spectrum of persuadability, which is this idea that when you're looking at a system, you can't assume where on the spectrum it is. You have to do experiments. And so for example, if you look at a gene regulatory network, which is just a bunch of nodes that turn each other on and off at various rates, you might look at that and you say, well, there's no magic here. I mean, clearly this thing is as deterministic as it gets. It's a piece of hardware. The only way we're going to be able to control it is by rewiring it, which is the way molecular biology works, right? We can add nodes, remove nodes, whatever. Well, so we've done simulations and shown that biological, and now we're doing this in the lab, the biological networks like that have associative memory. So they can actually learn, they can learn from experience. They have habituation, they have sensitization, they have associative memory, which you wouldn't have known if you assume that they have to be on the left side of that spectrum. So when you're going to communicate with something, and we've even, Charles Abramson and I have written a paper on behaviorist approaches to synthetic organisms, meaning that if you're given something, you have no idea what it is or what it can do, how do you figure out what its psychology is, what its level is, what does it, and so we literally lay out a set of protocols, starting with the simplest things and then moving up to more complex things where you can make no assumptions about what this thing can do, right? You have to start and you'll find out. So when you're going to, so here's a simple, I mean, here's one way to communicate with something. If you can train it, that's a way of communicating. So if you can provide, if you can figure out what the currency of reward of positive and negative reinforcement is, right, and you can get it to do something it wasn't doing before based on experiences you've given, you have taught it one thing. You have communicated one thing, that such and such an action is good, some other action is not good. That's like a basic atom of a primitive atom of communication. What about in some sense, if it gets you to do something you haven't done before, is it answering back? Yeah, most certainly. And there's, I've seen cartoons, I think maybe Gary Larson or somebody had had a cartoon of these rats in the maze and the one rat, you know, assist to the other. You look at this every time, every time I walk over here, he starts scribbling in that on the, you know, on the clipboard that he has, it's awesome. If we step outside ourselves and really measure how much, like if I actually measure how much I've changed because of my interaction with certain cellular automata. I mean, you really have to take that into consideration about like, well, these things are changing you too. Yes. I know, you know how it works and so on, but you're being changed by the thing. Yeah, absolutely. I think I read, I don't know any details, but I think I read something about how wheat and other things have domesticated humans in terms of, right, but by their properties change the way that the human behavior and societal structures. In that sense, cats are running the world because they've took over the, so first off, so first they, while not giving a shit about humans, clearly with every ounce of their being, they've somehow got just millions and millions of humans to take them home and feed them. And then not only the physical space did they take over, they took over the digital space. They dominate the internet in terms of cuteness, in terms of memeability. And so they're like, they got themselves literally inside the memes, they become viral and spread on the internet. And they're the ones that are probably controlling humans. That's my theory. Another, that's a follow up paper after the frog kissing. Okay. I mean, you mentioned sentience and consciousness. You have a paper titled Generalizing Frameworks for Sentience Beyond Natural Species. So beyond normal cognition, if we look at sentience and consciousness, and I wonder if you draw an interesting distinction between those two elsewhere, outside of humans, and maybe outside of Earth, you think aliens have sentience. And if they do, how do we think about it? So when you have this framework, what is this paper? What is the way you propose to think about sentience? Yeah, that particular paper was a very short commentary on another paper that was written about crabs. It was a really good paper on them, crabs and various, like a rubric of different types of behaviors that could be applied to different creatures, and they're trying to apply it to crabs and so on. Consciousness, we can talk about if you want, but it's a whole separate kettle of fish. I almost never talk about crabs. In this case, yes. I almost never talk about consciousness, per se. I've said very, very little about it, but we can talk about it if you want. Mostly what I talk about is cognition, because I think that that's much easier to deal with in a kind of rigorous experimental way. I think that all of these terms have, you know, sentience and so on, have different definitions, and I fundamentally, I think that people can, as long as they specify what they mean ahead of time, I think people can define them in various ways. The only thing that I really think that I really kind of insist on is that the right way to think about all this stuff is from an engineering perspective. What does it help me to control, predict, and does it help me do my next experiment? That's not a universal perspective. Some people have philosophical kind of underpinnings, and those are primary, and if anything runs against that, then it must automatically be wrong. Some people will say, I don't care what else. If your theory says to me that thermostats have little tiny goals, I'm not, so that's it. That's my philosophical preconception. Thermostats do not have goals, and that's it. That's one way of doing it, and some people do it that way. I do not do it that way, and I think that we can't, I don't think we can know much of anything from a philosophical armchair. I think that all of these theories and ways of doing things stand or fall based on just basically one set of criteria. Does it help you run a rich research program? That's it. I agree with you totally, but forget philosophy. What about the poetry of ambiguity? What about at the limits of the things you can engineer using terms that can be defined in multiple ways and living within that uncertainty in order to play with words until something lands that you can engineer? I mean, that's to me where consciousness sits currently. Nobody really understands the heart problem of consciousness, the subject, what it feels like, because it really feels like, it feels like something to be this biological system. This conglomerate of a bunch of cells in this hierarchy of competencies feels like something, and yeah, I feel like one thing, and is that just a side effect of a complex system, or is there something more that humans have, or is there something more that any biological system has? Some kind of magic, some kind of, not just a sense of agency, but a real sense with a capital letter S of agency. Yeah. Ah, boy, yeah, that's a deep question. Is there room for poetry in engineering or no? No, there definitely is, and a lot of the poetry comes in when we realize that none of the categories we deal with are sharp as we think they are, right? And so in the different areas of all these spectra are where a lot of the poetry sits, I have many new theories about things, but I, in fact, do not have a good theory about consciousness that I plan to trot out. And you almost don't see it as useful for your current work to think about consciousness? I think it will come. I have some thoughts about it, but I don't feel like they're going to move the needle yet on that. And you want to ground it in engineering always. So, well, I mean, so if we really tackle consciousness per se, in the terms of the hard problem, that isn't necessarily going to be groundable in engineering, right? That aspect of cognition is, but actual consciousness per se, first person perspective, I'm not sure that that's groundable in engineering. And I think specifically what's different about it is there's a couple of things. So let's, you know, here we go. I'll say a couple of things about consciousness. One thing is that what makes it different is that for every other thing, other aspect of science, when we think about having a correct or a good theory of it, we have some idea of what format that theory makes predictions in. So whether those be numbers or whatever, we have some idea. We may not know the answer, we may not have the theory, but we know that when we get the theory, here's what it's going to output, and then we'll know if it's right or wrong. For actual consciousness, not behavior, not neural correlates, but actual first person consciousness. If we had a correct theory of consciousness, or even a good one, what the hell would, what format would it make predictions in, right? Because all the things that we know about basically boil down to observable behaviors. So the only thing I can think of when I think about that is, it'll be poetry, or it'll be something to, if I ask you, okay, you've got a great theory of consciousness, and here's this creature, maybe it's a natural one, maybe it's an engineered one, whatever. And I want you to tell me what your theory says about this being, what it's like to be this being. The only thing I can imagine you giving me is some piece of art, a poem or something, that once I've taken it in, I share, I now have a similar state as whatever. That's about as good as I can come up with. Well, it's possible that once you have a good understanding of consciousness, it would be mapped to some things that are more measurable. So for example, it's possible that a conscious being is one that's able to suffer. So you start to look at pain and suffering. You can start to connect it closer to things that you can measure that, in terms of how they reflect themselves in behavior and problem solving and creation and attainment of goals, for example, which I think suffering is one of the, you know, life is suffering. It's one of the big aspects of the human condition. And so if consciousness is somehow a, maybe at least a catalyst for suffering, you could start to get like echoes of it. You start to see like the actual effects of consciousness and behavior. That it's not just about subjective experience. It's like it's really deeply integrated in the problem solving decision making of a system, something like this. But also it's possible that we realize, this is not a philosophical statement. Philosophers can write their books. I welcome it. You know, I take the Turing test really seriously. I don't know why people really don't like it. When a robot convinces you that it's intelligent, I think that's a really incredible accomplishment. And there's some deep sense in which that is intelligence. If it looks like it's intelligent, it is intelligent. And I think there's some deep aspect of a system that appears to be conscious. In some deep sense, it is conscious. At least for me, we have to consider that possibility. And a system that appears to be conscious is an engineering challenge. Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. I mean, especially intelligence, I think, is a publicly observable thing. Science fiction has dealt with this for a century or much more, maybe. This idea that when you are confronted with something that just doesn't meet any of your typical assumptions, so you can't look in the skull and say, oh, well, there's that frontal cortex, so then I guess we're good. So this thing lands on your front lawn, and the little door opens, and something trundles out, and it's shiny and aluminum looking, and it hands you this poem that it wrote while it was flying over, and how happy it is to meet you. What's going to be your criteria for whether you get to take it apart and see what makes it tick, or whether you have to be nice to it and whatever? All the criteria that we have now and that people are using, and as you said, a lot of people are down on the Turing test and things like this, but what else have we got? Because measuring the cortex size isn't going to cut it in the broader scheme of things. So I think it's a wide open problem. Our solution to the problem of other minds, it's very simplistic. We give each other credit for having minds just because we're sort of on an anatomical level, we're pretty similar, and so it's good enough. But how far is that going to go? So I think that's really primitive. So yeah, I think it's a major unsolved problem. It's a really challenging direction of thought to the human race that you talked about, like embodied minds. If you start to think that other things other than humans have minds, that's really challenging. Because all men are created equal starts being like, all right, well, we should probably treat not just cows with respect, but like plants, and not just plants, but some kind of organized conglomerates of cells in a petri dish. In fact, some of the work we're doing, like you're doing and the whole community of science is doing with biology, people might be like, we were really mean to viruses. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the thing is, you're right. And I certainly get phone calls about people complaining about frog skin and so on. But I think we have to separate the sort of deep philosophical aspects versus what actually happens. So what actually happens on Earth is that people with exactly the same anatomical structure kill each other on a daily basis. So I think it's clear that simply knowing that something else is equally or maybe more cognitive or conscious than you are is not a guarantee of kind behavior, that much we know of. And so then we look at a commercial farming of mammals and various other things. And so I think on a practical basis, long before we get to worrying about things like frog skin, we have to ask ourselves, why are we, what can we do about the way that we've been behaving towards creatures, which we know for a fact, because of our similarities are basically just like us. That's kind of a whole other social thing. But fundamentally, of course, you're absolutely right in that we are also, think about this, we are on this planet in some way, incredibly lucky. It's just dumb luck that we really only have one dumb animal. We only have one dominant species. It didn't have to work out that way. So you could easily imagine that there could be a planet somewhere with more than one equally or maybe near equally intelligent species. But they may not look anything like each other. So there may be multiple ecosystems where there are things of similar to human like intelligence. And then you'd have all kinds of issues about how do you relate to them when they're physically like you at all. But yet in terms of behavior and culture and whatever, it's pretty obvious that they've got as much on the ball as you have. Or maybe imagine that there was another group of beings that was on average 40 IQ points lower. We're pretty lucky in many ways. We don't really have, even though we still act badly in many ways. But the fact is, all humans are more or less in that same range, but didn't have to work out that way. Well, but I think that's part of the way life works on Earth, maybe human civilization works, is it seems like we want ourselves to be quite similar. And then within that, you know, where everybody's about the same relatively IQ, intelligence, problem solving capabilities, even physical characteristics. But then we'll find some aspect of that that's different. And that seems to be like, I mean, it's really dark to say, but that seems to be the, not even a bug, but like a feature of the early development of human civilization. You pick the other, your tribe versus the other tribe and you war, it's a kind of evolution in the space of memes, a space of ideas, I think, and you war with each other. So we're very good at finding the other, even when the characteristics are really the same. And that's, I don't know what that, I mean, I'm sure so many of these things echo in the biological world in some way. Yeah. There's a fun experiment that I did. My son actually came up with this and we did a biology unit together. He's a homeschool. And so we did this a couple of years ago. We did this thing where, imagine you get this slime mold, right? Fisarum polycephalum, and it grows on a Petri dish of agar and it sort of spreads out and it's a single cell protist, but it's like this giant thing. And so you put down a piece of oat and it wants to go get the oat and it sort of grows towards the oat. So what you do is you take a razor blade and you just separate the piece of the whole culture that's growing towards the oat. You just kind of separate it. And so now think about the interesting decision making calculus for that little piece. I can go get the oat and therefore I won't have to share those nutrients with this giant mass over there. So the nutrients per unit volume is going to be amazing. I should go eat the oat. But if I first rejoin, because Fisarum, once you cut it, has the ability to join back up. If I first rejoin, then that whole calculus becomes impossible because there is no more me anymore. There's just we and then we will go eat this thing, right? So this interesting, you can imagine a kind of game theory where the number of agents isn't fixed and that it's not just cooperate or defect, but it's actually merge and whatever, right? Yeah. So that computation, how does it do that decision making? Yeah. So it's really interesting. And so empirically, what we found is that it tends to merge first. It tends to merge first and then the whole thing goes. But it's really interesting that that calculus, I mean, I'm not an expert in the economic game theory and all that, but maybe there's some sort of hyperbolic discounting or something. But maybe this idea that the actions you take not only change your payoff, but they change who or what you are, and that you could take an action after which you don't exist anymore, or you are radically changed, or you are merged with somebody else. As far as I know, that's a whole different thing. As far as I know, we're still missing a formalism for even knowing how to model any of that. Do you see evolution, by the way, as a process that applies here on Earth? Where did evolution come from? Yeah. So this thing from the very origin of life that took us to today, what the heck is that? I think evolution is inevitable in the sense that if you combine, and basically, I think one of the most useful things that was done in early computing, I guess in the 60s, it started with evolutionary computation and just showing how simple it is that if you have imperfect heredity and competition together, those two things, or three things, so heredity, imperfect heredity, and competition, or selection, those three things, and that's it. Now you're off to the races. And so that can be, it's not just on Earth because it can be done in the computer, it can be done in chemical systems, it can be done in, you know, Lee Smolin says it works on cosmic scales. So I think that that kind of thing is incredibly pervasive and general. It's a general feature of life. It's interesting to think about, you know, the standard thought about this is that it's blind, right? Meaning that the intelligence of the process is zero, it's stumbling around. And I think that back in the day, when the options were it's dumb like machines, or it's smart like humans, then of course, the scientists went in this direction, because nobody wanted creationism. They said, okay, it's got to be like completely blind. I'm not actually sure, right? Because I think that everything is a continuum. And I think that it doesn't have to be smart with foresight like us, but it doesn't have to be completely blind either. I think there may be aspects of it. And in particular, this kind of multi scale competency might give it a little bit of look ahead maybe or a little bit of problem solving sort of baked in. But that's going to be completely different in different systems. I do think it's general. I don't think it's just on Earth. I think it's a very fundamental thing. And it does seem to have a kind of direction that it's taking us that's somehow perhaps is defined by the environment itself. It feels like we're headed towards something. Like, we're playing out a script that was just like a single cell defines the entire organism. It feels like from the origin of Earth itself, it's playing out a kind of script. You can't really go any other way. I mean, so this is very controversial, and I don't know the answer. But people have argued that this is called, you know, sort of rewinding the tape of life, right? And some people have argued, I think, I think Conway Morris, maybe has argued that it is that there's a deep attractor, for example, to human to the human kind of structure and that and that if you were to rewind it again, you'd basically get more or less the same thing. And then other people have argued that, no, it's incredibly sensitive to frozen accidents. And then once certain stochastic decisions are made downstream, everything is going to be different. I don't know. I don't know. You know, we're very bad at predicting attractors in the space of complex systems, generally speaking, right? We don't know. So maybe, so maybe evolution on Earth has these deep attractors that no matter what has happened, it pretty much would likely to end up there or maybe not. I don't know. What's a really difficult idea to imagine that if you ran Earth a million times, 500,000 times you would get Hitler? Like, yeah, we don't like to think like that. We think like, because at least maybe in America, you'd like to think that individual decisions can change the world. And if individual decisions could change the world, then surely any perturbation could result in a totally different trajectory. But maybe there's a, in this competency hierarchy, it's a self correcting system. There's just ultimately, there's a bunch of chaos that ultimately is leading towards something like a super intelligent, artificial intelligence system that answers 42. I mean, there might be a kind of imperative for life that it's headed to. And we're too focused on our day to day life of getting coffee and snacks and having sex and getting a promotion at work, not to see the big imperative of life on Earth that is headed towards something. Yeah, maybe, maybe. It's difficult. I think one of the things that's important about Chimerica bioengineering technologies, all of those things are that we have to start developing a better science of predicting the cognitive goals of composite systems. So we're just not very good at it, right? We don't know if I create a composite system, and this could be Internet of Things or swarm robotics or a cellular swarm or whatever. What is the emergent intelligence of this thing? First of all, what level is it going to be at? And if it has goal directed capacity, what are the goals going to be? Like, we are just not very good at predicting that yet. And I think that it's an existential level need for us to be able to because we're building these things all the time, right? We're building both physical structures like swarm robotics, and we're building social financial structures and so on, with very little ability to predict what sort of autonomous goals that system is going to have, of which we are now cogs. And so learning to predict and control those things is going to be critical. So in fact, if you're right and there is some kind of attractor to evolution, it would be nice to know what that is and then to make a rational decision of whether we're going to go along or we're going to pop out of it or try to pop out of it because there's no guarantee. I mean, that's the other kind of important thing. A lot of people, I get a lot of complaints from people who email me and say, you know, what you're doing, it isn't natural. And I'll say, look, natural, that'd be nice if somebody was making sure that natural was matched up to our values, but no one's doing that. Evolution optimizes for biomass. That's it. Nobody's optimizing. It's not optimizing for your happiness. I don't think necessarily it's optimizing for intelligence or fairness or any of that stuff. I'm going to find that person that emailed you, beat them up, take their place, steal everything they own and say, no, this is natural. This is natural. Yeah, exactly. Because it comes from an old worldview where you could assume that whatever is natural, that that's probably for the best. And I think we're long out of that garden of Eden kind of view. So I think we can do better. I think we, and we have to, right? Natural just isn't great for a lot of life forms. What are some cool synthetic organisms that you think about, you dream about? When you think about embodied mind, what do you imagine? What do you hope to build? Yeah, on a practical level, what I really hope to do is to gain enough of an understanding of the embodied intelligence of the organs and tissues such that we can achieve a radically different regenerative medicine so that we can say, basically, and I think about it as, you know, in terms of like, okay, can you, what's the goal kind of end game for this whole thing? To me, the end game is something that you would call an anatomical compiler. So the idea is you would sit down in front of the computer and you would draw the body or the organ that you wanted. Not molecular details, but like, yeah, this is what I want. I want a six legged, you know, frog with a propeller on top, or I want a heart that looks like this, or I want a leg that looks like this. And what it would do if we knew what we were doing is put out, convert that anatomical description into a set of stimuli that would have to be given to cells to convince them to build exactly that thing, right? I probably won't live to see it, but I think it's achievable. And I think with that, if we can have that, then that is basically the solution to all of medicine except for infectious disease. So birth defects, right? Traumatic injury, cancer, aging, degenerative disease. If we knew how to tell cells what to build, all of those things go away. So those things go away. And the positive feedback spiral of economic costs, where all of the advances are increasingly more heroic and expensive interventions of a sinking ship when you're like 90 and so on, right? All of that goes away because basically, instead of trying to fix you up as you degrade, you progressively regenerate, you apply the regenerative medicine early before things degrade. So I think that that'll have massive economic impacts over what we're trying to do now, which is not at all sustainable. And that's what I hope. I hope that we get it. So to me, yes, the xenobots will be doing useful things, cleaning up the environment, cleaning out your joints and all that kind of stuff. But more important than that, I think we can use these synthetic systems to try to develop a science of detecting and manipulating the goals of collective intelligences of cells specifically for regenerative medicine. And then sort of beyond that, if we think further beyond that, what I hope is that kind of like what you said, all of this drives a reconsideration of how we formulate ethical norms because this old school, so in the olden days, what you could do is if you were confronted with something, you could tap on it, right? And if you heard a metallic clanging sound, you'd say, ah, fine, right? So you could conclude it was made in a factory. I can take it apart. I can do whatever, right? If you did that and you got sort of a squishy kind of warm sensation, you'd say, ah, I need to be more or less nice to it and whatever. That's not going to be feasible. It was never really feasible, but it was good enough because we didn't have any, we didn't know any better. That needs to go. And I think that by breaking down those artificial barriers, someday we can try to build a system of ethical norms that does not rely on these completely contingent facts of our earthly history, but on something much, much deeper that really takes agency and the capacity to suffer and all that takes that seriously. The capacity to suffer and the deep questions I would ask of a system is can I eat it and can I have sex with it? Which is the two fundamental tests of, again, the human condition. So I can basically do what Dali does that's in the physical space. So print out like a 3D print Pepe the Frog with a propeller head, propeller hat is the dream. Well yes and no. I mean, I want to get away from the 3D printing thing because that will be available for some things much earlier. I mean, we can already do bladders and ears and things like that because it's micro level control, right? When you 3D print, you are in charge of where every cell goes. And for some things that, you know, for, for like this thing, they had that I think 20 years ago or maybe earlier than that, you could do that. So yeah, I would like to emphasize the Dali part where you provide a few words and it generates a painting. So here you say, I want a frog with these features and then it would go direct a complex biological system to construct something like that. Yeah. The main magic would be, I mean, I think from, from looking at Dali and so on, it looks like the first part is kind of solved now where you go from, from the words to the image, like that seems more or less solved. The next step is really hard. This is what keeps things like CRISPR and genomic editing and so on. That's what limits all the impacts for regenerative medicine because going back to, okay, this is the knee joint that I want, or this is the eye that I want. Now, what genes do I edit to make that happen, right? Going back in that direction is really hard. So instead of that, it's going to be, okay, I understand how to motivate cells to build particular structures. Can I rewrite the memory of what they think they're supposed to be building such that then I can, you know, take my hands off the wheel and let them, let them do their thing. So some of that is experiment, but some of that may be AI can help too. Just like with protein folding, this is exactly the problem that protein folding in the most simple medium tried and has solved with alpha fold, which is how does the sequence of letters result in this three dimensional shape? And you have to, I guess it didn't solve it because you have to, if you say, I want this shape, how do I then have a sequence of letters? Yeah. The reverse engineering step is really tricky. It is. I think, I think we're, we're, and we're doing some of this now is, is to use AI to try and build actionable models of the intelligence of the cellular collectives. So try to help us and help us gain models that, that, that, and, and we've had some success in this. So we, we did something like this for, for, you know, for repairing birth defects of the brain in frog. We've done some of this for normalizing melanoma where you can really start to use AI to make models of how would I impact this thing if I wanted to given all the complexities, right. And, and, and given all the, the, the, the controls that it, that it knows how to do. So when you say regenerative medicine, so we talked about creating biological organisms, but if you regrow a hand, that information is already there, right? The biological system has that information. So how does regenerative medicine work today? How do you hope it works? What's the hope there? Yeah. Yeah. How do you make it happen? Well today there's a set of popular approaches. So, so one is 3d printing. So the idea is I'm going to make a scaffold of the thing that I want. I'm going to seed it with cells and then, and then there it is, right? So kind of direct, and then that works for certain things. You can make a bladder that way or an ear, something like that. The other, the other ideas is some sort of stem cell transplant. These are the ideas. If we, if we put in stem cells with appropriate factors, we can get them to generate certain kinds of neurons for certain diseases and so on. All of those things are good for relatively simple structures, but when you want an eye or a hand or something else, I think in this maybe an unpopular opinion, I think the only hope we have in any reasonable kind of timeframe is to understand how the thing was motivated to get made in the first place. So what is it that, that made those cells in the, in the beginning, create a particular arm with a particular set of sizes and shapes and number of fingers and all that. And why is it that a salamander can keep losing theirs and keep regrowing theirs and a planarian can do the same even more? So to me, uh, kind of ultimate regenerate medicine was when you can tell the cells to build whatever it is you need them to build. Right. And so the, so that we can all be like planaria basically, do you have to start at the very beginning or can you, um, do a shortcut? Cause we're going to hand, you already got the whole organism. Yeah. So here's what we've done, right? So, we've, we've more or less solved that in frogs. So frogs, unlike salamanders do not regenerate their legs as adults. And so, so, uh, we've shown that with a very, um, uh, kind of simple intervention. So what we do is there's two things you need to, uh, you need to have a signal that tells the cells what to do, and then you need some way of delivering it. And so this is work together with, um, with David Kaplan and I should do a, um, a disclosure here. We have a company called morphosuticals and spin off where we're trying to, uh, to address, uh, uh, regenerate, you know, limb regeneration. So we've solved it in the frog and we're now in trials and mice. So now we're going to, we're in mammals now. It's, I can't say anything about how it's going, but the frog thing is solved. So what you do is, um, after you have a little frog, Lou Skywalker with every growing hand. Yeah, basically, basically. Yeah. Yeah. So what you do is we did, we did with legs instead of forearms. And what you do is, um, after amputation, normally they, they don't regenerate. You put on a wearable bioreactor. So it's this thing that, um, that goes on and, uh, Dave Kaplan does lab makes these things and inside it's a, it's a very controlled environment. It is a silk gel that carries, uh, some drugs, for example, ion channel drugs. And what you're doing is you're saying to the cells, you should regrow what normally goes here. So, uh, that whole thing is on for 24 hours and you take it off and you don't touch the leg. Again, this is really important because what we're not looking for is a set of micromanagement, uh, you know, printing or controlling the cells we want to trigger. We want to, we want to interact with it early on and then not touch it again because, because we don't know how to make a frog leg, but the frog knows how to make a frog leg. So 24 hours, 18 months of leg growth after that, without us touching it again. And after 18 months, you get a pretty good leg that kind of shows this proof of concept that early on when the cells right after injury, when they're first making a decision about what they're going to do, you can, you can impact them. And once they've decided to make a leg, they don't need you after that. They can do their own thing. So that's an approach that we're now taking. What about cancer suppression? That's something you mentioned earlier. How can all of these ideas help with cancer suppression? So let's, let's go back to the beginning and ask what, what, what, what cancer is. So I think, um, you know, asking why there's cancer is the wrong question. I think the right question is why is there ever anything but cancer? So, so in the normal state, you have a bunch of cells that are all cooperating towards a large scale goal. If that process of cooperation breaks down and you've got a cell that is isolated from that electrical network that lets you remember what the big goal is, you revert back to your unicellular lifestyle as far as, now think about that border between self and world, right? Normally when all these cells are connected by gap junctions into an electrical network, they are all one self, right? That meaning that, um, their goals, they have these large tissue level goals and so on. As soon as a cell is disconnected from that, the self is tiny, right? And so at that point, and so, so people, a lot of people model cancer cell cells as being more selfish and all that. They're not more selfish. They're equally selfish. It's just that their self is smaller. Normally the self is huge. Now they got tiny little selves. Now what are the goals of tiny little selves? Well, proliferate, right? And migrate to wherever life is good. And that's metastasis. That's proliferation and metastasis. So, so one thing we found and people have noticed years ago that when cells convert to cancer, the first thing they see is they close the gap junctions. And it's a lot like, I think it's a lot like that experiment with the slime mold where until you close that gap junction, you can't even entertain the idea of leaving the collective because there is no you at that point, right? Your mind melded with this, with this whole other network. But as soon as the gap junction is closed, now the boundary between you and now, now the rest of the body is just outside environment to you. You're just a, you're just a unicellular organism and the rest of the body's environment. So, so we, so we studied this process and we worked out a way to artificially control the bioelectric state of these cells to physically force them to remain in that network. And so then, then what that, what that means is that nasty mutations like KRAS and things like that, these really tough oncogenic mutations that cause tumors. If you, if you do them and then, but then within artificially control of the bioelectrics, you greatly reduce tumor genesis or, or normalize cells that had already begun to convert. You basically, they go back to being normal cells. And so this is another, much like with the planaria, this is another way in which the bioelectric state kind of dominates what the, what the genetic state is. So if you sequence the, you know, if you sequence the nucleic acid, you'll see the KRAS mutation, you'll say, ah, well that's going to be a tumor, but there isn't a tumor because, because bioelectrically you've kept the cells connected and they're just working on making nice skin and kidneys and whatever else. So, so we've started moving that to, to, to human glioblastoma cells and we're hoping for, you know, a patient in the future interaction with patients. So is this one of the possible ways in which we may quote cure cancer? I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think, I think the actual cure, I mean, there are other technology, you know, immune therapy, I think is a great technology. Chemotherapy, I don't think is a good, is a good technology. I think we've got to get, get off of that. So chemotherapy just kills cells. Yeah. Well, chemotherapy hopes to kill more of the tumor cells than of your cells. That's it. It's a fine balance. The problem is the cells are very similar because they are your cells. And so if you don't have a very tight way of distinguishing between them, then the toll that chemo takes on the rest of the body is just unbelievable. And immunotherapy tries to get the immune system to do some of the work. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's potentially a very good, a very good approach. If, if the immune system can be taught to recognize enough of, of the cancer cells, that that's a pretty good approach. But I, but I think, but I think our approach is in a way more fundamental because if you can, if you can keep the cells harnessed towards organ level goals as opposed to individual cell goals, then nobody will be making a tumor or metastasizing and so on. So we've been living through a pandemic. What do you think about viruses in this full beautiful biological context we've been talking about? Are they beautiful to you? Are they terrifying? Also maybe let's say, are they, since we've been discriminating this whole conversation, are they living? Are they embodied minds? Embodied minds that are assholes? As far as I know, and I haven't been able to find this paper again, but, but somewhere I saw in the last couple of months, there was some, there was some papers showing an example of a virus that actually had physiology. So there was some, something was going on, I think proton flux or something on the virus itself. But, but barring that, generally speaking, viruses are very passive. They don't do anything by themselves. And so I don't see any particular reason to attribute much of a mind to them. I think, you know, they represent a way to hijack other minds for sure, like, like cells and other things. But that's an interesting interplay though. If they're hijacking other minds, you know, the way we're, we were talking about living organisms that they can interact with each other and have it alter each other's trajectory by having interacted. I mean, that's, that's a deep, meaningful connection between a virus and a cell. And I think both are transformed by the experience. And so in that sense, both are living. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the whole category, I, this question of what's living and what's not living, I really, I'm not sure. And I know there's people that work on this and I don't want to piss anybody off, but, but I have not found that particularly useful as, as to try and make that a binary kind of a distinction. I think level of cognition is very interesting of, but as a, as a continuum, but, but living and nonliving, I, you know, I don't, I really know what to do with that. I don't, I don't know what you do next after, after making that distinction. That's why I make the very binary distinction. Can I have sex with it or not? Can I eat it or not? Those, cause there's, those are actionable, right? Yeah. Well, I think that's a critical point that you brought up because how you relate to something is really what this is all about, right? As an engineer, how do I control it? But maybe I shouldn't be controlling it. Maybe I should be, you know, can I have a relationship with it? Should I be listening to its advice? Like, like all the way from, you know, I need to take it apart all the way to, I better do what it says cause it seems to be pretty smart and everything in between, right? That's really what we're asking about. Yeah. We need to understand our relationship to it. We're searching for that relationship, even in the most trivial senses. You came up with a lot of interesting terms. We've mentioned some of them. Agential material. That's a really interesting one. That's a really interesting one for the future of computation and artificial intelligence and computer science and all of that. There's also, let me go through some of them. If they spark some interesting thought for you, there's teleophobia, the unwarranted fear of erring on the side of too much agency when considering a new system. Yeah. That's the opposite. I mean, being afraid of maybe anthropomorphizing the thing. This'll get some people ticked off, I think. But I don't think, I think the whole notion of anthropomorphizing is a holdover from a pre scientific age where humans were magic and everything else wasn't magic and you were anthropomorphizing when you dared suggest that something else has some features of humans. And I think we need to be way beyond that. And this issue of anthropomorphizing, I think it's a cheap charge. I don't think it holds any water at all other than when somebody makes a cognitive claim. I think all cognitive claims are engineering claims, really. So when somebody says this thing knows or this thing hopes or this thing wants or this thing predicts, all you can say is fabulous. Give me the engineering protocol that you've derived using that hypothesis and we will see if this thing helps us or not. And then, and then we can, you know, then we can make a rational decision. I also like anatomical compiler, a future system representing the longterm end game of the science of morphogenesis that reminds us how far away from true understanding we are. Someday you will be able to sit in front of an anatomical computer, specify the shape of the animal or a plant that you want, and it will convert that shape specification to a set of stimuli that will have to be given to cells to build exactly that shape. No matter how weird it ends up being, you have total control. Just imagine the possibility for memes in the physical space. One of the glorious accomplishments of human civilizations is memes in digital space. Now this could create memes in physical space. I am both excited and terrified by that possibility. Cognitive light cone, I think we also talked about the outer boundary in space and time of the largest goal a given system can work towards. Is this kind of like shaping the set of options? It's a little different than options. It's really focused on... I first came up with this back in 2018, I want to say. There was a conference, a Templeton conference where they challenged us to come up with frameworks. I think actually it's the diverse intelligence community. Summer Institute. Yeah, they had a Summer Institute. That's the logos, the bee with some circuits. Yeah, it's got different life forms. The whole program is called diverse intelligence. They challenged us to come up with a framework that was suitable for analyzing different kinds of intelligence together. Because the kinds of things you do to a human are not good with an octopus, not good with a plant and so on. I started thinking about this. I asked myself what do all cognitive agents, no matter what their provenance, no matter what their architecture is, what do cognitive agents have in common? It seems to me that what they have in common is some degree of competency to pursue a goal. What you can do then is you can draw. What I ended up drawing was this thing that it's kind of like a backwards Minkowski cone diagram where all of space is collapsed into one axis and then here and then time is this axis. Then what you can do is you can draw for any creature, you can semi quantitatively estimate what are the spatial and temporal goals that it's capable of pursuing. For example, if you are a tick and all you really are able to pursue is maximum or a bacterium and maximizing the level of some chemical in your vicinity, that's all you've got, it's a tiny little icon, then you're a simple system like a tick or a bacterium. If you are something like a dog, well, you've got some ability to care about some spatial region, some temporal. You can remember a little bit backwards, you can predict a little bit forwards, but you're never ever going to care about what happens in the next town over four weeks from now. As far as we know, it's just impossible for that kind of architecture. If you're a human, you might be working towards world peace long after you're dead. You might have a planetary scale goal that's enormous. Then there may be other greater intelligences somewhere that can care in the linear range about numbers of creatures, some sort of Buddha like character that can care about everybody's welfare, really care the way that we can't. It's not a mapping of what you can sense, how far you can sense. It's not a mapping of how far you can act. It's a mapping of how big are the goals you are capable of envisioning and working towards. I think that enables you to put synthetic kinds of constructs, AIs, aliens, swarms, whatever on the same diagram because we're not talking about what you're made of or how you got here. We're talking about what are the size and complexity of the goals towards which you can work. Is there any other terms that pop into mind that are interesting? I'm trying to remember. I have a list of them somewhere on my website. Human morphology, yeah, definitely check it out. Morphosutical, I like that one. Ionisutical. Yeah. Those refer to different types of interventions in the regenerative medicine space. Amorphosutical is something that it's a kind of intervention that really targets the cells decision making process about what they're going to build. Ionisuticals are like that, but more focused specifically on the bioelectrics. There's also, of course, biochemical, biomechanical, who knows what else, maybe optical kinds of signaling systems there as well. Target morphology is interesting. It's designed to capture this idea that it's not just feedforward emergence and oftentimes in biology, I mean, of course that happens too, but in many cases in biology, the system is specifically working towards a target in anatomical morphospace. It's a navigation task really. These kinds of problem solving can be formalized as navigation tasks and that they're really going towards a particular region. How do you know? Because you deviate them and then they go back. Let me ask you, because you've really challenged a lot of ideas in biology in the work you do, probably because some of your rebelliousness comes from the fact that you came from a different field of computer engineering, but could you give advice to young people today in high school or college that are trying to pave their life story, whether it's in science or elsewhere, how they can have a career they can be proud of or a life they can be proud of advice? Boy, it's dangerous to give advice because things change so fast, but one central thing I can say, moving up and through academia and whatnot, you will be surrounded by really smart people. What you need to do is be very careful at distinguishing specific critique versus kind of meta advice. What I mean by that is if somebody really smart and successful and obviously competent is giving you specific critiques on what you've done, that's gold. It's an opportunity to hone your craft, to get better at what you're doing, to learn, to find your mistakes. That's great. If they are telling you what you ought to be studying, how you ought to approach things, what is the right way to think about things, you should probably ignore most of that. The reason I make that distinction is that a lot of really successful people are very well calibrated on their own ideas and their own field and their own area. They know exactly what works and what doesn't and what's good and what's bad, but they're not calibrated on your ideas. The things they will say, oh, this is a dumb idea, don't do this and you shouldn't do that, that stuff is generally worse than useless. It can be very demoralizing and really limiting. What I say to people is read very broadly, work really hard, know what you're talking about, take all specific criticism as an opportunity to improve what you're doing and then completely ignore everything else. I just tell you from my own experience, most of what I consider to be interesting and useful things that we've done, very smart people have said, this is a terrible idea, don't do that. I think we just don't know. We have no idea beyond our own. At best, we know what we ought to be doing. We very rarely know what anybody else should be doing. Yeah, and their ideas, their perspective has been also calibrated, not just on their field and specific situation, but also on a state of that field at a particular time in the past. There's not many people in this world that are able to achieve revolutionary success multiple times in their life. Whenever you say somebody very smart, usually what that means is somebody who's smart, who achieved a success at a certain point in their life and people often get stuck in that place where they found success. To be constantly challenging your worldview is a very difficult thing. Also at the same time, probably if a lot of people tell, that's the weird thing about life, if a lot of people tell you that something is stupid or is not going to work, that either means it's stupid, it's not going to work, or it's actually a great opportunity to do something new and you don't know which one it is and it's probably equally likely to be either. Well, I don't know, the probabilities. Depends how lucky you are, depends how brilliant you are, but you don't know and so you can't take that advice as actual data. Yeah, you have to and this is kind of hard to describe and fuzzy, but I'm a firm believer that you have to build up your own intuition. So over time, you have to take your own risks that seem like they make sense to you and then learn from that and build up so that you can trust your own gut about what's a good idea even when, and then sometimes you'll make mistakes and they'll turn out to be a dead end and that's fine, that's science, but what I tell my students is life is hard and science is hard and you're going to sweat and bleed and everything and you should be doing that for ideas that really fire you up inside and really don't let kind of the common denominator of standardized approaches to things slow you down. So you mentioned planaria being in some sense immortal. What's the role of death in life? What's the role of death in this whole process we have? Is it, when you look at biological systems, is death an important feature, especially as you climb up the hierarchy of competency? Boy, that's an interesting question. I think that it's certainly a factor that promotes change and turnover and an opportunity to do something different the next time for a larger scale system. So apoptosis, it's really interesting. I mean, death is really interesting in a number of ways. One is like you could think about like what was the first thing to die? That's an interesting question. What was the first creature that you could say actually died? It's a tough thing because we don't have a great definition for it. So if you bring a cabbage home and you put it in your fridge, at what point are you going to say it's died, right? So it's kind of hard to know. There's one paper in which I talk about this idea that, I mean, think about this and imagine that you have a creature that's aquatic, let's say it's a frog or something or a tadpole, and the animal dies, in the pond it dies for whatever reason. Most of the cells are still alive. So you could imagine that if when it died, there was some sort of breakdown of the connectivity between the cells, a bunch of cells crawled off, they could have a life as amoebas. Some of them could join together and become a xenobot and twiddle around, right? So we know from planaria that there are cells that don't obey the Hayflick limit and just sort of live forever. So you could imagine an organism that when the organism dies, it doesn't disappear, rather the individual cells that are still alive, crawl off and have a completely different kind of lifestyle and maybe come back together as something else, or maybe they don't. So all of this, I'm sure, is happening somewhere on some planet. So death in any case, I mean, we already kind of knew this because the molecules, we know that when something dies, the molecules go through the ecosystem, but even the cells don't necessarily die at that point, they might have another life in a different way. You can think about something like HeLa, right? The HeLa cell line, you know, that has this, that's had this incredible life. There are way more HeLa cells now than there ever been, than there, than there were when, when she was alive. It seems like as the organisms become more and more complex, like if you look at the mammals, their relationship with death becomes more and more complex. So the survival imperative starts becoming interesting and humans are arguably the first species that have invented the fear of death. The understanding that you're going to die, let's put it this way, like long, so not like instinctual, like, I need to run away from the thing that's going to eat me, but starting to contemplate the finiteness of life. Yeah. I mean, one thing, so, so one thing about the human light, cognitive light cone is that for the first, as far as we know, for the first time, you might have goals that are longer than your lifespan, that are not achievable, right? So if you're, if you are, let's say, and I don't know if this is true, but if you're a goldfish and you have a 10 minute attention span, I'm not sure if that's true, but let's say, let's say there's some organism with a, with a short kind of cognitive light cone that way, all of your goals are potentially achievable because you're probably going to live the next 10 minutes. So whatever goals you have, they are totally achievable. If you're a human, you could have all kinds of goals that are guaranteed not achievable because they just take too long, like guaranteed you're not going to achieve them. So I wonder if, you know, is that, is that a, you know, like a perennial, you know, sort of thorn in our, in our psychology that drives some, some psychosis or whatever? I have, I have no idea. Another interesting thing about that, actually, I've been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks, this notion of giving up. So you would think that evolutionarily, the most adaptive way of being is that you go, you, you, you, you fight as long as you physically can. And then when you can't, you can't, and there's in, there's this photograph, there's videos you can find of insects are crawling around where like, you know, like, like most of it is already gone, and it's still sort of crawling, you know, like, Terminator style, right? Like, as far as as long as you physically can, you keep going. Mammals don't do that. So a lot of mammals, including rats, have this thing where when, when they think it's a hopeless situation, they literally give up and die when physically, they could have kept going. I mean, humans certainly do this. And there's, there's some like, really unpleasant experiments that the this guy forget his name did with drowning rats, where if he where where rats normally drown after a couple of minutes, but if you teach them that if you just tread water for a couple of minutes, you'll get rescued, they can tread water for like an hour. And so right, and so they literally just give up and die. And so evolutionarily, that doesn't seem like a good strategy at all evolutionarily, since why would you like, what's the benefit ever of giving up, you just do what you can, and you know, one time out of 1000, you'll actually get rescued, right? But this issue of actually giving up suggests some very interesting metacognitive controls where you've now gotten to the point where survival actually isn't the top drive. And that for whatever, you know, there are other considerations that have like taken over. And I think that's uniquely a mammalian thing. But then I don't know. Yeah, the Camus, the existentialist question of why live, just the fact that humans commit suicide is a really fascinating question from an evolutionary perspective. And what was the first and that's the other thing, like, what is the simplest system, whether whether evolved or natural or whatever, that is able to do that? Right? Like, you can think, you know, what other animals are actually able to do that? I'm not sure. Maybe you could see animals over time, for some reason, lowering the value of survive at all costs, gradually, until other objectives might become more important. Maybe. I don't know how evolutionarily how that how that gets off the ground. That just seems like that would have such a strong pressure against it, you know. Just imagine, you know, a population with a lower, you know, if you were a mutant in a population that had less of a less of a survival imperative, would you put your genes outperform the others? Is there such a thing as population selection? Because maybe suicide is a way for organisms to decide themselves that they're not fit for the environment? Somehow? Yeah, that's a that's a really contrary, you know, population level selection is a kind of a deep controversial area. But it's tough because on the face of it, if that was your genome, it wouldn't get propagated because you would die and then your neighbor who didn't have that would would have all the kids. It feels like there could be some deep truth there that we're not understanding. What about you yourself as one biological system? Are you afraid of death? To be honest, I'm more concerned with especially now getting older and having helped a couple of people pass. I think about what's a what's a good way to go? Basically, like nowadays, I don't know what that is, I, you know, sitting in a, you know, a facility that sort of tries to stretch you out as long as you can, that doesn't seem that doesn't seem good. And there's not a lot of opportunities to sort of, I don't know, sacrifice yourself for something useful, right? There's not terribly many opportunities for that in modern society. So I don't know, that's that's that's more of I'm not I'm not particularly worried about death itself. But I've seen it happen. And and it's not it's not pretty. And I don't know what what a better what a better alternative is. So the existential aspect of it does not worry you deeply? The fact that this ride ends? No, it began. I mean, the ride began, right? So there was I don't know how many billions of years before that I wasn't around. So that's okay. But isn't the experience of life? It's almost like feels like you're immortal. Because the way you make plans, the way you think about the future. I mean, if you if you look at your own personal rich experience, yes, you can understand, okay, eventually, I died as people I love that have died. So surely, I will die and it hurts and so on. But like, he sure doesn't. It's so easy to get lost in feeling like this is going to go on forever. Yeah, it's a little bit like the people who say they don't believe in free will, right? I mean, you can say that but but when you go to a restaurant, you still have to pick a soup and stuff. So right, so so I don't know if I know I've actually seen that that happened at lunch with a with a well known philosopher and he didn't believe in free will and the other waitress came around and he was like, Well, let me see. I was like, What are you doing here? You're gonna choose a sandwich, right? So it's I think it's one of those things. I think you can know that, you know, you're not going to live forever. But you can't you can't. It's not practical to live that way unless you know, so you buy insurance and then you do some stuff like that. But but but mostly, you know, I think you just you just live as if as if as if you can make plans. We talked about all kinds of life. We talked about all kinds of embodied minds. What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of all the biological lives we've been talking about here on Earth? Why are we here? I don't know that that's a that that's a well posed question other than the existential question you post before. Is that question hanging out with the question of what is consciousness and there at retreat somewhere? Not sure because sipping pina coladas and because they're ambiguously defined. Maybe I'm not sure that any of these things really ride on the correctness of our scientific understanding. But I mean, just just for an example, right? I've always found I've always found it weird that people get really worked up to find out realities about their their bodies, for example. Right. You've seen them. Ex Machina. Right. And so there's this great scene where he's cutting his hand to find out, you know, a piece full of cock. Now, to me, right? If if I open up and I find out and I find a bunch of cogs, my conclusion is not, oh, crap, I must not have true cognition. That sucks. My conclusion is, wow, cogs can have true cognition. Great. So right. So. So it seems to me, I guess I guess I'm with Descartes on this one, that whatever whatever the truth ends up being of of of how is what is consciousness, how it can be conscious? None of that is going to alter my primary experience, which is this is what it is. And if and if a bunch of molecular networks can do it, fantastic. If it turns out that there's a there's a non corporeal, you know, so great. We can we'll study that, whatever. But but the fundamental existential aspect of it is, you know, if somebody if somebody told me today that, yeah, yeah, you were created yesterday and all your memories are, you know, sort of fake, you know, kind of like like like Boltzmann brains, right. And the human, you know, human skepticism, all that. Yeah. OK. Well, so so but but here I am now. So so it's the experience. It's primal, so like that's the that's the thing that matters. So the the backstory doesn't matter. I think so. I think so. From a first person perspective, now from a third person, like scientifically, it's all very interesting. From a third person perspective, I could say, wow, that's that's amazing that that this happens and how does it happen and whatever. But from a first person perspective, I could care less. Like I just it's just what I've what I learned from any of these scientific facts is, OK, well, I guess then that's that that then I guess that's what is sufficient to to give me my, you know, amazing first person perspective. I think if you dig deeper and deeper and get a get surprising answers to why the hell we're here, it might give you some guidance on how to live. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. That would be nice. On the one hand, you might be right, because on the one hand, if I don't know what else could possibly give you that guidance. Right. So so you would think that it would have to be that or you would do it would have to be science because there isn't anything else. So so that's so maybe on the other hand, I am really not sure how you go from any, you know, what they call from an is to an odd right from any factual description of what's going on. This goes back to the natural. Right. Just because somebody says, oh, man, that's that's completely not natural. It's never happened on Earth before. I'm not impressed by that whatsoever. I think I think whatever hazard hasn't happened, we are now in a position to do better if we can. Right. Well, this also because you said there's science and there's nothing else. There it's it's really tricky to know how to intellectually deal with a thing that science doesn't currently understand. Right. So like, the thing is, if you believe that science solves everything, you can too easily in your mind think our current understanding, like, we've solved everything. Right. Right. Right. Like, it jumps really quickly to not science as a mechanism as a as a process, but more like science of today. Like, you could just look at human history and throughout human history, just physicists and everybody would claim we've solved everything. Sure. Sure. Like, like, there's a few small things to figure out. And we basically solved everything. Were in reality, I think asking, like, what is the meaning of life is resetting the palette of like, we might be tiny and confused and don't have anything figured out. It's almost going to be hilarious a few centuries from now when they look back how dumb we were. Yeah, I 100% agree. So when I say science and nothing else, I certainly don't mean the science of today because I think overall, I think we are we know very little. I think most of the things that we're sure of now are going to be, as you said, are going to look hilarious down the line. So I think we're just at the beginning of a lot of really important things. When I say nothing but science, I also include the kind of first person, what I call science that you do. So the interesting thing about I think about consciousness and studying consciousness and things like that in the first person is unlike doing science in the third person, where you as the scientist are minimally changed by it, maybe not at all. So when I do an experiment, I'm still me, there's the experiment, whatever I've done, I've learned something, so that's a small change. But but overall, that's it. In order to really study consciousness, you will you are part of the experiment, you will be altered by that experiment, right? Whatever, whatever it is that you're doing, whether it's some sort of contemplative practice or, or some sort of psychoactive, you know, whatever. You are now you are now your own experiment, and you are right. And so I consider I fold that in, I think that's that's part of it. I think that exploring our own mind and our own consciousness is very important. I think much of it is not captured by what currently is third person science for sure. But ultimately, I include all of that in science, with a capital S in terms of like a, a rational investigation of both first and third person aspects of our world. We are our own experiment, as beautifully put. And when when two systems get to interact with each other, that's the kind of experiment. So I'm deeply honored that you would do this experiment with me today. Thanks so much. I'm a huge fan of your work. Likewise, thank you for doing everything you're doing. I can't wait to see the kind of incredible things you build. So thank you for talking. Really appreciate being here. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Michael Levin. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we're capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals directly follows. There's grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms, or into one, and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from its most simpler beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots | Lex Fridman Podcast #325