Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #218
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Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, author, and founder of the field of virtual reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Jaron's Website: http://www.jaronlanier.com/
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:39 - What is reality?
5:52 - Turing machines
7:10 - Simulating our universe
13:25 - Video games and other immersive experiences
17:12 - Death and consciousness
25:43 - Designing human-centric AI
27:17 - Empathy with robots
31:09 - Social media incentives
43:29 - Data dignity
51:01 - Jack Dorsey and Twitter
1:02:46 - Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies
1:07:26 - Government overreach and freedom
1:17:41 - GitHub and TikTok
1:19:51 - The Autodidactic Universe
1:24:42 - Humans and the mystery of music
1:30:53 - Defining moments
1:41:39 - Mortality
1:43:31 - The meaning of life

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 The following is a conversation with Jaren Lanier, a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer, futurist, musician, and the founder of the field of virtual reality. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. As a side note, you may know that Jaren is a staunch critic of social media platforms. Him and I agree on many aspects of this, except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms. And better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first. Let me also say a general comment about these conversations. I try to make sure I prepare well, remove my ego from the picture, and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind. This can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized. In those cases, I do offer a little pushback, but respectfully, and then move on, trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange. I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations, nor in life. My goal is to learn and to have fun. I ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness. It is not. It is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person. That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking, but you probably already knew that. So please give me a pass on that as well. This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Jaren Lanier. You're considered the founding father of virtual reality. Do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds? I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtual reality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh, as if you were a newborn baby, but with a little more experience. So you can really notice just how incredibly strange and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is. So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be in the physical world. Well, that's my take on it. That's just me. I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtual reality. And at this point, there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things. But I should say also even in what some, well, I called it mixed reality, back in the day and these days it's called augmented reality, but with something like a HoloLens, even then, like one of my favorite things is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out as being astounding. It's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention. And it's hard to pay attention to that, but when you compare it to a trans, all of a sudden you do. And even in practical applications, my favorite early application of virtual reality, which we prototype going back to the 80s when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med, near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator. And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation, which is incredibly valuable for many things, for designing procedures, for training, for all kinds of things, then to go to the real person, boy, it's really something like, surgeons really get woken up by that transition. It's very cool. So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation. That's fascinating. I never really thought about that. It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you return. Well, that's how I take it. I mean, once again, people have different attitudes towards it, all are welcome. What do you think is the difference between the virtual world and the physical meat space world? That you are still drawn, for you personally, still drawn to the physical world. Like there clearly then is a distinction. Is there some fundamental distinction or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology? In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now, it's made of software and software is terrible stuff. Software is always the slave of its own history, its own legacy. It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary. Working with it brings out a certain kind of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me, which I'm not that fond of. And there are all kinds of things about software I don't like. And so that's different from the physical world. It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out. On the other hand, I'm a little mystified when people ask me, well, do you think the universe is a computer? And I have to say, well, I mean, what on earth could you possibly mean if you say it isn't a computer? If it isn't a computer, it wouldn't follow principles consistently and it wouldn't be intelligible because what else is a computer ultimately? And we have physics, we have technology, so we can do technology so we can program it. So I mean, of course it's some kind of computer, but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine is probably a foolish approach. Right, that's the question. Whether it performs, this computer we call the universe, performs the kind of computation that can be modeled as a universal Turing machine, or is it something much more fancy, so fancy in fact, that it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand? Turing machines are kind of, I'd call them teases in a way, because if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of memory, and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal, but that cannot exist. So they're not universal in practice. And they actually are in practice a very particular sort of machine within the constraints, within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably. And so, I think universality of a particular model is probably a deceptive way to think, even though at some sort of limit, of course something like that's gotta be true at some sort of high enough limit, but it's just not accessible to us. So what's the point? Well, to me, the question of like, whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way. There's a technical question is here. How difficult does it to build a machine, not that simulates the universe, but that makes it sufficiently realistic that we wouldn't know the difference, or better yet, sufficiently realistic, that we would kind of know the difference, but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway. I wanna give you a few different answers. I wanna give you the one that I think has the most practical importance to human beings right now, which is that there's a kind of an assertion sort of built into the way the question's usually asked that I think is false, which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level of ability to perceive reality in a given way. And actually, people are always learning, evolving, forming themselves. We're fluid too. We're also programmable, self-programmable, changing, adapting. And so my favorite way to get at this is to talk about the history of other media. So for instance, there was a peer review paper that showed that an early wire recorder playing back an opera singer behind a curtain was indistinguishable from a real opera singer. And so now, of course, to us, it would not only be distinguishable, but it would be very blatant because the recording would be horrible. But to the people at the time, without the experience of it, it seemed plausible. There was an early demonstration of extremely crude video teleconferencing between New York and DC in the 30s, I think so, that people viewed as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible. And there are many other examples. Another one, one of my favorite ones is in the Civil War era, there were itinerant photographers who collected photographs of people who just looked kind of like a few archetypes. So you could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved one to remind you of that person, because actually photographing them was inconceivable and hiring a painter was too expensive, and you didn't have any way for the painter to represent them remotely anyway. How would they even know what they looked like? So these are all great examples of how, in the early days of different media, we perceived the media as being really great, but then we evolved through the experience of the media. This gets back to what I was saying. Maybe the greatest gift of photography is that we can see the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more. Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera singer now from that recording of the opera singer on the horrible wire recorder. So we shouldn't limit ourselves by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect. So that's my first answer, which is I think the most important one. Now, of course, somebody might come back and say, oh, but technology can go so far. There must be some point at which it would surpass. That's a different question. I think that's also an interesting question, but I think the answer I just gave you is actually the more important answer to the more important question. That's profound, yeah. But can you, the second question, which you're now making me realize is way different, is it possible to create worlds in which people would want to stay instead of the real world? Well. Like, en masse, like large numbers of people. What I hope is, as I said before, I hope that the experience of virtual worlds helps people appreciate this physical world we have and feel tender towards it and keep it from getting too fucked up. That's my hope. Do you see all technology in that way? So basically, technology helps us appreciate the more sort of technology-free aspect of life. Well, media technology. You can stretch that. I mean, you can, let me say, I could definitely play McLuhan and turn this into a general theory. It's totally doable. The program you just described is totally doable. In fact, I will psychically predict that if you did the research, you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already. I don't know, but they might exist. But I don't know how much value there is in pushing a particular idea that far. Claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense seems incoherent to me because we can program it. We have technology. It seems to obey physical laws. What more do you want from it to be a computer? I mean, it's a computer of some kind. We don't know exactly what kind. We might not know how to think about it. We're working on it. Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right. That's my fascination with the AI as well, is it helps in the case of AI, I see it as a set of techniques that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans. In the same way, virtual reality, and you're putting it brilliantly, it's a way to help us understand reality. Sure. And we can navigate and open our eyes more richly to reality. That's certainly how I see it. And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated, who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations with whether we're in a simulation or not, or there's a whole world of variations on that, I wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations and exactly what they mean. And I think the danger with these things is, so if you say, is the universe some kind of computer broadly, it has to be, because it's not coherent to say that it isn't. On the other hand, to say that that means you know anything about what kind of computer, that's something very different. And the same thing is true for the brain, the same thing is true for anything where you might use computational metaphors. Like we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand. And the problem I have with these framings of computation is these ultimate cosmic questions is that it has a way of getting people to pretend they know more than they do. Can you maybe, this is a therapy session, so can you analyze me for a second? I really like the Elder Scrolls series, it's a role playing game, Skyrim for example. Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world? And then there's people you could talk to, and you can just like, it's an escape, but you know, my life is awesome, I'm truly happy. But I also am happy with the music that's playing and the mountains and carrying around a sword. And just that, I don't know what that is. It's very pleasant though to go there, and I miss it sometimes. I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations, it's wonderful to love contact with other people, it's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving meaning and patterns with other people. I think it's a good thing. You know, I'm not like anti-tech and I'm certainly not anti-digital tech, I'm anti, as everybody knows by now, I think the manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that. So I'm anti that stuff, but the core of it, of course I worked for many, many years on trying to make that stuff happen because I think it can be beautiful. Like I don't, like why not? You know, and by the way, there's a thing about humans, which is we're problematic. Like any kind of social interaction with other people is gonna have its problems. People are political and tricky. And like, I love classical music, but when you actually go to a classical music thing and it turns out, oh, actually this is like a backroom power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well. And that's kind of not as fun. That's part of the package. And the thing is, it's always going to be, there's always gonna be a mix of things. I don't think the search for purity is gonna get you anywhere. So I'm not worried about that. I worry about the really bad cases where we're becoming, where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough that we might not survive. And I think, you know, the social media criticism rises to that level, but I'm glad you enjoy it. I think it's great. And I like that you basically say that every experience is both beauty and darkness, as in with classical music. I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much. But it's interesting. I mean, every, and even the darkness, it's a man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl and the concentration camps. Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty. And so it's, that's the interesting thing about humans is the capacity to discover beautiful in the darkest of moments. But there's always the dark parts too. Well, I mean, it's, our situation is structurally difficult. We are. Structurally difficult. No, it is, it's true. We perceive socially, we depend on each other for our sense of place and perception of the world. I mean, we're dependent on each other. And yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably, we inevitably let each other down. We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive. I mean, it's, our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things. One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of, being human, allegedly, you wrote an essay on death and consciousness in which you write a note, certainly the fear of death has been one of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization. And yet it is under acknowledged. The great book on the subject, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker deserves a reconsideration. I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this. What's the role of death in life? See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house because my wife is Russian and we also have, we have a piano of such spectacular qualities. You wouldn't, you would have freaked out. But anyway, we'll let all that go. So the context in which, I remember that essay sort of, this was from maybe the 90s or something. And I used to publish in a journal called the Journal of Consciousness Studies, because I was interested in these endless debates about consciousness and science, which certainly continue today. And I was interested in how the fear of death and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness. Because I think on the one hand, the sort of sentimental school of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something apart from the physical brain, some kind of soul or something else is obviously motivated in a sense by a hope that whatever that is will survive death and continue. That's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions. Not all of them, not really, but most of them. The thing I noticed is that the opposite of those, which might be the sort of hardcore, no, the brain's a computer and that's it, in a sense, we're motivated in the same way with a remarkably similar chain of arguments, which is no, the brain's a computer and I'm gonna figure it out in my lifetime and upload myself and I'll live forever. That's interesting. Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right? Yeah, and so it's kind of this, in a funny way, it's the same thing. It's peculiar to notice that these people who would appear to be opposites in character and cultural references and in their ideas actually are remarkably similar. And to an incredible degree, the sort of hardcore computationalist idea about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity. There are the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought, you'll piss off the super AIs of the future who will come back and zap you and all that stuff. It's really turned into medieval Christianity all over again. So the Ernest Becker's idea that the fear of death is the warm at the core, which is like, that's the core motivator of everything we see humans have created. The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core, is like a prerequisite to consciousness. You just moved across this vast cultural chasm that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way. And I can't answer what you just said on the level without this huge deconstruction. Yes. Should I do it? Yes, what's the chasm? Okay. Let us travel across this vast chasm. Okay, I don't believe in AI. I don't think there's any AI. There's just algorithms. We make them, we control them. Now, they're tools, they're not creatures. Now, this is something that robs a lot of people the wrong way. And don't I know it? When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky, who's the principal author of the computer as creature rhetoric that we still use. He was the first person to have the idea at all, but he certainly populated AI culture with most of its tropes, I would say. Cause a lot of the stuff people will say, oh, did you hear this new idea about AI? And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978. Sure, yeah, I remember that. So Marvin was really the person. And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about the stuff cause I always rejected it. And of all of his, I wasn't formally his student, but I worked for him as a researcher, but of all of his students and student-like people of his young adoptees, I think I was the one who argued with him about this stuff in particular and he loved it. Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation. It was fun. Did you ever converse to a place? Oh, no, no. So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail. And I was in Boston and I was going to the old house in Brookline, his amazing house. And one of our mutual friends said, hey, listen, Marvin's so frail. Don't do the argument with him. Don't argue about AI. And so I said, but Marvin loves that. And so I showed up and he's like, he was frail. And he looked up and he said, are you ready to argue? He's such an amazing person for that. So it's hard to summarize this because it's decades of stuff. The first thing to say is that nobody can claim absolute knowledge about whether somebody or something else is conscious or not. This is all a matter of faith. And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith needs to be updated. So it's not about God, but it's just about stuff in the universe. We have faith in each other being conscious. And then I used to frame this as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers. And then it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement. So I noticed Peter Singer using it. I don't know if it was coincident or, but anyway, there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself and the stuff inside is more like you, might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy, of your consideration, and the stuff outside the circle isn't. And outside the circle might be a rock or, I don't know. And that circle is fundamentally based on faith. Well, it's normally- Your faith in what is and what isn't. The thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith. It's also a pragmatic decision. And this is where things get complicated. If you try to make it too big, you suffer from incompetence. If you say, I don't wanna kill a bacteria, I will not brush my teeth. I don't know, what do you do? There's a competence question where you do have to draw the line. People who make it too small become cruel. People are so clannish and political and so worried about themselves ending up on the bottom of society that they are always ready to gang up on some designated group. And so there's always these people who are always trying to shove somebody out of the circle. And so- So aren't you shoving AI outside the circle? Well, give me a second. All right. So there's a pragmatic consideration here. And so, and the biggest questions are probably fetuses and animals lately, but AI is getting there. Now with AI, I think, and I've had this discussion so many times, people say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI, you'd be cruel to some consciousness? And then I would say, well, if you include AI, you make yourself, you exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer. And so you're facing incompetence immediately. So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them. Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly with social media, how things can go wrong. Isn't it possible to design systems that show compassion, not to manipulate you, but give you control and make your life better if you so choose to, like grow together with systems. And the way we grow with dogs and cats, with pets, with significant others in that way, they grow to become better people. I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible. You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble by thinking, you know what's good for people. Well, look, there's this question of what framework we're speaking in. Do you know who Alan Watts was? So Alan Watts once said, morality is like gravity that in some absolute cosmic sense, there can't be morality because at some point it all becomes relative and who are we anyway? Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures. But here on earth, we're with each other. This is our frame and morality is a very real thing. Same thing with gravity. At some point, you get into interstellar space and you might not feel much of it, but here we are on earth. And I think in the same sense, I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel sort of separate from and superior to other people or something like that. There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject. And we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes. Okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologists sort of lack this basic respect, understanding and love for humanity. There's a separation there. The thing I'd like to push back, and it's not that you disagree, but I believe you can create technologies and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer that does build systems that respect humanity, not just respect, but admire humanity, that have empathy for common humans, have compassion. Not impossible. So, I mean, no, no, no. I think, yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments are a great example of that. Musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways. And that's a great example. My invention or design during the pandemic period was this thing called together mode, where people see themselves seated sort of in a classroom or a theater instead of in squares. And it allows them to semi-consciously perform to each other as if they have proper eye contact, as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally and weirdly that turns out to work. And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell. I hope it is of some use to somebody. The AI idea isn't really new. I would say it was born with Adam Smith's invisible hand, with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing and it gets a bit beyond us and then we think it must be smarter than us. And the thing about the invisible hand is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say, no, no, no, we're gonna take control of this thing. They might have different lines, they might care about different things, but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian because it just didn't work. It really wasn't that smart. It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed. And so if you really, people who really, really, really wanna believe in the invisible hand is infinitely smart, screw up their economies terribly. You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool. Everybody does when it's to their advantage. They might not when it's not to their advantage. That's kind of an interesting game that happens. But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms. You know, like you can have a sort of a Chicago economic philosophy about your computers. You know, no, no, my things come alive. It's smarter than anything. I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us. This is what we seek. We seek love from each other. I think AI can help us connect deeper. Like this is what you criticize social media for. I think there's much better ways of doing social media. That doesn't lead to manipulation, but instead leads to deeper connection between humans, leads to you becoming a better human being. And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI to be almost like a therapist. I mean, a companion. It's not telling you what's right. It's not guiding you as if it's an all-knowing thing. It's just another companion that you can leave at any time. You have complete transparency control over. There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have that are counter to how current social media operates that I think is subservient to humans or no, deeply respects human beings and is empathetic to their experience and all those kinds of things. I think it's possible to create AI systems like that. And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion of whether they need to have something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms, something that has identity, something that has a personality, all those kinds of things. AI systems, and you've spoken extensively how AI systems manipulate you within social networks. And that's the biggest problem. Isn't necessarily that there's advertisement that social networks present you with advertisements that then get you to buy stuff. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is they then manipulate you. They alter your human nature to get you to buy stuff or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants. Maybe you can correct me. Yeah, I don't see it quite that way, but we can work with that as an approximation. Sure, so my- I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous and stupider than that, but that's okay. So my question is, let's not use the word AI, but how do we fix it? Oh, fixing social media, that diverts us into this whole other field in my view, which is economics, which I always thought was really boring, but we have no choice but to turn into economists if we wanna fix this problem, because it's all about incentives. But I've been around this thing since it started, and I've been in the meetings where the social media companies sell themselves to the people who put the most money into them, which are usually the big advertising holding companies and whatnot. And there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction, and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody, that the algorithm will get really good at getting people to buy something. Because I think people have looked at their returns and looked at what happens, and everybody recognizes that's not exactly right. It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment at this point. Just to be connected, you're paying the money. It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms. So Stanford renamed its program, but it used to be called Engage Persuade. The engage part works. The persuade part is iffy, but the thing is that once people are engaged, in order for you to exist as a business, in order for you to be known at all, you have to put money into the- Oh, that's dark. Oh, no, that's not, no, that- It doesn't work, but they have to- But they're still, it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme at this point. So because the science behind the persuade part, it's not entirely a failure, but it's not what, there's, we play make believe that it works more than it does. The damage doesn't come, honestly, as I've said in my books, I'm not anti-advertising. I actually think advertising can be demeaning and annoying and banal and ridiculous and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff. There's a lot of ways to criticize that advertising that's accurate, and it can also lie and all kinds of things. However, if I look at the biggest picture, I think advertising, at least as it was understood before, social media helped bring people into modernity in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall. And you might say, am I contradicting myself because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people? Yeah, I am probably here. I mean, I'm not pretending to have this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions. I think there's a bit of a contradiction there, so. Well, looking at the long arc of history, advertisement has in some parts benefited society because it funded some efforts that perhaps- Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a thing where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use. Now, where the damage comes is a different thing though. Social media, algorithms on social media have to work on feedback loops where they present you with stimulus and they have to see if you respond to the stimulus. Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop is very, very crude. It's things like whether you click more or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated, but typically there isn't. So you have this incredibly crude back channel of information and so it's crude enough that it only catches sort of the more dramatic responses from you and those are the fight or flight responses. Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off or aggressive or horny. These are these ancient, the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain circuits or whatever. These fast response, old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have that are helpful in survival once in a while, but are not us at our best. They're not who we wanna be. They're not how we relate to each other. They're this old business. So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically, totally aside from whatever the topic is, you start to get incrementally just a little bit more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive. You get a little stupid and you become a jerk. And it happens slowly. It happens, it's not like everybody's instantly transformed, but it does kind of happen progressively where people who get hooked kind of get drawn more and more into this pattern of being at their worst. Would you say that people are able to, when they get hooked in this way, look back at themselves from 30 days ago and say, I am less happy with who I am now, or I'm not happy with who I am now versus who I was 30 days ago. Are they able to self-reflect when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain? Sometimes. I wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens, and maybe even delete, actually the title of the book was just Arguments to Delete Your Account. Yeah, 10 arguments. 10 arguments, although I always said, I don't know that you should. I can give you the arguments, it's up to you. I'm always very clear about that. But you know, I get like, I don't have a social media account, obviously, and it's not that easy for people to reach me. They have to search out an old-fashioned email address on a super crappy, antiquated website. Like, it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy. And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail from people who say, oh, I quit my social media, I'm doing so much better, I can't believe how bad it was. But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective of Facebook, right? And so I think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves and say, oh boy, I sure screwed myself over. It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody. None of us find that easy, right? It's just hard. The reason I ask this is, is it possible to design social media systems that optimize for some longer term metrics of you being happy with yourself? Well, see, I don't think you should try to engineer personal growth or happiness. I think what you should do is design a system that's just respectful of the people and subordinates itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives. And then at least there's a chance of something decent happening. You have to recommend stuff, right? So you're saying like, be respectful. What does that actually mean engineering wise? People, yeah, curation, people have to be responsible. Algorithms shouldn't be recommending. Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend. Algorithms are crap in this era. I mean, I'm sorry, they are. And I'm not saying this as somebody as a critic from the outside, I'm in the middle of it. I know what they can do, I know the math, I know what the corpora are. I know the best ones. Our office is funding GPT-3 and all these things that are at the edge of what's possible. And they do not have yet, I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudo semantics. It doesn't actually have the representation emerging of anything. It's just not like, I mean, that I'm speaking the truth here and you know it. Well, let me push back on this. There's several truths here. So you're speaking to the way certain companies operate currently. I don't think it's outside the realm of what's technically feasible to do. There's just not incentive, like companies are not, why fix this thing? I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search and discovery has been very helpful to me. And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos that it's nice to have a little bit of help. Have you done, but I'm still in control. Let me ask you something. Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube recommend videos to you, either starting from a absolutely anonymous random place where it doesn't know who you are, or from knowing who you or somebody else is, and then going 15 or 20 hops? Have you ever done that and just let it go top video recommend and then just go 20 hops? No, I haven't. I've done that many times now. I have, because of how large YouTube is and how widely it's used, it's very hard to get to enough scale to get a statistically solid result on this. I've done it with high school kids, with dozens of kids doing it at a time. Every time I've done an experiment, the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops, you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory. Because ultimately, that is the stuff the algorithm rewards the most because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about. So I'm not saying that the video never recommends something cool. I'm saying that its fundamental core is one that promotes a paranoid style, that promotes increasing irritability, that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger, promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people. And I would encourage, the thing is, it's very hard to do this work solidly. Many have repeated this experiment, and yet it still is kind of anecdotal. I'd like to do like a large citizen science thing sometime and do it, but then I think the problem with that is YouTube would detect it and then change it. Yes, I love that kind of stuff on Twitter. So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations on Twitter, optimizing for healthy conversations. What that requires within Twitter are most likely citizen experiments of what does healthy conversation actually look like and how do you incentivize those healthy conversations. You're describing what often happens and what is currently happening. What I'd like to argue is it's possible to strive for healthy conversations, not in a dogmatic way of saying, I know what healthy conversations are and I will tell you. I think one way to do this is to try to look around at social, maybe not things that are officially social media, but things where people are together online and see which ones have more healthy conversations. Even if it's hard to be completely objective in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely. You could do subjective annotation of this, like have a large crowdsourced annotation. One that I've been really interested in is GitHub. Because it contains, I'm not saying it'll always be, but for the most part, GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient. And I think there's a few things about GitHub that are interesting. One thing about it is that people have a stake in it. It's not just empty status games. There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done. And I think as soon as you have a real world stake in something, you have a motivation to not screw up that thing. And I think that that's often missing, that there's no incentive for the person to really preserve something if they get a little bit of attention from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something. They don't pay any price for it. But you have to kind of get decent with people when you have a shared stake, a little secret. So GitHub does a bit of that. GitHub is wonderful, yes. But I'm tempted to play the Jaren Becka at you, which is that GitHub is currently is amazing. But the thing is, if you have a stake, then if it's a social media platform, they can use the fact that you have a stake to manipulate you because you wanna preserve the stake. So like. Right, well this is why, this gets us into the economics. So there's this thing called data dignity that I've been studying for a long time. I wrote a book about an earlier version of it called Who Owns the Future. And the basic idea of it is that, once again, this is a 30 year conversation. It's a fascinating topic. Let me do the fastest version of this I can do. The fastest way I know how to do this is to compare two futures. All right, so future one is then the normative one, the one we're building right now. And then future two is gonna be data dignity, okay. And I'm gonna use a particular population. I live on the hill in Berkeley. And one of the features about the hill is that as the climate changes, we might burn down and I'll lose our houses or die or something. Like it's dangerous, and it didn't used to be. And so who keeps us alive? Well, the city does. The city does some things. The electric company, kinda sort of, maybe hopefully better. Individual people who own property, take care of their property, that's all nice. But there's this other middle layer, which is fascinating to me, which is that the groundskeepers who work up and down that hill, many of whom are not legally here, many of whom don't speak English, cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch to transfer fire easily from lot to lot. They have this whole little web that's keeping us safe. I didn't know about this at first. I just started talking to them because they were out there during the pandemic. And so I try to just see who are these people? Who are these people who are keeping us alive? Now, I wanna talk about the two different traits for those people under future one and future two. Future one, some weird kindergarten paint job van with all these cameras and weird things drives up, observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing. A few years later, some amazing robots that can shimmy up trees and all this show up. All those people are out of work and there are these robots doing the thing and the robots are good. And they can scale to more land and they're actually good. But then there are all these people out of work and these people have lost dignity. They don't know what they're gonna do. And then somebody will say, well, they go on basic income, whatever. They become wards of the state. My problem with that solution is every time in history that you've had some centralized thing that's doling out the benefits, that things get seized by people because it's too centralized and it gets seized. This happened to every communist experiment I can find. So I think that turns into a poor future that will be unstable. I don't think people will feel good in it. I think it'll be a political disaster with a sequence of people seizing this central source of the basic income. And you'll say, oh no, an algorithm can do it. Then people will seize the algorithm. They'll seize control. Unless the algorithm is decentralized and it's impossible to seize the control. Yeah, but 60 something people own a quarter of all the Bitcoin. Like the things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized. So let's go to future two. Future two, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten paint job. And they say, the groundskeepers, and they say, hey, the robots are coming. We're gonna form a data union. And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law emerging in the books. Yes. Interesting. And they say, we're gonna form a data union. And we're gonna, not only are we gonna sell our data to this place, but we're gonna make it better than it would have been if they were just grabbing it without our corporation. And we're gonna improve it. We're gonna make the robots more effective. We're gonna make them better. And we're gonna be proud of it. We're gonna become a new class of experts that are respected. And then here's the interesting, there's two things that are different about that world from future one. One thing, of course, the people have more pride. They have more sense of ownership of agency. But what the robots do changes. Instead of just like this functional, like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood from burning down. You have this whole creative community that wasn't there before thinking, well, how can we make these robots better so we can keep on earning money? There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping with spiral pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things. There'll be new ideas like, wow, I wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation with how we do this. What about fresh water? Can we make the food healthier? What about all of a sudden, there'll be this whole creative community on the case. And isn't it nicer to have a high-tech future with more creative classes than one with more dependent classes? Isn't that a better future? But future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms. There's no technological difference. There's only a human difference. And that second future too, that's data dignity. The economy that you're, I mean, the game theory here is on the humans. And then the technologies is the tools that enable. Yeah, I mean, I think you can believe in AI and be in future two. I just think it's a little harder. You have to do more contortions. It's possible. So in the case of social media, what is data dignity look like? Is it people getting paid for their data? Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future, there should be massive data unions for people putting content into the system. And those data unions should smooth out the results a little bit, so it's not winner take all. But at the same time, and people have to pay for it too. They have to pay for Facebook the way they pay for Netflix with an allowance for the poor. There has to be a way out too. But the thing is people do pay for Netflix. It's a going concern. People pay for Xbox and PlayStation. Like people, there's enough people to pay for stuff they want. This could happen too. It's just that this precedent started that moved it in the wrong direction. And then what has to happen, the economy is a measuring device. If it's an honest measuring device, the outcomes for people form a normal distribution, a bell curve. And then so there should be a few people who do really well, a lot of people who do okay. And then we should have an expanding economy reflecting more and more creativity and expertise flowing through the network. And that expanding economy moves the result just a bit forward. So more people are getting money out of it than are putting money into it. So it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats and the society has to support the lower wing of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income. It has to be for the, cause if it's an honest economy, there will be that lower wing and we have to support those people. There has to be a safety net. But see what I believe, I'm not gonna talk about AI, but I will say that I think there'll be more and more algorithms that are useful. And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data to grounds-keeping robots, nor do I think everybody's gonna make their living with TikTok videos. I think in both cases, there'll be a rather small contingent that do well enough at either of those things. But I think there might be many, many, many, many of those niches that start to evolve as there are more and more algorithms, more and more robots. And it's that large number that will create the economic potential for a very large part of society to become members of new creative classes. Do you think it's possible to create a social network that competes with Twitter and Facebook that's large and centralized in this way? Not centralized, sort of large, large. How to get, all right, so I gotta tell you how to get from what I'm talking, how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone of what I'm talking about is challenging. I know some of the people who run, like I know Jack Dorsey, and I view Jack as somebody who's actually, I think he's really striving and searching and trying to find a way to make it better, but is kind of like, it's very hard to do it while in flight and he's under enormous business pressure too. So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study because I think his mind is in a lot of good places. He's a good human being, but there's a big Titanic ship that's already moving in one direction, it's hard to know what to do with it. I think that's the story of Twitter. I think that's the story of Twitter. One of the things that I observe is that if you just wanna look at the human side, meaning like how are people being changed, how do they feel, what does the culture like? Almost all of the social media platforms that get big have an initial sort of honeymoon period where they're actually kind of sweet and cute. Like if you look at the early years of Twitter, it was really sweet and cute, but also look at Snap, TikTok. And then what happens is as they scale and the algorithms become more influential instead of just the early people, when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it, then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style and then they start to get dark. And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently. But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws within the incentives. I feel like I'm torturing you, I'm sorry. No, no, no, it's not torture. No, because I have hope for the world with humans and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create, including technology. And I just, I feel it is possible to create social media platforms that incentivize different things than the current. I think the current incentivization is around like the dumbest possible thing that was invented like 20 years ago, however long, and it just works. So nobody's changing it. I just think that there could be a lot of innovation for more, see, you kind of pushed back this idea that we can't know what long-term growth or happiness is. If you give control to people to define what their long-term happiness and goals are, then that optimization can happen for each of those individual people. Well, I mean, imagine a future where probably a lot of people would love to make their living doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally that's kind of hard to get into. Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub. So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub and they get together and they have rights. They're negotiating for returns. They join different artist societies in order to soften the blow of the randomness of who gets the network effect benefit because nobody can know that. And I think an individual person might join a thousand different data unions in the course of their lives or maybe even 10,000. I don't know, but the point is that we'll have like these very hedge distributed portfolios of different data unions we're part of. And some of them might just trickle in a little money for nonsense stuff where we're contributing to health studies or something. But I think people will find their way. They'll find their way to the right GitHub-like community in which they find their value in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste and correctives and all of this into the algorithms and the robots of the future. And that is a way to resist the lizard brain-based funding mechanism. It's an alternate economic system that rewards productivity, creativity, value as perceived by others. It's a genuine market. It's not doled out from a center. There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable. It's actual market. And the money is made by supporting that instead of just grabbing people's attention in the cheapest possible way, which is definitely how you get the lizard brain. Yeah, okay. So we're finally at the agreement. But I just think that... So yeah, I'll tell you how I think to fake social media. There's a few things. So one, I think people should have complete control over their data and transparency of what that data is and how it's being used if they do hand over the control. Another thing, they should be able to delete walk away with their data at any moment, easy, like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons. I don't know. Just easily walk away with their data. The other is control of the algorithm, individualized control of the algorithm for them. So each one has their own algorithm. Each person has their own algorithm. They get to be the decider of what they see in this world. And to me, that's, I guess, fundamentally decentralized in terms of the key decisions being made. But if that's made transparent, I feel like people will choose that system over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today, when they have the ability to walk away, to control their data and to control the kinds of things they see. Now, let's walk away from the term AI. You're right. In this case, you have full control of the algorithms that help you if you want to use their help, but you can also say F you to those algorithms and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall of the internet. I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media, but I think it will make a lot more money. So I would like to challenge the idea, I know you're not presenting that, but that the only way to make a ton of money is to operate like Facebook is. I think you can make more money by giving people control. Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that. We're definitely in the territory of wholehearted agreement here. I do want to caution against one thing, which is making a feature that benefits programmers versus people, like this idea that people are in control of their data. So years ago, I co-founded an advisory board for the EU with a guy named Giovanni Bottarelli, who passed away. It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it. A remarkable guy who'd been, he was originally a prosecutor who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily. So he was like this intense guy who was like, I've dealt with death threats, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me, whatever. So we worked on this path of saying, let's make it all about transparency and consent. And it was one of the feeders that led to this huge data privacy and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR. And so therefore we've been able to have empirical feedback on how that goes. And the problem is that most people actually get stymied by the complexity of that kind of management. They have trouble and reasonably so. I don't, I'm like a techie. I can go in and I can figure out what's going on. But most people really do. And so there's a problem that it differentially benefits those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works. I kind of still wanna come back to incentives. And so if the incentive for whoever's, if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people of the future make more money, cause you get a cut of it, that's how you grow an economy. Not the programmers. Well, some of them will be programmers. It's not anti-programmer. I'm just saying that it's not only programmers. You know? So. So yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right. I mean, I like, control is an interface problem to where you have to create something that's compelling to everybody, to the creatives, to the public. I mean, there's, I don't know, creative commons, like the licensing. There's a bunch of legal speak, just in general, the whole legal profession. It's nice when it can be simplified in a way that you can truly simply understand. Everybody can simply understand the basics. In that same way, it should be very simple to understand how the data is being used and what data is being used for people. But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen, you have to have the incentives to like. I mean, a lot of people, I mean, a lot of the reason that money works is actually information hiding and information loss. Like one of the things about money is a particular dollar you get might have passed through your enemy's hands and you don't know it, but also, I mean, this is what Adam Smith, if you wanna give the most charitable interpretation possible to the invisible hand, is what he was saying, is that like, there's this whole complicated thing. And not only do you not need to know about it, the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried and just like, let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing. And that in a sense, every transaction is like a neuron and a neural net. If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it and let the whole thing settle to a solution and don't worry about it. I think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work. And that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative or not, going back to your question before about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative. And I would say a GitHub like, if you just have this vision, GitHub plus TikTok combined, is it possible? I think it is. I really think it is. I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea of creatives on TikTok collaborating in the same way that people on GitHub collaborate. Why not? I like that kind of version. Why not? I like it, I love it. I just, like right now when people use, by the way, father of teenage daughter, so. It's all about TikTok, right? So, when people use TikTok, there's a lot of, it's kind of funny, I was gonna say cattiness, but I was just using the cat as this exemplar of what we're coming into. I contradict myself, but anyway, there's all this cattiness where people are like, eee, this person's, and I just, what about people getting together and kind of saying, okay, we're gonna work on this move, we're gonna get a better, can we get a better musician? And they do that, but that's the part that's kind of off the books right now. You know, that should be like right there, that should be the center. That's where the, that's the really best part. Well, that's where the invention of Git period, the versioning is brilliant. And so some of the things you're talking about, technology, algorithms, tools can empower. And that's the thing, for humans to connect, to collaborate and so on. Can we upset more people a little bit? Can you already? Maybe, we'd have to try. No, no, can we, can I ask you to elaborate? Because I, my intuition was that you would be a supporter of something like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization. What do you, so can you elaborate on what? Yeah, okay, look. Your thoughts on Bitcoin. It's kind of funny. I wrote, I've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time and when the, when Bitcoin came out and the original paper on blockchain, my heart kind of sank because I thought, oh my God, we're applying all of this fancy thought and all these very careful distributed security measures to recreate the gold standard. Like it's just so retro, it's so dysfunctional. It's so useless from an economic point of view. So it's always amazing. And then the other thing is using computational inefficiency at a boundless scale as your form of security is a crime against this atmosphere. Obviously a lot of people know that now, but we knew that at the start. Like the thing is when the first paper came out, I remember a lot of people saying, oh my God, this thing scales, it's a carbon disaster. And I just like, I'm just mystified, but that's a different question than when you asked, can you have a cryptographic currency or at least some kind of digital currency that's of a benefit? And absolutely. And there are people who are trying to be thoughtful about this. If you haven't, you should interview Vitalik Buterin sometime. Yeah, I've interviewed him twice. Okay, so like there are people in the community who are trying to be thoughtful and trying to figure out how to do this better. It has nice properties though, right? So one of the nice properties is that like government centralized, it's hard to control. And then the other one, to fix some of the issues that you're referring to, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, there's Lightning Network, there's ideas how you build stuff on top of Bitcoin, similar with gold, that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy that operates not on the blockchain, but outside the blockchain and uses Bitcoin for like checking the security of those transactions. So Bitcoin's not new, it's been around for a while. I've been watching it closely. I've not seen one example of it creating economic growth. There was this obsession with the idea that government was the problem. That idea that government's the problem, let's say government earned that wrath honestly, because if you look at some of the things that governments have done in recent decades, it's not a pretty story. Like after a very small number of people in the US government decided to bomb and land mine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back and say, oh, government's this great thing. But then the problem is that this resistance to government is basically resistance to politics. It's a way of saying, if I can get rich, nobody should bother me. It's a way of not having obligations to others. And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation. But does that mean that the impulse that the government should not overreach its power is flawed? Well, I mean, what I wanna ask you to do is to replace the word government with politics. Like our politics is people having to deal with each other. My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form of freedom is perpetual annoyance. All right, so annoyance means you're actually dealing with people, because people are annoying. Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable, so it doesn't destroy us all. So if you have perpetual annoyance, then you have freedom. And that's politics. That's politics. If you don't have perpetual annoyance, something's gone very wrong, and you've suppressed those people, it's only temporary, it's gonna come back and be horrible. You should seek perpetual annoyance. I'll invite you to a Berkeley City Council meeting so you can know what that feels like. What perpetual annoyance feels like. But anyway, so freedom is being, the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people. If you're not, you're not free. If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion that's gonna fall apart. Now, this quest to avoid government is really a quest to avoid that political feeling, but you have to have it. You have to deal with it. And it sucks, but that's the human situation. That's the human condition. And this idea that we're gonna have this abstract thing that protects us from having to deal with each other is always an illusion. The idea, and I apologize, I overstretched the use of the word government. The idea is there should be some punishment from the people when a bureaucracy, when a set of people or a particular leader like in an authoritarian regime, which more than half the world currently lives under, if you, like if they become, they start stop representing the people, it stops being like a Berkeley meeting and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation. So the point is it's nice to give people, the populace in a decentralized way, power to resist that kind of government becoming over-authoritarian. Yeah, but people, see this idea that the problem is always the government being powerful is false. The problem can also be criminal gangs. The problem can also be weird cults. The problem can be abusive, abusive clergy. The problem can be infrastructure that fails. The problem can be poisoned water. The problem can be failed electric grids. The problem can be a crappy education system that makes the whole society less and less able to create value. There are all these other problems that are different from an overbearing government. Like you have to keep some sense of perspective and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem because then the others will pop up. But empirically speaking, some problems are bigger than others. So like some groups of people, like governments or gangs or companies lead to drop more than- Are you a US citizen? Yes. Has the government ever really been a problem for you? Well, okay. So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union used to, well, and actually- Yeah, my wife did too. So I have seen- Sure. And has the government bothered me? I would say that's a really complicated question, especially because the United States is such, it's a special place. And like a lot of other countries- My wife's family were refuseniks. And so we have like a very, and her dad was sent to the Gulag. For what it's worth on my father's side, all but a few were killed by a pogrom in a post-Soviet pogrom in Ukraine. So I- I would say, because you did a little trick of, eloquent trick of language that you switched to the United States to talk about government. So I believe, unlike my friend Michael Malice who's an anarchist, I believe government can do a lot of good in the world. That is exactly what you're saying, which is it's politics. The thing that Bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue is that one of the big ways that governments can control the populace is centralized bank. Like control the money. That was the case in the Soviet Union too. There's, you know, inflation can really make poor people suffer. And so what they argue is this is one way to go around that power that government has of controlling the monetary system. So that's a way to resist. That's not actually saying government bad. That's saying some of the ways that central banks get into trouble can be resisted through centralized banks. So let me ask you on balance today in the real world in terms of actual facts, do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes or to resist those regimes? Where do you think the balance is right now? I know exactly having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks what they would tell me, right? I, it's hard. I don't know. I'm asking it as a real question. There's no way to know the answer perfectly. There's no way to know the answer perfectly. However, I gotta say, if you look at people who've been able to decode blockchains and they do leak a lot of data, they're not as secure as this widely thought. There are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales from pretty early and they're huge. And if you ask who are these people, there's evidence that a lot of them are quite not the people you'd wanna support, let's say. And I just don't, like, I think empirically this idea that there's some intrinsic way that bad governments will be disempowered that bad governments will be disempowered and people will be able to resist them more than new villains or even villainous governments will be empowered. There's no basis for that assertion. It just is kind of circumstantial. And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing, but Bitcoin transactions have tended to support criminality more than productivity. Of course, they would argue that was the story of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin is being used for legitimate transactions. But- I didn't say for legitimate transactions. I said for economic growth, for creativity. Like, I think what's happening is people are using it a little bit for buying, I don't know, maybe somebody's companies make it available for this and that, they buy a Tesla with it or something. Investing in a startup, hard, it might've happened a little bit, but it's not an engine of productivity, creativity and economic growth. Whereas old fashioned currency still is. And anyway, look, I think something, I'm pro the idea of digital currencies. I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics as a result. I think they have to exist in some balance to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each. In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea, but it can be used to manipulate, you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans. Well, I think that you can make better designs and worse designs. And I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs because we're all so hooked on that Horatio Alger story on like, I'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit. You know, way back when all this stuff was starting, I remember it would have been in the 80s, somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor for network effect. And the whole point was to talk about how bad network effect was, that it always created distortions that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives that created dangerous distortions. Like, but then somehow even after the pandemic, we think of viral as this good thing because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right? We wanna be on the beneficiary side of it. But of course, you're not likely to be. There is a sense because money is involved, people are not reasoning clearly always because they want to be part of that first viral wave that makes them rich and that blinds people from their basic morality. I had an interesting conversation. I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy, but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin, I remember having an argument about like, it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, the early people have more than the later people. And the further down the chain you get, the more you're subject to gambling-like dynamics where it's more and more random and more and more subject to weird network effects and whatnot, unless you're a very small player, perhaps, and you're just buying something. But even then you'll be subject to fluctuations because the whole thing is just kind of, like as it fluctuates, it's gonna wave around the little people more. And I remember the conversation turned to gambling because gambling's a pretty large economic sector. And it's always struck me as being non-productive. Like somebody goes to Las Vegas, they lose money. And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment. They paid for entertainment as they lost money, so that's fine. And Las Vegas does up the losing of money in an entertaining way, so why not? It's like going to a show. So that's one argument. The argument that was made to me was different from that. It's that, no, what they're doing is they're getting a chance to experience hope, and a lot of people don't get that chance. And so that's really worth it, even if they're gonna lose. They have that moment of hope and they need to be able to experience that. And it's a very interesting argument. That's so heartbreaking. But I've seen that way. I have that a little bit of a sense. I've talked to some young people who invest in cryptocurrency. And what I see is this hope. This is the first thing they gave them, hope. And that's so heartbreaking to me that you've gotten hope from, so much is invested. It's like hope from somehow becoming rich, as opposed to something to me. I apologize, but money is in the long-term not going to be a source of that deep meaning. It's good to have enough money, but it should not be the source of hope. And it's heartbreaking to me how many people is the source of hope. Yeah. You've just described the psychology of virality or the psychology of trying to base a civilization on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks. And it doesn't really work. I mean, I think we need to get away from that. We need to soften those peaks, except Microsoft, which deserves every penny, but in every other case. Well, you mentioned GitHub. I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant. I was very happy. Okay, if I can give, not a critical, but- Sure, go ahead. On Microsoft, because they recently purchased Bethesda. So Elder Scrolls is in their hands. I'm watching you, Microsoft. Do not screw up my favorite game. So- Yeah, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft. I have an explicit arrangement with them where I don't speak for them, obviously. That should be very clear. I do not speak for them. I am not saying, I like them. I think such is amazing. The term data dignity was coined by Sacha. So we have, it's kind of extraordinary, but Microsoft's this giant thing. It's going to screw up this or that. It's not, I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I've had a few occasions in my life to see how things work from the inside of some big thing. And it's always just people kind of, I don't know, there's always coordination problems. And there's always- There's human problems. Oh my God. There's some good people, there's some bad people. There's always- I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game. And I hope they bring Clippy back. You should never kill Clippy. Bring Clippy back. Oh, Clippy. But Clippy promotes the myth of AI. Well, that's why I think you're wrong. How about if we, all right, could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy? Which one was Bob? Oh, Bob was another thing. Bob was this other screen character who was supposed to be the voice of AI. Cortana, Cortana, would Cortana do it for you? Cortana is too corporate. I like it, it's fine. There's a woman in Seattle who's like the model for Cortana, did Cortana's voice and was like- The voice? No, the voice is great. We had her as a, she used to walk around if you were wearing Halloween's for a bit. I don't think that's happening anymore. I don't think you should turn a software into a creature. Well, you and I- Get a cat, just get a cat. You and I, you and I, well, get a dog. Get a dog. Or a dog, yeah. Yeah, you're- Or a hedgehog. A hedgehog. Yeah. You co-authored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin, titled the Autodidactic Universe, which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws. That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea. What would you say are the key ideas in this paper? Ah, okay. Well, I should say that paper reflected work from last year and the project, the program has moved quite a lot. So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published that I'm quite excited about. So I have to kind of keep my frame in that last year's thing. So I have to try to be a little careful about that. We can think about it in a few different ways. The core of the paper, the technical core of it is a triple correspondence. One part of it was already established and then another part is in the process. The part that was established was, of course, understanding different theories of physics as matrix models. The part that was fresher is understanding those as machine learning systems so that we could move fluidly between these different ways of describing systems. And the reason to wanna do that is to just have more tools and more options because, well, theoretical physics is really hard and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state where they feel a little stalled, I guess. I wanna be delicate about this because I'm not a physicist. I'm the computer scientist collaborating. So I don't mean to diss anybody's. So this is almost like, gives a framework for generating new ideas in physics. As we start to publish more about where it's gone, I think you'll start to see there's tools and ways of thinking about theories that I think open up some new paths that will be of interest. There's the technical core of it, which is this idea of a correspondence to give you more facility. But then there's also the storytelling part of it. And this is something Lee loves stories and I do. And the idea here is that a typical, a typical way of thinking about physics is that there's some kind of starting condition and then there's some principle by which the starting condition evolves. And the question is like, why the starting condition? Like how the starting condition has to get kind of, it has to be fine-tuned and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect. And so we were thinking, well, look, what if we could push the storytelling about where the universe comes from much further back by starting with really simple things that evolve and then through that evolution, explain how things got to be how they are through very simple principles, right? And so we've been exploring a variety of ways to push the start of the storytelling further and further back, which, and it's an interesting, it's really kind of interesting because like for all of his, Lee is sometimes considered to be, to have a radical quality in the physics world, but he still is like, no, this is gonna be like, the kind of time we're talking about in which evolution happens is the same time we're now. And we're talking about something that starts and continues. And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind of time that's time-like and so it sounds like metaphysics, but there's an ambiguity, you know? Like it has to start from something and it's kind of an interesting, so there's this, a lot of the math can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting. So push this so far back that basically all the things we take for granted in physics start becoming emergent. It's emergent. I really wanna emphasize this is all super baby steps. I don't wanna over claim. It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing, we're approaching some old problems in a pretty fresh way informed. There's been a zillion papers about how you can think of the universe as a big neural net or how you can think of different ideas in physics as being quite similar to, or even equivalent to some of the ideas in machine learning. And that actually works out crazy well. Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie when you look at it. Like there's probably two or three dozen papers that have this quality and some of them are just crazy good. And it's very interesting. What we're trying to do is take those kinds of observations and turn them into an actionable framework where you can then start to do things with landscapes or theories that you couldn't do before and that sort of thing. So in that context or maybe beyond, how do you explain us humans? How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization? Or is there a lot of others or are we alone in this universe? Yeah. You seem to appreciate humans very much. I've grown fond of us. We're okay. We have our nice qualities. I like that. I mean, we're kind of weird. We spread this hair on our heads and then we're, I don't know, we're sort of weird animals. That's the feature, not a bug, I think, the weirdness. I hope so. I hope so. I think if I'm just gonna answer you in terms of truth, the first thing I'd say is we're not in a privileged enough position, at least as yet to really know much about who we are, how we are, what we're really like in the context of something larger, what that context is. Like all that stuff we might learn more in the future, our decisions, our ideas, our ideas, we might learn more in the future, our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know very much, which you can either view as frustrating or charming like that first year of TikTok or something. But- All roads lead back to TikTok, I like it. Well, lately. But in terms of, there's another level at which I can think about it where I sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens, and for me it's playing music, sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it and there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot more stuff flowing through. I'm not speaking as a scientist now, this is kind of a more, my artist side talking and it's, so I feel like I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you, but- Well, Kerouac, Jack Kerouac said that music is the only truth. What do you, it sounds like you might be at least in part- There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sax, where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in like a paragraph. And I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah, like there are these boldest things that walk around and they make these sounds, you can sort of understand them, but only kind of, and then there's like this, and it's just like this amazing, like just really quick, like if some spirit being or something was gonna show up in our reality and had knew nothing about it, it's like a little basic intro of like, okay, here's what's going on here. An incredible passage. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a one or two sentence summary in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right? Of what this- Mostly harmless. Mostly harmless. Yeah. Do you think there's truth to that, that music somehow connects to something that words cannot? Yeah, music is something that just towers above me. I don't feel like I have an overview of it. It's just the reverse. I don't fully understand it because on one level, it's simple, like you can say, oh, it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or something like that. There's all these things you can say about music, which are, you know, some of that's probably true. It's also, there's kind of like this, this is the mystery of meaning. Like there's a way that just, instead of just being pure abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible. I don't know what to do with it. Yeah. The amount of understanding I feel I have when I hear the right song at the right time is not comparable to anything I can read on Wikipedia. Anything I can understand, read through in language. The music does connect us to something. There's this thing there. Yeah, there's some kind of a thing in it. And I've never ever, I've read across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people, like that is some kind of a flow language between people or between people and how they perceive and that kind of thing. There's, and that sort of explanation is fine, but it's not quite it either. Yeah. There's something about music that makes me believe that panpsychism could possibly be true, which is that everything in the universe is conscious. It makes me think, it makes me be humble in how much or how little I understand about the functions of our universe, that everything might be conscious. Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually land in panpsychism, but I'm not one of them. I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat people as special. So I will proudly be a dualist. Sure. Without people and cats, people and cats. Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the line's there or anything like that, but I don't think I should be required to all the same questions are equally mysterious for no line. So I don't feel disadvantaged by that. So I shall remain a dualist, but if you listen to anyone trying to explain where consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you pretty much say, screw this, I'm gonna be a panpsychist. Okay. Fair enough, well put. Is there moments in your life that happen that we're defining in the way that you hope others, your daughters might as well. I gotta say, the moments that defined me were not the good ones. The moments that defined me were often horrible. I've had successes, but if you ask what defined me, my mother's death, being under the World Trade Center and the attack, the things that have had an effect on me were the most were sort of real world, terrible things, which I don't wish on young people at all. And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice to young people that they have to learn their own lessons and lessons don't come easily. And a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid world. And I don't know what to do with it. That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it. But I don't, this is like when I was saying that, freedom equals eternal annoyance. Like you can't, like, there's a degree to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give. And I don't want young people to have to know about everything. I think- You don't wanna wish hardship on them. Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period of naivete that's pleasant. I mean, I do, if it's possible, if it's, these things are, this is like, this is tricky stuff. I mean, if you, okay, so let me try a little bit on this advice thing. I think one thing, any serious broad advice will have been given a thousand times before for a thousand years. So this, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to claim originality, but I think trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person, what your, like to try to escape the constant sway of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish, not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible, but to find cover from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored in that, to believe in experience as a real thing. Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic. That goes with my philosophy of dualism. I believe there's something magical, and instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something real and something apart, something mystical and something- Your own personal experience that you just have, and then you're saying, silence the rest of the world enough to hear that, like whatever that magic justice is in that experience. Find what is there. And I think that's one thing. Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius, that it's actually really hard, that facile kindness is not kindness, and that it'll take you a while to have the skills to have kind impulses to wanna be kind, you can have right away. To be effectively kind is hard. To be effectively kind, yeah. It takes skill, it takes hard lessons. You'll never be perfect at it. To the degree you get anywhere with it, it's the most rewarding thing ever. Let's see, what else would I say? I would say when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed by social and interpersonal emotions. You'll have broken hearts and jealousies. You'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things. And you have to remember what a fragile crest all that stuff is. And it's hard, just right when it's happening, it's just so intense. And if I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already be out of the room. So this is for some hypothetical teenager that doesn't really exist, that really wants to sit and listen to my Western for this amount of time. For your daughter, 10 years from now. Maybe. Can I ask you a difficult question? Yeah, sure. You talked about losing your mom. Yeah. Do you miss her? Yeah, I mean, I still connected her through music. She was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna and she survived the concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the US. What music makes you think of her? Is there a song that connects you? Well, she was in Vienna, so she had the whole Viennese music thing going, which is this incredible school of absolute skill and romance bundled together and wonderful on the piano, especially. I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her and I played them in this exaggerated drippy way, I remember when I was a kid. Exaggerated meaning too full of emotion? Yeah, just like... It's not the only way to play Beethoven? I mean, I didn't know there's any other way. That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly Apollonian even with Beethoven, but one imagines that actual Beethoven playing might've been different. I don't know. I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried to see if I could feel anything about how it might've been for him. I don't know really. I was always against the clinical precision of classical music. I thought a great piano player should be in pain, like emotionally, like truly feel the music and make it messy sort of. Sure. Maybe play classical music the way, I don't know, blues pianist plays blues. It seems like they actually got happier and I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different kind of concept of the place of music. I think the blues, the whole African-American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances. So you could say there was some of that in the concentration camps and all that too. And it's not that Beethoven circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of also, I don't know, this is hard. I mean, it would seem to be his misery was somewhat self-imposed maybe through, I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I've known some people who loathed Beethoven, like the composer, late composer, Pauline Oliveros, wonderful modernist composer. I played in her band for a while and she was like, oh, Beethoven, that's the worst music ever. It's like all ego, it completely, it turns emotion into your enemy. And it's ultimately all about your own self-importance, which has to be at the expense of others could, but what else could it be and blah, blah, blah. So she had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive, I'm just saying her position on Beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed, which is really interesting for me. The manner of the music. I think, I don't know. I mean, she's not here to speak for herself, so it's a little hard for me to answer that question. But it was interesting because I'd always thought of Beethoven, it's like, whoa, you know, this is like Beethoven is like really the dude, you know, and she's like, ah, you know, Beethoven, Schmadoven, you know, it's like not really happening. Yeah, it's still, even though it's cliche, I like playing personally just for myself, Moonlight Sonata, I mean, I just. Moonlight's amazing. You know, I, you know, you're talking about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe is so different in so many ways. One of the musicians I play with is John Battiste, who has the band on Colbert's show, and he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into Moonlight, he loves Moonlight. And what's kind of interesting is he's found a way to do Beethoven, and he, by the way, he can really do Beethoven. Like he went through Julliard, and one time he was at my house, he's saying, hey, do you have the book of Beethoven Sonatas? I said, yeah, I want to find one I haven't played. And then he sight read through the whole damn thing perfectly, and I'm like, oh God, I just need to get out of here. I can't even deal with this. But anyway. Yeah. But anyway, the thing is he has this way of with the same persona and the same philosophy moving from the blues into Beethoven. That's really, really fascinating to me. It's like, I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, well, he was sight reading, he talks, like Beethoven's talking to him. Like he's like, oh yeah, I hear this dude, I can't do John, but you know, it's like, it's really interesting. Like it's very different. For me, I was introduced to Beethoven as like almost like this God-like figure, and I presume Pauline was too, that was really kind of a press for an art to deal with. And for him, it's just like- The conversation he's having. He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's like another musician who did something and they're talking and it's very cool to be around. It's very kind of freeing to see someone have that relationship. I would love to hear him play Beethoven. That sounds amazing. He's great. We talked about Ernest Becker and how much value he puts on our mortality and our denial of our mortality. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about your own death? You know, what's funny is I used to not be able to, but as you get older, you just know people who die and there's all these things that just becomes familiar and more of a more ordinary, which is what it is. But are you afraid? Sure, although less so. And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've died. And I really believe in the future. I have this optimism that people are this whole thing of life on earth, this whole thing we're part of. I don't know where to draw that circle, but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of value. And you can't both believe in the future and wanna live forever. You have to make room for it. You know, like you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own like humility. You have to make yourself small to believe in the future. And so it actually in a funny way comforts me. Wow, that's powerful. And optimism requires you to kind of step down after time. Yeah, I mean, that said, life seems kind of short, but you know, whatever. Do you think there's- I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department. I really wanna bring this up, but the customer service number never answers. And like the email bounces. One way. So yeah. Do you think there's meaning to it, to life? Ah, we'll see. Meaning's a funny word. Like we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but meaning, we don't know what we mean when we say meaning. Like we obviously do not. And it's a funny little mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in. I guess there are why, like if you look up to the stars and you experience that awe, inspiring like joy, whatever, when you look up to the stars, I don't know why for me, that's kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit melancholy, just some weird soup of feelings. And ultimately the question is like, why are we here in this vast universe? That question, why? Have you been able in some way, maybe through music, answer it for yourself? My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask, but I feel like going down that path is just too tedious for the moment. And I don't wanna do it, but. The wrong question. Well, just because I don't know what meaning is. And I think I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to answer it but I don't know what meaning is and I think, I do know that sense of awe. I grew up in Southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid. I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of optics research at White Sands. And when he was young, he discovered Pluto, his name was Clyde Tombaugh. And he taught me how to make telescopes as grinding mirrors and stuff. And my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid, but Clyde had like backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of like, I mean, he really, he did his telescopes, you know? And so I remember he'd let me go and play with them and just like looking at a globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons. And with a good telescope, it's really like this object. Like you can really tell this isn't coming through some intervening information structure. This is like the actual photons and it's really a three-dimensional object. And you have even a feeling for the vastness of it. And it's, I don't know. So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate to have a connection to this guy that way when I was a kid. To have had that experience again, the emphasis on experience. I, it's kind of funny. Like I feel like sometimes like I've taken when she was younger, I took my daughter and her friends to like a telescope. There are a few around here that are kids can go and use and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something. I think like Galilean moons. And I don't know if they quite had that because it's like too, it's been just too normalized. And I think maybe when I was growing up, screens weren't that common yet. And maybe it's like too confusable with a screen. I don't know. Somebody brought up in conversation to me somewhere. I don't remember who, they kind of posited this idea that if humans, early humans weren't able to see the stars, like if earth atmosphere was such that it was cloudy that we would not develop human civilization. There's something about being able to look up and see a vast universe is like, that's fundamental to the development of human civilization. I thought that was a curious kind of thought. That reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story where there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while. And it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster and there are all these stars. I forget what happens exactly. God, that's from when I was the same age as a kid. I don't really remember. But yeah, I don't know. It might be right. I was thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds. I mean, like the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun. They had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this one cave. Do you know about that? So they were in this like, they were trying to navigate boats in the North Atlantic without being able to see the sun because it was cloudy. And so they used a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really was because they couldn't tell by eye and they didn't navigate. So I'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive that had to deal with a lot of clouds. The Amazonians invented our agriculture and they were probably under clouds a lot. I don't know. To me personally, the question of the meaning of life becomes most vibrant, most apparent when you look up at the stars because it makes me feel very small. That we're not small. But then you ask, it still feels that we're special. And then the natural question is like, well, if we are as special as I think we are, why the heck are we here in this vast universe? That ultimately is the question of the meaning of life. I mean, look, there's a confusion sometimes in trying to set up a question or a thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something where there is no larger context. And that's a category error. If we wanna do it in physics, or in computer science, it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine because a Turing machine has an external clock and an observer and input and output. There's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all. And so if you're talking about the universe, you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine. Quantum mechanics is like that. Quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context depending on your interpretation that's either the observer or whatever. And they're similar that way. So maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be better friends or something because they have a similar setup. But the thing is, if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context, you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it's not suited for that. So there's some ideas that are their own context. General relativity is its own context. It's different. That's why it's hard to unify. And I think the same thing is true when we talk about these types of questions. Like meaning is in a context and to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category or it's not a resolvable way of thinking. It might be a way of thinking that is experientially or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring. But to try to treat it analytically is not sensible. Maybe that's what music and poetry are for. Yeah, maybe. I think so. I think music actually does escape any particular context. That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that. That's once again, crazy artists talking, not scientists. Well, you do both masterfully. Jaren, like I said, I'm a big fan of everything you've done of you as a human being. I appreciate the fun argument we had today that will I'm sure continue for 30 years as it did with Mark Minsky. Honestly, I deeply appreciate that you spent your really valuable time with me today. It was a really great conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jaren Lanier. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jaren Lanier himself. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Jaren Lanier,
 a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer,
 futurist, musician, and the founder of the field
 of virtual reality.
 To support this podcast,
 please check out our sponsors in the description.
 As a side note, you may know that Jaren is a staunch critic
 of social media platforms.
 Him and I agree on many aspects of this,
 except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible
 to build better platforms.
 And better artificial intelligence systems
 that put long-term interests
 and happiness of human beings first.
 Let me also say a general comment about these conversations.
 I try to make sure I prepare well,
 remove my ego from the picture,
 and focus on making the other person shine
 as we try to explore the most beautiful
 and insightful ideas in their mind.
 This can be challenging
 when the ideas that are close to my heart
 are being criticized.
 In those cases, I do offer a little pushback,
 but respectfully, and then move on,
 trying to have the other person come out
 looking wiser in the exchange.
 I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations,
 nor in life.
 My goal is to learn and to have fun.
 I ask that you don't see my approach
 to these conversations as weakness.
 It is not.
 It is my attempt at showing respect
 and love for the other person.
 That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking,
 but you probably already knew that.
 So please give me a pass on that as well.
 This is the Lex Friedman podcast,
 and here is my conversation with Jaren Lanier.
 You're considered the founding father of virtual reality.
 Do you think we will one day spend most
 or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds?
 I have always found the very most valuable moment
 in virtual reality to be the moment
 when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed
 and you perceive physicality afresh,
 as if you were a newborn baby,
 but with a little more experience.
 So you can really notice just how incredibly strange
 and delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is.
 So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be
 in the physical world.
 Well, that's my take on it.
 That's just me.
 I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else
 how to think or how to experience virtual reality.
 And at this point, there have been multiple generations
 of younger people who've come along and liberated me
 from having to worry about these things.
 But I should say also even in what some,
 well, I called it mixed reality,
 back in the day and these days it's called augmented reality,
 but with something like a HoloLens,
 even then, like one of my favorite things
 is to augment a forest,
 not because I think the forest needs augmentation,
 but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree,
 the real tree just pops out as being astounding.
 It's interactive, it's changing slightly all the time
 if you pay attention.
 And it's hard to pay attention to that,
 but when you compare it to a trans,
 all of a sudden you do.
 And even in practical applications,
 my favorite early application of virtual reality,
 which we prototype going back to the 80s
 when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med,
 near where we are now,
 we made the first surgical simulator.
 And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation,
 which is incredibly valuable for many things,
 for designing procedures, for training,
 for all kinds of things,
 then to go to the real person,
 boy, it's really something like,
 surgeons really get woken up by that transition.
 It's very cool.
 So I think the transition is actually more valuable
 than the simulation.
 That's fascinating.
 I never really thought about that.
 It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere
 in the physical space can help you appreciate
 how much you value your home once you return.
 Well, that's how I take it.
 I mean, once again, people have different attitudes
 towards it, all are welcome.
 What do you think is the difference
 between the virtual world and the physical meat space world?
 That you are still drawn, for you personally,
 still drawn to the physical world.
 Like there clearly then is a distinction.
 Is there some fundamental distinction
 or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology?
 In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now,
 it's made of software and software is terrible stuff.
 Software is always the slave of its own history,
 its own legacy.
 It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary.
 Working with it brings out a certain kind
 of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me,
 which I'm not that fond of.
 And there are all kinds of things
 about software I don't like.
 And so that's different from the physical world.
 It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out.
 On the other hand, I'm a little mystified
 when people ask me, well,
 do you think the universe is a computer?
 And I have to say, well, I mean,
 what on earth could you possibly mean
 if you say it isn't a computer?
 If it isn't a computer,
 it wouldn't follow principles consistently
 and it wouldn't be intelligible
 because what else is a computer ultimately?
 And we have physics, we have technology,
 so we can do technology so we can program it.
 So I mean, of course it's some kind of computer,
 but I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine
 is probably a foolish approach.
 Right, that's the question.
 Whether it performs, this computer we call the universe,
 performs the kind of computation that can be modeled
 as a universal Turing machine,
 or is it something much more fancy,
 so fancy in fact,
 that it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities
 to understand?
 Turing machines are kind of,
 I'd call them teases in a way,
 because if you have an infinitely smart programmer
 with an infinite amount of time,
 an infinite amount of memory,
 and an infinite clock speed,
 then they're universal, but that cannot exist.
 So they're not universal in practice.
 And they actually are in practice
 a very particular sort of machine within the constraints,
 within the conservation principles of any reality
 that's worth being in probably.
 And so,
 I think universality of a particular model
 is probably a deceptive way to think,
 even though at some sort of limit,
 of course something like that's gotta be true
 at some sort of high enough limit,
 but it's just not accessible to us.
 So what's the point?
 Well, to me, the question of like,
 whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation
 is interesting in the following way.
 There's a technical question is here.
 How difficult does it to build a machine,
 not that simulates the universe,
 but that makes it sufficiently realistic
 that we wouldn't know the difference,
 or better yet, sufficiently realistic,
 that we would kind of know the difference,
 but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway.
 I wanna give you a few different answers.
 I wanna give you the one that I think
 has the most practical importance to human beings right now,
 which is that there's a kind of an assertion
 sort of built into the way the question's usually asked
 that I think is false,
 which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level
 of ability to perceive reality in a given way.
 And actually, people are always learning, evolving,
 forming themselves.
 We're fluid too.
 We're also programmable, self-programmable,
 changing, adapting.
 And so my favorite way to get at this
 is to talk about the history of other media.
 So for instance, there was a peer review paper
 that showed that an early wire recorder
 playing back an opera singer behind a curtain
 was indistinguishable from a real opera singer.
 And so now, of course, to us,
 it would not only be distinguishable,
 but it would be very blatant
 because the recording would be horrible.
 But to the people at the time,
 without the experience of it, it seemed plausible.
 There was an early demonstration
 of extremely crude video teleconferencing
 between New York and DC in the 30s, I think so,
 that people viewed as being absolutely realistic
 and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible.
 And there are many other examples.
 Another one, one of my favorite ones
 is in the Civil War era,
 there were itinerant photographers
 who collected photographs of people
 who just looked kind of like a few archetypes.
 So you could buy a photo of somebody
 who looked kind of like your loved one
 to remind you of that person,
 because actually photographing them was inconceivable
 and hiring a painter was too expensive,
 and you didn't have any way for the painter
 to represent them remotely anyway.
 How would they even know what they looked like?
 So these are all great examples of how,
 in the early days of different media,
 we perceived the media as being really great,
 but then we evolved through the experience of the media.
 This gets back to what I was saying.
 Maybe the greatest gift of photography
 is that we can see the flaws in a photograph
 and appreciate reality more.
 Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording
 is that we can distinguish that opera singer now
 from that recording of the opera singer
 on the horrible wire recorder.
 So we shouldn't limit ourselves
 by some assumption of stasis that's incorrect.
 So that's my first answer,
 which is I think the most important one.
 Now, of course, somebody might come back and say,
 oh, but technology can go so far.
 There must be some point at which it would surpass.
 That's a different question.
 I think that's also an interesting question,
 but I think the answer I just gave you
 is actually the more important answer
 to the more important question.
 That's profound, yeah.
 But can you, the second question,
 which you're now making me realize is way different,
 is it possible to create worlds
 in which people would want to stay
 instead of the real world?
 Well.
 Like, en masse, like large numbers of people.
 What I hope is, as I said before,
 I hope that the experience of virtual worlds
 helps people appreciate this physical world we have
 and feel tender towards it
 and keep it from getting too fucked up.
 That's my hope.
 Do you see all technology in that way?
 So basically, technology helps us appreciate
 the more sort of technology-free aspect of life.
 Well, media technology.
 You can stretch that.
 I mean, you can, let me say,
 I could definitely play McLuhan
 and turn this into a general theory.
 It's totally doable.
 The program you just described is totally doable.
 In fact, I will psychically predict
 that if you did the research,
 you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already.
 I don't know, but they might exist.
 But I don't know how much value there is
 in pushing a particular idea that far.
 Claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense
 seems incoherent to me because we can program it.
 We have technology.
 It seems to obey physical laws.
 What more do you want from it to be a computer?
 I mean, it's a computer of some kind.
 We don't know exactly what kind.
 We might not know how to think about it.
 We're working on it.
 Sorry to interrupt, but you're absolutely right.
 That's my fascination with the AI as well,
 is it helps in the case of AI,
 I see it as a set of techniques
 that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans.
 In the same way, virtual reality,
 and you're putting it brilliantly,
 it's a way to help us understand reality.
 Sure.
 And we can navigate and open our eyes more richly to reality.
 That's certainly how I see it.
 And I wish people who become incredibly fascinated,
 who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations
 with whether we're in a simulation or not,
 or there's a whole world of variations on that,
 I wish they'd step back
 and think about their own motivations
 and exactly what they mean.
 And I think the danger with these things
 is, so if you say,
 is the universe some kind of computer broadly,
 it has to be,
 because it's not coherent to say that it isn't.
 On the other hand,
 to say that that means you know anything
 about what kind of computer,
 that's something very different.
 And the same thing is true for the brain,
 the same thing is true for anything
 where you might use computational metaphors.
 Like we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand.
 And the problem I have with these framings of computation
 is these ultimate cosmic questions
 is that it has a way of getting people
 to pretend they know more than they do.
 Can you maybe, this is a therapy session,
 so can you analyze me for a second?
 I really like the Elder Scrolls series,
 it's a role playing game, Skyrim for example.
 Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world?
 And then there's people you could talk to,
 and you can just like, it's an escape,
 but you know, my life is awesome, I'm truly happy.
 But I also am happy with the music that's playing
 and the mountains and carrying around a sword.
 And just that, I don't know what that is.
 It's very pleasant though to go there,
 and I miss it sometimes.
 I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations,
 it's wonderful to love contact with other people,
 it's wonderful to love play and ongoing evolving meaning
 and patterns with other people.
 I think it's a good thing.
 You know, I'm not like anti-tech
 and I'm certainly not anti-digital tech,
 I'm anti, as everybody knows by now,
 I think the manipulative economy of social media
 is making everybody nuts and all that.
 So I'm anti that stuff, but the core of it,
 of course I worked for many, many years
 on trying to make that stuff happen
 because I think it can be beautiful.
 Like I don't, like why not?
 You know, and by the way, there's a thing about humans,
 which is we're problematic.
 Like any kind of social interaction with other people
 is gonna have its problems.
 People are political and tricky.
 And like, I love classical music,
 but when you actually go to a classical music thing
 and it turns out, oh, actually this is like a backroom
 power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well.
 And that's kind of not as fun.
 That's part of the package.
 And the thing is, it's always going to be,
 there's always gonna be a mix of things.
 I don't think the search for purity
 is gonna get you anywhere.
 So I'm not worried about that.
 I worry about the really bad cases where we're becoming,
 where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough
 that we might not survive.
 And I think, you know, the social media criticism
 rises to that level, but I'm glad you enjoy it.
 I think it's great.
 And I like that you basically say that every experience
 is both beauty and darkness, as in with classical music.
 I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much.
 But it's interesting.
 I mean, every, and even the darkness,
 it's a man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl
 and the concentration camps.
 Even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty.
 And so it's, that's the interesting thing about humans
 is the capacity to discover beautiful
 in the darkest of moments.
 But there's always the dark parts too.
 Well, I mean, it's, our situation is structurally difficult.
 We are.
 Structurally difficult.
 No, it is, it's true.
 We perceive socially, we depend on each other
 for our sense of place and perception of the world.
 I mean, we're dependent on each other.
 And yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably,
 we inevitably let each other down.
 We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive.
 I mean, it's, our fundamental situation
 is complicated and challenging,
 and I wouldn't have it any other way.
 Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things.
 One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of,
 being human, allegedly, you wrote an essay
 on death and consciousness in which you write a note,
 certainly the fear of death has been one
 of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought
 and in the formation of the character of civilization.
 And yet it is under acknowledged.
 The great book on the subject,
 The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker
 deserves a reconsideration.
 I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this.
 What's the role of death in life?
 See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house
 because my wife is Russian and we also have,
 we have a piano of such spectacular qualities.
 You wouldn't, you would have freaked out.
 But anyway, we'll let all that go.
 So the context in which, I remember that essay sort of,
 this was from maybe the 90s or something.
 And I used to publish in a journal called
 the Journal of Consciousness Studies,
 because I was interested in these endless debates
 about consciousness and science,
 which certainly continue today.
 And I was interested in how the fear of death
 and the denial of death played
 into different philosophical approaches to consciousness.
 Because I think on the one hand, the sort of sentimental school
 of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something apart
 from the physical brain, some kind of soul
 or something else is obviously motivated in a sense
 by a hope that whatever that is will survive death
 and continue.
 That's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions.
 Not all of them, not really, but most of them.
 The thing I noticed is that the opposite of those,
 which might be the sort of hardcore,
 no, the brain's a computer and that's it,
 in a sense, we're motivated in the same way
 with a remarkably similar chain of arguments,
 which is no, the brain's a computer
 and I'm gonna figure it out in my lifetime
 and upload myself and I'll live forever.
 That's interesting.
 Yeah, that's like the implied thought, right?
 Yeah, and so it's kind of this,
 in a funny way, it's the same thing.
 It's peculiar to notice that these people
 who would appear to be opposites in character
 and cultural references and in their ideas
 actually are remarkably similar.
 And to an incredible degree,
 the sort of hardcore computationalist idea
 about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity.
 There are the people who are afraid
 that if you have the wrong thought,
 you'll piss off the super AIs of the future
 who will come back and zap you and all that stuff.
 It's really turned into medieval Christianity all over again.
 So the Ernest Becker's idea that the fear of death
 is the warm at the core, which is like,
 that's the core motivator
 of everything we see humans have created.
 The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core,
 is like a prerequisite to consciousness.
 You just moved across this vast cultural chasm
 that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way.
 And I can't answer what you just said on the level
 without this huge deconstruction.
 Yes. Should I do it?
 Yes, what's the chasm?
 Okay.
 Let us travel across this vast chasm.
 Okay, I don't believe in AI.
 I don't think there's any AI.
 There's just algorithms.
 We make them, we control them.
 Now, they're tools, they're not creatures.
 Now, this is something that robs a lot of people
 the wrong way.
 And don't I know it?
 When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky,
 who's the principal author of the computer
 as creature rhetoric that we still use.
 He was the first person to have the idea at all,
 but he certainly populated AI culture
 with most of its tropes, I would say.
 Cause a lot of the stuff people will say,
 oh, did you hear this new idea about AI?
 And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978.
 Sure, yeah, I remember that.
 So Marvin was really the person.
 And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about the stuff
 cause I always rejected it.
 And of all of his,
 I wasn't formally his student,
 but I worked for him as a researcher,
 but of all of his students and student-like people
 of his young adoptees,
 I think I was the one who argued with him
 about this stuff in particular and he loved it.
 Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation.
 It was fun.
 Did you ever converse to a place?
 Oh, no, no.
 So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail.
 And I was in Boston and I was going to the old house
 in Brookline, his amazing house.
 And one of our mutual friends said,
 hey, listen, Marvin's so frail.
 Don't do the argument with him.
 Don't argue about AI.
 And so I said, but Marvin loves that.
 And so I showed up and he's like, he was frail.
 And he looked up and he said, are you ready to argue?
 He's such an amazing person for that.
 So it's hard to summarize this
 because it's decades of stuff.
 The first thing to say is that nobody can claim
 absolute knowledge about whether somebody
 or something else is conscious or not.
 This is all a matter of faith.
 And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith
 needs to be updated.
 So it's not about God,
 but it's just about stuff in the universe.
 We have faith in each other being conscious.
 And then I used to frame this as a thing called
 the circle of empathy in my old papers.
 And then it turned into a thing
 for the animal rights movement.
 So I noticed Peter Singer using it.
 I don't know if it was coincident or, but anyway,
 there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself
 and the stuff inside is more like you,
 might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy,
 of your consideration,
 and the stuff outside the circle isn't.
 And outside the circle might be a rock or,
 I don't know.
 And that circle is fundamentally based on faith.
 Well, it's normally-
 Your faith in what is and what isn't.
 The thing about this circle is it can't be pure faith.
 It's also a pragmatic decision.
 And this is where things get complicated.
 If you try to make it too big,
 you suffer from incompetence.
 If you say, I don't wanna kill a bacteria,
 I will not brush my teeth.
 I don't know, what do you do?
 There's a competence question
 where you do have to draw the line.
 People who make it too small become cruel.
 People are so clannish and political
 and so worried about themselves
 ending up on the bottom of society
 that they are always ready to gang up
 on some designated group.
 And so there's always these people
 who are always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.
 And so-
 So aren't you shoving AI outside the circle?
 Well, give me a second.
 All right.
 So there's a pragmatic consideration here.
 And so, and the biggest questions
 are probably fetuses and animals lately,
 but AI is getting there.
 Now with AI, I think,
 and I've had this discussion so many times,
 people say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI,
 you'd be cruel to some consciousness?
 And then I would say, well, if you include AI,
 you make yourself, you exclude yourself
 from being able to be a good engineer or designer.
 And so you're facing incompetence immediately.
 So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms
 and be much more skeptical of them.
 Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly
 with social media, how things can go wrong.
 Isn't it possible to design systems
 that show compassion, not to manipulate you,
 but give you control and make your life better
 if you so choose to, like grow together with systems.
 And the way we grow with dogs and cats,
 with pets, with significant others in that way,
 they grow to become better people.
 I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible.
 You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble
 by thinking, you know what's good for people.
 Well, look, there's this question
 of what framework we're speaking in.
 Do you know who Alan Watts was?
 So Alan Watts once said, morality is like gravity
 that in some absolute cosmic sense,
 there can't be morality because at some point
 it all becomes relative and who are we anyway?
 Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures.
 But here on earth, we're with each other.
 This is our frame and morality is a very real thing.
 Same thing with gravity.
 At some point, you get into interstellar space
 and you might not feel much of it,
 but here we are on earth.
 And I think in the same sense,
 I think this identification with a frame that's quite remote
 cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel
 sort of separate from and superior to other people
 or something like that.
 There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject.
 And we're just not competent yet to talk about
 these kinds of absolutes.
 Okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologists
 sort of lack this basic respect, understanding
 and love for humanity.
 There's a separation there.
 The thing I'd like to push back,
 and it's not that you disagree,
 but I believe you can create technologies
 and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer
 that does build systems that respect humanity,
 not just respect, but admire humanity,
 that have empathy for common humans, have compassion.
 Not impossible.
 So, I mean, no, no, no.
 I think, yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments
 are a great example of that.
 Musical instruments are technologies that help people
 connect in fantastic ways.
 And that's a great example.
 My invention or design during the pandemic period
 was this thing called together mode,
 where people see themselves seated sort of in a classroom
 or a theater instead of in squares.
 And it allows them to semi-consciously perform
 to each other as if they have proper eye contact,
 as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally
 and weirdly that turns out to work.
 And so it promotes empathy so far as I can tell.
 I hope it is of some use to somebody.
 The AI idea isn't really new.
 I would say it was born with Adam Smith's invisible hand,
 with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing
 and it gets a bit beyond us
 and then we think it must be smarter than us.
 And the thing about the invisible hand is absolutely
 everybody has some line they draw where they say,
 no, no, no, we're gonna take control of this thing.
 They might have different lines,
 they might care about different things,
 but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian
 because it just didn't work.
 It really wasn't that smart.
 It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed.
 And so if you really, people who really, really, really
 wanna believe in the invisible hand is infinitely smart,
 screw up their economies terribly.
 You have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool.
 Everybody does when it's to their advantage.
 They might not when it's not to their advantage.
 That's kind of an interesting game that happens.
 But the thing is, it's just like that with our algorithms.
 You know, like you can have a sort of a Chicago
 economic philosophy about your computers.
 You know, no, no, my things come alive.
 It's smarter than anything.
 I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us.
 This is what we seek.
 We seek love from each other.
 I think AI can help us connect deeper.
 Like this is what you criticize social media for.
 I think there's much better ways of doing social media.
 That doesn't lead to manipulation,
 but instead leads to deeper connection between humans,
 leads to you becoming a better human being.
 And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI
 to be almost like a therapist.
 I mean, a companion.
 It's not telling you what's right.
 It's not guiding you as if it's an all-knowing thing.
 It's just another companion that you can leave at any time.
 You have complete transparency control over.
 There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have
 that are counter to how current social media operates
 that I think is subservient to humans or no,
 deeply respects human beings
 and is empathetic to their experience
 and all those kinds of things.
 I think it's possible to create AI systems like that.
 And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion
 of whether they need to have
 something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms,
 something that has identity,
 something that has a personality, all those kinds of things.
 AI systems, and you've spoken extensively
 how AI systems manipulate you within social networks.
 And that's the biggest problem.
 Isn't necessarily that there's advertisement
 that social networks present you with advertisements
 that then get you to buy stuff.
 That's not the biggest problem.
 The biggest problem is they then manipulate you.
 They alter your human nature to get you to buy stuff
 or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants.
 Maybe you can correct me.
 Yeah, I don't see it quite that way,
 but we can work with that as an approximation.
 Sure, so my-
 I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous
 and stupider than that, but that's okay.
 So my question is, let's not use the word AI,
 but how do we fix it?
 Oh, fixing social media, that diverts us
 into this whole other field in my view, which is economics,
 which I always thought was really boring,
 but we have no choice but to turn into economists
 if we wanna fix this problem,
 because it's all about incentives.
 But I've been around this thing since it started,
 and I've been in the meetings
 where the social media companies sell themselves
 to the people who put the most money into them,
 which are usually the big advertising holding companies
 and whatnot.
 And there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction,
 and maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody,
 that the algorithm will get really good
 at getting people to buy something.
 Because I think people have looked at their returns
 and looked at what happens,
 and everybody recognizes that's not exactly right.
 It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment
 at this point.
 Just to be connected, you're paying the money.
 It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms.
 So Stanford renamed its program,
 but it used to be called Engage Persuade.
 The engage part works.
 The persuade part is iffy,
 but the thing is that once people are engaged,
 in order for you to exist as a business,
 in order for you to be known at all,
 you have to put money into the-
 Oh, that's dark.
 Oh, no, that's not, no, that-
 It doesn't work, but they have to-
 But they're still, it's a giant cognitive access
 blackmail scheme at this point.
 So because the science behind the persuade part,
 it's not entirely a failure,
 but it's not what, there's,
 we play make believe that it works more than it does.
 The damage doesn't come, honestly,
 as I've said in my books, I'm not anti-advertising.
 I actually think advertising can be demeaning
 and annoying and banal and ridiculous
 and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff.
 There's a lot of ways to criticize that advertising
 that's accurate, and it can also lie and all kinds of things.
 However, if I look at the biggest picture,
 I think advertising, at least as it was understood before,
 social media helped bring people into modernity
 in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall.
 And you might say, am I contradicting myself
 because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people?
 Yeah, I am probably here.
 I mean, I'm not pretending to have this perfect
 airtight worldview without some contradictions.
 I think there's a bit of a contradiction there, so.
 Well, looking at the long arc of history,
 advertisement has in some parts benefited society
 because it funded some efforts that perhaps-
 Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a thing
 where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use.
 Now, where the damage comes is a different thing though.
 Social media, algorithms on social media
 have to work on feedback loops
 where they present you with stimulus
 and they have to see if you respond to the stimulus.
 Now, the problem is that the measurement mechanism
 for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop
 is very, very crude.
 It's things like whether you click more
 or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more
 if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated,
 but typically there isn't.
 So you have this incredibly crude back channel
 of information and so it's crude enough
 that it only catches sort of the more dramatic responses
 from you and those are the fight or flight responses.
 Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off
 or aggressive or horny.
 These are these ancient, the sort of what are sometimes
 called the lizard brain circuits or whatever.
 These fast response, old, old, old evolutionary business
 circuits that we have that are helpful in survival
 once in a while, but are not us at our best.
 They're not who we wanna be.
 They're not how we relate to each other.
 They're this old business.
 So then just when you're engaged using those intrinsically,
 totally aside from whatever the topic is,
 you start to get incrementally just a little bit
 more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive.
 You get a little stupid and you become a jerk.
 And it happens slowly.
 It happens, it's not like everybody's instantly transformed,
 but it does kind of happen progressively where people
 who get hooked kind of get drawn more and more
 into this pattern of being at their worst.
 Would you say that people are able to,
 when they get hooked in this way,
 look back at themselves from 30 days ago and say,
 I am less happy with who I am now,
 or I'm not happy with who I am now versus who I was
 30 days ago.
 Are they able to self-reflect when you take yourself
 outside of the lizard brain?
 Sometimes.
 I wrote a book about people suggesting people take a break
 from their social media to see what happens,
 and maybe even delete, actually the title of the book
 was just Arguments to Delete Your Account.
 Yeah, 10 arguments.
 10 arguments, although I always said,
 I don't know that you should.
 I can give you the arguments, it's up to you.
 I'm always very clear about that.
 But you know, I get like, I don't have a social media
 account, obviously, and it's not that easy for people
 to reach me.
 They have to search out an old-fashioned email address
 on a super crappy, antiquated website.
 Like, it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy.
 And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail
 from people who say, oh, I quit my social media,
 I'm doing so much better, I can't believe how bad it was.
 But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail
 would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective
 of Facebook, right?
 And so I think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves
 and say, oh boy, I sure screwed myself over.
 It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody.
 None of us find that easy, right?
 It's just hard.
 The reason I ask this is, is it possible to design
 social media systems that optimize for some longer term
 metrics of you being happy with yourself?
 Well, see, I don't think you should try to engineer
 personal growth or happiness.
 I think what you should do is design a system
 that's just respectful of the people and subordinates
 itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives.
 And then at least there's a chance
 of something decent happening.
 You have to recommend stuff, right?
 So you're saying like, be respectful.
 What does that actually mean engineering wise?
 People, yeah, curation, people have to be responsible.
 Algorithms shouldn't be recommending.
 Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend.
 Algorithms are crap in this era.
 I mean, I'm sorry, they are.
 And I'm not saying this as somebody as a critic
 from the outside, I'm in the middle of it.
 I know what they can do, I know the math,
 I know what the corpora are.
 I know the best ones.
 Our office is funding GPT-3 and all these things
 that are at the edge of what's possible.
 And they do not have yet, I mean, it still is
 statistical emergent pseudo semantics.
 It doesn't actually have the representation
 emerging of anything.
 It's just not like, I mean, that I'm speaking the truth here
 and you know it.
 Well, let me push back on this.
 There's several truths here.
 So you're speaking to the way certain companies
 operate currently.
 I don't think it's outside the realm
 of what's technically feasible to do.
 There's just not incentive, like companies are not,
 why fix this thing?
 I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search
 and discovery has been very helpful to me.
 And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos
 that it's nice to have a little bit of help.
 Have you done, but I'm still in control.
 Let me ask you something.
 Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube
 recommend videos to you, either starting from
 a absolutely anonymous random place
 where it doesn't know who you are,
 or from knowing who you or somebody else is,
 and then going 15 or 20 hops?
 Have you ever done that and just let it go
 top video recommend and then just go 20 hops?
 No, I haven't.
 I've done that many times now.
 I have, because of how large YouTube is
 and how widely it's used, it's very hard
 to get to enough scale to get a statistically
 solid result on this.
 I've done it with high school kids,
 with dozens of kids doing it at a time.
 Every time I've done an experiment,
 the majority of times after about 17 or 18 hops,
 you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory.
 Because ultimately, that is the stuff
 the algorithm rewards the most because of the
 feedback crudeness I was just talking about.
 So I'm not saying that the video never
 recommends something cool.
 I'm saying that its fundamental core is one
 that promotes a paranoid style,
 that promotes increasing irritability,
 that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger,
 promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people.
 And I would encourage, the thing is,
 it's very hard to do this work solidly.
 Many have repeated this experiment,
 and yet it still is kind of anecdotal.
 I'd like to do like a large citizen science thing
 sometime and do it, but then I think the problem
 with that is YouTube would detect it and then change it.
 Yes, I love that kind of stuff on Twitter.
 So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy
 conversations on Twitter,
 optimizing for healthy conversations.
 What that requires within Twitter are most likely
 citizen experiments of what does healthy conversation
 actually look like and how do you incentivize
 those healthy conversations.
 You're describing what often happens
 and what is currently happening.
 What I'd like to argue is it's possible to strive
 for healthy conversations, not in a dogmatic way of saying,
 I know what healthy conversations are and I will tell you.
 I think one way to do this is to try to look around
 at social, maybe not things that are officially
 social media, but things where people are together online
 and see which ones have more healthy conversations.
 Even if it's hard to be completely objective
 in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely.
 You could do subjective annotation of this,
 like have a large crowdsourced annotation.
 One that I've been really interested in is GitHub.
 Because it contains, I'm not saying it'll always be,
 but for the most part, GitHub has had a relatively
 quite low poison quotient.
 And I think there's a few things about GitHub
 that are interesting.
 One thing about it is that people have a stake in it.
 It's not just empty status games.
 There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done.
 And I think as soon as you have a real world stake
 in something, you have a motivation
 to not screw up that thing.
 And I think that that's often missing,
 that there's no incentive for the person
 to really preserve something if they get a little bit
 of attention from dumping on somebody's TikTok or something.
 They don't pay any price for it.
 But you have to kind of get decent with people
 when you have a shared stake, a little secret.
 So GitHub does a bit of that.
 GitHub is wonderful, yes.
 But I'm tempted to play the Jaren Becka at you,
 which is that GitHub is currently is amazing.
 But the thing is, if you have a stake,
 then if it's a social media platform,
 they can use the fact that you have a stake
 to manipulate you because you wanna preserve the stake.
 So like.
 Right, well this is why, this gets us into the economics.
 So there's this thing called data dignity
 that I've been studying for a long time.
 I wrote a book about an earlier version of it
 called Who Owns the Future.
 And the basic idea of it is that,
 once again, this is a 30 year conversation.
 It's a fascinating topic.
 Let me do the fastest version of this I can do.
 The fastest way I know how to do this
 is to compare two futures.
 All right, so future one is then the normative one,
 the one we're building right now.
 And then future two is gonna be data dignity, okay.
 And I'm gonna use a particular population.
 I live on the hill in Berkeley.
 And one of the features about the hill
 is that as the climate changes, we might burn down
 and I'll lose our houses or die or something.
 Like it's dangerous, and it didn't used to be.
 And so who keeps us alive?
 Well, the city does.
 The city does some things.
 The electric company, kinda sort of, maybe hopefully better.
 Individual people who own property,
 take care of their property, that's all nice.
 But there's this other middle layer,
 which is fascinating to me,
 which is that the groundskeepers
 who work up and down that hill,
 many of whom are not legally here,
 many of whom don't speak English,
 cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch
 to transfer fire easily from lot to lot.
 They have this whole little web that's keeping us safe.
 I didn't know about this at first.
 I just started talking to them
 because they were out there during the pandemic.
 And so I try to just see who are these people?
 Who are these people who are keeping us alive?
 Now, I wanna talk about the two different traits
 for those people under future one and future two.
 Future one, some weird kindergarten paint job van
 with all these cameras and weird things drives up,
 observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing.
 A few years later, some amazing robots
 that can shimmy up trees and all this show up.
 All those people are out of work
 and there are these robots doing the thing
 and the robots are good.
 And they can scale to more land and they're actually good.
 But then there are all these people out of work
 and these people have lost dignity.
 They don't know what they're gonna do.
 And then somebody will say,
 well, they go on basic income, whatever.
 They become wards of the state.
 My problem with that solution is every time in history
 that you've had some centralized thing
 that's doling out the benefits,
 that things get seized by people
 because it's too centralized and it gets seized.
 This happened to every communist experiment I can find.
 So I think that turns into a poor future
 that will be unstable.
 I don't think people will feel good in it.
 I think it'll be a political disaster
 with a sequence of people seizing this central source
 of the basic income.
 And you'll say, oh no, an algorithm can do it.
 Then people will seize the algorithm.
 They'll seize control.
 Unless the algorithm is decentralized
 and it's impossible to seize the control.
 Yeah, but 60 something people own a quarter
 of all the Bitcoin.
 Like the things that we think are decentralized
 are not decentralized.
 So let's go to future two.
 Future two, the gardeners see that van with all the cameras
 and the kindergarten paint job.
 And they say, the groundskeepers,
 and they say, hey, the robots are coming.
 We're gonna form a data union.
 And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law
 emerging in the books.
 Yes. Interesting.
 And they say, we're gonna form a data union.
 And we're gonna, not only are we gonna sell our data
 to this place, but we're gonna make it better
 than it would have been if they were just grabbing it
 without our corporation.
 And we're gonna improve it.
 We're gonna make the robots more effective.
 We're gonna make them better.
 And we're gonna be proud of it.
 We're gonna become a new class of experts
 that are respected.
 And then here's the interesting,
 there's two things that are different about that world
 from future one.
 One thing, of course, the people have more pride.
 They have more sense of ownership of agency.
 But what the robots do changes.
 Instead of just like this functional,
 like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood
 from burning down.
 You have this whole creative community
 that wasn't there before thinking,
 well, how can we make these robots better
 so we can keep on earning money?
 There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping
 with spiral pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things.
 There'll be new ideas like, wow,
 I wonder if we could do something
 about climate change mitigation with how we do this.
 What about fresh water?
 Can we make the food healthier?
 What about all of a sudden,
 there'll be this whole creative community on the case.
 And isn't it nicer to have a high-tech future
 with more creative classes
 than one with more dependent classes?
 Isn't that a better future?
 But future one and future two have the same robots
 and the same algorithms.
 There's no technological difference.
 There's only a human difference.
 And that second future too, that's data dignity.
 The economy that you're,
 I mean, the game theory here is on the humans.
 And then the technologies is the tools that enable.
 Yeah, I mean, I think you can believe in AI
 and be in future two.
 I just think it's a little harder.
 You have to do more contortions.
 It's possible.
 So in the case of social media,
 what is data dignity look like?
 Is it people getting paid for their data?
 Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future,
 there should be massive data unions
 for people putting content into the system.
 And those data unions should smooth out the results
 a little bit, so it's not winner take all.
 But at the same time, and people have to pay for it too.
 They have to pay for Facebook the way they pay for Netflix
 with an allowance for the poor.
 There has to be a way out too.
 But the thing is people do pay for Netflix.
 It's a going concern.
 People pay for Xbox and PlayStation.
 Like people, there's enough people to pay
 for stuff they want.
 This could happen too.
 It's just that this precedent started
 that moved it in the wrong direction.
 And then what has to happen,
 the economy is a measuring device.
 If it's an honest measuring device,
 the outcomes for people form a normal distribution,
 a bell curve.
 And then so there should be a few people
 who do really well, a lot of people who do okay.
 And then we should have an expanding economy
 reflecting more and more creativity and expertise
 flowing through the network.
 And that expanding economy moves the result
 just a bit forward.
 So more people are getting money out of it
 than are putting money into it.
 So it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats
 and the society has to support the lower wing
 of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income.
 It has to be for the,
 cause if it's an honest economy,
 there will be that lower wing
 and we have to support those people.
 There has to be a safety net.
 But see what I believe, I'm not gonna talk about AI,
 but I will say that I think there'll be more
 and more algorithms that are useful.
 And so I don't think everybody's gonna be supplying data
 to grounds-keeping robots,
 nor do I think everybody's gonna make their living
 with TikTok videos.
 I think in both cases, there'll be a rather small contingent
 that do well enough at either of those things.
 But I think there might be many, many, many, many
 of those niches that start to evolve
 as there are more and more algorithms,
 more and more robots.
 And it's that large number
 that will create the economic potential
 for a very large part of society
 to become members of new creative classes.
 Do you think it's possible to create a social network
 that competes with Twitter and Facebook
 that's large and centralized in this way?
 Not centralized, sort of large, large.
 How to get, all right, so I gotta tell you
 how to get from what I'm talking,
 how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone
 of what I'm talking about is challenging.
 I know some of the people who run,
 like I know Jack Dorsey,
 and I view Jack as somebody who's actually,
 I think he's really striving and searching
 and trying to find a way to make it better,
 but is kind of like, it's very hard to do it while in flight
 and he's under enormous business pressure too.
 So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study
 because I think his mind is in a lot of good places.
 He's a good human being,
 but there's a big Titanic ship that's already moving
 in one direction, it's hard to know what to do with it.
 I think that's the story of Twitter.
 I think that's the story of Twitter.
 One of the things that I observe is that
 if you just wanna look at the human side,
 meaning like how are people being changed,
 how do they feel, what does the culture like?
 Almost all of the social media platforms that get big
 have an initial sort of honeymoon period
 where they're actually kind of sweet and cute.
 Like if you look at the early years of Twitter,
 it was really sweet and cute,
 but also look at Snap, TikTok.
 And then what happens is as they scale
 and the algorithms become more influential
 instead of just the early people,
 when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it,
 then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style
 and then they start to get dark.
 And we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently.
 But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws
 within the incentives.
 I feel like I'm torturing you, I'm sorry.
 No, no, no, it's not torture.
 No, because I have hope for the world with humans
 and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create,
 including technology.
 And I just, I feel it is possible
 to create social media platforms
 that incentivize different things than the current.
 I think the current incentivization is around
 like the dumbest possible thing that was invented
 like 20 years ago, however long, and it just works.
 So nobody's changing it.
 I just think that there could be a lot of innovation
 for more, see, you kind of pushed back this idea
 that we can't know what long-term growth or happiness is.
 If you give control to people to define
 what their long-term happiness and goals are,
 then that optimization can happen
 for each of those individual people.
 Well, I mean, imagine a future where probably a lot of people
 would love to make their living doing TikTok dance videos,
 but people recognize generally
 that's kind of hard to get into.
 Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience
 that's very similar to programmers
 working together on GitHub.
 So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub
 and they get together and they have rights.
 They're negotiating for returns.
 They join different artist societies
 in order to soften the blow of the randomness
 of who gets the network effect benefit
 because nobody can know that.
 And I think an individual person might join
 a thousand different data unions in the course of their lives
 or maybe even 10,000.
 I don't know, but the point is that we'll have
 like these very hedge distributed portfolios
 of different data unions we're part of.
 And some of them might just trickle in a little money
 for nonsense stuff where we're contributing
 to health studies or something.
 But I think people will find their way.
 They'll find their way to the right GitHub-like community
 in which they find their value
 in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste
 and correctives and all of this into the algorithms
 and the robots of the future.
 And that is a way to resist
 the lizard brain-based funding mechanism.
 It's an alternate economic system
 that rewards productivity, creativity,
 value as perceived by others.
 It's a genuine market.
 It's not doled out from a center.
 There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable.
 It's actual market.
 And the money is made by supporting that
 instead of just grabbing people's attention
 in the cheapest possible way,
 which is definitely how you get the lizard brain.
 Yeah, okay.
 So we're finally at the agreement.
 But I just think that...
 So yeah, I'll tell you how I think to fake social media.
 There's a few things.
 So one, I think people should have complete control
 over their data and transparency of what that data is
 and how it's being used if they do hand over the control.
 Another thing, they should be able to delete walk away
 with their data at any moment, easy,
 like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons.
 I don't know.
 Just easily walk away with their data.
 The other is control of the algorithm,
 individualized control of the algorithm for them.
 So each one has their own algorithm.
 Each person has their own algorithm.
 They get to be the decider of what they see in this world.
 And to me, that's, I guess, fundamentally decentralized
 in terms of the key decisions being made.
 But if that's made transparent,
 I feel like people will choose that system
 over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today,
 when they have the ability to walk away,
 to control their data
 and to control the kinds of things they see.
 Now, let's walk away from the term AI.
 You're right.
 In this case, you have full control of the algorithms
 that help you if you want to use their help,
 but you can also say F you to those algorithms
 and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall
 of the internet.
 I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media,
 but I think it will make a lot more money.
 So I would like to challenge the idea,
 I know you're not presenting that,
 but that the only way to make a ton of money
 is to operate like Facebook is.
 I think you can make more money by giving people control.
 Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that.
 We're definitely in the territory
 of wholehearted agreement here.
 I do want to caution against one thing,
 which is making a feature that benefits programmers
 versus people,
 like this idea that people are in control of their data.
 So years ago, I co-founded an advisory board for the EU
 with a guy named Giovanni Bottarelli,
 who passed away.
 It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it.
 A remarkable guy who'd been,
 he was originally a prosecutor
 who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily.
 So he was like this intense guy who was like,
 I've dealt with death threats,
 Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me, whatever.
 So we worked on this path of saying,
 let's make it all about transparency and consent.
 And it was one of the feeders that led to this huge
 data privacy and protection framework
 in Europe called the GDPR.
 And so therefore we've been able to have empirical feedback
 on how that goes.
 And the problem is that most people actually get stymied
 by the complexity of that kind of management.
 They have trouble and reasonably so.
 I don't, I'm like a techie.
 I can go in and I can figure out what's going on.
 But most people really do.
 And so there's a problem that it differentially benefits
 those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in
 and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works.
 I kind of still wanna come back to incentives.
 And so if the incentive for whoever's,
 if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people
 of the future make more money,
 cause you get a cut of it, that's how you grow an economy.
 Not the programmers.
 Well, some of them will be programmers.
 It's not anti-programmer.
 I'm just saying that it's not only programmers.
 You know?
 So.
 So yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right.
 I mean, I like, control is an interface problem
 to where you have to create something
 that's compelling to everybody, to the creatives,
 to the public.
 I mean, there's, I don't know, creative commons,
 like the licensing.
 There's a bunch of legal speak,
 just in general, the whole legal profession.
 It's nice when it can be simplified
 in a way that you can truly simply understand.
 Everybody can simply understand the basics.
 In that same way, it should be very simple to understand
 how the data is being used
 and what data is being used for people.
 But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen,
 you have to have the incentives to like.
 I mean, a lot of people,
 I mean, a lot of the reason that money works
 is actually information hiding and information loss.
 Like one of the things about money is a particular dollar
 you get might have passed through your enemy's hands
 and you don't know it, but also, I mean,
 this is what Adam Smith,
 if you wanna give the most charitable interpretation possible
 to the invisible hand, is what he was saying,
 is that like, there's this whole complicated thing.
 And not only do you not need to know about it,
 the truth is you'd never be able to follow it
 if you tried and just like,
 let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing.
 And that in a sense, every transaction is like a neuron
 and a neural net.
 If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it
 and let the whole thing settle to a solution
 and don't worry about it.
 I think this idea of having incentives
 that reduce complexity for people can be made to work.
 And that's an example of an algorithm
 that could be manipulative or not,
 going back to your question before
 about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative.
 And I would say a GitHub like,
 if you just have this vision,
 GitHub plus TikTok combined, is it possible?
 I think it is.
 I really think it is.
 I'm not gonna be able to unsee that idea
 of creatives on TikTok collaborating in the same way
 that people on GitHub collaborate.
 Why not? I like that kind of version.
 Why not? I like it, I love it.
 I just, like right now when people use,
 by the way, father of teenage daughter, so.
 It's all about TikTok, right?
 So, when people use TikTok, there's a lot of,
 it's kind of funny, I was gonna say cattiness,
 but I was just using the cat as this exemplar
 of what we're coming into.
 I contradict myself, but anyway,
 there's all this cattiness where people are like,
 eee, this person's, and I just,
 what about people getting together
 and kind of saying, okay, we're gonna work on this move,
 we're gonna get a better, can we get a better musician?
 And they do that, but that's the part
 that's kind of off the books right now.
 You know, that should be like right there,
 that should be the center.
 That's where the, that's the really best part.
 Well, that's where the invention of Git period,
 the versioning is brilliant.
 And so some of the things you're talking about,
 technology, algorithms, tools can empower.
 And that's the thing, for humans to connect,
 to collaborate and so on.
 Can we upset more people a little bit?
 Can you already?
 Maybe, we'd have to try.
 No, no, can we, can I ask you to elaborate?
 Because I, my intuition was that you would be a supporter
 of something like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin,
 because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization.
 What do you, so can you elaborate on what?
 Yeah, okay, look.
 Your thoughts on Bitcoin.
 It's kind of funny.
 I wrote, I've been advocating some kind of digital currency
 for a long time and when the,
 when Bitcoin came out and the original paper on blockchain,
 my heart kind of sank because I thought, oh my God,
 we're applying all of this fancy thought
 and all these very careful distributed security measures
 to recreate the gold standard.
 Like it's just so retro, it's so dysfunctional.
 It's so useless from an economic point of view.
 So it's always amazing.
 And then the other thing is using computational inefficiency
 at a boundless scale as your form of security
 is a crime against this atmosphere.
 Obviously a lot of people know that now,
 but we knew that at the start.
 Like the thing is when the first paper came out,
 I remember a lot of people saying, oh my God,
 this thing scales, it's a carbon disaster.
 And I just like, I'm just mystified,
 but that's a different question than when you asked,
 can you have a cryptographic currency
 or at least some kind of digital currency
 that's of a benefit?
 And absolutely.
 And there are people who are trying
 to be thoughtful about this.
 If you haven't, you should interview
 Vitalik Buterin sometime.
 Yeah, I've interviewed him twice.
 Okay, so like there are people in the community
 who are trying to be thoughtful
 and trying to figure out how to do this better.
 It has nice properties though, right?
 So one of the nice properties is that like
 government centralized, it's hard to control.
 And then the other one, to fix some of the issues
 that you're referring to,
 I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here,
 there's Lightning Network,
 there's ideas how you build stuff on top of Bitcoin,
 similar with gold, that allow you to have
 this kind of vibrant economy
 that operates not on the blockchain,
 but outside the blockchain and uses Bitcoin
 for like checking the security of those transactions.
 So Bitcoin's not new, it's been around for a while.
 I've been watching it closely.
 I've not seen one example of it creating economic growth.
 There was this obsession with the idea
 that government was the problem.
 That idea that government's the problem,
 let's say government earned that wrath honestly,
 because if you look at some of the things
 that governments have done in recent decades,
 it's not a pretty story.
 Like after a very small number of people
 in the US government decided to bomb and land mine
 Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back and say,
 oh, government's this great thing.
 But then the problem is that this resistance to government
 is basically resistance to politics.
 It's a way of saying, if I can get rich,
 nobody should bother me.
 It's a way of not having obligations to others.
 And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.
 But does that mean that the impulse
 that the government should not overreach its power is flawed?
 Well, I mean, what I wanna ask you to do
 is to replace the word government with politics.
 Like our politics is people having to deal with each other.
 My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form
 of freedom is perpetual annoyance.
 All right, so annoyance means you're actually dealing
 with people, because people are annoying.
 Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable,
 so it doesn't destroy us all.
 So if you have perpetual annoyance,
 then you have freedom.
 And that's politics.
 That's politics.
 If you don't have perpetual annoyance,
 something's gone very wrong,
 and you've suppressed those people,
 it's only temporary, it's gonna come back and be horrible.
 You should seek perpetual annoyance.
 I'll invite you to a Berkeley City Council meeting
 so you can know what that feels like.
 What perpetual annoyance feels like.
 But anyway, so freedom is being,
 the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people.
 If you're not, you're not free.
 If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion
 that's gonna fall apart.
 Now, this quest to avoid government is really a quest
 to avoid that political feeling, but you have to have it.
 You have to deal with it.
 And it sucks, but that's the human situation.
 That's the human condition.
 And this idea that we're gonna have this abstract thing
 that protects us from having to deal with each other
 is always an illusion.
 The idea, and I apologize,
 I overstretched the use of the word government.
 The idea is there should be some punishment from the people
 when a bureaucracy, when a set of people
 or a particular leader like in an authoritarian regime,
 which more than half the world currently lives under,
 if you, like if they become,
 they start stop representing the people,
 it stops being like a Berkeley meeting
 and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation.
 So the point is it's nice to give people,
 the populace in a decentralized way,
 power to resist that kind of government
 becoming over-authoritarian.
 Yeah, but people, see this idea that the problem
 is always the government being powerful is false.
 The problem can also be criminal gangs.
 The problem can also be weird cults.
 The problem can be abusive, abusive clergy.
 The problem can be infrastructure that fails.
 The problem can be poisoned water.
 The problem can be failed electric grids.
 The problem can be a crappy education system
 that makes the whole society less and less able
 to create value.
 There are all these other problems that are different
 from an overbearing government.
 Like you have to keep some sense of perspective
 and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem
 because then the others will pop up.
 But empirically speaking,
 some problems are bigger than others.
 So like some groups of people,
 like governments or gangs or companies lead
 to drop more than-
 Are you a US citizen?
 Yes.
 Has the government ever really been a problem for you?
 Well, okay.
 So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union
 used to, well, and actually-
 Yeah, my wife did too.
 So I have seen-
 Sure.
 And has the government bothered me?
 I would say that's a really complicated question,
 especially because the United States is such,
 it's a special place.
 And like a lot of other countries-
 My wife's family were refuseniks.
 And so we have like a very,
 and her dad was sent to the Gulag.
 For what it's worth on my father's side,
 all but a few were killed by a pogrom
 in a post-Soviet pogrom in Ukraine.
 So I-
 I would say,
 because you did a little trick of,
 eloquent trick of language that you switched
 to the United States to talk about government.
 So I believe, unlike my friend Michael Malice
 who's an anarchist,
 I believe government can do a lot of good in the world.
 That is exactly what you're saying,
 which is it's politics.
 The thing that Bitcoin folks
 and cryptocurrency folks argue
 is that one of the big ways that governments
 can control the populace is centralized bank.
 Like control the money.
 That was the case in the Soviet Union too.
 There's, you know, inflation
 can really make poor people suffer.
 And so what they argue is this is one way to go around
 that power that government has
 of controlling the monetary system.
 So that's a way to resist.
 That's not actually saying government bad.
 That's saying some of the ways that
 central banks get into trouble
 can be resisted through centralized banks.
 So let me ask you on balance today in the real world
 in terms of actual facts,
 do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more
 to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes
 or to resist those regimes?
 Where do you think the balance is right now?
 I know exactly having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks
 what they would tell me, right?
 I, it's hard.
 I don't know.
 I'm asking it as a real question.
 There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
 There's no way to know the answer perfectly.
 However, I gotta say,
 if you look at people who've been able to decode blockchains
 and they do leak a lot of data,
 they're not as secure as this widely thought.
 There are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales
 from pretty early and they're huge.
 And if you ask who are these people, there's evidence
 that a lot of them are quite not the people
 you'd wanna support, let's say.
 And I just don't, like, I think empirically this idea
 that there's some intrinsic way
 that bad governments will be disempowered
 that bad governments will be disempowered
 and people will be able to resist them more
 than new villains or even villainous governments
 will be empowered.
 There's no basis for that assertion.
 It just is kind of circumstantial.
 And I think in general, Bitcoin ownership is one thing,
 but Bitcoin transactions have tended
 to support criminality more than productivity.
 Of course, they would argue that was the story
 of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin
 is being used for legitimate transactions.
 But-
 I didn't say for legitimate transactions.
 I said for economic growth, for creativity.
 Like, I think what's happening is people are using it
 a little bit for buying, I don't know,
 maybe somebody's companies make it available
 for this and that, they buy a Tesla with it or something.
 Investing in a startup, hard,
 it might've happened a little bit,
 but it's not an engine of productivity,
 creativity and economic growth.
 Whereas old fashioned currency still is.
 And anyway, look, I think something,
 I'm pro the idea of digital currencies.
 I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics
 as a result.
 I think they have to exist in some balance
 to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each.
 In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion
 of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea,
 but it can be used to manipulate,
 you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans.
 Well, I think that you can make better designs
 and worse designs.
 And I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency
 that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible
 for the poor designs because we're all so hooked
 on that Horatio Alger story on like,
 I'm gonna be the one who gets the viral benefit.
 You know, way back when all this stuff was starting,
 I remember it would have been in the 80s,
 somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor
 for network effect.
 And the whole point was to talk about
 how bad network effect was,
 that it always created distortions
 that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives
 that created dangerous distortions.
 Like, but then somehow even after the pandemic,
 we think of viral as this good thing
 because we imagine ourselves as the virus, right?
 We wanna be on the beneficiary side of it.
 But of course, you're not likely to be.
 There is a sense because money is involved,
 people are not reasoning clearly always
 because they want to be part of that first viral wave
 that makes them rich and that blinds people
 from their basic morality.
 I had an interesting conversation.
 I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy,
 but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin,
 I remember having an argument about like,
 it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme.
 Like, you know, the early people have more
 than the later people.
 And the further down the chain you get,
 the more you're subject to gambling-like dynamics
 where it's more and more random
 and more and more subject to weird network effects
 and whatnot, unless you're a very small player, perhaps,
 and you're just buying something.
 But even then you'll be subject to fluctuations
 because the whole thing is just kind of,
 like as it fluctuates,
 it's gonna wave around the little people more.
 And I remember the conversation turned to gambling
 because gambling's a pretty large economic sector.
 And it's always struck me as being non-productive.
 Like somebody goes to Las Vegas, they lose money.
 And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment.
 They paid for entertainment as they lost money,
 so that's fine.
 And Las Vegas does up the losing of money
 in an entertaining way, so why not?
 It's like going to a show.
 So that's one argument.
 The argument that was made to me was different from that.
 It's that, no, what they're doing is they're getting
 a chance to experience hope,
 and a lot of people don't get that chance.
 And so that's really worth it,
 even if they're gonna lose.
 They have that moment of hope
 and they need to be able to experience that.
 And it's a very interesting argument.
 That's so heartbreaking.
 But I've seen that way.
 I have that a little bit of a sense.
 I've talked to some young people
 who invest in cryptocurrency.
 And what I see is this hope.
 This is the first thing they gave them, hope.
 And that's so heartbreaking to me
 that you've gotten hope from, so much is invested.
 It's like hope from somehow becoming rich,
 as opposed to something to me.
 I apologize, but money is in the long-term
 not going to be a source of that deep meaning.
 It's good to have enough money,
 but it should not be the source of hope.
 And it's heartbreaking to me how many people
 is the source of hope.
 Yeah.
 You've just described the psychology of virality
 or the psychology of trying to base a civilization
 on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks.
 And it doesn't really work.
 I mean, I think we need to get away from that.
 We need to soften those peaks,
 except Microsoft, which deserves every penny,
 but in every other case.
 Well, you mentioned GitHub.
 I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant.
 I was very happy.
 Okay, if I can give, not a critical, but-
 Sure, go ahead.
 On Microsoft, because they recently purchased Bethesda.
 So Elder Scrolls is in their hands.
 I'm watching you, Microsoft.
 Do not screw up my favorite game.
 So-
 Yeah, look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft.
 I have an explicit arrangement with them
 where I don't speak for them, obviously.
 That should be very clear.
 I do not speak for them.
 I am not saying, I like them.
 I think such is amazing.
 The term data dignity was coined by Sacha.
 So we have, it's kind of extraordinary,
 but Microsoft's this giant thing.
 It's going to screw up this or that.
 It's not, I don't know.
 It's kind of interesting.
 I've had a few occasions in my life
 to see how things work from the inside of some big thing.
 And it's always just people kind of,
 I don't know, there's always coordination problems.
 And there's always-
 There's human problems.
 Oh my God.
 There's some good people, there's some bad people.
 There's always-
 I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game.
 And I hope they bring Clippy back.
 You should never kill Clippy.
 Bring Clippy back.
 Oh, Clippy.
 But Clippy promotes the myth of AI.
 Well, that's why I think you're wrong.
 How about if we, all right,
 could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy?
 Which one was Bob?
 Oh, Bob was another thing.
 Bob was this other screen character
 who was supposed to be the voice of AI.
 Cortana, Cortana, would Cortana do it for you?
 Cortana is too corporate.
 I like it, it's fine.
 There's a woman in Seattle
 who's like the model for Cortana,
 did Cortana's voice and was like-
 The voice?
 No, the voice is great.
 We had her as a, she used to walk around
 if you were wearing Halloween's for a bit.
 I don't think that's happening anymore.
 I don't think you should turn a software into a creature.
 Well, you and I-
 Get a cat, just get a cat.
 You and I, you and I, well, get a dog.
 Get a dog.
 Or a dog, yeah.
 Yeah, you're-
 Or a hedgehog.
 A hedgehog.
 Yeah.
 You co-authored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin,
 titled the Autodidactic Universe,
 which describes our universe as one
 that learns its own physical laws.
 That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea.
 What would you say are the key ideas in this paper?
 Ah, okay.
 Well, I should say that paper reflected work
 from last year and the project,
 the program has moved quite a lot.
 So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff
 that's not published that I'm quite excited about.
 So I have to kind of keep my frame in that last year's thing.
 So I have to try to be a little careful about that.
 We can think about it in a few different ways.
 The core of the paper, the technical core of it
 is a triple correspondence.
 One part of it was already established
 and then another part is in the process.
 The part that was established was, of course,
 understanding different theories of physics as matrix models.
 The part that was fresher is understanding those
 as machine learning systems so that we could move fluidly
 between these different ways of describing systems.
 And the reason to wanna do that
 is to just have more tools and more options because,
 well, theoretical physics is really hard
 and a lot of programs have kind of run into a state
 where they feel a little stalled, I guess.
 I wanna be delicate about this because I'm not a physicist.
 I'm the computer scientist collaborating.
 So I don't mean to diss anybody's.
 So this is almost like, gives a framework
 for generating new ideas in physics.
 As we start to publish more about where it's gone,
 I think you'll start to see there's tools
 and ways of thinking about theories
 that I think open up some new paths
 that will be of interest.
 There's the technical core of it, which is this idea
 of a correspondence to give you more facility.
 But then there's also the storytelling part of it.
 And this is something Lee loves stories and I do.
 And the idea here is that a typical,
 a typical way of thinking about physics
 is that there's some kind of starting condition
 and then there's some principle
 by which the starting condition evolves.
 And the question is like, why the starting condition?
 Like how the starting condition has to get kind of,
 it has to be fine-tuned and all these things about it
 have to be kind of perfect.
 And so we were thinking, well, look,
 what if we could push the storytelling
 about where the universe comes from much further back
 by starting with really simple things that evolve
 and then through that evolution,
 explain how things got to be how they are
 through very simple principles, right?
 And so we've been exploring a variety of ways
 to push the start of the storytelling further
 and further back, which, and it's an interesting,
 it's really kind of interesting
 because like for all of his,
 Lee is sometimes considered to be,
 to have a radical quality in the physics world,
 but he still is like, no, this is gonna be like,
 the kind of time we're talking about
 in which evolution happens is the same time we're now.
 And we're talking about something that starts and continues.
 And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind of time
 that's time-like and so it sounds like metaphysics,
 but there's an ambiguity, you know?
 Like it has to start from something
 and it's kind of an interesting,
 so there's this, a lot of the math can be thought of
 either way, which is kind of interesting.
 So push this so far back that basically all the things
 we take for granted in physics start becoming emergent.
 It's emergent.
 I really wanna emphasize this is all super baby steps.
 I don't wanna over claim.
 It's like, I think a lot of the things we're doing,
 we're approaching some old problems
 in a pretty fresh way informed.
 There's been a zillion papers about how you can think
 of the universe as a big neural net
 or how you can think of different ideas in physics
 as being quite similar to, or even equivalent to
 some of the ideas in machine learning.
 And that actually works out crazy well.
 Like, I mean, that is actually kind of eerie
 when you look at it.
 Like there's probably two or three dozen papers
 that have this quality and some of them are just crazy good.
 And it's very interesting.
 What we're trying to do is take those kinds of observations
 and turn them into an actionable framework
 where you can then start to do things with landscapes
 or theories that you couldn't do before
 and that sort of thing.
 So in that context or maybe beyond,
 how do you explain us humans?
 How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization?
 Or is there a lot of others or are we alone
 in this universe?
 Yeah.
 You seem to appreciate humans very much.
 I've grown fond of us.
 We're okay.
 We have our nice qualities.
 I like that.
 I mean, we're kind of weird.
 We spread this hair on our heads and then we're,
 I don't know, we're sort of weird animals.
 That's the feature, not a bug, I think, the weirdness.
 I hope so.
 I hope so.
 I think if I'm just gonna answer you in terms of truth,
 the first thing I'd say is we're not
 in a privileged enough position,
 at least as yet to really know much about who we are,
 how we are, what we're really like in the context
 of something larger, what that context is.
 Like all that stuff we might learn more in the future,
 our decisions, our ideas, our ideas,
 we might learn more in the future,
 our descendants might learn more,
 but we don't really know very much,
 which you can either view as frustrating or charming
 like that first year of TikTok or something.
 But-
 All roads lead back to TikTok, I like it.
 Well, lately.
 But in terms of, there's another level
 at which I can think about it where
 I sometimes think that if you are just quiet
 and you do something that gets you in touch
 with the way reality happens,
 and for me it's playing music,
 sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit
 of how the universe is and it feels like
 there's a lot more going on in it
 and there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening
 and a lot more stuff flowing through.
 I'm not speaking as a scientist now,
 this is kind of a more, my artist side talking
 and it's, so I feel like I'm suddenly
 in multiple personalities with you,
 but-
 Well, Kerouac, Jack Kerouac said that
 music is the only truth.
 What do you, it sounds like you might be at least in part-
 There's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sax,
 where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation
 with reality and people in like a paragraph.
 And I couldn't reproduce it for you here,
 but it's like, yeah, like there are these boldest things
 that walk around and they make these sounds,
 you can sort of understand them, but only kind of,
 and then there's like this,
 and it's just like this amazing, like just really quick,
 like if some spirit being or something was gonna show up
 in our reality and had knew nothing about it,
 it's like a little basic intro of like,
 okay, here's what's going on here.
 An incredible passage.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 It's like a one or two sentence summary
 in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right?
 Of what this-
 Mostly harmless.
 Mostly harmless.
 Yeah.
 Do you think there's truth to that,
 that music somehow connects to something that words cannot?
 Yeah, music is something that just towers above me.
 I don't feel like I have an overview of it.
 It's just the reverse.
 I don't fully understand it because on one level,
 it's simple, like you can say,
 oh, it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains
 on a pattern level or something like that.
 There's all these things you can say about music,
 which are, you know, some of that's probably true.
 It's also, there's kind of like this,
 this is the mystery of meaning.
 Like there's a way that just,
 instead of just being pure abstraction,
 music can have like this kind of substantiality to it
 that is philosophically impossible.
 I don't know what to do with it.
 Yeah.
 The amount of understanding I feel I have
 when I hear the right song at the right time
 is not comparable to anything I can read on Wikipedia.
 Anything I can understand, read through in language.
 The music does connect us to something.
 There's this thing there.
 Yeah, there's some kind of a thing in it.
 And I've never ever,
 I've read across a lot of explanations
 from all kinds of interesting people,
 like that is some kind of a flow language between people
 or between people and how they perceive
 and that kind of thing.
 There's, and that sort of explanation is fine,
 but it's not quite it either.
 Yeah.
 There's something about music that makes me believe
 that panpsychism could possibly be true,
 which is that everything in the universe is conscious.
 It makes me think,
 it makes me be humble in how much or how little
 I understand about the functions of our universe,
 that everything might be conscious.
 Most people interested in theoretical physics
 eventually land in panpsychism,
 but I'm not one of them.
 I still think there's this pragmatic imperative
 to treat people as special.
 So I will proudly be a dualist.
 Sure.
 Without people and cats, people and cats.
 Yeah, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line
 or why the line's there or anything like that,
 but I don't think I should be required
 to all the same questions are equally mysterious
 for no line.
 So I don't feel disadvantaged by that.
 So I shall remain a dualist,
 but if you listen to anyone trying to explain
 where consciousness is in a dualistic sense,
 either believing in souls or some special thing
 in the brain or something,
 you pretty much say,
 screw this, I'm gonna be a panpsychist.
 Okay.
 Fair enough, well put.
 Is there moments in your life that happen
 that we're defining in the way that you hope others,
 your daughters might as well.
 I gotta say, the moments that defined me
 were not the good ones.
 The moments that defined me were often horrible.
 I've had successes, but if you ask what defined me,
 my mother's death,
 being under the World Trade Center and the attack,
 the things that have had an effect on me
 were the most were sort of real world,
 terrible things, which I don't wish on young people at all.
 And this is the thing that's hard about giving advice
 to young people that they have to learn their own lessons
 and lessons don't come easily.
 And a world which avoids hard lessons
 will be a stupid world.
 And I don't know what to do with it.
 That's a little bundle of truth
 that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it.
 But I don't, this is like when I was saying that,
 freedom equals eternal annoyance.
 Like you can't, like,
 there's a degree to which honest advice
 is not that pleasant to give.
 And I don't want young people to have to know
 about everything.
 I think-
 You don't wanna wish hardship on them.
 Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period
 of naivete that's pleasant.
 I mean, I do, if it's possible, if it's,
 these things are, this is like, this is tricky stuff.
 I mean, if you,
 okay, so let me try a little bit on this advice thing.
 I think one thing,
 any serious broad advice will have been given
 a thousand times before for a thousand years.
 So this, I'm not gonna,
 I'm not going to claim originality,
 but I think trying to find a way
 to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally,
 what your sense of the world is, what your intuition is,
 if you feel like an intuitive person, what your,
 like to try to escape the constant sway
 of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish,
 not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible,
 but to find cover from it once in a while,
 to find a sense of being anchored in that,
 to believe in experience as a real thing.
 Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic.
 That goes with my philosophy of dualism.
 I believe there's something magical,
 and instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs,
 I think experience is something real and something apart,
 something mystical and something-
 Your own personal experience that you just have,
 and then you're saying,
 silence the rest of the world enough to hear that,
 like whatever that magic justice
 is in that experience.
 Find what is there.
 And I think that's one thing.
 Another thing is to recognize
 that kindness requires genius,
 that it's actually really hard,
 that facile kindness is not kindness,
 and that it'll take you a while to have the skills
 to have kind impulses to wanna be kind,
 you can have right away.
 To be effectively kind is hard.
 To be effectively kind, yeah.
 It takes skill, it takes hard lessons.
 You'll never be perfect at it.
 To the degree you get anywhere with it,
 it's the most rewarding thing ever.
 Let's see, what else would I say?
 I would say when you're young,
 you can be very overwhelmed
 by social and interpersonal emotions.
 You'll have broken hearts and jealousies.
 You'll feel socially down the ladder
 instead of up the ladder.
 It feels horrible when that happens.
 All of these things.
 And you have to remember what a fragile crest
 all that stuff is.
 And it's hard,
 just right when it's happening, it's just so intense.
 And if I was actually giving this advice to my daughter,
 she'd already be out of the room.
 So this is for some hypothetical teenager
 that doesn't really exist,
 that really wants to sit and listen to my Western
 for this amount of time. For your daughter,
 10 years from now.
 Maybe.
 Can I ask you a difficult question?
 Yeah, sure.
 You talked about losing your mom.
 Yeah.
 Do you miss her?
 Yeah, I mean, I still connected her through music.
 She was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna
 and she survived the concentration camp
 and then died in a car accident here in the US.
 What music makes you think of her?
 Is there a song that connects you?
 Well, she was in Vienna,
 so she had the whole Viennese music thing going,
 which is this incredible school
 of absolute skill and romance bundled together
 and wonderful on the piano, especially.
 I learned to play some of the Beethoven sonatas for her
 and I played them in this exaggerated drippy way,
 I remember when I was a kid.
 Exaggerated meaning too full of emotion?
 Yeah, just like...
 It's not the only way to play Beethoven?
 I mean, I didn't know there's any other way.
 That's a reasonable question.
 I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly Apollonian
 even with Beethoven, but one imagines
 that actual Beethoven playing might've been different.
 I don't know.
 I've gotten to play a few instruments he played
 and tried to see if I could feel anything
 about how it might've been for him.
 I don't know really.
 I was always against the clinical precision
 of classical music.
 I thought a great piano player should be in pain,
 like emotionally, like truly feel the music
 and make it messy sort of.
 Sure.
 Maybe play classical music the way,
 I don't know, blues pianist plays blues.
 It seems like they actually got happier
 and I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier.
 I think it's a different kind of concept
 of the place of music.
 I think the blues, the whole African-American tradition
 was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances.
 So you could say there was some of that
 in the concentration camps and all that too.
 And it's not that Beethoven circumstances were brilliant,
 but he kind of also, I don't know, this is hard.
 I mean, it would seem to be his misery
 was somewhat self-imposed maybe through, I don't know.
 It's kind of interesting.
 I've known some people who loathed Beethoven,
 like the composer, late composer, Pauline Oliveros,
 wonderful modernist composer.
 I played in her band for a while
 and she was like, oh, Beethoven,
 that's the worst music ever.
 It's like all ego, it completely,
 it turns emotion into your enemy.
 And it's ultimately all about your own self-importance,
 which has to be at the expense of others could,
 but what else could it be and blah, blah, blah.
 So she had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive,
 I'm just saying her position on Beethoven
 was very negative and very unimpressed,
 which is really interesting for me.
 The manner of the music.
 I think, I don't know.
 I mean, she's not here to speak for herself,
 so it's a little hard for me to answer that question.
 But it was interesting because I'd always thought of Beethoven,
 it's like, whoa, you know, this is like Beethoven
 is like really the dude, you know,
 and she's like, ah, you know, Beethoven, Schmadoven,
 you know, it's like not really happening.
 Yeah, it's still, even though it's cliche,
 I like playing personally just for myself,
 Moonlight Sonata, I mean, I just.
 Moonlight's amazing.
 You know, I,
 you know, you're talking about comparing the blues
 and that sensibility from Europe
 is so different in so many ways.
 One of the musicians I play with is John Battiste,
 who has the band on Colbert's show,
 and he'll sit there playing jazz
 and suddenly go into Moonlight, he loves Moonlight.
 And what's kind of interesting is
 he's found a way to do Beethoven,
 and he, by the way, he can really do Beethoven.
 Like he went through Julliard,
 and one time he was at my house, he's saying,
 hey, do you have the book of Beethoven Sonatas?
 I said, yeah, I want to find one I haven't played.
 And then he sight read through the whole damn thing
 perfectly, and I'm like, oh God, I just need to get out of here.
 I can't even deal with this.
 But anyway.
 Yeah.
 But anyway, the thing is he has this way
 of with the same persona and the same philosophy
 moving from the blues into Beethoven.
 That's really, really fascinating to me.
 It's like, I don't want to say he plays it
 as if it were jazz, but he kind of does.
 It's kind of really, and he talks,
 well, he was sight reading, he talks,
 like Beethoven's talking to him.
 Like he's like, oh yeah, I hear this dude,
 I can't do John, but you know,
 it's like, it's really interesting.
 Like it's very different.
 For me, I was introduced to Beethoven
 as like almost like this God-like figure,
 and I presume Pauline was too,
 that was really kind of a press for an art to deal with.
 And for him, it's just like-
 The conversation he's having.
 He's playing James P. Johnson or something.
 It's like another musician who did something
 and they're talking and it's very cool to be around.
 It's very kind of freeing to see someone
 have that relationship.
 I would love to hear him play Beethoven.
 That sounds amazing.
 He's great.
 We talked about Ernest Becker and how much value
 he puts on our mortality and our denial of our mortality.
 Do you think about your mortality?
 Do you think about your own death?
 You know, what's funny is I used to not be able to,
 but as you get older, you just know people who die
 and there's all these things that just becomes familiar
 and more of a more ordinary, which is what it is.
 But are you afraid?
 Sure, although less so.
 And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight
 or revelation to become less afraid.
 I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity.
 It's just knowing people who've died.
 And I really believe in the future.
 I have this optimism that people are this whole thing
 of life on earth, this whole thing we're part of.
 I don't know where to draw that circle,
 but this thing is going somewhere
 and has some kind of value.
 And you can't both believe in the future
 and wanna live forever.
 You have to make room for it.
 You know, like you have to,
 that optimism has to also come with its own like humility.
 You have to make yourself small to believe in the future.
 And so it actually in a funny way comforts me.
 Wow, that's powerful.
 And optimism requires you to kind of step down after time.
 Yeah, I mean, that said, life seems kind of short,
 but you know, whatever.
 Do you think there's-
 I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department.
 I really wanna bring this up,
 but the customer service number never answers.
 And like the email bounces.
 One way.
 So yeah.
 Do you think there's meaning to it, to life?
 Ah, we'll see.
 Meaning's a funny word.
 Like we say all these things as if we know what they mean,
 but meaning, we don't know what we mean when we say meaning.
 Like we obviously do not.
 And it's a funny little mystical thing.
 I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience
 that dualists tend to believe in.
 I guess there are why, like if you look up to the stars
 and you experience that awe, inspiring like joy,
 whatever, when you look up to the stars,
 I don't know why for me,
 that's kind of makes me feel joyful,
 maybe a little bit melancholy,
 just some weird soup of feelings.
 And ultimately the question is like,
 why are we here in this vast universe?
 That question, why?
 Have you been able in some way,
 maybe through music, answer it for yourself?
 My impulse is to feel like
 it's not quite the right question to ask,
 but I feel like going down that path
 is just too tedious for the moment.
 And I don't wanna do it, but.
 The wrong question.
 Well, just because I don't know what meaning is.
 And I think I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to answer it
 but I don't know what meaning is and I think,
 I do know that sense of awe.
 I grew up in Southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid.
 I've had some weird misfortunes,
 but I've had some weird luck also.
 One of our near neighbors
 was the head of optics research at White Sands.
 And when he was young, he discovered Pluto,
 his name was Clyde Tombaugh.
 And he taught me how to make telescopes
 as grinding mirrors and stuff.
 And my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid,
 but Clyde had like backyard telescopes
 that would put to shame a lot of like,
 I mean, he really, he did his telescopes, you know?
 And so I remember he'd let me go and play with them
 and just like looking at a globular cluster
 and you're seeing the actual photons.
 And with a good telescope, it's really like this object.
 Like you can really tell
 this isn't coming through some intervening
 information structure.
 This is like the actual photons
 and it's really a three-dimensional object.
 And you have even a feeling for the vastness of it.
 And it's, I don't know.
 So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate
 to have a connection to this guy that way when I was a kid.
 To have had that experience again,
 the emphasis on experience.
 I, it's kind of funny.
 Like I feel like sometimes like I've taken
 when she was younger,
 I took my daughter and her friends to like a telescope.
 There are a few around here that are kids can go and use
 and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something.
 I think like Galilean moons.
 And I don't know if they quite had that
 because it's like too,
 it's been just too normalized.
 And I think maybe when I was growing up,
 screens weren't that common yet.
 And maybe it's like too confusable with a screen.
 I don't know.
 Somebody brought up in conversation to me somewhere.
 I don't remember who,
 they kind of posited this idea that if humans,
 early humans weren't able to see the stars,
 like if earth atmosphere was such that it was cloudy
 that we would not develop human civilization.
 There's something about being able to look up
 and see a vast universe is like,
 that's fundamental to the development of human civilization.
 I thought that was a curious kind of thought.
 That reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story
 where there's this planet where they finally get to see
 what's in the sky once in a while.
 And it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster
 and there are all these stars.
 I forget what happens exactly.
 God, that's from when I was the same age as a kid.
 I don't really remember.
 But yeah, I don't know.
 It might be right.
 I was thinking of all the civilizations that grew up
 under clouds.
 I mean, like the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece
 of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun.
 They had this thing called a sunstone
 that they found from this one cave.
 Do you know about that?
 So they were in this like,
 they were trying to navigate boats in the North Atlantic
 without being able to see the sun because it was cloudy.
 And so they used a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be
 able to align where the sun really was
 because they couldn't tell by eye and they didn't navigate.
 So I'm just saying there are a lot of civilizations
 that are pretty impressive that had to deal
 with a lot of clouds.
 The Amazonians invented our agriculture
 and they were probably under clouds a lot.
 I don't know.
 To me personally, the question of the meaning of life
 becomes most vibrant, most apparent
 when you look up at the stars
 because it makes me feel very small.
 That we're not small.
 But then you ask, it still feels that we're special.
 And then the natural question is like,
 well, if we are as special as I think we are,
 why the heck are we here in this vast universe?
 That ultimately is the question of the meaning of life.
 I mean, look, there's a confusion sometimes
 in trying to set up a question or a thought experiment
 or something that's defined in terms of a context
 to explain something where there is no larger context.
 And that's a category error.
 If we wanna do it in physics,
 or in computer science,
 it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine
 because a Turing machine has an external clock
 and an observer and input and output.
 There's a larger context implied
 in order for it to be defined at all.
 And so if you're talking about the universe,
 you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine.
 Quantum mechanics is like that.
 Quantum mechanics has an external clock
 and has some kind of external context
 depending on your interpretation
 that's either the observer or whatever.
 And they're similar that way.
 So maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics
 can be better friends or something
 because they have a similar setup.
 But the thing is, if you have something that's defined
 in terms of an outer context,
 you can't talk about ultimates with it
 because obviously it's not suited for that.
 So there's some ideas that are their own context.
 General relativity is its own context.
 It's different.
 That's why it's hard to unify.
 And I think the same thing is true
 when we talk about these types of questions.
 Like meaning is in a context
 and to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category
 or it's not a resolvable way of thinking.
 It might be a way of thinking
 that is experientially or aesthetically valuable
 because it is awesome in the sense of awe-inspiring.
 But to try to treat it analytically is not sensible.
 Maybe that's what music and poetry are for.
 Yeah, maybe.
 I think so.
 I think music actually does escape any particular context.
 That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that.
 That's once again, crazy artists talking, not scientists.
 Well, you do both masterfully.
 Jaren, like I said, I'm a big fan of everything you've done
 of you as a human being.
 I appreciate the fun argument we had today
 that will I'm sure continue for 30 years
 as it did with Mark Minsky.
 Honestly, I deeply appreciate
 that you spent your really valuable time with me today.
 It was a really great conversation.
 Thank you so much.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation
 with Jaren Lanier.
 To support this podcast,
 please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now let me leave you with some words
 from Jaren Lanier himself.
 A real friendship ought to introduce each person
 to unexpected weirdness in the other.
 Thank you for listening.
 I hope to see you next time.