The Joe Rogan Experience - #1422 - Lex Fridman

Episode Date: February 4, 2020

Lex Fridman is a research scientist at MIT working on human-centered artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. Check out is podcast "Artificial Intelligence Podcast" available on Spotify.

Here we go! Three, two, one. Lex, handsome as ever. Thank you. Well dressed, always feel like a slob when I'm around you. Do you dress like that in real life, or only when you do podcasts? Yeah, so I have two outfits. This, and black shirt and jeans.

Slick outfit. There's nothing more classic than a dark suit with a white shirt and a black tie. Is that a black tie or is that a dark blue? Black tie. Black tie. Black suit, black tie. Is that a black tie or is that a dark blue? Black tie. Black tie. Black suit, black tie. It's armor. Yes.

Makes me feel like it focuses the mind. Like a professional. Yeah, like I'm taking this seriously. Yes, yes, yes. Like you're fucking for real, man. You got notes and shit? Yeah, I got notes and shit. But given the suit, I like to get dirty.

I like to work in a car or whatever. I don't want to—I love to get in a fight in this. This isn't like me trying to protect myself from the messiness of the real world. Oh, I understand. This is a farmer. It just looks good. It just makes you feel like a professional. I feel good.

I don't know if it looks good. Is it flexible? Like, you know, they make clothes that are flex. Yeah. You can move in it? I can move in it. Oh, that's nice. And I can, I mean, you showed me how you can choke me last time with the tie.

Did you get a breakaway tie? No, I didn't. But, you know, I kind of let you have that one because I think I can defend it pretty well. Well, you're probably very good at defending chokes. Yeah. No, no, no. With the tie. I don't have a system yet. Iokes. Yeah. No, no, no. With a tie. I don't have a system yet.

I'll have to talk to John Donahue to develop a tie. All you have to do, man, is just take the back of the tie, cut it, put a little piece of Velcro on each end. You got the same tie. But I think you going under the tie to try to start the choke actually actually, I mean, you're making yourself vulnerable, like maybe to an armbar or something like that. I think there's a system. Don't be silly.

Well, listen, if someone grabs a hold of your collar, that's the same thing. Like Ezekiel chokes are deadly, right? Yeah, but it's not over. Yeah, if you sink it in, it's over. Collars are a real problem, right, in jujitsu. Yeah. They're a real problem.

If someone gets deep on your collar. Like even on this with a suit, right? Someone starts doing this, man, you're fucked. Not good. Not good. Collars are not good. If you go deep, if you get in deep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, the problem with that is it's a handle. It's worse than a collar because I'll get underneath that knot, and I'll grab ahold of that pitch, and then it's all just twisting. Yeah, but you have to – You're right. I would have to get it. I'd have to get it, but it's there. And you also kind of have to hold on to this part because it can loosen naturally

unless you're really good at, like – because it loosens. Does it? Yeah, it loosens naturally. There's a system to this. I think – you haven't thought through this. You don't think I have? Dude, I try to choke people with ties on. Just friends, yeah.

I'm like, let me grab a hold of that tie real quick. What happens if I do this? No, no, not jujitsu people. And also it's probably a joke. If I was fighting for my life, I think it'd be different. But sure, you're a tough guy. You are actually trained martial artists. I mean, I'm not saying it would be easy. Sure, you're a tough guy. You're actually trained martial artist. I'm not saying

it'd be easy to grab your tie and choke you to death. What I'm saying is it's one more area of vulnerability that doesn't need to exist. Yeah, but see, I'm disagreeing with you in saying if I was gonna fight to the death, I would wear the suit. Okay. Because then I would look good. Let me tell you something about CIA agents

and Secret Service guys. They wear breakaway ties. That's because they're not good martial artists. Oh, that's not true. There's a lot of those guys are savages. Are they? Fuck yeah, man. You mean like blue belts or purple belts? No, black belts, man.

If you're a fucking, if you're a Secret Service guy, you're supposed to be protecting the president. I guarantee you a bunch of those guys are savages. I think they're smart enough to use guns. That too. Yeah. But they don't, you know, if they have to wear a tie, a lot of people like to wear breakaway ties. Is that a fact? Mm-hmm.

I might be making this up right now. I think that's a bro fact. No, I know, but it's a little bro fact, but only like 10%. I think, let's Google breakaway ties for self-defense. Oh. Because, dude, look, I'm definitely a dummy, a dummy right okay i think about this stuff too much but when i was uh driving limos i always felt super vulnerable when i had to wear that tie it looks good though my one of my uh actually my first album my first real album that i ever did

for warner brothers was in 1999 and i wore exactly outfit. I wore a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie, and it looked dope. It's called I'm Going to Be Dead Someday. Look at that. Breakaway tie. Like a stand-up? Mm-hmm. Look at that. Breakaway tie, son.

Low pro. Breakaway tie. Woo! That's what I'm wearing. Let me explain to you something. Come get some. Most people, when they're vulnerable, like say I'm afraid I'm going to be picked on by bullies, I learn a martial art how to defend myself. Yes.

You, when you felt vulnerable wearing a tie, decided not to wear a tie as opposed to learn how to defend yourself while wearing a tie. There must be a system. I guarantee you there's a – Sure. You could say that. You could defend yourself if you had a dog collar around your neck too, but I wouldn't recommend it. I wouldn't recommend it. I choked my dog out once.

I had a pit bull and he bit my cat. He grabbed a hold of my cat. It's a terrible story. I had a crazy dog. One of my dogs was a dog that I had gotten. I was young and irresponsible in my 20s. And I had gotten this dog that was bred from a pig hunting dog in hawaii and those dogs are hyper animal aggressive they're great with people he was great with people he

loved people but everything that moved he was like locked in on he would spend his days in my yard chasing lizards his thing was to jump up on the wall of the house and try to snatch lizards it was like a video game for him and uh my friend eddie was terrified of this dog eddie bravo yeah and so eddie would come over the house and frank would just decide that he runs shit when eddie's around because eddie was so scared of him he'd be like hmm i think i'm gonna kill this cat so he just just tried to kill my cat and i got a hold of him in time, and I got my hand into his collar, and I choked him unconscious. Like on top of his head like that? Yeah, I just dug.

Oh, from behind. Yeah, from behind. I just dug my hand under his collar, and I twisted it, and I put him to sleep. He went right out. It's crazy. Yeah, it works. It works on dogs. Yeah, maybe from the back.

I wasn't thinking from the back. I was thinking from the front, but from the back. Anywhere you can grab a dog collar, if you get your hand in in there if you're strong enough and you have good technique you know how to go knee on belly and then you twist it you can put a dog to sleep well you're changing my mind see yeah but i don't know i mean look obviously you're going to be aware of that and you're going to defend and you get but it's a it's an area of vulnerability right pull up uh 1990 and pull up i'm gonna be dead someday the cover of that because i'm literally dressed exactly like you on the cover or when actually doing the show no i never wore it doing a show

i think i just wore it for the cover almost ironically no i kind of like the way it looked just you know there it is. Bam. It's hard to tell there because that one's orange and the other one's hot pink. But it's like the shirt collar's a little more open, like you don't give a damn. Well, that was a long day, and it was a long photo shoot, and we were drinking. Yeah, that's what it looked like. There was a lot of chaos involved. That's legit. That is legit.

There was a lot of chaos involved. That's legit. There's legit. There was a lot of stuff going on there. But it was just a – I like that look. It's a good look. By the way, congratulations on the 10 years. Oh, thank you very much. I don't think you've celebrated – all I see is on Jamie's Instagram like a naked picture of Bert. The 10-year picture? Yeah, we probably

should do something it was December was officially 10 years so it was 2 months ago probably should have some sort of a party or something I know you don't like

to talk about it think about it but you've inspired millions so thank you for that it's very nice it's a very nice side effect but it's a

it's a weird gig man you know and it's a it's a gig that became what it is, slowly, without me understanding what was happening, why it was happening, which makes it weirder and weirder.

And with it has come increasingly stronger levels of responsibility to where now I have to actually vet guests and think about what they're saying. Whereas before, I would have someone on if they're crazy. I was like, let that crazy motherfucker on. Let's hear what he has to say and people would say a lot of crazy shit and then they would say oh you know you didn't push back or you had this person on and they they said something irresponsible and i had no idea what they were going to say there's a lot

of people that have said some pretty outrageous things that i had no idea they were going to say yeah i saw the like i started one of the things you inspired me to do is to start a podcast on artificial intelligence and i have uh jack dorsey as a guest coming up uh-huh and that's a good example of somebody you got like an insane amount of pushback on yes because they were mad that i didn't talk to him about censorship but my my take on it was it was um certainly irresponsible on my part the first podcast because my take on it was i just want to see what it's like to be a guy that starts this thing and it becomes probably one of the most important conversation tools the world's ever

known and also along the way becomes you know it becomes something weird like right now it's weird like twitter now it's just it's just 50 hot dumpster fire you know it's so much amazing inspiring stuff like you can always find the dumpster fire in all kinds of conversations yes and the confusing thing to me about your conversation with jack which i didn't look at the internet before i listened to it and i really enjoyed it it was interesting i learned a lot from your first conversation with jack and like and then i looked at the internet and that told me i'm supposed to hate that conversation and what i'm confused about is why why there's such like why is there such hatred thrown towards – I also talked to the head of YouTube,

the head of the YouTube algorithm, Search and Discovery. A lot of hate towards YouTube. A lot of hate towards Twitter, a lot towards Facebook. And deservedly so, there's some challenges and so on. But they're doing like an incredible service. And the algorithm they're trying to develop and control is really hard to develop and control. Yes, for sure. So the pushback that people get, it's almost like they're taking specific anecdotal pieces of evidence.

Or look, this person said this, and it's not that problematic in our eyes, but they somehow got censored from the platform, removed from the platform. And they don't look at the bigger picture of how challenging the entirety of it is and how incredible, first of all, how incredible the platform is to have a conversation, like a global conversation like this,

and how hard it is to do to achieve the goal of having, it sounds like cheesy, but having like a healthy conversation a healthy discourse because you want an algorithm and a platform that removes the assholes from the scene because it's a really difficult challenge because you want this is one person who's really loud who's screaming in the room, comes to the party. You have a cool party, a bunch of cool people, some communists, some right-wingers, whatever. It doesn't matter. They can all disagree.

But they're not assholes. They're there to have an interesting debate, conversation, and so on. And then there's somebody that comes and just starts screaming one slogan or something like that. Or is trolling is completely sort of non-genuine in their way of communication they're destroying the nature of the conversation and then of course that person if they get you know the bodyguards come in and say can you please leave the party sir then they get extremely that's exactly the kind of personality that's extremely upset and sometimes they almost look for that.

So what are you supposed to do as a Jack Dorsey, as a leader of that kind of platform? It's a very good question, and I really think that there's no real answer. It's one of the reasons why it's so frustrating. If you just let people say whatever they want whenever they want to, there's going to be a lot of people that get turned off to that kind of a platform because you're going to have a lot of people yelling out racial slurs ethnic slurs gender slurs homophobic slurs there's going to be a bunch of people that are trolling there's going to be a bunch of people that just say things to rile people up and that's all they do there's going

to be a bunch of people that just want to shit stir and they want to dox people and they want so you got it then you have to set parameters like what are the parameters don't you can't dox people you can't um don't say racial slurs don't say ethnic slurs it's you're managing at scale and you're managing an insane amount of people but then there's legitimate criticism that they lean towards progressive people and liberal people and they they have woke politics like for instance you can get banned from twitter for life if you dead name someone so lex if you became um a female and you change your name to ally and i just said fuck you man you're Lex banned for life that's what a dead naming that's dead naming like if you

wanted to call Caitlyn Jenner if you want to call Caitlyn Jenner Bruce on Twitter you would get dead named or you would be dead naming her and you would get banned for life a woman named Megan Murphy who is a turf do you know the turf is what do you think I don't knowF is. I'm sure you don't. You're two balls deep in science. Yeah. TERF is Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists. So trans exclusionary.

Why do I have such a hard time with that word? Exclusionary, right? Exclusionary. Why does it sound wrong? Exclusionary sounds wrong. So what does it mean to be exclusionary to trans? TERFs do not want trans people to have a say in women's issues. I see.

They think that they are a different thing, that there's women and women's issues, and these feminists that have been female their whole life dealing with women's issues, do not want trans people coming in. And in many cases, what you find is that trans people come in, and then the conversation changes, and it becomes about trans issues, and they want these conversations to be about women's issues in feminist movements. It's complicated, right? She got banned from Twitter for life for saying a man is never a woman they made her take the tweet down so she took a screenshot of it took it down

and then put the screenshot back up and then they banned it for life should she get banned no no she shouldn't because biologically she's correct if there's an argument there if there's an argument a scientific argument a man is never a woman but can a man identify as a woman and should you respect them her then and treat them as a woman yes so yes so the question is whether i mean i i'm not too deep into thinking about these specific issues but the question is whether you should get banned for being an or you should get banned for being uh for lying because i think lying is okay whatever that's a lot of people lie on twitter lie and sort of or insult you can insult people on twitter as long as you're not specific about their gender see that the insult thing that's where it gets it's the party thing like if you have the the asshole douchebag whatever term you want to use they show up to the party and then if a person shows up to the party and a lot of people leave

because they're annoying or whatever yes that should be like we should do something to discourage that behavior that's a good point however let's let's paint a different picture of a party let's have a party where everyone says my pronouns are they them and zzer and javu and they and and then you come in you come on bro you're a guy and like no no i'm a they you fucking cisgendered heteronormative piece of shit and then they want to kick you out of the party yeah now all you're saying is you're a guy. Ban both of them. No, wait. Ban the person who's not open-minded or respectful for the, you know. Don't ban people.

Here's the, here's. No, no, no. Not the, yeah. So, of course, it's been well documented by people now. The reason we probably have the current president is that the people on the left are very also rude and disrespectful. It's a small percentage of the people on the left. It's very small. This is part of the real issue. They're all on Twitter.

They are all on Twitter. But it's also the small percentage when you – it's so hard to have a group and call that group the left because the variables are so extreme there's so many different people that follow politics or that that espouse to certain belief systems that recognize themselves as left funny enough you're probably on the left yes i'm very much on the left yeah but i don't get considered to be on the left because I'm a cage fighting commentator. You have an American flag behind you. Yeah, I'm very bro-ish. I hunt.

I bow hunt, which is even more bro-ish. And I am unabashedly masculine. I'm a man. And a comedian. Yes, and I'm a dirty comedian. And I make fun of everything, including sacred cows like gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality, my own kids, my wife, my mom, everybody. I make fun of everybody. And if you take that stuff out of context and just publish a bunch of it, it makes you

look like a moron or it makes you look like an asshole. That's, you know, what is the left, right? What is the left? In my mind, the left, when I was a child, I always thought of the left because I grew up, my parents were hippies, right? My stepdad was an architect, and before that he was a computer programmer. He had long hair until I was, I think I was 20 years old when he cut his hair. I mean long, like down to his ass, like a Native American. Nice.

And he smoked pot when I was little. I mean, I was always around hippies. I lived in San Francisco from the time I was 7 until I was 11. And I was always, and my family was very left-wing. They were always pro-gay marriage. very left wing. They were always pro-gay marriage. They were pro-gay rights, pro-racial equality, pro, just name it, man, pro-welfare, pro, you know, just the idea was open-mindedness, education, all these things are good. And this is, and war was bad. And was bad, and there's a lot of things that maybe they had very strong beliefs on that maybe they weren't entirely nuanced on as well.

You find that about people on the left as much as you find that about people on the right. But it's the radicals on both sides. There's nothing wrong with being conservative, right? There's nothing wrong with valuing hard work. There's nothing wrong with someone who values fiscal frugality or someone who is, you know, you have a conservative view on economics or on social policies, you know, you you want less government there's nothing wrong with those things either that's when you get extreme like yeah the guest was amazing guess you had recently um that converted a bunch of folks from the kkk gerald davis yeah wow this

is him right here this is his cd he's amazing he's a incredible human man but that kind of thinking i wish you saw more of that yeah sort of like not like not, even if you're on the left, to talk to people on the right. Instead of just shut them out. Shut them out. That's the problem with this idea of kicking people out of the party. You kick people out of the party, guys like Daryl Davis never get to convert them. There's been people from Twitter that have been converted. You know, Megan Phelps is a famous one.

She was a part of the Westboro Baptist Church. Her grandfather was Fred Phelpsps that fucking famous crazy asshole who was like super rude like who you know would make them take those signs and say god hates fags and and literally go to soldiers funerals and say that soldiers died because God is angry that people are homosexual. Yeah. So Megan was completely entrenched in this toxic ideology. And Twitter allowed her to escape that ideology. She met her husband on Twitter from arguing back and forth.

And now she's out. And if you talk to her, you would never believe it. And man, not that long ago either. Not that long ago. She was in that church like six years ago. It's kind of incredible that you can sort of grow that mindset so no matter i mean that's inspiring that you can hold a mindset of hatred and i'll yes escape it well she was indoctrinated into it from the time she was a child and you know for her it was the only life she knew right her family is in that and for her she just just i mean by whatever for whatever grace of

the grand universe plan she had enough open-mindedness to take into consideration some of these other things that people are saying man we have a problem today with cancel culture it's a real problem is that you just want to write people off well those people still exist it's basically a cultural form of euthanasia. You just want to go out and whack everyone who doesn't agree with you. But if you do that, whether it's eugenics or whatever you want to call it, you just eliminate everyone who's not the way that you like. Culturally eliminate them. Take them out of the conversation.

They still exist. They still exist. So what happens then? Well, out of the conversation. They still exist. Yeah. They still exist. So what happens then? Well, then they're angry. They're angry. They're left out of the conversation and they don't grow. And then you've written them off as a human being.

You said that they're 100% bad. Now, if you had a spectrum of people in this world, 100% bad and 100% good, I mean, there are some beautiful people that really are 100% good. I mean, there are some beautiful people that really are 100% good. Like my friend, Justin Wren, who runs Fight for the Forgotten Charity. He's about as close to 100% good as you can get. I mean, this beautiful person goes to the Congo and makes wells for the pygmies and gets malaria. He's got some crazy parasite now that they don't even know what it is. They can't recognize it. He's been suffering for eight months now, I think. That's about as good as you can get, right?

And then there's people, you know, you could name. It's a gray area when you start to drift away from the good. I have the same thing in my, like that's the focus I have in the academic setting of science. And that's the inspiration of your podcast that you you gave me is to talk outside the people that are sort of conventionally accepted by the scientific community like a little bit on the fringes yeah on the quote-unquote fringes so you have the same thing in machine learning and artificial intelligence there's people that are working on specific

it's called deep learning these learning methodologies that are accepted you know there's conferences and we all kind of accept the problems we're working on and there's people a little bit on the fringes there's people in neuroscience actually anybody thinking about working on what's called artificial general intelligence is already on the fringes yeah if you even raise the question okay so how do we build human-level intelligence, that's a little bit of a taboo subject. The consciousness is called the C word for a while. Consciousness. Really?

Yeah. Well, it's scientists. I know. I understand. Yeah. But explain it to me. Like what's the aversion? What is everyone worried about?

Well, no, it's what are they worried about? What are they worried about? It's this culture of rolling your eyes the same way you might roll your eyes if somebody tells you the earth is flat. They sort of put all other things in that category as well. It's like, well, okay, whatever. So in the case of consciousness, we really don't understand very much at all what consciousness is, So in the case of consciousness, we really don't understand very much at all what consciousness is, what the subjective experience, the fact that it feels like something to take in the world, that it's not just raw sensory information being processed. It actually feels like to touch something, to taste something, to see something. It's like incredible. David Chalmers calls it the hard problem of consciousness.

Why do we feel it? Okay, but we don't have scientific physics engineering methods of studying consciousness. So it immediately gets put into this bin that it's not an okay thing. You're a little bit crazy off the reservation. I think somebody was… Daryl saying that's a slur. I never even thought of that. I didn't think of what that meant. Yeah, so they already put in this bin of you're not a legitimate researcher and the same

kind of you know and i think we're now in a in a culture which is great you know eric weinstein is good at this i'm hoping to be good at this you're good at this at allowing those people on the fringes in and saying what are your your ideas? Exploring those. Yeah. Of course, you have a greater and greater platform to where there is a line. You don't want too far in the fringes. Yeah, that's something I'm aware of now that I wasn't aware of, say, like three or four years ago. And I used to have a lot of those. I've had some people on that I would never have on again. You know, and then I've had some people on that i've been criticized for having them on i'm like okay i see why you are upset but i think there's

value in having conversations with people that are on the fringes there's people that are bad faith actors right they act in bad faith those are the ones you have to be careful of and sometimes you don't know who they are until you get to know them yeah and then you've already kind of opened the door like for some people for like the democratic the legitimate seven-year-old plus democratic party tulsi gabbard is on the fringe yeah right but i think you having her on is great is exploring you know she's one of the young minds exploring sort of uh the role of the United States, the foreign policy in the world, militarily, in terms of trade, and so on. So she's an excellent mind who I don't think is on the fringe.

I don't think she's on the fringe either. Bernie Sanders, for many people, still is on the fringe. Yeah. I think he gets misrepresented, though. Yeah, for sure. One of the things that was tremendously beneficial for me is to sit down with him for hours and have a conversation. And you go, oh, you're a real person. You're not this wacky guy yelling about billionaires.

When you get these 90-second sound bites and these debates, you don't get a chance to know who someone is. Yeah, so I used to listen to this. I listened to a lot of radio on the left and the right to try to get like take in what what people are thinking about. I used to listen to this program, I think it's called the Tom Hartman program. He's like a major lefty, but he had this segment called brunch with Bernie. And he would invite Bernie Sanders like every Friday or something like that. And just sort of the intellectual honesty and curiosity that Bernie exhibited was just fascinating.

Sort of like as opposed to being a political thing that just repeats the same message over and over, which actually what it kind of sounds like when you listen to him now publicly, he's actually a thinking individual and somebody who's open and changing his mind. But within that has just completely been consistent. What people are terrified of is that he's going to raise taxes on successful people and ruin business. Yeah.

That's what people are worried about, that in doing that, it will crash the economy. Yes. I don't know if they're right. I don't even know if they're... So first of all, the people are using the word socialist. Yeah. So you're saying, he's a socialist.

Do you really want socialism? America is a great country because we're a capitalist kind of thing. From my perspective, I think we already have a huge number of socialists. Well, he's a democratic socialist. Democratic socialist. It's a different perspective. He just values workers the idea is he wants people to earn a living wage he wants people to not be indebted with a tremendous amount of student loan debt when you're just 21 years old and getting out

of college he thinks it's insane and i agree with him he doesn't want people to be burdened in this insane way if you ever get sick and i agree with him he wants to want people to be burdened in this insane way if you ever get sick and i agree with him he wants to improve the health care system i think as a community if we're looking at the united states as a community one of the things that you know look it's great to support business it's great to have a strong economy it's great to give business the confidence to take chances and a lot of people think donald does that. It's also great to take care of our own. And I don't think we do that enough. I don't think we take care of our own enough in terms of we have the same problems in the same inner cities that we've had for a decade after decade after decade.

And there's no significant attempt to change that. But meanwhile, we do these nation building projects in other countries. attempt to change that but meanwhile we do these nation building projects in other countries and we have the interventionist foreign policy where we go in and invade these countries and try to prop up new new governments and try to support them and we spend insane amounts of money doing that and along the while we don't do anything to our inner cities that are the exact same fucked up places that they were in the 70s and in the 60s do you know do you know michael wood jr is no he was on the podcast a couple times and he used to be a police officer in baltimore yes i know him okay so i listen to that podcast i'm just horrible

with names okay his his uh experience was first of all just he found a piece of paper that showed like a crime docket from the 1970s all the stuff like drugs crime robbery it was all the same issues in the same neighborhoods that he was patrolling in today and he was like holy shit and he realized like oh this is a quagmire and then he found out about the laws that were in place from way back in the day where you literally if you were an african-american you couldn't buy a home in certain areas right they had what is that term is it redlined is that what the term is where they um they designate certain areas where they literally won't sell homes to black people. And he was becoming aware of this shit as he was a cop.

And in the beginning, he was all gung-ho. He was like, I'm a cop. I'm here to bust bad guys and do the right thing. And then along the way, he kind of recognized you're dealing with systemic racism. You're right. Redlining. Redlining. Yeah.

So that hasn't been addressed it's all about i mean there's a million other things at home education everything and all those things i think bernie sanders when he talks about those things he he seems like a guy who really cares about education health care and people that live in poverty yeah i don't I don't know if he's going to be able to do anything. I don't know. That's the main thing is, like, people say Democratic Socialists and so on is going to – he's going to make a slight move into whatever direction he's trying to advocate, which in this case is more investment into the infrastructure and so on into our – Yeah.

At home. But, like, you know, he's just one human being. There has to be a congress that represents the people and if there's anything i think congress is probably the most hated entity in all of the universe like you look at all the polls of what people like and hate like like rats are above in terms of favorability ratings so congress is really the broken system bernie won't be able to do much except take a little sort of the role of the president as I see it is to, one, the terrifying one is to start wars. And so it's a very serious responsibility you have to take.

And the second is to inspire the population. In terms of executive power of enacting laws, there's not much power. of enacting laws there's not much power all you can all you can do is what our current president is doing sort of inspiring the in that case the Republicans in Congress to sort of work together to work on certain legislation so you can inspire the Congress and you can inspire the people but you don't have actual direct power so Bernie is not going to turn America into a socialist haven. He's going to take a small step into maybe he's probably focusing on one aspect, like health care or something like that, like President Obama did,

and try to make a little change. And so in that sense, people that are genuine and have ideas like andrew yang is another one he has like a ridiculous number of ideas i don't know if you've seen like he thinks all cops should be purple belts in jujitsu yeah i like it i'm like go andrew fuck yeah he has a million other ideas he does he sees well he's a genius i mean he's a brilliant guy and he's an entrepreneur so he comes at this stuff from a different angle sees well he's a genius i mean he's a brilliant guy and he's an entrepreneur so he comes at this stuff from a different angle yeah and he's open-minded like yes i well i disagree with him on his uh evaluation of the state of artificial intelligence and automation

in terms of its capabilities and having an impact on the economy you don't think it's going to be as much of a deal as he thinks it is? On the time scale that he thinks it is. But I also want to be careful sort of commenting on that because I think for him, it's a tool to describe the concerns, the suffering that people go through in terms of losing their job, like the pain that people are feeling throughout the country. It's like a mechanism he uses to talk to people about the future and that there are people that are well off,

like the different tech companies that should also contribute to investing in our community. I mean, the specifics, I want to kind of sit back and relax a little bit. It's like when you watch a sci-fi movie and the details are all really bad, I want to just suspension or disbelieve or whatever and just enjoy the movie. In the same way, the stuff he says about AI, he's not very knowledgeable about AI and automation.

So it touches me a little bit the wrong way. We're not as far along. The transformative effects of artificial intelligence in terms of replacing humans in trucking, autonomous vehicles, something I know a couple of things about, is not going to be as – I can speak relatively confidently. The revolution in autonomous vehicles will be more gradual than Andrew is describing. But that's okay. He has a million other ideas. but that's okay he has a million other ideas and ubi nevertheless the university basic income was some kind of support structure of that kind nevertheless could be a very good idea for people that lose their job for people to be mobile in terms of going from one type of job to another type of job so continually learning throughout life it's just that artificial intelligence in

this case i don't think will be the enemy it enemy. There could be other things that are a little bit sort of neighbors of artificial intelligence, which is sort of the software world eating up some of the mechanization of factors and so on. Maybe the fact that the kind of way that Tesla and Elon Musk are approaching the design and engineering of vehicles that are a little bit more software-centric will change, will sort of move some of the job from Detroit, Michigan, in terms of cars, to the Silicon Valley, not necessarily location-wise, but sort of a different type of person would need to be hired to work on cars, a little bit more software, engineering, software-centric, versus the sort of a different type of person would need to be hired to work on cars a little bit more software engineering software centric versus the sort of hardcore mechanical engineers more sort of

you know traditionally called car guys or car gals right yeah so that there will be some job replacements and so on but it's not this artificial intelligence, trucks will completely replace your job. And in the case of trucks, you know, it's not, there's a lot of complicated aspects about the impact of automation. Sort of trucking jobs, there's actually a lot of need for jobs. Like there's not the truck, that job, there's already people leaving that job sector. It's a really difficult job. It doesn't pay as well as it should.

It's really difficult to train people and so on. So the impact that he talks about in terms of AI is a little bit exaggerated. Like I said, a million really good ideas. He's open-minded. So in terms of, I think, the nice role of a president is to have ideas, like the purple belt one, to inspire people and inspire Congress to implement some of those ideas and be open-minded and not take yourself seriously enough to think that you know all the right answers. Andrew Yang, Bernie is like that, although Bernie is like 78 years old.

So he's getting up there. Yeah, look at President Tulsi when he kicks the bucket. You know what? I didn't really – well, yeah, that's – so I think Hillary Clinton endorsed Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard for president. Reverse endorsement. Accidentally. Accidentally. Well, yeah.

It's just such a petty thing to say that no one likes Bernie. Like, come on, lady. You're in the twilight of your life. I think she's really aware of the fact that if she says something like that, people are going to like Bernie more. I think it's an endorsement. I don't think she has any idea of that. I think she's super insulated. I think she thinks that she can actually hamstring him by saying something like that. And she doesn't understand that it just makes people realize that the things that they say about her are correct. Yeah. I don't think you give her enough credit.

Really? You gave her credit for killing Epstein. I was joking. I don't think she did it. I think Bill did it. I'm joking, too. Somebody did it. I don't, too. Somebody did it. I don't know who it was.

Maybe it was some scientist character. Maybe he's still alive. Could be. That's what Eddie Bravo thinks. Yeah. Eddie Bravo thinks he's in, like, Dominican Republic somewhere eating bananas and drinking Mai Tais. It's a conspiracy on the conspiracy.

Yeah, well, Eddie's always like that. He's many levels deep. He plays 4D chess when it comes to conspiracies. Eddie's always like that. He's many levels deep. He plays 4D chess when it comes to conspiracies. Do you think that Andrew Yang is off, but ultimately will be correct in terms of the automation timeline? Do you think that maybe he doesn't know clearly as much as you know about automation and artificial

intelligence, but do you think that it's possible that, you know, I think he's looking at a timeline. I think he was looking at a timeline. I think he was thinking within the next 10 years, millions and millions of jobs are going to be replaced. Do you think that it's more like 20 years or 30 years, but still something to be concerned? So the timeline, of course, nobody knows,

but I think the timeline is much, the time scale is more stretched out. So 20, 30 years, and it'll continue. There'll be certain key revolutions, and those revolutions, it's an incorrect word to use, but they'll be stretched out over time. I think the autonomous vehicle revolution is something to achieve a scale of millions of vehicles that are fully autonomously navigating our streets, I think is 20, 30 years away. And it won't be like all of a sudden. It'll be gradual. It'll be people like the former Google self-driving car, Waymo company, who's doing a lot of testing now, incredible engineer. I visited them for a day.

It'll be expanding their efforts slowly. They're doing also way more trucks, autonomous trucking. They're already deploying them in Texas, I think. And then, of course, Tesla, who's this year going to approach a million vehicles, and they're trying to achieve full self-driving capability. But that's going to be gradual. I just got a new update for the Tesla, some new self-driving update. It costs four grand. And I was like, what is it? But I think I was high. And I was looking at my phone, and i was like what is it you know and then but uh i think i was high and i was looking at my phone i was like hmm okay let's do it let's do it and so i i got this update

but i'm like what did i just pay for and i'm not even i don't even know if i'm gonna use it but i think it can change i think it does everything i think it changes lanes and yeah well okay so i'm not exactly sure what the update is, but it's probably- See if you can find out, Jamie. So it's probably the quote-unquote full self-driving. Yeah. Very important. The safety person, I guess, on this podcast.

Tesla cannot drive itself fully autonomously. You have to keep your eyes on the road. Always pay attention. But I saw a guy sleeping on the internet, and he was fine. Yeah, well- In a car. How cold? I'll look into it. Was it on CNN?

No, it was someone filmed the guy. He was in his car passed out. Not just one. There's been a few examples of that. People commuting on their way to work out cold. So some are for fun and fake, but it's certainly a real thing that you pass out and sleep.

We do that with manual-driven cars, too. I enjoy driving home in my Tesla from the commie store at, like, 1 o'clock in the morning, hitting that autopilot. And I keep my hand on the wheel, but it's a level of relaxation. Keep your ass on the road? Yes. I'm not looking at my phone or anything stupid, but it's just like a doo-doo. You press that double button, and I just, ah, and it changes lanes. Oh, it doesn't change lanes.

It stays in the lane. It can change lanes, but I think you have to prompt it. Like if you want to, like there's an option for navigate on autopilot. Like it will, like, take you everywhere you need to go. But I think you need to step in at certain points. Yeah, and you actually, so now it can, it can change lanes without you pressing. That's what it is now? Yeah, so you can do it automatically.

And they're doing hundreds of thousands, I think. They're tracking the number of automated lane changes. First of all, incredible that this is possible. There's hundreds of thousands of automated lane changes without human initiation happening right now on i mean to me as a sort of a robotics person that's just incredibly here it is from whole snack on twitter um it says tesla's new update lets the car recognize traffic cones stop signs and stop lines trash cans and stop lights at their colors if you try to run a stop sign under autopilot the

car emergency brakes and forces you to take over after right wow you can't run a stop sign under autopilot the car emergency brakes and forces you to take over after right wow you can't run stop signs so this isn't the update you paid four thousand dollars for that's already that's part of that but i'm actually surprised so the four thousand but it says tesla's new update what's the time on this jamie what date is uh december 24th i was looking for a more recent so this this isn't the exact update that you paid $4,000 for. I think this is a general part of the full self-driving, which is $4,000. And just to be clear, again, safety person, it's not like it detects traffic lights, but it doesn't stop at the traffic lights for you. And maybe in this case it does emergency braking on the stop sign, but it's not.

Not good enough. It's not good enough. It's not there yeah it's not there don't trust it it's not there it's in fact this you know there's a lot of people including myself think it's we're quite a few years away but i've also sort of also on the podcast just like you got just to talk to elon musk meet him talk to him in person and realize that, and realize that there's people in this world that can make the impossible happen. You interviewed him as well? Yeah, twice. Yeah.

Tell me, what's that experience like for you? So, you know, it's quite incredible in the sense that he is a legit engineer and designer, which is like a pleasure for me. I've talked to a few CEOs. I've talked to Eric Schmidt, just CEOs, and they're a little bit more business oriented elon is really really focused on the fundamental like the first principles to like the physics level of the problems that are being solved whether that's spacex with the fundamentals of rocket reusable rockets and and uh you know going into deep space and colonizing Mars,

whether that's in Neuralink, sort of getting to the core, the fundamentals of what it's like to have a computer communicate with the human brain. And with Tesla, on the battery side, sort of saying he threw away a lot of the conventional thinking about what's required to build, first of all, an appealing electric car, but also one that has a long range. That's something I don't know as much about. But on the AI side, just, I mean, he boldly said from scratch, we can build the system ourselves in a matter of months,

now a couple of years, that's able to drive autonomously. I mean, most people would laugh at that idea. Most roboticists that know from the DARPA challenges, most of them know how hard this problem is. He said, no, no, no, we're not only going to throw away LIDAR, which is this laser-based sensor, we're going to say cameras only, and we're going to use deep learning, machine learning, which is learning-based systems.

So it's a system that learns from scratch, and we're going to teach it to drive from eight cameras and so on. So just talking to somebody like that was not – the fact that he thinks like that, I think it's just fun to talk to people like that. I don't meet them often that say, no, no, no, stop this bullshit of thinking that this task is impossible. Let's say, why is it impossible? Is it really impossible? Well,

you find out when you start to think about most problems from first principles is that it's not actually impossible. And then you have to think, okay, so how do we make it happen? How do we create an infrastructure that allows you to learn from huge amounts of data? So one of the most revolutionary things that Tesla is doing, and hopefully other car companies will be doing, is the over-the-air software updates, just like the update that you got. The fact that just like on your phone, you can get updates over time, means you can have a learning system, a machine learning-based system,

that can learn and then deploy the thing and learned over time and do that weekly. That sounds like maybe trivial, but nobody else is doing it and it's completely revolutionary. So cars, once you buy them, they don't learn, most cars. Tesla learns. That's a huge thing. Forget about Tesla autopilot, all this stuff, just the fact that you can update the software. I think there's a revolutionary thing. Forget about Tesla autopilot, all this stuff, just the fact that you can update the software. I think there's a revolutionary idea. And then they're also doing everything else from scratch. This is the first principles type of thinking. The hardware. So the hardware in your car, I don't know when you got the Tesla, but it should be hardware version two. But that hardware

performs what's called inference. So it's already inference so it's already trained it's already learned its thing and it's just taking in the raw sensory input and making decisions okay they built that hardware themselves from scratch again ballsy move now they're building what they're calling again he's such a troll but they're calling dojo is the the name of the the specialized hardware for training the neural networks or training the models what training is is the learning side of it so they're building their own like supercomputer google has a tpu to improve the training tpu was a stand for tensor processing unit it's the same thing as the more general. NVIDIA has graphics processing unit, GPUs, that all the nerds, all the people like me have been using for machine learning to train neural networks.

It's what most gamers use to play video games, right? But they have this nice quality that you can train huge neural networks on them. Okay. TPU is a specialized hardware train huge neural networks on them okay tpu is uh is a specialized hardware for training neural networks gpus allow you to play video games and train neural networks tpus clean some stuff up to make it more efficient energy efficient more efficient for the kinds of computation neural networks need google has them a bunch of other companies have them. You know, most car companies would be like, okay, let me partner with somebody else, with Google,

to use their TPUs or use NVIDIA's GPUs. Tesla's building it from scratch. So that kind of from-scratch thinking is incredible. And the other two things I really like, listen, that I like about Musk is the hard work. We live in a culture, like so many people, like I often don't sleep. I do crazy shit in terms of just focus, stay up nights sometimes. And often people recommend to me that, you know, balance is really important.

Taking a break is important. That you rejuvenate yourself, you return to it with fresh ideas. All those things are true. Sleep is important. People on the podcast tell you how important sleep is. But what most people don't advise me is hard work is more important.

Passion is more important than all of those things. That should come first. And then sleep empowers it. Rest empowers come first. And then sleep empowers it. Rest empowers it. Regimination empowers it, especially in the engineering disciplines. Hard work is everything. And he's sort of unapologetically about that. It's not like a come to us, come work with us.

It will be a friendly environment with free snacks. It's like you're going to work the hardest you've ever worked on, whether you agree with him or not, on the most important problems of your life. Okay. I like that kind of thinking because it emphasizes the hard work. The other part, in terms of meeting him in person, I don't know if you got to interact with that off because when he was on mic with you, he was very kind of.

It was hard to bring it out of him. Yeah. In person before that, he was very jovial and friendly and huggy. He's great. Yeah, he's fun. And then once he got on the microphone, I was like, oh, this is heavy lifting. Yeah. Bring this out of him.

So then we started drinking. Drinking helps. And then, oh, yeah, it helps a lot. And then once the drinking, you know, then I got to see who he is. Yeah, I should have done that. But no, I'm just kidding. He likes drinking. Yeah.

No, I mean, the thing that's really interesting is he's gone, if you look at his biography, like the kind of stress he's been under in terms of he's been at the brink of losing his companies several times. Yes. And he lost a child. And that's the other thing that inspired me is that he can be a good dad while running so many companies. Because I often wonder about you know the kind of hours i pull on what i'm doing can i have a family can i really give because i'd love to be

a father and can i have a family can i be a good person like it's very very very very difficult if you're working 18 hours a day yes to give your kids the time that they need but it's possible not 18 now there's always i believe there's in life months, maybe years that you have to do the 18 hours a day. But not always. There's time for everything. Right. Do the sprint. Sprints, yeah.

And then establish everything and then sit back. But the problem with a lot of guys like him is, first of all, it's very difficult to find a replacement for the way he thinks. Right? So if he's a CEO of these companies and he's the one who's the mastermind behind all these things and then he wants to step back finding a commensurate replacement is insanely difficult because most people who would be a potential replacement are already off doing their own shit and there's not many people like him. That's interesting. That's actually the disappointing thing to me, is that his kind of thinking is a rarity.

I'm not sure why that is exactly. Well, he's, I joke around about it, but I think there's a spectrum of evolution. And his mind is clearly way more advanced than my mind there's there's something going on in his mind in terms of his uh attraction to engineering issues solutions to global problems solutions to traffic problems pollution problems all the all the things that he's the internet and he's trying to put he's trying to give the world internet i mean he's got all these things going simultaneously and one of the things that i's, the internet, he's trying to put, he's trying to give the world internet. I mean, he's got all these things going simultaneously. And one of the things that I got out of him when I was talking to him was that he almost has a hard time containing these ideas that are just pouring out of his head, like a raging river, like he's trying to catch handfuls of water. river like he's trying to catch handfuls of water and his raging river of ideas that's going through his head you know and when he described his childhood that he thought that everybody was

like that and then as he got older he you know thought he was insane yeah i didn't i've i can relate to that i've i'm trying to learn how to talk but i have trouble talking because uh it's like a million ideas running in my head like Like anything you say, I'll immediately start. There's these like weird tangent that go off and I want to start thinking about them. Is that true with a lot of people in your line of work? I think so. I think that's kind of puzzle solving. Like that's where the comfort is.

I'm just surprised that a CEO is able to continue being that kind of puzzle solver. Do you see that tweet that he made about his plans? Like you put a tweet up, I think it was 2006. And then he's essentially done all those things. He's done all those things. Now, the thing is, most people, so a lot of people love Elon Musk, but there's quite a large community of people that don't love him so much. Well, that's always the case. I don't i don't think anybody great i don't i don't know if that's always the

case when is it not the case i don't know who does who accomplishes as many things as that guy does where everybody loves him it's a difficult i mean i i'm not a historian, but I could say Steve Jobs. Terrible example. So many people hated that guy. So many people hated that guy. I have personal friends that are involved in technology that wouldn't use Apple products because he's such a twat. Sure. They didn't want to have anything to do with him.

They knew people that were engineers under him. They said it was horrible and mean and it just required so much. He would scream at people and insult them. And he had these ideas in his head that he needed to get done. And if you couldn't work the hours that you needed to do what he wanted to accomplish, he would treat you like shit. You're right. I just wish the world was better. Like with all people like that, like with Steve Jobs and with Elon Musk,

when he dies, people will always – you'll remember the greatness, right? Yeah. So that's how it seems to work. It's just sad that you can't celebrate that currently. But I do think there's one particular aspect of his personality that I also share that pisses people off really bad, which is, like you said, he had a plan. But he's late on that plan. He keeps promising things, and he keeps being like a year or two or three late. Right.

And that really, I don't know if it actually angers people or if people that already don't like you use that as a thing to say why they don't like you, but it's certainly a thing that people say a lot. But I think that's an essential element of doing extremely difficult things is over-promising and trying to over-deliver. That's the whole point. Right. Is to say, to make all the engineers around you believe that it's doable in a year.

That's essential to do it in two years. So like that kind of, and truly believing it seems to be essential. Well, didn't he have people pay full price for that Roadster? Like, you got on a list. Ahead of time, yeah. Yes. So you paid a quarter of a million dollars for a car that's essentially vaporware. Yeah.

But the thing – so I don't know. There's a whole bunch of financial people that get, like, mad at that kind of idea. They get furious. Like, there's investors. You know, it's like – I think it's the most shorted stock in history. Yeah. financial people, they get mad at that kind of idea. They get furious. There's investors. I think it's the most shorted stock in history. But it keeps kicking ass. It confuses the fuck out of people.

To me, the stock market is the most boring thing ever. It's gambling. Yes. And so you trying to say you're an expert in investing in the stock market, I removed those people from my life because they don't say any interesting ideas. I said it. But when you're doing legitimate investment, yes, that's a really important service to society. But if you're commenting on the fundamentals of engineering problems that real engineers are trying to solve, that's not interesting to me. So that kind of stuff upsets, I think, financial folks.

But the beautiful thing is when you have people buy vaporware and you bring that vaporware to reality, that's the amazing thing. Yeah. He will definitely bring that roadster to reality if he doesn't die that roadster will happen yeah if he dies bail out now same with it same with that insane cyber truck yeah that cyber truck is fucking awesome it's so ridiculous if he lives long enough you better believe there's humans being put on mars whether it's him or he gets everybody else. See, that one I'm skeptical of.

Just the type of people that are going to want to go. See, you're not talking about the engineering problem. No. I think it's possible ultimately. I mean, look, can we put people in space? For sure, we've definitely done it. Can we put things? Well, some people think space is fake.

Space is fake. Do you ever Google hashtag space is fake? It's wonderful. It's a testament to the education system in this country. Well, on that tiny little tangent, I've gotten, I joked about flat earth and space is fake a little bit, almost like saying that's an interesting way to being open-minded. And then I realized that's not something to joke about.

That there's a community of people that take it extremely seriously. And then some of them thanked me for acknowledging that the possibility of. And then I had said, okay. Bless their little hearts. Okay. This is not. And their little brains. But I appreciated their open-mindedness but they should take introduction to physics uh mit open courseware provides courses on physics they should um can a regular person just sign up for that

yeah yeah it's open free so how does that work um what do you have to do in order to take those courses? It's all made available online. Just go to MIT.org or is it.edu? MIT OpenCourseWare is the website. I mean, most people. Oh, and it's all on YouTube now. Oh, that's beautiful. It's all lectures. There are like millions of views, introductory lectures to physics, mathematics, statistics.

I have courses on there. Ah-ha, physics. I have courses on there. Ah-ha. Shut up. But in order to understand that the work has been done to recognize the fact that the earth is round, what would you recommend right away? Classical mechanics with exponential focus, experimental focus. See, none of those things are going to—

No, no. Classical mechanics is good. But if you're a dingbat, you're not going to be able to absorb all that? Look up the Wikipedia page for gravity, I think. That's not going to help either. They say gravity has never been proven. No one understands gravity. There's no one who actually understands what gravity is.

We just know the effects of it. It's actually magnetism. Yes, for sure. So you have to undertake the effort of proving the wikipedia article for gravity wrong so but wikipedia bro what a terrible example wikipedia is sketchy it says i'm brian callan's brother it says i got celiac disease there's a bunch of shit that's not real how do you know you're not related i know okay i'm pretty sure i mean you might as well be my brother. I don't know if it says it anymore, but whatever. Someone put it in there again.

Fuck it. Wikipedia is actually another distributed system that's incredibly surprising to me that it works. Yeah, it is, right? Because even though there is a lot of misinformation in it and there's a lot of falsehoods, there's a lot of really good information as well you know particularly about historical figures and interesting stuff you know if you want to find facts on things and on science research on science and technical topics so not not like nutrition science or things where there's a lot of debates on like physics and math and so on it's really good like it's really really good

so it's community supported yeah by other physicists but moving back from Flat Earth, can we go back to why you think we're not going to be colonizing Mars? Oh, I'm not saying ever. I'm just saying the problem to me is the type of people that would want to do it because they can't return. That's the real issue with going to Mars is that you can't return. You don't think there's a huge number of non-crazy explorers in this world? That want to die on Mars? Yeah.

I had a whole bit about it. I really believe that it's the fringe of the fringe that would be willing to die on Mars. No. Really? I'd be willing to die on Mars. Really? Stay here. Come on.

I like you. Don't go there. No, it's... Here's my take on it. What do you like about me? It's all temporary. What's all temporary? Life? Life. Life is temporary. there. No, it's... Here's my take on it. What do you like about me? It's all temporary. What's all temporary? Life?

Life. Life is temporary. Right. You're going to die someday. Sure, but if you decide to die on fucking Mars, I'm like, bro, you'll be sending me emails from Mars. Dude, I fucked up. I won't be sending you emails.

It sucks here. This is the thing. You're into the Native Americans. You've been reading yeah i've been following your work there i'm obsessed man yeah i've been obsessed about world war two world war one but you're like you're converting me to think of like to the to the both the warrior cultures and the suffering in that world the suffering's insane it's insane i'm this book on black elk man it details his life from he was a young boy when during custer's last stand he was

there when custer was killed black elk yeah the man the guy yeah what do you call that he's a ogallalus uh lakota medicine man medicine man yeah and he just lived through the transition he lived through the transition of them battling with the u.s soldiers to them being on the reservation and fucking insane poverty insane just in just the stories of people the illnesses and the deaths how many people's children died malnourishment star starvation, abuse, and then just how much they hated where they were living and how they were living. On the reservation. Yeah, it's horrific, man. It's horrific.

It's like, it's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine when you're reading that this just happened. You know, I mean, he's talking about the really horrible parts at the end were in the early 1920s, 1930s. It's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine that this tribe from 100 years prior in the 1820s were living wild and free. And were, you know, were living the same way they'd lived for hundreds of years and had this incredible relationship with the land and these incredible religion that they practiced where they worship the earth and the animals and the sky. these concepts for the way you should live your life and how to guarantee prosperity and how to guarantee success and man it's just they had a fascinating culture i mean and it's gone it was wiped off the face of the map there was nothing like it anywhere else on earth there's no there

was no culture anywhere on earth that was like the Native American culture in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s. But in that period of time, they had this spectacular way of life. And it was often very cruel and very ruthless. And they warred on each other. This idea that Native Americans were living in peace and harmony with each other is nonsense yeah so i started i was listening while doing hills yesterday kicked my ass i was listening to the empire of the summer moon fucking great book i commented on your instagram like saying something um you know basically admiring the purity of that way of life.

And I got so much shit by people saying, oh, you think rape and murder is pure and admirable? So there is certainly an aspect to their way of life, which is sort of the warrior ethos, right? The Comanches in particular. Comanches. They were the most ruthless, the most warlike. That's all they did.

It's basically like the Genghis Khan, the same kind of, the same horses, the innovators actually more innovators yeah and all they ate was meat as well i mean all they date was buffalo i mean they essentially rode with the buffalo killed buffalo hunted buffalo and then raided other tribes and then until the white man came and then they started raiding the white man killing the white man but they then they started raiding the white man and killing the white man. But they were, you know, at war with white people for hundreds of years. I mean, they were the reason why the West was hard to settle. I mean, the sneaky shit, I don't know if you've gotten to the point where they were giving people these big swaths of land in Oklahoma. And they essentially set them up to be killed by the Comanche.

They will say, hey, go out here. We'll give you 1,600 acres. It's all yours. And they're like, oh, terrific. Let's get our family and get in a wagon. And no one let them know that the wildest motherfuckers that ever lived on this continent were running that place. And they would go there and just get slaughtered.

And one after another, families were wiped out that way and people were kidnapped and that lady that i have on the wall outside cynthia ann parker who was adopted by the comanches she's her family was murdered in front of her when she was nine years old and she became the wife of a great comanche chief and her son became the last Comanche chief, Quanah Parker. It's crazy, man. It's the craziest story. There's all these tribes that some are probably more warlike, some are more peaceful, that had a way of life here.

I don't want to romanticize too much. Most people don't believe me, but I really like that way of life, that closeness to nature. You said texting from Mars or whatever. I like, you know, I wouldn't choose it, but I would be happier if I was forced into it. It seems like a counterintuitive notion.

Because I'm so weak, I'm so soft. Like even running hills yesterday, I realized how soft I am. Well, you work too much. Yeah, no, behind a a computer yeah little fingers typing right but you're also a black belt in jujitsu you're also a martial artist you know me against the comanche warrior good luck i think you'd fuck a comanche up they don't know how to fight for real if they had a weapon they'd kill you i think you're just i no i i i okay listen first of all they were pretty small they weren't very big people maybe first of all, they were pretty small.

They weren't very big people. Second of all, they didn't know jiu-jitsu. The average person that doesn't know jiu-jitsu, you're going to choke the fuck out of them. That'd be fun, actually, to sort of go into different warring cultures, like going to Genghis Khan times without weapons to see what kind of combat styles they had.

Just send Francis Ngannou. He'd clean out the entire fucking crew. I mean, just send Hoyes Gracie is what I mean. Yeah, for sure. Francis Ngannou and all generations will be, everybody will be screwed. It's not a, he's not as interesting. Yeah, right.

It's just overwhelming. But I think that if you had real jujitsu skills, you know, what you know now today, particularly because jiu-jitsu has evolved so much. I mean, even the jiu-jitsu of 2020 is so radically different from the jiu-jitsu of 1990. It's radically different, like almost unrecognizable in a lot of ways. But clearly, though, the basics are still the most important, and they're some of the greats of all time who just operate with the basics, whether it's Harger Gracie or Hickson Gracie.

There's a lot of great, great jiu-jitsu players that just have those solid, Saluhibero, solid basics that are just honed to a razor-sh you know uh you know crone crone gracie he's got and i when i say basic it is a compliment i mean he you know arm bars triangles guillotines rear naked chokes those types of things but perfected to a level that is they don't they don't participate in a lot of the more modern. There's a lot of, like, crafty, weird stuff that a lot of guys try today. And some of the greats, even the greats that participate in jiu-jitsu matches today and are effective at it don't really have that kind of style.

Yeah, I mean, but Cronus actually has some more creativity. If you look at Roger Gracie, that's, like, I don't even Cronus actually has some more creativity. If you look at Haja Gracie, that's like – Very basic. I don't even know if he does footlocks. I think my favorite thing to do is on YouTube just watch Haja Gracie matches. Like he looks like he's half asleep, and he demolishes the greatest black belts in the world slowly by just – like in a half-asleep way, taking them down, passing their guard, going to mount, and doing a choke.

Yeah. It's like the, against, I don't know, Buchecha, against just the best. Well, my instructor, John Jock Machado, same thing, man. Just his style is just solid basics of jiu-jitsu. And he has a saying that the more you know, the less use which is really interesting well you mentioned comanche warriors and the meat yeah congrats on the i saw the the diet the carnivore diet is yeah man here's something crazy i got off that diet for this weekend because it was i did the month and then once saturday came around i ate italian food i had girl scout cookies pasta and

then yesterday i went to disneyland so yesterday i went way way off the diet and i had ice cream and i ate all kinds of shitty food and i was getting back pains and knee pains and all these kind of weird pains that went away when i was on the diet. Now, this is not a testament against plant-based diets because I was eating shit, shitty food. Right. And pasta, which is a lot of bread. White pasta. Yeah, yeah, yeah, spaghetti.

That stuff, it causes inflammation. It just does. It just does. Sugar causes inflammation. But it's interesting to have this great month where basically two weeks in after the diarrhea died off i had two solid weeks of no aches and pains and feeling great i was like this is wild this is really wild i feel amazing look and then two days of eating shit and like my back hurts right now i'm sitting here my back is hurting my knee

was hurting yesterday like all those weird aches come right back well it's uh there's a the nice thing about the joe rogan effect is that you're trying to die and you're talking about keto a lot that's like become more socially acceptable to do because i've been eating keto or low carb for many years and doing fasting like 24 24, 48-hour fasts. And I always kind of keep it more in the low-down. But even this time, like traveling, like what I like to do when traveling is I'm kind of trying to be, given my current situation, not spend much money. situation not spend much money and so i go one of the best ways to go either carnivore or keto is to go to mcdonald's and just order beef patties they'll sell you just beef patties a dollar 50 really patty for a quarter pound yeah so you can you know like it's it's like usually what i use

about two pounds of meat a day and that's what is it i don't know that's like uh 15 bucks so you've been doing this carnivore thing too how long you've been doing it for off and on so i have some i have two for um the carnivore i've done since the first time either your podcast or jordan peterson or that kind of thing i i dived into but before then i've been doing keto like my favorite meal is just like meat and i know some people hate cauliflower but cauliflower and or green beans just why do you worry if people hate cauliflower why'd you have to make that distinction i don't know some people hate cauliflower i'm not out there hating cauliflower who the fuck are those people that's a weird thing to hate.

I just had a bunch of people say cauliflower sucks recently. Yeah, you're right. If you cook it right, it doesn't suck. You know what's good? Buffalo cauliflower, like buffalo wings, buffalo sauce, cauliflower, fucking delicious. What's that? But that's a sauce. Yeah.

No, sauce is like you're giving into your weakness. It's spices. And you're giving away. No, see, like you're giving into your weakness. It's spices. And you're giving away. No, see, like a blander taste to me is better because you get to appreciate the fundamentals of the food. Oh, okay. So I don't know. I just enjoy it. You do salt meat?

Salt, yeah. Oh, how do you do that when you can just appreciate the fundamentals of the meat? Yeah. Good point, Joe. You don't like hot sauce? I'm playing checkers. You're playing chess. can just appreciate the fundamentals of the meat. Yeah. Good point, Joe. You don't like hot sauce? I'm playing checkers, you're playing chess. Do you like hot sauce? I put hot sauce on everything.

Yeah, I do, but I stay away from it. Like I try to, listen, food to me right now in my life is a source of energy, not a source of pleasure. But it can be both. Unfortunately, I'm not addicted to i unfortunately i'm not addicted to drugs i'm not addicted to many things but with food my mind i don't know how to moderate really so like anything pleasurable is a problem for me in terms of food like cookies you put two cookies in front of me like i don't know how to eat just one of them like It's just my brain is terrible at it. This is Girl Scout cookie season, son.

Yeah. They changed the name of Samoas. Those are my favorite, and now they have a new name. They're like, I think they're called like Tagalongs or something like that. They've been that name for a while, I think. Really? When did they change? Those are separate things, though, I think.

Am I talking about the wrong thing? Maybe. The ones that are like they're chocolate on the bottom. Dude, they're so good. Samoas have that coconut in them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That doesn't sound like the words of a man who's going to stick to the carnivore diet. Oh, I'm going to stick. All right. Yeah, I mean, I'll have cheat days. Or cheat meals, I should say. Tag along is the peanut butter chocolate one. Oh, that's right. Those are good.

Those are fucking good. What are the Samoas now? What do they call them now? Not Samoa But they just changed Oh okay They just changed to something new Let's see if there's a new name

I have never eaten a Girl Scout cookie Ever? No What are you a robot? I'm Russian too Basically a robot Basically I ate six of those

And I was feeling like shit I'm like oh Oh What? Maybe This is just a very quick but I ate six of those, and I was feeling like shit. I'm like, oh. Oh. What? Maybe. This is just a very quick caramel delight. Is that what it's called now?

I don't think so. It's just someone might have owned another company or whoever they were paying to make them. I was wondering if it was a racial issue. That's what the question was. Was someone saying, because it was racist? It's an odd question. The answer is no. The name of the cookies are owned by the two different companies

who make them. Oh. So they outsource it, and they just put their company name on it. They change the name. R's an odd question. The answer is no. The name of the cookies are owned by the two different companies who make them. So they outsource it and they just put their girls' company name on it. Racial issue. Wow. Because Samoa. Someone might be sensitive

to having a cookie named after an island. People are like, hey, fuckface, that's our island, not your cookie. See, those cookies don't even sound

good to me anymore. What about American cheese? Is that okay? Yeah, cheat about American cheese? Is that okay? Yeah, cheese. American cheese? Not okay. Wait, American? Oh, yeah.

What, like, I stay with the Russian dvorak. It's a cottage cheese. Well, there's Swiss cheese, there's American cheese, and that's it, right? Is there any other countries that are named specifically after the cheese named after the country i bet you it's not even just like french fries i bet you american cheese is not even american do you remember when there was freedom fries for a while people were trying to call fries freedom fries like post 9-11 because they were mad that france didn't want us going over to iraq yeah and then people who hate freedom banned it yeah freedom fries, that's so dumb.

The thing I really like actually, I think that's the thing that people don't often talk about is the focus. So my life, I think a lot of people do this, is being able to focus for long periods of time. And that's why I stuck with keto or fasting especially. Yes. The focus is pretty tremendous. Well, that's what I really got with the carnivore diet. The amount of my flatness of energy, the lack of dips and valleys, peaks and valleys, it's amazing. Yeah, it's great.

And the fasting helps me too. Jack Dorsey does only what's called OMAD, one meal a day. You could just say one meal a day. This OMAD stuff, Jesus Christ. I'm a hip Reddit lingo guy. I think on Reddit it's OMAD. Oh, okay. No, I don't know, One Meal a Day.

But 24-hour fast, that's a careful weapon you have to play with, at least for me. It's weird. It helps your mind really focus. I can sit sometimes for five, six hours a day programming, really thinking and lose track of time and really focus. But when you interact with other human beings, you're kind of a little bit of an asshole. I am, sorry.

I mean, when I am. a little bit of an asshole like i am sorry i mean when i am in a in a way where it's it's funny but if there's something about a person that's full of crap you are more likely to point that out like when you're on keto or carnivore uh no it's uh irrespective of diet keto carnivore whatever is the the fasting oh the fasting okay fasting really so it's just more irritable is that what it is i i think it's irritable but you also see things more clearly and so like i don't know i'll talk to my parents right or something like that when i'm more well fed i'll be like just enjoy having fun with them and if i'm like fasted i'll be like why are you always judging me kind of thing, right? Like you realize the thing, the aspects of the interaction which are problematic and you want to sort of highlight them.

I'm just sort of noticing it, which is problematic when you're in a working environment, especially sort of deliberating, discussing with other engineers how to solve a problem. of deliberating, discussing with other engineers how to solve a problem. I'm more likely, especially with a lead team, to say that somebody is a little bit full of shit when I'm fasting as opposed to being a little bit more kind and eloquent about expressing why they're full of shit. I found myself feeling more aggressive and more inclined to use recreational insults. When fasting or carnivore?

Carnivore. What's a recreational insult? Like, come on, fuck face. Fuck face. You know, like saying something like that to someone or fill in the blank with whatever other words you would like to use. That sounds like an academic paper. The rate of fuck face goes up.

Well, just in casual conversation, I'd find myself using fun insults more often. But fun with the intent of kindness behind? No, I mean having fun. Even talking about people who aren't there, just having fun. Yeah. But that's also a function of being a comedian. Right. We do that to each other really bad.

Yeah. Like I had a birthday. My friends made me a cake that said happy birthday faggot it's just like that kind of shit is just so a part of the culture of comedians like everybody calls everybody bitch everybody you know it's just yeah it's fun which is awesome because this comedian culture is now at full-on war with the cancel culture and it's like it's like two armies of people who don't give a damn with people who give way too much of a damn well i have mixed

feelings about all that stuff but i ultimately feel like the direction it's moving in the reason why it's happening is for good i think there's a lot of people that are complaining about things and they're trying to cancel people and all that stuff. And it's, you know, ultimately some of it's misguided. But I think the ideas behind it, like the primary push, like the gravity behind it, is people want less racism, less discrimination, less of a lot of things. But then along the way you have hypocritical human behavior that gets involved in this and you have people that are you know deeply flawed themselves but pointing out minor flaws and other people and then they get exposed and they feel horrible and for every person who participates in this cancel culture it's like the wave is coming back at you i mean it comes in and

it comes out and if you go too far out on that fucking pier it's it's gonna get you and this is part of it that we're learning and i think what what people are today like if you look at Like if you look at the – just the – if you look at humanity from like the 1930s, it was hard, man. People lived in a hard way. It was ruthless. If you watch films from the 1900s, early 1900s, first of all, the domestic violence was so normal. Like heroes in movies in the 50s and the 60s just smacked women in the face. Heroes smacked their wives, hit their kids. It was a different world.

And people will look probably at our time today and say, you know, people openly ate meat, meaning not, or like, I could see a few. Not engineered meat. Not engineered meat, right? Sort of ate meat from factory farms. Mm-hmm. Yeah. As opposed to recreationally hunting it themselves and eating what they've hunted, or engineered meat, lab meat.

Yeah, or you can get ethically raised food. I mean, there are a lot of ranchers. It's one of the things that ButcherBox does very well is they make sure that they have relationships with ranchers who have a commitment to ethically raised animals and ethically killed animals. And what that means is they don't participate in anything that has anything to do with factory farming, no antibiotics, no added hormones ever. And that is possible.

I mean, people have been eating animals from the beginning of time, literally. Ninety-seven percent of the world eats animals. And this idea that the only way to do it is through factory farming. I don't think that's correct. And the only way, you know, I mean, the idea is if you eat meat, you participate in factory farming, and that's horrific. I don't think that's true. But I do think it is true when it comes to fast food for the most part. And that's unfortunate. And I think if they could, I mean, we need more transparency for sure when it comes to that stuff. And that's one of the reasons why those ag gag laws, agricultural gag laws where people, there's laws that prevent people from working in these factory farming situations to expose.

There's laws that prohibit them from exposing the horrors of these environments. That's a real problem. That's a real issue that's clearly designed to protect that industry and allow them to commit these crimes yeah it's one of the things i'm uh i'm conscious of my own hypocrisy in this so i've i think deeply unfortunately love meat sort of like and i'm aware of the they how unethical factory farming is. Yeah. And so those two things I have to sit with and be conscious of.

I don't know. That's a question like when did that happen? When did the factory farming thing happen? You go back to the 1930s, there was no factory farming. It was just farming. Are you sure? I think it was probably incremental. Are you sure it wasn't in the 1930s?

There wasn't already some mass So what is factory farming? It's scale But also sort of the suffering There's a certain line you start to cross Where it just feels so I mean it's unclear at which point It really becomes torture versus

Agriculture Agriculture That's an interesting line And we kind of Yeah it's probably a good answer for that. The real problem is the scale. Probably fast food. The birth of fast food is really probably where it exploded.

Where's McDonald's? McDonald's probably started 100 years ago. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure when it started. At scale, the feeding of massive amounts of people that aren't growing anything. That's the real issue. The real issue is whether you're in New York City or Shanghai or Los Angeles,

large, gigantic metropolitan areas that aren't growing anything. They've got to get a lot of food to those people. If you have 20 million people like in Los Angeles, 20 million people eat meat, that's a lot of meat. Yeah, you've got to feed them of meat yeah you gotta feed them yeah you gotta feed them oh there's science steps up i think lab engineer meat is kind of interesting yeah it is interesting have how much have you paid attention to it not much i'm waiting like i uh this is the horrible thing i'm very cognizant of it that i kind of don't allow my brain to think much about this whole space because I love meat and I'm trying to save money. I get it. Right. So you eat those McDonald's quarter pounder.

You know, so I, and, um, the life of a scientist, right? The scientist, and especially now I've taken a leap. That's a difficult leap. So I'm still affiliated with mit but i decided to leave my full-time position why do a startup so i want to try to build uh trying trying to build the kind of thing i dreamed about we talked about the movie her i've been working that's been 80 90 of my day and in fact me doing the podcast is trying to is not, is already successful at giving me enough money for food and shelter. Tell people the name of the podcast so they can.

Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Lex Friedman. Lex Friedman. Listen to, what is it, Elon Musk, Eric Weinstein's on there. I talk with Gary Kasparov, Chomsky, Sean Carroll.

Sean Carroll is brilliant. He is brilliant. What is it like talking to Chomsky, Sean Carroll. Sean Carroll is brilliant. He is brilliant. What is it like talking to Chomsky? He talks slow. Well, I talk, most people say my voice is very boring and I talk slowly. To those people I say, go fuck yourself. I love you, I love you.

You're right. I'm trying to actually, I love you. I love you. You're right. I'm trying to actually. It's very difficult to be, to express thoughts, like Sam Harris struggles with this too, to express thoughts with the kind of humor and eloquence that they are in your brain,

like to convert them. As a comedian, you're essentially a storyteller. So you're already, you don't often, you probably don't even acknowledge, you don't even know how you did it. You're like Haja Gracie. You've probably developed this art of storytelling, of being able to laugh and make other people laugh, of like bouncing back and forth.

To me, most of my life has been spent behind a book or computer, thinking interesting thoughts, but not connecting with other people and doing that dance of conversation. thinking interesting thoughts, but not connecting with other people and doing that dance of conversation. And so learning that dance while also thinking is really tough. So with Chomsky, it was like a pleasure because we could both be robots. But I think he's like 92 years old. Is he really?

Yeah, and the thing I love about him, so there's all that political stuff that I don't pay attention to. I mean, he's a major sort of activist but he's also a linguist that thinks that language is at the core of everything of cognition so like it's at the bottom everything starts with language cognition the reasoning perception all of that is things built on top of language so it's a brilliant sort of seminal research but at 92 92 years old, he still looked in my eyes and really listened and really thought and really sharp ideas came out.

Like, you do the same thing. That was, people ask me, like, we meet Joe Rogan. Like, you don't take yourself too seriously. Even with your celebrity, with the popularity of the podcast, that's a huge thing. And with Chomsky, what was really surprising to me is while he's pretty stubborn on his ideas and so on, people criticize him, he's so stubborn in his ways,

he didn't take himself too seriously. Like I sat there, I'm just some kid talking to him. He like really listened. Like the stupid questions, the interesting questions, he really listened. At 92 years old to have that kind of curiosity, I was like, I'm so happy when i see that kind of thing yeah that's that's a wonderful example of a career academic who's still just concentrating

on ideas ideas yeah i'm still thinking always you know because academics can be like really any other endeavor any other discipline you can get lazy right you you see that in almost every walk of life there's certain people that rest on their laurels and especially when you become popular you get really good at explaining so you get like you do these talks you do these lectures you start saying the same thing over and over yeah and you forget to listen like i've because of because of this podcast uh the the artificial Intelligence podcast, but also Joe Rogan, two different groups of fans whom I both love, people come up to me and start a conversation, and I love it, just listening to them.

And I hope I never lose that. I'm younger than Chomsky, but I hope you stay that way. It's nice if you have the time. It's a problem if you're in the rush and someone wants to talk to you about something like very deep yes i've had those moments where someone says hey man i gotta ask you and then they i'm like dude this is a long conversation i can't i can't do this right now that's the burden that's your burden actually i'm in a beautiful place which i don't think will last too long, which is I'm not sufficiently famous to work.

Those things don't happen often enough to where I can have that conversation. Right, you have the luxury of indulging. Although let me say, I got to hang out with Brian Callen, who I've been a huge fan of on New Year's Eve. I got to watch the old man dance, break some dance moves. And this funny thing happened. He's a celebrity yeah right so we're we're hanging out and uh two times somebody came up to me and brian and they said wow it's lex friedman it's so good to me and then they completely ignore brian

made me so proud it's because it's in boston and i think it's like nerds and whatever sure Completely ignore Brian. I was like, this is Brian Cowan. That must have been. He must have been like, motherfucker. It made me so proud. It's because it's in Boston. Yeah. And I think it's like nerds and whatever. Sure. Yeah. That was awesome. That is funny, though.

That's hilarious. He's one of my, I mean, it was incredible. I didn't know you guys were friends until we all came together in the podcast and so on. I was a huge fan of his from like Mad TV days. He's one of my oldest friends. Yeah. How'd you guys, what's, how'd you guys meet? We met on Mad TV.

I was a host one week and he was the, he was, you know, one of the stars of the show. He's an awesome guy, man. Like a really underappreciated person. And he's a guy that because he acts so much and because he gets into that, you know, he's just always into that world. He didn't put the same amount of time into doing his podcast his personal podcast as i think he should have because he's great at it you know um he was one of the first people that i knew that interviewed jordan peterson

and he's uh i didn't know that yeah he's had a bunch of brilliant people on his podcast he's had a bunch of like really interesting intellectuals. He's had a bunch of really interesting intellectuals and scientists. I think it's mixed mental arts or something like that. Yeah, and he's doing it with Hunter, his friend, but he stopped doing it with him. He's an unusual guy, Brian Kalanis, because he's silly, but he's also brilliant. Yeah, you can see that. Eric Weinstein has the same quality, obviously, from different worlds. The silliness, you can see through the silliness that there's an intelligent,

first of all, a good human being there, but also an intelligent human being. But at the same time, he's like the butt of every joke. I appreciate that so much. I love silly people. Silly people are so much more fun. People that are easily offended and easily upset, Like, ugh, you're so exhausting. Silly people are the best. I actually played your theme song on guitar.

And Brian Cowell was researching it. Like, how do you play it? And it was a Jerry E. theme song. And there's a Brian Cowell singing video of Joe Rogan's Shoulders for Days. Yeah, some silly song he made up. I'm working on a deal. I'm going to try to figure out, because I can play guitar

and play the theme song I put up online. Are you guys going to work together and make an album? No, we're going to make a Joe Rogan theme. He's going to come up with some words on there. What's the notes? You've got pages and pages of notes in front of you. Is there stuff that you really wanted to discuss? Yeah, well, we haven't talked about AI at all, but let me at least notes you got you got pages and pages of notes in front of you these are stuff that you really wanted to discuss yeah yeah well we definitely talked about ai at all but let me at least uh

boston dynamics it'd be interesting to talk about i don't think there was a fake video that i sent jamie today these motherfuckers they keep getting me there's a new fake video i think that was the same one i think someone just took another clip from it oh is it those guys have been making vfx videos on youtube for 10 plus years they're really good at it so it's so good for people who don't know there's a youtube channel where people i think it's a single youtube channel that does like yeah visual effects like fake humanoid or robot dog uh robots that kind of resemble something like boston dynamics who do They do some crazy stuff with guns. This one, they gave the robot a gun.

Pull it up, Jamie. What is the gentleman? Corridor Digital on YouTube is the guys that make it. Corridor Crew is the YouTube channel. Fucking incredible that it's not real. It looks so real. And so the robot, they kick it, they hit it with a hockey helmet

or a hockey stick, rather. Is there a long video they made a while ago? They might have made a new one, which was the one out in the desert, but I think I had seen it before. See, they trick you with the Boston Dynamics. It's Boss Town. Boss Town Dynamics. It looks so realistic. But here's the thing.

We're not that far off from this thing. No. Okay, okay, okay. Let's walk it back's let's walk it back let's walk it back it it's not realistic uh in what way so let's it looks human realistic so you can tell it's a human like a robotics person could tell it's a human because it's really difficult to do that kind of motion that kind of movement oh like when it's getting shot well not the getting shot so there's a lot of movement it does for the purpose of comedy.

Right. Like it actually is on purpose trying to look like a human for the comedic internet effect, like getting a human that's getting pissed off and so on. Yeah. Those qualities are like another order of magnitude. Like this here where it's like, give me that.

Come on, give me that. Come on guys. Oh, come on. So for a terminator, yeah. Yeah.

That's hilarious. Doing Bruce Lee type of movements. Some of those are just comedic. You don't need Terminator type robot. Right, but they do have legitimate robots that can do backflips now and do. So it's really a backflip, parkour. This one's real. This is all real.

It's manipulation. So all of these robots, depending on what we're talking about here, but those are remote controlled. And these are single demonstrations that they've perfected. So it's really important to distinguish between the body of the robot and the brain of the robot. So these bodies, unlike anything else, unlike a Roomba, unlike a drone, who can also be very threatening, these bodies somehow, we anthropomorphize them,

and they terrify us. I don't know what it is. I met Spot Mini in person. That was one of the most transformative moments in my life. Really? Because I know how dumb it is, but the experience of it, like, it's not even a head. It's supposed to be a hand, but it looks like a head.

And it, like, looking up at me with that hand, I felt like I was, like, it was magic. It was like Frankenstein coming to life. It was this moment of creation. And what I realized is my own brain sort of anthropomorphizes. In the same way you're looking at these robots and you're thinking these things are terrifying, like in 10, 20 years, where are we going to be? That's our brain playing tricks on us

because the key thing that's a threat to humanity or an exciting possibility for humanity is the intelligence of the robots, the brains, the mind. And these robots have very, very little intelligence. So in terms of being able to perceive and understand the world, very importantly, very importantly, to learn about the world from scratch. So the terrifying thing is, you talked often, like, with this philosophical kind of notion that Sam Harris talks about, sort of exponential improvement, be able to become human level intelligence, superhuman level intelligence in a matter of days, become more intelligent than that.

That's all learning process. That's being able to learn. That's the key aspect. We're in the very early days of that. We're in the very early days of that. There's an idea of, you know, Big Bang is a funny word for one of the most fundamental ideas in the nature of our universe. Same way, self-play is a term for, I think, one of the most important, powerful ideas in artificial intelligence that people are currently working on. So self-play, I don't know if you're familiar with a company called DeepMind and OpenAI, so Google DeepMind, and a game, I know you're a first-person shooter

guy, but StarCraft and Dota 2. So last year, these are, what do you call them, real-time strategy, I guess, and people win millions of dollars in esport competitions. And so OpenAI separately had OpenAI 5, which took on Dota 2. Dota 2 is the computer game based on Warcraft 3. That's the most popular esport game. And then DeepMind took on StarCraft with their AlphaStar system. And the key amazing thing is there, similar to AlphaGo and AlphaZero that learn to play Go, is the mechanism of self-play. That's the exciting mechanism that I think if we can figure out how to have an impact on more serious problems than games would be transformative. Okay, what is it?

It's learning from scratch in a competitive environment. So thinking of you have two white belts, sorry, I'm going to do jiu-jitsu, you have two white belts training against each other and trying to figure out how to beat each other without ever having black belt supervision and structures and so on, and slowly getting better that way, coming up, inventing new moves that way. And eventually they get better and better

by that competitive process. That's the machine playing itself without human supervision. The interesting thing is there's a lot of cases in which if you set up the competitive environment well enough for those two white belts, they'll learn to be black belts. They'll learn to be not only black belts. They'll learn to be better than like exactly the kind of evolution that's happening in mma right now if you put that in a digital space and speed it up you know a million fold it'll continue to improve let me pause you here because this is one of the things that i think probably translates to ai as it does to jujitsu you need more than one opponent like you can't have one input one person training with one person

specifically and singularly you're not going to develop the type of game that you need to become a real black belt in jiu-jitsu 100 exactly so that's part of the brilliance of this mechanism so uh imagine you didn't just have white belts. You had an opportunity to generate a new random white belt, like a fat, big one, a little one, and all kinds of different ones. An aggressive one. A passive one. And let them play. So what you find is like jiu-jitsu might be simpler than the general problem

sort of different kind of of like uh starcraft and so on but there is sets of strategies in this giant space they're these complex hierarchical strategies like high level strategies and the specifics of different moves that emerge some of which you didn't even realize existed and that requires that you start with the huge amounts of random initial states like the fat person the skinny person the aggressive person so on and then you also keep injecting randomness in the system so you discover new ideas so even when you reach purple belt you don't continue with those same people you start your own school you start like you start expanding to totally random new ideas and expanding this way and what you find out is there's totally surprising to

human beings like in the game of chess or in the game of go in the game of starcraft these this self-play mechanism can do what sort of ai people have dreamed of which is be creative create totally new behaviors totally new strategies they are surprising to human experts. That's why Go was so astounding to them, right? Because it's such a complex game. It's such a hard game. And it's able to, well, the first astounding thing, it's able to beat the world champion at it. Yeah.

The second astounding thing about both chess and Go is it's able to create totally new ideas sort of i'm not good enough at chess or go to understand the newness of them but grandmasters talk about the way alpha alpha zero uh plays chess and they say there's a lot of brilliant interesting ideas there like very counterintuitive ideas and that's such a and that's all the first breakthroughs didn't have as much self-play. They were trained on human experts. But AlphaZero and AlphaStar and OpenAI 5, these systems are all fundamentally self-play, meaning no human supervision starting from scratch. So no black belt instructor. You just – and that means – so learning from scratch, that's exceptionally powerful.

That's a process from zero. You can get to superhuman level intelligence in a particular task in a matter of days. That's super powerful, super exciting, super terrifying, if that's kind of what you think about. exciting, super terrifying, if that's kind of what you think about. The challenge is we don't know how to do that in the physical space, in the space of robots. There's something fundamentally different about being able to perceive, to understand this environment, to do common sense reasoning. The thing we really take for granted is our ability to reason about the physics of the world, about the fact that things weigh things, that you can stack things on top of each other the fact that some things are hard some things are soft some things are painful when you touch them all that like there seems to be a

giant wikipedia inside our brain of like common sense dumb logic that's very tough to build up that this yeah that's that's it seems to be an exceptionally difficult learning problem that boston dynamics will have to solve in order to achieve even the same kind of physical movement behavior that we saw in those videos and then on top of that to have the ethical behavior the that not ethical, sort of the objective, the complex strategies involved in first following orders and then getting frustrated and then shooting everybody. That's an exceptionally difficult thing to arrive at because ultimately these systems operate on a set of objectives. these systems operate on a set of objectives. And what a lot of people that think about artificial general intelligence say, the objectives we need to inject in these systems that they're trained on need to have one uncertainty. So they should always doubt themselves. Just like if you want to be a good black belt, you should always be sort of always open-minded, sort of relax,

always need to learn techniques. It's okay to get submitted. So always have a degree of uncertainty about your worldview, the kind of thing we criticized Twitter outrage mobs for not having. So having uncertainty. And the other thing is always have a place where there should be human supervision. a place where there should be human supervision. And I think we have good mechanisms for that in place that I think I'm very optimistic about where these kinds of learning systems can take us. The exciting thing is Boston Dynamics,

well, terrifying, depending on whether you think I'm a trustworthy human being, but Boston Dynamics is now opening up their platform. So they're working with a few people. I'm trying to make, I'm quite busy these days, but I'm trying to make time to make it happen, to work with them to build stuff on top of the platform. Sorry, I'm referring to Spot Mini as a platform.

So this robot is this dumb, it's like a Roomba. It's a dumb mechanistic thing that can move for you. But you can build, you can add a brain on top of it. So you can make it learn. You can make it see the world and so on. That's all extra. That's not what Boston Dynamics offers. So they want to work with people like me to add that kind of capability.

And that's exciting because now you can have hundreds of people start to add interesting learning capabilities. And so I may have to retract my words about how far away we are with the capabilities of these robots once you now open up to the Internet. So I was speaking to Boston Dynamics. I think they're solving the really hard robotics problem. But once you open it up to the huge world of researchers that are doing machine learning and doing computer vision and doing AI research, the kind of capabilities that might add to these robots might surprise us. That's where people are concerned, right?

The big leaps. The big leaps. And then sort of just not being aware of the consequences of these big leaps. And once you let the genie out of the bottle, you can never put it back. Right. The genie and the self-play mechanism where you grow from zero to becoming world-class chess player, that's the genie being out of the bottle. Did you see Black Mirror?

Yeah, Black Mirror. You know that episode, Heavy Metal? Heavy Metal. Very difficult to pull that off. For now. For now. For now. And you had a conversation with Nick Bostrom, whom I'm also talking with on the podcast. Yeah. One of the things he mentioned is, so I don't think he thinks about this stuff a lot. I do about military applications.

I talk to folks. That's one of the things people don't just like with me they kind of put to the side they don't want to think about military applications right i would be more worried about drones than i would be about robot dogs right because the kind of stuff we saw in the black mirror episode is really difficult to pull off to make a robot learn i can drones are kind of more impressive right because they they hover they can move through 3d space they they have hellfire missiles attached to them i mean there's a lot of crazy shit that they can absolutely do right now with drones and you're talking about large-scale drones but you can think of small-scale drones and i think there's a i think there's also a black mirror episode with drones where they take over i haven't't seen that one. So there's, I think there's drones everywhere and they're kind of doing

you know, your basic friendly government surveillance, mass surveillance kind of thing. I think it's for, I think they sell in the episode that it's for a good cause. Spoiler alert, but I think they like start killing everybody or whatever.

Wasn't there, there has been research done on making artificial insects that have little cameras inside of them that look like a dragonfly or some sort of bug, and they fly around and they can film things. And the thing that terrifies a lot of people is going more microscopic than that, more like robots inside the body that help you cure diseases yeah not certain things even at the nano scale so so basically creating viruses yeah creating new viruses little tiny ones yeah and they if they learn they can be pretty dumb but on a mass scale dumb you don't have to be intelligent to destroy all of human civilization so so the real question about this artificial intelligence stuff that everybody seems to the ultimate end of the

line the what sam harris is terrified of is it becoming sentient and it making its own decisions and deciding that we don't need people. That's what everybody's really scared of, right? I'm not sure if everybody's scared of it. Yeah, they might be. I think that's a story that's the most compelling, the sexiest story that the philosopher side of a Sam Harris is very attracted to. Yeah. I am also interested in that story. But I think achieving sentience, I think that requires also creating consciousness.

I think that requires creating the kind of intelligence and cognition and reasoning abilities that's really, really difficult. I think we'll create dangerous software-based systems before then. That'll be a huge threat. I think we already have them. The YouTube algorithm, the Twitter, the recommender systems of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, from everything I know, having talked to those folks, having worked on it, the challenging aspect there is they have the power to control minds, the mass sort of what the mass population thinks and youtube itself and twitter itself

don't have direct ability to control the algorithm exactly like that one they don't have a way to understand the algorithm and two they don't have a way to control it because but what I mean by control is control it in a way that leads to, in aggregate, a better civilization, meaning like sort of the Steven Pinker, the better angels of our nature, sort of encourage the better sides of ourselves. It's very difficult to control a single algorithm that recommends the journey of millions of people through the space of the internet. It's very difficult to control that. And I think that intelligence instilled in those algorithms will have a much more potentially either positive or detrimental effect than sentient killer robots. I hope we get to sentient killer robots

because that problem I think we can work with. I'm very optimistic about the positive aspects of approaching sentience, of approaching general intelligence. There's going to be a huge amount of benefit. And I think there will be – there's a lot of mechanisms that can protect against that going wrong. Just from knowing the – we know how to control intelligent systems when they are sort of in a box, when they're singular systems, when they're distributed across millions of people and there's not a single control point. That becomes really difficult.

And that's the worry for me is the distributed nature of dumb algorithms on every single phone, sort of controlling the behavior, adjusting the behavior, adjusting the learning journey of different individuals. So to me, the biggest worry and the most exciting thing is recommender systems, what they're called, at Twitter, at youtube uh youtube especially that one that one has just like i think you mentioned there's something special about videos in terms of educating and sometimes indoctrinating people and youtube has the hardest time i mean they have such a difficult problem on their hands in terms of in terms of that recommendation because they don't uh this is a this is a machine learning problem but knowing the contents of tweets is much easier than knowing the contents of videos like we our algorithms are really dumb in terms of being able to watch a video, understand what's being talked about. So all YouTube is looking at is the title and the description.

And that's it. Mostly the title. It's like basically keyword searching. And it's looking at the clicking, viewing behavior of the different people. So it figures out that the Flat Earth supporters enjoy these kinds of videos. It forms a different kind of cluster and, you know, makes decisions based on that. By the way, it seems to make definitive decisions about, you know, it doesn't like Flat Earth, YouTube, I think. Well, YouTube in particular, they're trying to do something about the influx of conspiracy theory videos.

Yeah. And the indoctrination aspect of them. That, you know, one of the things about videos is, like, say if someone makes a video and they make it on a very particular subject and they speak eloquently and articulately, but they're wrong about everything they're saying. They don't understand the science. Say if they're talking about artificial intelligence. Right.

They're saying something about things that you are an expert in. They could, without being checked, without someone like you in the room that says that's not possible because of X, Y, and Z, without that, they can just keep talking. So one of the things that they do, whether it's about flat Earth or whether it's about dinosaurs being fake or nuclear bombs being fake, they can just say these things and they do it with an excellent grasp of the English language, right? So they say it, they're very compelling in the way they speak. They'll show you pictures and images. And if you are not very educated and you don't understand

that this is nonsense, and if you're, especially if can get roped in you can get roped in real easy and that's a problem and it's a problem with some of the people that work in these platforms their children get indoctrinated and they get angry their children get indoctrinated now what's interesting is they get indoctrinated also with right-wing ideology and then people get mad that they're indoctrinated by like ben shapiro videos so they'll they'll get pissed off at that well but you're okay with left wing right why because you're left wing so then it becomes like okay what is a problem what's really a problem and what is just something that's

opposed to your personal ideology? And who gets to make that distinction? And that is where the arguments for the First Amendment come into play. Like, should these social media companies that have massive amounts of power and influence, should they be held to the same standards as the First Amendment? And should these platforms be treated as essentially a town hall, like where anyone can speak? And there's a platform. And there's a real problem in that there's not that many of them. This is a real problem.

The real problem is like Twitter is the place where people go to argue and talk about shit. And then Twitter maybe has a competitor on Facebook, but YouTube certainly doesn't have a competitor. YouTube doesn't have any competitor. I mean, there's Vimeo. There's a few other platforms, but realistically, it's YouTube. You know, YouTube is a giant, giant platform. What is this? Alphabet reports YouTube ad revenue for the first time.

Video service generated $15.1 billion in 2019. Holy shit. In comparison, I just looked up Twitch ad revenue was supposedly around $500 to $600 million. Wow, that's a big difference. And what about Facebook? Facebook is stupendously valuable. Probably way higher than that, but this is the first time I've seen a report. Facebook, I don't think, pays.

Like, YouTube paid for my McDonald's burgers yesterday. Yeah, Facebook's not, right? Facebook is not, and Twitter and Instagram, I don't think, are paying you directly. There's a lot of calls to break up Facebook. I'm not. I mean, I'm on Facebook, but I'm not on it. I don't use it. It's just connected to my Instagram.

When I post something on Instagram, it goes to Facebook as well. I never go to Facebook. There's a Joe Rogan Facebook group that's a dumpster fire of brilliant folks. Let me just put it that way. Look at this. Facebook's revenues amounted to $21.8 billion. In just the fourth quarter. Jesus Christ, just the fourth quarter.

The majority of which were generated through advertising. The company announced over 7 million active advertisers on Facebook during the third quarter of 2019. That probably, though, also adds an Instagram. That thing with YouTube is just YouTube, not Google, not YouTube Premium, not anything else. And to be fair, so the cash they have, they spend like Facebook AI research groups, some of the most brilliant. It's a huge group that's doing general open-ended research.

Google Research, Google Brain, Google DeepMind are doing open-ended research. Like they're not doing the ad stuff. They're really trying to build. That's the cool thing about these companies having a lot of cash is they can bring some of the smartest people and let them work on whatever in case it comes up with a cool idea like autonomous vehicles with Waymo. It's like, let's see if we can make this work. Let's throw some money at it even if it doesn't make any money in the next 5, 10, 20 years.

Let's make it work. That's the positive sort of side of having that kind of money. Yeah, that makes sense. That there is, as long as they keep doing those kind of things. The real concern, though, is that they're actually severely influencing the democratic process. So it's difficult. I mean, certainly in Jack Dorsey.

Jack Dorsey, in terms of the CEOs we've interacted with, I think was one of the good guys. Yes, I agree. Yeah. I mean, he's – He wants a Wild West Twitter. Well, he doesn't know – he wants a good Twitter. He's kind of thinking about Wild West. But he wants – his ideas have two.

Oh, two Twitter? One that's filtered and one that's like, anything goes. Yeehaw. But I think he, the point is, nobody knows what's the best kind of Twitter. Even having two Twitters,

like, do you really want the Wild West? Do you want the First Amendment to say free speech for everyone? It's a difficult, like, the gray area there, you were just talking

about YouTube with certain people like saying that i'm an expert in ai or autonomous vehicles but i disagree with a lot of people and if those people make videos and maybe they don't have a phd god forbid like are they not an expert either am i right i'm actually personally sick of the academic sort of cathedral thinking that just because you have a PhD and just you can be an expert. Like I'm not an expert. I'm an idiot. Do you feel like that that line is getting more blurred with the access to like all those MIT courses that are online and the extreme amount of data that's available to people that there are going to be a lot of people that even though they might not be classically trained they have a massive amount of information and have an open mind yeah like the

best you know i love uh like i like i've recorded a podcast right i do like what first of all shout out to uh jamie for being incredible mastermind of audio production right what sir thank you yeah but he's the goat the reason reason I'm giving a shout out because it sucks so badly I didn't have to do it. I do it all myself. But I learned that I do it pretty good. When you learn it yourself from scratch,

just like with jiu-jitsu or with music and so on, I learned guitar from scratch. You can learn with the online materials they have now. You can become really good. And the journey you take is not the traditional conformist journey through that education process. You take your own journey.

And when you have millions of people taking their own journey through that process, there's going to be brilliant people without a PhD or without ever having gone to college. Right. And they, I mean, it's difficult to know what to do with that, especially about political questions like economists. There's these, you know, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner, economists, Harvard economists, you know, they're supposed to be the holders of the truth, the fundamentals of our economy. And when is there going to be a crash? What's good for economy is the left the right what taxation system is good for the economy

but nobody really knows same with like nutrition science psychology economics anything that involves humans it's a giant mess that expertise can come from anywhere. Right. Like Rhonda Patrick. I think she's pretty criticized for – she's kind of young. Yeah. And she's – I would say she's incredibly knowledgeable as one of the world sort of experts. But I think academia probably doesn't acknowledge her as an expert because she's like young. She recently got a PhD. I don't – I'm not even sure – like there's that kind of hierarchy that people push she's been unjustly criticized by people who don't even know her actual credentials there

was one guy who was criticizing her and saying well she's not a clinical researcher that's one of the things he was backing his criticism on like no that's exactly what she is and she's been doing that for years like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. People get very touchy with her because she's young and also because she's incredibly brilliant. Like, that lady, she brings stacks and stacks of notes when she comes here. She doesn't even look at them. She just rattles off all those studies off the top of her head. She has a massive amount of data available. And she's very unbiased in her perceptions of things.

Like, she's all about what do the results say what have the studies proven what can we learn from those studies and what do we have to take into consideration when we're we're assessing this data she's brilliant she's she's off the charts brilliant and people get fucking jealous and i've seen it i've seen it with weaker lazy minds in academia that criticize her that had at least at one point in time, had a larger platform. And I think her platform is bigger now. And I'm happy that I've played a part in that. And I don't want to be a social justice warrior, but I have seen women being criticized more harshly in a lot of domains of science.

I think you're right. Yeah. Well, you know, she's pretty, too. There's a lot of things wrong there. I get criticized for that, too. Good-looking. Beautiful guy. Good think you're right. Yeah. Well, you know, she's pretty too. There's a lot of things wrong there. You know, I get criticized for that too. Like good looking, beautiful guy, good dress. Well, funny. Yeah. Handsome. No, actually I get criticized as this guy's an idiot. Boring. Why can't he be more like Joe Rogan? Okay. What else you got there? Uh, what else? The notes wise? Yeah. I got to talk to you about martial arts. Okay. I got to talk to you about, well, so I'm a huge fan of wrestling and a huge fan of the Dagestan region.

Yes. And I've gotten a lot of shit for it, posted that, you know, Conor's going to be cowboy before that happened. I'm also a huge fan of the different styles of fighters in MMA and I'm surprised how much shit actually Conor gets even though he brought besides

sort of all the mess that came with him he also brought an interesting style an interesting way of approaching fights an interesting style of thinking and also philosophizing about fighting which I think is amazing an interesting style, an interesting way of approaching fights, an interesting style of thinking, and also philosophizing about fighting,

which I think is amazing. And it clashes with the ideas of Khabib. To me, Khabib Nurmagomedov, it'd be... So I posted that Conor would be cowboy, and, well, I didn't know Dana was going to say what he was going to say, but face Masvidal,

and I thought he could beat Masvidal. And then the biggest fight ever, 30,000 people in Moscow against Khabib. For a rematch. For a rematch would be the greatest fight ever. Getting past Masvidal is not easy, man. And Khabib getting past Tony Ferguson is not easy. Not easy, yeah. Both of those fights, and first of all, Masvidal is now going to fight Usman, which is very interesting.

Is going to, right? Yeah. That's July. Very, very interesting fight. Usman is such a tank. He's fucking terrifying. They hate each other. There's a lot of, yeah.

Animosity, yeah. Certainly a lot of animosity and a lot of shit talking. But it's also the more that happens, the better it is for both of them in terms of revenue generated. It's a really interesting fight. Now, let me tell you something. When Masvidal was at the Connor cowboy fight, when they put the camera on him, biggest pop from the crowd. The biggest. Pop meaning like a blouse, like screaming.

People went nuts. They saw him. They're like, yeah. And he was like... And wearing that robe over there. He's hilarious. Dude, I mean, he's right. Look, he's a slow starter in terms of his career,

like being recognized for the kind of fighter that he is now and also being recognized publicly as like a superstar. But his time has come. He is here. He is a fucking star. When that camera went on him and the audience saw him, that crowd went bananas. The entire T-Mobile arena, just they went crazy.

Yeah, that would be, I mean, yeah, with Luz Mala would be an epic fight. But in terms of like the great, I just think, maybe it's me, the romanticized notion of like Rocky IV, but Conor versus Khabib in Moscow. I can just see it with like Putin and Fedor sitting there. I'll sit next to him. Do you think they would do it in Moscow?

Yeah. 30,000 people. If Conor went to Moscow, man. Good luck getting out of there if you win. Good luck getting out of there if you lose. If you lose. He's so loved there khabib is so loved in russia but they i think russian people also love mma generally there's a

like the the fan the number of people that love fighting in russia is huge and i i know it seems like on the internet khabib is like uh love Khabib and Conor's hated. But I think ultimately they love a good – what does Conor call it? A good – Heel? No, no. A good scrap I think he calls it. A good fight.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that would be probably the biggest fight of all time. And I think actually Conor has a shot. Like this – I love – Khabib is probably my favorite fighter. I love that style of fighting. I like the Sayetiev brothers that Frankie Edgar mentioned to you about. They're probably the – Buvaissar Sayetiev is the greatest freestyle wrestler of all time.

Just epic. His brother Adam has a match against the Soldier of God. What's his name? Yoel Romero. Yoel Romero at the 2000 Olympics in the finals. Yoel Romero looks like if you were to imagine the most terrifying opponent ever, he's just like shredded, ripped. And then Adam Saetiev looks like like i don't know dad bod very

skinny like nerd and he just effortlessly like like destroys him really yeah with a trip like let me see that video is it online 2000 olympic sydney finals adam satiev versus his name um adam uh satiev s-a-i-t-i-e-v versus um yoel romero's fighting israel adesanya in march that is giant i can't i okay maybe not too much of a nerd but well he definitely doesn't look as built as yoel i mean yoel's a freak yoel's probably the freakiest athlete i think i've ever seen personally in terms of his build like his small waist he hugged that guy and picked him up i was at the end of it what moment was i looking for in here? There's a couple moments where he scores points. Noel's got them down here. Yeah, so he's up by 4-1.

And I think, once again, he takes them down. There's a 4-0 there. Let's see. Just start it off from the beginning so we can watch it. There's a certain moment. There it goes. Just start it right there. They're basically technicians.

Yes, for sure. When you look at the dagestani people i mean it's such emphasis on technique yeah everything else but also toughness it's like they don't they have both things like and this is one of the things that george saint pierre told me about training in russia uh excuse me training in montreal what a takedown right there fuck yeah spectacular yep oh my god it's's amazing. Look at that. I think that was like an inner trip, Uchigari type of trip.

Look, he covers his mouth. What George St. Pierre told me about training with Russian nationals in Montreal, he said they're so technical in that you get a lot of Americans that are definitely technical, but they emphasize being hard and tough and grueling training routines and grinding, butting heads in practice. And he said, whereas

the Russian nationals are far more committed to drilling, far more committed to the technical aspects of exchanges and going through one through you know one one technique after the other chaining these techniques together understanding the paths also the one of the at least to me one of the differences it could be similar to y'all romero's actually philosophy but the philosophy of the dagestani the russian people the soviet union is that recognition fame money all that stuff doesn't matter even winning doesn't matter the purity of the art is what matters at least with the saiti of brothers is what they stood for well that's that's mirrors what khabib says about connor that he doesn't want to have a rematch with him yeah he's like fuck that dude that's there i mean yeah khabib

is a little bit more of the modern age. I mean, he has an Instagram and Twitter and so on, right? And Khabib, despite what he says, also does a little bit of trash talking. And, you know, he still plays the game a little bit. I want to change his face. That's my favorite. Send me location. I want to change his face.

Most people say, especially when I'm here, is basically if Khabib did science. I take that as a compliment. That's one of my favorite quotes he's ever said, though. I want to change his face. I want to change his face. It's terrifying. It's terrifying because he can do it. The cool thing is with Conor, that doesn't affect him.

The confidence he has, the confidence that Conor has is just incredible. Well, that he wants to do it again. But I know for a fact that Conor was going through a whole lot of shit before that fight and did not have the best training camp. And if he did, an amazing training camp for this. Like he really prepared. Like he did for Conor. Or excuse me, Cowboy.

The Cowboy fight, his coaches were saying he's never looked better. That he just was on fire and so focused and so so accurate and and precise in training and that he was just on fire and that just seemed to be that all of the bullshit and the distractions and all the things that sort of come with being the kind of global superstar that connor is he managed to figure out a way to get away from those and to just really concentrate on his craft and pull everything to a championship level again. And God damn it, he looked like it against Cowboy.

And to see the contrast of those two cultures, I mean, it is a Rocky IV type of situation. Yeah. Because you better believe Conor McGregor will resume trash-talking. Who knows? He might not. He might not? He might not. I mean, he didn't in this fight with Cowboy at all. He didnor will resume trash-talking. Who knows? He might not. He might not. He might not.

I mean, he didn't in this fight with Cowboy at all. He didn't do any trash-talking. I wonder if maybe he has learned, and I wonder if his desire to beat Khabib eclipses his desire to get inside of his head and play all the games that he usually plays and the promotional games that ultimately probably won't be necessary. But I think, you know, the UFC is trying to push for it right now. They're pushing for it right now, a rematch with Khabib.

But they're ignoring Tony Ferguson in a lot of ways, in my eyes. And I'm like, that is the boogeyman. That's going to be exciting. It can go anywhere. He's the boogeyman, dude. He doesn't get tired. He doesn't get tired. He slices go anywhere. He's the boogeyman, dude. He doesn't get tired. He doesn't get tired. He slices everybody up.

He's lost one fight in X amount of years, and that was because he had a broken arm. Michael Johnson broke his arm. So when you think about what Tony has been able to do to world-class fighters, what he did to Donald, I mean, he just smashed Donald's face. He smashed Anthony Pettis. He smashes everybody. Tony Ferguson's the goddamn boogeyman. He really is.

He doesn't get tired, man. Do you think he'll get taken down? For sure he'll get taken down. Do you think he'll be able to do his thing on him? He's not scared to be taken down. That's the difference between Tony and everyone else. If he gets taken down, he might let him take him down and just attack off of his back and elbow the shit out of him off of his back He's fucking dangerous off his back. He's hard to control. He scrambles very very well

He also has fantastic submissions and he catches him from everywhere. I mean he catches Triangle chokes darts chokes his darts chokes are spectacular. He's got one of the best darts chokes, Darce chokes. His Darce chokes are spectacular. He's got one of the best Darce chokes in the sport. And he's not scared. Ooh, if Khabib gets submitted. Oh, my God, that would be crazy. What if he puts Khabib to sleep? Look, remember when Dustin Poirier caught Khabib in a guillotine?

Yeah. Yeah, he did. He caught Khabib in a guillotine. Listen, that is not where you want to be with Tony Ferguson ferguson you do not want to be in that position with tony ferguson that's a different kind of guillotine so dustin poirier is primarily a striker clearly he has submission skills he submitted guys before he submitted max holloway and dustin poirier is a bad motherfucker no doubt about it but when it comes to pure submission skills tony ferguson has an edge and um you know he's a black belt and a tenth planet black belt he's a master of submissions

and a great wrestler and a great scrambler and the thing about him that's so fucking terrifying is his cardio is all the things right it's the striking it's the the grappling it's the submission abilities. But he's not going to get tired. He doesn't get tired. And his mind is impenetrable. His mind's impenetrable. Yeah, people are looking past that fight.

Fuck no, not me, man. I don't understand it. When the UFC's talking about, you know, look at everybody he's fought. Beat the fuck out of everybody. Edson Barboza, Rafael Dos Anjos. Tony Ferguson, yeah. Yeah, I mean, Rafael Dos Anjos. Tony Ferguson, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he smashes people. He smashes people.

I mean, it's crazy. I would say it probably could be his toughest fight to date. I think it is his toughest fight. I do. I think that puts, you know, a lot of people put Khabib, like, in close to the top ten of all time. Oh, he close to the top 10 of all time. Oh, he's in the top 10 of all time. In my eyes. He's 28-0 as a lightweight.

Who cares about the record? You look at the people you've beat. Sometimes we idolize people for the perfection of the record too much. Dude, the way he ragdolled Rafael dos Anjos, the way he steamrolled. He's beaten top flight competition and made them look like they have no business being in there with them but i think if you beat tony ferguson i mean that yeah that's the place is him that's the message yeah and people put him above like i don't know i think hana deserves to be in that story in that in that top like 15 top 10 perhaps perhaps jose aldo yes like beating oh yeah i don't know why people look

past like jose aldo or um eddie alvarez oh yeah the eddie alvarez fight was unbelievable like at least maybe i'm just um biased in the sense that i thought there's no way that connor beats jose aldo and then there's no way connor beats beats Eddie Alvarez moving up a weight class. Like, I always thought he's going to lose. And being surprised makes me, like, up Conor's ability in my head. Well, he's phenomenal. With Conor, it seems to be a matter of how focused he is and who is he fighting and, you know, where is he at in his life.

He's just, his life is so chaotic he's always filled with so many distractions i mean think about all the crazy shit that he's done the throwing the throwing the uh the dolly at the bus and just all the nutty shit he's done but it's nice that he seems to be still hungry to fight even though he probably has a lot of money in the bank well he certainly was hungry to fight cowboy i mean he looked fantastic in that fight um and again you know he's worth a couple hundred million dollars it's so it's just the pure love of the game that pure love of the game and that's kind of the ethic that's the warrior ethos that khabib comes from and that it's cool to see that mind if i nobody's ever said anything in Russian, actually,

probably in the Joe Rogan podcast. No, I don't think so. If you ever need a translator, I'm your man. No, can I read, so, Saitiev, just a few lines in Russian. Okay, sure. So, Bovaissar Saitiev would read Boris Parstanak, which is a famous Russian poet,

won the Nobel Prize before every match, and he kind of captures that ethic. So this is the poem. I'll say it in Russian and then in English. Please. Okay. Другие по живому следу пройдут твой путь с опять до пять, но поражение от победы ты сам не должен отличать.

И должен ни единой долькой не отпуститься от лица. Но быть живым, живым и только, живым и только до конца. I know there's a bunch of Russian people that would appreciate that. The translation is a bit crappy. It's very difficult to translate the Russian language.

But it's the others step by step will follow the living imprint of your feet. But you yourself must not distinguish your victory from your defeat. And never for a single moment betray your credo or pretend. But be alive, only this matters, alive and burning to the end. So this is the end of a poem that represents the fact that fame, most of the poem says that fame, recognition, money, none of that matters.

The winning and losing, none of that matters. What matters is the purity of the art, just giving yourself completely over to the art. So others will write your story. Others will tell whether you did good or bad. Others will inspire using your story. But as the artist, so in the case of Pasternak, he's a poet, writer, wrote Dr. Zhivago,

is the art, you should only think about the art and the purity of it and the love of it. And so when you look at Bovaser Seytiev and the brothers and the whole Dagestan region, they shunned fame. So the thing that Khabib has thrust into this MMA world, which is fundamentally, I mean, it's a popular sport. It's an interesting thing. I mentioned, I think, last time I was on here, the most terrifying human being. You know, investors, when they buy a penny stock, seeing it's going to blow up?

To me, the most terrifying human being in the heavyweight division, the Russian tank I mentioned last time, the Sadulaev, who now just continues destroying everybody. And it looks like he's already won a gold medal, won a bunch of world championships. He's a heavyweight. The heavyweights in the UFC should be scared. Is he going to fight MMA? So the hard thing – Spell his name and let's get a video so we can look at it.

There he is. Jamie's got it. Bam. I will never join MMA. No, hold on a second. That's not true. The MMA. The MMA.

That's part of the quote. And that's not true that's the mma that's a that's part of the quote that's and that's not that's that's not so yeah i love said live that's closer to where he was chasing he's still chasing the olympics so 2020 olympics how do you say the name how'd you say his first name uh well i just call him the russian tank but uh's Abdul Rashid Sadalai. Okay. 23, 24 years old, and I think his tension is, and he says he has a lot of close friends who are MMA fighters. He loves watching it.

He feels a lot for them, but it's not the very thing that this poem gets at. He doesn't want – he thinks that wrestling, the pure sport of wrestling, is all about courage, skill, like he describes it in this way. He thinks MMA also has to have this component of sort of trash talk and showmanship. And he doesn't like it. But I think that MMA needs that guy too, right? Like a heavyweight Khabib. Heavyweight Khabib.

Every Conor needs a Khabib. Like every showman needs a person who says showmanship sucks. Every Ali needs a Frazier. Yeah, Frazier, right. But this guy is terrifying. I think he would do the same thing to the Khabib division. Again, humble technique is everything, but just strength-wise is also a monster. And is he really thinking about fighting or no?

It's hard to say. It's hard to say because, again, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time really focused on 2020 Olympics. He's throwing punches here. I think what's going to happen is once Likely wins gold at this Olympics, he's going to, you know, this titanic ship, a 23-, 24-year-old ship is going to start thinking and turning. Maybe there is artistry.

Maybe there is skill and courage in mixed martial arts. Well, there definitely is. I mean, he doesn't have to do the trash-talking thing. There's a lot of people that are very stoic that fight, and they don't participate in any of that stuff. And then there's people that thrive on that stuff. I mean, it's really up to you. The UFC doesn't tell you you have to talk trash.

I mean, results are what matters. Right. And it's not even trash that's interesting. I think stories are interesting. Yeah. That's why people like team sports, like NFL. Did you watch the Super Bowl yesterday? No, I didn't.

Yeah. Went to Disneyland. I wanted to talk to you about something that was at Disneyland. What's that? There's a new Star Wars ride This crazy Star Wars ride It's a 20 minute ride I mean it's a crazy long ride

And a lot of it you're in Like a vehicle And the vehicle is all programmed By computers The direction of the vehicle, the way the vehicle moves It's very complex There's no tracks so you're riding around

on this vehicle and the vehicle like they're shooting at you the vehicle has to back up you go into this new door the vehicle knows how to go around a corner and what's that guy's name

Darth Maul he's trying to cut through the wall spoiler alert fucking this new ride is amazing it's crazy

how intricate and complicated it is and how far off the deep end Disneyland went to create this thing I mean it looks so crazy I mean you're like how much money this cost this is it right here so you're riding around and these things and stormtroopers are shooting at you and are there rails or no no no there's no rails man everything is done by computer the computer tracks out the environment and knows where each one of these go and by the way there's several cars moving at the same time so there's people in front of you they're in cars they get shot at and look at the

fucking scale of this place so that's one of them giant four four-legged robot things that's in star wars so you're moving underneath them there's giant cannons that you have to move through it's in rise of the resistance it's trackless yeah so this represents on the ground there's some uh yeah i think those lines in the ground are just the wheels going the same way over and over and over yeah no sorry i just wanted to sort of commentate but they're probably not using the computer version. So, yeah, I think it's probably LiDAR-based. I don't know what it's based on,

but the computer is coordinating all of these different things at the same time. You go through this room, and you're seeing battles outside, and you feel it. You see the walls get hit like that. Like, it's fucking crazy, man. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, in the ride the line is bonkers so the robotics aspect of this like the ai aspect of this is

probably minimal look at that look at that like you're in this thing you move through this room and in the background you're watching these starships shooting at each other and the fucking time perfectly yeah it's crazy man yeah so to make this happen i mean these are people starships shooting at each other. It's all timed perfectly. Yeah. It's crazy, man. It's really cool. To make this happen, I mean, these are people that are willing to probably invest hundreds of millions in this. Guaranteed.

So I think there's some, like there's very minimal AI in this because AI creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is very undesirable in situations like this. Yes. Yeah, I don't think there's any AI in it, but there is some, for sure, there's some sort of automation, some computer automation. Yeah, but it's basic software. It's like, it's software automation. Don't call this basic.

Don't you dare. Don't you dare, Lex. Star Wars is not even real. Wow. Who are you? There's reusable rockets being launched on a monthly basis and we're gonna colonize Mars

for real soon that's real right that's more interesting for sure definitely but this is dope so I'll be sitting on Mars while you

no I'll be here playing fucking Disneyland rides and then I'll go home and sleep in a bed and breathe air and fuck you'll be out there

on Mars and the history books will remember you 80 degrees history books I don't know history books don remember you. 80 degrees, bozer. The history books. I don't know. The history books don't matter once you're dead. Yeah.

I mean, it's nice that we have access to the history books, and I praise the historians for sure. But I'm not interested in making history. Yeah, I don't know actually why I said that, because I don't care about the history books. Just the exciting, it's one of the only frontiers that we can actually be explorers in. Like we've explored – well, the depths of the ocean we haven't exactly explored.

Right, yeah. But the outer space, that's like – man, that's like the most exciting possibility for engineering and science that we can explore. And the mind, like I mentioned. Like we don't know shit about the mind and exploring that with neuroscience, with AI, just all of that, the, the cautious, the, all the other thing you talked about with Bostrom and simulation. Yes. I wanted to talk to you about that too. Um, cause you brought up Bostrom. He was relying on theories in terms of like mathematical theories of probability to say that he thinks it's more likely that we're in a simulation. Yeah, he has a – the thing he's articulated, I don't think he's come up with the idea of the simulation.

He just kind of really thought about it deeply. He came up with a simulation argument, which are these three categories that he described to possible outcomes i think uh the first one is we destroy ourselves before we ever create a simulation the second one is that we would lose interest in creating a simulation at some point and the third one is uh we're living in a simulation yeah and Where do you lean? I think to, I think there's going to, the three paths that he highlighted, it makes it sound like it's so clear

that it's just three, but I think there's going to be a huge amount of possibilities of the kinds of simulations. Like to me, I keep asking, you know, to ask Elon Musk, he's about the simulation, where he said, What's on the other side? Elon Musk about the simulation where he said

what's outside the simulation? Yeah, I think I asked what would you ask an AGI system? He said what's outside the simulation is the question. He believes in it. Or at least he entertains it as a troll. Elon Musk embodies

the best of the Twitter internet troll, a meme, and a brilliant engineer and designer in one. It's like a quantum state that you can't quite figure out what's the coupling. Because I don't know if he's trolling, but I'm the same way. I love asking people out to simulation even though I get a little bit of hate from the scientific community. Why do you get hate from the scientific community about simulation? Because it's a ridiculous notion if you think of it like literally because it's not a testable thing. We don't know how to test.

Like why are you talking about this? Why do you sit down with Elon Musk and talk about the simulation when you're sitting with a world expert in particular aspects of rockets or robotics. I'm an expert. I can't believe I just said that. I'm not an expert on anything. But I know a few things about autonomous vehicles. Why don't you talk to them about that? Why don't we talk about simulation?

Well, the thing is the simulation pushes you outside of the muck, the messiness of everyday details of science and makes you ask big questions about like the nature of our reality and i i like to think of it as like what how would we build a simulation like what would be a compelling enough virtual reality game that you want to stay there for all your your whole life that's a first step there that's useful to think about like what is our reality what what aspects of the are most interesting for us humans to be able to perceive with our limited perception cognitive abilities interpret and interact with and then the bigger question then is like how do you build a larger scale simulation that would be able to create that virtual reality game which i think is a possible future we're already creating virtual worlds for ourselves on twitter and social networks and so that would be able to create that virtual reality game, which I think is a possible future.

We're already creating virtual worlds for ourselves on Twitter and social networks and so on. I really believe that virtual reality will enter. We'll spend more and more of our lives in the next 50 to 100 years in virtual worlds. And the simulation hypothesis, the simulation discussion is part of that. I think there's the question of what's outside simulation is really interesting.

That's the other way of because like what created us? What started the whole thing? It's the modern version of asking what is God? What does God look like? It's asking what does the programmer look like i think that's a a fascinating question but arguing that we're already living this simulation i think you've got stuck in that little point i think it's not that there's a bit of a language barrier too there's a there's a technical yeah i think nick is legit it's funny it's funny nick is

a legit philosopher and so he's been fighting battles in the philosophy game like you asked him does somebody disagree with him yeah on these hypothesis and there's a bunch of philosophers disagree with them but including sean carroll on the philosophical level and a lot of the arguments are in philosophy and they're sort of technical and they're about language and about terms and so on. But I think, yeah, it's very possible that we live in a simulation. I think one of the constructs of physics, theoretical physics, with many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, as Sean has talked to you about, reveals some interesting sort of fundamental building blocks of our reality. There's something I don't think people have talked to you about, which is like the coolest thing to me,

the most amazing thing that nobody can explain, yet things called cellular automata. And there's a guy, a mathematician named John Conway, who came up in the 70s with a thing called Game of Life. And cellular automata are these two-dimensional or one-dimensional, but Game of Life is two-dimensional grid where every single little cell is really dumb and it behaves based on the cells next to it.

And it's born when there's a certain number, like three cells alive next to it, and it dies otherwise. So it's like a simple rule for birth and death, and all it knows is its nearby surrounding and its own life. And if you take that system with a really dumb rule and expand it in size, arbitrary complexity emerges. You can have Turing machines, so you can simulate perfect computers

with that system and it can grow and all these behaviors grow like if you watch if people google like game of life and you can watch this extremely dumb simple system just grow arbitrary complexities complexities and what you start to realize that from such incredibly simple building blocks that don't know anything about the bigger world around them you can build our entire universe you can build the kind of complexities we see in this so like we think that god is like designing every little aspect or whatever of our world or a simulation hypothesis the simulation is designed by hand like I'm going to craft these things what you realize is all you can all you need to do is just set some initial conditions set some really basic rules and allow the system to grow as long as it can grow arbitrarily just crazy stuff amazing stuff can happen from like

from simplicity complexity can emerge and that for like if you study this a little bit closer just like watch it people can watch a game of life on youtube and think about what it's showing like for 10 minutes it'll blow your mind the The fact that from simplicity, arbitrary complexity, beauty can emerge is like incredible. So for the simulation, the creator of the simulation is probably some 13-year-old nerd living in his mom's basement. It's probably just set some rules in this video game and press play. And then arbitrary complexity can emerge it can have a joe rogan it can have an elon musk all the technologies that we've developed and probably millions of other alien species that are living throughout our universe

jesus so the yeah that to me the cellular automata reveals that the simulation is much easier to create than we might think. But there's a lot of variability in the kinds of simulations we'll create. I think the simulation hypothesis thinks there's one. But I think there's going to be a lot of varieties. There's a lot of possible different rule sets. There's a lot of different physical mediums in which these simulations could be created. It can be a completely virtual world. The role of consciousness, whether you make most people conscious or not,

whether most of them are philosophical zombies, they're just like non-player characters and it's just you, or is your mind simulated? Like the role of suffering. So consciousness brings with it this idea of basically subjective experience. And with subjective experience comes the idea of pain and fear and so on. The thing, again, my Russian romanticization of it, but I think fear of death is essential. Scarcity is essential for beauty, for life.

Yeah. And that's a nice feature of this little simulation we've got going on, that there could be a lot of different alternatives, I think, that could be less individualistic, less consciousness can be present in different kinds of forms. So I see there's a lot more options than those three that he highlights. And we can destroy ourselves in a lot of interesting ways uh the entire civilizations from ai to nuclear weapons to biological to all kinds of weapons so it's almost like whether it's a simulation or not

is almost irrelevant the complexity of the existence and all of the various pushes and pulls that keep everything together, they're almost operating like some grand plan, whether they like it or not. Whether or not a grand plan exists, all these different things are happening and everything is moving in a very specific direction, right? It's moving towards further complexity. Like I was having a conversation with a friend of mine last night where we were talking about phones. And we were like, you know, like when are they ever going to look at a phone and say, I think we're good. We don't have to – the camera works great. Signal's great. You can call people. You can call people.

You can text people. Let's just stop innovating right here. And we're both laughing. Like, it's never going to happen. But even though we admit, like, if you have an iPhone 11 or a Pixel 4, is that what you have? Yeah, Pixel 4, yeah. They work great. You don't really need anything better.

Like, in terms of the way our culture works, you get so much done on these things. You can bank on them. Is it okay if I'm drinking all your waters terms of the way our culture works you get so much done on these things you can bank on them is it okay if i'm drinking all your waters by the way yeah we have a lot of water yeah please you're so russian that's very polite of you um this the just the existence itself whether or not there's a design to it, it seems to operate in a matter that would indicate there's a design. The design doesn't have to be real. It doesn't have to be a simulation. It doesn't have to be a grand plan. But it moves in the same way as if it's a grand plan.

It's weird. It's hard to put into words, but there's a different force and a momentum, like the evolutionary process, the fact that life was created, the fact that there's always a kind of progress. And also, just like with the Native Americans, the fact that suffering seems to be a constant story that was weaving in. We constantly progress, but it seems to be creating the other and torturing. There seems to be constant suffering and war and so on through this growth process. And that seems to be – death is a huge part of that. And conflict.

Conflict. Even social conflict. Like we were talking about social justice warriors and that type of thing. I think they almost have to exist. It's almost like the world creates a space for them, and people find a way to fill that space. Yeah. The conflict, by the way, also, I don't know if you're even aware,

you're kind of, even though you were thrust into politics, you're not aware of politics, but there is the Iowa caucus going on today. It's like the first vote for the Democrats. Yeah. So Bernie's leading in the polls, which is interesting. But that's the fun little, Americans have their own little conflict going on here. Oh, there's always going to be conflict

with all groups of people, with everything. I mean, there's conflict in the comedy community. I'm sure there's conflict in the AI and autonomous vehicle community. There's conflict. I mean, and those things are critical. You know, you learn from conflict. If everything was just simple and easy and there was no resistance whatsoever, nothing would get done. And also your own personal systems would never get tested. I feel like every adversity that you

experience is really a gift because on the other end of that adversity, there's an opportunity for massive growth. What was that Think and Grow Rich quote that Lovato said the other day? Every adversity carries the seed of an equivalent advantage. I mean, just that. Yeah. Just that. That's a beautiful way to see it. That's a beautiful quote.

I had to write it down. I bought that book, too. I'm going to get to that once I'm worn out on Native Americans. I got about seven other Native American books. I've been, like I mentioned, doing the startup since August, and it's been a bit of a torture. Like the self-doubt is pretty hardcore because I've been failing nonstop. So I'm trying to build, spending most of my day programming.

You're trying to build a her or a she, whatever it is. Is it she or her? Her. Her. But no, on that path, there's a particular thing because you want to create a business. You want to make, you know, you have to create tools that people would enjoy using on the path.

That's a long journey to create a companion that can form a deep friendship. That seems so weird. It seems – everything seems weird until your life becomes better because of it. Like flying cars seem weird. Oh, yeah. To me still in fact uber and hyundai just partnered they're still pushing this idea of flying cars electric vtols i just feel like people are going to slam into each other yeah unless they are autonomous and they have like magnets so they repel you know

like they can't hit each other they get close and it's your and what happens when they hit like to me the like what does an accident look like? They fall on your head. Yeah. You're hanging out in your house trying to watch Black Mirror. Or also, currently, most accidents people can walk away from. Cars today are incredible. Right.

And I don't know how you can walk away from an air crash. Good question. Very good question. You probably won't. Yeah. Fuck, that's scary. Yeah yeah but any technology kind of seems awkward or weird you can you can be terrified of it or you can you know you can think it's weird until it until it takes over i mean none of us know what that would look like to have a closer connection with AI systems I don't know one of the things

in this book that I'm in the middle of with I'm actually towards the end of this black elk book is it details the invention of the automobile and the implementation of it so we have a world changes that was the other surprising thing about this book is it's so recent it's crazy really really recent yeah so during this time where black elk was a young boy, sees Custer get killed, takes his first scalp, remembers the sound of the man gritting his teeth as he's cutting his hair off, like cutting his scalp off. And then later on in his life, as he's an older man, the world goes from very few automobiles to most people have an automobile during his lifetime. Most travel is by automobile. What does he say about this world, this new world?

Oh, let's read the book. Right. Because he doesn't even know about this world. He knows about the world in the 1930s. I believe he died in the late 30s. It's scary to be born. Not scary, but I don't know what it would feel like to be born in this natural world, to see the kind of suffering in the U.S. military,

and then see the technology of the Industrial Revolution kind of propagate and be faced with that i don't know what that would feel like i don't know which world is better which world represents progress is um right right what is progress yeah what is pro i mean it's it progress seems to be inevitable complexity inevitable never-ending complexity and then there's this push towards that and i've always wondered if i mean elon has this saying that human beings are the biological bootloader for ai and i've always thought that if you paid attention to the human being's desire for materialism like materialism seems to be like a constant throughout cultures. People want things. And when they have things, they want better things.

They want newer things. Well, that generates a consistent level of innovation inside that civilization, that culture. People are going to make better stuff because people are going to want better stuff. So they're going to improve upon things. Well, if you just scale that and you keep going, improving, improving, what do you get to? Well, you get to something like artificial intelligence. You get to something like some sort of an event, some sort of a thing where the world changes. And I think technology will help us ride that wave.

I'm an optimist in that sense. We haven't talked about much, but I'm an optimist on Neuralink. I think there will be a few exciting developments there. So Neuralink brain-computer interfaces, I think it's a really exciting possibility there that Nick Boston was too also skeptical about. I'm more positive about increasing the bandwidth of our brain, being able to communicate with the internet, with the information. It doesn't necessarily need to be through bank computer interfaces, but increasing that bandwidth to expand our ability of our mind to reason, not to expand the ability to reason, sorry, to take the mechanism of our mind's ability to reason

and expand it with access to a lot of information and increase that bandwidth to be able to reason with facts. Just like we can look up stuff on Wikipedia now, increasing the speed at which we can do that can, I think, fundamentally transform our ability to think. Do you think that that's ever going to be a wireless option? Because right now they have to drill holes in your head, right? Right.

Yeah, I think there could be other interfaces, I think. Yeah, I think so. But also, like I said, weird technology. Holes in your head sounds terrifying right now, but it could be normal. Like ear piercing. Well, yeah, ear piercings, yeah. So there's something special about that. Like, hey, did you get suited for Neuralink yet?

Yeah. Billy's only 13. He's not ready for Neuralink. We're going to wait until he's 16. He's like, Dad, all my friends have it. Come on, Dad. I want to get fitted. And just like surgery, you take knee surgery,

you take all surgery except brain surgery, and you take that for granted. You're like okay with it, but on the brain it's... Yeah, it's scary. It's sketchy. Can I... Because I know you probably got to go. Yeah.

What do you got? Can I close it out with a poem? Let's do it. can I cause I know you probably gotta go yeah what do you got last can I can I close it out with a poem let's do it cause I'm that guy okay

cause I've been doing the startup I've been suffering so I'm reading a lot of Bukowski oh Bukowski poems do you get drunk when you read them

of course some whiskey roll the dice not vodka uh vodka is for friends and family. When you're by yourself, it's whiskey?

No, a man does not drink by himself. Some men do. Well, this man doesn't. But it's more like relaxed thinking. Drink is whiskey. Vodka is we're going crazy. Oh, okay. We're going dark.

We're going to raid. And pillage. Roll the Dice or Go All the Way by Charles Bukowski. If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. If you're going to try, go all the way. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs, and maybe your mind. Go all the way. It can mean not eating

for three or four days. It can mean freezing at a park bench. It can mean jail. It can mean derision, mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance or how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds, and it will be better than anything you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There's no other feeling like that. You'll be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. Do it. Do it. All the way. All the way. you will ride life straight to perfect laughter it's the only good fight there is

I want to take a picture of you while you're reading that pick up that piece of paper real quick we'll fake it for Instagram alright fake it for Instagram people on Instagram that watch it will know fake fake look up fake that was awesome Fake it for Instagram. People on Instagram that watch it will know. Fake. Fake. Look up. Fake.

That was awesome. Appreciate you, brother. Thank you very much for coming in here. It's always a pleasure. We've got to do it more often. Ten more years. Yes, ten more years. Bye, everybody. Nice. That was great, man.