The Shintaro Higashi Show - Who Is Peter Yu?

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

In this episode, Shintaro interviews Peter! They talk about how they met, how Peter started Judo, and what he does outside of Judo. Please support us on Patreon if you can: https://www.patreon.com/shintaro_higashi_show. Any amount helps!

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Shintaro Higashi Show with Peter Yu. Today we have a special, special episode. We're going to talk about who Peter Yu is. Who are you, Peter? What's going on? Yeah, well, I guess we're all going to find out today. That's right, that's right. I'm going to interview you. Yeah, that's right. It's going to be a great one.

Hope you have some good questions. Tough ones. So, to begin off, right, I know a lot of people already sort of know you from a YouTube channel. Right. And you're a great uke and you're a great friend and all these different things. I just kind of want to give the viewers and the audience sort of my take on who Peter Yu is. Peter Yu is a friend of mine. He was also a student of mine at the dojo. He was one of our top black belts and he was sort of the enforcer of KBI. Did you like that title at the dojo he was one of our top black belts and he was sort of the enforcer of kbi

right did you did you like that title at the dojo i i mean yeah i enjoyed it but you know it's like i think it was uh it was an honor you know it was an honor to be the enforcer but i don't know if in actuality how much of an enforcer i was. But what I did was I would go first and then kind of tire people out. No, no, you got to give yourself a little bit more credit than that. So if you don't know what an enforcer is, every dojo sort of has one, right? A guy comes in, they want to work out, they have tons of training somewhere else, and they're sort of like, hey, let's work out. And it's kind of a bad look when a guest comes in and beats everyone at the school right right so if they come in and

usually these are our first line of defense which is like our brown belts and our guest beats up on the brown belts right and then peter sort of comes in and then right okay yeah i'm a challenger yeah i'm not i'm not that big so a lot of people you know i look a little unassuming i guess so yeah yeah i can kind of surprise them sometimes you're kind of the best type of enforcer because you're 73 kilos right you fought at nationals when you took seventh at nationals you were 66 kilos so you were 150 pounds essentially yeah right and then no one really expects that much out of 150 pound person to be like, right. Normally enforcers are heavy. They're big guys. They're bigger guys.

That comes in, throws everyone around. It's like, all right, get the big dude from about the back over here. Right. And then if your sensei is young, if the enforcer goes down, the sensei has to step in. Right. But if the sensei's over like 55 60 then it's like okay you know they get a pass right right so you need to develop your enforcers at the dojo so peter was an enforcer of ours like always good had technique he was tricky and we had a couple others sort of in the ranks but peter was a very very special person at the dojo because yeah it was just like a very special time in our lives that we sort of met and you were at the dojo because yeah it was just like a very special time in our lives that we sort of met and you were at the dojo right right the early 20s mid-20s whatever you know

we're hanging out in new york city um just you know working out and i we talked about this right like friday night practices and whatnot just it wasn't just that we like hung out outside of the dojo a lot you know i would always invite you to my parties you invite me to your parties yeah i i used to like throwing parties you know i think those days are behind me now yeah but yeah is you should tell was always at my birthday parties halloween parties whatever you know all those things and it's a special time in my life too. You know, what people don't realize it's like, Oh, I go to the school, the sensei's there and he is this, that, this, or the dojo is this, that, whatever it is. But a lot of the times it's sort of when they are in the cycle

of the dojo, right? If the teacher's in his twenties and started taking on the dojo and teaching the schools and they're capable of going out and hanging out with some of the students. I know a lot of people have different feelings about that, right? And I was always pretty good with the boundaries between the students and the teacher, but there's some people sort of that break through those boundaries and you were definitely one of those people. And I was at the time in my life where I had the time to be able to, right? Because I didn't have a kid, right? I was just doing judo and teaching judo. So you were sort of like the perfect fit. You're a smart guy, right? How about that? Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit more about your academic background and all that stuff and what makes you so interesting.

Yeah. Right. And essentially you sort of became this person that sort of became irreplaceable because now I'm in a different phase of my life, running a different phase of the dojo, right? Deep in your thirties, you get married, have kids, right? I'm not a different phase of my life, running a different phase of the dojo. Deep in your 30s, you get married, have kids. I'm not married, but if you have kids, I have a kid. That takes up a little bit more of your time and you're not afforded the same type of ability to interact and let people sort of come through those boundaries. You're completely right. I think it's like a serendipity i guess like we we were at the same we're in the same city doing the same thing together around this like when we were at the same

stage of life you know just you know a lot of time to hang out and whatnot and also i think because of that now we're kind of moving on to the new stage of life together in a way yeah you know i'm i'm married now you have a kid i'm settling down although i moved away from new york city but we still keep in touch and we all yeah we can still talk about things you'll be back you'll be yeah i hope so i hope so yeah it's great, man. Because the timeline stuff is real. My father, who's known to be very stoic, he had a Peter, too. We talked about this. He had a friend named Peter.

And I remember somebody in the dojo family, my father's a lot older, passed away. And he saw his old Peter from his days of his 30s, and he was so happy. Right. He ran up to him and was like, oh, my God, Peter. And they were holding hands, jumping up and down like kind of like my three-year-old dog does you know when she sees her friends at the park you know what i mean so it's like oh man like my dad had the time to hang out and he right spent a lot of time with his friend right doing judo and that's what we were right i had more time you had more time right you were working as a programmer in the city and

you'd come to the dojo three or four times a week sometimes five times so like we would see each other almost every day every day we would train we would work out and then we would talk about judo and we would talk about life afterwards and then you know little by little your wife started chipping away at my time yeah that's right we also live right next to each other in the city on the upper west side like literally a block away that's right because you were on the lower east side for a while like a midtown east and then you know what i'm gonna go closer to the dojo yeah now it's like commute after the dojo it's like dinner walk home right that's right like sort of the perfect storm of

like being in the same place like-minded individuals right and we would hit up the local like dive bars yeah time and yeah it was it was a great good times man yeah it's like i would like to have something like that now too but it's like my life position my life kind of makes that a little bit difficult yeah because it's like i have to go home to my kid you know if i go home now then it's like i could you know put her to bed and all this stuff and now you're gone and you know little by little right the dojo is like this living breathing thing and it changes and it evolves right maybe when i'm 45 years old i'm a little bit jaded you know maybe when i'm 55 i'm like oh i gotta teach osoto again holy moly you know by the time i'm 60 i'm

just like sitting on the sidelines just hanging out right yeah and you just maybe you'll get yourself a lamborghini ah yeah right can you imagine that's i'm in the wrong business for that but yeah peter you walked into the dojo uh late right right after college right you moved to new york 2013 summer 2013 man so i've known you almost a decade yeah almost a decade it's heading up there yeah yeah so yeah this this episode's gonna be all about you and uh let's first off start off with your judo journey right can you tell us all a little bit about that yeah i mean uh so it's i my family is not you know a grappling family i was the first to first one to grapple and it started with uh wrestling in high schools i just had a friend group of friends who were wrestlers and they um my high school was actually not good at wrestling and then actually the

wrestling team was kind of uh was uh this is in michigan yeah it's back in michigan it kind of disbanded for a year or two but then my friends tried to make uh bring it back so he invited me to join so i just went i didn't really know what wrestling was except how many kids on the team uh it was like it would be barely had enough to fill the dual meets, really. No depth or anything. It was like a new program. But I really liked it. And so I started in my junior year. Oh, wow. Yeah, very late.

Because my main sport was soccer in high school. And I still play soccer. I love watching soccer, playing soccer. But anyway, so then I really liked it. All I could bring to the table was just hard work, just trying to catch up. I only knew how to double leg, single leg, and fireman's carry. And you were Korean born, right?

Yeah, Korean born. And you came over when you were a young teen. Yeah, I was 15. So you came over when you were 15 years old and then and then picked up wrestling and then right away yeah pretty much and then did you like that i did i i did i really liked it and then my mom was actually kind of apprehensive about it because she thought i would get hurt but then she liked it because i started taking care of my body better you know like eating right and you you know, trying to make weight.

Were you the quintessential skinny Asian kid in high school? I was not skinny. I was about 140 pounds in high school, 5'9". So I wasn't like skinny. Is that skinny? Yeah. Maybe. I never thought myself as skinny but anyway so

and then i i i really got into a senior year the coaches made me captain just because i was working hard and whatnot uh then at the end of my uh like after the wrestling season was over i wanted to continue to do this but i knew that i wasn't good enough to wrestle in college yeah and i didn't want to cut weight or anything so i was looking for some other grappling sports to do and like i watched all those you know this was when the gracies were like going hard on the marketing online so i watched those old videos and i was like wow bjj is something i want to do so i went to a local bjj gym learn try to learn but honestly i didn't really like it because i even in wrestling i was a tech takedown guy yeah so and you know in bjj you you don't really i guess it's it it's been

it's changed a little bit but even then yeah especially then it wasn't like that so then i did more research and then uh i i stumbled upon judo and you know there wasn't a lot of judo content uh in in the like in the english speaking world especially in america online back then so i actually went to see a lot of videos in korean because in korea judo is you know popular like they have like regular tv shows where they have judo champ versus yeah right i've seen some of those those are like amazing could you imagine like lady gaga goes out there in a gi i know and she gets bombed or something like this. Yeah, things like that happen, and judo is quite popular there. So after I graduated from high school, before I started college,

I had the opportunity to spend three months in Korea just to hang out with my dad because my dad was working in Korea by then. months in korea just to hang out with my dad because my dad was working in korea back by then yeah now i asked my dad to put me to a judo gym and i basically uh in the during the day i would just go see uh stuff you know hang out with my friends and then at five o'clock like six o'clock rolls in i'll go to the local judo gym so you're at this point how old are you i was like 18 18 that's when you started judo yeah yeah right after high school and i'll spend like four hours a day five days a week for three months oh wow that's a pretty intensive amount of time yeah i mean it wasn't like uh you know it, I wasn't on a team or anything. It's a local dojo, but that dojo was known to send kids to Yongin University.

The owner was a Yongin grad. Ah, yeah. For those of you who don't know, Yongin is one of the best judo universities in the world. Yeah. I've heard people even call it judo university in Korea. Yeah. They have, you know, you can major in judo. You can even get a call it judo university in korea yeah they have you know you can major in judo you can even get a phd in judo yeah it's it's a lot of olympians actually phd in judo

yeah you can write a dissertation on like you know the mechanics of uchimata how to teach it well things like that yeah abstract i did judo today i hurt my knee yeah exactly and how to prevent it yeah data uh i know eight guys that hurt their knee that's right yeah so um so i trained with a lot of high school kids who are trying to make it to the university and then some of the alums like who are college kids and young and will come down and train with us so it was a yeah very i have a lot of good memories from there i actually still keep in touch with the some of the people i met there including the owner who is now the coach of the uh the paralympic team of korea very nice gentleman and then so i actually they in korea uh you know showdown is really it wasn't it's not like a prestigious thing it's if you know how to agree black belt yeah yeah if

you know how to do judo they're like okay you're good and then they give you so i because i had some wrestling under my belt and i picked things up quickly the owner was like you know I hear you know I'll get you a Shura at the end of summer so that's why I came and then I came back to uh the States and I could I went to college so you're the equivalent of that guy the Brazilian guy that goes to Brazil on a Jiu Jitsu retreat and comes back with a box that's right I kind of did that so for you know funny thing I for for a long time I didn't tell people this because i did this some people would think you think exactly that so well now the whole world knows it i know it's out there but you know now you're good enough to you you could even support it yeah it's so funny because when you came in

with the korean on your gi and all the stuff with the black belt everyone was like oh my god who is that guy there was a gift from my uh uh yeah that gentleman that taught me the first nice nice and but yeah i they uh so i went came to the states and then went to college and i went to a local dojo yeah you know at the ymca ywca is this when you went to princeton let's talk about that yeah that's right i did surprise you haven't brought that up yet i well you know i knew you you usually do that for me so yeah yeah you're at the princeton university judo club as well right yeah prince not university club because uh um so at princ, it was an interesting thing. So there was a student club for BJJ.

Yeah. And there was a local club at the Y for judo. So I did both. Oh, you did both. Nice. Yeah. So I was like my buddy Mike and I would run the student club um he was the president and i was the vp so i would just like teach class like run some practice on fridays and then like on that i think the

classes at the y was twice a week and i'll go to those nice nice so after class yeah it was kind of a it was a little lonely uh because really it was just a handful of people who even knew what judo and bjj were yeah um we had some wrestling kids coming in to train with us i mean like princeton has a pretty good wrestling program right yeah so uh we had actually uh one of my friends on the wrestling team, Andrew. Yeah, he would come and train with us a lot. He was very talented. This guy from Hawaii. He actually did judo in Hawaii because in Hawaii,

apparently it's a high school sport. Yeah, yeah. Crazy amount of judo over there. Yeah. So that's how I went. that's how i trained in uh in college and i did compete here and there local tournaments yeah i went to liberty bell one but it's tough you know there's no team so you have to do everything yourself no one's on no one on my sideline to coach yeah it's pretty amazing how like you stuck it out through that time period

yeah it's hard to do a sport like that by yourself and go to competitions by yourself and be driven and motivated to keep at it like what kept you going it's that's a good question i actually was thinking about that the other night um and i mean it's a lot of reasons but um like the superficial reason i guess it's that you know i did i just didn't want to quit you know i really i i kind of like that i have this skill to defend myself and also you know get in shape and whatnot well another thing was you know now i look back and then i'm i guess i know a little bit more about life and whatnot. But the biggest thing I got out of judo was that it's been a very humbling experience in a way. And, you know, because in high school and even through college,

I thought I was this hot shot, you know, I was pretty athletic and I got into a good college and whatnot. this hot shot you know i was pretty athletic and i got i got into good college and whatnot but and i you know my mom actually who knows me well one of the people who knows me the best right like she would warn me like hey don't get too cocky you have the tendency to do that yada yada yada but then judo kind of put me in a place in a way like you you you have uh all this older people who've been doing judo yeah it's a long time yeah they don't they don't look athletic and whatever but you i've experienced so many times when i would go randori with them and i can't even do anything you know yeah i like

how that that was the one humbling experience like yeah i'm smart i'm athletic i got into princeton just better than everyone i did judo and i got thrown like oh man i'm humble now no i had a lot yeah i guess it's not it might sound funny but it had it had a lot of like a huge impact on me and i am i wanted to kept that made me want to keep going because i wanted i like in a way i wanted to be like those uh you know wise old men in a way yeah you know it's just and women you know but yeah i did and then also i really like the community it was very close-knit you know yeah for sure all the things that would keep people in sport right so what'd you study in college i mean i know all these answers because i know you pretty well but for our viewers and listeners this is good because if i could ask you questions that i forgot about

you and then i could cloak it and like oh i already know it but you know like that's right so i studied computer science i've always wanted to become a programmer from early age. Yeah. So what made you want to do that at an early age? Like that never appealed to me. Like what about that appealed to you? Was it your parents' influence or? So a little bit, I guess.

So my dad was an engineer. What kind of engineer? He was a material science engineer scientist yeah interesting i knew that i might have mentioned it to you in there but but he eventually moved on to management quickly and you know he's more talented and bad than being an engineer anyway big time resident yeah well he is retired now but he he he climbed up the ladder and then he got you know get as high as it could be it's pretty amazing he reminds me kind of like elon musk right elon musk is like an engineer by trade but he's a ceo right and uh it surprised me because when i went to your wedding

uh you know the socially distant wedding your father gave a speech and boy did he blow it away he was amazing he's such a charismatic character right he he loves doing that he he he thrives in that kind of environment and you know it's it's it's good to see yeah and yeah so he influenced me a lot he you know in that way like uh my interest in science and yeah and And then when I was in elementary school, my mom bought me this comic book about Bill Gates. That's the nerdiest thing I've ever heard in my life. I used to love reading about science and these people. I have always been interested in it,

but she bought me that for random reason i hadn't even really heard of bill gates really by an elementary school mind you yeah i mean yeah i knew how to use windows i i played computer games yeah but i didn't know who bill gates was it's amazing man anyway that, that book, I was, that was one of my favorite books growing up. That character, his life kind of mesmerized me. Yeah.

When he would like walk all the way to the other side of town just to code at a computer because it was available, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. You know, he,

he, he would sneak into his school with his friends to code all night, you know, teach themselves how to code. And know later became rich and then now he's a big philanthropist and all it's just fascinated me so i was like you know i want to become like that i want to become like bill gates and yeah yeah that's how it started in um middle school i mean there wasn't a lot of right nowadays it's really easy to teach yourself how to code if you're motivated enough because there's so much free content out there but i mean i i'm i'm not even that old but i guess the field is so

fast moving but back when i was in middle school like i couldn't find anything um to go off of and especially in korean i didn't speak english back then yeah so so i it was hard to teach myself how to do that but then uh in middle school i i randomly uh there was like a local bookstore that i used to go a lot and then i randomly saw this book on c++ in korean and i was like oh my god mom can you please get that to me get that for me i know it's weird like i was like you i cannot believe how nerdy this this guy yeah i was a nerd yeah it's just i was like oh my god when my mom actually didn't want me to get it for me at first. Why? I don't know.

Maybe I should talk to her for a bit. But I think she thought it was something else. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, but eventually. What could she think it was? I mean, I get C++. Like, who knows what that is, you know?

Yeah. And also, I think she was kind of worried that I was getting too into computers. Like, I was spending too much time on it at some point. It's good balance that you were doing grappling, you know, to round the air. Yeah. Honestly, that's one of the things that I'm most thankful for moving to America, that I could become a more balanced person. Yeah.

Because in Korea, I wouldn't have had a chance to yeah even try wrestling or you know it's it's sure you like in japan you know it's well i think japan is actually better because in in middle school and high school everyone kind of does bukkatsu right like this club activities yeah but when you're stuck in that club that you're done that's what you do oh really if you get pretty decent at it you know now you're a lifer oh okay okay yeah especially if you get pretty decent at it. You know, now you're a lifer. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, especially if you go to school that's good at that particular sport. Like, you're in it. I see. Judo guys are going to be judo guys forever.

In Korea, it's like that too. I mean, it's kind of scary, right? Like, it's something you do in middle school. And then if you're good, you're like, okay. You're done. That's it. Yeah, that's your life profession. Yeah.

At least in America, it's like, I have a fall sport and a spring sport and a winter right i play basketball here and track there and i don't have to do any of it if i don't want to and i could go to any college that i want and i could kind of mess around and drink and you know hang out i think there's some virtue in that like it really helps with the exploration and whatnot but anyway so i yeah that and i try to teach myself c++ it's it's it's a hard language to for it's a hard language to learn so i i didn't do anything fancy just yeah putting stuff on what were some of your favorite things you've built on c++ back then i didn't really build much i just i was happy to just have my computer print print some text on the screen and that's about it really i learned the basics you know pointers and

you know whatnot yeah eventually it helped me because now if now it just i move and then i moved to america and my high school actually had programming classes. So you took that? Yeah. And I devoured it. I had so much fun there. And then the teacher was great. Mr.

Fraser. Oh, yeah. Give him a shout out. Yeah. He's retired now. He was an old gentleman back then too. But yeah, I mean, he was a, he was a very popular teacher. He was so nice and calm and you know

good with kids and he taught me uh you know the basics right like that's like the first class i first programming class i took and i like devoured it i i even i even took i finished two classes in one semester because i liked it so much. So what do you, what is it about program that would like really was a draw for you? Like just the idea of like being able to tell a computer to do something. Yeah. I think that that's, I think that was the biggest appeal for me. Um, the fact that, uh, there's something that I could, uh, like this mystery machine, right?

Like if you look at it, it's like a magic machine right like if you look at it it's like a magic machine but you can actually control it like every single behavior i mean it's a machine if you drill down to it's all zeros and ones yeah and and another thing now after i got better at it the biggest appeal is that this is like a it's a very creative exercise you know it's kind of like woodworking except there is no physical constraints you can build anything you can think of interesting um yeah yeah i love the feeling when i like click on the email icon and my email comes up. And then it's not even like you can't even script you.

Like, for example, when you learn Excel and one night in school and, you know, you know, if that's programming, you know, that's how you use the. You know, tools available to make the computer do what you want to do, you yeah i mean and then when everything clicks it feels good right and then if you go a little further and then study it more and practice more you can have this liberating feeling a very like creative uh feeling where you can you feel like you can create anything really so what is your favorite thing that you've created yeah through my teenage years no just your whole life oh in programming wow you know i had a lot of fun this kind of goes into now my interest switching from not just programming to ai um i built a chess engine based on the alpha zero like algorithm nice yeah you yeah you played it yeah yeah did you win i forget uh i can't remember i want to say i did but i don't i think you did because back then it wasn't that good. That was a lot of fun because I read all these cutting-edge research papers and then I referenced that.

I had to tweak it a little bit because I don't have enough computing resources as DeepMind did. But it's really cool to see that oh wow i i barely know how to play chess but i created something that plays better than me that's really interesting man like i don't know much about programming the only thing i know is pretty much what you tell me and i just based everything off for that but it kind of blew my mind when you were like yeah my engine ran through 10 000 simulations already yeah right in such a short amount of like wait wait a minute your chess engine played 10 000 games already right and then it was learning every single time i'm like wow that's really kind of

blew my mind yeah it's just uh it really blew my mind too and and i i could only i mean i could do this because as a field it's of it had advanced enough for people like me who were beginners at that time to implement something like that so when you're doing that did you create something new like did it did your engine do something different that no one else's did or no no it wasn't any novel anything novel um it was uh so what deep mind did was that it it created a system that could teach itself how to play chess without ever having human input um but for me i mean i don't and the algorithm they develop requires a lot of computing power yeah but i don't have that so i had to kind of shortcut it and then just use uh human play data you know so i yeah so which which requires a lot less because it's more directed approach it's a more directed

approach so that's what i did i mean that's nothing really um yeah it's nothing uh novel about it really interesting interesting i've heard something about like uh chess there's certain you know there's lots of different combinations and all this stuff. But Go is one that's a little bit more complicated. Go, yeah, you do need more computational power because there's more combinations. I originally wanted to build a Go engine, but I just couldn't because there's not enough data or computer computing power available so when you're thinking about like all right i want to program this next or that next do you i'm sure some people are one camp and some people other do you try to like find something that's already been done to make it better or do you want to just come up with something completely different and new

um so i'm actually learning that process as a phd student oh you're getting a phd uh yeah yeah we can talk about that later too but it's it i'll say usually what you want to do is build uh go off what other people have done and then yeah try to make it better uh like every other scientific paper right it's like oh this thing and you reference that and then you his own thing yeah it's it's really um i mean judo too you're not gonna you know it's a whole process right you start simple and then you kind of grow it up yeah point and then you all you know your work your you have your own novel strategies in judo but you know they are based on kano's work or your dad's work you know yeah yeah right first right has already been done right right mostly been done now there's georgian judo mongolian judo and you look right patterns and you try to integrate it

and make it kind of your own and you're not reinventing dial right already there you know you're not reinventing back and forth attacking or reaction thing yeah but that's exactly how science is done yeah you know you have to read so first you want to read a lot like you you do with judo you know watching all these different videos and uh theories i actually don't really watch that much oh really or yeah i don't really i'm not like some people like hey did you see the thing i'm like not really though how do you how do you keep up well you you exchange ideas with other people too right like i do yeah you know i like watching like uh i have like a couple of instagram you know channels that i follow it's very scientific and then if i see like a highlight reel and if i see something

i haven't seen then i'll go watch it and then every now and then like a major major tournament i'll watch some matches and see if i see anything new and if i see something completely out of the blue and new then i'll like be like okay i gotta learn this and study it and then i'll try it on my own oh that i mean that's exactly what happens in science. Like you don't read all the papers. You read, you go to, you kind of keep up with journals and, you know, conferences and talks. Do you do a lot of that stuff? I do now because it's part of the job now. And, you know, you got to learn how to, oh, okay, just read the abstract quickly. And if it's interesting, you go and read the intro the conclusion yeah a little more to see if it's relevant and then if it's relevant you read the

whole paper more in more detail and take taking notes kind of like what you're doing uh have you ever read satoshi's article about bitcoin oh no no the the The white paper. Did I? Like, I remember I did read the white paper and yellow paper for Ethereum because you told me so much about it. Yeah, I was going to do that for a hot second. Yeah. Not Bitcoin, I don't think. Yeah. Yeah.

But no, I did read Ethereum and I thought it was quite interesting. Yeah. I don't know if it's... It's amazing that you could read that and understand it. Like the ethereal virtual machine and ether and gas and all this stuff. I'm like reading it. I'm like, man, I have no clue.

I mean, I, I, I didn't really get the nitty gritties. Well, either. I mean, you just,

yeah. I mean, you, but I guess in some aspects I could kind of imagine, Oh, like I could see how they will build these things. Do you think like a place like AI can have in like sport, you know, like judo or something,

like if you had someone manually code, like this is the code for Uchimata Throne, this is the code for weight, and then you do like a regression analysis and then it just kind of constantly runs. Like, do you think that'll ever happen? Well, I think... Because they did that in baseball a little bit right remember you ever see the movie moneyball yeah because they use statistics so baseball is a it's a very statistics heavy sport and it's easy to collect data like because everything is kind of term-based in a way right and you can you can keep track of all the data that way and so that's why at baseball it's i heard this from a friend

who was also a programmer and also a baseball player and he said yeah this money ball things like money ball happened in baseball first because there was just so much uh data around and soccer is trying to do that there are like data analytics companies that you know collect data from all the players of all the players and whatnot but it's a little harder because soccer is so it's still real time and you know it's now they have this uh calculate things like expected goal over the game like how how many goals a team was expected to get whatever but with judo is so dynamic and like you gotta come up with the metrics i guess before you could actually because right now all the algorithms are very data hungry so you have to collect this data and that would be a monumental challenge i

think especially a sport like judo because so dynamic can you do like okay right side versus left side right you can calculate the person which side do they attack more right then you could use that as a data point can you use like person who puts their hand on first and use that as a data point i guess it's it's tricky right because yeah it's that's what they call like i guess it's it's what they call like feature engineering you have to come up with these features interesting yeah yeah i mean but then you know you you would need experts like you domain experts like you to kind of guide the process like okay we have this we have a lot of video data right yeah from igf and now we have to kind of the current status of the algorithm is that you need a lot of label data yeah meaning you have to some

someone has to go in and then like okay this is uchimata this is right versus right this is left versus right things like that very time consuming i'm not digging on that job yeah and that's a like a dark side of ai right now because a lot of uh people a lot of companies rely on this label data and then they have these uh people called data annotators who have to be quite skilled they have to know the domains well and then be trained uh to label these things but you know a lot apparently uh the treatment is not so good across the board yeah like they don't get paid enough and whatnot but yeah but right now hopefully I'm hoping that eventually we'll get over that and then we don't need as much data.

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. But so what are some of your, uh, small projects that you're working on these days? Small projects. Well, I, I mean, I don't really have time to do side projects that much besides this. Yeah. Um, this is like, oh oh yeah podcast and kind of helping you out with the blog and yeah yeah producing these podcasts yeah and and then uh i guess my research is in so yeah like i i after working as a programmer i I started my PhD program just now. Yeah. And my research is on natural language processing and cognitive architectures.

I can go a little bit into it if you want. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that in layman's terms though because I don't think most people are programmers. No, yeah. So natural language processing is about, you know, making machines that can so natural language processing is about, you know, making machines that can understand natural language,

which is human language that occur in nature, I guess. Like how we talk, how we write. Now, this excludes like, yeah, okay, so it's all textual. Well, natural language processing usually focuses on textual yeah yeah because it's just the easiest form to deal with and then that's yeah limits sort of uh so like my initial master's degree my first master's degree is in teaching english right teaching language to other speakers and then we had this thing called second language acquisition it was like a class for you know like learning about language acquisition right and there was like a statistic in there by this guy noam chonsky or somebody like this probably yeah yeah he's kind of famous right

yeah and then it's like uh most you know communication is non-verbal and paraverbal and words only account for x amount of percentages like you know i i you know you've had or i know people who had relationship with brazilian girls who didn't speak a lick of english or japanese and then uh you could communicate right yeah right so yeah you're really you're right but the field right now i mean they're trying to make so yeah as a field they're trying to incorporate a lot of these modes of communication right sound and you know whatever but then it's right now it's hard because even speech recognition is a different field because audio data is completely different from textual data so

there are a whole swath schools of people who are trying to take the audio data and then transcribe it into text so that other algorithms can process. And even human gesture recognition that's in the computer vision side, and they are working on how to do all this. And then I guess the goal eventually is to combine all of that, like you said,

and make a system that can incorporate all kinds of information to understand so is apple going to win that battle because that little microphone that's facing us is always on and they're always collecting data and they're always looking at the way right because now they're probably listening to us so they have textual stuff right that gets converted that's pretty that's already been done all right right and then intonation they have the data for that and then they have the visual data so now they can make it really they're ahead of the game but you know i heard it's like okay yeah eight apple yeah but like the phone carriers the verizon tnt because all that data gets pushed through that right those are the ones with the real power right if they can i don't know the legalities

of that i'm pretty sure that it's all legal and i mean but even if they can do whatever they want they could do say let's assume that they do collect the data yeah the problem is we don't really have a you know the computing power the algorithms algorithms advanced enough to effectively process all of that into a single like model or agent yet so there's companies like palantir who's sort of like palantir yeah yeah how do you pronounce it palantir yeah that was palantir i think well i actually i had some friends who worked there and i actually applied and i i got rejected really oh i didn't know that i did get rejected but it's they've told me it's pronounced palantir okay so palantir right they have uh so they can collect all this data all the different sources can they scrub it and use it in a way where the way we're talking about like do they already have the technology to do that technology to ingest all this different data well yeah i mean like just what we're talking about

uh well i don't think we're there yet um i mean it's coming from a first year phd student so take that with a grain of salt but yeah i as a field well i haven't heard of a uh technology that's capable of doing that yet yeah and it's it's usually i know you know people can go on and onto conspiracy theories oh my god cia must have something nsa must have something well it's the this problem is so big that a no single organization will be would have the resources to solve it yeah so right now the move is that okay let's just make it as open as possible all the results and research so that as a whole community we can solve it and then we'll worry about how to because it's not just about figuring things out now we have to have people actually implement it at scale that's what companies do and we're not even there yet we don't even know what to make it's crazy man like i uh took a data analytics class

in my b.a and then the professor was saying like yeah i work for this thing and i worked on the case with the facebook ipo case he's like we had to go through petabytes of data. Yeah. I'm like, what does that even mean? It really blew my mind, right? Can you, right? I mean, how big are these data sets nowadays? I don't even, well, Facebook, they track everything.

Because, so I interned at Facebook when I was in college. college and then so it's changed a lot since then too but at that time it was before the time of deep learning and ai explosion that we have now but their advancements their so facebook makes a lot of technical contributions yeah and at that time their main contribution was how to store the petabytes of data and and uh is it petabytes or petabytes i have no idea i i just i've only said peta what's the next level up i don't know no no no? No, no, no. Zeta bytes? Gigabytes? I don't know. So how does that go? Bytes? Kilobytes? Megabytes?

No, don't cheat. Don't cheat. Oh, I know up till tera, I guess. All right, can you give it to us? There's a byte, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. And probably petabytes after that. Terabyte, petabyte? You sure? I'm not sure. I think so.

Oh boy. They're all about a thousand times bigger. They don't make you learn this in PhD 101? They do. I learned in undergrad, but I just forgot because I never really use them

both bigger than terra right now yeah you know it's right now yeah i am yeah i don't have the means to deal with like petabytes of data so what do you what are you learning right now that's very interesting in your right now one thing quick i've been let's do like a rapid fire thing rapid fire okay so right now i've been learning all about a lot about actually human cognition like psychology yeah neuroscience about it because i want to be inspired by that to make machines think better yeah so that's been very interesting yeah will machines ever be able to feel well i think that's a very hard question because what does it even mean to feel like how can we actually define that what are feelings i don't know and i've i've listened to some talks but i think you know the whole question about consciousness and feeling and

yeah i don't people don't even know because you have to be able to define it you know exactly to be able to talk about it so if you could ask steve wozniak anything what would you ask him wozniak i would say i would ask Wozniak, I would say, I would ask. Cause he programmed too. Yeah. I love how Tim Cook never, not Tim Cook, uh, Steve Jobs never programmed anything. Yeah.

He's not a programmer. He was, well, I think he's more of a hard worker. So I, maybe I would ask him about, like, I would want to hear some candid answers from him about his relationship with jobs like nothing to do with programming how they worked because i think that's i i all the technical stuff you know it's it's amazing but i think the more interesting stuff a lot of times is you know human human relationships yeah because they're such different people you know sure i just assume it was like me in the nba class like oh we have to do the excel spreadsheet like hey you know how to do it can you please help me with this and has it already been done and that's what they say huh jobs is bill gates said jobs is good at marketing and inspiring people to work and wozniak well jobs

didn't say anything about wasney i don't think but i mean bill gates butzniak well Jobs didn't say anything about Wozniak I don't think but I mean Bill Gates but Wozniak's more the guy who knew the technologies and put everything together sure all right so if you were to interview with Elon Musk and he asks you the question the interview question what is the biggest problem that you've ever solved? What would you answer? I think, well, any problem, right? It's not just technology. I mean, you would want it to be an engineering thing, right? Right. I think, okay, this is getting a little technical,

but, you know, it's, I guess at my previous job, you know, I had to. Which one, Etsy or AppTexas? ASAP, yeah. ASAP, okay. i guess at my previous job you know i had to which one etsy or asap yeah asap like yeah and we had to kind of re-architect our servers and that was the biggest yeah what was the problem well so asap does custom customer support chat with ai models on top of it and we have this chat servers yeah so if you kind of i'll go very briefly chat servers have this real-time component right because we have to you know send chat messages in real time but then most web servers are not real time in the sense that you just make a request and then the server just sends something back so those are very two different modes of communication and then they have to uh when you grow it you have they you have to do

different things to optimize for each thing so you have to we decided that we need to separate them out and that was a big undertaking because you have to like the pro the biggest challenge with production systems is basically you have to fix and then re-architecture a car while it's driving yeah because you can't break anything you can't take the system down and work on it that's what they do with we could that's what they have to do with buildings or something right yeah you can shut it down but with these servers you can't take them down because it'll be you know business will be done really so yeah and i think that's the problem with also like airplane control systems too right

because they're running on 1970s technology and airplanes are constantly fine they can't just be like all right shut airplanes out honestly man they should have shut this thing down and done it and revamped it during the coronavirus pandemic like i was thinking i've been thinking about it non-stop i'm like man march hit air travel was down 80 now is a great time to update all the technology and try to implement some of these things you know they did new york city did that with uh subway you know remember l line was gonna be like under construction for two years or something yeah but they did they finished it over the pandemic really yeah i don't hear about any of

that because uh what did de blasio do this yeah yeah well cuomo is in charge you know i guess he did something good there yeah so yeah the because you know they could only work on weekends and you know odd hours why not but then because of the pandemic they could work every night because remember i i think it's still the case subway is closed at night now right yeah 24 hours yeah yeah i mean i guess you know they kind of destroyed a lot of businesses but you could go get some food and greenpoint now you know i know that's the plus right is i'm upside there right hang out with the the gentrification gentrifying hipsters at williams park that's right all right another question right, another question. Right.

How many windows are there in New York City? Ah. Good. That's a tech-related question. Why do all these tech companies ask that question? Actually, tech companies don't ask those questions anymore. I know that a lot of- They used to. They used to.

They used to ask a lot of brain teasers. Yeah. they used to they used to ask a lot of brain teasers yeah but they it they say um you know we're not hiring programmers to solve brain teasers yeah they just asked encoding questions you know what i would love i would love for if someone asked you that in an interview question and they're really you know wanted to know your thought process and explanation but you just gave such a specific hard number with absolute confidence you know confidence wins sometimes right it's like 47 million 376 million 271 not one more not one less like how would that fare in an interview you think well they'll probably ask like i mean they'll probably say okay how did you come up with that

number i just think i just know you don't you don't know what you don't know and you just don't know that i know this and then can you imagine you said that and got into the philosophy of knowing they'll probably well i guess it depends on how you play it off but some you could go either way some people think oh my god he's a he was a massive asshole all right if you did that in a playful way and then if you were like i'm just kidding and then you'd be like i'm just joking it's actually and then you went like 37 billion 472 million it depends you gotta laugh i it depends on the interview some people are really serious you know some people take it lightly i i think i i used to take things like when i was interviewing people i thought i i was taking things lightly so what was your favorite interview question that you would ask

people who you're hiring well i i my interviews were no fun because I was in charge of the technical interviews. So I would ask programming questions. Give me a technical programming question that you would ask me on an interview if I was applying for a job with you. So I like these kind of questions. Like, okay, you know, at ASAP, we were building chat servers, right? So, okay,

we need to build a chat server. Can you, can you kind of walk through the design, how you would build a chat server? Yes. The answer is 27 billion, 432 million, 7,043.

Okay. And that's my final answer. I'll be like, okay, thank you for your time i guess are you serious i failed no i will probably ask okay like where what's that number mean and yeah well how does that work with the chess over you're trying to build yeah it just does man just does that's why you hire me because you don't know and you need my knowledge bro oh and i'll be like oh my god we do oh my god yeah anything else you want to talk about what do you want everybody who's listening

week after week right because their numbers are pretty good. Right. You're the mastermind behind this podcast. Well, about the podcast, I guess, um, I, let's see about the podcast specifically or something else. A little bit of both. Right.

I want, you know, so how's the podcast doing? Let's talk a little bit about that. And then like, what do you want our listeners to, to know about you? Cause this was the whole thing, right? Who's right so yeah i mean i'm i'm actually first of all want to thank everyone who's been listening and i'm we we

definitely want this to grow and i this is i had never produced a podcast before you know i i had only started listening to podcasts only recently and um so you know i would love to hear your feedback you know about the sound qualities all the production related things so that i can be better and also we're like we also i guess i wanted to talk to you and the audience about you know if you want to keep things everything judo related or you want to digress and talk about other things and then maybe have guests over

for other topics and yeah and then if you guys have tips for me about podcast production and what do you want your listeners to know about you uh well i am i guess um i love judo but also i love other ai you know anything like that i'm i would love to talk to you um plug your instagram instagram i don't have much on that it's plug it plug it well my

instrument is uh peter kunu kunu is my first name uh peter is my middle name kunu spell k-e-u-n-w-o-o so you can follow me peter kunu i usually oh i i ski a lot that's another thing i play i i love playing soccer i i like skiing yeah so i remember that time you took me skiing and then i was snowboarding and then you took me up that black diamond it was a black diamond man i would never do that well we went down the blue square right we went up the main lift and that was very strange for me yeah that was if we went to the highest peak of hunter mountain yeah you did really well like for the uh for a person who had never snowboarded before yeah i'm just very athletic so yeah it was a we had that video up on youtube on my youtube channel yeah yeah and i have a little clip of me snowboarding too i took all out the parts where

i was falling over and i couldn't even stand and i just used like snippets of the parts that are good right that's right it was it's it was a fun time but yeah i you know i i ski i play soccer i haven't played soccer in a while i love watching soccer my favorite team is arsenal i think we mentioned that here and there um we're kind of struggling up right now but hopefully things will get better yeah and um i live in detroit now i want to give a shout out to your wife, who's a doctor, front lines of fighting COVID. Oh, yeah.

My wife was an intern at Lenox Hill. Oh, there's a, during the pandemic. So that was kind of scary. But she, you know, there's a Netflix show called Lenox Hill. And they had a pandemic special episode and my wife's in there for like a few seconds.

Yeah, that's right. I saw it. I was like, oh shoot. There's so many Asian doctors in there. I don't know which one is. One of them. And then she now is a dermatology resident at Henry Ford in Detroit. Nice. Good. Amazing. Nice little shout out. Yeah.

That's kind of why we, you know, one of the major reasons why I moved here and started school. Yeah. Yeah. It's nice she's so busy so you could do this with me and go online and hang out and talk. I know. That's all we do. Well, you know, I'm home and she's working, you know that's all we do well you know i'm home and she's working you know treating patients and i just i just with shintaro yeah i love doing

that that's where it's at all right peter thank you i think we know everybody knows you a little bit better now i mean i knew everything from this conversation beforehand because you know i talk to you all the time yeah it's nice to get you out there right some people are wondering who is this guy who is Peter you know maybe maybe people will like me less because this mystery factor is gone now well hopefully hopefully that's not true they probably like you more now hopefully so thank you everyone for listening please tune in next week Mondays right Peter one days yep every Monday and have a good one guys