#135 – Charles Isbell: Computing, Interactive AI, and Race in America

Charles Isbell is the Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Neuro: https://www.getneuro.com and use code LEX to get 15% off – Decoding Digital: https://appdirect.com/decoding-digital – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off annual sub – Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10 EPISODE LINKS: Charles’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/isbellHFh Charles’s Website: https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:16) – Top 3 movies of all time (13:26) – People are easily predictable (19:08) – Breaking out of our bubbles (30:54) – Interactive AI (37:26) – Lifelong machine learning (45:53) – Faculty hiring (53:27) – University rankings (1:00:55) – Science communicators (1:10:20) – Hip hop (1:19:20) – Funk (1:20:44) – Computing (1:36:35) – Race (1:52:40) – Cop story (2:01:01) – Racial tensions (2:10:23) – MLK vs Malcolm X (2:13:44) – Will human civilization destroy itself? (2:18:14) – Fear of death and the passing of time

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Charles Isbell, Dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, a researcher and educator in the field of artificial intelligence, and someone who deeply thinks about what exactly is the field of computing and how do we teach it. He also has a fascinatingly varied set of interests, including music, books, movies, sports, and history. They make him especially fun to talk with. When I first saw him speak, his charisma immediately took over the room, and I had a stupid, excited smile on my face. And I knew I had to eventually talk to him on this podcast. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  First is Neuro, the maker of functional sugar-free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. Second is Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy. Third is MasterClass, online courses that I watch from some of the most amazing humans in history. And finally, Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I'm trying to make it so that the conversations with Charles, Eric Weinstein, and Dan Carlin will be published before Americans vote for president on November 3rd.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  There's nothing explicitly political in these conversations, but they do touch on something in human nature that I hope can bring context to our difficult time and maybe, for a moment, allow us to empathize with people we disagree with. With Eric, we talk about the nature of evil. With Charles, besides AI and music, we talk a bit about race in America and how we can bring more love and empathy to our online communication. And with Dan Carlin, well, we talk about Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and all the complicated parts of human history in between, with a hopeful eye toward a brighter future for our humble, little civilization here on Earth.

• 2:14Lex Fridman?

  The conversation with Dan will hopefully be posted tomorrow on Monday, November 2. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I do give you timestamps. So if you skip, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Neuro, a company that makes functional gum and mints that supercharge your mind with a sugar-free blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and B6, B12 vitamins.

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  It's loved by Olympians and engineers alike. I personally love the mint gum. It helps me focus during times when I can use a boost. My favorite use case is in the morning at the start of a deep work session. For me, it's really important to get that first 10 to 20 minutes off to a great start. That's when the desire to think about and check on the stresses of the previous day is strongest, but it's also when it's most important to calm the mind and focus on the task at hand. Anyway, two pieces of Neuro gum has one cup of coffee's worth of caffeine. Neuro is offering 15% off when you use code Lex at checkout.

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  So go to getneuro.com and use code Lex. This show is sponsored by Decoding Digital Podcast that is hosted by App Direct co-CEO Dan Sacks. It's a relatively new show I started listening to where every episode is an interview with an entrepreneur or expert on a particular topic in the tech space. I like the recent interview with Michelle Zatlin of CloudFlare about security. I've been progressively getting more interested in hacking culture, both on the attack and the defense side. So this conversation was a fun, educational 45 minutes to listen to. I think this podcast has a nice balance between tech and business that many of you might

• 4:24Lex Fridman?

  enjoy, especially if you're thinking of starting a business yourself or working at a startup. I'm thinking through this process myself, trying to find the balance between careful planning and throwing caution to the wind and just going with it. Anyway, check out the Coding Digital on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Please give them all the love in the world and encouragement to help keep it going and help the podcast grow. This show is also sponsored by MasterClass. $180 a year for an all-access pass to watch courses from literally the best people in the world on a bunch of different topics. Let me list some I've enjoyed watching in part or in whole.

• 5:09Lex Fridman?

  Chris Hadfield on space exploration, Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking and communication, Will Wright, creator of Simcity and Sims on game design, Carlos Santana on guitar, Garry Kasparov on chess, Daniel Negrono on poker, Neil Gaiman on storytelling, Martin Scorsese, one of my favorite directors, on filmmaking, Tony Hawk on, you guessed it, skateboarding, Jane Goodall on conservation, and many, many more. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Sign up at masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off the first year of an annual subscription. That's masterclass.com/lex.

• 5:50Lex Fridman?

  Finally, this show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. I'm thinking of doing more conversations with folks who work in and around the cryptocurrency space, similar to AI, unfortunately, but even more so, I think, there's a lot of charlatans in this space. But there's also a lot of free thinkers and technical geniuses that are worth exploring in depth and with care. If I make mistakes in guest selection and details in conversation, I'll keep trying to improve, correct where I can, and also keep following my curiosity wherever it takes

• 6:35Lex Fridman?

  me. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store, Google Play, and use code LEXPODCAST, you get $10, and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Charles Isbell.

• 7:16Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned that you love movies and TV shows. Let's ask an easy question, but you have to be definitively, objectively conclusive. What's your top three movies of all time?

• 7:30Charles Isbell?

  So you're asking me to be definitive and to be conclusive? That's a little hard. I'm gonna tell you why. It's very simple. It's because movies is too broad of a category. I gotta pick subgenres. But I will tell you that of those genres, I'll pick one or two from each of those. And I'll get us to three, except I'm gonna cheat. So my favorite comedy of all times, which probably my favorite movie of all time, is His Girl Friday, which is probably a movie that you've not ever heard of, but it's based on a play called The Front Page from, I don't know, early 1900s. And the movie is a fantastic film.

• 8:06Lex Fridman?

  What's the story? What's the independent film?

• 8:08Charles Isbell?

  No, no, no.

• 8:09Lex Fridman?

  What are we talking about?

• 8:09Charles Isbell?

  This is one of the movies that would have been very popular as a screwball comedy. You ever see Moonlighting, the TV show? You know what I'm talking about? So you've seen these shows where there's a man and a woman, and they clearly are in love with one another, and they're constantly fighting and always talking over each other?

• 8:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Charles Isbell?

  Banter, banter, banter, banter, banter. This was the movie that started all that, as far as I'm concerned. It's very much of its time, so it's, I don't know, it must have come out sometime between 1934 and 1939. I'm not sure exactly when the movie itself came out. It's black and white. It's just a fantastic film. It's hilarious.

• 8:43Lex Fridman?

  So it's mostly conversation?

• 8:45Charles Isbell?

  Not entirely, but mostly, mostly. Just a lot of back and forth. There's a story there. Someone's on death row, and they're newspaper men, including her. They're all newspaper men. They were divorced. The editor, the publisher, I guess, and the reporter, they were divorced. But, you know, they clearly, he's thinking, trying to get back together, and there's this whole other thing that's going on, but none of that matters. The plot doesn't matter.

• 9:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. It's just a little play in conversation.

• 9:12Charles Isbell?

  It's fantastic. And I just love everything about the conversation, because at the end of the day, sort of narrative and conversation are the sort of things that drive me. And so I really, I really liked that movie for that reason. Similarly, I'm now gonna cheat, and I'm gonna give you two movies as one, and they're Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and John Wick. Both relatively modern, John Wick, of course.

• 9:32Lex Fridman?

  One, two, or three.

• 9:33Charles Isbell?

  One. It gets increasingly, I love them all for different reasons, and increasingly more ridiculous. Kind of like loving Alien and Aliens, despite the fact they're two completely different movies. But the reason I put Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and John Wick together is because I actually think they're the same movie, or what I like about them, the same movie, which is both of them create a world that you're coming in the middle of, and they don't explain it to you. But the story is done so well that you pick it up. So anyone who's seen John Wick, you know, you have these little coins, and they're headed out, and there are these rules, and apparently every single person in New York City is an assassin. There's like two people who come through who aren't, but otherwise they are. But there's this complicated world, and everyone knows each other. They don't sit down and explain it to you, but you figure it out. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a lot like that.

• 10:18Charles Isbell?

  You get the feeling that this is chapter nine of a ten-part story, and you've missed the first eight chapters, and they're not going to explain it to you, but there's this sort of rich world behind you.

• 10:26Lex Fridman?

  You get pulled in anyway, like immediately.

• 10:28Charles Isbell?

  You get pulled in anyway. So it's just excellent storytelling in both cases, in very, very different.

• 10:32Lex Fridman?

  And also you like the outfit, I assume? The John Wick outfit?

• 10:35Charles Isbell?

  Oh, yeah, of course. Of course. Yes. I think the John Wick outfit is perfect. And so that's, that's number two. And then.

• 10:40Lex Fridman?

  But sorry to pause on martial arts. You have a long list of hobbies, like it scrolls off the page, but I didn't see martial arts as one of them.

• 10:48Charles Isbell?

  I do not do martial arts, but I certainly watch martial arts. Oh, I appreciate it very much. Oh, we could talk about every Jackie Chan movie ever made. And I would be, I would be on board with that.

• 10:56Lex Fridman?

  Like a shower too? Like that kind of, the comedy of a cop?

• 10:59Charles Isbell?

  Yes, yes. By the way, my favorite Jackie Chan movie would be Drunken Master Two, known in the States usually as Legend of the Drunken Master. Actually, Drunken Master, the first one, is the first Kung Fu movie I ever saw, but I did not know that.

• 11:15Lex Fridman?

  First Jackie Chan movie?

• 11:16Charles Isbell?

  No, first one ever, that I saw and remember. But I had no idea.

• 11:20Lex Fridman?

  What is this?

• 11:20Charles Isbell?

  That that's what it was. And I didn't know that was Jackie Chan. That was like his first major movie. I was a kid, it was done in the seventies. I only later rediscovered that that was actually.

• 11:30Lex Fridman?

  And he creates his own martial art by, by drinking. Was he actually drinking, or was? Or was he play drinking?

• 11:38Charles Isbell?

  You mean as an actor or?

• 11:40Lex Fridman?

  No. I'm sure as an actor.

• 11:43Charles Isbell?

  No.

• 11:43Lex Fridman?

  Seventies or whatever.

• 11:44Charles Isbell?

  He was definitely drinking and he, in the end, he drinks industrial grade alcohol.

• 11:50Lex Fridman?

  Ah, yeah.

• 11:51Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, and has a fan, one of the most fantastic fights ever in that, that subgenre. Anyway, that's my favorite one of his movies, but I'll tell you the last movie.

• 12:00Charles Isbell?

  It's actually a movie called Nothing But A Man, which is nineteen sixties. Start Ivan Dixon, who you'll know from Hogan's Heroes and Abby Lincoln. It's just a really small little drama. It's, it's a beautiful story, but my favorite scenes, I'm cheating. My favorite, one of my favorite movies, just for the ending is The Godfather. I think the last scene of that is just fantastic. It's the whole movie all summarized in just eight, nine seconds.

• 12:29Lex Fridman?

  Godfather, part one?

• 12:30Charles Isbell?

  Part one.

• 12:31Lex Fridman?

  How does it end? I don't think you can, you need to worry about spoilers. If you haven't seen The Godfather.

• 12:35Charles Isbell?

  Spoiler alert, the, it ends with the wife coming to Michael. And he says, just this once, I'll let you ask me my business. And she asks him if she, if he did this terrible thing. And he looks her in the eye and he lies and he says, no. And she says, thank you. And she, she walks out the door and you see, you see him as she's going, you see him go, you see her going out of the door. And all these people are coming in and they're kissing Michael's hands and Godfather. And then the camera switches perspective. So instead of looking at him, you're looking at her. And the door closes in her face and that's the end of the movie. And that's the whole movie, right there.

• 13:15Lex Fridman?

  Do you see parallels between that and your position as Dean at Georgia Tech, Crowe? Just kidding, a trick question.

• 13:22Charles Isbell?

  Sometimes, certainly the door gets closed on me every once in a while.

• 13:26Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that was a rhetorical question. You've also mentioned that you, I think, enjoy all kinds of experiments, including on yourself. But I, I saw a video where you said you did an experiment where you tracked all kinds of information about yourself. And a few others, the sort of wiring up your home. And this, this little idea that you mentioned in that video, which is quite interesting, that you thought that two days worth of data. Is enough to capture majority of the behavior of the human being.

• 13:59Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:00Lex Fridman?

  First, can you describe what the heck you did to collect all the data? Because it's fascinating, just like little details of how you collect that data? And also what your intuition behind the two days is?

• 14:11Charles Isbell?

  So first off, it has to be the right two days. But I was, I was thinking of a very specific experiment. There's actually a suite of them that I've been a part of and other people have done this. Of course, I just sort of dabbled in that part of the world. But to be very clear, the specific thing that I was talking about had to do with recording all the IR going on in my infrared going on in my, my house. So this is a long time ago. So this is everything's being curled by, by pressing buttons on remote controls as opposed to speaking to Alexa or Siri or, or someone like that. And I was just trying to figure out if you could get enough data on people to figure out what they were going to do with their TVs or their lights. My house was completely wired up at the time. But you know, what I'm about to look at a movie, I'm about to turn on the TV or whatever, and just see what I could predict from it. It was kind of surprising.

• 14:56Charles Isbell?

  It shouldn't have been, but that's all very easy to do. By the way, just capturing all the little stuff is, I mean, it's a bunch of computer systems. It's really easy to capture the, if you know what you're looking for. At Georgia Tech, long before I got there, we had this thing called the Aware Home, where everything was wired up and you saw, you captured everything that was going on. Nothing even difficult, not with video or anything like that. Just the way that the system was just capturing everything. So it turns out that, and I did this with myself and then I had students and they worked with many other people. And it turns out at the end of the day, people do the same things over and over and over again. So it has to be the right two days, like a weekend. But it turns out not only can you predict what someone's going to do next, at the level of what button they're going to press next on a remote control.

• 15:38Charles Isbell?

  But you can do it with something really, really simple, like a, you don't even need a hidden Markov model. It's like a mark, just simply, I press this, this is my prediction of the next thing. It turns out you can get 93% accuracy just by doing something very simple and stupid and just counting, counting statistics. But what was actually more interesting is that you could use that information. This comes up again and again in my work. If you try to represent people or objects by the things they do, the things you can measure about them that have to do with action in the world. So a distribution over actions and you try to represent them by the distribution of actions that are done on them, then you do a pretty good job of sort of understanding how people are and they cluster. Remarkably well, in fact irritatingly so.

• 16:23Charles Isbell?

  And so by clustering people this way, you can maybe, you know, I got the 93% accuracy of what's the next button you're going to press, but I can get 99% accuracy or somewhere there's about on the collections of things you might press. And it turns out the things that you might press are all related to number to each other in exactly the way that you would expect. So for example, all the key, all the numbers on the keypad, it turns out all have the same behavior with respect to you as a human being. And so you would naturally cluster them together and you discover that numbers are all are related to one another in some way and all these other things. And then, and here's the part that I think is important. I mean, you can see this in all kinds of things.

• 17:03Charles Isbell?

  Every individual is different, but any given individual is remarkably predictable because you keep doing the same things over and over again. And the two things that I've learned in the long time that I've been thinking about this is people are easily predictable and people hate when you tell them that they're easily predictable. But they are.

• 17:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Charles Isbell?

  And there you go.

• 17:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What about, let me play devil's advocate and philosophically speaking, is it possible to say that what defines humans is the outlier? So even though ninety, some large percentage of our behaviors, whatever the signal we measure is the same and it would cluster nicely, but maybe it's the special moments of when we break out of the routine is the definitive things. And the way we break out of that routine for each one of us might be different.

• 17:49Charles Isbell?

  It's possible. I would say that, I would say it a little differently, I think. I would make two things. One is a, I'm going to disagree with the premise, I think, but that's fine. I think the way I would put it is there are people who are very different from lots of other people, but they're not 0%, they're closer to 10%, right? So in fact, even if you do this kind of clustering of people, that'll turn out to be this small number of people, they all behave like each other, even if they individually behave very differently from, from, from everyone else. So I think that's kind of important. But what you're really asking, I think, and I think this is really a question is, You know, what do you do when you're faced with the situation you've never seen before? What do you do when you're faced with an extraordinary situation? Maybe you've seen others do, and you're actually forced to do something. And you react to that very differently. And that is the thing that makes you human.

• 18:34Charles Isbell?

  I would agree with that, at least at a philosophical level, that it's the the times when you are faced with something difficult, a decision that you have to make, where the answer isn't easy, even if you know what the right answer is. That's sort of what defines you as the individual. And I think what defines people broadly. It's the hard problem. It's not the easy problem. It's the thing that's going to hurt you. It's not the thing. It's not even that it's difficult. It's this that you know that the outcome is going to be highly suboptimal for you. And I do think that that's a reasonable place to start for the question of what makes us human.

• 19:08Lex Fridman?

  So before we talk about, sort of explore the different ideas underlying interactive artificial intelligence, which we're working on, let me just go along this thread to skip to kind of our world of social media, which is something that, at least on the artificial intelligence side, you think about. There's a popular narrative, I don't know if it's true, but that we have these silos in social media. And we have these clusterings, as you're kind of mentioning. And the idea is that, you know, along that narrative is that, you know, we want to, we want to break each other out of those silos so we can be empathetic to other people to, if you're a Democrat,

• 19:53Lex Fridman?

  you're empathetic to the Republican. If you're a Republican, you're empathetic Democrat. Those are just two silly bins that we seem to be very excited about. But there's other binings that we can think about. Is there, from an artificial intelligence perspective? Because you're just saying we cluster along the data. But then interactive artificial intelligence is referring to throwing agents into that mix, AI systems in that mix, helping us, interacting with us humans and maybe getting us out of those silos? Is that something that you think is possible? Do you see? A hopeful possibility for artificial intelligence systems in these large networks of people to get us outside of our habits

• 20:38Lex Fridman?

  in at least the idea space to where we can sort of be empathetic to other people's lived experiences, other people's points of view, you know, all that kind of stuff.

• 20:52Charles Isbell?

  Yes, I actually don't think it's that hard. Well, it's not hard in this sense. So imagine that you can, let's just, let's make life simple for a minute. Let's assume that you can do a kind of partial ordering over ideas or clusterings of behavior. It doesn't even matter what I mean here, so long as there's some way that this is a cluster, this is a cluster, there's some edge between them, right? And this is kind of, they don't quite touch even, or maybe they come very close. If you can imagine that conceptually, then the way you get from here to here is not by going from here to here. The way you get from here to here is you find the edge and you move slowly together. Right? And I think that machines are actually very good at that sort of thing. Once we can kind of define the problem, either in terms of behavior or ideas or words or whatever. So it's easy in the sense that if you already have the network and you know the relationships, you know, the edges and sort of the strengths on them,

• 21:38Charles Isbell?

  and you kind of have some semantic meaning for them. The machine doesn't have to, you do as a designer. Then yeah, I think you can kind of move people along and sort of expand them. But it's harder than that. And the reason it's harder than that, or sort of coming up with the network structure itself is hard, is because I'm gonna tell you a story that I, someone else told me. And I don't, I may get some of the details a little bit wrong, but it's roughly, it roughly goes like this. You take two sets of people from the same backgrounds, and you want them to solve a problem. So you separate them, which we do all the time. And oh, you know, we're gonna break out in the, we're gonna break out groups. You're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this. You're gonna go over there and you're gonna talk about this. And then you have them sort of in this big room, but far apart from one another. And you have them sort of interact with one another.

• 22:21Charles Isbell?

  When they come back to talk about what they learned, you want to merge what they've done together. It can be extremely hard because they don't, they basically don't speak the same language anymore. Like when you create these problems and you dive into them, you create your own language. So the example this one person gave me, which I, I found kind of interesting because we were in the middle of that at the time, was they're sitting over there and they're talking about these rooms that you can see. But you're seeing them from different vantage points, depending upon what side of the room you're on. They can see a clock very easily. And so they start referring to the room as the one with the clock. This group over here, looking at the same room, they can see the clock, but it's, you know, not in their line of sight or whatever, so they end up referring to it by some other way. When they get back together and they're talking about things, they're referring to

• 23:06Charles Isbell?

  the same room and they don't even realize they're referring to the same room. In fact, this group doesn't even see that there's a clock there and this group doesn't see whatever. The clock on the wall was the thing that stuck with me. So if you create these different silos, the problem isn't that the ideologies disagree. It's that you're using the same words and they mean radically different things. The hard part is just getting them to agree on the, well, maybe we'd say the axioms in our world, right? But, you know, just get them to agree on some basic definitions. Because right now, they're talking past each other, just completely talking past each other. That's the hard part. Getting them to meet, getting them to interact, that may not be that difficult. Getting them to see where their language is leading them to lead past one another, that's the hard part.

• 23:47Lex Fridman?

  It's a really interesting question to me. It could be on the layer of language, but it feels like there's multiple layers to this. Like, it could be worldview, it could be, I mean, all boils down to empathy, being able to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to learn the language, to learn, like, visually how they see the world, to learn, like, the, I mean, I experienced this now with trolls, the degree of humor in that world. For example, I talk about love a lot. I'm very, like, I'm very lucky to have this amazing community of loving people, but whenever I encounter trolls, they always roll their eyes at the idea of love because it's so, quote unquote, cringe.

• 24:27Charles Isbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Lex Fridman?

  So, so they show love by, like, derision, I would say. And I think about, on the human level, that's a whole nother discussion, that's psychology, that's sociology, so on. But I wonder if AI systems can help somehow and to bridge the gap of what is this person's life like? Encourage me to just ask that question, to put myself in their shoes, to experience the agitations, the fears, the hopes they have, to experience, you know, even just to think about what was their upbringing like?

• 25:09Lex Fridman?

  Like, having a single-parent home, or a shitty education, or all those kinds of things? Just to put myself in that mind space. It feels like that's really important. For us to bring those clusters together, to find that similar language. But it's unclear how AI can help that because it seems like AI systems need to understand both parties first.

• 25:32Charles Isbell?

  So, you know, the word understand there is doing a lot of work, right?

• 25:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Charles Isbell?

  So.

• 25:36Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 25:36Charles Isbell?

  Do you have to understand it or you just simply have to note that there is something similar as a point to touch, right? So, you know, you use the word empathy and I like that word for a lot of reasons. I think you're right in the way that you're using and the way that you're describing, but let's separate it from sympathy, right? So, you know, sympathy is feeling sort of for someone. Empathy is kind of understanding where they're coming from and how they feel, right? And for most people, those things go hand in hand. For some people, some are very good at empathy and very, very bad at sympathy. Some people cannot experience, well, my observation would be, I'm not a psychologist. My observation would be that some people seem incapable of feeling sympathy unless they feel empathy first.

• 26:18Charles Isbell?

  You can understand someone, understand where they're coming from and still think, no, I can't support that. Right? It doesn't mean that the only way, because if that, if that isn't the case, then what it requires is that you, you must, the only way that you can, to understand someone means you must agree with everything that they do. Which isn't right, right? And, and if the only way I can feel for someone is to completely understand them and make them like me in some way. Well, then we're lost, right? Because we're not all exactly like each other. I have to understand everything that you've gone through. It helps clearly, but they're separable ideas, right? Even though they get clearly, clearly tangled up in one another. So what I think AI could help you do actually is if, and you know, I'm being quite fanciful as it were.

• 27:03Charles Isbell?

  But if you, if you think of these as kind of, I understand how you interact, the words that you use, the, you know, the actions you take. I have some way of doing this. Let's not worry about what that is. But I can see you as a kind of distribution of experiences and actions taken upon you, things you've done and so on. And I can do this with someone else and I can find the places where there's some kind of commonality. A mapping, as it were, even if it's not total, you know, the, if I think of this as distribution, right? Then, you know, I can take the cosine of the angle between you. And if it's, you know, if it's zero, you've got nothing in common. If it's one, you're completely the same person. Well. You know, you're probably not one, you're almost certainly not zero. I can find the place where there's the overlap and I might be able to introduce you on that basis or connect you in that, connect you in that way.

• 27:48Charles Isbell?

  And make it easier for you to take that step of, that step of empathy. It's not, it's not impossible to do. Although I wonder if it requires that everyone involved is at least interested in asking the question. So maybe the hard part is just getting them interested in asking the question. In fact, maybe if you can get them to ask the question, how are we more alike than we are different? They'll solve it themselves. Maybe that's the problem that AI should be working on, not telling you how you're similar or different, but just getting you to decide that it's worthwhile asking the question.

• 28:16Lex Fridman?

  So.

• 28:17Charles Isbell?

  It feels like an economist's answer, actually.

• 28:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, people, okay, first of all, people like, would disagree. So let me disagree slightly, which is, I think everything you said is brilliant. But I, I tend to believe philosophically speaking, that people are interested underneath it all. And I would say that AI, the, the possibility that an AI system would show the commonality is incredible. That's a really good starting point. I would say if you, if on social media, I could discover the common things, deep or shallow, between me and a person who there's tension with. I think that my basic human nature would take over from there.

• 28:59Lex Fridman?

  And I think enjoy that commonality and like, there's something sticky about that that my mind will linger on. And that person in my mind will become like warmer and warmer. And like, I'll, I'll start to feel more and more compassion towards them. I, I think for majority of the population, that's true, but that might be, that's a hypothesis.

• 29:20Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's an empirical question, right? You'd have to figure it out. I'd, I, I mean, I want to believe you're right. And so I'm going to say that I think you're right. Of course, some people come to those things for the purpose of trolling, right? And it doesn't matter, they're, they're playing a different game.

• 29:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Charles Isbell?

  But I don't know, I, you know, my experience is it requires two things. It requires, in fact, maybe this is really at the end what you're saying. And then, and I, and I do agree with this for sure. So.

• 29:46Charles Isbell?

  It's hard to hold on to that kind of anger or to hold on to just a desire to humiliate someone for that long. It's just difficult to do. It takes a toll on you. But more importantly, we know this, both from people having done studies on it, but also from our own experiences, that it is much easier to be dismissive of a person if they're not in front of you, if they're not real. Right? So much of the history of the world is about making people other. Right? So if you're in social media, if you're on the web, if you're doing whatever in the internet, being forced to deal with someone as a person, some equivalent to being in the same room, makes a huge difference because then you're, one, you're forced to deal with their humanity because it's in front of you.

• 30:30Charles Isbell?

  The other is, of course, that, you know, they might punch you in the face if you go too far. So, you know, both of those things kind of work together, I think, to the right end. So I think bringing people together is really a kind of substitute for forcing them to see the humanity in another person and to not be able to treat them as bits. It's hard to troll someone when you're looking them in the eye. This is very difficult to do.

• 30:53Lex Fridman?

  Agreed. Your broad set of research interests fall under interactive AI, as I mentioned, which is a fascinating set of ideas. And you have some concrete things that you're particularly interested in. But maybe could you talk about how you think about the field of interactive artificial intelligence?

• 31:12Charles Isbell?

  Sure. So let me say upfront that if you look at certainly my early work, but even if you look at most of it, I'm a machine learning guy. Right? I do machine learning. First paper I ever published was in NIPS.

• 31:24Charles Isbell?

  Back then it was NIPS, now it's in NERIPS. It's a long story there. Anyway, that's another thing. But so, so I'm a machine learning guy. I believe in data, I believe in statistics and all those kinds of things.

• 31:32Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 31:33Charles Isbell?

  And the reason I'm bringing that up is even though I'm a new fangled statistical machine learning guy and have been for a very long time, the problem I really care about is AI. Right? I care about artificial intelligence. I care about building some kind of intelligent artifact, however that gets expressed, that would be.

• 31:50Charles Isbell?

  At least as intelligent as humans and as interesting as humans, perhaps on their sort of in their own way.

• 31:57Lex Fridman?

  So that's the deep, underlying love and dream is the bigger AI.

• 32:01Charles Isbell?

  Yes.

• 32:01Lex Fridman?

  It's the bigger, whatever the heck that is.

• 32:03Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, the machine learning in some ways is a means to the end. It is not the end. And I don't understand how one could be intelligent without learning. So therefore, I got to figure out how to do that. Right? So that's important. But machine learning, by the way, is also a tool. I said statistical because that's what most people think of themselves, machine learning people. That's what they think. Pat Langley might disagree, or at least 1980s Pat Langley might disagree with what it takes to do to do machine learning. But I care about the AI problem, which is why it's interactive AI and not just interactive ML. I think it's important to to understand that, that there's a long term goal here, which I will probably never live to see, but I would love to have been a part of, which is building something truly intelligent outside of outside of ourselves.

• 32:43Lex Fridman?

  Can we take a tiny tangent? Or am I interrupting? Which is, is there something you can say concrete about the mysterious gap between the subset ML and the bigger AI? What's missing? What's, what do you think? I mean, obviously, it's totally unknown, not totally, but in part unknown at this time. But is it something like what Pat Langley's? Is it knowledge, like expert system reasoning type of kind of thing?

• 33:10Charles Isbell?

  So AI is bigger than ML, but ML is bigger than AI. This is kind of the real, the real problem here is that they're really overlapping things that are really interested in slightly different problems. I tend to think of ML, and there are many people out there are going to be very upset at me about this, but I tend to think of ML being much more concerned with the engineering of solving a problem.

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 33:27Charles Isbell?

  And AI about the sort of more philosophical goal of of true intelligence. And that's the thing that motivates me, even if I end up finding myself living in this kind of engineering-ish space.

• 33:36Lex Fridman?

  Got it.

• 33:36Charles Isbell?

  I've now made, made Michael Jordan upset. But, you know, it's, it's, it's, to me, they just feel very different. You're just measuring them differently. Your, your, your, your sort of goals of where you're trying to be are somewhat different.

• 33:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Charles Isbell?

  But to me, AI is about trying to build that intelligent thing. And typically, but not always, for the purpose of understanding ourselves a little bit better. Machine learning is, I think, trying to solve the problem. Whatever that problem is. Now, that's my take. Others, of course, would disagree.

• 34:04Lex Fridman?

  So on that note, so with the interactive AI, do you tend to, in your mind, visualize AI as a singular system, or is it as a collective huge amount of systems interacting with each other? Like, is the social interaction of us humans and of AI systems the fundamental to intelligence?

• 34:22Charles Isbell?

  I think, well, certainly fundamental to our kind of intelligence, right? And I actually think it matters quite a bit. So the reason the interactive AI part matters to me is because I don't, this is going to sound simple, but I don't care whether a tree makes a sound when it falls and there's no one around, because I don't think it matters, right? If there's no observer in some sense. And I think what's interesting about the way that we're intelligent is we're intelligent with other people, right, or other things, anyway. And we go out of our way to make other things intelligent. We're hardwired to like find intention, even whether there is no intention. I mean, anthropomorphize everything. We, I think, anyway, we, I think the interactive AI part is being intelligent in and of myself

• 35:06Charles Isbell?

  in isolation is a meaningless act in some sense. The correct answer is you have to be intelligent in the way that you interact with others. It's also efficient because it allows you to learn faster, because you can import from, you know, past history. It also allows you to be efficient in the transmission of that. So we ask ourselves about me. Am I intelligent? Clearly, I think so. But I'm also intelligent as a part of a larger species and group of people. And we're trying to move the species forward as well. And so I think that notion of being intelligent with others is kind of the key thing, because otherwise you come and you go, and then it doesn't matter. And so that's why I care about that aspect of it. And it has lots of other implications. One is not just, you know, building something intelligent with others,

• 35:50Charles Isbell?

  but understanding that you can't always communicate with those others. They have been in a room where there's a clock on the wall that you haven't seen, which means you have to spend an enormous amount of time communicating with one another constantly in order to figure out what the other, what each other wants, right? So, I mean, this is why people project, right? You project your own intentions and your own reasons for doing things on to others as a way of understanding them so that you know, you know how to behave. But by the way, you. Completely predictable person. I don't know how you're predictable. I don't know you well enough, but you probably eat the same five things over and over again, or whatever it is that you do, right? Uh, I know I do. Uh, if I'm going to a new Chinese restaurant, I will get General Gao's chicken because that's the thing that's easy to get. I will get hot and sour soup. You know, the, the, people do the things that they do, but other people get the chicken and broccoli.

• 36:34Charles Isbell?

  I can push this analogy way too far. Uh, the chicken and broccoli.

• 36:37Lex Fridman?

  I don't know what's wrong with those people.

• 36:38Charles Isbell?

  I don't know what's wrong with them either. They.

• 36:40Lex Fridman?

  That's not, that's not good.

• 36:41Charles Isbell?

  We have all had our trauma. Uh, so they get their chicken and broccoli and their egg drop soup or whatever. Um, we gotta communicate and it's gonna change, right? So it's not, interactive AI is not just about learning to solve a problem or a task. It's about having to adapt that over time, over a very long period of time and interacting with other people who will themselves change. This is what we mean about things like adaptable models, right? That you have to have a model, that model's gonna change. And by the way, it's not just the case that you're different from that person, but you're different from the person you were 15 minutes ago, or certainly 15 years ago. And I have to assume that you're at least gonna drift. Hopefully not too many discontinuities, but you're gonna, you're gonna drift over time. And, and I have to have some mechanism for adapting to that as you an individual over time and across individuals over time.

• 37:26Lex Fridman?

  On, on the topic of adaptive modeling and you talk about lifelong learning, which is a, I think a topic that's understudied, or maybe because nobody knows what to do with it. But like, you know, if you look at Alexa or most of our artificial intelligence systems that are primarily machine learning based systems or dialogue systems, all those kinds of things, they know very little about you in the sense of the lifelong learning sense that, uh, we learn as humans, we learn a lot about each other, not in the quantity of facts, but like the.

• 38:07Lex Fridman?

  Temporally rich set of information that seems to like pick up the crumbs along the way that somehow seems to capture a person pretty well.

• 38:17Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:17Lex Fridman?

  Do you have any ideas how to, uh, how to do lifelong learning? Because it seems like most of the machine learning community does not.

• 38:26Charles Isbell?

  No, well, by the way, not only does the machine learning community not, not spend a lot of time on lifelong learning, they don't, I don't think they spend a lot of time on, um, learning period in the sense that they tend to be very task focused. Everybody is overfitting to whatever problem is they happen to have. They're over engineering their solutions to the task. Even the people, and I think these people do, um, are trying to solve a hard problem of transfer learning, right? I'm going to learn on one task and learn the other task. It's you still end up creating the task, you know? It's like looking for your keys where the light is because that's where the light is, right? It's not because the keys have to be there. I mean, and one could argue that we tend to do this in general. We tend to kind of do it as a group. We tend to hill climb and get stuck in local optima. Um, and I think we do this in the small, the small as well. I think it's very hard to do.

• 39:08Charles Isbell?

  Because, so, look, here's the hard thing about AI, right? The hard thing about AI is it keeps changing on us, right? You know, what is AI? AI is the, you know, the art and science of making computers act the way they do in the movies, right? That's what it is, right?

• 39:21Lex Fridman?

  That's a good definition.

• 39:22Charles Isbell?

  But, but beyond that.

• 39:24Lex Fridman?

  And they keep coming up with new movies.

• 39:25Charles Isbell?

  Yes. And they just, and it's right, exactly. We are driven by this kind of need to, uh, sort of ineffable quality of who we are, which means that the moment you understand something is no longer AI, right? Well, like, we understand this. That's just you take the derivative and you divide by two and then you, you average it out over time in the window. And so therefore that's no longer AI. So the problem is unsolvable because it keeps kind of going away. This creates a kind of illusion, which I don't think is an entire illusion of either there's very simple task based things you can do very well and over engineer. There's all of AI and there's like nothing in the middle. Like, it's very hard to get from here to here and it's very hard to see how to get from here to here. And I don't think that we've done a very good job of it because we get stuck trying to solve the small problems in front of us, myself included.

• 40:08Charles Isbell?

  I'm not going to pretend that I'm better at this than anyone else. Um, and of course, all the incentives in academia and in industry are set to make that very hard because you, you have to get the next paper out, you have to get the next product out, you have to solve this problem. And it's very sort of naturally incremental and none of the, the incentives are set up to allow you to take a huge risk unless you're already so well established, you can take that big risk. And if you're that well established that you can take that big risk, then you've probably spent much of your career taking these little risks, relatively speaking. And so you have got a lifetime of experience telling you not to take that particular big risk. Right. So the whole system is set up to make progress very slow. That's fine. It's just the way it is, but it does make this gap seem really big,

• 40:51Charles Isbell?

  which is my long way of saying, I don't have a great answer to it, except that stop doing N equals one. At least try to get an equal two and maybe an equal seven so that you can say, I'm gonna, or maybe T is a better variable here. I'm going to not just solve this problem, I'm going to solve this problem and another problem. I'm not going to learn just on you. I'm going to keep living out there in the world and just seeing what happens. And that we'll learn something as designers and our machine learning algorithms and our AI algorithms can learn as well. But unless you're willing to build a system, which you're going to have live for months at a time in an environment that is messy and chaotic, you cannot control, then you're never going to make progress in that direction. So I guess my answer to you is yes. My idea is that you should, it's not no, it's yes.

• 41:33Charles Isbell?

  You should be deploying these things and making them live for months at a time and be okay with the fact that it's going to take you five years to do this. Not rerunning the same experiment over and over again and refining the machine. So it's slightly better at whatever, but actually having it out there and living in the chaos of the world and seeing what its learning algorithm say can learn, what data structure it can build and how it can go from there. Without that, you're going to be stuck ultimately.

• 42:00Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about the possibility of N equals one growing? It's probably crude approximation, but growing like if you look at language models like GPT three, if you just make it big enough, it'll swallow the world. Meaning like it'll solve all your tea to infinity by just growing in size of this, taking the small over engineered solution and just pumping it full of steroids in terms of compute, in terms of size of training data and the Yann LeCun style self supervised or OpenAI self supervised. Just throw all of YouTube at it and it will learn how to reason,

• 42:41Lex Fridman?

  how to paint, how to create music, how to love, all of that by watching YouTube videos.

• 42:46Charles Isbell?

  I mean, I can't think of a more terrifying world to live in than a world that's based on YouTube videos. But yeah, I think, I think the answer that I just kind of don't think that'll quite well. It won't work that easily. You will get somewhere and you will learn something, which means it's probably worth it. But you won't get there. You won't solve the, you know, here's the thing.

• 43:08Charles Isbell?

  We build these things and we say we want them to learn. But what actually happens, and let's say they do learn. I mean, certainly every paper I've gotten published, the things learn, I don't know about anyone else. But they actually change us, right? We react to it differently, right? So we keep redefining what it means to be successful, both in the negative, in the bad case, but also in the positive, in that, oh, well, this is, this is a, this is an accomplishment. I'll give you an example, which is like the one you just described with YouTube. Let's, let's get completely out of machine learning. Well, not completely, but mostly out of machine learning. Think about Google.

• 43:40Charles Isbell?

  People were trying to solve information retrieval, the ad hoc information retrieval problem forever. I mean, first major book I ever read about it was, what, 71? I think was when it came out. Anyway, it's, you know, we'll treat everything as a vector and we'll do these vector space models and whatever. And that was all great. And we made very little progress. I mean, we made some progress. And then Google comes and makes the ad hoc problem seem pretty easy. I mean, it's not, there's lots of computers and databases involved, but, you know, and there's some brilliant algorithmic stuff behind it too, and some systems building.

• 44:14Charles Isbell?

  But the problem changed, right?

• 44:18Charles Isbell?

  If you've got a world that's that connected so that you have, you know, there are 10 million answers, quite literally, to the question that you're asking.

• 44:27Charles Isbell?

  Then the problem wasn't, give me the things that are relevant. The problem is, don't give me anything that's irrelevant, at least in the first page, because nothing else matters. So Google is not solving the information retrieval problem, at least not on this webpage. Google is minimizing false positives, which is not the same thing as getting an answer. It turns out it's good enough for what it is we want to use Google for. But it also changes what the problem was we thought we were trying to solve in the first place. You thought you were trying to find an answer, but you're not, or you're trying to find the answer. But it turns out you're just trying to find an answer. Now, yes, it is true, it's also very good at finding you exactly that webpage. Of course, you trained yourself to figure out what the keywords were to get you that webpage.

• 45:09Charles Isbell?

  But in the end, by having that much data, you've just changed the problem into something else. You haven't actually learned what you set out to learn. Now, the counter to that would be, maybe we're not doing that either. We just think we are, because, you know, we're in our own heads. Maybe we're, we're, we're learning the wrong problem in the first place. But I don't think that matters. I think the point is, is that Google has not solved information retrieval. Google has done amazing service. I have nothing bad to say about what they've done. Lord knows, my entire life is better because Google exists in front of Google Maps. I don't think they've ever found this place.

• 45:39Lex Fridman?

  Where is this?

• 45:40Charles Isbell?

  Like 95, I see 110 and I see, but where, where, where'd 95 go? You know, so I'm very, I'm very grateful for Google. But, you know, they just have to make certain the first five things are right. And everything after that is wrong. Look, we're going off in a totally different topic here, but, but

• 45:58Charles Isbell?

  think about the way we hire faculty. It's exactly the same thing.

• 46:02Lex Fridman?

  Are you getting controversial?

• 46:03Charles Isbell?

  I'm not getting controversial. It's exactly the same problem, right? It's minimizing false positives.

• 46:11Charles Isbell?

  We say things like, we want to find the best person to be an assistant professor at MIT in the new College of Computing, which I will point out was founded 30 years after the College of Computing I'm a part of. Both, both are my alma mater.

• 46:26Lex Fridman?

  Them are fighting words.

• 46:28Charles Isbell?

  I'm just saying, I appreciate all that they did and all that they're doing. Anyway, so we're gonna, we're gonna try to, we're gonna try to hire the best professor. That's what we say, the best person for this job. But that's not what we do at all, right? Do you know which percentage of faculty in the top four earn their PhDs from the top four? Say in 2017, for which we have, which is the most recent year for which I have data.

• 46:53Lex Fridman?

  Maybe a large percentage.

• 46:54Charles Isbell?

  About 60%.

• 46:55Lex Fridman?

  60.

• 46:56Charles Isbell?

  60% of the faculty in the top four earn their PhDs in the top four. This is computer science.

• 47:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Charles Isbell?

  For which there is no top five. There's only a top four, right? Because they're all tied for one.

• 47:04Lex Fridman?

  For people who don't know, by the way, that would be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU.

• 47:07Charles Isbell?

  Yep.

• 47:09Lex Fridman?

  Georgia Tech.

• 47:11Charles Isbell?

  Number eight.

• 47:12Lex Fridman?

  Number eight. You keeping track?

• 47:14Charles Isbell?

  Oh, yes. It's a large part of my job. Number five is Illinois. Number six is a tie with U. Davenport Cornell. And Princeton and Georgia Tech are tied for eight, and UT Austin is number 10.

• 47:26Charles Isbell?

  Michigan's number 11, by the way. So if you look at the top 10, you know, a percentage of faculty in the top 10 earn their PhDs from the top 10? 65, roughly. 65%. If you look at the top 55 ranked departments, 50% of the faculty earn their PhDs from the top 10. There's no universe in which all the best faculty, even just for R1 universities, the majority of them come from 10 places. There's no way that's true, especially when you consider how small some of those universities are in terms of the number of PhDs they produce.

• 48:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Charles Isbell?

  Now, that's not a negative. I mean, it is a negative. It also has a habit of intrinsing certain historical inequities and accidents. But what it tells you is, well, ask yourself the question. Why is it like that? Well, because it's easier.

• 48:19Charles Isbell?

  If we go all the way back to the 1980s, you know, there was a saying that, you know, nobody ever lost his job buying a computer from IBM. And it was true. And nobody ever lost their job hiring a PhD from MIT, right? If the person turned out to be terrible, well, you know, they came from MIT. What did you expect me to know? However, that same person coming from pick whichever is your least favorite place that produces PhDs in, say, computer science. Well, you took a risk, right? So all the incentives, particularly because you're only going to hire one this year. Well, now we're hiring 10, but you know, you're only going to hire one or two or three this year. And by the way, when they come in, you're stuck with them for at least seven years in most places, because that's before you know whether they're getting tenure or not. And if they get tenure, you're stuck with them for a good 30 years unless they decide to leave.

• 49:02Charles Isbell?

  That means the pressure to get this right is very high. So what are you going to do? You're going to minimize false positives. You don't care about saying no inappropriately. You only care about saying yes inappropriately. So all the pressure drives you into that particular direction. Google. Not to put too fine a point on it, was in exactly the same situation with their search. It turns out, you just don't want to give people the wrong page in the first three or four pages. And if there's 10 million right answers and 100 bazillion wrong answers, just make certain the wrong answers don't get up there. And who cares if you, the right answer was actually the 13th page. A right answer, a satisficing answer, is number one, two, three, or four. So who cares?

• 49:41Lex Fridman?

  Or an answer that will make you discover something beautiful, profound to your question.

• 49:46Charles Isbell?

  Well, that's a different problem, right?

• 49:47Lex Fridman?

  But isn't that the problem? Can we linger on this topic without sort of walking with grace? How do we get for hiring faculty? How do we get that 13th page with the truly special person? Like, there's, I mean, it depends on the department. Computer Science probably has those departments, those kinds of people. Like you have the Russian guy, Grigory Proman. Like, just these awkward, strange minds that don't know how to play the little game of etiquette that faculty have all agreed somehow, like converged over the decades, how to play with

• 50:30Lex Fridman?

  each other. And also is not, you know, on top of that is not from the top four, top whatever numbers, the schools. And maybe actually just says a few every once in a while to the traditions of old within the computer science community. Maybe talks trash about machine learning is a total waste of time. And that's there on their resume. So like, how do you allow the system to give those folks a chance?

• 51:00Charles Isbell?

  Well, you have to be willing to take a certain kind of, without taking a particular position on any particular person. You'd have to take, you have to be willing to take risk, right? A small amount of it. I mean, if we were treating this as a Well, it's a machine learning problem, right? There's a search problem, which is what it is. It's a search problem. If we were treating it that way, you would say, oh, well, the main thing is you want, you know, you've got a prior, you want some data, because I'm Bayesian. If you don't want to do it that way, we'll just inject some randomness in and it'll be okay. The problem is that feels very, very hard to do with people. All the incentives are wrong there. But it turns out, and let's say, let's say that's the right answer. Let's just give, for the sake of argument, that, you know, injecting randomness in the system at that level for who you hire is just not, not worth doing. Because the price is too high, the cost is too high.

• 51:44Charles Isbell?

  We had infinite resources, sure, but we don't. And also, you've got to teach people. So, you know, you're ruining other people's lives if you get it too wrong.

• 51:52Charles Isbell?

  But we've taken that principle, even if I grant it, and pushed it all the way back. Right? So we could have a better pool than we have of people we look at and give an opportunity to. If we do that, then we have a better chance of finding them. Of course, that just pushes the problem back, back another level. But let me, let me tell you something else. You know, I did a sort of study, I call it a study. I called and paid my friends and asked them for all of their data for graduate admissions. But then someone else followed up and did an actual study. And it turns out that I can tell you how everybody gets into grad school, more or less, more or less. You basically admit everyone from places higher ranked than you. You admit most people from places ranked around you, and you admit almost no one from places ranked below you, with the exception of the small liberal arts colleges that aren't

• 52:37Charles Isbell?

  ranked at all, like Harvey Mudd, because they don't, they have PhDs, but they aren't ranked. This is all CS.

• 52:43Charles Isbell?

  Which means the decision of whether, you know, you become a professor at Cornell was determined when you were 17, right? By where, what you knew to go to undergrad to do whatever, right? So if we can push these things back a little bit and just make the pool a little bit bigger, at least you raise the probability that you will be able to see someone interesting and, and, and take the risk. The other answer to that question, by the way, which you could argue is the same, is you either adjust the pool so the probabilities go up. That's a way of injecting a little bit of uniform, uniform noise in the system, as it were, is you change your loss function. You just let yourself be measured by something other than whatever it is that

• 53:24Charles Isbell?

  we're measuring ourselves by now. I mean, US News and World Report, every time they change their formula for determining rankings, move entire universities to behave differently because rankings matter.

• 53:37Lex Fridman?

  Can you talk trash about those rankings for a second? No, I'm joking about talking trash. I actually, it's so funny how, from my perspective, from very shallow perspective, how dogmatic, like, how much I trust those rankings. They're almost ingrained in my head. I mean, at MIT, everybody kind of, it's a propagated, mutually agreed upon, like, idea that those rankings matter. And I don't think anyone knows what they're, like, most people don't know what they're based on. And what are they exactly based on? And what are the flaws in that?

• 54:15Charles Isbell?

  Well, so it depends on which rankings you're talking about. Do you want to talk about computer science? Or do you want to talk about universities?

• 54:20Lex Fridman?

  Computer science, US News, isn't that the main one?

• 54:24Charles Isbell?

  Yes, the only one that matters is US News. Nothing else matters. Sorry, CS rankings, but nothing else matters but US News. So US News has formula that it uses for many things, but not for computer science, because computer science is considered a science, which is absurd. So the rankings for computer science is 100% reputation. So two people at each department, it's not really a department, whatever, at each department, basically rank everybody. Slightly more complicated than that. But whatever, they rank everyone. And then those things are put together and somehow.

• 55:00Lex Fridman?

  So that means, how do you improve reputation? How do you move up and down the space of reputation?

• 55:06Charles Isbell?

  Yes, that's exactly the question.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  Twitter?

• 55:09Charles Isbell?

  It can help. I can tell you how Georgia Tech did it, or at least how I think Georgia Tech did it, because Georgia Tech is actually the case to look at. Not just because I'm at Georgia Tech, but because Georgia Tech is the only computing unit that was not in the top 20 that has made it into the top 10. It's also the only one in the last two decades, I think, that moved up in the top 10.

• 55:31Charles Isbell?

  As opposed to having someone else move down. So we used to be number 10. And then we became number nine because UT Austin went down slightly. And now we retired for ninth because that's how rankings work. Uh, and we moved from nine to eight because our raw score moved up a point. So Georgia, something, something, something about Georgia Tech, computer science or computing. Anyway, um, I think it's because we have shown leadership at every crisis level. Right? So we created a college, first public university to do it. Second college, second university to do it after CMU is number one. I also think it's no, um, accident that CMU is the largest and we're depending upon how you count. And depending on exactly where MIT ends up with its final college of computing, second or third largest. I don't think that's an accident. We've been doing this for a long time.

• 56:14Charles Isbell?

  Uh, but in the 2000s, when there was a crisis about undergraduate education, Georgia Tech took a big risk and succeeded at rethinking undergrad education and computing. Um, I think we, we created these schools at a time when most public universities anyway, were afraid to do it. We did the online masters. Um, and that mattered because people were trying to figure out what to do with MOOCs and so on. I think it's about being observed by your peers and having an impact. So, I mean, that is what reputation is, right? So the way you move up in the reputation rankings is by doing something that makes people turn and look at you and say, that's good. They're better than I thought. Yeah. Beyond that, it's just inertia and this huge history system, the system, right?

• 56:57Charles Isbell?

  Like, I mean, there was these, I can't remember this, this may be apocryphal, but the, you know, there were, there's a, a major or department that like MIT was ranked number one in and they didn't have it. Right? It's just about what you, I don't know if that's true, but someone said that to me anyway. Um, but it's, it's a, it's a, it's a thing, right? It's all about reputation. Of course MIT is great because MIT is great. It's always been great. By the way, because MIT is great, the best students come.

• 57:22Charles Isbell?

  Which keeps it being great. I mean, it's just a positive feedback loop. It's not surprising. I don't think it's wrong.

• 57:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's almost like a narrative, like it doesn't actually have to be backed by reality. And it's, you know, not to say anything about MIT, but like, it, it does feel like we're playing in the space of narratives, not the space of some, something grounded. And like, one of the surprising things when I showed up at MIT and just all the students I've worked with and all the research I've done is it like, they're the same people as I've met other places.

• 57:59Charles Isbell?

  I mean, what MIT has going for it, well, MIT has many things going for it. One of the things MIT has going for it is.

• 58:03Lex Fridman?

  Nice logo.

• 58:04Charles Isbell?

  It's a nice logo. It's a lot better than it was when I was here. Nice colors, too. Terrible, terrible name for a mascot. But the, the thing that MIT has going for it is it really does get the best students. It just doesn't get all of the best students. There are many more best students out there, right? And the best students want to be here because it's the best place to be, or one of the best places to be. And it just kind of, it's a sort of positive feedback. But you said something earlier, which I think is worth examining for a moment, right? You said it's, I forget the word you used. You said, we're living in the space of narrative as opposed to something objective. Narrative is objective. I mean, one could argue that the only thing that we do as humans is narrative. We just build stories to explain why we do this.

• 58:48Charles Isbell?

  Someone once asked me, but wait, there's nothing objective. No, it's completely an objective measure. It's an objective measure of the opinions of everybody else.

• 58:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Charles Isbell?

  Now, is that physics? I don't know. But, you know, what, I mean, tell me something you think is actually objective and measurable in a way that makes sense. Like cameras, they don't, do you know that, I mean, you're getting me off on something, but do you know that?

• 59:15Charles Isbell?

  Cameras, which are just reflecting light and putting them on film, like, did not work for dark-skinned people until like the 1970s. You know why? Because you were building cameras for the people who are gonna buy cameras, who all, at least in the United States and Western Europe, were relatively light-skinned. Turns out, took terrible pictures of people who look like me. That got fixed with better film and whole processes. Do you know why? Because furniture manufacturers wanted to be able to take pictures of mahogany furniture. Right? Because candy manufacturers wanted to be able to take pictures of chocolate. Now, the reason I bring that up is because you might think that cameras-

• 59:58Lex Fridman?

  Are objective.

• 59:59Charles Isbell?

  They're objective, they're just capturing light. No, they're made, they are doing the things that they're doing based upon decisions by real human beings to privilege, if I may use that word, some physics over others. Because it's an engineering problem, they're trade-offs, right? So, I can either worry about this part of the spectrum, or this part of the spectrum. This costs more, that costs less, this costs the same, but I have more people paying money over here, right? And it turns out that, you know, if a giant, you know, conglomerate wants you, demands that you do something different, and it's gonna involve all kinds of money for you, suddenly the trade-offs change, right? And so, there you go. I actually don't know how I ended up there. Oh, it's because of this notion of objectiveness, right? So, so even the objective is an objective? Because at the end, you've got to tell a story, you've got to make decisions, you've got to make trade-off, and what else is engineering, other than that?

• 1:00:42Charles Isbell?

  So, I think that the rankings capture something. They just don't necessarily capture what people assume they capture.

• 1:00:51Lex Fridman?

  You know, just to linger on this, this idea, why is there not more people who just like play with whatever that narrative is, have fun with it, have like excite the world, whether it's in the Carl Sagan style of like that calm, sexy voice of explaining the stars and all the romantic stuff? Or, or the Elon Musk, dare I even say Donald Trump, where you're like trolling and shaking up the system and just saying controversial things? That like, I talked to Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist, who just enjoys playing the controversy, thinks like, like finds the counterintuitive ideas in the particular

• 1:01:33Lex Fridman?

  science, and throws them out there and sees how they play in the public discourse. Like, why don't we see more of that? And why does academia attract an Elon Musk type?

• 1:01:44Charles Isbell?

  Well, tenure is a powerful thing that allows you to do whatever you want. But getting tenure typically requires you to be relatively narrow, right? Because people are judging you. Well, I think the answer is we have told ourselves a story, a narrative, that that is vulgar, what you just described is vulgar. It's certainly unscientific, right? And it is easy to convince yourself that in some ways you're the mathematician, right? The fewer there are in your major, the more that proves your purity, right?

• 1:02:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Charles Isbell?

  So, once you tell yourself that story, then it is beneath you to do that kind of thing, right? I think that's wrong. I think that, and by the way, everyone doesn't have to do this. Everyone's not good at it and everyone, even if they would be good at it, would enjoy it.

• 1:02:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Charles Isbell?

  So it's fine. But I do think you need some diversity in the way that people choose to relate to the world as academics. Because I think the great universities are ones that engage with the rest of the world. It is a home for public intellectuals.

• 1:02:55Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:02:55Charles Isbell?

  And in 2020, being a public intellectual probably means being on Twitter. Whereas, of course, that wasn't true 20 years ago because Twitter wasn't around in 20 years ago. And if it was, it wasn't around in a meaningful way. I don't actually know how long Twitter's been around. As I get older, I find that my notion of time has gotten worse and worse. Like, Google really has been around that long? Anyway, the point is that I think that we sometimes forget that a part of our job is to impact the people who aren't in the world that we're in. And that that's the point of being at a great place and being a great person, frankly.

• 1:03:30Lex Fridman?

  There's an interesting force in terms of public intellectuals. You know, if we get Twitter, we could look at just online courses that are public facing in some part. Like, there is a kind of...

• 1:03:43Lex Fridman?

  Force that pulls you back, I would, let me just call it out because I don't give a damn at this point. It's, there's a little bit of, all of us have this, but certainly faculty have this, which is jealousy. It's whoever is popular at being a good communicator, exciting the world with their science. And of course, when you excite the world with the science, it's not peer reviewed, clean. It's, it's, it all sounds like bullshit. It's like a TED Talk. And people roll their eyes and they, they hate that a TED Talk gets millions of views or something like that.

• 1:04:22Lex Fridman?

  And then everybody pulls each other back. There's this force that's just kinda, it's hard to stand out unless you like win a Nobel Prize or whatever. Like it's only when you like get senior enough where you just stop giving a damn. But just like you said, even when you get tenure, that was always the surprising thing to me. I have many colleagues and friends who have gotten tenure, but there's not a switch.

• 1:04:49Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's not an F you money switch. Where you're like, you know what? Now I'm going to be more bold. It doesn't, I don't see it.

• 1:04:57Charles Isbell?

  Well, there's a reason for that. Tenure isn't a test. It's a training process. It teaches you to behave in a certain way, to think in a certain way, to accept certain values and to react accordingly. And the better you are at that, the more likely you are to earn tenure. And by the way, this is not a bad thing. Most things are like that. And I think most of my colleagues are interested in doing great work and they're just having impact in the way that they want to have impact. I do think that as a field, not just as a field, as a profession, we have a habit of belittling those who are popular, as it were, as if the word itself is a kind of scarlet A, right? I think.

• 1:05:44Charles Isbell?

  It's easy to convince yourself, and no one is immune to this, that the people who are better known are better known for bad reasons. The people who are out there dumbing it down are not being pure to whatever the values beneath us is for your field. And it's just very easy to do. Now, having said that, I think that ultimately, people who are able to be popular and out there and are touching the world and making a difference, you know, our colleagues do in fact appreciate that in the long run. It's just, you know, you have to be very good at it, or you have to be very interested in pursuing it. And once you get past a certain level, I think people, people accept that for who it is. I mean, I don't know.

• 1:06:26Charles Isbell?

  I'd be really interested in how Rod Brooks felt about how people were interacting with him when he did Fast, Cheap and Out of Control way, way, way back when.

• 1:06:35Lex Fridman?

  What's Fast, Cheap and Out of Control?

• 1:06:37Charles Isbell?

  It was a documentary that involved four people. I remember nothing about it other than Rod Brooks was in it and something about naked mole rats. Can't remember what the other two things were. It was robots, naked mole rats, and then two other.

• 1:06:49Lex Fridman?

  By the way, Rod Brooks used to be the head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, and then launched, I think, I, Robot, and then Think Robotics, Rethink Robotics?

• 1:06:59Charles Isbell?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:07:01Lex Fridman?

  Think is in the word. And, and also is a little bit of a rock star personality in the AI world, a very opinionated, very intelligent. Anyway, sorry, mole rats and naked.

• 1:07:13Charles Isbell?

  Naked mole rats. Also, he was one of my two advisors for my PhD.

• 1:07:17Lex Fridman?

  This explains a lot.

• 1:07:18Charles Isbell?

  I don't know. I love Rod. But I also love my other advisor, Paul. Paul, if you're listening, I love you too. Both very, very different people. Paul Viola. Both very interesting people, very different in many ways. But I don't know what Rod would say to you about how, what the reaction was. I know that for the students at the time, because I was a student at the time, it was amazing. Right? This guy was on in a movie being very much himself. Actually, the movie version of him is a little bit more Rod than Rod. I mean, I think they edited it appropriately for him, but it was very much Rod. And he did all this while doing great work. I mean, he was running, was he running the I lab at that point or not? I don't know. But anyway, he was running the I lab or would be soon. He's a giant in the field. He did amazing

• 1:08:03Charles Isbell?

  things, made a lot of his bones by doing the kind of counterintuitive science, right? And saying, no, you're doing this all wrong. Representation is crazy. The world is your own representation. You just react to me. This is amazing things and continues to do those, those sorts of things as he's, as he's moved on. I have, I think he might tell you, I don't know if he would tell you what's good or bad, but I, I know that for everyone else out there in the world, it was a good thing. And certainly he continued to be respected. So it's not as if it destroyed his career by being popular.

• 1:08:32Lex Fridman?

  All right, let's go into a topic where I'm on thin ice because I grew up in the Soviet Union, Russia, my, my knowledge of music, this American thing you guys do is, is quite foreign. So your research group is called, as we've talked about, the Lab for Interactive Artificial Intelligence, but also there's just a bunch of mystery around this. My research fails me, also called P-Funk.

• 1:09:01Charles Isbell?

  Yep.

• 1:09:01Lex Fridman?

  P stands for probabilistic.

• 1:09:03Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:04Lex Fridman?

  And what does funk stand for?

• 1:09:08Charles Isbell?

  So a lot of my life is about making acronyms. So if I have one quirk, it's that people will say words and I see if they make acronyms.

• 1:09:14Lex Fridman?

  Ah.

• 1:09:15Charles Isbell?

  And if they do, then I'm happy. And then if they don't, I try to change it so that they make acronyms. It's just a thing that I do. So P-Funk is an acronym. It has three or four different meanings. But finally, I decided that the P stands for probabilistic because at the end of the day, it's machine learning and it's randomness and it's uncertainty, which is the important thing here.

• 1:09:34Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:09:34Charles Isbell?

  And the funk can be lots of different things, but I decided I should leave it up to the individual to, to figure out exactly what it is. But I will tell you that when my students graduate. When they get out, as we say at tech, I hand them, they put on a hat and star glasses and a medallion from the P-Funk era. And we take a picture and I hand them a pair of fuzzy dice, which they get to keep.

• 1:10:02Lex Fridman?

  So there's a sense to it, which is not an acronym, like literally funk. There's a, you have a dark, mysterious past.

• 1:10:11Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:12Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's not dark, it's just fun, is in hip hop and funk.

• 1:10:18Charles Isbell?

  Yep.

• 1:10:19Lex Fridman?

  So can you educate a Soviet born Russian about this thing called hip hop? Like if you were to give me, like, you know, went on a journey together and you were trying to educate me about especially, you know, the past couple of decades in the 90s about hip hop or funk, what records or artists would you, would you introduce me to? Would you, or would you tell me about, or maybe what influenced you in your journey? Or what you just love? Like when, when, when the family's gone and you just sit back and just blast some stuff these days, what do you listen to?

• 1:11:00Charles Isbell?

  Well, so I listen to a lot, but I will tell you, well, first off, all great music was made when I was 14 and that statement is true for all people, no matter how old they are or where they live. But for me, the first thing that's worth pointing out is that hip hop and rap aren't the same thing. So depending on who you talk to about this, and there are people who feel very strongly about this, much more strongly than I do.

• 1:11:19Lex Fridman?

  You're offending everybody in this conversation, so this is great, let's keep going.

• 1:11:22Charles Isbell?

  Hip hop is a culture.

• 1:11:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Charles Isbell?

  It's a whole set of things, of which rap is a part. So tagging is a part of hip hop. I don't know why that's true, but people tell me it's true and I'm willing to go along with it because they get very angry about it.

• 1:11:33Lex Fridman?

  Tagging is like graffiti?

• 1:11:34Charles Isbell?

  Tagging is like graffiti. And there's all these, including the popping and the locking and all the dancing and all those things, that's all a part of hip hop. It's a way of life, which I think is true. And then there's rap, which is this particular.

• 1:11:45Lex Fridman?

  It's the music part.

• 1:11:46Charles Isbell?

  Yes, a music part. I mean, you wouldn't call the stuff that DJs do the scratching. That's not rap, right? But it's a part of hip hop, right? So, given that we understand that hip hop is this whole thing, what are the rap albums that best touch that for me? Well, if I were going to educate you, I would try to figure out what you liked and then I would work you there.

• 1:12:05Lex Fridman?

  Skinnerd.

• 1:12:07Charles Isbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:12:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Charles Isbell?

  I would probably start with.

• 1:12:12Lex Fridman?

  What's that?

• 1:12:14Charles Isbell?

  There's a fascinating, oh, it's okay. There's a fascinating exercise one can do by watching old episodes of I Love the Seventies, I Love the Eighties, I Love the Nineties with a bunch of friends and just see where people come in and out of pop culture. So if you're talking about those people, then I would actually start you with, where I would hope to start you with anyway, which is Public Enemy. Particularly, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which is clearly the best album ever produced and certainly the best hip hop album ever produced, in part because it was so much of what was great about the time. Fantastic lyrics, because to me, it's all about the lyrics. Amazing music that was coming from Rick Rubin was the producer of that.

• 1:12:57Charles Isbell?

  And he did a lot, very kind of heavy metal-ish, at least in the eighties sense at the time. And it was focused on politics in the 1980s, which was what made hip hop so great then. I would start you there, then I would move you up through things that have been happening more recently. I'd probably get you to someone like a Mos Def. I would give you a history lesson, basically. Mos Def's amazing.

• 1:13:18Lex Fridman?

  He hosted a poetry jam thing on HBO or something like that?

• 1:13:21Charles Isbell?

  Probably. I don't think I've seen it, but I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:13:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, spoken poetry.

• 1:13:24Charles Isbell?

  Yes, he's amazing. He's amazing. And then I would, after I got you there, I'd work you back to EPMD. And eventually, I would take you back to The Last Poet. And particularly their first album, The Last Poets, which was 1970, to give you a sense of history and that it actually has been building up over a very, very long time. So we would start there because that's where your music aligns and then we would cycle out and I'd move you to the present and then I'd take you back to the past. Because I think a large part of people who are kind of confused about any kind of music, you know, the truth is, this is the same thing we've always been talking about, right? It's about narrative and being a part of something and being immersed in something so you understand it, right?

• 1:14:05Charles Isbell?

  Jazz, which I also like, is, one of the things that's cool about jazz is that you come and you meet someone who's talking to you about jazz and you have no idea what they're talking about. And then one day it all clicks and you've been so immersed in it, you go, oh yeah, that's a Charlie Parker. You start using words that nobody else understands, right? And it becomes a part of, hip hop's the same way. Everything's the same way. They're all cultural artifacts. But I would help you to see that there's a history of it and how it connects to other genres of music that you might like to bring you in, so that you could kind of see how it connects to what you already like, including some of the good work that's been done with fusions of hip hop and bluegrass.

• 1:14:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 1:14:43Charles Isbell?

  Yes. Some of it's even good. Not all of it, but some of it is good. But I'd start you with It Takes a Nation to Me, It's a Hold His Back.

• 1:14:53Lex Fridman?

  There's an interesting tradition in like more modern hip hop of integrating almost like classic rock songs or whatever, like integrating into the, into their music, into the beat, into the whatever. It's kind of interesting. It gives a whole new, not just classic rock, but what is it? Kanye with Gold Digger, the...

• 1:15:15Charles Isbell?

  Old R and B.

• 1:15:16Lex Fridman?

  Taking and pulling old R and B, right?

• 1:15:18Charles Isbell?

  Well, that's been true since the beginning. I mean, in fact, that's in some ways, that's why the DJ used to get top billing, because it was the DJ that brought all the records together and made it work so that people could dance. If you know, you go back, you go back to those days, mostly in New York, though not exclusively, but mostly in New York where it sort of came out of, you know, it was the DJ that brought all the music together and the beats and showed that basically music is itself an instrument, very meta. And you can bring it together and then you sort of rap over it and so on. And it sort of, it moved that way. So that's going way, way back. Now, in the period of time where I grew up, when I became really into it, which was mostly the 80s, it was more funk. Was the back for a lot of the stuff Public Enemy at that time notwithstanding.

• 1:16:01Charles Isbell?

  And so, which is very nice because it tied into what my parents listened to and what I vaguely remember listening to when I was very small. So, and by the way, complete revival of George Clinton and Parliament and Funkadelic and all of those things to bring it sort of back into the eighties and into the nineties. And as we go on, you're going to see, you know, the last decade and the decade before that being brought in. And when you don't think that you're hearing something you've heard, it's probably because it's being sampled by someone who, referring to something they remembered when they were young, perhaps from somewhere else altogether. And you just didn't realize what it was because it wasn't a popular song where you happened to grow up. So this stuff's been going on for a long time. It's one of the things that I think is beautiful.

• 1:16:45Charles Isbell?

  Run DMC, Jam Master J used to play, he played piano. He would record himself playing piano and then sample that to make it a part of what was going on rather than play the piano.

• 1:16:55Lex Fridman?

  That's how his mind can think.

• 1:16:57Charles Isbell?

  Well, it's pieces, you're putting pieces together, you're putting pieces of music together to create new music, right? Now, that doesn't mean that the root, I mean, the roots are doing their own thing.

• 1:17:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Those, those are, that's a whole.

• 1:17:06Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, but still, it's the right attitude that, you know, and what else is jazz, right? Jazz is about putting pieces together and then putting your own spin on it. It's all the same, it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing.

• 1:17:17Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, because you mentioned lyrics. It, it does make me sad, again, this is me talking trash about modern hip hop. I haven't, you know, investigated, I'm sure people correct me that there's a lot of great artists. That's part of the reason I'm saying it is they'll leave it in the comments that you should listen to this person, is the lyrics went away from talking about maybe not just politics, but life and so on, like, you know, the kind of like protest songs, even if you look at like a Bob Marley, or you said Public Enemy or Rage Against the Machine, more on the rock side. There's, that's the place where we go to those lyrics. Like, classic rock is all about like, my woman left me, or, or I'm really happy that

• 1:18:01Lex Fridman?

  she's still with me, or the flip side, it's like love songs of different kinds, it's all love, but it's less political, like, less interesting, I would say, in terms of like, deep profound knowledge. And it seems like rap is the place where you would find that, and it's sad that. For the most part, what I see, like you look like mumble rap or whatever, they're moving away from lyrics and more towards the beat and the musicality of it.

• 1:18:26Charles Isbell?

  I've always been a fan of the lyrics. In fact, if you go back and you read my reviews, which I recently was rereading, man, fuck, I wrote my last review the month I graduated, I got my PhD, which says something about something. I'm not sure what, though. I always would, I didn't always, but often would start with, it's all about the lyrics. For me, it's all, it's about the lyrics.

• 1:18:47Charles Isbell?

  Someone has already written in the comments before I've even finished having this conversation that, you know, neither of us knows what we're talking about. And it's all in the underground hip hop and here's who you should go listen to. And that is true. Every time I despair for popular rap, someone points me to, or I discover some underground hip hop song and I'm, I am made happy and whole again. So I know it's out there. I don't listen to as much as I used to because I'm listening to podcasts and old music from the 1980s.

• 1:19:15Lex Fridman?

  No beat.

• 1:19:15Charles Isbell?

  It's a kind of, no, no beat at all. But you know, there's a little bit of sampling here and there, I'm sure.

• 1:19:21Lex Fridman?

  By the way, James Brown is funk or no?

• 1:19:23Charles Isbell?

  Yes. And so is Junior Wells, by the way.

• 1:19:25Lex Fridman?

  Who's that?

• 1:19:26Charles Isbell?

  Ah, Junior Wells, Chicago Blues. He was James Brown before James Brown was.

• 1:19:31Lex Fridman?

  It's hard to imagine somebody being James Brown.

• 1:19:33Charles Isbell?

  Go look up Hoodoo Man Blues, Junior Wells. And just listen, listen to Snatch It Back and Hold It. And you'll see it. And they were contemporaries.

• 1:19:44Lex Fridman?

  Where do you put like Little Richard or all that kind of stuff, like Ray Charles, like when they get like, Hit the Road Jack, Don't You Come Back? Isn't that like, there's a funkiness in it?

• 1:19:54Charles Isbell?

  Oh, there's definitely a funkiness in it. I mean, it's all, I mean, it's all, it's all a line. I mean, it's all, there's all a line that carries it all together. You know, it's, I guess I would answer your question, depending whether I'm thinking about it in 2020 or I'm thinking about it in 1960, I'd probably give a different answer. I'm just thinking in terms of, you know, that was rock, but when you look back on it, it's, it was funky. But we didn't use those words, or maybe we did. I wasn't around. But, you know, I don't think we used the word 1960 funk, certainly not the way we used it in the 70s and the 80s.

• 1:20:23Lex Fridman?

  Do you reject disco?

• 1:20:25Charles Isbell?

  I do not reject disco. I appreciate all the mistakes that we have made to get here today. Actually, some of the disco is actually really, really good.

• 1:20:31Lex Fridman?

  John Travolta, oh, boy. He regrets it probably. Maybe not. Well, like it's the mistakes thing.

• 1:20:37Charles Isbell?

  Yeah. And it got him to where he's going, where he is.

• 1:20:41Lex Fridman?

  Oh, well, thank you for taking that detour. You've you've talked about computing, where we've already talked about computing a little bit, but can you try to describe how you think about the world of computing, where it fits into the sets of different disciplines? We mentioned college of computing. What what should people? How should they think about computing, especially from an educational perspective of like, what is the perfect curriculum that defines for a young mind what computing is?

• 1:21:13Charles Isbell?

  So I don't know about a perfect curriculum, although that's an important question because at the end of the day, without the curriculum, you don't get anywhere. Curriculum, to me, is the fundamental data structure. It's not even the classroom.

• 1:21:22Lex Fridman?

  I love it.

• 1:21:23Charles Isbell?

  In the world of, right? So I think the curriculum is where I like to play. So I spent a lot of time thinking about this. But I will tell you, I'll answer your question by answering a slightly different question first and getting back to this, which is, you know, you talked about disciplines and what does it mean to be a discipline? The truth is, what we really educate people in from the beginning, but certainly through college, you've sort of failed if you don't think about it this way, I think, is the world. People often think about tools and toolsets, and when you're really trying to be good, you think about skills and skillsets. But disciplines are about mindsets, right? They're about fundamental ways of thinking, not just the the hammer that you pick up,

• 1:22:04Charles Isbell?

  whatever that is, to hit the nail, not just the the skill of learning how to hammer well or whatever. It's the mindset of like, what's the fundamental way to think about to think about the world, right? And disciplines, different disciplines, give you different mindsets, give you different ways of sort of thinking through. So with that in mind, I think that computing, even ask the question, whether it's a discipline, is you have to decide, does it have a mindset? Does it have a way of thinking about the world that is different from, you know, the scientist who is doing discovery and using the scientific method as a way of doing it? Or the mathematician who builds abstractions and tries to find sort of steady state truths about the abstractions that may be artificial, but whatever? Or is it the engineer who's all about, you know, building demonstrably superior technology

• 1:22:49Charles Isbell?

  with respect to some? Notion of trade offs, whatever that means, right? That's sort of the world that you, the world that you, you live in. What is computing, you know, how is computing different? So I've thought about this for a long time and I've come to a view about what computing actually is, what the mindset is and, and it's, you know, it's a little abstract, but that would be appropriate for computing. I think that what distinguishes the computationalist from others is that he or she understands that models, languages and machines are equivalent. They're the same thing. And because it's not just a model, but it's a machine that is an executable thing that can be described as a language, that means that it's dynamic.

• 1:23:31Charles Isbell?

  So it's not the, it is mathematical in some sense, in the kind of sense of abstraction, but it is fundamentally dynamic and executable. The mathematician is not necessarily worried about either the dynamic part. In fact, whenever I tried to write something for mathematicians, they invariably demand that I make it static. And that's not a bad thing. It's just, it's a way of viewing the world that truth is a thing, right? It's not a process that continually runs, right? So that dynamic thing matters, that self-reflection of the system itself matters. And that is what computing, that is what computing brought us. So it is a science because it, the models fundamentally represent truths in the world. Information is a scientific thing to discover, right? Not just a mathematical conceit that, that gets created.

• 1:24:14Charles Isbell?

  But of course it's engineering because you're actually dealing with constraints in the world and trying to execute machines that, that, that actually run. But it's also math because you're actually worrying about these languages that describe, that describes, describe what's happening. But the fact that, um, um, that, uh, regular expressions and finance data time, one of which feels like a machine, or at least an abstraction machine, and the other is a language that they're actually the equivalent thing. I mean, that is not a small thing and it, it permeates everything that we do, even when we're just trying to figure out how to, how to do debugging. So that idea, I think, is fundamental and we would do better if we made that more explicit. How my life has changed and my thinking about this, um, in the 10 or 15 years,

• 1:24:58Charles Isbell?

  it's, it's been since I tried to put that to paper with some colleagues, is the realization, which comes to a question you, you, uh, you actually asked me earlier, which has to do with trees falling down, whether it matters, is this sort of triangle of equality?

• 1:25:15Charles Isbell?

  It only matters because there's a person inside the triangle. Right. That what's changed about computing, computer science, whatever you want to call it, is we now have so much data and so much computational power. We're able to do really, really interesting, promising things. But the interesting and the promising kind of only matters with respect to human beings and their relationship to it. So the triangle exists. That is fundamentally computing. What makes it worthwhile and interesting and potentially world species changing is that there are human beings inside of it and intelligence that has to interact with it that changes the data, the information that makes sense

• 1:25:55Charles Isbell?

  and gives meaning to the models, the languages and the machines. So if the curriculum can convey that while conveying the tools and the skills that you need in order to succeed, then it is a big win. That's what I think you have to do.

• 1:26:11Lex Fridman?

  Do you pull psychology, like these human things into that, into the idea, into this framework of computing? Do you pull in psychology and neuroscience, like parts of psychology, parts of neuroscience, parts of sociology? What about philosophy, like studies of human nature from different perspectives?

• 1:26:29Charles Isbell?

  Absolutely. And by the way, it works both ways. So let's take biology for a moment. It turns out a cell is basically a bunch of if then statements, if you look at it the right way, which is nice because I understand if then statements. I never really enjoyed biology, but I do understand if then statements. And if you tell the biologist that and they begin to understand that, it actually helps them to think about a bunch of really cool things. There'll still be biology involved, but whatever. On the other hand, the fact of biology is in fact a bunch of, the cell is a bunch of if then statements or whatever, allows the computationalists to think differently about the language and the way that we, well, certainly the way we would do AI and machine learning, but there's just even the way that we think about, we think about computation. So the important thing to me is, as you know, my engineering colleagues who are not in computer science worry about computer science

• 1:27:14Charles Isbell?

  eating up engineering to colleges where computer science is trapped.

• 1:27:19Charles Isbell?

  It's not a worry. You shouldn't worry about that at all. Computing is computer science. Computing, it's not, it's central, but it's not the most important thing in the world. It's not more important. It is just key to helping others do other cool things they're gonna do. You're not gonna be a historian in 2030. You're not gonna get a PhD in history without understanding some data science and computing, because the way you're gonna get history done, in part, and I say done, the way you're gonna get it done is you're going to look at data and you're gonna let, you're gonna have a system that's gonna help you to analyze things, to help you to think about a better way to describe history and to understand what's going on and what it tells us about where we might be going. The same is true for psychology, same is true for all of these things. The reason I brought that up is because the philosopher has a lot to say about computing. The psychologist

• 1:28:01Charles Isbell?

  has a lot to say about the way humans interact with computing, right? And certainly a lot about intelligence, which, at least for me, ultimately is kind of the goal of building these computational devices, is to build something intelligent.

• 1:28:14Lex Fridman?

  Did you think computing will eat everything in some certain sense, or almost like disappear because it's part of everything?

• 1:28:20Charles Isbell?

  It's so funny you say this. I want to say it's gonna metastasize, but there's kind of two ways that fields destroy themselves. One is they become super narrow, and I think we can think of fields that might be that way. They become pure. And we have that instinct. We have that impulse. I'm sure you can think of several people who want computer science to be this pure thing. The other way is you become everywhere and you become everything and nothing. And so everyone says, you know, I'm gonna teach for transfer engineers or whatever, I'm gonna do this. And then you lose the thing that makes it worth studying in and of itself. The thing about computing, and this is not unique to computing, though at this point in time it is distinctive about computing, where we happen to be in 2020,

• 1:29:04Charles Isbell?

  is we are both a thriving major, in fact, the thriving major almost every place.

• 1:29:11Charles Isbell?

  And we're a service unit because people need to know the things we need to know. And our job, much as the mathematician's job is to help, you know, this person over here to think like a mathematician, much the way the point isn't, the point of you taking chemistry as a freshman is not to learn chemistry. It's to learn to think like a scientist, right? Our job is to help them to think, think like a computationalist. And we have to take both of those things very seriously. And I'm not sure that as a field, we have historically certainly taken the second thing, that our job is to help them to think a certain way. People who aren't going to be on me, I don't think we've taken that, that very seriously at all.

• 1:29:46Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if you know who Dan Carlin is. He has this podcast called Hardcore History.

• 1:29:50Charles Isbell?

  Yes.

• 1:29:50Lex Fridman?

  I've just did an amazing four hour conversation with him, mostly about Hitler. But I, I bring him up because he talks about this idea that it's possible that history as a field will become like currently, most people study history a little bit. We kind of are aware of it. We have a conversation about it, different parts of it. I mean, there's a lot of criticism to say that some parts of history are being ignored, blah, blah, blah, so on. But most people are able to, to have a curiosity and able to learn it. The, his thought is it's possible, given the way social media works, the, the current way we communicate,

• 1:30:32Lex Fridman?

  that history becomes a niche field where literally most people just ignore, because everything is happening so fast that the history starts losing its meaning. And then it starts being a thing that only, you know, it's like the theoretical computer science, part of computer science. It becomes a niche thing that only like the rare holders of the, the world wars and the, you know, all the history, the founding of the, the United States, all those kinds of things, the, the civil wars. And it's, it's a kind of profound thing to think about how these, how we can lose track, how can lose these fields when they're best, like in the case of history,

• 1:31:14Lex Fridman?

  is best for that to be a pervasive thing that everybody learns and thinks about and so on. And I would say computing is quite obviously similar to history in the sense that it seems like it should be a, a part of everybody's life to some degree. And especially like as we move into the later parts of the 21st century. And it's not obvious that that's the way it'll go. It might be in the hands of the few still. Like depending if it's machine learning, you know, it's unclear that it'll, computing will win out. It's currently very successful, but it's not, I would say that's something, I mean, you're at the leadership level of this. You're defining the future, so it's in your hands.

• 1:31:59Charles Isbell?

  No pressure.

• 1:31:59Lex Fridman?

  But like, it feels like there's multiple ways this can go. And there's this kind of conversation of everybody should learn to code. Right? The changing nature of jobs and so on.

• 1:32:12Lex Fridman?

  Do you have a sense of what your role in education of computing is here? Like, what's the hopeful path forward?

• 1:32:23Charles Isbell?

  There's a lot there. I will, I will say that, well, first off, it would be an absolute shame if no one studied history. On the other hand, as t approaches infinity, the amount of history is presumably also growing, at least linearly. And so it's, you have to forget more and more of history, but history needs to always be there. I mean, I can imagine a world where, you know, if you think of your brains as being outside of your head, that you can kind of learn the history you need to know when you need to know it. That seems fanciful, but it's a, it's a kind of way of, you know, is there a sufficient statistic of history? No, and there certainly, but there may be for the particular thing you have to care about, but you know, those who do not remember.

• 1:33:01Lex Fridman?

  It's for our objective camera discussion, right?

• 1:33:03Charles Isbell?

  Yeah. It's. Right. And, you know, we've already lost lots of history. And of course, you have your own history that some of which will be, are, it's even lost to you, right? You don't even remember whatever it was you were doing 17 years ago.

• 1:33:14Lex Fridman?

  All the ex-girlfriends.

• 1:33:15Charles Isbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Lex Fridman?

  Gone.

• 1:33:17Charles Isbell?

  Exactly. So, you know, history is being lost anyway, but the big lessons of history shouldn't be. And I think, you know, to take it to the question of computing and sort of education, the point is you have to get across those lessons, you have to get across the way of thinking. And you have to be able to go back and, you know, you don't want to lose the data, even if, you know, you don't necessarily have the information at your fingertips. With computing, I think it's. Somewhat different. Everyone doesn't have to learn how to code, but everyone needs to learn how to think in the way that you can be precise. And I mean precise in the sense of repeatable, not just, you know, in the sense of, not resolution in the sense of get the right number of bits.

• 1:33:57Charles Isbell?

  In saying what it is you want the machine to do and being able to describe a problem in such a way that it is executable, which we are not. Human beings are not very good at that. In fact, I think we spend much of our time talking back and forth just to kind of vaguely understand what the other person means and hope we get it good enough that we can, we can act accordingly. You can't do that with machines, at least not yet. And so, you know, having to think that precisely about things is quite important. And that's somewhat different from coding. Coding is a crude means to an end. On the other hand, the idea of coding, what that means, that it's a programming language and it has these sort of things that you fiddle with in these ways that you express. That is an incredibly important point.

• 1:34:41Charles Isbell?

  In fact, I would argue that one of the big holes in machine learning right now and in AI is that we forget that we are basically doing software engineering. We forget that we are doing, we are using programming, like we're using languages to express what we're doing. We get just so all caught up in the deep network or we get all caught up in whatever that we forget that, you know, we're making decisions based upon a set of parameters that we made up. And if we did slightly different parameters, we'd have completely different, different outcomes. And so the lesson of computing, computer science education, is to be able to think like that and to be aware of it when you're doing it. Basically, it's a, you know, at the end of the day, it's a way of surfacing your assumptions. I mean, we call them parameters or, you know, we, we, we call them if then statements or whatever,

• 1:35:26Charles Isbell?

  but you're forced to surface those, those assumptions. That's the key, the key thing that you should get out of a computing education, that and that the models, the languages and the machines are equivalent. But it actually follows from that, that you have to be explicit about, about what it is you're trying to do because the model you're building is something you will one day run. So you better get it right or at least understand it and be able to express roughly what, what you want to express. So I think it is key that we figure out how to educate everyone to think that way. Because at the end, it will not only make them better at whatever it is that they are doing. And I emphasize doing, it'll also make them better citizens.

• 1:36:10Charles Isbell?

  It'll help them to understand what others are doing to them so that they can react accordingly. Because you're not going to solve the problem of social media insofar as you think of social media as a problem by just making slightly better code, right? It only works if people react to it appropriately and know what's happening and therefore take control over what they're doing. I mean, that's, that's my take on it.

• 1:36:36Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let me try to proceed awkwardly into the topic of race.

• 1:36:41Charles Isbell?

  Okay.

• 1:36:42Lex Fridman?

  One is because it's a fascinating part of your story and you're just eloquent and fun about it. And then the second is because we're living through a pretty tense time in terms of race tensions and discussions and ideas in this time in America. You grew up in Atlanta, not born in Atlanta, you're, is some southern state, somewhere in Tennessee, something like that?

• 1:37:06Charles Isbell?

  Tennessee.

• 1:37:06Lex Fridman?

  Nice, okay. But you, you, early on, you moved, you, you're basically, you identify as an Atlanta native. Yeah. And you've mentioned that you grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood. By the way, black African American person of color.

• 1:37:25Charles Isbell?

  I prefer black.

• 1:37:26Lex Fridman?

  Black.

• 1:37:27Charles Isbell?

  With a capital B.

• 1:37:28Lex Fridman?

  With a cap. The other letters are?

• 1:37:31Charles Isbell?

  The rest of them don't matter, with a capital B.

• 1:37:34Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so the predominantly black neighborhood and so you didn't almost see race? Maybe you can correct me on that? Like, and then what, just in the video, you talked about when you showed up to Georgia Tech for your undergrad, you're one of the only black folks there. And that was like, oh, that was a new experience. Can you take, take, take me from a, just a human perspective, but also from a race perspective, your journey growing up in Atlanta and then showing up at Georgia Tech?

• 1:38:05Charles Isbell?

  All right, that's easy. And by the way, that story continues through MIT as well. In fact, it was. Quite a bit more stark and at MIT and Boston.

• 1:38:13Lex Fridman?

  So maybe just a quick pause. Georgia Tech was undergrad, MIT was graduate school.

• 1:38:18Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm. And I went directly to grad school from undergrad. So I had no, I had no distractions in between my bachelor's and my master's and PhD.

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  You didn't go on backpacking trip in Europe?

• 1:38:28Charles Isbell?

  Didn't do any of that. Didn't do, in fact, I literally went to IBM for three months, got in a car and drove straight to Boston with my mother, or Cambridge.

• 1:38:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Charles Isbell?

  Moved into an apartment I'd never seen over the Royal East. Anyway, that's, that's another story. So let me tell you a little bit about it.

• 1:38:44Lex Fridman?

  You miss MIT?

• 1:38:45Charles Isbell?

  Oh, I loved MIT. I don't miss Boston at all, but I loved MIT.

• 1:38:49Lex Fridman?

  Them as fighting warrants. Okay.

• 1:38:51Charles Isbell?

  So let's back up to this. So as you said, I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. My earliest memories arriving in Atlanta in a moving truck at the age of three and a half. So I think of myself as being from Atlanta, I have a very distinct memory of that. So I grew up in Atlanta. It's the only place I ever knew as a kid. I loved it. Like much of the country and certainly much of Atlanta in the seventies and eighties, it was deeply, highly segregated, though not in a way that I think was obvious to you unless you were looking at it or were old enough to have noticed it. But you could divide up Atlanta, and Atlanta is hardly unique in this way, by highway. And you could get race and class that way. So I grew up not only in a predominantly black area, to say the very least, I grew up on the poor side of that.

• 1:39:35Charles Isbell?

  But I was very much aware of race for a bunch of reasons. One, that people made certain that I was, my family did, but also that it would come up. So in first grade, I had a girlfriend. I say I had a girlfriend. I didn't have a girlfriend. I wasn't even entirely sure what girls were in the first grade, but I do remember she decided I was her girlfriend, so a white girl named Heather. And we had a long discussion about how it was okay for us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, despite the fact that she was white and I was black.

• 1:40:03Lex Fridman?

  Between the two of you or your parents? Did your parents know about this?

• 1:40:07Charles Isbell?

  Yes, but being a girlfriend and boyfriend in first grade just basically meant that you spent slightly more time together during recess. It is, it had no, I think we Eskimo kissed once. It doesn't mean, it didn't mean anything. It was, at the time, it felt very scandalous because everyone was watching. It was like, ah, my life is, now my life has changed in first grade. No one told me elementary school would be like this.

• 1:40:27Lex Fridman?

  Did you write poetry or?

• 1:40:28Charles Isbell?

  Not in first grade, that would come later. Okay. That would come during puberty, uh, when I wrote lots and lots of poetry. Uh, anyway, so, um, so I was aware of it. I didn't think too much about it, but I, I was aware of it. Um, but I was surrounded. It wasn't that I wasn't aware of race. It's that I wasn't aware that I was a minority. It's different. Uh, and it's because I wasn't. As far as my world was concerned, I mean, I'm six years old, five years old, first grade. The world is the seven people I see every day, right? You know, so, so it didn't feel that way at all. Um, and by the way, this being Atlanta, home of the civil rights movement and all the rest. It meant that when I looked at TV, which back then one did, because there were only three, four or five channels. Right? And I saw the news, which my mother might make me watch, you know?

• 1:41:11Charles Isbell?

  The, uh, Monica Kaufman was, was on TV, um, telling me the news and they were all black. And the mayor was black and always been black. And so it just never occurred to me. When I went to Georgia Tech, I remember the first day walking across campus from West Campus to East Campus and realizing along the way that of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students that I was seeing, I was the only black one. That was enlightening, um, and very off putting because that occurred to me. And then, of course, it continued that way for, well, for the rest of my, for much of the rest of my career at Georgia Tech. Of course, I found lots of other students and I met people because in Atlanta you're either black or you're white. There was nothing else.

• 1:41:52Charles Isbell?

  So I began to meet students of Asian descent and I met students who we would call Hispanic and so on and so forth. And, you know, so my world, this is what college is supposed to do, right? It's supposed to open you up to people and, uh, it did. But it was a very strange thing to be, uh, in the minority. Uh, when I came to Boston, uh, I will tell you a story. I, I applied to one place as an undergrad, Georgia Tech, because I was stupid. I didn't know any better, I just didn't know any better, right? No one told me. Uh, when I went to grad school, I applied to three places, Georgia Tech, because that's where I was, MIT and CMU.

• 1:42:30Charles Isbell?

  When I got in to MIT, I

• 1:42:34Charles Isbell?

  I got into CMU, but I had a friend who went to CMU. And so I asked him what he thought about it. He spent his time explaining to me about Pittsburgh, much less about CMU, but more about Pittsburgh, which I developed a strong opinion based upon his strong opinion, something about the sun coming out two days out of the year. And I didn't even have a chance to go there because the timing was wrong. I think it was because the timing was wrong. At MIT, I asked 20 people I knew, either when I visited or I had already known for a variety of reasons whether they liked Boston. And 10 of them loved it and 10 of them hated it. The 10 who loved it were all white. The 10 who hated it were all black. And they explained to me very much why that was the case.

• 1:43:17Charles Isbell?

  Both deaths told me why it's in the stories were remarkably the same for the two clusters. And I came up here and I could see it immediately, why people would love it and why people would not.

• 1:43:28Lex Fridman?

  And Why people tell you about the nice coffee shops and

• 1:43:32Charles Isbell?

  Well, when coffee shops, it was CD, UCD places. But yeah, it was that kind of a thing. Nice shops. Oh, there's all these students here. Harvard Square is beautiful. You can do all these things and you can walk in something about the outdoors, which I was the slightest bit interested. The outdoors is for the bugs, not for humans. And the

• 1:43:48Lex Fridman?

  That should be a T-shirt.

• 1:43:50Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the way I feel about it. The and the black folk told me completely different stories about which part of town you did not want to be caught in after dark. And and I heard all, but that was nothing new. So I decided that MIT was a great place to be as a university. And I believed it then, I believe it now. And that whatever it is I wanted to do, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. But what if I was wrong? Someone there would know how to do it. Of course, then I would pick the one topic that nobody was working on at the time. But that's okay. It was great. And so I thought that I would be fine and I'd only be there for like four or five years. I told myself, which turned out not to be true at all. But I enjoyed my time. I enjoyed my time there. But I did see a lot of

• 1:44:33Charles Isbell?

  I ran across a lot of things that were driven by what I look like. While I was here, I got asked a lot of questions. I ran into a lot of cops. I did a, I saw a lot about the city, but at the time, I mean, I haven't been here a long time. These are the things that I remember. So this is 1990. There is not a single black radio station. Now, this is 1990. There aren't, I don't know if there are any radio stations anymore. I'm sure there are, but you know, I don't listen to the radio anymore. Almost no one does.

• 1:45:05Charles Isbell?

  At least if you're under a certain age. But the idea is you could be in a major metropolitan area and there wasn't a single black radio station, by which I mean a radio station that played what we would call black music then, was absurd, but somehow captured kind of everything about, about the city. I grew up in Atlanta and you know, you've heard me tell you about Atlanta.

• 1:45:25Charles Isbell?

  Boston had no economically viable or socially cohesive black middle class. Insofar as it existed, it was uniformly distributed throughout large parts, not all parts, but large parts of the city. And where you had concentrated concentrations of black Bostonians, they tended to be poor. This is very different from where I grew up. I grew up on the poor side of town, sure. But then in high school, well, in ninth grade, we didn't have middle school. I went to an eighth grade school where there was a lot of, uh, let's just say we had a riot the year that I was there. There was at least one major fight every week. It was a, it was, it was a, it was an amazing, it was an amazing experience. But when I went to ninth grade, I went to academy.

• 1:46:08Lex Fridman?

  Math and.

• 1:46:09Charles Isbell?

  Math and Science Academy, Mays High. It was a public school. It was a magnet school. That's why I was able to go there. It was the first school, high school, I think in the state of Georgia to sweep the state math and science fairs. It was great. It had.

• 1:46:24Charles Isbell?

  Three hundred and eighty-five students, all but four of whom were black. I went to school with the daughter of the former mayor of Atlanta, Michael Jackson's cousin. I mean, you know, there was, it was an upper-middle-class.

• 1:46:37Lex Fridman?

  Dropping names.

• 1:46:38Charles Isbell?

  Whatever. You know, I just dropped names occasionally, you know? Like, dropped the mic, dropped some names, just to let you know I used to hang out with Michael Jackson's cousin. Twelve cousins, nine times removed. I don't know. The point is, they had money. We had a parking problem because the kids had cars. I did not come from a place where, where you had cars. I had my first car when I came to MIT, actually. So, it was a, it was just a, it was just a very, very different experience for me. But I'd been to places where, whether you were rich or whether you were poor, you know, you could be black and rich or black and poor, and it was there, and there were places, and they were segregated by class as well as by race, but that existed. Here, at least when I was here, it didn't feel that way at all, and it felt like a bunch of a really interesting contradiction.

• 1:47:22Charles Isbell?

  It felt like it was the interracial dating capital of the country.

• 1:47:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Charles Isbell?

  You really felt that way. But it also felt like the most racist place I ever spent any time. You know, you couldn't go up the orange line. At that time, I mean, again, that was thirty years ago. I don't know what it's like now, but there were places you couldn't go, and you knew it. Everybody knew it, and there were places you couldn't live, and everybody knew that. And that was just the greater Boston area in nineteen ninety-two.

• 1:47:53Lex Fridman?

  Saddle racism or explicit racism?

• 1:47:55Charles Isbell?

  Both.

• 1:47:57Lex Fridman?

  In terms of within the institutions, did you feel, was, was there levels in which you were empowered to be first, or one of the first black people in a particular discipline in some of these great institutions that you were part of, you know, Georgia Tech or MIT, and was there a part where it was, it felt limiting?

• 1:48:20Charles Isbell?

  I always felt empowered. Some of that was my own delusion, I think, but it worked out. So I never felt, in fact, quite the opposite. Not only did I not feel as if no one was trying to stop me, I had the distinct impression that people wanted me to succeed. By people, I meant the people in power. Not my fellow students, not that they didn't want me to succeed, but I felt supported, or at least that people were happy to see me succeed at least as much as anyone else. But, you know, 1990, you're dealing with a different set of problems, right? You're very early, at least in computer science, you're very early in the sort of Jackie Robinson period. You know, there's this thing called

• 1:49:03Charles Isbell?

  the Jackie Robinson syndrome, which is that you have to, you know, the first one has to be perfect or has to be sure to succeed because if that person fails, no one else comes after for a long time. So, you know, it was kind of in everyone's best interest. But I think it came from a sincere place. I'm completely sure that people went out of their way to try to make certain that the environment would be good, not just for me, but for the other people who, of course, were around. And I was hardly the only, I was the only person in the AI lab, but I wasn't the only, the only person at MIT by a long shot. On the other hand, we're what? At that point, we would have been, what, less than 20 years away from the first black PhD to graduate from MIT, right? Shirley

• 1:49:43Charles Isbell?

  Jackson, right? 1971, something like that, somewhere around then. So we weren't that far away from the first first, and we were still another eight years away from the first black PhD in computer science, right? So we were in a, it was, it was a sort of interesting time. But I did not feel as if the institutions of the university were against any of that. And furthermore, I felt as if there was enough of a critical mass across the institute from students and probably faculty, though I didn't know them, who wanted to make certain that the right thing happened. That's very different from the institutions of the rest of the city, which I think were designed in such a way that they felt no need to be supportive.

• 1:50:28Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a touchy question on that. So you kind of said that you didn't feel

• 1:50:39Lex Fridman?

  You felt empowered. Is there some lesson, advice, in the sense that no matter what, you should feel empowered? You should, you said, you used the word, I think, illusion or delusion.

• 1:50:51Charles Isbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:52Lex Fridman?

  Is there a sense from the individual perspective where you should always kind of ignore, you know, the, uh, ignore your own eyes, ignore the, the, the little forces that you are able to observe around you. They're like trying to mess with you of whether it's jealousy, whether it's hatred in its pure form, whether it's just hatred in its like diluted form, all that kind of stuff. And just kind of see yourself as empowered and confident, all those kinds of things.

• 1:51:30Charles Isbell?

  I mean, it certainly helps, but it's, there's a trade off, right? You have to be diluted enough to think that you can succeed. I mean, you can't get a PhD unless you're crazy enough to think you can invent something that no one else has come up with. I mean, that kind of massive delusion is that. You have to be diluted enough to believe that you can succeed despite whatever odds you see in front of you. But you can't be so diluted that you don't think that you need to step out of the way of the oncoming train.

• 1:51:51Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:51:51Charles Isbell?

  Right. So it's all a trade off, right? You have to kind of believe in yourself. It helps to have a support group around you in some way or another. I was able to find that. I've been able to find that wherever I've gone, even if it wasn't necessarily on the floor that I was in. I had lots of friends when I was here, many of them still live here. And I've kept up with many of them. So I felt supported and certainly I had my mother and my family and those people back home. That I could always, I could always lean back on, even if it were a long distance call that cost money, which, you know, it's not something that any of the kids today even know what I'm talking about. But, you know, back then it mattered, calling my mom was an expensive proposition. But, you know, you have that and it's fine. I think it helps, but you cannot be so diluted that you miss the obvious because it makes things slower.

• 1:52:34Charles Isbell?

  And it makes you think you're doing better than you are and it will hurt you in the long run.

• 1:52:40Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned cops. You tell the story of being pulled over. Perhaps it happened more than once.

• 1:52:47Charles Isbell?

  More than once, for sure.

• 1:52:49Lex Fridman?

  One, could you tell that story? And in general, can you give me a sense of what the world looks like when the when the law doesn't always look at you with the with a blank slate? What like with a with the objective eyes? I don't know how to say it more poetically.

• 1:53:14Charles Isbell?

  Well, I guess the I don't either. I guess the the answer is it looks exactly the way it looks now, because this is the world that we happen to live in, right? It's people clustering and doing the things that they do and making decisions based on, you know, one or two bits of information they find relevant, which, by the way, are all positive feedback loops, which makes it easier for you to believe what you believed before because you behave in a certain way that makes it true. And it goes on and circles and it cycles and cycles and it's like, so it's just about being on edge. I do not, despite having made it over 50 now.

• 1:53:52Lex Fridman?

  Congratulations, by the way.

• 1:53:54Charles Isbell?

  God, I have a few gray hairs here and there.

• 1:53:56Lex Fridman?

  You did pretty good.

• 1:53:58Charles Isbell?

  I think, you know, I don't imagine I will ever see a police officer and not get very, very tense. Now, everyone gets a little tense because it probably means you're being pulled over for speeding or something, or you're going to get a ticket or whatever, right? I mean, the interesting thing about the law in general is that most human beings experience of it is fundamentally negative, right? You're only dealing with the lawyer if you're in trouble, except in a few very small circumstances, right? But so that's just a that's an underlying reality. Now imagine that that's also at the hands of the police officer. I remember at the time when I was when when I got pulled over that time halfway between Boston and Wellesley, actually. I remember thinking.

• 1:54:45Charles Isbell?

  As when he pulled his gun on me, that if he shot me right now, he'd get away with it. That was the worst thing that I felt about that particular moment is that if he shoots me now, he will get away with it. It would be years later when I realized actually much worse than that.

• 1:55:05Charles Isbell?

  Is that he'd get away with it. And if anyone, if it became a thing that other people knew about, odds were would be of course that it wouldn't. But if it became a thing that other people knew about, if I was living in today's world as opposed to the world 30 years ago, that not only we get away with it, but that I would be painted a villain. I was probably big and scary and I probably moved too fast and finally had done what he said and da, da, da, da, da, da, da, which is somehow worse, right? You, you know, that hurts not just you, you're dead, but your family and the way people look at you and look at your legacy or your history. That's terrible and it would work. I absolutely believe it would have worked had he done it. Now, he didn't. I don't think he wanted to shoot me. I don't think he felt like killing anybody.

• 1:55:48Charles Isbell?

  He did not go out that night expecting to do that or planning on doing it. And I wouldn't be surprised if he never, ever did that or ever even pulled his gun again. I don't know the man's name. I don't remember anything about him. I do remember the gun. Guns are very big when they're in your face. I can tell you this much, they're much larger than they seem, but.

• 1:56:03Lex Fridman?

  And you're basically like speeding or something like that.

• 1:56:06Charles Isbell?

  He said I ran a light.

• 1:56:07Lex Fridman?

  Ran a light.

• 1:56:08Charles Isbell?

  I don't think I ran a light, but you know, in fact, I may not have even gotten a ticket. I may have just gotten a warning. I think he was a little.

• 1:56:14Lex Fridman?

  But he pulled a gun.

• 1:56:15Charles Isbell?

  Yeah. Apparently I moved too fast or something, rolled my window down before I should have. It's unclear. I think he thought I was going to do something, or at least that's how he behaved.

• 1:56:25Lex Fridman?

  So how, if we can take a little walk around your brain.

• 1:56:31Lex Fridman?

  How do you feel about that guy? And how do you feel about cops?

• 1:56:38Charles Isbell?

  Well, I don't.

• 1:56:38Lex Fridman?

  After that experience.

• 1:56:39Charles Isbell?

  Well, I don't remember that guy, but my views on police officers is the same view I have about lots of things.

• 1:56:47Charles Isbell?

  Fire is an important and necessary thing in the world. But you must respect fire because it will burn you. Fire is a necessary evil in the sense that it can burn you. Necessary in the sense that, you know, heat and all the other things that we use fire for. So when I see a cop, I see a giant ball of flame. And I just try to avoid it.

• 1:57:12Lex Fridman?

  And then some people might see a nice place, a nice thing to roast marshmallows with the family over.

• 1:57:17Charles Isbell?

  Which is fine, I don't roast marshmallows.

• 1:57:21Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so let me go a little darker and I apologize. Just talked to Dan Carlin about Hitler for four hours. So sorry if I go dark here a little bit, but is it easy for that, this experience of just being careful with the fire and avoiding it to turn to hatred?

• 1:57:39Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, of course. And one might even argue that it is a illogical conclusion, right? On the other hand, you've got to live in the world and I don't think it's helpful. Hate is something one should, I mean, hate, hate is something that takes a lot of energy. So one should reserve it for when it is useful and not carry it around with you all the time. Again, there's a big difference between the happy delusion that convinces you that you can actually get out of bed and make it to work today without getting hit by a car. And the sad delusion that means you can not worry about this car that is barreling towards you, right? So we all have to be a little deluded because otherwise we're paralyzed, right?

• 1:58:24Charles Isbell?

  But one should not be ridiculous. We go all the way back to something you said earlier about empathy. I think what I would ask other people to get out of this one of many, many, many stories is to recognize that it is real.

• 1:58:45Charles Isbell?

  People would ask me to empathize with the police officer. I would quote back statistics saying that, you know, being a police officer isn't even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in the United States. You're much more likely to get killed in a taxicab. Half of police officers are actually killed by suicide. But that means their lives are something. Something's going on there with them. And I would more than happy to be empathetic about what it is they go through and how they see the world. I think, though, that if we step back from what I feel, and we step back from what an individual police officer feels, you step up a level. And all this, because all things tie back into interactive AI. The real problem here is that we've built a narrative.

• 1:59:28Charles Isbell?

  We've built a big structure that has made it easy for people to put themselves into different pots in the different clusters and to basically forget that the people in the other clusters are ultimately like them. It is a useful exercise to ask yourself sometimes, I think, that if I had grown up in a completely different house and a completely different household, as a completely different person, if I had been a woman, would I see the world differently? Would I believe what that crazy person over there believes? And the answer is probably yes, because after all, they believe it. And fundamentally, they're the same as you. So then what can you possibly do to fix it? How do you fix Twitter if you think Twitter is broken? Or Facebook if you think Facebook is broken?

• 2:00:13Charles Isbell?

  How do you fix racism? How do you fix any of these things? It's all structural, right? It's not, I mean, individual conversations matter a lot, but you have to create structures that allow people to have those individual conversations all the time in a way that is relatively safe and that allows them to understand that other people have had different experiences, but that ultimately we're the same. Which sounds very, I don't even know what the right word is. I'm trying to avoid a word like saccharin. But, you know, it feels very optimistic. But I think that's okay. I think that's a part of the delusion, is you want to be a little optimistic and then recognize that the hard problem is actually setting up the structures in the first place.

• 2:00:55Charles Isbell?

  Because it's in almost no one's interest to change the infrastructure.

• 2:01:01Lex Fridman?

  Right, I tend to believe that leaders have a big role to that of selling that optimistic delusion to everybody and that eventually leads to the building of the structures. But that requires a leader that unites, sort of unites everybody on a vision as opposed to divides on a vision, which is, this particular moment in history feels like there's a non-zero probability, if we go to the P, of something akin to a violent or a non-violent civil war. This is one of the most divisive periods of American history in recent, you can speak to this from a perhaps a more knowledgeable and deeper perspective than me, but from

• 2:01:46Lex Fridman?

  my naive perspective, this seems like a very strange time. There's a lot of anger and it has to do with people, I mean, for many reasons. One, the thing that's not spoken about, I think, much is the quiet economic pain of millions that's like growing because of COVID, because of closed businesses, because of like lost dreams. So that's building, whatever that tension is building. The other is, there is, seems to be an elevated level of emotion. I'm not sure if you can psychoanalyze where that's coming from, but this sort of from which the protests and so on percolated. It's like, why now? Why this particular moment in history?

• 2:02:30Charles Isbell?

  Oh, because time, enough time has passed, right? I mean, you know, the very first race riots were in Boston, not to draw anything.

• 2:02:37Lex Fridman?

  Really? When? This is before like?

• 2:02:40Charles Isbell?

  Going way, I mean, like the 1700s or whatever, right? I mean, there was a mass in New York. I mean, I'm talking way, way, way back when. So Boston used to be the hotbed of riots. It's just what Boston was all about, or so I'm told from history class. There's an interesting one in New York. I don't remember when that was. Anyway, the, the, the point is.

• 2:02:59Charles Isbell?

  You know, basically, you got to get another generation, old enough to be angry, but not so old to remember what happened the last time. Right?

• 2:03:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:08Charles Isbell?

  And that's sort of what happens. But, you know, you

• 2:03:10Lex Fridman?

  Gotcha.

• 2:03:11Charles Isbell?

  You said like two completely, you said two things there that I think are worth unpacking. One has to do with this, this sort of moment in time.

• 2:03:21Charles Isbell?

  And, you know, why, why is this sort of upbuilding? The other has to do with a kind of, you sort of the economic reality of COVID. So I'm actually, I want to separate those things because, for example, you know, this happened before COVID happened. Right? So let's separate these two things for a moment.

• 2:03:39Charles Isbell?

  Now, let me preface all this by saying that although I am interested in history, one of my three minors as an undergrad was history, specifically history of the 1960s.

• 2:03:50Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 2:03:51Charles Isbell?

  The other was Spanish and

• 2:03:53Lex Fridman?

  Okay, that's a mistake.

• 2:03:54Charles Isbell?

  Oh, I loved, I loved.

• 2:03:57Charles Isbell?

  And history of Spanish, and Spanish history, actually, but Spanish and the other was what we would now call cognitive science, but at the time.

• 2:04:03Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's fascinating. Interesting.

• 2:04:05Charles Isbell?

  I minded in CogSci here for grad school. That was really, that was really fascinating. It was a very different experience from all the computer science classes I'd been taking, even the CogSci classes I was taking, taking at an undergrad. But anyway, I'm not, I'm, I am a, I'm interested in history, but I'm hardly historian.

• 2:04:24Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:04:25Charles Isbell?

  So, you know, forgive my, my, I will ask the audience to forgive my, my simplification. But

• 2:04:35Charles Isbell?

  I think the question that's always worth asking as opposed to, it's the same question, but a little different. Not why now, but why not before? Right? So why the 1950s, 60s civil rights movement as opposed to 1930s, 1940s? Well, first off, there was a civil rights movement in the 30s and 40s. It just wasn't of the same character or quite as well known. Post-World War II, lots of interesting things were happening. It's not as if a switch was turned on and Brown versus the Board of Education or the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and that's when it happened. These things have been building up forever and go all the way back and all the way back and all the way back. And, you know, Harriet Tubman was not born in 1950. Right? So, you know, we can take these things.

• 2:05:16Lex Fridman?

  It could have easily happened after, right after World War II.

• 2:05:19Charles Isbell?

  Yes. I think.

• 2:05:23Charles Isbell?

  And again, I'm not a scholar. I think that the big difference was TV. These things are visible. People can see them. It's hard to avoid, right? The, you know, why not James Farmer? Why Martin Luther King? Because one was born 20 years after the other, whatever. Uh, I think it turns out that, you know, you know what King's biggest failure was in the early days? It was in Georgia. You know, they were doing some, uh, doing the usual thing, uh, trying to, trying to integrate. And, uh, I forget the guy's name, but you can look this up. But he, he, a cop, this is a sheriff, made a deal with the whole state of Georgia.

• 2:06:05Charles Isbell?

  We're going to take people and we're going to non-violently put them in trucks. And then we're going to take them and put them in jails very far away from here. And we're going to do that. And we're not going to, there'll be no reason for the press to hang around. And they did that and it worked. And the press left and nothing changed. So next they went to Birmingham, Alabama and Bull O'Connor. And you got to see on TV little boys and girls being hit with fire hoses and being knocked down. And there was outrage and things changed, right? Part of the delusion is pretending that nothing bad is happening that might force you to do something big. You don't want to do, um, but sometimes it gets put in your face and then you kind of can't ignore it.

• 2:06:46Charles Isbell?

  And a large part in my view of what happened right was that it was too public to ignore. Now we created other ways of ignoring it. Um, lots of change happened in the South. But part of that delusion was that it wasn't going to affect the West or the Northeast. And of course it did, and that caused its own set of problems, which went into the late 60s into the 70s. And, you know, in some ways we're living with that legacy now, uh, and so on. So why not what's happening now? Why didn't happen 10 years ago? I think it's, people have more voices. There's not just more TV. There's social media. It's very easy for these things to kind of build on themselves. Uh, and things are just quite visible. Um, and there's demographic change. I mean, the world is changing rapidly, right?

• 2:07:28Charles Isbell?

  And so it's very difficult. Uh, you're now seeing people you could have avoided seeing most of your life, growing up in a particular time. Uh, and it's happening. It's dispersing at a speed that is fast enough to cause concern for some people, but not so fast to cause massive negative reaction.

• 2:07:45Charles Isbell?

  So that's that. On the other hand, and again, that's a massive oversimplification, but I think there's something there anyway, at least something worth exploring. I'm happy to be yelled at by a real historian.

• 2:07:54Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, there's just the obvious thing. I mean, I guess you're implying, but not the saying is, I mean, it seemed to have percolated the most was just a single video, for example, the George Floyd.

• 2:08:06Charles Isbell?

  Makes huge difference.

• 2:08:07Lex Fridman?

  Makes, makes, it's fascinating to think that, that whatever the mechanisms that put injustice in front of our face, not like, like directly in front of our face, those mechanisms are the mechanisms of change.

• 2:08:23Charles Isbell?

  Yeah. On the other hand, Rodney King. So, no one remembers this. I seem to be the only person who remembers this, but sometime before the Rodney King incident, there was a guy who was a police officer, who was saying that things were really bad in Southern California. And he was going to prove it by having some news, some camera people follow him around. And he says, I'm going to go into these towns and just follow me for a week and you will see that I'll get harassed. And like, the first night, he goes out there, he crosses into the city, some cops pull him over, and they, he's a police officer, remember. They don't know that, of course. They like shove his face through a glass window. This was on the news. Like, I distinctly remember watching this as a kid. Actually, I guess I wasn't a kid. I was, I was in college at, I was in grad school at the time.

• 2:09:05Lex Fridman?

  So that's not enough. Like, just, just, just.

• 2:09:08Charles Isbell?

  Well, it disappeared. Like, a day later, it didn't go viral.

• 2:09:11Lex Fridman?

  Whatever that is, whatever that magic thing is.

• 2:09:14Charles Isbell?

  And whatever it was in 92, it was harder to go viral in 92, right? Or 91, actually, it must have been 90 or 91. But that happened. And like, two days later, it's like it never happened. Like, nobody, again, nobody remembers this. I'm like, the only person. Sometimes I think I must have dreamed it. Anyway, Rodney King happens, it goes viral, or the moral equivalent thereof, at the time. And eventually, we get April 29th, right? And I don't know what the difference was between the two things, other than one thing caught on and one thing didn't. Maybe what's happening now is two things are feeding on to one another. One is, more people are willing to believe. And the other is, there's easier and easier ways to give evidence. Cameras, body cams, but we're still finding ourselves telling the same story. It's the same thing over and over again.

• 2:09:59Charles Isbell?

  I would invite you to go back and read the op-eds from what people were saying about the violence is not the right answer after Rodney King and then go back to 1980 and the big riots that were happening around then and read the same op-ed. It's the same words over and over and over again. I mean, there's your remembering history right there. I mean, it's like literally the same words. Like you could have just caught, and I'm surprised no one got flagged for plagiarism.

• 2:10:23Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting if you have an opinion on the question of violence and the popular, perhaps caricature of Malcolm X versus, versus King, Martin Luther King.

• 2:10:33Charles Isbell?

  You know Malcolm X was older than Martin Luther King? People kind of have it in their head that he's younger. Well, he, he, he died sooner, right? But only by a few years, right? People think of MLK as the older statesman and they think of Malcolm X as the, the young, angry, whatever, but that's more of a narrative device. It's not true at all.

• 2:10:54Charles Isbell?

  I don't, I just, I reject the choice as, I, I think it's a false choice. I think they're just things that happen. You just do, as I said, hatred is not, it takes a lot of energy, but you know, every once in a while you have to fight.

• 2:11:09Charles Isbell?

  One thing I will say without taking a moral position, which I will not take on this matter.

• 2:11:18Charles Isbell?

  Violence has worked.

• 2:11:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's the annoying thing.

• 2:11:23Charles Isbell?

  That's the annoying thing.

• 2:11:24Lex Fridman?

  It seems like over the top anger works. Outrage works. So you can, you can say like being calm and rational, just talking it out is, is going to lead to progress, but it seems like if you just look through history, being irrationally upset is the way you make progress.

• 2:11:47Charles Isbell?

  Well, certainly the way that you get someone to notice you.

• 2:11:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And that's it.

• 2:11:51Charles Isbell?

  And if they don't notice you, I mean, what's the difference between that and what did, again, without taking a moral position on this, I'm just trying to observe history here. If you, maybe if television didn't exist, the civil rights movement doesn't happen or it takes longer or it takes a very different form. Maybe if social media doesn't exist, a whole host of things.

• 2:12:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:09Charles Isbell?

  Positive and negative don't happen, right? So, and what do any of those things do other than?

• 2:12:16Charles Isbell?

  Expose things to people.

• 2:12:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:18Charles Isbell?

  Violence is a way of shouting. I mean, many people far more talented and thoughtful than I have have said this in one form or another, right? That, you know, violence is the voice of the unheard, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's a thing that people do when they feel as if they have no other option. And sometimes we agree and sometimes we disagree. Sometimes we think they're justified. Sometimes we think they are not. But regardless, it is a way of shouting. And when you shout, people tend to hear you, even if they don't necessarily hear the words that you're saying. They hear that you, you were shouting. I see no way. So another way of putting it, which I think is less, let us just say provocative, but I think is true, is that

• 2:13:06Charles Isbell?

  all change, particularly change that impacts power, requires struggle.

• 2:13:12Charles Isbell?

  The struggle doesn't have to be violent.

• 2:13:15Charles Isbell?

  You know, but it's a struggle nonetheless.

• 2:13:18Lex Fridman?

  Powerful don't give up power easily.

• 2:13:21Charles Isbell?

  I mean, why, why should they?

• 2:13:24Charles Isbell?

  But even so, you still, it has to be a struggle. And by the way, this isn't just about, you know, violent, political, whatever, nonviolent, political change, right? This is true for understanding calculus, right? I mean, everything requires a struggle.

• 2:13:34Lex Fridman?

  We're back to talking about faculty hiring.

• 2:13:36Charles Isbell?

  At the end of the day, in the end of the day, it all comes down to faculty hiring.

• 2:13:39Lex Fridman?

  And the godfather scene.

• 2:13:41Charles Isbell?

  All a metaphor. Faculty hiring is a metaphor for all of life.

• 2:13:44Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask a strange question. Do you have a, do you think everything is gonna be okay in the next year? Do you have a hopeful, do you have a hope that we're gonna be okay?

• 2:13:57Charles Isbell?

  I tend to think that everything's gonna be okay because I just tend to think that everything's gonna be okay. My mother says something to me a lot and always has, and, and I find it quite comforting, which is this too shall pass. And this too shall pass. Now, this too shall pass is not just a. This bad thing is going away. Everything passes. I mean, I have a 16 year old daughter who's going to go to college probably in about 15 minutes, given how fast she seems to be growing up. And, you know, I get to hang out with her now, but one day I won't. She'll ignore me just as much as I ignored my parents when I was in college and went to grad school. This too shall pass. But I think that, you know, one day, if we're all lucky, you live long enough to look back

• 2:14:37Charles Isbell?

  on something that happened a while ago, even if it was painful and mostly it's a memory. So, yes, I think, I think it'll be okay.

• 2:14:46Lex Fridman?

  What about humans? Do you think we'll, uh, we'll live into the 21st century?

• 2:14:52Charles Isbell?

  I certainly hope so.

• 2:14:53Lex Fridman?

  Are you worried about, are you worried that we might destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, with AGI, with, uh, engineer?

• 2:15:00Charles Isbell?

  I'm not worried about AGI doing it, but I am worried. I mean, at, at any given moment, right? Also, but, you know, at any given moment, a comet, I mean, you know, whatever. I, I, I tend to think that outside of things completely beyond our control, we have a better chance than not of making it.

• 2:15:17Lex Fridman?

  You know, I, I talked to Alex Filpenka from, uh, from Berkeley. He, he was talking about comets and that they can come out of nowhere. And that was a realization to me. Uh, wow, we're, we're just watching this darkness and they can just enter and then we have less than a month.

• 2:15:33Charles Isbell?

  Yeah. And yet you make it from day to day.

• 2:15:38Lex Fridman?

  That one shall not pass. Well, maybe for Earth they'll pass, but not for humans.

• 2:15:42Charles Isbell?

  Right. But I'm just, I'm just choosing to believe.

• 2:15:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45Charles Isbell?

  That, uh, it's going to be okay and we're not going to get hit by an asteroid, at least not while I'm around. And if we are, well, there's very little I can do about it. So I might as well assume it's not going to happen.

• 2:15:56Lex Fridman?

  It makes food taste better.

• 2:15:58Charles Isbell?

  It makes food taste better.

• 2:16:00Lex Fridman?

  So you, out of the millions of things you've done in your life, you've also began the, uh, This Week in Black History Calendar of facts. There's, there's like a million questions that can ask here. Uh, you said you're not a historian, but is there, let's start at the big history question of, is there somebody in, um, in history, in black history that you draw a lot of? Philosophical or personal inspiration from, or you just find interesting, or a moment in history you find interesting?

• 2:16:35Charles Isbell?

  Well, I find the entirety of the 40s to the 60s and the civil rights movement that didn't happen and did happen at the same time during then quite inspirational. I mean, I've, I have, I've read quite a bit of the time period, at least I did in my younger days when I had more time to read as many things as I wanted to. What was quirky about This Week in Black History, when I started in the 80s, was how focused it was. It was because of the sources I was stealing from. And I was very much stealing from, sort of like I'd take calendars, anything I could find. Google didn't exist, right? And I just pulled as much as I could and just put it together in one place for other people. What ended up being quirky about it, and I started getting people sending me information on it, was the inventors.

• 2:17:19Charles Isbell?

  People who, you know, Garrett Morgan to Benjamin Banneker, right? People who were inventing things.

• 2:17:30Charles Isbell?

  At a time when, how in the world did they manage to invent anything? Like, all these other things were happening, Mother Necessity, right? All these other things were happening and, you know, there were so many terrible things happening around them and, you know, they went to the wrong state at the wrong time. They may never, never come back, but they were inventing things we use, right? And it was always inspiring to me that people would still create, even under those circumstances. I got a lot out of that. I also learned a few lessons, I think, you know, the Charles Richard Druze of the world. You know, you, you, you create things that impact people. You don't necessarily get credit for them. And that's not right, but it's also okay.

• 2:18:11Lex Fridman?

  You okay with that?

• 2:18:12Charles Isbell?

  Up to a point, yeah. I mean, look, in our world, all we really have is credit.

• 2:18:20Lex Fridman?

  I was always bothered by how much value credit is given.

• 2:18:24Charles Isbell?

  That's the only thing you got. I mean, if you're an academic in some sense, no, it isn't the only thing you've got, but it feels that way sometimes.

• 2:18:30Lex Fridman?

  But you got the actual, we're all gonna be dead soon. You got the joy of having created. The, you know, the credit we yawn, I've talked to Jürgen Schmitt-Huber, right?

• 2:18:45Lex Fridman?

  The touring award given to three people for deep learning and you could say that a lot of other people should be on that list. It's the Nobel Prize question. Yeah, it's sad. It's sad and people like talking about it, but I feel like in the long arc of history, the only person who'll be remembered is Einstein, Hitler, maybe Elon Musk.

• 2:19:06Lex Fridman?

  And the rest of us are just like.

• 2:19:08Charles Isbell?

  Well, you know, someone asked me about immortality once and I said, and I stole this from somebody else. I don't remember who, but it was, you know, I asked him, what's your great grandfather's name? Any of them? Of course, they don't know. Most of us do not know. I mean, I'm not entirely sure. I know my grandparents, all my grandparents' names. I know what I called them. Right? I don't know any of their middle names, for example.

• 2:19:32Charles Isbell?

  Then within living memory, so I could find out. Actually, my grandfather didn't know when he was born. I had no idea how old he was. Right? But I definitely don't know who any of my great grandparents are. So in some sense, immortality is doing something preferably positive so that your great grandchildren know who you are. Right? And that's kind of what you can hope for, which is very depressing in some ways. You can, I could turn it into something uplifting if you need me to, but.

• 2:19:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you do the work here?

• 2:19:59Charles Isbell?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's simple, right? It doesn't matter. I don't know, have to know who my great grandfather was to know that I wouldn't be here without him.

• 2:20:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:07Charles Isbell?

  And I don't know who my great grandchildren are, certainly who my great, great grandchildren are. And I'll probably never meet them, although I would very much like to. But hopefully I'll set the world in motion in such a way that their lives will be better than they would have been if I hadn't done that. Well, certainly they wouldn't have existed if I hadn't done the things that I did. So I think that's a good positive thing you live on through other people.

• 2:20:30Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of death?

• 2:20:31Charles Isbell?

  I don't know if I'm afraid of death, but I don't like it.

• 2:20:35Lex Fridman?

  That's another t-shirt.

• 2:20:39Lex Fridman?

  I mean, do you ponder it? Do you think about the?

• 2:20:43Charles Isbell?

  The inevitability of oblivion? I do occasionally. This feels like a very Russian conversation, actually.

• 2:20:48Lex Fridman?

  This is very, yeah.

• 2:20:50Charles Isbell?

  I will tell you a story, a very, something that happened to me recently. I, if you look very carefully, you will see I have a scar.

• 2:20:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:20:58Charles Isbell?

  Which, by the way, is an interesting story of its own about why people have half of their thyroid taken out. Some people get scars and some don't. But anyway, I, I had half my thyroid taken out. The way I got there, by the way, is its own interesting story, but I won't go into it. Just suffice it to say, I did what I, I keep telling people should never do, which is never go to the doctor unless you have to, because there's nothing good that's ever going to come out of a doctor's visit, right? So I went to the doctor to do, look at one thing. It's a little bump I had on the side that I thought might, might be something bad because my mother made me. And I went there and he's like, oh, it's nothing. But by the way, your thyroid is huge. Can you breathe? Yes, I can breathe. You sure? Because it's pushing on your windpipe. You should be dead. Ah, right? So I ended up going there and to get my, to look at my thyroid, it was growing. I had what's called a goiter. And he said, we're going to have to take it out at some point. When?

• 2:21:43Charles Isbell?

  Sometime before you're 85, probably. But if you wait till you're 85, that'll be really bad. Because you don't want to have surgery when you're 85 years old, if you can help it. Certainly not the kind of surgery it takes to take out your thyroid. So I went there and we decided, I would decide I'd put it off until December 19th, because my birthday's December 18th. And I wanted to be able to say I made it to 49 or whatever. So I said, I'll wait till after my birthday. In the interview, in the first six months of that, nothing changed. Apparently, in the next three months, it had grown. I hadn't noticed this at all. I went and had surgery. They took out half of it. The other half is still there and is working fine, by the way. I don't have to take a pill or anything like that.

• 2:22:28Charles Isbell?

  It's great. I'm in the hospital room and the doctor comes in, I've got these things in my arm, they're gonna, they're gonna do whatever, they're talking to me. And the anesthesiologist says, huh, your blood pressure's through the roof. Are you, do you have high blood pressure? I said, no, but I'm terrified if that helps you at all. And the anesthetist, who's the nurse who supports the anesthesiologist, if I got that right, said, oh, don't worry about it. I've just put some, put some stuff in your IV, you're gonna be feeling pretty good in a couple of minutes. And I remember turning and saying, well, I'm gonna feel pretty good in a couple of minutes. Next thing I know, there's this guy and he's moving my bed. And I have this, and he's talking to me and I have this distinct impression that I've

• 2:23:10Charles Isbell?

  met this guy and I should know what he's talking about, but I kind of like, just don't remember what just happened. And I look up and I see the tiles going by and I'm like, oh, it's just like in the movies where you see the tiles go by. And then I have this brief thought that I'm in an infinitely long warehouse and there's someone sitting next to me. And I remember thinking, oh, she's not talking to me. And then I'm back in the, the hospital bed. And in between the time where the tiles were going by and I got in the hospital bed, something like five hours had passed. Apparently it had grown so much that it was a four and a half hour procedure instead of an hour long procedure. I lost a neck size and a half. It was pretty big.

• 2:23:55Charles Isbell?

  Apparently it was as big as my heart. Why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because- So I have a story already. Between tiles going by and me waking up in my hospital bed, no time passed. There was no sensation of time passing. When I go to sleep and I wake up in the morning, I have this feeling that time has passed, this feeling that something has physically changed about me. Nothing happened between the time they put the magic juice in me and the time that I woke up. Nothing. By the way, my wife was there with me talking. Apparently I was also talking. I don't remember any of this, but luckily I didn't say anything I wouldn't normally say.

• 2:24:35Charles Isbell?

  My memory of it is I would talk to her and she would teleport around the room. And then I accused her of witchcraft and that was the end of that. But she, her point of view is I would start talking and then I would fall asleep and then I would wake up and leave off where I was before. I had no notion of any time passing.

• 2:24:53Charles Isbell?

  I kind of imagine that that's death.

• 2:24:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:57Charles Isbell?

  Is the lack of sensation of time passing. And on the one hand, I am, I don't know, soothed by the idea that I won't notice. On the other hand, I am very unhappy at the idea that I won't notice.

• 2:25:13Charles Isbell?

  So I don't know if I'm afraid of death, but I am completely sure that I don't like it. And that I particularly would prefer to discover on my own whether immortality sucks and be able to make a decision about it. That's what I would prefer.

• 2:25:26Lex Fridman?

  You'd like to have a choice in the matter?

• 2:25:29Charles Isbell?

  I would like to have a choice in the matter.

• 2:25:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, again, on the Russian thing, I think the finiteness of it is the thing that gives it a little flavor, a little spice, so.

• 2:25:38Charles Isbell?

  Well, in reinforcement learning, we believe that. That's why we have discount factors. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what you do.

• 2:25:43Lex Fridman?

  Amen. Well, let me, one last question, sticking on the Russian theme. You talked about your great grandparents not remembering their name. What do you think is the, in this kind of Markov chain that is life? What do you think is the meaning of it all? What's the meaning of life?

• 2:26:09Charles Isbell?

  Well, in a world where eventually you won't know who your great grand, you won't know who your great grandchildren are, I'm reminded of something I heard once, or I read, I read once that I really like, which is, it is well worth remembering

• 2:26:28Charles Isbell?

  that the entire universe, save for one trifling exception, is composed entirely of others.

• 2:26:37Charles Isbell?

  And I think that's the meaning of life.

• 2:26:41Lex Fridman?

  Charles, this was one of the best conversations I've ever had, and I get to see you tomorrow again to hang out with a, with a, who looks to be one of the most, how should I say, interesting personalities that I'll ever get to meet with Michael Littman. So I can't wait. I'm excited to have had this opportunity. Thank you for traveling all the way here. It was amazing. I'm excited, I always loved Georgia Tech. I'm excited to see with you being involved there what the future holds. So thank you for talking today.

• 2:27:12Charles Isbell?

  Thank you for having me, enjoyed every minute of it.

• 2:27:14Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Charles Isbell, and thank you to our sponsors. Neuro, the maker of functional, sugar-free gum and mints that I use to give my brain a quick caffeine boost. Decoding Digital, a podcast on tech and entrepreneurship that I listen to and enjoy. Masterclass, online courses that I watch from some of the most amazing humans in history. And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends for food and drinks. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars and up a podcast,

• 2:27:54Lex Fridman?

  follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman. And now, let me leave you with some poetic words from Martin Luther King Jr. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an Alpine November. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.