#218 – Jaron Lanier: Virtual Reality, Social Media & the Future of Humans and AI

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, author, and founder of the field of virtual reality. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Skiff: https://skiff.org/lex to get early access – Novo: https://banknovo.com/lex – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off – Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex and use code LEX to get special savings EPISODE LINKS: Jaron’s Website: http://www.jaronlanier.com/ Jaron’s Books: https://amzn.to/3tlhl9T 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/lexfridman – 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 (08:04) – What is reality? (12:17) – Turing machines (13:35) – Simulating our universe (19:49) – Video games and other immersive experiences (23:37) – Death and consciousness (32:08) – Designing human-centric AI (33:42) – Empathy with robots (37:33) – Social media incentives (49:53) – Data dignity (57:26) – Jack Dorsey and Twitter (1:09:10) – Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies (1:13:51) – Government overreach and freedom (1:24:06) – GitHub and TikTok (1:26:16) – The Autodidactic Universe (1:31:07) – Humans and the mystery of music (1:37:17) – Defining moments (1:48:03) – Mortality (1:49:56) – The meaning of life

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 Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, visual artist, philosopher, writer, futurist, musician, and the founder of the field of virtual reality. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. As a side note, you may know that Jaron is a staunch critic of social media platforms. Him and I agree on many aspects of this, except perhaps I am more optimistic about it being possible to build better platforms and better artificial intelligence systems that put long-term interests and happiness of human beings first. Let me also say a general comment about these conversations. I try to make sure I prepare well, remove my ego from the picture,

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  and focus on making the other person shine as we try to explore the most beautiful and insightful ideas in their mind. This can be challenging when the ideas that are close to my heart are being criticized. In those cases, I do offer a little pushback, but respectfully, and then move on, trying to have the other person come out looking wiser in the exchange. I think there's no such thing as winning in conversations, nor in life. My goal is to learn and to have fun. I ask that you don't see my approach to these conversations as weakness. It is not. It is my attempt at showing respect and love for the other person. That said, I also often just do a bad job of talking,

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  but you probably already knew that, so please give me a pass on that as well.

• 1:35Lex Fridman?

  As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, so hopefully you don't skip. But if you do, please still check out the sponsor links in the description. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. I use their stuff. I enjoy it. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Skiff, an end-to-end encrypted and decentralized collaboration platform built for privacy from the ground up. What Signal is to messaging, Skiff is to document writing and collaboration. It's like Google Docs, but with a lot more security features. From the early days, I happen to be a big user of Google Docs. Probably have over a thousand documents on there.

• 2:19Lex Fridman?

  I also use Evernote, Notion, Google Keep for various kinds of note taking. So I'm very picky on the usability front of document writing and collaboration. And that's the magic of Skiff. Not only is it secure, the writing and collaboration experience in it, in my opinion, is better than Google Docs. On Skiff, only you can decrypt your data. No one, not even Skiff, can ever see it. If you like using Signal, which I do, you'll love using Skiff. They're offering listeners of this podcast early access to their platform. You get to skip their over 60,000 person waitlist. You know, all those times where you had to wait in line outside of a club

• 3:03Lex Fridman?

  just to see those people who are on the list get in without any waiting? That could be you with Skiff. Sign up to Skiff's beta at skiff.org/lex. I'm thinking of doing a fun collaborative document with a free for all to all that listen to this podcast. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, go to skiff.org/lex to sign up for their early access. This show is also brought to you by Bank Novo, which is a business banking app. The process is simple. You sign up and they will mail you a Novo debit card and you get free ATM use. In my opinion, if there's any industry that needs to be disrupted, revolutionized, it's the old school banking industry.

• 3:48Lex Fridman?

  And that's what Bank Novo does. It's backed with FDIC insurance. There's no hidden fees, unlike traditional banks, no monthly fees or minimum balance requirements, easy to use mobile app. Like I said, you apply in under 10 minutes, super easy. There's a human powered customer service, free transfers, mailed checks, and incoming wires. It integrates with other small business tools like Stripe, Shopify, QuickBooks, and many more, refunds all ATM fees, and there are thousands of dollars in exclusive perks. Go to banknovo.com/lex to sign up for free. That's banknovo.com/lex.

• 4:30Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, nutrition, supplement, and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus. I really enjoy using AlphaBrain as a boost when thinking through a difficult problem. So if I anticipate there's a deep work session where I'm going to spend two, three hours on a particular difficult problem, especially in front of a sheet of paper, so I'm designing some aspect of a system or some aspect of a process, that's when I take an AlphaBrain. It's kind of this catalyst of really getting in the zone, really focusing. It clears the mind, helps me maintain focus, get to a focus place and maintain it.

• 5:13Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com/onnit. This episode is brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led in the past. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately. I think work is a source of meaning and happiness for many people, maybe even most people, maybe even all people. So I think if that's the case, and you're in a position of selecting the team with whom

• 5:54Lex Fridman?

  you work, it really pays off to invest a lot of effort and use the best tools to select that team. In terms of tools, Indeed should definitely be a service you consider for that initial candidate selection especially, but the whole process they help with. But the initial candidate selection is just stellar. Anyway, right now, get a free 75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex. Get it at indeed.com/lex. This offer valid through September 30th. Terms and conditions apply. Join 3 million businesses that use Indeed by going to indeed.com/lex.

• 6:37Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by the awesome, the amazing, the comfortable, Eight Sleep and its Pod Pro mattress. It controls temperature with an app, it's packed with sensors, it can cool down to as low as 55 degrees on each side of the bed separately. It is so damn hot outside right now in Austin, Texas. I cannot tell you how pleasant it is to lay down in a cool bed. Of course, I have air conditioning too, but there's something really nice about having a cold bed, a relatively cold room with a warm blanket is just heaven. It makes me look forward to the naps, to the power nap. It makes me look forward to sleep. They have a Pod Pro

• 7:19Lex Fridman?

  cover, so you can just add that to your mattress without having to buy theirs, but I have theirs and it's pretty nice. The thing can track a bunch of metrics like heart rate variability, but cooling alone is honestly worth the money. Go to eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings. That's eightsleep.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and here is my conversation with Jaron Lanier.

• 8:04Lex Fridman?

  You're considered the founding father of virtual reality. Do you think we will one day spend most or all of our lives in virtual reality worlds?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I have always found the very most valuable moment in virtual reality to be the moment when you take off the headset and your senses are refreshed and you perceive physicality afresh, you know, as if you were a newborn baby, but with a little more experience, you can really notice just how incredibly strange and...

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Delicate and peculiar and impossible the real world is.

• 8:45Lex Fridman?

  So the magic is, and perhaps forever will be, in the physical world.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, that's my take on it. That's just me. I mean, I think I don't get to tell everybody else how to think or how to experience virtual reality. And at this point, there have been multiple generations of younger people who've come along and liberated me from having to worry about these things. But I should say also, even in what some, well, I called it mixed reality back in the day, and these days it's called augmented reality, but with something like a hollow lens, even then, like, one of my favorite things is to augment a forest, not because I think the forest needs augmentation, but when you look at the augmentation next to a real tree, the real tree just pops out as being astounding. You know, it's, it's

• 9:35Speaker 01

  interactive, it's changing slightly all the time if you pay attention, and it's hard to pay attention to that. But when you compare it to virtual reality, all of a sudden you do. And even in practical applications, my favorite early application of virtual reality, which we prototype going back to the 80s, when I was working with Dr. Joe Rosen at Stanford Med, near, near where we are now, we made the first surgical simulator. And to go from the fake anatomy of the simulation, which is incredibly valuable for many things, for designing procedures, for training, for all kinds of things, then to go to the real person, boy, it's really something like surgeons really get woken up by that transition. It's

• 10:18Speaker 01

  very cool. So I think the transition is actually more valuable than the simulation.

• 10:23Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. I never really thought about that. It's almost, it's like traveling elsewhere in the physical space can help you appreciate how much you value your home once you return.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Well, that's how I take it. I mean, once again, people have different attitudes towards it. All are welcome.

• 10:43Lex Fridman?

  What do you think is the difference between the virtual world and the physical meat space world? That, that you are still drawn, for you personally, still drawn to the physical world? Like, there clearly then is a distinction. Is there some fundamental distinction? Or is it the peculiarities of the current set of technology?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  In terms of the kind of virtual reality that we have now.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It's made of software and software is terrible stuff.

• 11:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Software is always the slave of its own history, its own legacy. It's always infinitely arbitrarily messy and arbitrary. Working with it brings out a certain kind of nerdy personality in people, or at least in me, which I'm not that fond of. And there are all kinds of things about software I don't like. And so that's different from the physical world. It's not something we understand, as you just pointed out. On the other hand, you know, I'm a little mystified when people ask me, well, do you think the universe is a computer? And I have to say, well, I mean,

• 11:49Speaker 01

  what on earth could you possibly mean if you say it isn't a computer? If it isn't a computer, it wouldn't follow principles consistently and it wouldn't be intelligible. Because what else is a computer ultimately? You know, I mean, and we have physics, we have technology, you know, so we can do technology, so we can program it. So, I mean, of course, it's some kind of computer. But I think trying to understand it as a Turing machine is probably a foolish approach.

• 12:17Lex Fridman?

  Right, that's the question, whether it performs, this computer we call the universe, performs the kind of computation that can be modeled as a universal Turing machine? Or is it something much more fancy? So fancy, in fact, that we, it may be beyond our cognitive capabilities to understand.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Turing machines are kind of, I'd call them teases in a way. Because like, if you have an infinitely smart programmer with an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of memory and an infinite clock speed, then they're universal. But that cannot exist, so they're not universal in practice. And they, they actually are, in practice, a very particular sort of machine within, you know, the constraints within the conservation principles of any reality that's worth being in probably. And so, so I, I,

• 13:16Speaker 01

  I think universality of a particular model is probably a deceptive way to think. Even though at some sort of limit, of course, it's

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Something like that's got to be true at some sort of high enough limit, but it's just not accessible to us. So what's the point?

• 13:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, to me, the question of like whether we're living inside a computer or a simulation is interesting in the following way.

• 13:43Lex Fridman?

  There's a technical question is here. How difficult does it to build a machine? Not that simulates the universe, but that makes it sufficiently realistic that we wouldn't know the difference. Or better yet, sufficiently realistic that we would kind of know the difference, but we would prefer to stay in the virtual world anyway.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  I want to give you a few different answers. I want to give you the one that I think has the most practical importance to human beings right now, which is that there's a kind of an assertion sort of built into the way the question's usually asked that I think is false, which is a suggestion that people have a fixed level of ability to perceive reality in a given way. And actually, people are always learning, evolving, forming themselves. We're fluid too. We're also programmable, self-programmable, changing, adapting. And so my favorite way to get at this is to talk about the history of other media. So for instance, there was a peer review paper that showed that an early wire recorder

• 14:51Speaker 01

  playing back an opera singer behind a curtain was indistinguishable from a real opera singer. And so now, of course, to us, it would not only be distinguishable, but it would be very blatant because the recording would be horrible. But to the people at the time, without the experience of it, it seemed plausible. There was an early demonstration of extremely crude video teleconferencing between New York and DC in the 30s? I think so, that people viewed as being absolutely realistic and indistinguishable, which to us would be horrible. And there are many other examples. Another one, one of my favorite ones is in the Civil War era. There were itinerant photographers who collected photographs of people who just looked kind of like a few archetypes.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  So you could buy a photo of somebody who looked kind of like your loved one. To remind you of that person, because actually photographing them was inconceivable, and hiring a painter was too expensive, and you didn't have any way for the painter to represent them remotely anyway. How would they even know what they looked like?

• 15:51Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  So, these are all great examples of how, in the early days of different media, we perceived the media as being really great, but then we evolved through the experience of the media. This gets back to what I was saying. Maybe the greatest gift of photography is that we can see the flaws in a photograph and appreciate reality more. Maybe the greatest gift of audio recording is that we can distinguish that opera singer now, singer now, from that recording of the opera singer on the horrible wire recorder. So, so we're, we shouldn't limit ourselves by some assumption of stasis. That's incorrect. So, that's the first thing, that's my first answer, which is, I think, the most important one. Now, of course, somebody might come back and say, "Oh, but you know, technology can go so far. There must be some point at which it would surpass." That's a different question.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I, I think that's also an interesting question, but I think the answer I just gave you is actually the more important answer to the more important question.

• 16:43Lex Fridman?

  That's profound, yeah. But can you, can you, the second question, which you're now making me realize is way different. Is it possible to create worlds in which people would want to stay instead of the real world?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Well...

• 16:58Lex Fridman?

  Like, unmasked, like, large numbers, numbers of people?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  What I hope is, you know, as I said before, I hope that the experience of virtual worlds helps people appreciate this, this physical world we have and feel tender towards it and, and keep it from getting too fucked up. That's my hope.

• 17:21Lex Fridman?

  Do you see all technology in that way? So, basically, technology helps us appreciate the more sort of technology-free aspect of life.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Well, media technology, you know, I mean, I, I, you can stretch that. I mean, you can, let me say, I could definitely play McLuhan and turn this into a general theory. It's totally doable. The program you just described is totally doable. In fact, I will psychically predict that if you did the research, you could find 20 PhD theses that do that already.

• 17:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know, but they might exist. But I, I don't know how much value there is in pushing a particular idea that far claiming that reality isn't a computer in some sense seems incoherent to me because we have, we can program it. We have technology. It has, it seems to obey physical laws. What more do you want from it to be a computer? I mean, it's a computer of some kind. We don't know exactly what kind. We might not know how to think about it. We're working on it. But

• 18:21Lex Fridman?

  Sorry to draw, but you're absolutely right. Like, that's my fascination with the AI as well, is it helps, in the case of AI, I see as, as a set of techniques that help us understand ourselves, understand us humans. In the same way, virtual reality, and you're putting it brilliantly, which it's, it's a way to help us understand reality.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:43Lex Fridman?

  Appreciate and open our eyes more richly to reality.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  That's, that's certainly how I see it. And I, I wish people who become incredibly fascinated, who go down the rabbit hole of the different fascinations with whether we're in a simulation or not, or, you know, that there's a whole world of variations on that. I wish they'd step back and think about their own motivations and exactly what they mean, you know what?

• 19:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  And, and I think the danger with these things is, so if you say, is the universe some kind of computer broadly, it has to be because it's not coherent to say that, that it isn't. On the other hand, to say that that means you know anything about what kind of computer, that's something very different. And the same thing is true for the brain. The same thing is true for anything where you might use computational metaphors. Like, we have to have a bit of modesty about where we stand. And the problem I have with these Framings of computation as these ultimate cosmic questions is that it has a way of getting people to pretend they know more than they do.

• 19:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you maybe, um, this is a therapy session. Psychanalys me for a second. Like, for example, I really like the Elder Scrolls series. It's a role playing game. Skyrim, for example. Why do I enjoy so deeply just walking around that world? And then there's people you could talk to and you can just like, it's an escape, but you know, my, my life is awesome. I'm truly happy, but I also am happy with the, with the music that's playing and the, and the mountains and carrying around a sword and just that. I, I don't know what that is. It's very pleasant though, to go there and I miss it sometimes.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  I think it's wonderful to love artistic creations. It's wonderful to love contact with other people. It's wonderful to love play and ongoing, evolving meaning and patterns with other people. I think it's a, it's a good thing. You know, I, um, my, my, I'm not, I'm not like anti-tech and I'm certainly not anti-digital tech. I'm anti, as everybody knows by now, I think the, you know, manipulative economy of social media is making everybody nuts and all that. So I'm anti that stuff. But the core of it, of course, I worked for many, many years

• 21:12Speaker 01

  on trying to make that stuff happen because I think it can be beautiful. Like I, um, I don't, like, why not? You know, and, and by the way, um, there's a thing about humans, which is, um,

• 21:26Speaker 01

  uh, we're problematic. Any, any kind of social interaction with other people is going to have its problems. People are.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Political and tricky and like I love classical music, but when you actually go to a classical music thing and it turns out, oh, actually this is like a backroom power deal kind of place and a big status ritual as well. And that's kind of not as fun. That's part of the package. And the thing is, it's always going to be, there's always going to be a mix of things. I, I don't, I don't think the search for purity is going to get you anywhere. So I'm not worried about that. I worry about the, the really bad cases where we're becoming, where we're making ourselves crazy or cruel enough that we might not survive. And I think, you know, the social media criticism rises to that level, but I'm glad you enjoyed it. I think it's great.

• 22:22Lex Fridman?

  And I like that you basically say that every experience is both beauty and darkness, as in with classical music. I also play classical piano, so I appreciate it very much. But it's interesting. I mean, every, and even the darkest, it's a man's search for meaning with Viktor Frankl and the, and the concentration camps, even there, there's opportunity to discover beauty. And so it's, that's, that's the interesting thing about humans is the capacity to discover beautiful in the darkest of moments, but there's always the dark parts too.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's, our situation is structurally difficult. We are.

• 23:04Lex Fridman?

  Structurally difficult.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  No, it is. It's true. We perceive socially, we depend on each other for our sense of place and, and perception of the world. I mean, we're dependent on each other. And yet there's also a degree in which we're inevitably, we inevitably let each other down. We are set up to be competitive as well as supportive. I mean, it's, it's, our fundamental situation is complicated and challenging. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

• 23:38Lex Fridman?

  Okay, let's talk about one of the most challenging things. One of the things I unfortunately am very afraid of, being human, allegedly. You wrote an essay on death and consciousness in which you write a note. Certainly, the fear of death has been one of the greatest driving forces in the history of thought and in the formation of the character of civilization. And yet, it is under acknowledged. The great book on the subject, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, deserves a reconsideration.

• 24:12Lex Fridman?

  I'm Russian, so I have to ask you about this. What's the role of death in life?

• 24:16Speaker 01

  See, you would have enjoyed coming to our house because my wife is Russian and we also have, we have a piano of such spectacular qualities, you wouldn't, you would have freaked out. But anyway, we'll let all that go. So the context in which I remember that essay, sort of, this was from maybe the 90s or something. And I used to publish in a journal called The Journal of Consciousness Studies because I was, I was interested in these endless debates about consciousness and science,

• 24:52Speaker 01

  which certainly continue today. And I was interested in how the fear of death and the denial of death played into different philosophical approaches to consciousness. Because I, I think on the one hand,

• 25:18Speaker 01

  the sort of sentimental school of dualism, meaning the feeling that there's something apart from the physical brain, some kind of soul or something else, is obviously motivated in a sense by a hope that that, whatever that is, will survive death and continue. And that's a very core aspect of a lot of the world religions. Not all of them, not, not really, but you know, most of them.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Thing I noticed is that the the opposite of those, which might be the sort of hardcore, no, the brain's a computer and that's it. In a sense, we're motivated in the same way with a remarkably similar chain of of of arguments, which is, no, the brain's a computer and I'm going to figure it out in my lifetime and upload it, upload myself and I'll live forever.

• 26:13Lex Fridman?

  That's interesting. Yeah, that's that's like the implied thought, right?

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's kind of this, in a funny way, it's it's the same thing. It's it's peculiar that you to notice that these people who would appear to be opposites in character and cultural references and and in their ideas actually are remarkably similar. And and to to to an incredible degree, the sort of hardcore computationalist idea about the brain has turned into medieval Christianity with together, like there's the there are the people who are afraid that if you have the wrong thought, you'll piss off the super AIs of the future who will come back and zap you and and all that stuff.

• 27:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  It's like, it's really, it's really turned into medieval Christianity all over again.

• 27:07Lex Fridman?

  This is so the Ernest Becker's idea that death, the fear of death is the warm of the core, which is like, that's the that's the core motivator of everything we see humans have created. The question is if that fear of mortality is somehow core, is like a prerequisite.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Hmm. So what you what you just, you just moved across this vast cultural chasm that separates me from most of my colleagues in a way. And I can't answer what you just said on the level without this huge deconstruction.

• 27:42Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Should I do it?

• 27:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes, what's the chasm?

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:46Lex Fridman?

  Let us travel across this vast.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't believe in AI. I don't think there's any AI. There's just algorithms. We make them, we control them. Now, they're tools, they're not creatures. Now, this is something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way. And don't I know it? When I was young, my main mentor was Marvin Minsky, who's the principal author of the computer as creature rhetoric that we still use. He was the first person to have the idea at all, but he certainly populated the AI culture with most of its tropes, I would say, because a lot of the stuff people will say, oh, did you hear this new idea about AI? And I'm like, yeah, I heard it in 1978. Sure. Yeah, I remember that. So Marvin was really the person.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  And Marvin and I used to argue all the time about this stuff because I always rejected it. And of all of his, of all of his, I wasn't formally his student, but I worked for him as a researcher. But of all of his students and studentlike people of his young adoptees, I think I was the one who argued with him about this stuff in particular, and he loved it.

• 28:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I would have loved to hear that conversation.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 28:58Lex Fridman?

  Did you ever converge to a place?

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no. So the very last time I saw him, he was quite frail. And I was in Boston and I was going to the old house in Brookline, his amazing house. And one of our mutual friends said, hey, listen, Marvin's so frail. Don't do the argument with him. Don't argue about AI, you know? And so I said, but Marvin loves that. And so I showed up and he's like, he was frail. He looked up and he said, are you ready to argue?

• 29:32Lex Fridman?

  He's such an amazing person for that.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  So it's hard to summarize this because it's decades of stuff. The first thing to say is that nobody can claim absolute knowledge about whether somebody or something else is conscious or not. This is all a matter of faith. And in fact, I think the whole idea of faith needs to be updated. So it's not about God, but it's just about stuff in the universe. We have faith in each other being conscious. And then I used to frame this as a thing called the circle of empathy in my old papers. And then it turned into a thing for the animal rights movement, too. I noticed Peter Singer using it.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  I don't know if it was coincident or, but anyway, we, there's this idea that you draw a circle around yourself and the stuff inside is more like you, might be conscious, might be deserving of your empathy, of your consideration, and the stuff outside the circle isn't. And outside the circle might be a rock or, I don't know.

• 30:37Lex Fridman?

  And that circle is fundamentally based on faith.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Well.

• 30:40Lex Fridman?

  Pure faith and what is and what isn't.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  The thing about the circle is it can't be pure faith. It also has, it's also a pragmatic decision. And this is where things get complicated. If you try to make it too big, you suffer from incompetence. If you say, I don't want to kill a bacteria, I will not brush my teeth. I don't know, like, what do you do? Like, you know, like, there's a, there's a competence question where you do have to draw the line. People who make it too small become cruel. People are so clannish and political and so worried about themselves ending up on the bottom of society that they are always ready to gang up on some designated group. And so there's always these people who are being trying, we're always trying to shove somebody out of the circle.

• 31:23Lex Fridman?

  And so aren't you shoving AI outside the circle?

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Well, give me a second.

• 31:26Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  So, so there's a pragmatic consideration here. And so, and, and the, the biggest questions are probably fetuses and animals lately, but AI is getting there. Now, with AI, I think, and I've had this discussion so many times, people say, but aren't you afraid if you exclude AI, you'd be cruel to some consciousness? And then I would say, well, if you include AI, you make yourself, you, you exclude yourself from being able to be a good engineer or designer. And so you, you're facing incompetence immediately. So like, I really think we need to subordinate algorithms and be much more skeptical of them.

• 32:08Lex Fridman?

  Your intuition, you speak about this brilliantly with social media, how things can go wrong. Isn't it possible?

• 32:17Lex Fridman?

  To design systems that show compassion, not to manipulate you, but give you control and make your life better if you so choose to. Like grow together with systems in the way we grow with dogs and cats with pets, with significant others in that way, that grow to become better people. I don't understand why that's fundamentally not possible. You're saying oftentimes you get into trouble by thinking you know what's good for people.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Well, look, there's this question of what frame we're speaking in. Do you know who Alan Watts was? So Alan Watts once said morality is like gravity, that in some absolute cosmic sense, there can't be morality, because at some point it all becomes relative and who are we anyway? Like morality is relative to us tiny creatures. But here on earth, we're with each other. This is our frame and morality is a very real thing. Same thing with gravity. At some point, you know, you get into interstellar space and you might not feel much of it, but here we are on earth. And I think in the same sense, I think this identification with a frame

• 33:26Speaker 01

  that's quite remote cannot be separated from a feeling of wanting to feel sort of separate from and superior to other people or something like that. There's an impulse behind it that I really have to reject. And we're just not competent yet to talk about these kinds of absolutes.

• 33:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but okay, so I agree with you that a lot of technologists sort of lack this basic respect, understanding and love for humanity. There's a separation there. The thing I'd like to push back against, it's not that you disagree, but I believe you can create technologies and you can create a new kind of technologist engineer that does build systems that respect humanity, not just respect, but admire humanity, that have empathy for common humans, have compassion.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  So I mean, no, no, no, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think musical instruments are a great example of that. Musical instruments are technologies that help people connect in fantastic ways. And that's a great example. My, uh, my invention or design during the pandemic period was this thing called Together Mode, where people see themselves seated sort of in a, uh, a classroom or a theater instead of in squares. And it allows them to semi-consciously perform to each other as if they're, as if they have proper eye contact, as if they're paying attention to each other non-verbally. And weirdly, that turns out to work. And so it promotes empathy, so far as I can tell.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  I hope, I hope it is of some use to somebody.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  The AI idea isn't really new. I would say it was born with Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, with this idea that we build this algorithmic thing and it gets a bit beyond us and then we think it must be smarter than us. And the thing about the invisible hand is absolutely everybody has some line they draw where they say, no, no, no, we're going to take control of this thing. They might have different lines, they might care about different things, but everybody ultimately became a Keynesian because it just didn't work. It really wasn't that smart. It was sometimes smart and sometimes it failed, you know? And, and, and so if you really, you know, people who really, really, really want to believe in the invisible hand is infinitely smart, screw up their economies terribly.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  You have, you know, you have to recognize the economy as a subservient tool. Everybody does when it's to their advantage. They might not when it's not to their advantage. That's kind of an interesting game that happens. But the thing is, it's, it's just like that with our algorithms, you know, like, uh, you, you, you can, uh, you can have a sort of a Chicago, you can, you know, economic philosophy about your computers. You know, no, no, my things come alive, it's smarter than anything.

• 36:13Lex Fridman?

  I think that there is a deep loneliness within all of us. This is what we seek. We seek love from each other. I think AI can help us connect deeper. Like this, this is what you criticize social media for. I think there's much better ways of doing social media that doesn't lead to manipulation, but instead leads to deeper connection between humans, leads to you becoming a better human being. And what that requires is some agency on the part of AI to, to be almost like a therapist. I mean, a companion. It's not telling you. What's right, it's not guiding you as if it's an all knowing thing. It's just another companion that you can leave at any time. You have complete transparency control over.

• 36:56Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of mechanisms that you can have that that are counter to how current social media operates. That I think is subservient to humans or no deeply respects human beings and empathetic to their experience and all those kinds of things. I think it's possible to create AS systems like that. And I think they, I mean, that's a technical discussion of whether they need to have

• 37:24Lex Fridman?

  something that looks like more like AI versus algorithms, something that has an identity, something that has a personality, all those kinds of things. AI systems, and you've spoken extensively how AI systems

• 37:39Lex Fridman?

  manipulate you within social networks. And that's the biggest, the biggest problem isn't necessarily that

• 37:48Lex Fridman?

  there's advertisement that, you know, social networks present you with advertisements that then get you to buy stuff. That's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is they then manipulate you. You're, they alter like your human nature to get you to buy stuff or to get you to do whatever the advertiser wants. Or maybe you can correct me.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't see it quite that way, but we can work with that as an approximation.

• 38:16Lex Fridman?

  Sure, so my.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  I think the actual thing is even sort of more ridiculous and stupider than that, but that's, that's okay. Let's, let's.

• 38:22Lex Fridman?

  So my, my question is, let's not use the word AI, but how do we fix it?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Oh, fixing social media. That diverts us into this whole other field in my view, which is economics, which I always thought was really boring, but we have no choice but to turn into economists if we want to fix this problem. Cause it's all about incentives. But I've been around this thing since it started and I've been in the meetings where the social media companies.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Sell themselves to the people who put the most money into them, which are usually the big advertising holding companies and whatnot. And there's this, there's this idea that I think is kind of a fiction. And maybe it's even been recognized as that by everybody that the, the algorithm will get really good at getting people to buy something. Cause I think people have looked at their returns and looked at what happens. And everybody recognizes it's not exactly right. It's more like a cognitive access blackmail payment at this point. Like just to be connected, you're paying the money. It's not so much that the persuasion algorithms. So Stanford renamed its program, but it used to be called Engage Persuade.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  The engage part works, the persuade part is iffy. But the thing is that once people are engaged, in order for you to exist as a business, in order for you to be known at all, you have to put money into-

• 39:47Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's dark.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that's not-

• 39:49Lex Fridman?

  It doesn't work, but they have to-

• 39:51Speaker 01

  But they're, they're still, it's a, it's a giant, it's a giant cognitive access blackmail scheme at this point. So, um, because the science behind the persuade part, it's not entirely, it's not entirely a failure, but it's, it's not what the, there's, we, we play make believe that it, it, it works more than it does. The, the damage doesn't come, honestly, as I've, I've said in my books, I'm not anti-advertising. I actually think advertising can be demeaning and annoying and banal and ridiculous and take up a lot of our time with stupid stuff. Like there's a lot of ways to criticize advertising that's accurate and it can also lie and all kinds of things.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  However, if I look at the biggest picture, I think advertising, at least as it was understood before, social media helped bring people into modernity in a way that overall actually did benefit people overall. And you might say, am I contradicting myself because I was saying you shouldn't manipulate people? Yeah, I am probably here. I mean, I'm not, I'm not pretending to have this perfect airtight worldview without some contradictions. I think there's a bit of a contradiction there. So, you know.

• 41:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, looking at the long arc of history, advertisement has, has in some parts benefited society.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:08Lex Fridman?

  Because it funded some efforts that perhaps-

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think like there's a, there's a thing where sometimes I think it's actually been of some use. Now let's-

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Where the damage comes is a different thing, though. Social media, um, algorithms on social media have to work on feedback loops where they present you with stimulus, they have to see if you respond to the stimulus. Now, the, the problem is that the, the measurement mechanism for telling if you respond in the engagement feedback loop is very, very crude. It's things like whether you click more, or occasionally if you're staring at the screen more, if there's a forward-facing camera that's activated, but typically there isn't. So you have this incredibly crude back channel of information. And so it's crude enough that it only catches sort of the more dramatic responses from you, and those are the fight or flight responses.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Those are the things where you get scared or pissed off, or aggressive, or horny, you know? These are these ancient, the sort of what are sometimes called the lizard brain circuits, or whatever, you know? These, these fast response, old, old, old evolutionary business circuits that we have that are helpful in survival once in a while, but are not us at our best. They're not who we want to be, they're not how we relate to each other, they're this old business. But it's, so then, just when you're engaged using those intrinsically, totally aside from whatever the topic is, you start to get incrementally just a little bit more paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive, you know, you get a little stupid and like, you become a jerk.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And it happens slowly, it happens, it's not, it's not like everybody's like instantly transformed, but it does kind of happen progressively, where people who get hooked kind, kind of get drawn more and more into this pattern of being at their worst.

• 42:58Lex Fridman?

  Would you say that people are able to, when they get hooked in this way, look back at themselves from 30 days ago and say, "I am less happy with who I am now," or, "I'm not happy with who I am now versus who I was 30 days ago"? Are they able to self-reflect when you take yourself outside of the lizard brain?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Sometimes. Um, I wrote a book about people, suggesting people take a break from their social media to see what happens, and maybe even, it was, actually, the title of the book was just "Arguments to Delete Your Account."

• 43:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 10, 10 arguments.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  10 arguments, although I always said, "I don't know that you should, I can give you the arguments, it's up to you." I'm always very clear about that. But, you know, I get, like, I don't have a social media account, obviously, and... It's not that easy for people to reach me. They have to search out an old fashioned email address on a super crappy antiquated website. Like, it's actually a bit, I don't make it easy. And even with that, I get this huge flood of mail from people who say, oh, I quit my social media, I'm doing so much better. I can't believe how bad it was. But the thing is, what's for me a huge flood of mail would be an imperceptible trickle from the perspective of Facebook, right? And so I think it's rare for somebody to look at themselves and say, oh, boy, I sure screwed myself over. It's a really hard thing to ask of somebody. None of us find that easy, right?

• 44:15Lex Fridman?

  Well, the reason I

• 44:16Speaker 01

  It's hard.

• 44:17Lex Fridman?

  The reason I ask this is, is it possible to design social media systems that optimize for some longer term metrics of you being happy with yourself?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Well, see,

• 44:29Lex Fridman?

  Personal growth.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  I don't think you should try to engineer personal growth or happiness. I think what you should do is design a system that's just respectful of the people and subordinates itself to the people and doesn't have perverse incentives. And then at least there's a chance of something decent happening.

• 44:43Lex Fridman?

  But you have to recommend stuff, right? So, but, so you're saying, like, be respectful. What does that actually mean engineering wise?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  People, yeah, curation. People have to, people have to be responsible. Algorithms shouldn't be recommending. Algorithms don't understand enough to recommend. Algorithms are crap in this era. I mean, I'm sorry, they are. Like, I, and I'm not saying this as somebody, as a critic from the outside. I'm in the middle of it. I know what they can do. I know the math. I know what the corpore are. I'm, you know, I know the best ones. Our office is funding GPT-3 and all these things that are, that are, you know, at the, at the edge of what's possible. And they do not have, yet, I mean, it still is statistical emergent pseudos semantics. It doesn't actually have deep representation emerging of anything. It's just not like, I mean, that, I'm speaking the truth here and you know it.

• 45:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me push back on this. This, there's several truths here. So, what, you're speaking to the way certain companies operate currently. I don't think it's outside the realm of what's technically feasible to do. There's just not incentive, like, companies are not, why fix this thing? I am aware that, for example, the YouTube search and discovery has been very helpful to me.

• 45:58Lex Fridman?

  And there's a huge number of, there's so many videos that it's nice to have a little bit of help.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Have you done-

• 46:05Lex Fridman?

  But I'm still in control.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Let me ask you something. Have you done the experiment of letting YouTube recommend videos to you, either starting from a absolutely anonymous random place where it doesn't know who you are, or from knowing who you or somebody else is, and then going 15 or 20 hops? Have you ever done that and just let it go top video recommend and then just go 20 hops?

• 46:25Lex Fridman?

  No, I've not.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  I've done that many times now. I have, because of how large YouTube is and how widely it's used, it's very hard to get to enough scale to get a statistically solid result on this. I've done it with high school kids, with dozens of kids doing it at a time. Every time I've done an experiment, the majority of times, after about 17 or 18 hops, you end up in really weird, paranoid, bizarre territory. Because ultimately, that is the stuff the algorithm rewards the most because of the feedback crudeness I was just talking about. So I'm not saying that the video never recommends something cool. I'm saying that its fundamental core is one that promotes a paranoid style, that promotes

• 47:09Speaker 01

  increasing irritability, that promotes xenophobia, promotes fear, anger, promotes selfishness, promotes separation between people. And I would encourage, the thing is, it's very hard to do this work solidly. Many have repeated this experiment, and yet it still is kind of anecdotal. I'd like to do like a large, you know, citizen science thing sometime and do it, but then I think the problem with that is YouTube would detect it and then change it.

• 47:33Lex Fridman?

  Yes, I definitely, I love that kind of stuff on Twitter. So Jack Dorsey has spoken about doing healthy conversations on Twitter, or optimizing for healthy conversations. What that requires within Twitter are most likely citizen experiments of what does healthy conversation actually look like, and what, how do you incentivize those healthy conversations? You're describing what often happens and what is currently happening. What I'd like to argue is it's possible to strive for healthy conversations, not in a dogmatic way of saying, "I know what healthy conversations are and I will tell you."

• 48:10Speaker 01

  I think one way to do this is to try to look around at social, maybe not things that are officially social media, but things where people are together online and see which ones have more healthy conversations, even if it's hard to-

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Be completely objective in that measurement, you can kind of, at least crudely.

• 48:27Lex Fridman?

  You could do subjective annotation of this, like have a large crowd sourced.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. One that I've been really interested in is GitHub. Cause it could change. I'm not saying it'll always be, but for the most part GitHub has had a relatively quite low poison quotient. And I think there's a few things about GitHub that are interesting. One thing about it is that people have a stake in it. It's not just empty status games. There's actual code or there's actual stuff being done. And I think as soon as you have a real world stake in something, you have a motivation to not screw up that thing. And I think that that's often missing, that there's a, there's no incentive for the person to really preserve something if they, if they get a little bit of attention from

• 49:17Speaker 01

  dumping on somebody's Tik Tok or something, that there's, they don't pay any price for it. But on, you have to kind of get decent with people when you have a shared stake, you know, a little secret. So GitHub does a bit of that.

• 49:31Lex Fridman?

  GitHub is wonderful. Yes. But I, yeah, I'm, I'm tempted to play the Jaron back at you, which is that, so GitHub is currently is amazing. But the thing is, if you have a stake, then if it's a social media platform, they can use the fact that you have a stake to manipulate you because you want to preserve the stake. So like.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Right. Well, this is why, this gets us into the economics. So there's this thing called data dignity that I've been studying for a long time. I wrote a book about an earlier version of it called Who Wants the Future? And the, the, the basic idea of it is that,

• 50:06Speaker 01

  once again, this is a 30 year conversation.

• 50:08Lex Fridman?

  Fascinating topic.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Let me do the fastest version of this I can do. The fastest way I know how to do this is to compare two futures. All right. So future one is then the normative one, the one we're building right now. And future two is going to be data dignity. Okay. And, and I'm going to use a particular population. I live on the hill in Berkeley. And one of the features about the hill is that as the climate changes, we might burn down and all lose our houses or die or something like it's, it's dangerous, you know, and it didn't use to be. And so who keeps us alive? Well, the city does. The city does some things. The electric company kind of sort of maybe hopefully better. Individual people who own property, take care of their property, that's all nice.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  But there's this other middle layer, which is fascinating to me, which is that the groundskeepers who work up and down that hill, many of whom are not legally here, many of whom don't speak English, cooperate with each other to make sure trees don't touch to transfer fire easily from lot to lot. They have this whole little web that's keeping us safe. I didn't know about this at first. I just started talking to them because they were out there during the pandemic. And so I tried to just see who are these people? Who are these people who are keeping us alive? Now, I want to talk about the two different faiths for those people under future one and future two. Future one, some weird like kindergarten paint job

• 51:34Speaker 01

  van with all these like cameras and weird things drives up, observes what the gardeners and groundskeepers are doing. A few years later, some amazing robots that can shimmy up trees and all this show up. All those people are out of work and there are these robots doing the thing and the robots are good and they can scale to more land and they're actually good. But then there are all these people out of work and these people have lost dignity. They don't know what they're going to do. And, and then somebody will say, well, they go on basic income, whatever, they become wards of the state. My problem with that solution is every time in history that you've had some centralized thing that's stalling out the benefits, that things get seized by people because it's too centralized and it gets seized. This happened to every communist experiment I can find. So I think

• 52:18Speaker 01

  that turns into a poor future that will be unstable. I don't think people will feel good in it. I think it'll be a political disaster with a sequence of people seizing this central source of the, the basic income. And you'll say, oh, no, an algorithm can do it. Then people will seize the algorithm. They'll seize, they'll seize control.

• 52:35Lex Fridman?

  Unless the algorithm is decentralized and it's impossible to seize the control.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but 60 something people own a quarter of all the Bitcoin. Like, like the things that we think are decentralized are not decentralized. So let's go to future two, future two. The gardeners see that van with all the cameras and the kindergarten paint job. And they say, the groundskeepers, and they say, hey, the robots are coming. We're going to form a data union. And amazingly, California has a little baby data union law emerging in the books. Yes. And so there's, and so the, and what they say, they say, we're going to form, we're going to form a data union and we're going to, not only are we going to sell our data to this place, but we're going to make it better than it would have been if they were just grabbing it without our cooperation.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  And we're going to improve it. We're going to make the robots more effective. We're going to make them better and we're going to be proud of it. We're going to become a new class of experts that are respected. And then here's the interesting, there's two things that are different about that world from future one. One thing, of course, the people have more pride, they have more sense of, of ownership of, of, of, of agency. But what the robots do changes. Instead of just like this functional, like we'll figure out how to keep the neighborhood from burning down. You have this whole creative community that wasn't there before thinking, well, how can we make these robots better so we can keep on earning money?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  There'll be waves of creative groundskeeping with spiral pumping pumpkin patches and waves of cultural things. There'll be new ideas like, wow, I wonder if we could do something about climate change mitigation with how we do this. What about, what about fresh water? Can we, what about, can we make the food healthier? What about, what about, all of a sudden, there'll be this whole creative community on the case. And isn't it nicer to have a high tech future with more creative classes than one with more dependent classes? Isn't that a better future? But, but, but, but, but. Future one and future two have the same robots and the same algorithms. There's no technological difference. There's only a human difference. Yeah. And that second future two, that's data dignity.

• 54:50Lex Fridman?

  The economy that you're, I mean, the game theory here is on the humans. And then the technology is just the tools that enable.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I mean, I think you can believe in AI and be in future too. I just think it's a little harder. You have to do, you have to do more contortions. It's possible.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  So in the case of social media, what does data dignity look like? Is it people getting paid for their data?

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what should happen is in the future, there should be massive data unions for people putting content into the system. And those data unions should smooth out the results a little bit. So it's not winner take all. But at the same time, and people have to pay for it too. They have to pay for Facebook the way they pay for Netflix with, with an allowance for the poor. There has to be, there has to be a way out too. But the thing is, people do pay for Netflix. It's a going concern. People pay for Xbox and PlayStation, like people, there's enough people to pay for stuff they want. This could happen too. It's just that this precedent started that moved it in the wrong direction.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  And then what has to happen, the economy is a measuring device. If it's an honest, honest measuring device, the outcomes for people form a normal distribution, a bell curve. And then, so there should be a few people who do really well, a lot of people who do okay. And then we should have an expanding economy reflecting more and more creativity and expertise flowing through the network. And that expanding economy moves the result just a bit forward. So more people are getting money out of it than are putting money into it. So it gradually expands the economy and lifts all boats. And the, and the society has to support the, the, the lower wing of the bell curve too, but not universal basic income. It has to be for the, you know, because if it's an honest, if it's an honest economy,

• 56:41Speaker 01

  there will be that lower wing and we, we have to support those people. There has to be a safety net. But see what I believe, I'm not going to talk about AI, but I will say. That I think there'll be more and more algorithms that are useful. And so I don't think everybody's going to be supplying data to groundskeeping robots, nor do I think everybody's going to make their living with TikTok videos. I think in both cases, there'll be a rather small contingent that do well enough at either of those things. But I think there might be many, many, many, many of those niches that start to evolve as there are more and more algorithms, more and more robots. And it's that large number that will create the economic potential for a very large part of society to become members of new creative classes.

• 57:26Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible to, um, to create a social network that competes with Twitter and Facebook that's large and centralized in this way? Not centralized, sort of large, large.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  How to get, all right, so I've got to tell you how to get from what I'm talking, how to get from where we are to anything kind of in the zone of what I'm talking about is challenging.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  I know some of the people who run, like I know Jack Dorsey, and I view Jack as somebody who's actually, I think he's really striving and searching and find, and trying to find a way to make it better, uh, but is kind of like, it's very hard to do it while in flight and he's under enormous business pressure too.

• 58:12Lex Fridman?

  So Jack Dorsey to me is a fascinating study because I think his mind is in a lot of good places. He's, he's a good human being, but there's a big Titanic ship that's already moving in one direction. It's hard to know what to do with.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  That's, I think that's the story of Twitter. I think that's the story of Twitter. One of the things that I observed is that if you just want to look at the human side, meaning like how are people being changed? How do they feel? What is the culture like? Almost all of the social media platforms that get big have an initial sort of honeymoon period where they're actually kind of sweet and cute.

• 58:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  Like if you look at the early years of Twitter, it was really sweet and cute. But also look at Snap, um, TikTok. And then what happens is as they scale and the algorithms become more influential instead of just the early people, when it gets, when it gets big enough that it's the algorithm running it, then you start to see the rise of the paranoid style and then they start to get dark. And we, we've seen that shift in TikTok rather recently.

• 59:08Lex Fridman?

  But I feel like that scaling reveals the flaws within the incentives.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I feel like I'm torturing you. I'm sorry.

• 59:17Lex Fridman?

  No, it's not torture. No, because I have hope for the world with with humans and I have hope for a lot of things that humans create, including technology. And I just, I feel it is possible to create social media platforms that incentivize different things than the current. I think the current incentivization is around like the dumbest possible thing that was invented like 20 years ago, however long, and it just works. And so nobody's changing it. I just think that there could be a lot of innovation for more. See, you kind of push back this idea that we can't know what long term growth or happiness is. I, if you give

• 59:58Lex Fridman?

  control to people to define what their long term happiness and goals are, then you that optimization can happen for each of those individual people.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, imagine a future where probably a lot of people would love to make their living doing TikTok dance videos, but people recognize generally that's kind of hard to get into. Nonetheless, dance crews have an experience that's very similar to programmers working together on GitHub. So the future is like a cross between TikTok and GitHub, and they get together and they have their negoti- they have rights, they're negotiating, they're negotiating for returns. They join different artist societies in order to soften the blow of the randomness of who gets the network effect benefit because

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  nobody can know that. And they, and I think an individual person might join 1,000 different data unions in the course of their lives, or maybe even 10,000. I don't know. But the point is that we'll have like these very hedged distributed portfolios of different data unions we're part of. And some of them might just trickle in a little money for nonsense stuff where we're contributing to health studies or something. And but I think people will find their way. They'll find their way to the right GitHub like community in which they find their value in the context of supplying inputs and data and taste and correctives and all of this into the algorithms and the robots of the future.

• 1:01:39Lex Fridman?

  And that is a way to resist the lizard brain based funding mechanisms.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  It's an alternate economic system that rewards productivity, creativity, value as perceived by others. It's a genuine market. It's not doled out from a center. There's not some communist person deciding who's valuable. It's actual market. And the money is made by supporting that instead of just grabbing people's attention in the cheapest possible way, which is definitely how you get the lizard brain.

• 1:02:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Okay. So we're finally at the agreement.

• 1:02:20Lex Fridman?

  But I, I just think that, so yeah, I'll tell you what, how I think to fix social media. There's a few things. There's a few things. So one, I think people should have complete control over their data and transparency of what that data is and how it's being used if they do handle over the control. Another thing they should be able to delete, walk away with their data at any moment, easy. Like with a single click of a button, maybe two buttons. I don't know. Just easily walk away with their data. The other is control of the algorithm, individualized control of the algorithm for them. So each one has their own algorithm. Each person has their own algorithm. They get to be the decider

• 1:03:01Lex Fridman?

  of what they see in this world. And to me, that, I mean, that's, I guess fundamentally decentralized in terms of the key decisions being made. But if that's made transparent, I feel like people will choose that system over Twitter of today, over Facebook of today, when they have the ability to walk away, to control their data and to control the kinds of thing they see. Now, let's walk away from the term AI. You're right. In this case, you, you have full control of the algorithms that help you if you want to use their help, but you can also say F you to those algorithms and just consume the raw, beautiful waterfall of the internet.

• 1:03:44Lex Fridman?

  I think that, to me, that's not only fixes social media, but I think it'll make a lot more money. So I would like to challenge the idea, I know you're not presenting that, but that the only way to make a ton of money. Is to operate like Facebook is. I think you can make more money by giving people control.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly believe that. We're definitely in the territory of wholehearted agreement here. I do want to caution against one thing, which is making a future that benefits programmers versus like this idea that people are in control of their data. So years ago, I co-founded an advisory board for the EU with a guy named Giovanni Butirelli, who passed away. It's one of the reasons I wanted to mention it. A remarkable guy who'd been, he was originally a prosecutor who was throwing mafioso in jail in Sicily. So he was like this intense guy who was like, I've been, I've dealt with death threats. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't scare me, whatever. So we worked, we worked on

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  this path of saying, let's make it all about transparency and consent. And it was one of the theatres that led to this huge data, data privacy and protection framework in Europe called the GDPR. And so therefore, we've been able to have empirical feedback on how that goes. And the problem is that most people actually get stymied by the complexity of that kind of management. They have trouble and reasonably so. I don't, I'm like a techie, you know, I can, I can go in and I can figure out what's going on. But most people really do. And why, and so there's a problem that it, it, it, it differentially, it differentially

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  benefits those who kind of have a technical mindset and can go in and sort of have a feeling for how this stuff works. I kind of still want to come back to incentives. And so if the incentive for whoever's, if the commercial incentive is to help the creative people of the future make more money because you get a cut of it, that's how you grow an economy.

• 1:05:46Lex Fridman?

  Not the programmers.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Well, some of them will be programmers. It's not anti-programmers. I'm just saying that it's not only programmers, you know?

• 1:05:55Lex Fridman?

  So I'd be, I'd definitely, so yeah, you have to make sure the incentives are right. I mean, I like. Control is an interface problem to where you have to create something that's that's compelling to everybody, to the creatives, to the public. I mean, there's, I don't know, Creative Commons, like the licensing.

• 1:06:19Lex Fridman?

  You know, there's a bunch of legal speak, just in general, the whole legal profession. It's nice when it can be simplified in the way that you can truly, you know, simply understand. Everybody can simply understand the basics. In that same way, it should be very simple to understand how the data is being used and what data is being used for people. But then you're arguing that in order for that to happen, you have to have the incentives like.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of the reason that money works is actually information hiding and information loss. Like, one of the things about money is a particular dollar you get might have passed through your enemy's hands and you don't know it. But also, this is, I mean, this is what Adam Smith, if you want to give the most charitable interpretation possible to the invisible hand is what he was saying is that, like, there's this whole complicated thing. And not only do you not need to know about it, the truth is you'd never be able to follow it if you tried. And it's like, let the economic incentives solve for this whole thing. And that, in a sense, every transaction is like a neuron in a neural net. If he'd had that metaphor, he would have used it.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  And let the whole thing settle to a solution and don't worry about it. I, I think this idea of having incentives that reduce complexity for people can be made to work. And that's an example of an algorithm that could be manipulative or not. Going back to your question before about can you do it in a way that's not manipulative? And I would say a GitHub-like, if you just have this vision, GitHub plus TikTok combined. Is it possible? I think it is.

• 1:07:59Lex Fridman?

  I'm not going to be able to unsee that idea of creatives on TikTok collaborating in the same way that people on GitHub collaborate. I like that kind of version.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Why not?

• 1:08:10Lex Fridman?

  I like it. I love it.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  I just, like, right now, when people use, by the way, father of teenage daughter, so.

• 1:08:16Lex Fridman?

  It's all about TikTok, right?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  So, you know, when people use TikTok, there's a lot of.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  It's kind of funny. I was gonna say cattiness, but I was just using the cat as this exemplar of what we're coming. I contradict myself. But anyway, there's all this cattiness where people are like, ew, this person. And, and I, I just, um, uh, what about people getting together and saying, okay, we're gonna work on this move. We're gonna get a bit of, can we get a better musician? Like, and they, they do that. But that's the part that's kind of off the books right now, you know? That should be like right there. That should be the center. That's where the, that's the really best part.

• 1:08:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, that's where the invention of Git, period, the versioning is brilliant. And so some of the, some of the things you're talking about, technology, algorithms, tools can empower. And that's, that's the thing for humans to, to connect, to collaborate and so on. Can we, uh, can we upset more people a little bit? You already?

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Maybe we'd have to try.

• 1:09:15Lex Fridman?

  No, no. Can we, uh, can I ask you to elaborate? Cause I, my intuition was that you would be a supporter of something like cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, because it is fundamentally emphasizes decentralization. What do you, so can you elaborate?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, look.

• 1:09:31Lex Fridman?

  Your thoughts on Bitcoin?

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  I, um, it's kind of funny. Um, I, I wrote, uh, I, I've been advocating some kind of digital currency for a long time. And when the, the, uh, when, when Bitcoin came out and the original paper on, on blockchain, my heart kind of sank because I thought, oh my God, we're, we're applying all of this fancy thought and all these very careful distributed security measures to recreate the gold standard. Like, it's just so retro. It's so dysfunctional. It's so useless from an economic point of view. So it's always, and then the other thing is using computational inefficiency at a boundless scale

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  as your form of security is a crime against this atmosphere. Obviously, a lot of people know that now, but we knew that at the start. Like the thing is, when the first paper came out, I remember a lot of people saying, oh my God, this thing scales. It's a carbon disaster, you know? And, and, um, I, I just like, I'm just mystified. But that, that's a different question than when you asked. Can you have, um, a cryptographic currency or at least some kind of digital currency that's of a benefit? And absolutely, like I'm. And there are people who are trying to be thoughtful about this. You should, if you haven't, you should interview Vitalik Buterin sometime.

• 1:10:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've interviewed him twice.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Okay, so like, there are people in the community who are trying to be thoughtful and trying to figure out how to do this better.

• 1:10:57Lex Fridman?

  It has nice properties, though, right? So that one of the nice properties is that like, government centralized, it's hard to control. And then the other one, to fix some of the issues that you're referring to, I'm sort of playing devil's advocate here, is, you know, there's Lightning Network, there's ideas how to, how you build stuff on top of Bitcoin, similar with gold, that allow you to have this kind of vibrant economy that operates not on the blockchain, but outside the blockchain, and uses Bitcoin for, for like, checking the security of those transactions.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  So Bitcoin's not new, it's been around for a while. I've been watching it closely, I've not, I've not seen one example of it creating economic growth. There was this obsession with the idea that government was the problem. That idea that government's the problem, let's say, government earned that wrath honestly. Because if you look at some of the things that governments have done in recent decades, it's not a pretty story. Like, after, after a very small number of people in the US government decided to bomb and landmine Southeast Asia, it's hard to come back and say, oh, government's this great

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  thing. But then, the problem is that this resistance to government is basically resistance to politics. It's a way of saying, if I can get rich, nobody should bother me. It's a way of not, of not having obligations to others. And that ultimately is a very suspect motivation.

• 1:12:25Lex Fridman?

  But does that mean that the impulse, that the government should not overreach its power is flawed?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, what I want to ask you to do is to replace the word government with politics. Like, our politics is people having to deal with each other. My theory about freedom is that the only authentic form of freedom is perpetual annoyance. All right, so annoyance means you're actually dealing with people because people are annoying. Perpetual means that that annoyance is survivable, so it doesn't destroy us all. So if you have perpetual annoyance, then you have freedom.

• 1:13:03Lex Fridman?

  And that's politics.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  That's politics. If you don't have perpetual annoyance, something's gone very wrong and you've suppressed those people. It is only temporary. It's going to come back and be horrible. You should seek perpetual annoyance. I'll invite you to a Berkeley City Council meeting so you can know what that feels like.

• 1:13:18Lex Fridman?

  What perpetual annoyance feels like.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  But anyway, so freedom is being, the test of freedom is that you're annoyed by other people. If you're not, you're not free. If you're not, you're trapped in some temporary illusion that's going to fall apart. Now, this quest to avoid government is really a quest to avoid that political feeling, but you have to have it. You have to deal with it. And it sucks, but that's the human situation. That's the human condition. And this idea that we're going to have this abstract thing that protects us from having to deal with each other is always an illusion.

• 1:13:51Lex Fridman?

  The idea, and I apologize, I overstretched the use of the word government. The idea is there should be some punishment from the people when a bureaucracy, when a set of people or a particular leader, like in an authoritarian regime, which more than half the world currently lives under. If you, like, if they become, they start, stop representing the people. It stops being like a Berkeley meeting and starts being more like a dictatorial kind of situation. And so the point is, it's nice to give people.

• 1:14:30Lex Fridman?

  The populace in decentralized way, power to resist that kind of government becoming over authoritarian.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but people, see, this idea that the problem is always the government being powerful is false. The problem can also be criminal gangs. The problem can also be weird cults. The problem can be abusive clergy. The problem can be infrastructure that fails. The problem can be poisoned water. The problem can be failed electric grids. The problem can be a crappy education system that makes the whole society less and less able to create value. There are all these other problems that are different from an overbearing government. Like, you have to keep some sense of perspective and not be obsessed with only one kind of problem, because then the others will pop up.

• 1:15:25Lex Fridman?

  But empirically speaking, some problems are bigger than others. So like, some, like, groups of people, like governments or gangs or companies lead to problems more than...

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  Are you a US citizen?

• 1:15:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  Has the government ever really been a problem for you?

• 1:15:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, okay. So first of all, I grew up in the Soviet Union, and actually...

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, my wife did too.

• 1:15:46Lex Fridman?

  So I have seen, you know...

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:50Lex Fridman?

  And has the government bothered me? I would say that that's a really complicated question, especially because the United States is such, it's a special place, like a lot of other countries.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  My wife's family were refuse nicks. And so we have like a very, and her dad was sent to the Gulag. For what it's worth, on my father's side, all but a few were killed by a pogrom in, post-Soviet pogrom in Ukraine.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  So I

• 1:16:22Lex Fridman?

  I would say, because you did a little trick of eloquent trick of language that you switched to the United States to talk about government. So I am, I'm, I believe, unlike my friend Michael Malice, who's an anarchist, I believe government can do a lot of good in the world. That is exactly what you're saying, which is it's, it's politics. The thing that Bitcoin folks and cryptocurrency folks argue is that one of the big ways that governments can control the populace is centralized bank, like control the money. That was the case in the Soviet Union, too. There's, you know, inflation can really make poor people suffer. And so what they argue is, this is one way to

• 1:17:06Lex Fridman?

  go around that power that government has of controlling the monetary system. So that's a way to resist. That's not actually saying government bad. That's saying some of the ways that central banks get into trouble can be resisted through

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  So let me ask you, on balance, today, in the real world, in terms of actual facts, do you think cryptocurrencies are doing more to prop up corrupt, murderous, horrible regimes, or to resist those regimes? Where do you think the balance is right now?

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  I know exactly, having talked to a lot of cryptocurrency folks, what they would tell me, right? It's hard, it's, I don't

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  No, I'm asking it as a real question. There's no way to know the answer perfectly.

• 1:17:55Lex Fridman?

  There's no way to know the answer perfectly.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  However, I gotta say, if you look at people who've been able to decode blockchains, and they do leak a lot of data, they're not as secure as is widely thought, there are a lot of unknown Bitcoin whales from pretty early, and they're huge, and

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  If you ask, who are these people? There's evidence that a lot of them are quite not the people you'd want to support, let's say. And I just don't like, I think empirically, this idea that there's some intrinsic way that bad governments will be, will be disempowered and people will be able to resist them more than new villains or even villainous governments will be empowered. There's no basis for that assertion. It just is kind of circumstantial. And I think in general Bitcoin ownership is one thing, but Bitcoin transactions have tended to support criminality more than productivity.

• 1:19:02Lex Fridman?

  Of course, they would argue that was, that was the story of its early days, that now more and more Bitcoin is being used for legitimate transactions.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  But that's the difference. I didn't say for legitimate transactions. I said for economic growth, for creativity. Like, I, I think what's happening is people are using it a little bit for, for buying, I don't know, maybe somebody's companies make it available for this and that. They buy a Tesla with it or something.

• 1:19:29Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Investing in a startup, hard. It might've happened a little bit, but it's, it's not an engine of productivity, creativity and economic growth. Whereas old fashioned currency still is. And anyway, I'm, look, I think something, I'm, I'm pro the idea of digital currencies.

• 1:19:51Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  I am anti the idea of economics wiping out politics as a result. I think they have to exist in some balance to avoid the worst dysfunctions of each.

• 1:20:07Lex Fridman?

  In some ways, there's parallels to our discussion of algorithms and cryptocurrency is you're pro the idea, but it can be used. To manipulate, you can be used poorly by aforementioned humans.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Well, I think that you can make better designs and worse designs.

• 1:20:27Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  And I think, and you know, the thing about cryptocurrency that's so interesting is how many of us are responsible for the poor designs because we're all so hooked on that Horatio Alger story on like, I'm going to be the one who gets the viral benefit. You know, way, way back when all this stuff was starting, I remember it would have been in the eighties. Somebody had the idea of using viral as a metaphor for network effect. And the whole point was to talk about how bad network effect was, that it always created distortions that ruined the usefulness of economic incentives that, that created dangerous distortions like, but then somehow even after the pandemic, we think of viral as this good thing because we imagine ourselves as the virus.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Right. We want to be on the, on the beneficiary side of it. But of course you're not likely to be.

• 1:21:19Lex Fridman?

  There is a sense, because money is involved, people are not reasoning clearly always because they want to be, they want to be part of that first viral wave that makes them rich. And that blinds people from their basic morality.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  I had an interesting conversation. I don't, I sort of feel like I should respect some people's privacy, but some of the initial people who started Bitcoin, I, I remember having an argument about like,

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  it's intrinsically a Ponzi scheme. Like, you know, the early people have more than the later people. And the further down the chain you get, the more you're subject to gambling like dynamics, where it's more and more random and more and more subject to weird network effects and whatnot. Unless you're a very small player, perhaps, and you're just buying something. But even then you'll be subject to fluctuations because the whole thing is just kind of, it like the, as it fluctuates, it's going to wave around the little people more. And they, and I remember the conversation turned to gambling because gambling is a pretty large economic sector. And it's always struck me as being non-productive, like somebody goes to Las Vegas, they lose money. And so one argument is, well, they got entertainment. They paid for entertainment as they lost money.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  So that's fine. And the, and Las Vegas does up the losing of money in an entertaining way. So why not? It's like going to a show. So that's one argument. The argument that was made to me was different from that. It's that, no, what they're doing is they're getting a chance to experience hope. And a lot of people don't get that chance. And so that's really worth it, even if they're going to lose. They have that moment of hope. And they need to be able to experience that. And it's a very interesting argument.

• 1:22:59Lex Fridman?

  That's so heartbreaking, because I

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:23:02Lex Fridman?

  I've seen, but I've seen that way that I have that a little bit of a sense. I've talked to some young people who invest in cryptocurrency. And what I see is this hope, this is the first thing they gave them hope. And that's so heartbreaking to me. That you've gotten hope from the, so much is invested, but it's like hope from somehow becoming rich as opposed to something to me. I apologize, but money is in the long term, not going to be a source of that deep meaning. It's good to have enough money, but it should not be the source of hope. And it's heartbreaking to me how many people is the source of hope.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  You've just described the psychology of virality, or the psychology of of trying to base a civilization on semi-random occurrences of network effect peaks.

• 1:23:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  And it doesn't really work. I mean, I think we need to get away from that. We need to soften those peaks.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And except Microsoft, which deserves every penny, but in every other case.

• 1:24:06Lex Fridman?

  Well, you mentioned GitHub. I think what Microsoft did with GitHub was brilliant. I was very, okay, if I can give a, not a critical, but

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:24:17Lex Fridman?

  On Microsoft, because they recently purchased Bethesda, so Elder Scrolls is in their hands. I'm watching you, Microsoft, do not screw up my favorite game. So.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Look, I'm not speaking for Microsoft. I have an, I have an explicit arrangement with them where I don't speak for them, obviously. Like, that should be very clear. I do not speak for them.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  I, I am not saying, I like them. I think Satya is amazing.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  The term data dignity was coined by Satya. Like, so you, you know, we have, it's, it's kind of extraordinary, but you know, Microsoft's this giant thing. It's going to screw up this or that, you know, it's, it's not. I don't know. It's kind of interesting. I've had a few occasions in my life to see how things work from the inside of some big thing. And you know, it's always just people kind of it. It's, I don't know, there's always like coordination problem. And there's always, there's always

• 1:25:14Lex Fridman?

  Human problems.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:25:15Lex Fridman?

  There's some good people, there's some bad people. It's always

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  I hope Microsoft doesn't screw up your game.

• 1:25:20Lex Fridman?

  And I hope they bring Clippy back. You should never kill Clippy. Bring Clippy back.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Oh, Clippy. But Clippy promotes the myth of AI.

• 1:25:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's why, this is why I think you're wrong.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  How about if we, all right, could we bring back Bob instead of Clippy?

• 1:25:34Lex Fridman?

  Which one was Bob?

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Oh, Bob was another thing. Bob was this other screen character who was supposed to be the voice of AI. Cortana? Cortana? Would Cortana do it for you?

• 1:25:43Lex Fridman?

  Cortana is too corporate. I like it. It's fine.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a woman in Seattle who's like the model for Cortana, did Cortana's voice and was that voice? There was like

• 1:25:54Lex Fridman?

  No, the voice is great.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  We had a, we had her as a, she used to walk around and if you were wearing Holland's forbid, I don't think that's happening anymore. I think, I don't think you should turn a software, software into a creature. I think

• 1:26:05Lex Fridman?

  Well, you and I, you and I, well, get a dog, get a dog.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  A dog, yeah.

• 1:26:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you're

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Or a hedgehog.

• 1:26:14Lex Fridman?

  A hedgehog.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Lex Fridman?

  You co-authored a paper, you mentioned Lee Smolin, titled The Autodidactic Universe, which describes our universe as one that learns its own physical laws. That's a trippy and beautiful and powerful idea. What are, what would you say are the key ideas in this paper?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Ah, okay. Well, I should say, that paper reflected work from last year and the project, the program has moved quite a lot. So it's a little, there's a lot of stuff that's not published that I'm quite excited about. So I have to kind of keep my frame in that, in that last year's things. I have to try to be a little careful about that.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  We can think about it in a few different ways.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  The core of the paper, the, the technical core of it is a triple correspondence. One part of it was already established and then another part is in the process. The part that was established was, of course, understanding different theories of physics as matrix models. The part that was fresher is understanding those as a machine learning system so that we could move fluidly between these different ways of describing systems. And the reason to want to do that is to just have more tools and more options because, well, theoretical physics is really hard and a lot of programs have kind of run into

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  a state where they feel a little stalled. I guess I can, I, I want to be delicate about this because I'm not a physicist. I'm the computer scientist collaborating, so I don't mean to diss anybody's.

• 1:27:56Lex Fridman?

  So this is almost like gives a framework for generating new ideas in physics.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  As you, as we start to publish more about where it's gone, I think you'll start to see there's, there's tools and ways of thinking about theories that I think open up some new paths that, that will be of interest. There's the technical core of it, which is this idea, this idea of a correspondence to give you more facility. But then there's also the storytelling part of it. And this is something, Lee loves stories and I do. And the idea here is that a typical way of thinking about physics is that there's some kind of starting condition and then there's some principle by which the starting condition

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  evolves. And the question is like, why the starting condition? Like how, how? Oh, the starting condition has to get kind of, there's this, it has to be fine tuned and all these things about it have to be kind of perfect. And so we were thinking, well, look, what if we could push the storytelling about where the universe comes from much further back by starting with really simple things that evolve and then through that evolution, explain how things got to be how they are through very simple principles, right? And so we've been exploring a variety of ways to push the, the start of the storytelling further and further back, which, and it's an interesting, it's really kind of interesting

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  because like, for all of his, Lee is sometimes considered to be, to have a radical quality in the physics world, but he still is like, no, this is going to be like, the kind of time we're talking about in which evolution happens is the same time we're in now and we're talking about something that starts and continues. And I'm like, well, what if there's some other kind of time that's time-like and so that sounds like metaphysics, but there's an ambiguity, you know, like it has to start from something and it's kind of interesting. So there's this, a lot of the math can be thought of either way, which is kind of interesting.

• 1:30:08Lex Fridman?

  So push this so far back that basically all the things we take for granted in physics start becoming emergent.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  I really want to emphasize this is all super baby steps. I don't want to overclaim. It's like, it's, I, I think a lot of the things we're doing, we're approaching some old problems in a, in a pretty fresh way, informed. There's been a zillion papers about how you can think of the universe as a big neural net, or how you can think of different ideas in physics as being quite similar to, or even equivalent to some of the ideas in machine learning. And that actually works out crazy well. Like, I mean, it, that is actually kind of eerie when you look at it. Like, there's probably two or three dozen papers that have this quality and some of them are just crazy good and it's very, it's very interesting. What we're trying to do is, is take those kinds of observations and turn them into

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  an actionable framework where you can then start to do things with landscapes, with theories that you couldn't do before and that sort of thing.

• 1:31:05Lex Fridman?

  So in that context, or maybe beyond, how do you explain us humans? How unlikely are we, this intelligent civilization? Or is there a lot of others or are we alone in this universe?

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:24Lex Fridman?

  You seem to appreciate humans very much.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  I've grown fond of us.

• 1:31:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, they are nice qualities.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  I like, I like that. I mean, we're kind of weird. We spread this hair on our heads and then I don't know, we're sort of weird animals.

• 1:31:44Lex Fridman?

  That's a feature, not a bug, I think. The weirdness.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  I hope so. I hope so. Um, I, I think if I'm just going to answer you in terms of truth, the first thing I'd say is we're not, we're not in a privileged enough position, at least as yet to really know much about who we are, how we are, what we're really like in the context of something larger, what that context is, like all that stuff. We might learn more in the future. Our descendants might learn more, but we don't really know very much. What you can either view as frustrating or charming, like that first year of TikTok or something.

• 1:32:28Lex Fridman?

  But all roads lead back to TikTok. I like it.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Well, lately, but, but in terms of, there's another level at which I can think about it where

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  I sometimes think that if you are just quiet and you do something that gets you in touch with the way reality happens, and for me, it's playing music. Sometimes it seems like you can feel a bit of how the universe is and it feels like there's a lot more going on in it. And there is a lot more life and a lot more stuff happening and a lot more stuff flowing through it. I'm not speaking as a scientist now. This is kind of a more my artist side talking and it's, uh, uh, so I feel like I'm suddenly in multiple personalities with you, but.

• 1:33:16Lex Fridman?

  Karak, Jack Karak said that music is the only truth.

• 1:33:22Lex Fridman?

  What do you, uh, it sounds like you might be at least in part.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a passage in Kerouac's book, Dr. Sacks, where somebody tries to just explain the whole situation with reality and people in like a paragraph. And I couldn't reproduce it for you here, but it's like, yeah, like there are these bulbous things that walk around and they make these sounds. You can sort of understand them, but only kind of. And then there's like this, and it's just like this amazing, like just really quick. Like if, if some spirit being or something was going to show up in our reality and had knew nothing about it. It's like a little basic intro of like, okay, here's what's going on here. An incredible passage.

• 1:33:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Lex Fridman?

  It's like a one or two sentence summary in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right? Of what this.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Mostly harmless.

• 1:34:05Lex Fridman?

  Mostly harmless. But do you think there's truth to that? That music somehow connects to something that words cannot?

• 1:34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, music is something that just towers above me. I don't, I don't, I don't feel like I have an overview of it. It's just the reverse. I don't, I don't fully understand it because on one level it's simple. Like you can say, oh, it's, it's a thing people evolved to coordinate our brains on a pattern level or a, or something like that. There's all these things you can say about music, which are, you know, some of that's probably true. It's also, there's kind of like this.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  This is the mystery of meaning. Like there's a way that just, instead of just being pure abstraction, music can have like this kind of substantiality to it that is philosophically impossible.

• 1:35:04Speaker 01

  I don't know what to do with it.

• 1:35:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. The amount of understanding I feel I have when I hear the right song at the right time is not comparable to anything I can read on Wikipedia.

• 1:35:18Lex Fridman?

  Anything I can understand, read through in language, there's the music does connect us to something.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  There's this thing there, yeah, there's, there's, there's some kind of a thing in it. I've never ever, I've read across a lot of explanations from all kinds of interesting people, like that it's some kind of a flow language between people or between people and how they perceive and that kind of thing. There's, and that sort of explanation is fine, but it's not, it's not quite it either.

• 1:35:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's, there's something about music that makes me believe that panpsychism could possibly be true, which is that everything in the universe is conscious. It makes me think, makes me be humble in how much or how little I understand about the functions of our universe, that everything might be conscious.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Most people interested in theoretical physics eventually land in panpsychism, but I'm not one of them. I, I still think there's this pragmatic imperative to treat people as special. So I will proudly be a dualist.

• 1:36:36Lex Fridman?

  Sure. People and cats, people and cats.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not quite sure where to draw the line or why the line's there or anything like that. But I don't think I should be required to, all the same questions are equally mysterious for no line. So I don't, I'm not, I don't feel disadvantaged by that. So I shall remain a dualist. But if you listen to anyone trying to explain where consciousness is in a dualistic sense, either believing in souls or some special thing in the brain or something, you pretty much say, screw this, I'm going to be a panpsychist.

• 1:37:15Lex Fridman?

  Fair enough. Well put. Is there moments in your life that happen that were defining in the way that you hope others, your daughters might?

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  I gotta say, the moments that defined me were not the good ones. The moments that defined me were often horrible. I've had successes, you know, but if you ask what defined me, my mother's death, being under the World Trade Center and the attack. The things that have had an effect on me were the most were sort of real world terrible things, which I don't wish on young people at all. And this is the thing

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  that's hard about giving advice to young people, that they have to learn their own lessons, and lessons don't come easily. And a world which avoids hard lessons will be a stupid world, you know, and I don't know what to do with it. That's a little bundle of truth that has a bit of a fatalistic quality to it, but I don't, I don't, this is like what I'm saying that, you know, freedom equals eternal annoyance. Like you can't, like, there's a degree to which honest advice is not that pleasant to give. And I don't want young people to have to know about everything. I think-

• 1:38:50Lex Fridman?

  You don't want to wish hardship on them.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they deserve to have a little grace period of naivety that's pleasant. I mean, I do, you know, if it's possible, if it's, these things are, this is like, this is tricky stuff. I mean, if you, if you-

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so let me, let me try a little bit on this advice thing. I think one thing,

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  and any, any serious broad advice will have been given a thousand times before for a thousand years. So this, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to claim originality, but I think trying to find a way to really pay attention to what you're feeling fundamentally, what your sense of the world is, what your intuition is, if you feel like an intuitive person, what you're,

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  like, like to try to escape the constant sway of social perception or manipulation, whatever you wish, not to escape it entirely, that would be horrible, but to, to find, to find cover from it once in a while, to find a sense of being anchored in that, to believe in experience as a real thing. Believing in experience as a real thing is very dualistic. That goes in, that goes with my philosophy of dualism. I believe there's something magical and I, instead of squirting the magic dust on the programs, I think experience is something real and something apart, something mystical and-

• 1:40:24Lex Fridman?

  Your own personal-

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Internal experience-

• 1:40:27Lex Fridman?

  Experience that you just have, and then you're saying-

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Lex Fridman?

  Silence the rest of the world enough to hear that, like, whatever that-

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Find, find-

• 1:40:34Lex Fridman?

  Magic dust is in that experience.

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  Find what, what, what is there. And I think that's one, that's one thing. Another thing is to recognize that kindness requires genius, that it's actually really hard, that facile kindness is not kindness, and that it'll take you a while to have the skills, to have kind impulses, to want to be kind, you can have right away. To be effectively kind is hard.

• 1:41:04Lex Fridman?

  To be effectively kind, yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  It takes skill, it takes, it takes hard lessons.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  It's, it's, you'll never be perfect at it. To the degree you get anywhere with it, it's, it's the most rewarding thing ever.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see, what else would I say?

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  I would say, when you're young, you can be very overwhelmed-

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  By social and interpersonal emotions, you'll have broken hearts and jealousies. You'll feel socially down the ladder instead of up the ladder. It feels horrible when that happens. All of these things. And you have to remember what a fragile crest all that stuff is. And it's hard because right when it's happening, it's just so intense. And if I was actually giving this advice to my daughter, she'd already be out of the room. So I'm just, this is for some like hypothetical

• 1:42:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  teenager that doesn't really exist, that really wants to sit and listen to my

• 1:42:23Lex Fridman?

  For your daughter 10 years from now.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:42:27Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you a difficult question?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:42:31Lex Fridman?

  You, uh, you talked about losing your mom.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Lex Fridman?

  Uh, do you, do you miss her?

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I still connected her through music. She was a, she was a young prodigy piano player in Vienna and she survived the concentration camp and then died in a car accident here in the US.

• 1:42:57Lex Fridman?

  What, what music makes you think of her? Is there, uh, is there a song?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know, she was in Vienna. So she's, she had the whole Viennese music thing going, um, which is this, you know, incredible school of, uh, absolute skill and romance bundled together and, uh, wonderful on the piano, especially I learned to play the, some of the Beethoven sonatas for her and I played them in this exaggerated drippy way. I remember when I was a kid and, uh,

• 1:43:31Lex Fridman?

  Exaggerated meaning, uh, too full of emotion?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, just like, just

• 1:43:35Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that the only way to play Beethoven? I mean, I didn't know there's any other way.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  That's a reasonable question. I mean, the fashion these days is to be slightly Apollonian with, even with Beethoven, but one imagines that actual Beethoven playing might've been different. I don't know. I, um,

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  I've gotten to play a few instruments he played and tried to see if I could feel anything about how it might have been for him. I don't know, really.

• 1:43:59Lex Fridman?

  I was always against the clinical precision of classical music. I thought a great piano player should be like in pain, like, you know, like emotionally, like truly feel the music and make it messy, sort of.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:44:22Lex Fridman?

  Maybe play classical music the way, I don't know, blues pianist plays blues, like.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  It seems like they actually got happier, and I'm not sure if Beethoven got happier. I think it's a different, I think it's a different kind of concept of the place of music. I think the blues, the whole African American tradition was initially surviving awful, awful circumstances. You could say, you know, there were some of that in the concentration camps and all that, too. And it's not that Beethoven's circumstances were brilliant, but he kind of also, I don't know, this is hard. Like, I mean, it would seem to be his misery was somewhat self-imposed, maybe through, I don't know. It's kind of interesting.

• 1:45:11Speaker 01

  Like, I've known some people who loathed Beethoven, like the composer, late composer Pauline Oliveros, wonderful modernist composer, played in her band for a while. And she was like, oh, Beethoven, like, that's the worst music ever. It's like all ego, it completely, it turns, it turns information, I mean, it turns emotion into your enemy. And it's ultimately all about your own self-importance, which is, which has to be at the expense of others, could, but else, what else could it be? And blah, blah, blah. So she had, I shouldn't say, I don't mean to be dismissive, but I'm just saying, like, her position on Beethoven was very negative and very unimpressed, which is really interesting.

• 1:45:51Lex Fridman?

  The manner of the music.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  I think, I don't know. I mean, she's not here to speak for herself, so it's a little hard for me to answer that question. But it was interesting, because I'd always thought of Beethoven, it's like, whoa, you know, this is like, Beethoven is like, really, the dude, you know, and it's just like, ah, you know, Beethoven, Schmeedovin, you know, it's like, not really happening.

• 1:46:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, still, even though it's cliche, I like playing personally, just for myself, moonlight sonata. I mean, I just.

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  Moonlight's amazing, you know, I.

• 1:46:23Speaker 01

  You know, you're talking about comparing the blues and that sensibility from Europe is so different, so different in so many ways. I, one of the musicians I play with is John Batiste, who has the band on Colbert Show, and he'll, he'll sit there playing jazz and suddenly go into Moonlight. He loves Moonlight. And what's kind of interesting is he's found a way to do Beethoven, and he, by the way, he can really do Beethoven. Like, he, he went through Juilliard, and one time he was, one time he was at my house, he's saying, "Hey, do you have the Book of Beethoven?" And I was just like, "Yeah, I want to find one I haven't played." And then he sight-read through the whole damn thing perfectly. And I'm like, "Oh, God, I just, like, get out of here. I don't, I can't even deal with this." But anyway.

• 1:47:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  But anyway, the thing is, he, he has this way of, with the same persona and the same philosophy, moving from the blues into Beethoven, that's really, really fascinating to me. It's like, um, I don't want to say he plays it as if it were jazz, but he kind of does. It's kind of really, and he talks, he'll, while he was sightreading, he talks like Beethoven's talking to him. Like, he's like, "Oh, yeah, I hear he's doing this. He's, I can't do John." But, you know, it's like, it's really, it's really interesting. Like, it's very different. Like, for me, I was introduced to Beethoven as like, almost like this godlike figure, figure, and I presume Pauline was too, that was really kind of a press for an art to deal with. And for him, it's just like,

• 1:47:44Lex Fridman?

  It's a conversation he's having.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  He's playing James P. Johnson or something. It's like another musician who did something, and they're talking. And it's, it's very cool to be around. It's very, uh, kind of, uh, freeing to see someone have that, that ability, that, that relationship.

• 1:47:59Lex Fridman?

  I would love to hear him play Beethoven. That sounds, that sounds amazing.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  He's great.

• 1:48:04Lex Fridman?

  We talked about Ernster Becker, and the, the, how much value he puts on our mortality and our denial of our mortality. Do you think about your mortality? Do you think about your own death?

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  You know, what's funny is, I used to not be able to, but as you get older, you just know people who die, and there's all these things, and it just becomes familiar and, and more of a, more ordinary, which is what it is.

• 1:48:31Lex Fridman?

  But are you afraid?

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Um, sure, although less so.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  And it's not like I didn't have some kind of insight or revelation to become less afraid. I think I just, like I say, it's kind of familiarity. It's just knowing people who've died. And I really believe in the future. I have this optimism that people or this whole thing of life on earth, this whole thing we're part of, I don't know where to draw that circle, but this thing is going somewhere and has some kind of value. And you can't both believe in the future and want to live forever. You have to make room for it, you know, like you have to, that optimism has to also come with its own like humility.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  You have to make yourself small to believe in the future. And so it actually, in a funny way, comforts me.

• 1:49:31Lex Fridman?

  Wow, that's powerful.

• 1:49:35Lex Fridman?

  And optimism requires you to kind of step down after a time.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that said, life seems kind of short, but you know, whatever.

• 1:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  I've tried to find, I can't find the complaint department, you know? I really want to, I want to bring this up, but the customer service number never answers. And like the email bounces.

• 1:49:54Lex Fridman?

  One way.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:49:56Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's meaning to it, to life?

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Ah, well, see, meaning's a funny word. Like, we say all these things as if we know what they mean, but meaning, we don't know what we mean when we say meaning, like, we obviously do not. And it's, it's, it's a funny little mystical thing. I think it ultimately connects to that sense of experience that dualists tend to believe in.

• 1:50:20Lex Fridman?

  Because there are why, like, if you look up to the stars and you experience that awe, inspiring, like, joy at whatever, when you look up to the stars, I don't know, like, for me, that's kind of makes me feel joyful, maybe a little bit melancholy, just some weird soup of feelings. And ultimately, the question is like, why are we here in this vast universe?

• 1:50:46Lex Fridman?

  That question, why?

• 1:50:50Lex Fridman?

  Have you been able, in some way, maybe through music, answer it for yourself?

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  My impulse is to feel like it's not quite the right question to ask, but I feel like going down that path is just too tedious for the moment and I don't want to do it.

• 1:51:17Lex Fridman?

  The wrong question.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Well, just because, you know, I don't know what meaning is and I, I think, I do know that sense of awe. I grew up in Southern New Mexico and the stars were so vivid.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  I had, I've had some weird misfortunes, but I've had some weird luck also. One of our near neighbors was the head of optics research at White Sands. And when he was young, he'd discovered Pluto. His name was Clyde Tombaugh and he taught me how to make telescopes, grinding mirrors and stuff. And my dad had also made telescopes when he was a kid, but Clyde had like backyard telescopes that would put to shame a lot of, like, I mean, he really, he did his telescopes, you know? And so I remember he'd let me go and play with him and just like looking at a globular cluster and you're seeing the actual photons and with a good telescope, it's really like this object. Like you can really tell this isn't coming

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  through some intervening information structure. This is like the actual photons and it's really a three dimensional object. And you have even a feeling for the vastness of it. And it's, it's, it's, I don't know. So I definitely, I was very, very fortunate to have a connection to the sky that way when I was a kid.

• 1:52:40Lex Fridman?

  To have had that experience. Again, the emphasis on experience.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  I, um, it's kind of funny. Like I, I feel like sometimes, like I've taken, when she was younger, I took my daughter and her friends to like a telescope. There are a few around here that are, kids can go and use and they would like look at Jupiter's moons or something. I think like Galilean moons. And I, I don't know if they quite had that because it's like too.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  It's been just too normalized. And I think maybe when I was growing up, screens weren't that common yet. And maybe it's like too confusible with the screen. I don't know.

• 1:53:20Lex Fridman?

  You know, somebody brought up in conversation to me somewhere, I don't remember who, but they kind of posited this idea that if humans, early humans weren't able to see the stars, like if Earth atmosphere was such that was cloudy, that we would not develop human civilization. There's something about being able to look up and see a vast universe is like, that's fundamental to the development of human civilization. I thought that was a curious kind of thought.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  That reminds me of that old Isaac Asimov story where the, you know, there's this planet where they finally get to see what's in the sky once in a while. And it turns out they're in the middle of a globular cluster and there are all these stars. And I forget what happens exactly. God, that's, that's from when I was the same age as a kid. I don't really remember. But yeah, I don't know. It's, it might be right. I'm just thinking of all the civilizations that grew up under clouds. I mean, like the Vikings needed a special diffracting piece of mica to navigate because they could never see the sun. They had this thing called a sunstone that they found from this, this one cave. Do you know about that? So they were in this like, they were trying to navigate boats, you know, in the North Atlantic without

• 1:54:35Speaker 01

  being able to see the sun because it was cloudy. And so they, they used a, a chunk of mica to diffract it in order to be able to align where the sun really was because they couldn't tell by eye and to navigate. So I'm just saying, there are a lot of civilizations that are pretty impressive that had to deal with a lot of clouds. The Amazonians invented our agriculture and they, they were probably under clouds a lot. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:55:02Lex Fridman?

  To me personally, the, the question of the meaning of life becomes most vibrant, most apparent when you look up at the stars because it makes me feel very small that we're not.

• 1:55:19Lex Fridman?

  But then you ask, it still feels that we're special. And then the natural question is like, well, if we are special, as I think we are, why the heck are we here in this vast universe? That ultimately is the question of

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Right, well, I mean, look, there's a confusion sometimes in trying to use, to set up a question or a thought experiment or something that's defined in terms of a context to explain something where there is no larger context, and that's a category error. If we want to do it in physics, or in, well, or in computer science, it's hard to talk about the universe as a Turing machine, because a Turing machine has an external clock and an observer and an input and output. There's a larger context implied in order for it to be defined at all. And so if you're talking about the universe, you can't talk about it coherently as a Turing machine.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Quantum mechanics is like that. Quantum mechanics has an external clock and has some kind of external context, depending on your interpretation. That's either, you know, the observer or whatever. And there's a, they're similar that way. So maybe, maybe Turing machines and quantum mechanics can be better friends or something because they have a similar setup. But the thing is, if you have something that's defined in terms of an outer context, you can't talk about ultimates with it because obviously it doesn't, it's not suited for that. So there's some ideas that are their own context. General relativity is its own context. It's different. That's why it's hard to unify. And I think the same thing is true when we talk about

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  these types of questions, like meaning is in a context. And to talk about ultimate meaning is therefore a category error. It's not, it's not a, it's not a resolvable way of thinking. It might be a way of thinking that is experientially

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  Or aesthetically valuable because it is awesome in the sense of awe, you know, awe inspiring, but to try to treat it analytically is not sensible.

• 1:57:45Lex Fridman?

  Maybe that's what music and poetry are for.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. I think so. I think music actually does escape any particular context. That's how it feels to me, but I'm not sure about that. That's once again, crazy artist talking, not scientist.

• 1:57:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, you did, you do both masterfully, Jaren. And like I said, I'm a big fan of everything you've done of you as a human being. I appreciate the, the fun argument we had today, though I'm sure continue for 30 years as it did with Mark Minsky. Honestly, I deeply appreciate that you spent your really valuable time with me today. It was a really great conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jaren Lanier. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jaren Lanier himself. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

• 1:58:42Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.