Lex Fridman

00:01four three two one hello Lex hey you're here man what's going on we're here thanks for doing this you brought notes you're seriously prepared when you're jumping out of a plane it's best to bring a parachute this is my parachute I understand yeah how long have you been working in artificial intelligence my whole life I think really so when I was a kid wanted to become a psychiatrist I wanted to understand the human mind I think the human mind is the most beautiful mystery that our entire civilization is taken on exploring through science I think you look up at the stars you know the universe out there you had Neil deGrasse Tyson here it's an amazing beautiful scientific journey that we're taking on and exploring the Stars but the mind to me is a bigger mystery and more fascinating and it's been the thing I've been fascinated by from the very beginning of my life and just I think

01:09all of human civilization has been wondering you know what is in this inside this thing the hundred trillion connections they're just firing all the time somehow making the magic happen to where you and I can look at each other make words all the fear love life death that happens is all because of this thing in here and understanding why is fascinating and what I early on understood is that one of the best ways for me at least to understand the human mind is to try to build it and that's what artificial intelligence is you know it's it's not enough to sort from a psychology perspective to study from a psychiatry perspective to investigate from the outside the best way to understand is to do so you mean almost like reverse engineering a brain there's some stuff exactly reverse engineering the brain there's some stuff that you can't understand until you tried to do

02:15it you can hypothesize you're I mean we're both martial artists from various directions you couldn't hypothesize about what is the best martial art but until you get in the ring like what the UFC did and test ideas is when you first realize that the touch of death that I've seen some youtube videos on that you perhaps cannot kill a person with a single touch or your mind or telepathy that there are certain things that work wrestling works punching works okay can we make it better can we create something like a touch of death can we figure out how to turn the hips how to deliver a punch in the way that does do a significant amount of damage and then you've at that moment when you start to try to do it and you face some of the people that are trying to do the same thing that's the scientific process and you try you actually begin to understand what is intelligence and you begin to also

03:24understand how little we understand it's like Richard Fineman who I'm dressed after today are you here's a physicist I'm not sure if you're sure yeah yeah yeah he always used to wear this exact thing so I feel I feel pretty badass wearing it if you think you know astrophysics you don't know astrophysics that's right well he said it about quantum physics right that's right so he was a quantum physicist and he kind of I remember hearing him talk about that understanding are the nature of the universe reality could be like an onion we don't know hmm but it could be like an onion to where you think you know you're studying a layer of an onion and then you peel it away and there's more and you keep doing it and there's an infinite number of layers with intelligence there's the same kind of component to where we think we know we got it we figure it out we figured out

04:17how to beat the human world champion to chess we solved intelligence and then we tried the next thing wait a minute go is really difficult to this game and then you say okay that's I've I came up when the game of Go was impossible for artificial intelligence systems to be and I've not recently have been beaten within the last like five years right next the last five years there's a lot of technical fascinating things of why that victory is interesting and important for artificial intelligence it requires creativity correct there it does not you know it just exhibits creativity oh so the technical aspects of why alphago from google deepmind that that was the the designers and the builders of the system that was the victor they did a few very interesting technical things where essentially you develop a neural network this is this type of artificial intelligence system that looks at a

05:17board of go as a lot of elements on it is black and white pieces and is able to tell you how good is this situation and how can I make it better and that idea so chess players can do this I'm not actually that familiar with a game of go so I can speak to I'm Russian so chess tosses amantha sighs it's a beautiful game I think that there you look at a board and all your previous experiences all the things you've developed over tons of years of practice and thinking you get this instinct of what is the right path to follow and that's exactly what in your own network is doing and some of the in some of the paths it has come up with are surprising to other world champions so in that sense it says well this thing's exhibiting creativity because it's coming up with solutions that are something that's outside the box thinking from the perspective of the human what do you differentiate between

06:18requires creativity and exhibits creativity I think one because we don't really understand what creativity is so it's almost it's on the level of concepts such as consciousness for example the question which there's a lot of thinking about whether creating something intelligent requires consciousness requires for us to be actual living beings aware of our own existence in the same way does doing something like building an autonomous vehicle that's the area where I work in does that require creativity does that even require something like consciousness and self-awareness I mean I'm sure in LA there's some degree of creativity required to navigate traffic and in that sense you start to think are there solutions that are outside of the box and a a system needs to create its once you start to build it you realize that cos humans certain things appear at creative certain things dope certain

07:24things we take for granted certain things we find beautiful and certain things were like yeah yeah that's well there's creativity in different levels right there's creativity like to write the stand with Stephen King novel that requires creativity there's something about his he's creating these stories he's giving voices to these characters he's developing these scenarios and these dramatic sequences in the book that's gonna get you really sucked in that's that's almost undeniable creativity right is it so yeah it's he's imagining a world mmm-hmm what is he always set in New Hampshire Massachusetts a lot of it's Maine Maine yes right so he's imagining a world and imagining the emotion of different levels surrounding that world yeah that's that's creative although if you there's a few really good books including his own that talks about writing yeah he's got a great book on writing in the

08:18bottle it's actually called on writing yeah if there's anyone who can write a book on writing it should be Stephen King hmm I think Stephen Pressfield I hope I'm not saying the war of art the war of art beautiful book and I would say if my recollection they don't necessarily talk about creativity very much that it's really hard work putting in the hours of every day of just grinding it out well Pressfield talks about the muse press field speaks of it almost in like a strange mystical mystical sort of connection to the unknown because he he almost I'm not even exactly sure if he believes in the muse but he I think if I could put words in his mouth I have met him he's a great guy he was on the podcast once I think the way he treats it is that if you decide the muse is real and you show up every day and you write as if the muse is real you get the benefits of the muse

09:18being real that's right whether or not there's actually a muse that's giving you these wonderful ideas and what is the muse so I think of artificial intelligence the same way there's a quote by Pamela McCourt ik from 1979 book that I really like I mean she talks about the history of artificial intelligence AI began with an ancient wish to force the gods and to me gods broadly speaking or religions represents it's kind of like the muse it represents the limits of possibility the limits of our imagination so it's this thing that we don't quite understand that is the muse that is God this us us chimps are very narrow in our ability to perceive and understand the world and there's clearly a much bigger beautiful mysterious world out there and God or the muse represents that world and for many people I think throughout history and especially in in the past sort of hundred years artificial

10:21intelligence has become to represent that a little bit to the thing which we don't understand and we crave we're both terrified and we crave in creating this thing that is greater that is able to understand the world better than us and that in that sense artificial intelligence is the desire to create the muse or this other this imaginary thing and I think the one of the beautiful things if you talk about everybody formula master Sam Harris to all the people thinking about this is that there's a mix of fear of that of that unknown of creative known and an excitement for it because there's something in human nature that desires creating that because like I said creating is how you understand mm-hmm did you initially study biology did you study the actual development of the mind or what what is known about the the evolution of the human mind of the human mind yeah so my path is different

11:24as it's the same for a lot of computer scientists and roboticist is we ignore biology neuroscience the physiology anatomy of our own bodies and there's a lot of beliefs now that you should really study biology you should study in your sights you should study your own brain the actual chemistry what's happening what what is actually how are the neurons interconnected all the different kinds of systems in there so that is a little bit of a blind spot or it's a big blind spot but the problem is so I started with more philosophy almost it's where if you think Sam Harris is the last couple of years has started kind of thinking about artificial intelligence and he has a back on you know science but he's also a philosopher and I started there by reading Camus and Nietzsche or Dostoevsky thinking what is what is intelligence what is human morality will so all of

12:29these concepts give you the context for which you can then start studying these problems and then I said there's a there's a magic that happens when you build a robot and it drives around I mean your father I'm I'd like to be but I'm not yet there's a creation aspect that's wonderful that's incredible it's for me I don't have any children at the moment but the act of creating a robot where you programmed it and it moves around and it senses the world is this is a magical moment did you see a lien covenant is a sci-fi movie ya know have you ever seen any of the alien films I so I grew up in the Soviet Union where we didn't watch to me movies so I need to catch up we should catch up on that one in particular because a lot of it has to do with artificial intelligence there's actually a battle between spoiler alert two different but identical artificially intelligent

13:35synthetic beings that are there to aid the people on the ship one of them is very creative and one of them is not and the one that is not has to save them from the one that is spoiler alert I don't won't tell you who wins right there's there's a really fascinating scene at the very beginning of the movie where the creator of this artificially intelligent being is discussing its existence with the being itself and the being is trying to figure out who made him and and it's this really fascinating moment and this being winds up being a bit of a problem because it possesses creativity and it has the ability to think for itself and may they found it to be a problem so they made a different version of it which was not able to create and the one that was not able to create was much more of more of a servant and there's this battle between these two I think you would find it

14:40quite fascinating it's a really good movie yeah the same kind of theme carries through ex machina hmm yeah 2001 Space Odyssey sort of you've seen ex machina yeah I seen it so because of your I've listened to your podcast and because because of it I've watched his second time because the first time I watched it and Neil deGrasse Tyson moment where it was you said there's cut be cut the cut the got the moments yes for me for me the it did the movie opening is everything everything about it was I was rolling my eyes why are you rolling your eyes what was a cut that moment so that's a general bad tendency that I'd like to talk about amongst people who are scientists that are actually trying to do stuff they're trying to build the thing it's it's very tempting to roll your eyes and you know in a lot of aspects of artificial intelligence discussion and so on for me

15:38there's real reasons to roll your eyes and there's just well let me let me just describe it so that this person in ex machina no spoiler alerts is in the middle what like a Jurassic Park type situation where is like in the middle of land that yawns yeah we don't really know where it is not established but you have to fly over glaciers and you get to this place and there's rivers and yeah it was fantastic compound and inside this compound he appears to be working alone right and he's like literally he's like doing curls I think like dumbbells and drinking heavily so the everything I know about science everything I know about engineering is it doesn't happen alone so the situation of a compound with no hundreds of engineers there working on this is not feasible is not feasible it's not possible and the other moments like that were the technical the discussion about how it's technically

16:43done they threw a few jargon to spice stuff up that makes doesn't make any sense well that's where I am blissfully ignorant yeah so I watched it I go this movie's awesome yeah and you're like I know too much yeah and not too much but that's that's a stupid way to think for me so once you suspend disbelief say okay well right those are those are not important details yeah but it is important I mean they could have gone to you or someone who really has knowledge in it and cleaned up those small aspects and still kept the the theme of the story that's right they could have but they would make a different movie so but slightly friend I don't know if it's possible to make so you look at 2001 Space Odyssey I don't know if you've seen them yes that's the kind of movie you'll start if you talk to scientists that you'll start making those kinds of movies because you

17:39can't actually use jargon that makes sense because we don't know how to build a lot of these systems so the way you need to film it and talk about it is with mystery it's this Hitchcock right type like you almost you say very little yes leave it to your imagination to see what happens yeah here everything was in the open right even with in terms of the actual construction of the brain that when they had that foam looking and whatever gel brain right yeah he said that if they gave a little bit more subtle mystery I think I would've heard that movie a lot more but the second time really because of you you say I think it's your favorite sci-fi movie it's absolutely one of my favorites I had one of my favorite movies period I loved it yeah so I I watched it again and also Sam Harris said that he also hated the movie and then washed again and liked it so I gave it so I get I give it a chance

18:35why would you see a movie again after you hate it because maybe you're self-aware enough to think there's something unhealthy about the way I hated the movie hmm like you're like introspective enough to know it's like I have the same experience with Batman okay I watched which one Dark Knight I think Christian Bale Christian Bale and so to me the first time I watched that is a guy in a costume like speaking excessively with an excessively low voice I mean it's just something sit with like little bunny ear not bunny ears but little ears it's so silly but then you go back and okay if we just accept that those that's the reality of the world we live in what's the human nature aspects that are being explored here what is the the beautiful conflict between good and evil as being explored here and what are the awesome graphics effects that are being on exhibit right so if you can just suspend

19:42that that's beautiful now I get the movie can become quite fun to watch but still unto me not to offend anybody but that superhero movies are difficult still difficult for me to watch yeah who was talking about that recently was it Kelly Kelly Slater no yesterday yesterday Kyle he's kind of right he doesn't like superhero movies we were talking about Batman about Christian Bale's voice and he's like the most ridiculous thing was that he's actually Batman not those voice I'm Batman that part of it is way less ridiculous than the fact that he's Batman he's Batman does anybody could do that voice yeah so but I contradict I'm I'm a hypocrite because Game of Thrones or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings I'm a talk it's totally believable to me yeah of course dragons and well that's a fantasy world right that's the problem with something like Batman or even ex machina is that

20:47it takes place in this world where they're in middle-earth they're in a place that doesn't exist if you it's like if you like avatar if you make a movie about a place that does not exist you can have all kinds of crazy in that movie because it's not real that's right yeah so but at the same time like Star Wars is harder for me and you're saying Star Wars is a little more real because it's it feels feasible like you could have spaceships flying around right what what's not feasible about Star Wars to you oh I'm not I'll leave that one to the other guy sighs he was getting angry about the robot that's circular rolls around he's like oh yeah slippery yeah trying to roll around all over the sand it wouldn't work it would get no traction that's true so if you had like glass tires yeah you try to drive over sand it was smooth time you'd get nothing yeah he's actually the guy that made me

21:46realize you know the movie ghost actually and it was a dis podcast so somewhere he was talking about the fact that so this guy can go through walls right mm-hmm it's a beautiful romantic movie that everybody should watch right but he doesn't seem to fall through chairs when he sits on them right so he can walk through walls but he can put his hand on the desk yeah can sit like his his butt has a magical shield that isn't in this reality this is a quantum shield that protects him from from yeah so that's you know those devices are necessary movies I get it in yeah but you got a good point he's got a good point too it's like dudes cut the moments they don't have to be there you know you just have to work them out in advance but the problem is a lot of movie producers think that they're smarter than people they just decide I just put it in there the average person is not

22:43gonna care I've had that conversation with movie producers about martial arts and I was like well this is just nonsense you can't do that like because I was explaining martial arts to someone and he was like God the average person is not gonna care I'm like oh the average person okay but you brought me in as a martial arts expert to talk to you about your movie and I'm telling you right now this is horseshit yeah I'm like huge believer of Steve Jobs philosophy where forget the average person discussion because first of all the average person will care the Steve Jobs designed would really push the design of the interior of computers to be beautiful not just the exterior even if you never see it if you have attention to detail to every aspect of the design even if it's completely hidden from the actual user in the end somehow that karma whatever it is that like love for

23:36everything you do and that love seeps through the product and the same I think with movies if you talk about space the 2001 Space Odyssey there's so many details I think there's probably these groups of people that study every detail of that movie and other Kubrick films those little details matter somehow they all come together to show how deeply passionate you are about telling the story well Kubrick was a perfect example of that because he would put layer upon layer upon layer of detail in the films that people would never even recognize like there's a bunch of correlations between the Apollo moon landings and The Shining you know there's like people have actually studied it to the point where they think that it's some sort of a confession that Kubrick faked the moon landing goes from the little boy having the rocket ship on his sweater to the the number of the

24:29number of the room that things happened this is like a bunch of like very bizarre connections in the film that Kubrick unquestionably engineered because he was just a stupid smart man I mean he was so goddamn smart that he would do complex mathematics for fun in spare time Kubrick was a legitimate genius and he engineered that sort of complexity into his films where he didn't have cut the moments in his moves nothing I can recall no not even close yeah it's very interesting I mean but that probably speaks to the reality of Hollywood today that the cut the moments don't affect the bottom line of how much the movie makes well thien really depends on the film right I mean the cut the moments that Neil deGrasse Tyson found in gravity I didn't see because I wasn't aware of what the effects of gravity on a person's hair would be you know he saw it and he was like this is ridiculous

25:30and then there were some things like why are the space station so close together I just let it slide while the movie was playing but then he went into great detail about how preposterous it would be those space stations were that close together that you can get to them so quickly that's with Sandra Bullock and yes looking guy and George Clooney George yeah so that did that pass muster with that movie no he tore it apart and when he tore it apart people went crazy they get so angry he reads the negative comments as we've talked about yeah I actually recently because of doing a lot of work with artificial intelligence and lecturing about and so on I've plugged into this community of folks that are thinking about the future of artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence and they are very much out-of-the-box thinkers to where the kind of messages I get are our best so I

26:25let it I'd let them kind of explore those ideas without sort of engaging to those discussions I think very complex discussion should be had with people in person that's what I think and I think that when you allow comments just random anonymous comments to enter into your consciousness like you're taking risks and you may you may run into a bunch of really brilliant ideas that are you know coming from people that are considerate they've thought these things through or you might just run into a river of it's entirely possible and I peeked into my comments today on Twitter I was like what in the yeah I started reading like a couple of them some just morons and am I right about something should I don't even know what the they were talking about but but that's the risk you take when you dive in you're gonna get people that are disproportionately upset you're gonna

27:20get people that are disproportionately you know delusional or whatever it is in regards to your position on something or whether or not they even understand your position they'll argue something that's an incorrect interpretation of your position yeah and you've actually from what I've heard you've actually been to this podcast and so I'm really good at being open-minded and it's something I try to preach as well so in AI discussions when you're talking about AGI and talking about so there's a difference between narrow AI and general artificial intelligence in area a is the kind of things that are the kind of tools that are being applied now I'm being quite effective and then there's general AI which is a broad categorization of concepts that are human level or superhuman level intelligence and they're when you talk about a GI artificial general intelligence there seems to be two camps

28:15of people ones who are really working deep in it like that's the camp I kind of sit in and a lot of those folks tend to roll their eyes and just not engage in Chinese discussion in the future their idea is is saying it's really hard to do what we're doing and it's just really hard to see how this becomes intelligent and then there's another group of people who say yeah baby you're being very short-sighted that you may not be able to do much now but the exponential the hard take off but you know overnight it can become super intelligent and then it'll be too late to think about mm-hmm the problem with those two camps as with any camps Democrat Republic any camps is they don't seem maybe seem to be talking past each other as opposed to both have really interesting ideas if you go back to the analogy of touch of death of this this idea of MMA right so I'm the in this analogy I'm gonna put

29:20myself in the UFC for a second in this analogy I'm you know like ranked in the top 20 I'm working really hard my dream is to become a world champion I'm training three times a day I'm really working I'm an engineer I'm trying to build my skills out and then there's other folks that come along like Steven Seagal and so on that kind of talked about other kinds of martial arts other ideas of how you can do certain things and I think I think Steven Seagal and could is not mine beyond to something I think we really need to be open-minded like an ancient civilizing talks this team or somebody talks to Steven Seagal right the well Anderson Silva thinks Steven Seagal is I would put this in a respectful way he Anderson Silva has a wonderful sense of humor and Anderson Silva is very playful and he thought it would be hilarious if people believed that he was learning all of his martial

30:22arts from got it he also loves Steven Seagal movies legitimately so treated him with a great deal of respect he also recognizes that Steven Seagal actually is a master of Aikido he really does understand Aikido and was one of the very first Westerners that was teaching in Japan speaks fluent Japanese was teaching at a dojo in Japan and is you know a legitimate master of Aikido right the problem with Aikido is it's it's one of those martial arts that has merit in it in a vacuum they give you if you're in a world where there's no NCAA wrestlers or no judo players or no Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belts or no Muay Thai kick boxers there might be something to that Aikido stuff but in the world where all those other martial arts exist and we've examined all the intricacies of hand-to-hand combat it falls horribly short let's see this is the point I'm trying to make you just said

31:30that we've investigated all the intricacies you said all the intricacies of hand-to-hand combat I mean you're just speaking but you want to open your mind to the possibility that Aikido has some techniques in practice that are effective yeah when I say all that's your you're correct that's not a correct way of describing it because there's always new moves that are being like for instance in this a recent fight between Anthony Pettis and Tony Ferguson Tony Ferguson actually used Wing Chun in a fight he he trapped one of Anthony Pettis Azur hands and hit him with the elbow he basically used a technique that you would use on a Wing Chun dummy and he did it in an actual world class mixed martial arts fight and I remember watching it wow going this crazy actually pulled that off because that's it's a technique that you just rarely see anybody getting that

32:29proficient at it that that fights in MMA and Ferguson is it extremely creative and open-minded guy and he figured out a way to make that work you know world class fight so and let me then ask you the question there's there's these people who still believe quite a lot of them that there is this touch of death mm-hmm right as soon as possible deep so do you think it's possible to discover through this rigorous scientific process that is MMA that started pretty recently do you think not the touch of death but do you think we can get a 10x improvement in the amount of power the human body can can generate in and punching no no certainly not 10x yeah I think you can get incremental improvements but it's all based entirely on your frame like if you're a person that has very small hands and narrow shoulders you're kind of screwed there's not really a lot of room for improvement

33:22you can you can certainly get incremental improvement and your ability to generate power but you'll never be able to generate the same kind of power as say a guy with a very big frame like brock lesnar or a Derek Lewis or you know anyone who has there's like classic elements that go with being able to generate large amounts of power exactly wide shoulders large hands there's a lot of characteristics of the human frame itself those even those people there's only so much power you can generate and we pretty much know how to do that correctly so the the way you're talking about as a martial arts expert now it's kind of the way a lot of the experts in robotics and AI talked about AI hmm and one topic of touch of death is brought up now the analogy is not perfect I tend to use probably too many analogies as we maybe know the human body better that we know the possibility of a I would assume

34:27so right yes the possibility of AI is basically limitless once AR starts redesigning itself it's not obvious that that's true our imagination allows it to be true when I am of two minds I am I I'm both I can hold both beliefs that are contradictory in my mind one is that idea is really far away almost bordering on BS and the other is it can be there overnight I think you could believe both those things so I'm hmm there's another quote from Barbara wouldn't it's a poem I heard on on the lecture somewhere that I really like which is it's from the champions of the impossible rather than the slaves of the possible that evolution draws its creative force so I see ayahuasca is a representative of the champion of the impossible I see exponential growth of AI within the next several decades as the impossible but it's the champions of the impossible that actually make the

35:32impossible happen why would the exponential growth of AI be impossible because that seems inevitable to me so it's not impossible I'm sort of using the word impossible meaning magnificent yeah it feels very difficult very very difficult we don't even know where to begin Ram yep like the touch of death actually feels I would see the touch of death is horseshit but see urine looks like ha and they touch you in the chest but we don't have the ability in the body to generate that kind of energy how do you know that let's good question it's never been done we understand you know it's never physiology how do you know it's never been done okay there could be someone out there with magic that I that has escaped my my grasp no you studied you've talked about with uh Graham Hancock you talked about the history maybe was in Roman times there was that idea was discovered and then it

36:29was lost hmm because weapons are much more effective ways of of delivering damage now I find myself in a very uncomfortable position of defending the concept as a martial artist and defining the concept of what martial arts did you study jiu-jitsu in judo and wrestling wrestling those are the hard ones Jitsu judo and wrestling those are absolute martial arts in my opinion this is what I mean like if you are a guy who just has a fantastic physique and incredible speed and ridiculous power just you just can generate ridiculous power if you just are just a pert you know who do you know Deontay Wilder is yes Healy champion the world boxer he's a fit you have what's his name - whew Tyson Fury on time tomorrow yes guys yes Deontay Wilder has fantastic power I mean he just knocks people flying across the ring he's just I think Deontay Wilder if he just came off the street if he was 25 years old

37:35and no one ever taught him how to box at all and you just wrapped his hands up and had him hit a bag he would be able to generate insane amounts of force now if you were a person that really didn't have much power and you had a box with Deontay Wilder and you were both of the same age and you were a person that knew boxing and he stood in front of Deonte it's entirely possible that Deontay Wilder could knock you into another dimension even though he had no experience in boxing if he just held on to you and hit you with a haymaker he might be able to put you out if you're a person who is let's say built like you and a guy who exercises who's strong and then there's someone who thank you identically built like you who's a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and you don't have any experience in martial arts at all you're right yes you're a person who's built

38:29like you who's a guy who exercises and is healthy and you grapple with the guy who's even stronger than you and bigger than you but he has no experience in Brazilian jiu-jitsu he's still yeah that's the difference that's why I think Brazilian jiu-jitsu and judo and wrestling and particularly those are absolutes in that you have control of the body yes and once you grab ahold of a person's body there's no lucky triangle chokes in jiu-jitsu that's right right but I think I think I would say jiu-jitsu is the highest representative of that and I think in wrestling and judo having practiced those I've never been quite as humbled as I have been jiu-jitsu yeah especially when I started I was like powerlifting I was like I was a total meathead and you know a 130 pound guy or girl could tap you easily yeah it's confusing it's very confusing in wrestling you can get pretty far with

39:28that joint head power yeah yeah and in judo a little bit less so at its highest levels if you go to Japan for example or they I mean the whole dream of judo is effortlessly throw your opponent but in you know if you go to gyms in America and so on you know there is some hard wrestling style gripping and just beating each other up pretty intensely where we're not talking about beautiful which mottos are these beautiful throws we're talking about some scrapping some some wrestling styles yeah yeah I know I see what you're saying yeah my experience with jiu-jitsu was very humbling when I first started out I was I had a long background in martial arts and striking and even wrestled in high school and then I started taking jiu-jitsu and a guy who is my size and I was young at the time and he was basically close to my age just mauled me and he wasn't even a black belt I think he was a purple

40:31belt he might have been a blue belt I think was a purple belt and just destroyed me just did anything he wanted to meet choked me arm barred me just and I remember thinking man I am so delusional I thought I had a chance like I thought just based on taking a couple classes and learning what an armbar is and then being a strong person who has a background in martial arts that I would be able to at least hold him off a little bit no and this is a that's so beautiful that I feel lucky to have that had that experience of having my ass kicked in Philadelphia is where I came up with because in science you don't often get that experience in the space of ideas you can't you can't choke each other out you can't beat each other up in science and so it's easy to go your whole life I have so many people around me telling me how smart I am there's no way to actually know if I'm

41:30smart or not because I think I'm full of BS and in the same eye in the same realm is as fighting there's no it's a what Hickson Gracie said it means or some ozawa bear that the mat doesn't lie hmm there's this deep honesty in it that was I'm really grateful almost like wanting you know you talk about bullies or you talk about or even just my fellow academics could benefit significantly from training a little bit I think so too it's a yeah it's it's a beautiful thing to almost I think it's been talked about in high school sort of requiring it yeah thinking so talked about many times yeah I think it's a more humbling sport to be honest than wrestling because you could in wrestling like I said get away with with some muscle it's also what martial arts are supposed to be in that a small person who knows technique can beat a big person who doesn't know the

42:25techniques that's right that's what we always hoped for right when we saw the Bruce Lee movies and Bruce Lee who was a smaller guy could beat all these bigger guys just because he had better technique that is actually real in jujitsu and it's one of the only martial arts where that's real yeah and I have an in Philadelphia started we had Steve Maxwell here and sure that's kind of where the that was the spring of jujitsu in Philadelphia yeah he was one of the very first American black belts in jujitsu like way back in the day I believe he was a black belt in the very early 90s when jiu-jitsu was really just starting to come to America and he had exercised exercise in Philadelphia is still there and then I I trained a balance which is a few Gracie folks which film Inglourious Rickman Clarice Bogle Brothers so all those I mean especially Vogel Brothers these couple

43:17black bolts they come up together is there well they're smaller little guys and I think those were the guys that really humbled me pretty quickly well little guys are the best to learn technique from yeah because they can't rely on strength there's a lot of really big powerful you know 250 pounds you just you guys who never are going to develop the sort of subtlety of technique that some like what the Mayo brothers like smaller guys who just they've from the very beginning they've never had an advantage in weight and size and so they've never been able to use anything but perf technique Eddie Bravo is another great example that - you know he he competed in the 140 pound 145 pound class you know but to get back to artificial intelligence so the idea is that there's two camps there's one camp that thinks that the exponential increase in technology and that once artificial

44:18intelligence become sentient it could eventually improve upon its own design and literally become a god in the short amount of time and then there's the other school of thought that thinks that is so far outside of the realm of what is possible today that even the speculation of this eventually taking place is kind of ludicrous to imagine right exactly and the balance needs to be struck because I think I'd like to talk about sort of the short-term threats that are there and it's really important to think about but the long-term threats if they come to fruition will overpower everything right that's really important to think about but what happens is if you think too much about the encroaching doom of humanity there's some aspect to it that is paralyzing hmm where you almost it turns you off from actually thinking about the these ideas there's something so appealing it's like

45:21a black hole that pulls you in and if you notice folks like sam harris and so on spend a large amount of the time talk you know they're talking about the negative stuff about something that's far away not to say it's not wrong to talk about it but they spent very little time about the potential positive impacts in the near term and also the negative impacts in the near term so let's go over those yep fairness so the we the more and more we put decisions about our lives into the hands of artificial intelligence systems whether you get a loan or in the autonomous vehicle context or in terms of recommending jobs for you on linkedin or all these kinds of things the idea of fairness because of bias in these machine learning systems becomes a really big threat because the way current your the way current artificial intelligence systems function is they train on data

46:25so there's no way to for them to somehow gain a greater intelligence than our then the data we provide them with so we provide them with actual data and so they carry over if we're not careful the biases in that data the the discrimination that's inherent in our current society is represented by the data so they'll just carry that forward okay also so there's people working in this more so to see to show really the negative impacts in terms of getting a loan or whether to say whether this particular human being should be convicted or not of a crime or there's there's ideas there that can carry you know in our criminal system there's discrimination and if you use data from that criminal system to then assist deciders judges juries lawyers in making this and committing in making a decision of what kind of balance a person gets they're going to carry that forward so

47:28you mean like racial economic biases racial economic um geographical and that's a sort of I don't study that exact problem but it's it's you're aware of it because of the tools were using it only so the two ways that I'd like to talk about neural networks with okay Joe sure okay so the current approaches are there's been a lot of demonstrated improvements exciting new improvements in our advancements of our artificial intelligence and those are for the most part has to do with neural networks something has been around since the 1940s has gone through to AI winters where everyone was super hyped and then super bummed and super hyped again and bummed again and now we're in this other hype cycle and what neural networks are is these collections of interconnected simple compute units they're all similar it's kind of like it's inspired by our own brain we have a bunch of little

48:33neurons interconnected and the idea is these interconnections are really dominant and random but if you feed it with some data they'll learn to connect just like they're doing our brain in a way that interprets that data they form representations of that data and can make decisions but there's only two ways to train those neural networks that we have now one is we have to provide a large data set if you want then you'll know how to tell the difference in a cat and the dog you have to give it ten thousand images of a cat and ten thousand images of a dog you need to give it those images and who tells you what a picture of a cat and a dog is it's humans so it has to be annotated so as teachers of these artificial intelligence systems we have to collect this data we have to invest significant amount of effort and annotate that data and then we teach in your networks to

49:30make that prediction the what's not obvious there is how poor of a method there is to achieve any kind of greater degree of intelligence you're just not able to get very far besides very specific narrow tasks of cat versus dog or should I give this person alone or not these kind of simple simple tasks I would argue autonomous vehicles are actually beyond the scope of that kind of approach and then the other realm of where neural networks can be trained is if you can simulate that world so if the world is simple enough or it's conducive to be formalized sufficiently to where you can simulate it so a game of chess is just it's it's there's rules game of goal there's rules so you can simulate it they had the big exciting thing about google deepmind is that they were able to beat the world champion by doing something called competitive self play which is they have

50:33two systems play against each other they don't need the human they play against each other but that only works and that's a beautiful idea and super powerful and really interesting and surprising but that only works on things like games and simulation so now if I wanted to decide to be going to analogies of like Yossi for example if I wanted to train a system to become the world champion beat what's his name number I met up right I could play the UFC game I could create such that occur a to neural networks that play use competitive self play to play in that virtual world and they could become state-of-the-art the best fighter ever in that game but transferring that to the physical world we don't know how to do that we don't know how to teach systems to do stuff in the real world so some of the stuff that freaks you out off in his Boston Dynamics robots oh yeah those every day

51:34I go to the Instagram page and just go what the you guys doing so nearing our demise mark Raber CEO is spoke at the class I taught he is a he calls himself a bad boy of robotics so he's having a little fun with it he should definitely stop doing that don't call yourself a bad boy of anything that's Joe how old is he okay he's one of the greatest roboticist of our generation that's wonderful call yourself don't call yourself a bad boy bro okay so you see you're not the bad boy of MMA but I'm not even the bad man bad man not a bad boy okay so silly yeah the those robots are actually functioning in the physical world that's what I'm talking about and they are using something called always I think coined I don't know 70s or 80s the term good old-fashioned AI meaning there is nothing like going on that you would consider artificial intelligence which is usually connected to learning

52:51so these systems aren't learning it's not like you dropped a puppy into the into the world and kind of stumbles around and figured stuff out and learns gets better and better and better and better that's the scary part that's the imagination that that that's what we imagine is we put something in this world at first it's like harmless and falls all over the place and also to figure something out and like a llama says that travels faster than whatever then you can only see with probable eyes there's no learning component there this is just purely there's hydraulics and the electric motors and there is twenty to thirty degrees of freedom and it's doing hard-coded control algorithms to control the task of how do you move efficiently through space so this is the task ibadis this work on a really really hard problem is taking robotic manipulation taking the arm grabbing a

53:47water bottle and lifting it super hard from somewhat unsolved to this point and learning to do that we really don't know how to do that right but this is what we're talking about essentially as the convergence of these robotic systems with artificial intelligence systems and as artificially intelligent intelligent systems evolve and then this convergence becomes complete you're going to have the ability to do things like the computer that beat humans that go that's right you're gonna have creativity you're going to have a complex understanding of language and expression and you're gonna have I mean perhaps even engineered things like emotions like jealousy and anger I mean it's an it's entirely possible that as you were saying we're gonna have systems that could potentially be biased the way human beings are biased towards people of certain economic groups or certain

54:46Geographic groups and you would use that data that they have to discriminate just like human beings discriminate but if you have all that in an artificially intelligent robot that has autonomy and that has the ability to move this is what people are totally concerned with and terrified of is that all of these different systems that are currently in semi crude States they can't pick up a water bottle yet they can't really do much other than they can do backflips but they you know I mean I'm sure you've seen there's more the more recent boston dynamic ones parkour yeah I saw that one the other day it's good they're getting better and better and better and it's it's increasing every year every year there's they have new abilities did you see the black mirror episode heavy metal yeah and I think about quite a lot because it's functionally it has we know how to do

55:39most aspects of that right now right now many clothes yeah pretty close I mean I don't remember exactly there's some kind of pebble shooting situation where it like hurts you by shooting you somehow I figured well has bullets didn't it bullets yeah yeah is it basically a gun a knife it's stuck into one of its arms remember and comes in spoiler alert it's just an amazing episode of how terrifying it would be if some emotionless robot with incredible abilities is coming after you and wants to terminate you and I think about that a lot because I love that episode because it's terrifying for some reason yeah but what I sit down and actually in the work we're doing think about how we would do that so we can do the actual movement of the robot we don't know how to do is to have robots that do the full thing which is have some have have a goal of pursuing humans and eradicate it

56:34I'm not spoiler alert all over the place mm-hmm I think the goal of eradicating humans so assuming their values are not aligned somehow that's one we don't know how to do that and two is the entire process of just navigating all over the world it's really difficult so we know how to go up the stairs but to say how to navigate like the path you took from home to the studio today how to get through that full path is so much an unsolved problem but is it because you could you could engineer or you could program it into your Tesla you could put it into your navigation system have it stop at red lights drive for you take turns and it can do that so first of all that I would argue we're quite far away from still but that's within 10 20 years well what can it do now it can stay inside the lane on the highway or on different roads and it can change lanes and what's being pushed now is

57:35they're trying to be able to enter and exit a highway so it's been some basic highway driving it doesn't stop the traffic lights it doesn't stop at stop signs and it doesn't interact with the complex irrational human beings pedestrians cyclists cars that's this is the onion I talked about is we first in 2005 the DARPA Grand Challenge darpur organized this challenge in the desert says let's go across the desert let's see if we can build an autonomous vehicle it goes across the desert 2004 they did the first one and everybody failed we're talking about some of the smartest people in the world really tried and and failed and so they did again 2005 there's a few Stanford one there's a really badass guy from CMU read that I think he's like a marine he led the team there and they succeeded the 14s finished Stanford one that was in the desert and there was this feeling

58:32that we saw the town was driving but that's that onion because you then okay what's the next step we got a card to travels across the desert autonomously what's the next so in 2007 they did the urban Grand Challenge the urban child DARPA urban challenge where you drove around the city a little bit and again super hard problem people took it on CMU won that one the Stanford second I believe and and then there was definitely a feeling like yeah we now the way a car drive around the city it's definitely solved the problem is those cars were traveling super slow first of all and second of all there's no pedestrians there there's no it wasn't a real city it was an artificial it's just basically having to stop at different sides again one other layer of the and they say ok when we actually have to put this car in a city like LA how we're gonna make this work because if there's

59:34no cars on the street and no pedestrians in the street driving around is still hard but doable and I think solvable the next five years when you put pedestrians everybody jaywalks mm-hmm if you put human beings into into this interaction it becomes much much harder now it's not impossible and I think it's very doable and with completely new interesting ideas including revolutionising infrastructure and rethinking a transportation in general it's possible to do the next five ten years maybe 20 but it's not easy like everybody says and but does anybody say it's easy yeah this the this there's a lot of height between autonomous behind it Tom's vehicles you know a musk himself and other people have promised autonomous vehicles at that time I was already passed it's been going on in 2018 we'll have autonomous vehicles now for this there's semi autonomous now right so

60:34yeah the I know they do they can brake for pedestrians like if they see pedestrians are supposed to brake for them and avoid them right that's part of the technically no wasn't an issue with an uber car that hit a pedestrian that was operating autonomously that's someone a homeless person stepped out off of median right into traffic and it nailed it then they found out it didn't have one of the settings those are employees that's right but that was an autonomous vehicle being tested in Arizona and unfortunately was a fatality a person a person died it yeah destron was killed so what happened there that's the that's the thing I'm saying is really hard that's full autonomy that's technically when the car you can remove the steering wheel in the car to drive itself and take care of everything everything I've seen everything we're studying so we're studying drivers and Tesla vehicles

61:26we're building our own vehicles it seems that it'll be a long way off before we can solve a fully autonomous problem because of pedestrians and put to things and pedestrians and cyclists and the edge cases of driving all the stuff would take for granted the same reason we take for granted how hard it is to walk our hardest to pick up this bottle our intuition about what's hard and easy is really flawed as human beings can i interject what if all cars were autonomous sure if we got to a point where every single car on the highway is operating off of a similar algorithm or off the same system then things would be far easier right because then you have to don't don't deal with random kinetic movements people just changing lanes people looking at their cell phone not paying attention to what they're doing all sorts of things you have to be wary of right now driving and

62:22pedestrians and bicyclists totally and that's that's in the realm of things I'm talking about where you think outside the box and and revolutionize our transportation system mmm that requires government to to play along seems like that's going that way though right do you feel like that one day we're gonna have autonomous driving pretty much everywhere especially in the highway yeah it's not going there in terms of its it's very slow moving so if government does stop very slow moving with infrastructure one of the biggest things you can do for autonomous driving will solve a lot of problems is to paint lane markings regularly right and even that have been extremely difficult to do for for comfort for yeah for for politicians right because right now there's not really the desire for it to but to explain to people what you mean by that when the lanes are painted very

63:18clearly the cameras and the autonomous vehicles can recognize them and stay inside those lanes much more easily yeah there is two ways that cars see the world three different sensors the big ones for autonomous vehicles is lidar which is these lasers are being shot all over the place and 360 and they can give you this point cloud or how far stuff is away but they don't give you the visual texture information oh this is what brand water-bottle they are and cameras give you that information so what Tesla is using the eight cameras I think is they perceive the world with with with cameras and those two things require different things from the infrastructure those two sensors cameras see the world the same art as our human eyes see the world so they need the lane markings they need infrastructure to be really nicely visible traffic lights to be visible so the same kind of things us

64:13humans like to have is cameras like to have and lane marking is a big one the other there's there's a lot of interesting infrastructure improvements that can happen like traffic lights our traffic lights are super dumb right now they sense nothing about the world about the density of pedestrians about the approaching cars if if if traffic lights can communicate with the car which it makes perfect sense it's a little it's right there there's no size limitations it can have a computer inside of it you can coordinate different things that in terms of the same pedestrian kind of problem well we have sensors now in streets so when you pull up to certain lights especially at night the light will be red you pull up it instantaneously turns green because it recognizes that you've stepped over or driven over a sensor that's right so that's a it's a step in the right

65:07direction but that's really sort of twenty years thirty years ago technology so you want to have something like the power of a smart phone inside every traffic light it's pretty basic to do but there is way outside of my expertise is how to get government to do these kinds of improvements so if I'm mistaken well correct me if I'm mistaken but you're you're looking at things in terms of what we can do right now right and a guy like Elon Musk or Sam Harris is saying yeah but look at where technology leads us if you go back to 1960 the kind of computers that they use to do the Apollo mission you got a whole room full of computers that doesn't have nearly the same power as the phone that's in your pocket right now now if you go into the future and exponentially calculate like what's going to take place in terms of our ability to create autonomous vehicles our ability to

66:06create artificial intelligence and all of these things going from what we have right now to what could be in 20 years where we very well might look at some sort of an artificial being that can communicate with you some sort of ex machina type creature I mean that's that's not outside the realm of possibility at all you have to be careful with the at all part at all it's our ability to predict the future is really difficult but I agree with you it's not outside the realm of possibility you know and the thing there's there's a few examples that brought along just because I enjoy these predictions so the the the of how bad we are predicting stuff from the very engineers the very guys and gals like me sitting before you made some of the worst predictions in history in terms of both pessimistic and optimistic the Wright brothers one of the Wright brothers before they flew in 1903

67:09predicted two years before that it will be 50 years I confess that in 1901 that's one of the brothers talking I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years two years later we ourselves were making flights this demonstration of my inability as a prophet gave me such shock that I have ever since distrusted myself and have refrained from all prediction that's one of the Wright brothers one of the people working at - that's a pessimistic estimation versus an optimistic explanation or exactly and in the same with Albert Einstein Fermi made these kind of pessimistic observations for me three years before they the first critical chain reaction as part of the he led the the nuclear didn't develop in the bomb he said that it would he has 90% confidence that's impossible three years before okay so that's on the pessimistic side on the optimistic side

68:09the history of AI is laden with optimistic predictions the in 1965 one of the seminal people in AI Herbert Simon said machines will be capable within 20 years of doing any work a man can do he also said within 10 years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion as in 58 and we didn't do that until 90 something 90 years of 40 yeah but that's one person right it's a guy taking a stab in the dark based on what data what's he what's the baseness off of our imagination right we have more data points now though don't you think no in terms of no not about the future that's the thing mmm not about the future but about what's possible right now right and if you look at the past is a really bad predictor of the future mm-hm if you look at the past what we've done the an immense advancement of technology has given us in many ways optimism about what's possible right but

69:09exactly what is possible we're not good at so I am much more confident that the world will look very fascinating me different in the future whether AI will be part of that world is unclear it could be we will all live in a virtual reality world but or for example one of the things I'm really think about is to me a really dumb AI on 1 billion smartphones is potentially more impactful than a super intelligent AI on one smartphone hmm the the the the fact that everybody now has smartphones this kind of access to information the way we communicate the the globalization of everything the potential impact there of just even subtle improvements in AI could be in could completely change the fabric of our society in a way where these discussions about an ex machina type lady walking around will be silly because we'll all be either living on Mars or living in virtual reality or

70:16there's so many exciting possibilities right and what I believe in is we have to think about them have to talk about them technology's always the source of danger of risk the although the biggest things that threatened our civilization at the small and large scale all are connected to misuse of technology we develop and at the same time it's that very technology that will empower us and save us so there's a Max tegmark brilliant guy life 3.0 I recommend people read his book on the artificial general intelligence he talks about the race that there's a there's a race that can't be stopped one is the development of technology and the other is the development of our wisdom of how to stop or how to control the technology and it's this is this kind of race and our wisdom is now it's always like one step behind and then that's why we need to invest in it and

71:21keep sort of keep always thinking about new ideas so right now we're talking about AI we don't know what it's going to look like in five years we have to keep thinking about we have to through simulation explore different ideas through conferences have debates come up with different approaches of how to solve particular problems like I said with bias and how to solve deep fakes where you fake you can make Donald Trump or president of former President Obama say anything or you can have Facebook advertisement Harvard hyper targeted advertisements how we can deal with those situations and constantly have this race of wisdom versus the development of Technology but not to sit and think well look at the you know look at the development of technology imagine what it could do in 50 years and we're all screwed because that's important to sort of be nervous about it in that way but it's not

72:23conducive to what do we do about it and the people that know what to do about it are the people trying to build this technology building this future once that but know what to do about it because like let's let's put it in terms of Elon Musk right like Elon Musk terrified of artificial intelligence because he thinks by the time it becomes sentient it'll be too late it'll be smarter than us and we'll have essentially created our successors yes and let me quote Joe Rogan and say that's just one guy yeah well Sam Harris thinks the same thing yes and there's a lot of a few people to think that and if Sam Harris I think is one of the smartest people I know and Elon Musk intelligence aside is one of the most impactful people I know yeah he's actually building these cars and in the narrow AI sense he's built these autopilot system that we've been studying the way that system works is

73:21incredible it was surprising to me on many levels it's an incredible demonstration of what AI can do in a positive way in the world so I don't not but I people can disagree I'm not sure the functional value of his fear about the possibility of this well if he's correct there's functional value and hitting the brakes before this takes place the to just just to be a person who's standing on top of the rocks with a light to warn the boats hey there's a rock here like a pay attention to where we're going because there's perils ahead I think that's what he's saying I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that and I think there's there's plenty of room for people saying what he's saying and people saying what you're saying I think what would hurt us is if we tried to silence either voice I think what we need in terms of our understanding of this future is many

74:22many many many many of these conversations where you're dealing with the the current state of Technology versus a bunch of creative interpretations of where this could go and have discussions about where it should go or what could be the possible pitfalls of any current or future actions I don't think there's anything wrong with this so when you say like what's the benefit of thinking in a negative way well it's too our demise so totally I agree on a percent negativity or worry about the existential threat is really important to have as part of the conversation mm-hm but there's this level there's this line it's hard to put into words there's a line that you cross when that worry becomes hyperbole yeah and and then it there's something about human psyche where it becomes paralyzing for some reason right now when I have beers and my friends the non ie I folks we

75:22actually go we cross that line all day and have fun with it I talked about you drunk right now maybe I regret every moment of it this I talked to Steve Pinker is enlightenment now mmm-hmm his book kind of highlights that that kind of that he's totally doesn't find that appealing because that's crossing all realms of rationality and reason when you say that appealing what do you mean crossing the line into what will happen in 50 years what could how could it happen he doesn't find that appealing he doesn't find an appealing because he's studied and I'm not sure I agree with him at a degree that he takes it he finds that there's no evidence he wants there to all our discussions to be grounded in evidence in data and he he highlights the fact that there's something about human psyche that desires this negativity that it wants there's there's something undeniable where we want to

76:28create an engineer the gods that overpower us and destroy us we want to or we worry about it there's stuff we want to that we let me rephrase that we want to worry about it there's something about the psyche that but there because you can't take the genie and put it back in the bottle that's right yeah I mean when you say there's no reason to think this way but if you do have cars that are semi-autonomous now and if you do have computers that can beat human beings who are world go champions and if you do have computer computers that can be people at chess and you do you have people that are consistently working on artificial intelligence you do have Boston Dynamics who are getting these robots to do all sorts of spectacular physical stunts and then you think about the possible future convergence of all these technologies and then you think about the possibility

77:21of this exponential increase in technology that allows them to be sentient like within a decade two decades three decades what what more evidence do you need you're seeing all the building blocks of a potential successor being laid out in front of you and you're seeing what we do with every single aspect of technology we constantly and consistently improve and innovate right with everything whether it's computers or cars or anything everything today is better than everything that was 20 years ago so if you looked at artificial intelligence which does agree does exist to a certain extent and you you look at what it could potentially be 30 40 50 years from now whatever it is why wouldn't you look at all these data points and say hey this could go bad I mean it could go great but it could also go bad I do not want to be mistaken as the person who's not the champion or the

78:19impossible I agree with you completely I think it's impossible though it's impossible at all I think it's inevitable I don't I think it is inevitable yes it's the Sam Harris argument if if super intelligence is nothing more than information processing mm-hmm it's same as the argument of the simulation that we're living in the simulation that's very difficult to argue against the fact that we're living in a simulation the question is one and what the world would look like right so it's like I said a race and and it's difficult you have to balance those two minds I agree with you totally yeah and I disagree with my fellow robotics folks who don't want to think about it at all of course they don't they want to buy new houses they've got a lot of money invested in this adventure they want to keep the party rolling they don't want to pull the brakes everybody pull the

79:15chords out of the walls we got to stop no one's gonna do that no one's no one's gonna come and say hey we've we've run all this data through a computer and we found that if we just keep going the way we're going in 30 years from now we will have a successor that will decide that human beings are outdated and inefficient and dangerous to the the actual world that we live in and we're gonna start wiping them out but it that's not exist right now doesn't exist right now but if that did happen if someone did come to the UN and had this multistage presentation with data that showed that if we continue on the path we're going we have seven years before artificial intelligence decides to eliminate human beings based on these data points what do you what do they do what did the Boston Dynamics people do well building a house in Cambridge what are you talking about man come on I just bought

80:08a new Tesla I need to finance this thing hey I got credit card bills I got student loans I'm still paying off look what how do you stop people from doing what they do for a living how do you say that hey I know that you would like a looked at the future with rose-colored glasses on but there's a real potential pitfall that could be the extermination of the human species and obviously I'm going way far with this yeah I like it I think every one of us trying to build these systems are similar in sound to the way you were talking about the touch of death in that my dream and the dream of many roboticist is to create intelligent systems that will improve our lives and working really hard at it not for our house in Cambridge not for a billion dollar for selling a startup paycheck we love this stuff some of you so obviously the motivations are different for every single human

81:09being that's involved in every endeavor so and we're trying really hard to build these systems and is really hard mm-hmm so whenever the the question is well this is gonna look at historically it's going to take off it can potentially take off any moment it's very difficult to really be cognizant as an engineer about how takes off because you're trying to make it take off in the Mosel and you're failing everybody is failing has been really hard and so you have to acknowledge that there that over night some yellow must type character may come along and you know people with this boring company or with SpaceX people didn't think anybody but NASA could do what you know I'm us is doing and he's doing it it's hard to think about that too much you have to do that but the reality is we're trying to create these super intelligent beings sure but isn't the reality also that we

82:13have done things in the past because we were trying to do it and then we realized that these have horrific consequences for the human race like Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project you know when he said I am death destroyer of worlds when he was quoting the bhagavad-gita when he's detonating the first nuclear bomb and realizing what he's done just because something is possible to do doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea for human beings to do it now we haven't destroyed the world with Oppenheimer's discovery and through the work of the Manhattan Project we've managed to somewhere another keep the lid on the for the level it's crazy right you know I mean for the last what seventy years has it been 70 sounds right ten thousand twenty thousand nukes no crazy I mean we literally could kill everything on the planet and somehow we've done somehow somehow in some

83:06amazing way we have not but that doesn't mean we I mean this a very short amount of time in relation to the actual lifespan of the earth itself and certainly in terms of the time human history's been around and nuclear weapons global warming is another one sure but that's a side effect of our actions right this is we're talking about a direct effect of human ingenuity and innovation the nuclear bomb it's a direct effect we tried to make it we made it there ghosts global warming's and accidental consequence of human civilization so you can't I don't think it's possible to not build a nuclear bomb you don't think it's possible to not build it because people are tribal they speak different languages they have different desires and needs and there were and more so if all these engineers are working towards it it was not possible to not build it yet and the like I said

84:06there's something about us chimps in a large collective where we are born and pushed forward towards progress of Technology why not stop the progress of technology so the goal is to how to develop how to guide that development right into a positive direction but surely if we do understand that this has taken place and we did drop these enormous bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed untold amounts of innocent people with these detonations that it's not necessarily always a good thing to pursue technology it nobody is so you see what I'm saying yes I agree with you totally I'm more playing devil's advocate than anything what I'm saying is you guys are looking at these things like we're just trying to make these things happen and what I think people like Elon Musk and Sam Harris and a bunch of others that are gravely concerned about the potential for AI are saying is that's I

85:08understand what you're doing but you've got to understand the other side of it we've got to understand that there are people out there that are terrified that if you do extrapolate if you do take this are relentless thirst for innovation and keep going with it if you look at what we can do so what human beings can do so far in our crude manner of to 2018 we'll all the amazing things have been able to accomplish it's entirely possible that we might be creating our successors this is not outside the realm of possibility and all of our biological limitations might be we we might figure out a better way and this better way might be some sort of an artificial creature yep AI began with our dream to Forge the gods and that's I would like I think that it's impossible to stop well it's not impossible to stop if you go Ted Kaczynski and kill all the people I mean

86:06that's what Ted Kaczynski anticipated no the Unabomber do you know the whole story behind him no what was he trying to stop who he's a fascinating cat here's what's fascinating was a bunch of fascinating things about him one of the more fascinating things about him he was involved in the Harvard LSD studies so they were nuke and that dude's brain with acid and then he goes to Berkeley becomes a professor takes all his money from teaching and just makes a cabin in the woods and decides to kill people that are involved in the creation of technology because he thinks technology is eventually gonna kill off all the people so he becomes crazy and schizophrenic and who knows what the is wrong with him and whether or not this would have taken place inevitably or whether this was a direct result of his being literally like drowned in LSD we don't even know how much they gave him or what the

86:55experiment entailed or how many other people's got their brain torched during these experiments but we do know for a fact that Ted Kaczynski was a part of the Harvard LSD studies and we do know that he went and did move to the woods and write his manifesto and start blowing up people that were involved in technology and the basic thesis of his manifesto that perhaps LSD opened his eyes to is that technology is gonna kill all humans yeah and so we should it was gonna be the end of the human race I think he might believe human race so the season you know what it is that what he said you look it up Industrial Red Bull the Industrial Revolution it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race yeah he extrapolated he was looking at where we're going and these people that were responsible for innovation and he was saying they're doing this with no regard

87:47for the consequences on the human race and he thought the way to stop that was to kill people obviously he's demented but this is I mean he literally was saying what we're saying right now you keep going we're so the Industrial Revolution I'll have to think about that it's a really important message coming from the wrong guy but is where I put it where's all this taking us yeah where is it a so I guess my underlying assumption is the journey the current capitalist structure of society that we always want a new iPhone you said one of the best reviewers on yesterday that always talks about Marcus Marcus yeah we always myself to pixel three I'm gonna have a pixel two I'm thinking maybe a you know pixel three I don't know but a camera you know that whatever that is that fire that wants more better better hmm I just don't think it's possible to stop and the best

88:45thing we can do is to explore ways to guide it towards safety where it helps us when you say it's not possible to stop you mean collectively as an organism like the human race that it's a tendency that's just built-in it's certainly possible to stop as an individual because I know people like my friend Ari who's given up on smartphones he went to a flip phone and he doesn't check social media anymore and he found it to be toxic he didn't like it he thought it was too addicted to it and he didn't like where it was leading him yep from an individual level it's possible in the visual level but then and just like with Gusinsky and the individual level it's possible to do certain things that try to stop it on more dramatic ways but I just think the force of our this this symbiotic this organism that's just this living breathing organism that is our civilization will progress

89:35forward we're just curious apes it's it's this desire to explore the universe why why do we want to do these things why do we look up and we want to travel and and it's not I don't think it's sort of we're trying to optimize for survival in fact I don't think most of us would want to be immortal I think the second Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the the fact that we're immortal the fact that one day will die is one of the things that gives life meaning and sort of trying to worry and trying to sort of say wait a minute where's this going as opposed to riding the wave and doing riding the wave of forward progress and it's one of the things he gets quite a bit of ironically hate for it Steve Pinker but he really describes in data how our world is getting better and better well he just gets to hate from people that don't want to admit that there's a trend towards

90:33things getting better because they feel like then people will ignore all the bad things that are happening right now and all the in Justices which i think is a very short-sighted thing but i think it's because of their own their own biases and the the perspective that they're trying to establish and push instead of looking at things objectively and looking at the data and say say I see where you're going it doesn't discount the fact that there's injustice in the world and crime and violence and also terrible things happen to people that are good people on a daily basis but what he's saying is just look at the actual trend of civilization in the human species itself and there's an undeniable trend towards peace slowly but surely working towards peace and way safer today way safer today than it was a thousand years ago just it is it just is yeah and there's

91:22there's these interesting arguments which his book kind of blew my mind to this funny joke he says that some people considered giving nuclear the atom bomb the Nobel Peace Prize mm-hmm because he believes I'm not an expert in this at all but he believes that sort of or some people believe that nuclear weapons are actually responsible for a lot of the decrease in violence because all of the major people can do damage all the Russia and all the major states because you do damage have a strong disincentive from engaging in warfare right and so these are the kinds of things you don't I guess anticipate and say so I think it's a it's very difficult to stop that forward progress but we have to really worry and think about okay how do we avoid the list of things that we worry about so one of the things that people really worried about is the control problem is basically AI becoming not

92:17necessarily super intelligent but super powerful but too much of our lives into it that's where our mosque and others the want to provide regulation of some sort saying wait a minute you have to put some bars on what this thing can do from a government perspective from a company perspective right but how could you stop rogues dates from doing that how could you why would you why would try and listen to us why would Russia listen to us why would other countries that are capable of doing this and maybe don't have the same sort of power that the United States has and they would like to establish that kind of power why wouldn't they just take the cap off in philosophical high-level sense there's no reason but if you engineer it in so I'm a big we do this thing with autonomous vehicles called arguing machines we have multiple AI systems argue against each other so

93:07it's possible that you have some AI systems over supervising other AI systems so have a sort of a like a in our in our nation there's a Congress arguing blue and red states being represented in as the discourse going on debate and have AI systems like that too it doesn't necessarily need to be one super powerful thing it could be AI supervising each other so there's a there's interesting ideas there to play with because ultimately what are these artificial intelligence systems doing we humans place power into their hands first mm-hmm in order for them to run away with it we need to put power into their hands so we have to figure out how we put that power in initially so it doesn't run away and how supervision can happen right but this is us right you're talking about rational people what about other people why would they engineer limitations their artificial

94:00intelligence and what incentive would they have to do that to somehow another limit their artificial intelligence to keep it from having as much power as ours there's really not a lot of incentive on their side especially if there's some sort of competitive advantage for their artificial intelligence to be more ruthless more sentient more autonomous I mean it's it seems like once the again once the genies out of the bottle it's gonna be very hard I have a theory and this is a very bizarre theory but I've been running with this for quite a few years now I think human beings are some sort of a caterpillar and I think we're creating a cocoon and through that cocoon we're gonna give birth to a butterfly and that we're gonna become something and I think we're whether we're gonna have some sort of a symbiotic connection to these electronic things where they're going to replace our our

94:47hearts are failing parts with far superior parts until we're not really a person anymore like what was that Scarlett Johansson movie the ghost in the shell' I tried to watch part of it it's pretty stupid but she's hot as so he kept my attention for a little bit but in that they took her brain and put it in this artificial body that was like had superpowers and they basically replaced everything about her that was in her consciousness with these artificial parts at the curt oliver frame everything was just some new thing there was a far superior and she had these abilities that no human being will ever have I I really wonder why we have this insatiable third why can't well if we're so logical we're so logical and so thoughtful in some ways why can't we be that way when it comes to materialism well I think one of the reasons why is because materialism is the main engine

95:46that pushes innovation if it wasn't for people's desire to get the newest latest and greatest thing what would fund these new TVs cell phones computers well why do you really need a new laptop every year is it because of engineered obsolescence where the laptop dies off and you have to get a new one because they you and they built a shitty machine that's designed to die so you buy a new one you're like iPhones doing well it's not even iPhones or a laptop yeah well is it because you're you know you just see the number two point six gigahertz is better than two point four oh it's the new one it has a 12 megapixel webcam instead of an eight and for whatever reason we have this desire to get those new things I think that's what fuels innovation and my cynical view of this thing that's happening is that we have this bizarre desire to fuel our demise and that we're

96:45doing so by fueling technology by by motivating these companies to continually innovate know if everybody just said you know what man I'm really in the log cabins and I want an axe or an cut my own fire and I realized that TVs rot in my brain I just want to read books so off and everybody started doing that and everybody started living like when it gets dark out I'll use candles and you know what I'm gonna get my water from a well and you know what I'm gonna do and I like living better that way if people started doing that there would be no need for companies to continually make new computers to make new phones to make new smart watches or whatever the they're making to make cars that can drive themselves these things that were there were really really attached to if you looked at the the human organism you look if somehow or another could objectively remove yourself from

97:39society and culture and you know all the things that make us a person and you look at what we do look what does this thing do we found this planet there's these little pink monkeys and brown monkeys and yellow monkeys and what are they all into well they all seem to be into making stuff and what kind of stuff are they making well they keep making better and better stuff it's more and more capable well where is it going what's gonna replace them they're gonna make a thing that's better than them they're gonna they're engineering these things slowly but surely to do all the things they do but do them better yeah and it's a fascinating theory it's it's not a theory it's it's a instructive way to think about intelligence and life period so if you step back look across human history right and look at earth as an organism and what is this thing doing the thing

98:28is I think at at in terms of scale and in terms of time you can look that way it's so many things like isn't there billions or trillions organisms on our skin right now both of us that have little civilizations right they have a different mechanism by which they operate and interact but for us to say that we're intelligent those organisms are not it's a very narrow sided view so they are operating under some force of nature that that Darwin has worked on on trying to understand some small elements of this is evolutionary theory but there's other more interesting forces at play that we don't understand sure and there's some kind of force it's it could be a fundamental force of physics that Einstein never got a chance to discover is our desire foreign iPhone update some some fundamental force of nature but somehow gravity in the strong force and these things

99:21described by physics add up to this drive for new things for creation and the fact that we die the the that the the fact that we're mortal the fact that what desires are built-in to us whether it's sexual or intellectual or whatever drives us Apes like somehow that all combines to this to this progress and towards what it is a compelling way to think that if an alien species did visit earth I think they would probably see the smartphone situation they see how many little lights are on and how us apes are looking at them it's possible I think some people have said that they would think the overlords are the phone's not the people hmm so to think that that's now moving into a direction where the future will be something that is beyond human or sabbatic with humor in ways we can't understand is really interesting not just that but something that we're creating are celebrating

100:25ourselves and it's a main focal point of our existence that's our purpose yeah I mean if you think about a main focal point if you think about the the average person what they do there's a great percentage of our population that has jobs where they work and one of the ways that they placate themselves doing these things that they don't really enjoy doing is earning money for objects right they want a new car they want a new house they want a bigger TV they wanted this or that and the way they motivate themselves to keep showing up at the shitty job is to think if I just put in three more months I can get that Mercedes if I just do this or that or that I can oh I can finance this new pixel three oh yeah and it's interesting because the sort of politicians what's the American dream is for you hear this thing I want my children to be better off than it's kind of desire you know you can

101:28almost see that that taking farther and farther will be there'll be a presidential candidate in 50 hundred years they'll say I want my children to be robots and you know I mean like sort of this idea that that's the natural evolution right is the highest calling of our species that scares me because I value my own life but does it scare you if if it comes out perfect like if each robot is like a god and each robot is beautiful and loving and they they recognize all the great parts of this existence and they avoid all the jealousy and the nonsense and all the stupid aspects of being a person we realized that a lot of these things are just sort of biological engineered tricks that are designed to keep us surviving from generation after generation but now here in this fantastic new age we don't need them anymore yeah it's well first one of the most transformative moments of my life

102:29was when I met spot Minnie in person which is one of the legged robots Boston Dynamics for the first time when I met them I meant that little fella there was I know exactly how it works I know exactly how every aspect of it works it's just a dumb robot but when I met him and he got up and he looked at me there it is right there have you seen dance now yeah the dance the dance is crazy it's but see it's not crazy on the technical side it's right engineered it's obvious it's programmed but it's crazy to watch like wow there's something the the reason the moment was transformative is I know exactly how it works and yet by watching it something about the feeling of it you're like this thing is alive hmm and there was this terrifying moment not terrifying with terrifying and appealing where this is the future right like this thing like this thing represents some future that

103:32is totally that we don't cannot understand just like a future in 18th century of feature with planes and smartphones was something who could understand that this thing that little dog could have had a human consciousness in it that was the feeling I had and I don't know exactly how it works there's nothing closer to the intelligence but it just gives you this picture of what the possibilities are of these living creatures and I think that's what people feel when they see basta dynamics look how awesome this thing running around is they don't care about the technicalities and how far away we are they see it look this thing is pretty human and the possibilities of human like things that supersede humans and can evolve and learn so quickly exponentially fast is this terrifying frontier that that really makes us think as it did for me maybe terrifying is a weird word because

104:32when I when I look at it and I'm not irrational and I look at there's there's videos that show the progression of Boston Dynamics robots from several years ago to today what they're capable of and it's it is a fascinating thing because you're watching all the hard work of these engineers and all these people that have designed these systems and have figured out all these problems that these things encounter and they've come with solutions and they continue to innovate and they're constantly doing it you're seeing this praat and you're like wow what are we gonna see in a year what am I gonna see in three years what I want to see in five years it's absolutely fascinating because if you extrapolate and you just keep going boy you you go fifteen twenty thirty fifty a hundred years now you have ex machina you know yeah you have ex machina and at least in our imagination

105:27and the problem is there'll be so many other things that are super exciting and you're interesting sure but that doesn't mean it's not crazy I mean there's many other things you could focus on also that are also gonna be bizarre and crazy sure but what about it just it it's going somewhere that is getting better the the parkour one is bananas you see it happened from box to box and left to right and leaping up in the air and you're like whoa I think there's any wires on it it's not connected to anything it's just jumping from box to box look if that thing had a machine gun it was running across a hill at you you'd be like oh how long's its battery last so how many bullets does it have let me just say that I would pick Tim Kennedy over that dog for the next 50 years 50 yeah so I'm a big kid Tim can it no but I'm talking about that but he'll probably have some

106:28robotic additions to his body to improve the well Tim Kennedy anymore if the brain is Tim Kennedy then he's still Tim Kennedy that's the way we think about it but there is a huge concern about the UN is meeting about this as autonomous weapons it it's a it's a allowing me I to make decisions about who lives and who dies is really concerning in the short term it's not about a robotic dog with a shotgun running around it's more about our military wanted to make destruction as efficient as possible minimizing human life and drones drones there's something really uncomfortable to me about drones in how you know compared with a Dan Carlin hardcore history of the Genghis Khan there's something impersonal about what drones are doing wait it moves you away from the actual destruction that you're achieving where I worry that our ability to encode the ethics into these

107:30systems will go wrong in ways we don't expect right and so I mean folks at the UN talk about well you have these automated so drones that make their drop bombs over a particular area so the bigger and bigger the area is over which you allow an artificial intelligence system to make a decision to drop the bombs the weirder and weirder it gets there's some line now presumably if there's like three tanks that you would like to destroy with a drone it's okay for a system to say I would like to destroy the street like I'll handle everything just give me the three tanks but now this makes me uncomfortable as well because I think I'm opposed to most Wars but it's just militaries military and they tried to get the job done now what if we now expand that to 10 20 100 tanks where you know let AI system draw bombs all over very large areas how can that go wrong and that's terrifying and

108:32there's practical engineering solutions to that oversight and there's that's something that engineers to sadhana's and engineering ethic where you encode and you have meetings of how do we make this safe that's what you worry about the thing that keeps me up at night is the 40,000 people that die every year in auto crashes like that's I worry about not have to understand like I worry about the future of AGI taking over but that's not as large AGI and the AGI are artificial general intelligence that's kind of the term is that people have been using for this but I'm maybe because I'm in it I worry more about the 40,000 people that die in the United States and the 1.2 million that die of a year from auto crashes there's something that is more real to me about the death that's happening now that could be helped mmm-hmm and that's the fight but of course if the threat becomes real then

109:31then that's a much you know that's a serious threat to to humankind and that's something that should be thought about I just worry that I worry also about the AI winter so I mentioned there's been two winters in the 70s and the 80s to 90s when funding completely dried up but more importantly just people stop getting into artificial intelligence and became cynical about his possibilities because there was a hype cycle what everyone is really excited about the possibilities of AI and then they realized you know 5 10 years into the development though we didn't actually achieve anything it was just too far off too far off same as it was for virtual reality for the longest time virtual reality was something that was discussed like even in the 80s and the 90s but it just died off that wood even thought about it now it's come back to the forefront when there's real AI or

110:26real excuse me real virtual reality that you can use like HTC vibes or you know things along those lines we can put these helmets on and you really do see these alternative worlds that people have created in these video games and it's you realize like there's a practical application for this stuff because the technology has caught up with the concept yeah and for I actually don't know where people stand on VR we do quite a bit of stuff with VR for research purposes for simulating robotic systems but I don't know where the hype is I don't know if people calm down a little bit on VR so there was a hype in the 80s and 90s I think it's ramped up quite a bit what is the other one that HD the oculus rift and what other one just those to me those are the main ones and there's other headsets that you can work and use with yeah and there's some you can use just with a Samsung phone correct

111:14yeah and they're working the next generation or which next year to two are gonna be all standalone systems yeah there's gonna be an oculus rift coming out you don't need a computer for at all so the ultimate end fear end game fear the event horizon of that is the matrix right that's that's what people were terrified of of some sort of a virtual reality world we don't exist in the physical sense anymore they just plug something into your brain stem just like they do in the matrix and you just locked into this artificial world is that terrifying to you is it so that seems to be less terrifying than AI killing all of humankind well it depends I mean what is life that's the real question right if you only exist inside of a computer program but it's a wonderful program and you you whatever your consciousness is and we have a really established what that is right we

112:04don't we don't I mean there's a lot of really weird hippie ideas out there about what consciousness is your body just like an antenna man and it's just like tuning into consciousness and consciousness is all around you it's Gaia it's the mother earth it's the universe itself it's God it's love okay maybe I don't know but if you could take that whatever the it is and send it in a cellphone a New Zealand is that where your consciousness is now because like if we figure out what consciousness is and get it to the point where we can turn it into a program or duplicate it I mean that's sounds so far away but if you went up to someone from 1820 and said hey man one day I'm gonna take a picture of my dick and I'm a sent to this girl she's gonna get it on her phone book what the are you talking about a photo what do you mean you got a what's a photo oh it's like a picture but like you don't

112:59draw it it's perfect it looks exactly like that it's an HD and I'm gonna make up video of me taking a and I'm gonna send it to everyone they're like what the is that's not even possible get out of here that is essentially you're capturing time you're capturing moments in time very not not a very crude sense but a crude sense in terms of comparing it to the actual world in the moment where it's happening like here you and I are having this conversation we're having it in front of this wooden desk there's paper in front of you - you and I we have access to all the textures this sounds we could feel the air conditioning we can look up we could see the this the the the ceiling we're where we got the whole thing in front of us because we're really here yeah but too many people that are watching this on youtube right now they're getting a minimized crude version of this that's similar but it

114:01feels real it feels pretty real it's pretty close it's a pretty close so I I mean I've listened to your podcast for a while you usually have so when I listen to your podcast it feels like I'm sitting in with friends listening to a conversation it's not as intense as for example Dan Carlin's hardcore history right where the guys like talking to me about the the darkest aspects of human nature that shows so good I don't think you can call it a podcast it's not a part it's an experience yeah you're there I was I was hanging out with him and Genghis Khan and I was in World War 1 World War 2 pain fo tainment is an episode he had we talks very dark ideas about our human nature and desiring the observation of the torture and suffering of others there's something really appealing to us he has this whole episode how throughout history we liked watching people die

114:57mm-hm and there's something really dark you're saying that if somebody streamed something like that now it would probably get hundreds of millions of views yeah we would and we're protecting ourselves from our own nature because we understand the destructive aspects of it that's why YouTube would pull something like that right if you tied a person in between two trucks and pulled them apart and put that on YouTube it would get millions of hits from YouTube would pull it because we've decided as a society collectively that those kind of images are gruesome and terrible for us but nevertheless that experience of listening to his podcast last show it feels real just like VR for me there's really strongly real aspects to it where I'm not sure I'm not sure that if the VR technology gets much better to where if you had a choice between do you want to live your life in VR you're going to die

115:50just like you would in in real life meaning your body will die you're just gonna hook up yourself to a machine like it's a deprivation tank and just all you are is in VR and you're going to live in that world which life would you choose would you choose that life in VR or would you choose a real life that was the guys decision in the matrix right the guy decided in the matrix he wanted to be a special person in the matrix he was eating that steak talk to the guys and decided he's gonna give up remember that yep yep so what solid decision would you make I mean what is reality if it's not what you're experiencing right if you're experiencing something but it's it's not tactile in the sense like you can't drag it somewhere and put it on a scale and take a ruler to it and measure it but in the moment of being there it seems like it is what is missing what is missing well it's not

116:41real well what is real then what is real well that's the ultimate question in terms of like are we living in a simulation that's one of the things that Ilan brought up when I was talking to him and this is one thing that people have struggled with if we are one day going to come up with an artificial it's indiscernible from reality in terms of emotions in terms of experiences feel touch smell all of the sensory input that you get from the regular world if that's inevitable if one day we do come up with that how are we to discern whether or not we have already created that and we're stuck in it right now that we can't and there's a lot of philosophical arguments for that but it gets it to ya the nature of reality it's I mean it's fascinating because we're okay we're totally clueless about what it means to be real what amounts to exist to exist so consciousness for us I mean it's

117:38incredible you could like look at your own hand like I'm pretty sure I'm on the Joe Rogan experience podcast I'm pretty sure this is not real I'm imagining all that there's a knife in front of me I mean it's surreal and I have no proof that it's not fake and and those kinds of things actually come into play with the way we think about artificial intelligence to like what is intelligence right it seems like it seems like we're easily impressed by by algorithms and robots we create that appear to have intelligence but we still don't know what is intelligent how close those things are to us and we think that ourselves as this biological entity that can think and talk and cry and laugh that we're somehow another more important than sort of some sort of silicon-based thing that we create that does everything that we do but far better yeah I think I think if I were to

118:35take a stand still right stand I hope I'm young a one day run for president on this platform by the way that's defending the right so I can because I'm rushing but maybe they'll change the rules that you know robots will have rights and I uh you know robots lives matter and I actually believe that we're going to have to start struggling with the idea of how we interact with robots I've seen too often the abuse of robots and not just the Boston Dynamics but literally people you leave them alone with the robot the dark nature of human human the dark human nature comes out and it's worrying to me I would like a robot that's sparse but only can move it like fifty percent of what I can move out so I could it up yeah you'd be able to practice like really well like you would develop like some awesome like sparring instincts yeah I Robot but there would still be

119:33consequences like if you did up and you got lazy and it leg kicked you didn't check it it would hurt I would love to see like a livestream of that session because the you know there's so many ways I used to I mean I practiced on a dummy there's aspects to a dummy that's helpful yeah in terms of positioning and where your stance is and technique to it I could certainly that going see that going wrong in ways where a robot might not respect you tapping yeah oh well it says to beat you to death it's tired are you it up every day and one day you get tired or what if you sprain your ankle and it gets on top of you and mounts you and just starts blast you in the face and does a heel hook or something right you'd have to be able to say stop well then no you're gonna have to use your martial art to defend yourself Yeah right because if you make it too easy

120:26for the robot to just stopping time then you're not going really gonna learn like one of the consequences of training if you're out of shape is if you get tired people you up and that's incentive for you to not get tired like there's so many times that I would be in the gym like doing strength and conditioning and I think about moments where I got tapped where guys caught me in something I was exhausted I couldn't get out of the triangle I'm like and I just I just really push on the treadmill or you know push on the you know airdyne bike or whatever it was that I was doing thinking about those moments of getting tired yeah those know thats what i think about when i do i experienced the stuff that was the the feeling of competition those nerves yeah stepping in there and just it's really hard to do that kind of visualization but it builds effective though and the the the feeling of

121:19consequences to you not having any energy so you have to muster up the energy because if you don't you're going to get or something Bad's gonna happen to someone you care about or something something's gonna happen to the world maybe you're a superhero you're saving the world from the robots that's right well I go back to what we're talking about sorry to interrupt you but just to bring this all back around but what is what is this life and what is consciousness and what is this experience and if you can replicate this experience in a way that's indiscernible will you choose to do that like if someone says to you hey Lex you don't have much time left but what we have an option we have an option and we can take your consciousness as you know it right now put it into this program you will have no idea that this has happened you're gonna close your eyes you're

122:11gonna wake up you're gonna be in the most beautiful green field it's gonna be naked women everywhere feasts everywhere you go it's gonna be just picnic tables filled with the most glorious food you're gonna drive around a Ferrari everyday and fly around in a plane you're never gonna die you're gonna have a great time or take your chances see what happens when the lights shut off well first of all I'm a simple man I don't need multiple women one is good I'm romantic I'll let you say but that's in this world this world you've got incentive to not be greedy in this other world where you can breathe underwater and fly through the air and you you know not I I believe that scarcity is the fundamental ingredient of happiness so if if you give me 72 virgins or whatever it is and just type one matter she requirement you know somebody intelligent and interesting who

123:11enjoys sexual intercourse well not just enjoy sexually like a person well that and keeps things interesting Lex we can engineer all this into your experience as you don't need all these different women I get it I understand yeah we've got this program for you don't worry about it okay you want one woman and a normal car like maybe a Saab or something like that nothing crazy Yeah right yeah but you're a simple man I get it no no but you need to adjust with someone who could beat you every now and right yeah but not just chess so engineers some flaws like because she needs to be able to lose her every once in a while yeah the matrix we're on the red dress which grow on the red dress that comes right here remember he goes like did you see notice the girl in the red dress it's like the one that catches his attention I remember this this is right at the very beginning when he's telling him

123:58what the matrix is she walks by right here oh there she is but BAM did you girl the guy afterwards it's like I'm telling you it's nice it's just not it's not well yeah but then I have certain features like I'm not an iPhone guy like Android so that that maybe an iPhone person's girl that's nonsense I thought if an iPhone came along that was better than Android you wouldn't want to use it no am I just definition of better is different like I know for me happiness lies in Android phones Android phones close connection with other human beings who are flawed but interesting or passionate about what they do yeah but this is all engineered into your program yeah that's that's I'm requesting features here yeah because your christening features but why why Android phones is that like I'm a Republican well I'm a democratic Android oh is that what you do any good in

124:55tribal not electronics I am totally not drivable I was just representing if I figured the girl in the red dress just seems like an iPhone as a feature set I imagine the kind of features I'm asking hot yeah and it seems like she's not interested in Dostoevsky how would you know that's so prejudiced of you just because she's beautiful and she's got a that's trending just I don't know that's very that's very you you sexist son of a I'm I'm sorry actually but that was totally she probably likes Nietzsche and does the S can come when I say she did her PhD in astrophysics mostly yeah no that's okay we're talking about all the trappings look at that BAM I'll take her all day iPhone Android involved in this Congress we take her if she's a Windows Phone how about that I don't give a Windows Phone come on I'll take her she's a Windows Phone I'll go with a flip phone from the early 2000s

125:53razor phone a Motorola RAZR phone with like 37 minutes of battery life but we're talking about all the learned experiences and preferences that you've developed in your time here and this actual real earth or what we're assuming is the actual real earth but how are we I mean if you're if you really are taking into account the possibility that one day some thing someone whether it's artificial intelligence figures it out or we figured out engineering a world us some sort of a simulation that is just as real as this world like where there is no there's no it's impossible to discern not only is it not in part not always impossible to discern people choose not to discern anymore because it's so what why bother why bother discerning that's a fascinating concept to me but I think that world not to sound hippie or anything but I think that I think we live in a world that's

126:58pretty damn good that is pretty good so but improving it with such fun flying ladies walking around is not necessarily that the Delta that's positive okay but that's one aspect of the improvement what about improving it and in this new world there's no drone attacks in Yemen that kill children I murder there's no rape there's no sexual harassment there's no there's no racism there's no any all the negative aspects of our current culture or engineer doubt I think I think a lot of religions have struggled this and of course I would say I was one a world without that but part of me thinks that our world is meaningful because of the suffering in the world right that's a real problem isn't it that's a real it's that is a fascinating concept it's almost impossible to ignore do you appreciate love because of all the hate you know one look if you have a hard time finding

127:55a girlfriend and just no one's compatible and honestly I just feel bad are you Halla letting the ladies know but if you if you do have a hard time connecting with someone then you finally do connect with someone off after all those years of loneliness and this person is perfectly compatible with you how much more will you appreciate them than the kind of like Dan Bilzerian was flying around at a private jet banging tens all day long yeah maybe he's drowning in his own sorrow maybe he's got too much too much prosperity man this you know yeah we have that with social networks to the people that I mean you're pretty famous in the amount of love you get us huge it's it might be because of the overflow of love it might be difficult to appreciate more like genuine little moments of love and it's not for me no I I spent a lot of time thinking about that and I also spent a lot I think time

128:55thinking about how Titanic Libas are my place in the world is I mean I think about it a lot and I spent a lot of time being poor and being a loser me my childhood was not the best I went through a lot of struggle when I was young that I cling to like a safety rep raft you know I don't I don't ever think there's something special about me and I try to let everybody know that you anybody could do what I've done you just have to just keep going though that's like 99% of this thing is just showing up and keep going keep improving keep working at things and keep going put the time in but the interesting thing is you haven't actually a couple days ago went back to your first podcast and listened to it you haven't really changed much so you were I mean the audio got a little better and but just like the you're the genuine nature of the way you interact hasn't changed and that's fascinating

129:54because you know Fame changes people well I was already famous then I just was all in a different way yeah I was famous I was already famous from Fear Factor I was already already had stand-up comedy specials I already had I had already been on a sitcom I wasn't as famous as I am now but I understood what it is I'm a big believer in adversity and struggle I think they're very important for you it's one of the reasons why I appreciate martial arts it's one of the reasons why I've been drawn to it as a learning tool not just as something where it's a puzzle that I'm fascinated to try to figure out how to get better at the puzzle and martial arts is a really good example because you're never really the best especially when there's just so many people doing it it's like you're always gonna get beat by guys and then I was never I was never putting the kind of

130:46time into it as an adult outside of my Taekwondo competition I was never really putting all day every day into it like a lot of people that I would train would and so I'd always get dominated by the really best guys so this certain amount of humility that comes from that as well but there's there's a struggle in that you're learning about yourself and your own limits and the limits of the the human mind and endurance and just not understanding all the various interactions of techniques and that you know there's some there's humility to that in that I've always described martial arts as a vehicle for developing your own human potential but I think marathon running has similar aspects I think when you're just you figure out a way to keep pushing and push through the control of your mind and your desire and overcoming adversity I think overcoming adversity is critical for the human

131:43because for humans we have this this these this set of reward systems that are designed to to reward us for overcoming for overcoming obstacles for overcoming relationship struggles for overcoming physical limitations and those rewards are great and they're some of the most amazing moments in life when you do overcome and I think this is sort of engineered into the system so for me Fame is almost like a cheat code it's like you don't really want it don't dwell on that man like that is that's like a free buffet like you don't you know you want to go hunt your own food you want to make your own fire you want to cook yourself and feel the satisfaction you don't want people feeding you grapes while you lie down what is the hardest thing so you talk about a challenge a lot what's the hardest thing you've won we'll have you been really humbled martial arts for

132:44sure the mumbling yeah from the moment I started I mean I got really good at Taekwondo but even then I'd still get the beaten out of me by my friends I got training part especially when you're tired and you're doing and you're rotating partners and guys are bigger than you it's just it's just humbling you know martial arts very humbling yes is that I and I gotta call you out on something so you talk about education system sometimes I've heard you say a little broken in high school and so on I'm not really calling out I just I just want to talk about it because I think it's important and there's somebody who loves math he talked but your own journey was school didn't give you passion value well you could maybe talk to that but I for me what I always maybe I'm sick in the head or something but for me math was exciting the way martial arts what we're exciting for you

133:44because it was really hard I wanted to quit and the idea with education I have that that that seems to be flawed nowadays a little bit is that we want to make education easier that we want to make you know more accessible and so on accessible of course is great but you kind of forget in that and that those are all good goals you forget in that that it's supposed to be all so hard hmm and like teachers just the way your wrestling coach if you like quit you say I can't do anymore I have to come up with some kind of excuse your wrestling coach looks at you wants to say get your ass back on the mat the same way I wish math teachers did that when people say it's almost like cool now to say I it's not math sucks that's not for me or science sucks as his bush teacher is boring I think their dish there's room for some culture or says no no you're not if you just put in the time and you

134:42struggle then that opens up the universe to you like whether you become Tyson or the next Fields Medal winner in mathematics I would not argue with you for one second I would also say that one of the more beautiful things about human beings is that we vary so much and that one person who is just obsessed with playing the trombone and to me I don't give a about trombones but that's okay like I can't be obsessed about everything some people love golf and they just want to play it all day long I've never played golf a day in my life set miniature golf and just around but that doesn't it's not bad or good and I think there's there's definitely some skills that you learn from mathematics that are hugely significant if you want to go into type of fields that you're involved in for me it's never been appealing but it's not that it was just difficult it's also that

135:40it's just for whatever reason who I was at that time in that school with those teachers having a life experience that I had that was not what I was drawn to but I was drawn to his literature I was drawn to reading I was drawn to stories I was drawn to possibilities and creativity I was drawn to all those things you're an artist of it - yeah yeah I used to be I just want to be a comic book illustrator that was that was a big thing when I was young I was really into comic books I was really into traditional comic books and also a lot of the horror comics from the 1970s a black and white like creepy and eerie did you ever see those things creepy and eerie like black and white yeah they were there were a comic book series that existed like way back in the day was all they were all horror and they were like really cool illustrations and these wild stories but it was comic books but they

136:37were all black and white that's creepy and eerie that's the actual name yeah eerie and creepy were the names - like that was from what year was that it says September but it doesn't tell you what year but I used to get these when I was a little kid man I was like eight nine years old in the 70s good and evil yeah it was they were they were my favorite like that's a cover of them and like even have like covers that were done by like Frank Frazetta Boris Vallejo and just really cool and I was fat those who I loved those when I was little I was always really into horror movies and really into like Bram like look at this werewolf one that was one of my favorite ones that was a crazy werewolf that was like about all-fours who's the hero usually superheroes everybody dies no that's the beautiful thing about everybody gets over there's nobody that was the thing that I

137:31really liked about them was like nobody made it out alive there was no one guy who figured it out and rescued the woman and they wrote off in the sunset uh-uh but you would turn the corner and they'd be a pack of wolves with glowing eyes waiting to tear everybody apart and that'd be the end of the book and I just I was just really into the illustrations I found them fascinating I just I loved those kind of horror movies and I loved those kinds of illustris so that's what I wanted to do when I was young yeah I think the education system is probably we talked about creativity it's probably not as good at inspiring and feeding that creativity because I think math and wrestling can be taught systematically I think creativity is something well actually I know nothing about it so I think it's harder to take somebody like you when you're young and say and

138:20inspire you to pursue that fire whatever is inside one of the best ways to inspire people is by giving them giving them these alternatives that are so uninteresting like saying you're gonna get a job selling washing machines you like that I'm gonna figure out a way to not get a job selling washing machines like some of the best motivations that I've ever had have been terrible jobs because you have these terrible jobs you go okay that I'm gonna figure out a way to not do this you know and whether you want to call it a DD or ADHD or whatever it is it makes kids squirm in class I didn't squirm in every class I didn't squirm in science class I didn't squirm in in you know in interesting subjects there's things that were interesting to me that I would be locked in and completely fascinated by and there was things where I just couldn't wait to run out of that room and I don't know what

139:20the reason is but I do know that a lot of what we call our education system is engineered for a very specific result and that result is you want to get a kid who can sit in class and learn so that they could sit in a job and perform and that for whatever reason that was just I mean I didn't have the ideal childhood maybe maybe if I did I would be more inclined to lean that way but I didn't want to do anything like that like I couldn't wait to get the out of school so I did never have to listen to anybody like that again and then just a few years later I mean you graduate from high school when you're 18 when I was 21 I was a stand-up comic and I was like I found it this is it I'm like good I found there's an actual job that nobody told me about where you could just make fun of and people go out and they pay money to hear you create jokes and routines and bits really you weren't

140:16terrified of not getting on stage and I was definitely nervous the first time probably more nervous and it was harder than fighting no respect it's different it's different the consequences aren't as grave but that's one are they not know how like embarrassment and you're not you don't get pummeled I mean there's just there's you there's you could say like emotionally it's probably more devastating or as devastating but man losing a fight is it you up for a long time you feel like for a long time um but then you win you feel amazing for a long time too when you kill on stage you only feel good for like an hour so and that goes away it feels normal it's just normal it's this life you know but I think that it prepared me like competing in martial arts the fear of that and then how hard it is to like to stand opposite another person who's the same size as you who's equally well

141:16trained who's also martial arts expert and they asked you were you ready are you ready you bow to each other and then they go fight and then you're like here we go like that to me probably was like one of the best prep and to do that from the time I was 15 until I was 21 was probably the best preparation for anything that was difficult too because it was so scary and then to go from that and to stand up I think it prepared me for stand up because I was already used to doing things that were scary and now I seek scary things out I think I seek difficult things I picking up the bow and learning that yes archery which is really difficult I mean there's some nights when our reasons why I got attracted even to playing pool pool is very difficult it's very difficult to control your nerves on high pressure situations yeah so that there's there's there's some benefits of that but here

142:11but it goes back to what you were saying earlier how much of all this stuff like when you're saying that scarcity there's there's there's real value in scarcity and that there's real value in struggle and there's how much of all this is just engineered into our human system that has given us the tools and the incentive to make it to 2018 with the human species yeah I think it's whoever the engineer is whether it's God or nature or whatever I think it's engineered in somehow mm-hmm that's we get to think about that when you try to create an artificial intelligence system when you imagine what's a perfect system for you we talked about this with with the lady what's the perfect system for you if you had a really put down on paper and engineer what's the experience of your life when you start to realize it actually looks a lot like your current life so this is the problem that

143:07companies are facing like Amazon and trying to create Alexa what do you want from Alexa do you want a tool that says what the weather is or do you want to Alexa to say Joe I don't want to talk to you right now I have Alexa well you have to work her over like Alexa come on what did I do I'm sorry listen if I was rude I I was insensitive I was tired the commute was really rough and they should be like I'm seeing somebody else do you remember avatar depression the movie avatar and depression is a psychological effect after the movie yeah it was a real term that people were using that psychologists were using because people would see the movie avatar which I loved a lot of people said oh that's Pocahontas with blue people to those people I say off you want to talk about suspension of disbelief that to me that movie was the ultimate suspension of disbelief I loved that movie

144:08I loved I can't I know James Cameron's working on like 15 sequels right now all simultaneously I wished that would dole them out he's like a crack dealer that gets you hooked once and then you just wait and outside in the cold shivering for years avatar depression was a psychological term that psychologists were using to describe this mass influx of people that saw that movie and were so enthralled by the way the Navi lived in Pandorum that they they came back to this stupid world alive they wanted to be like the blue guy in Avatar and it also there was a there's a mechanism in that film where this regular person became a Navi he became it through the avatar and then eventually that tree of life or whatever it was they transferred his essence into this creation this avatar and he became one of them he became one of them he absorbed their culture and it was very

145:10much like our romanticized versions of the Native Americans that they lived in symbiotic relationship with the earth they only took what they needed they they had a spiritual connection to their food and to nature and to the just their existence it was was Noble and it was honorable and it wasn't selfish and it was powerful and it was spiritual and that we're missing these things we're missing these things and I think we are better at romanticizing them and craving them as opposed to living them as I mean you look at movies like happy people with the life in the tie god and life in the taiga yeah I'm Russian son or her socks film yeah party who wants to be like well I want to be out there in nature focusing on simple survival setting traps for animals cooking some soup mm-hmm a family around you and just kind of focusing on the basics but and I'm the

146:12same way like I go out you know hiking and I go out in nature I would love to pick up hunting and I won't I crave that but um if you just put me in the forest I'll probably and be like here I'm taking your phone away and you're staying here that's it you're never going to return to your Facebook and your Twitter and your and your robots I don't know if I'll be so romantic about that notion anymore I don't know either but I think that's also the genie in the bottle right discussion they think that genies been out of the bottle for so long you'd be like but what am i Facebook what if I got some messages okay let me check my email real quick no no we're in the forest there's no Wi-Fi out here no Wi-Fi ever what the how do you people get your porn like this is still porn no no that's another understudied again not an expert but the impact of internet pornography on culture oh yeah I'm it's

147:10significant and also ignored to a certain extent and if not ignored definitely purposefully left out of the conversation yeah there's a another PhD student a person from Google came to give a Tech Talk and he opened by saying 90% of you and the audience have this month Google the pornographic term in our search engine and it was really is a great opener because people were just all really uncomfortable yeah because we just kind of hide it away into this but it certainly has an impact well I think there's a suppression aspect to that too that's unhealthy we said we we have a suppression of our sexuality because we think that somehow another its negative right you know and especially for women I mean for women like men a man who is a sexual Conqueror is thought to be a stud whereas a woman who seeks out multiple desirable sexual partners is thought to

148:15be troubled there's something wrong with her you know they they're criticized there they use terms like we used earlier like or you know there's no you call man a male they'll start laughing yup that's me dude like men don't give a about that it's not it's not stigmatized but somehow or another through our culture it's stigmatized for women and then the idea of masturbation is stigmatized these all these different things that we are Puritan roots of our society start showing and our religious ideology starts showing when we discuss our our issues that we have with sex in pornography right and for me this is something I think about a little bit because my dream is to create an artificial intelligence a human centered artificial intelligence system that provides a deep meaningful connection with another human being and you have to consider the fact that pornography or

149:16sex dolls will be part of the journey somehow in society something you're the dummy they'll be using for martial arts would likely to be an out of sex robots and we have to think about what's the impact of those kinds of robots on society but women in particular are violently opposed to sex robots I've read I read a couple articles written by women about sex robots and the possibility of future sex robots and the I wouldn't say violently but it's always negative so is the idea that men would want to have sex with some beautiful thing that's programmed to love them as opposed to earning the love of a woman but you don't hear that same interpretation from men from men it's it seems to be that there's a thought about maybe it's kind of gross but also that it's inevitable and that and then there's like this like sort of nod to it like how crazy would that be if you have the perfect

150:16woman like the red won't the woman in the red dress the matrix yeah but comes over your house and she's perfect because you're not thinking about the alternative which is a male robot doll which will now be able to satisfy your girlfriend wife better than you I think you'll hear from guys a lot more than ah maybe or maybe I start commuting luck with her she's annoying she's always yelling at me let her yell at the robot he isn't that he's not gonna care then that robot turns into a grappling yeah and maybe she can get just go ahead and get fat with the robot he's not even care go ahead just sit around eat Cheetos all day and screaming him he's your he's your your slave good I mean he could worth both ways right you can work the same way that a man would you know a woman would see a man that is interested in a sex robot to be disgusting and pathetic a man could see the same thing

151:15in a woman that's interested in a sex robot like okay that is that what you want you some crude thing that just wants physical pleasure and you don't even care about a real actual emotional connection to a biological human being like okay well then you're not my kind of woman anyway yeah and I'm but if done well so those are the kinds of in terms of threats of AI to me it can change the fabric of society because like I'm old school in a sense I I I like monogamy for example you know well you say that because you don't have a girlfriend so yeah wanted for one is better is there well no the real reason have a girlfriend is because and it's fascinating with people like you actually with Elon Musk like the time yes is there's a huge challenge because because of how much in romantic I am because how much I care about people around me I feel like it's a significant

152:08investment of time and also the amount of work that you do I mean if you're if you're dedicated to a passion like artificial intelligence and the sheer amount of studying and research and and programming to there's certain disciplines in which you have to certain disciplines require like super impressive talks about writing you can get pretty far with 2-3 hours a day when you're programming when you're a lot of the engineering tasks they just take of hours it's just hard which is why I really want one of the reasons I may disagree with y'all my school but bunch of things but he's an inspiration cuz I think he's a pretty good dad right and he finds the time for his sons while being probably an order of magnitude busier than I am and it's fascinating to me how that's possible well once you have children I mean there obviously are people that are bad dads

153:01but once you have children your life shifts in an almost it's an indescribable way because you're you're different it's not just that your life is different when you have a child like your daily there hasn't been a moment while we're having this conversation I have them thinking about my children thinking about what they're doing where they are it's always running in the background it's a part of life you're you're connected to these people that you love so much and they rely on you for guidance and for for warmth and affection and but how did your life have to change well your life you just changed man when you see the baby you change when you when you start feeding them you change when you hold them you change when you you hold their hand while they walk you change when they ask you questions you change when they laugh and giggle you change when they smack

153:54you in the face and you pretend to fall down they laugh you change you know everything you just change man you change you become a different thing you become a dad so you almost can't help but the people do help but though that's what's sad some people resist it I mean I've know people that have been terrible terrible parents they just they'd rather stay out all night and never come home and they don't want to take care of their kids and they get they split up with the wife or the girlfriend who's got the kid and they don't give child support them it's a really common theme man I mean there's a lot of men out there that don't pay child support that's a dark dark thing you have a child out there that needs food and you don't want you're so selfish you don't want to provide resources not only you not want to be there for companionship you don't want to provide

154:42resources to pay for the child's food you don't feel responsible for I mean that was my case when I was a kid my dad didn't pay child support and we were very poor it's one of the reasons why we were so poor and I know other people that have had that same experience so it's not everyone that becomes a father or that impregnates I should say a woman and becomes a and and the other side is true too there's women that are terrible mothers for whatever reason I mean maybe they're broken psychologically maybe they have mental health issues well whatever it is there's some women that are terrible moms and it's sad but it makes you appreciate women that a great mom so much more yeah yeah what I want to see you guys like you the inspiration is so I'm looking for sort of structural what's the process to then fit people into your life but what I hear is when it happens you just do you

155:37just always but that's this is a thing man we're not living in a book right we're not living in a movie it doesn't always happen like you have to decide that you want it to happen and you got to go looking for it because if you don't you could just be older and it's still alone time goes it's a lot of my friends they've never had kids and now they're in their 50s I mean comedians yeah you have to be on the road a lot not just in the road you you have to be obsessed with comedy like it's it's got to be something you're you're always writing new jokes because you're always writing a new especially if you put out a special right you put like I just did a Netflix special it's out now so I really have like a half hour new material that's it and I'm great by the way sometimes thank you from the first special I've watched it was actually really weird decided to

156:21go on a tangent but I've listened to you quite a bit but I've never looked at you doing comedy and it was so different because like here you're just like like improv are you like a jazz musician here it's like a regular conversation the stand-up special it was clear like that's like everything is perfect the timing it's like watching you do a different art almost it is kind of interesting it's like a song or something it's like you don't it's not there's some riffing to it there's some improvisation to it but it's all so there's a very clear structure to it but that's that's theirs it's so time intensive and you have to you gotta be obsessed with it to continue to do something like that so for some people that travel in the road that takes priority over all things including relationships and then you never really settle down and so you never you never have a significant relationship with

157:15someone that you can have a child with and I know many friends that are like that and no friends have gotten vasectomies because they don't want it they like this life and there's nothing wrong with that either you know that I always was upset by this notion that in order to be a full and complete adult you have to have a child you have to be a parent and I think even as a parent where I think it's probably one of the most significant things in my life I reject that notion I think you could absolutely be a fully developed person and amazing influence in society and amazing contributor to your culture in your community without ever having a child with you're a man or a woman it's entirely possible and the idea that it's not a silly like we're all different in so many different ways you know and we contribute in so many different ways like sim there's going to be people that

158:04are obsessed with mathematics there's going to be people that are obsessed with literature there's gonna be people that are obsessed with music and they don't all have to be the same person because you really don't have enough time for it to be the same person you know and there's there's going to be people that love having children they love being a dad or love being a mom and there's gonna be people that don't to have nothing to do with that and they get snipped early and they're like off I'm gonna smoke cigarettes and drink booze and I'm gonna fly around the world and talk and those people are okay too like it's the way we interact with each other that's most important that's what I think the way human beings to do way we form bonds and friendships the way we we contribute to each other's lives the way we we we find our passion and create those things are what's really important

158:52yeah but there's also an element just looking at my parents I think they got they're still together that gotten together what it means standards you get to go when you're like 20 or actually notice 23:28 whatever young and there's an element there where you don't want to be too rational you just want to be just dive in right should you be and I'm I'm a fighter should you be like a I'm an academia now so I'm a research scientist MIT the pay is much much lower than all the offers I'm getting non-stop as it rational I don't know what your passion is doing what you're doing currently yeah but it's like it's what are the other offers like what kind of other jobs and are they appealing in any way yeah yeah they're appealing so I I'm making a decision that's similar to actually get married which is so the offers are well I shouldn't call them up a Google faced with the usual the usual

159:51AI research pretty high positions and the I'm a did you supplement me that says I the edge the chaos of this environment at MIT is something I'm drawn to it doesn't make sense so I can do what I'm passionate about in a lot of places you just kind of dive in Navis I had a sense that a lot of our culture creates that momentum you just kind of have to go with it and that that's why my parents got together like a lot of people they're probably I mean a lot of people couples wouldn't be together if they weren't kind of culturally forced to be together and divorce was such a negative thing and they grew together and be created a super happy connection so I'm a little afraid of over rationality about choosing the path of life so you're saying like monogamy doesn't know or not monogamy relationship don't always make sense they don't have to make sense you know

160:47what I think I'm a big believer in doing what you want to do and if you want to be involved in a monogamous relationship I think you should do it but if you don't want to be involved one I think you should do that too I mean if you want to be like a nomad and travel around the world and just live out of a backpack I don't think there's anything wrong with that as long as you're healthy and you survive and you're not depressed and you're not longing for something that you're not participating in but I think when you are doing something you don't want to be doing it it brings me - was it the rose quote I guess I always up who made this what yeah most men live lives of silent desperation that's that's real man that's a real that's real that's what you don't want I think it's Thoreau right you don't want silent desperation yeah I love that quote because I've

161:42seen I seen it in so many people's faces and that's one thing I've managed to avoid and I don't know if I avoided that by luck or just by fact I'm stupid and I just I just follow my instincts whether they're right or wrong or and I make it work but this goes back to what we were discussing when in terms of what is the nature of reality and what what are these are the are we just finding these romanticized interpretations of our own biological needs and our human reward systems that's creating these beautiful visions of what is life and what is important poetry and food and music and all the passions and dancing and holding someone in your arms that you care for deeply and like all those things just little tricks are all those little biological tricks in order just to keep keep on this very strange dance of human civilization so that we can keep on creating new and better products that

162:41keep on moving innovation towards this ultimate eventual goal of artificial intelligence giving birth to the gods yeah giving birth to the gods yeah so you know I did want to mention one thing about the one thing I really I don't understand fully but I've been thinking about for the last couple years at the application of artificial intelligence to went to politics yeah I've heard you talked about sort of government being broken in the sense that one guy one president that doesn't make any sense I see you you get like we you know people get hundreds of millions of likes on their Facebook pictures and Instagram and we're always voting with our fingers every single day and yet for the action process it seems that we're voting like once every four years it feels like this new technology could bring about a world where the voice of the people can be heard on a daily basis

163:43like where you could speak about the issues you care about whether it's gun control and abortion all these topics that are so Heatley so debated it feels like there needs to be an Instagram for our elections hmm I agree you know and and I think there's room for that I've been thinking about how to write a few papers of proposing different technologies it just feels like the people that are playing politics need to are old-school the only problem with that is like the influencers right if you look at Instagram I mean should Nicki Minaj be able to decide how the world works cuz she's got the most followers should Kim Kardashian like who's influencing things and why and you have to deal with the fickle nature of human beings and do we give enough patience towards the decisions of these so-called leaders that were electing dude or do you just decide them they're out new person in because we

164:41have like a really short attention span it comes to thing especially today the new cycles so quick so the same process so the Instagram might be a bad example because yeah you get or Twitter you start following Donald Trump or and you start to sort of idolize these certain icons that do we necessarily want them to represent us I was more thinking about the the Amazon product reviews model recommender systems or Netflix the movies you've watched the Netflix learning enough about you to represent you in your next movie selection so in the kind of movies like what are you like you Joe Rogan what are the kind of movies that you would like the recommender systems these are artificial intelligence systems learn based on your Netflix election that could be deeper understanding of who you are then you're even aware of and I think there's that element I'm not sure exactly but there's

165:38that element of learning who you are like do you think drugs should be legalized or not I do you think do you think immigration should we let everybody in I'll keep everybody out should we all these topics with a red and blue teams now have a hard answer of course you keep all the immigrants out or of course you need to be more compassionate of course but for most people it's really a gray area and exploring that gray area the way you would explore the gray area of Netflix what is the next movie you're watching do you want to watch The Little Mermaid or Godfather 2 what what that process of understanding who you are just it feels like that there's room for that well the problem is of course that you have there's grave consequences to these decisions that you're going to make in terms of the way it affects the community and you might not have any information that you're

166:37basing this on at all you might be basing all these decisions on misinformation propaganda nonsense advertising you be easily influenced you might not have looked into it at all you could be ignorant about the subject and it might just appeal to certain dynamics that have been programmed into your brain because you grew up religious or you grew up in a theist or you know the real problem is whether or not people are educated about the consequences of what these decisions are going to get the information yeah and then I think I mean I think there's going to be a time in our in our life where our ability to access information is many steps better than it is now with smartphones I think we're going like what Elon Musk has some neural link thing that he's working on right now he's being very vague about it increased the bandwidth yeah our human interaction of machines is what he's

167:34working on yeah I'm I'm very interested to see where this leads but I think that we can assume that because something like the internet came along and because it's so accessible to you and I right now with your phone just pick it up say hey Google what the is this and then you get the you get the answer almost instantaneously well that's gonna change what a purse as that advances and I think we're much more likely looking at some sort of a symbiotic connection between us and artificial intelligence and computer augmented access to information then we are looking at the rise of some artificial being that takes us over and our girlfriend Wow yeah that's the real existential threat yeah I think so that's to me is super exciting the phone is a portal to this collective that we have this collective consciousness and it gives people a voice I would say if anyone's like me

168:35you really know very little about the politicians you're voting for or even the issues like global warming I'm embarrassed to say I like I know very little about like if I'm actually being honest with myself I've heard different like I know what I'm supposed to believe right as a scientist but I actually know nothing about hungry and nothing concrete about process but the avaya the environmental process and why is it so certain you know it's scientist apparently completely agrees so as a scientist I kind of take on faith oftentimes what the community agrees in my own discipline I questioned but outside I just kind of take on faith in the same thing with gun control and so on you just kind of say which team of my own and I'm just gonna take that honor I just feel like it's such a disruptive space to where people could be given just a tiny bit more information to help

169:30them well maybe that's where something like neuro-link comes along and just enhances our ability to access this stuff in a way that's much more just more tangible than just being able to Google search it and maybe this is this process is something that we really can't anticipate it's gotta have to happen to us just like who we're talking about cell phone images that you could just send to Australia with the click of a button that no one would have ever anticipated that three hundred years ago maybe we are beyond our our capacity for understanding the impact of all this yeah yeah many kids coming up now what is that world gonna look like when you're too old to you'll be sitting you'll be like 95 sitting on a porch with a shotgun and what do those kids look like when they're 18 years old robots x-ray vision and they could read minds yeah well you're gonna happen you'd be saying

170:23robots are everywhere these days back back in my day we used to put robots in their place yeah all right yeah we're serving shut them off yeah ugh and now your mom now they want to go to the same school as us yeah and they want to they want to run for president yeah they want to run for president yeah they're more compassionate and smarter but we still hate them because they don't go to the bathroom yeah well not we half the country we hate them and the other will love them and Abraham Lincoln character will come along that's not pitching on my cell phone tell you ever have Lincoln of the robot world on the robot world that's the speeches that everybody quotes and one other thing I got to say about academia okay in defense of academia so you've had a lot of really smart people on including sam harris and jordan peterson and often the word academia is used to

171:17replace a certain concept so I'm part of academia and most of academia is engineering his biology is medicine is hard sciences the humanities that are slippery exactly in humanity and I think a subset of humanities that I know nothing about and they're said I don't want to speak about the understudies say it I don't know I don't know so I been a man Candyman I actually live on Harvard campus so I got and I'm at MIT but I live on Harvard campus and it's their way of apartments for you guys how does that work yeah they hand them out I know I just I don't really live on the campus what do you mean oh sorry like in the Harvard Square Oh Harvard Square in Cambridge in Cambridge yeah yeah so I I used to go to catch a rising star when it existed they used to be a great comedy club in Cambridge there's a few uh there's a few good comedy clubs there right well there's a

172:12Chinese restaurant that uh that has stand up there still how does that work well it's upstairs there's like this comedy club up there yeah do you ever because you've done I think your specials in Boston yes I did at the Wilbur theater have you ever considered just go back to Boston doing like that Chinese restaurant ding ho yeah that was before my time when I came around I started in 1988 the dingo had already ended but I you know I got to be friends with guys like Lenny Clarke and Tony V and all these people that told me about the dingo and Kenny Rogers and the the comics that were and Barry Crimmins who just passed away rest in peace who was really the The Godfather of that whole scene and one of the the major reasons why that scene was so so that had such really some rock-solid morals and ethics when it came to the creation of material and standards it

173:10was a lot of it was Barry Crimmins because he was just that's just who he was as a person you know but that was before my time I came around when they would I came around like four years after that stuff and so there was tons of comedy clubs it was everywhere but I just didn't get a chance to be around that uh that dingo scene and you stayed in Boston for how many before you moved out here uh I was in New York in by the time night I think I was in New York by 92 91 92 so Boston for what four or five years to and stand up how'd you get to from Boston to New York I won Jesus opportunity for you to talk about Connecticut it's become a running theme to talk about Connecticut I've heard you do it once Tony was horrible I go I told you you should've listened to me don't book gigs in Connecticut wrong with you this 49 other states but go to Alaska it's great you go back to

174:20Boston and do like small gigs small sometimes yeah I'll do yeah laughs Boston is a great club I used to do Nick Tommy stop and all the other ones there but yeah I you know I love the the world was a great place to perform I love Boston I would live there wasn't so cold in the winter that's what keeps people like me out keeps the away listen we gotta end this we got to wrap it up we've already be done three hours holy flies by it did it flew by can't say - sure sure so first I gotta give a shout-out to my shout out shout out to a long longtime friend Matt her Andy from Chicago there's been there all along he's a fan of the podcast so he's probably listening him and his wife Adi I just had a beautiful baby girl so I want to just send my love to him and I told myself all ended this way okay let me end it the way you want to ended it love is the answer

175:17love is the answer it probably is unless you're a robot by