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May 7, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:59:57
Joe Rogan Experience #1292 - Lex Fridman
Participants
Main voices
j
joe rogan
01:23:21
l
lex fridman
01:30:26
Appearances
j
jamie vernon
02:14
Clips
d
donald j trump
00:01
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Speaker Time Text
joe rogan
Ready?
Boom!
And we're live.
Hello, Lex.
lex fridman
Hey.
joe rogan
What's going on?
lex fridman
The sequel, part two.
joe rogan
You have a very similar, if not the exact same suit on.
lex fridman
This is all I wear.
joe rogan
You look very professional.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Very, um, Reservoir Dogs.
lex fridman
Reservoir Dogs?
Well, let's go to the best sequel of all time, Godfather Part 2. Is that the best sequel of all time?
joe rogan
I think John Wick might be.
lex fridman
I haven't seen John Wick.
unidentified
Same suit?
lex fridman
How dare you, sir?
Godfather Part 2, I mean, that has to be the best sequel.
joe rogan
Okay.
lex fridman
And if this is Godfather Part 2, let's definitely not do Part 3. Yeah, part three was terrible, right?
Well, let's not offend anyone, but it was not up to far.
joe rogan
It wasn't as good.
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
I don't remember it.
lex fridman
It was the older Pacino.
joe rogan
Oh.
lex fridman
With that deeper voice.
joe rogan
Oh, that was like way later, right?
lex fridman
Yeah.
That was 90s.
joe rogan
Oh, okay.
So it's like Point Break, the remix.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
When they try to redo things way, way, way later, they almost never...
Except the Alien franchise.
They've done a pretty fucking good job with the Alien franchise.
They had a couple of duds in there, but for the most part.
lex fridman
I've actually never seen the Alien franchise.
unidentified
What?
joe rogan
Who are you?
lex fridman
What's wrong with you?
joe rogan
Aren't you into science?
lex fridman
Intelligent men can disagree, but...
joe rogan
You're not into science?
lex fridman
I don't know.
I prefer Al Pacino, I would say.
joe rogan
Okay.
lex fridman
The older Senta woman, Al Pacino, you know that movie?
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
Yeah.
unidentified
What?
joe rogan
Over Alien?
lex fridman
Come on.
Yeah, he got the Oscar for that one.
joe rogan
What about the one when he played the devil?
And the devil likes to rant!
lex fridman
Okay, there's two.
There's duds for everybody.
unidentified
What was that one?
jamie vernon
That was Advocate.
joe rogan
Uh-huh, there you go.
lex fridman
That was with Keanu Reeves.
joe rogan
Ah, Keanu Reeves from John Wick.
I heard John Wick Part 3 is very good.
lex fridman
Or The Matrix.
joe rogan
Whatever.
lex fridman
The better movie.
joe rogan
Not true!
jamie vernon
Did you see this?
That happened?
This high school in North Bergen, Jersey, put on the Alien play a couple weeks ago.
joe rogan
And Sigourney Weaver showed up, right?
jamie vernon
No, she showed up just the other day to say thanks or whatever and tell them they did awesome.
It looked crazy.
And I was just wondering, if they did this when you were in high school, do you think you might have joined drama?
Like if they did the Alien play?
joe rogan
No.
I would have loved it.
I would have watched it.
I'm not getting into drama.
Those people cry too much.
It's too much work.
It's a cool suit, though.
lex fridman
Yeah, okay.
Let's talk about this.
There's two kinds of movies.
There's fun movies and there's movies that are like transformational for society.
Okay, Scent of a Woman.
unidentified
What?
joe rogan
Are you going to say Scent of a Woman is transformational for society?
lex fridman
Yeah, it's one of the greatest scenes between a man and a woman on film.
The tango scene.
joe rogan
Are you not married?
lex fridman
No, I'm not married.
joe rogan
Yeah.
It's like someone talking about French who can't speak French.
lex fridman
I see, yeah.
joe rogan
It's nonsense.
That movie sucked.
unidentified
I read about French in a book.
lex fridman
Talking about France without ever being into Paris, yeah.
joe rogan
Is Scent of a Woman your favorite movie?
lex fridman
No, it's not my favorite movie.
joe rogan
I don't really think that movie sucked either, by the way, if you're getting mad right now.
I don't barely remember it.
lex fridman
But it is up there.
joe rogan
I'm sure it's a good movie.
lex fridman
It's one of the greatest performances by any actor ever.
unidentified
Jesus Christ, bro.
joe rogan
Jesus Christ, you okay?
lex fridman
We're off to a good start.
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
lex fridman
I bet you there's thousands of people who agree with me right now.
joe rogan
Yeah, there's millions that don't.
lex fridman
And they're called haters.
joe rogan
Everyone who disagrees is always a hater.
lex fridman
Okay, so what's your favorite love scene in a movie?
You need to get married, bro.
joe rogan
You're into love movies and shit?
lex fridman
No, I'm not.
joe rogan
You need to fire yourself a gal.
Settle down.
lex fridman
We're not talking about romantic comedies.
Adam Sandler here.
Rom-coms.
We're talking about serious, dramatic moments, right?
joe rogan
Okay.
lex fridman
So, Godfather.
joe rogan
Good movie.
lex fridman
Yeah, great movie.
unidentified
Great movie.
lex fridman
Does it have to have two guys shooting each other?
unidentified
No.
lex fridman
Okay.
So, you ever seen A Sent to a Woman?
joe rogan
Yeah, I'm sure I saw it.
Yeah, but I barely remember it.
lex fridman
All right.
joe rogan
I can watch it today.
It'll be like a new movie to me.
lex fridman
Okay.
There's this broken man.
Spoiler alert.
Considering suicide, right?
unidentified
Oh.
Okay.
lex fridman
It's deep.
So he is tortured by, you know, by his involvement in the war, by being responsible, all this kind of stuff.
He's now mentoring a younger version of himself who has more character, more integrity.
And throughout all of this, he meets this beautiful young woman.
He's blind.
He asks her for the dance and there's this beautiful moment where they connect.
I mean, okay, listen.
What's the purpose of film, right?
joe rogan
Entertainment.
lex fridman
Or make us think.
joe rogan
Make us think.
You're going to think if you want to think.
Nothing makes you think.
A film can engage you.
It can resonate with you or not.
I have a movie that I throw by people whenever I want to find out whether or not I want to listen to anything they have to say about movies.
The Big Lebowski.
lex fridman
Yeah, that's one of the greatest movies of all time.
joe rogan
Oh, look at you.
Okay.
lex fridman
That could be slightly better than Sent to a Woman.
joe rogan
Oh, boy.
lex fridman
That also is one of the greatest scenes between a man and a woman when the fine young lady is painting her toenails.
joe rogan
Right.
And she's offering him sex for money.
lex fridman
Yeah.
That's a beautiful moment too.
unidentified
You think so?
lex fridman
Yeah.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
Isn't that that girl that used to be a hot mess?
What's her name?
jamie vernon
Tara Reid.
joe rogan
Tara Reid?
Yeah.
Is she still a hot mess or does she get her shit together?
jamie vernon
She's been like the Sharknado series is what she's been doing recently.
unidentified
Oh, she's in that?
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
So I passed the Big Lebowski test, and you failed the Central Woman test.
joe rogan
Well, I don't remember it.
unidentified
I gotta wrap this conversation up.
joe rogan
I legitimately don't remember it.
I mean, I'm sure it's great.
I'm sure it's great.
You're a wise man.
If you like it, I'm sure it's good.
And you also recognize that Godfather 3 kind of sucks.
lex fridman
Yeah, yeah.
But I like the old Pacino.
Listen, Godfather is about...
Your people, the Italian people, have dominated the mob, the brilliant mob movies, right?
I mean, Godfather is about family, right?
There's something deeply genuine about that, that in our modern society we really crave for.
So it's bigger than the individual, bigger than the rules of society, the government, the man.
It's family above all.
That's like a...
I don't know.
That's timeless.
joe rogan
I agree with that.
lex fridman
The moment with the young Pacino when he talks to his brother, Fredo, says don't ever take sides against the family again, ever.
That's one of the greatest moments ever.
joe rogan
That's a great moment.
lex fridman
Alright, alright, alright.
I'm romanticizing movies here.
joe rogan
You didn't like John Wick though, huh?
lex fridman
Never seen it.
unidentified
Whoa.
lex fridman
I've never seen it.
joe rogan
It's a good movie to watch on the treadmill.
lex fridman
Is he playing a Russian mobster in that?
joe rogan
No, he kills a bunch of them, though.
And he speaks Russian.
He works for the Russians.
Kills people for the Russians.
lex fridman
Keanu Reeves is one of the greatest human beings ever.
joe rogan
You think so?
lex fridman
Yeah, he's like the nicest guy.
joe rogan
I heard he's a really nice guy.
But he plays a badass gangster.
I would like him to be a little bit more fit.
Work out a little bit more.
You see him without a shirt on, you're like, hmm, not quite buying it.
But that's okay.
jamie vernon
Average man.
joe rogan
Yeah, but the average man's not the fucking best assassin of all time.
With all this martial arts skill.
lex fridman
Fedor.
joe rogan
Yeah, but Fedor's big.
Fedor might have like a gut, but he's a thick motherfucker.
unidentified
Okay, what about...
joe rogan
Especially the young Fedor.
You ever see young Fedor when he was in his prime?
Like back when he fought like Fujita.
Like back when...
There's a picture of Fedor standing around with a bunch of kettlebells.
You ever see that picture?
lex fridman
Nope.
joe rogan
That was Fedor in his lifting days.
I suspect, and this is coming from...
That's one when Fedor was fairly young up there.
But that's not the one I'm talking about.
You know that one with the kettlebells?
Is that picture up?
See if you find that picture.
lex fridman
Never a six-pack in sight.
joe rogan
No, no six-pack.
But I suspect that Fedor might have been on some performance-enhancing substances during his prime.
lex fridman
You mean like hard training, lots of drilling, technique, sort of strategy?
unidentified
Steroids.
lex fridman
How dare you, sir?
joe rogan
Dude, he was in pride.
Everybody was on steroids.
Yeah, that's him.
Look at him.
That's him in his prime.
That's a big motherfucker.
Now, I do not know if he was on anything, but everybody else was.
I mean, literally everybody.
They had it in their contract that we will not test for steroids.
Ensign Inouye told me that they essentially encouraged people to take steroids.
lex fridman
Yeah, the pride days.
That's right.
joe rogan
It's not like Russians don't have a long history of using performance-enhancing substances.
I'm sure you saw that movie, Icarus.
Did you see it?
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
Fascinating, right?
lex fridman
It's fascinating.
Steroids often feel to me like a bit of a witch hunt.
assume people are on steroids i'm a bit of uh maybe i'm naive or an optimist but i tend to give people the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise but icarus obviously proves yeah icarus kind of throws a monkey wrench at those gears but you know with uh with fatal right the technique on that the technique the execution the timing the brilliance of his movement no doubt He's phenomenal.
joe rogan
If not the greatest heavyweight of all time, he's certainly one of them.
lex fridman
And I don't think steroids would help that guy.
joe rogan
Yes, they do.
They help.
lex fridman
That guy in particular?
joe rogan
Yeah, they help everything.
They help your training, they help your ability to recover, they help your explosive power, they help your speed, they help everything.
But they also, it's not just steroids.
Like, a lot of them are on EPO. EPO radically enhances your endurance.
And they're starting to catch people.
They just stripped TJ Dillashaw, UFC bantamweight champion for EPO. It's tragic.
Yes, it is tragic.
Especially TJ. I mean, he's just a phenomenal fighter.
If not, I mean, certainly top 10 pound for pound.
And then this is one of those things that comes up and you go, oh.
Man, it's a legacy killer.
lex fridman
In this world, we have to kind of reconsider what should be allowed or not.
joe rogan
Yeah, I agree with that.
lex fridman
There is an idea where you should make steroids legal, right?
Or not legal, sorry.
Allowed or some kind of supplementation.
Where's the line when you start to talk about the future of martial arts, the future of sport?
If you can control the levels so that they're healthy, I mean, isn't that the reason that they're not allowed is because if abused, they become unhealthy?
They damage long-term well-being of the person?
joe rogan
Look, if that was the case, we wouldn't allow fighting.
Because fighting is more damaging than steroids, for sure.
For sure.
Getting punched and kicked and fucking kneed in the face and elbowed into unconsciousness, that is way worse for you than steroids.
The concern is not for the athlete.
The concern is for the opponent.
The idea is that you will be able to inflict punishment that you would not ordinarily be able to inflict.
You will have more endurance.
You will have more power.
You will hurt someone, potentially even...
Look, there's going to be a time where someone dies in a mixed martial arts event.
And if that's someone who was the victor, who did not die, was on steroids, it is going to be a huge national tragedy and a massive disaster for the sport, for everything, if that ever does happen.
We can only hope it never does.
For sure.
It's a very, very dangerous game you're playing.
Martial arts is a very dangerous game.
And when you are enhancing your body with chemicals that are illegal while you're doing that game.
The real question is, though, here's my take on it.
It's one of the most human subjects, meaning that it's messy.
Humans are messy.
There's good and there's bad.
Look, abortion is a messy subject.
It's messy.
Whether you agree with someone's right to have it or not, it is what you're doing, especially as the fetus gets older, it's messy.
You know, when it's a complicated discussion, it's not a clear, it's not like you should drink water.
You know what I mean?
It's a very complicated discussion.
Steroids are a very complicated discussion.
You're not allowed to do them, but they exist for a reason.
The reason why they exist is they're really effective.
They're really effective at enhancing your body.
But how much of that will we allow?
We allow creatine, we allow supplements in terms of There's certain things that can slightly elevate your testosterone, slightly elevate your growth hormone.
We allow sauna and ice baths and all these things that have shown to enhance recovery, but that's too much.
It's too good.
They're too effective.
But it's weird.
It's weird that this thing that we found that makes you better, you can't use.
lex fridman
Yeah, and so I have to go back a little bit and disagree with you on something.
So in terms of fighting, being dangerous, and that's if we wanted to forbid things that are dangerous for you, we would forbid fighting.
I think the main thing you're doing can be dangerous, right?
The main thing that we're talking about, the sport...
The combat event.
That can be dangerous because that is what we watch.
Two people at the height of their skill, ability, heart, passion, putting their life at risk.
That can be dangerous.
But the supplementation around it, the way to make it To make their training better, more effective, that can't be dangerous.
joe rogan
That can't be dangerous?
lex fridman
Can't be dangerous.
So I thought steroids were considered, were sort of banned because abuses lead to long-term damage to health.
Now we see steroids as cheating, but it was banned initially because it has detrimental effects to your health.
joe rogan
No, because there's no real evidence that it's detrimental.
It's not as detrimental as alcohol when you allow people to drink.
But even when abused, where are the bodies?
There's a great documentary on it called Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
It's by my friend Chris Bell.
And when you watch that documentary and you realize, oh, well, the real negative consequences of taking steroids are that it shuts down your endocrine system.
So it stops your body's natural production.
Of testosterone and growth hormone and hormones.
That's the real problem.
And for young people, that can be very devastating.
And it can lead to depression and suicidal thoughts and all sorts of really bad things when your testosterone shuts down.
But as far as like death, boy, I mean, there's...
People are prescribed pain pills every day of the week, and fighters that are on injuries that have gotten surgery, they're prescribed pain pills every day of the week, and those pain pills kill people left and right.
That's just a fact.
People die of those things all the time, much more so than die of steroids.
I'm not advocating for the use of steroids.
I'm being pretty objective and neutral about this, but I'm just looking at it like it's a very messy subject.
lex fridman
Yeah, it's very eloquently put.
So your problem in terms of damaging the opponent is if one side takes steroids and the other doesn't.
joe rogan
Yes, exactly.
lex fridman
What happens if both?
joe rogan
The problem is you would require someone to do that.
Maybe someone's a holistic person.
and they don't want to introduce any unnatural exogenous steroids into their body and hormones into their body.
They want everything to be produced by the human body.
They want to eat healthy food, train hard, sleep well, and compete naturally.
lex fridman
Yeah, you had C.T. Fletcher here yesterday, right?
unidentified
Yes.
lex fridman
He's a natural bodybuilder.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
Or not bodybuilder.
joe rogan
Power lifter.
lex fridman
Power lifter.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
But that's not required, right?
You're not requiring people.
You're giving them the choice.
So, you know, it's an interesting possibility where in moderation you'll be able to allow steroids in future athletics because with an argument that if done in moderation you can actually create healthier athletes.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's a real argument for the Tour de France.
The Tour de France, they say that you actually are better off and healthier taking steroids and EPO than you are doing it without it because it's so unbelievably grueling on the body.
lex fridman
Yeah.
I mean, those athletes are basically some of the best people in the world at suffering.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Long-term suffering.
It's incredible.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Ultra-marathon runners, all those guys.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's a different sort of thing.
The thing about ultramarathon runners is they don't even test them.
Because they're like, good luck.
Those people have iron wills.
I don't know.
Like Courtney DeWalter is a woman who, you know who she is?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
She's been in here.
She eats candy.
She drinks beer, eats candy and pizza.
lex fridman
That doesn't make sense.
joe rogan
Yeah.
I mean, she's just got a fucking iron will.
Her will is indomitable.
And you could take all the steroids you want.
When you're running for three days, that chick is going to beat you.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
She just doesn't know how to quit.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
Just has no quit in her.
joe rogan
Did you see the podcast with her where she talked about how she fell?
She couldn't see.
She was experiencing, I think it was interocular hemorrhaging?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
So her eyeballs were bleeding internally, something like that, where it was impeding her vision.
She couldn't see.
I would stop.
I would stop running.
No, she fell because she couldn't see, busted her head open, bleeding all down her face, keeps running.
Barely can see her feet as she's running.
Keeps running.
lex fridman
I'm glad those people are out there.
I'm actually a bit like that.
I don't know how to quit.
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
Yeah.
I do a lot of stuff like that.
I ran yesterday.
I couldn't sleep.
I ran here yesterday, 13 miles.
I'm not a runner.
Just this weird obsession.
joe rogan
You don't run?
lex fridman
No, I run, but I'm not a runner.
Look at my body.
I have a similar body like yours.
We do better build for short sprinting and then maybe killing somebody with our hands.
Versus long distance.
joe rogan
You're a black belt in jiu-jitsu, right?
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
Where do you train at?
lex fridman
I now train at Broadway Jiu Jitsu in Boston.
joe rogan
Nice.
lex fridman
And before I was in Philly, Balanced Studios with Phil McGuire's and so on.
Right.
But Karl Bokniak actually trains in Broadway.
joe rogan
Oh, really?
I love that, Karl.
lex fridman
Yeah, last time I was on, I actually wanted to talk about the Zabid fight.
Because I'm Russian, so I love the Russian way.
But I also love the...
I mean, Kyle to me represents like the American...
He's like the Rocky.
If you remember that fight against Zabid?
joe rogan
The third round, he was winning.
lex fridman
I mean, that's the best of what martial arts is.
MMA is, to me, is like you have two technicians that just throw everything away.
Like, screw this.
I'm just going to throw down.
joe rogan
Well, Zabit had broken his hand.
He broke his hand somewhere, I think, in the second round.
So he was pretty compromised going into that third round.
He couldn't really fire back.
And Kyle just has zero quit in him.
That guy's an animal.
lex fridman
Yeah.
I mean, that's the most beautiful...
You talk about technical fights on the ground or technical striking.
When two technicians throw everything away, I'm sorry, but that's what I love the most about any kind of fighting, any kind of sport.
joe rogan
I enjoy it in the moment.
I discourage it.
Heavily.
I don't think it's a smart way to fight.
lex fridman
But I get it.
That's probably your job.
joe rogan
Well, it's not just my job.
It's what I like.
I get the impulse.
But I don't want people to give in to the impulse.
I think fighting is something that you should do correctly.
There's principles that you should follow to fight correctly.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't take chances.
But you know there's moments like Ricardo Lamas, when he fought Max Holloway, and they just stood in the center of the ring for the last few seconds of the fight, and Max Holloway pointed down at the ground.
He's like, come on, right here, right here.
And they just started swinging haymakers.
It was amazing.
Well, it happened.
But if I was in Max's corner, I'd be like, don't!
No!
Don't do that, man.
This macho shit is going to give you fucking brain damage.
You're going to get hit with shots you wouldn't get hit with.
lex fridman
That's a difficult...
Like you said, human nature is messy.
I would say that is the greatest...
That is the greatest moment of their lives.
unidentified
What?
lex fridman
That war.
joe rogan
No.
lex fridman
Listen.
joe rogan
That war is the greatest moment of Max Holloway's life?
Max Holloway's the greatest featherweight of all time.
lex fridman
Discussion.
joe rogan
No, but Max Holloway is the greatest featherweight of all time.
He's a guy who destroyed Jose Aldo twice.
He's a guy that...
He's beaten everybody in front of him at featherweight.
The idea that this one moment where they decided to throw out all his skill and technique and just swing for the bleachers in the middle of the octagon.
It was a fun moment.
It was great to watch.
But the idea that that was the greatest moment in his life is ridiculous.
You're a crazy person.
lex fridman
Yeah, there's moments in sports...
They're just magic.
Olympics bring that when, like, the thing that you don't think should happen or can't possibly happen or is not wise, where people just throw everything away.
joe rogan
Yeah?
You like that?
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
You're a passion person.
lex fridman
Yeah, passion person.
Yeah, for sure.
joe rogan
That's an interesting thing for someone who studies artificial intelligence.
I mean, if anybody listened to this podcast, they'd be like, what the fuck does this guy do?
He dresses like Reservoir Dogs.
They talk about movies.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
So many people angry right now.
Talk about autonomous vehicles.
We have plenty of time, sir.
We have plenty of time.
But that's the beautiful thing about this podcast.
We're just talking.
So tell me what you got here with your notes, man.
I mean, you are fucking prepared.
A lot of shit here.
Many, many pages.
lex fridman
For sure.
I don't want to miss stuff.
I mean, there's been a lot of exciting stuff on the autonomous vehicle space.
joe rogan
Since you came on, I got a Tesla.
And I've experienced what that thing is like when I put it on autopilot.
And it's stunning.
It's crazy.
I mean, it's the future.
lex fridman
In terms of the performance of the vehicle.
joe rogan
It's amazing.
Well, in terms of its ability to change lanes and its ability to drive without you doing anything, I just put my hand on the wheel and hold it there, and it does all the work.
lex fridman
So, because, like, one or two people listen to this podcast...
I want to take this opportunity and tell people, if you drive a Tesla, whether you listen to this now or a year from now, two years from now, Tesla or any other car, keep your damn eyes on the road.
So, whatever you think the system is able to do, you will have to still monitor the road.
unidentified
Yes.
lex fridman
And you will still have to take over when it fails.
joe rogan
If?
lex fridman
When.
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
So...
This is like the moment we're throwing down, right?
No, I think...
joe rogan
No, this is your level of expertise, obviously.
I mean, I'm not throwing down with you on this.
lex fridman
No, I think it's really important in this transitionary phase, whatever the car company, whatever the system, that we don't overtrust the system.
We don't become complacent.
We don't think it can do more than it can.
Currently, 40,000 people die in the United States from fatal crashes.
The number one reason for that is distraction.
So, texting, smartphones.
joe rogan
How much has it gone up since smartphones?
lex fridman
People don't exactly...
They're trying to understand that.
There's a lot of studies showing that it's significant increases, but it's hard to say it's because of smartphones.
But it's almost obvious.
joe rogan
Yeah, it's pretty obvious.
lex fridman
The flip side is, even though everybody's now using a smartphone, texting, and so on, they've become better at using the smartphone.
So, they're better at texting and driving.
joe rogan
Ugh.
lex fridman
The better at balancing that.
Now, this is a horrible thing to do.
So if you're listening to this podcast, you should listen to it in your car and keep your eyes on the road and not text.
joe rogan
The worst was Pokemon.
When Pokemon was in its prime, I was watching a guy on the highway playing Pokemon as he was driving.
No more than one person.
Two people.
A guy and I saw a girl do it once too.
Holding the phone on the steering wheel playing Pokemon.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Yeah, it's incredible.
joe rogan
What are you doing, Jamie?
jamie vernon
This grandpa has...
Oh, shit.
Sorry.
joe rogan
I'm confused.
What is this?
jamie vernon
This grandpa in Japan, he drives around on a bike with 15 phones playing Pokemon all at the same exact time.
joe rogan
Look at this.
This guy has 15 phones.
jamie vernon
It's ridiculous.
joe rogan
This guy needs to find hookers.
jamie vernon
There's people that do this also in their car with maybe four or five doing exactly what you're saying.
joe rogan
This man needs a better hobby.
This is preposterous.
Look at his...
He can't see what the fuck's going on in front of him.
He spends about $300 a month to buy virtual currencies in the game.
Wow, that guy's bored.
lex fridman
Or an innovative genius.
unidentified
You think?
lex fridman
Depending on the perspective.
Well, no.
People misuse their innovative...
joe rogan
How is he innovative?
He's just playing a stupid game while he's driving around on his bike like an asshole.
lex fridman
Well, he's doing...
unidentified
This is back to the Scent of a Woman thing.
joe rogan
It's passion.
It's the most amazing moment of his life.
Driving around playing Pokemon.
lex fridman
I'm sure most people are on my side.
Scent of a Woman versus...
joe rogan
Oh, you're crazy.
You think most people are on your side?
They think Scent of a Woman's the greatest movie of all time?
lex fridman
Not Scent of a Woman, but I was defending Godfather, Scent of a Woman...
joe rogan
Well, you weren't defending Godfather against me.
lex fridman
I'm going to throw you under the bus.
unidentified
I'm a fan.
Okay.
lex fridman
I'm going to manipulate this conversation.
Jamie, can you edit this in post?
joe rogan
Did you see the video that just came out yesterday of a Tesla on autopilot avoiding a crash?
lex fridman
Alright, so yeah, I have and there's a lot of examples like that.
joe rogan
There's quite a few of those.
lex fridman
Of course, it's hard to prove exactly what happened and whether Autopilot was involved.
Just like on the flip side, it's hard to prove that Autopilot was involved in the dangerous stuff.
But I think, by any measure, the media is really negative in terms of their reporting on Tesla.
Do you think so?
I think you've talked about this before.
In general, negativity gets more clicks.
joe rogan
Right, right.
lex fridman
And I think Tesla, negative stuff on Tesla gets a lot of clicks.
Well, not Tesla.
Let me speak more broadly about autonomous vehicles.
If there's any fatality, any crash, it's over-represented.
It's over-reported on.
To me, people who are interested in AI helping save lives in these systems like Autopilot, Yes.
I agree.
Listen to some music, some classic rock.
joe rogan
Classic rock?
Is that what you're into?
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
Like Credence?
lex fridman
No.
joe rogan
No?
Just say no?
Like you don't like it?
Like you would change the channel?
lex fridman
No, you're going to put me in the scent of a woman.
joe rogan
Of course.
Like Fortunate Son comes on, you don't get excited?
There you go.
lex fridman
I take my shirt off.
joe rogan
Start drinking.
lex fridman
No, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Skinner, Hendrix.
joe rogan
Of course, Hendrix.
lex fridman
I have to admit something.
I thought about messaging you a couple times.
I wanted to...
I play guitar.
joe rogan
Do you?
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
You good?
lex fridman
You can't...
Are you good at jiu-jitsu?
joe rogan
Yeah, I'm good.
lex fridman
Okay.
joe rogan
I'm a black belt.
lex fridman
I'm pretty good.
joe rogan
You're a black belt, too.
I'm sure you're good.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, I'm not world class.
A lot of dudes fuck me up.
lex fridman
I'm a three-stripe purple belt guitar.
joe rogan
That's a good way of putting it.
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, I say that about hunting.
I'm like a blue belt in hunting.
lex fridman
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I've been doing it.
Like, I got the purple belt by doing it a long time, as opposed to being amazing.
joe rogan
Did you take lessons?
lex fridman
No, I learned everything myself.
I have a couple of videos online, me playing Comfortably Numb.
joe rogan
Did you learn from watching videos, or did you learn from books?
Like, how did you learn?
Let me see this.
Give me this.
Look at you.
Well, this is going to get us booted off of YouTube.
lex fridman
No, this is me playing.
No, no, no.
jamie vernon
It probably won't pick it up.
lex fridman
And if it picks it up, it'll be to my channel.
joe rogan
You sure?
lex fridman
Yeah.
It's me playing.
joe rogan
I know, but it's so good.
jamie vernon
They've blocked people from humming songs recently.
lex fridman
So this is on YouTube.
No, I didn't know that.
But this didn't get blocked.
joe rogan
If you were humming a song, and then someone made a claim on that song, it would block our YouTube.
Like, literally, we could get demonetized.
We lose our streaming ability.
jamie vernon
Lots of things can happen.
joe rogan
Lots of things.
It's fucked up, man.
We've gotten flagged for watching something on the screen, picture in picture, no sound, commenting on it.
And we get flagged.
And they want all the advertising revenue from a three-hour show for five, ten seconds of a video.
lex fridman
It's a slightly broken system.
joe rogan
Ooh, it's broken.
But there's a lot of scam artists, too.
lex fridman
So I played another song, Black Betty.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah?
lex fridman
I played the damn song, but they said it was...
They did exactly that.
joe rogan
Oh, they said it was...
lex fridman
Ram Jam or whatever said it was there.
And I may have borrowed the beat behind it from them.
I'm not sure.
I just took a beat like...
joe rogan
Well, that's what I was thinking about that song.
It sounded like there was other shit going on besides just your guitar.
lex fridman
Oh, no, that's all me.
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
That's all me at the back.
joe rogan
Let me hear that again.
That's really good, man.
You sound good.
That's a great fucking song, too.
Comfortably numb.
lex fridman
You know the scariest thing for me?
unidentified
What?
lex fridman
Was to play guitar on this podcast.
So it's like going back and forth.
unidentified
Oh, really?
lex fridman
Should I do it?
Should I not do it?
joe rogan
Actually play?
Play, play?
There's only a few people that have ever played play.
Everlast.
Ben and Suzanne from Honey Honey.
Gary Clark didn't, right?
He just came on and talked.
He brought his guitar.
lex fridman
I wanted to play Hendrix here.
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
Live?
lex fridman
Live.
joe rogan
You got it with you right now?
Guitar?
Yeah.
unidentified
Well, no.
lex fridman
I meant...
I was...
Okay, sure.
In the future.
I'm not promising.
unidentified
I'm scared.
joe rogan
Will you wear a Hendrix wig?
With a bandana?
lex fridman
Is that racially insensitive, though?
joe rogan
No!
You're allowed to.
lex fridman
Joe, I will not take advice on you.
joe rogan
As long as you don't wear blackface, you're allowed.
lex fridman
Okay.
joe rogan
The hair is just hair.
You can't wear dreadlocks, though.
lex fridman
Yeah, so there's rules.
joe rogan
But I think you...
Yeah, there's rules.
lex fridman
Hendrix is above all rules, though, right?
joe rogan
Well, he's the goat, you know, of guitar players.
That's the goat.
unidentified
One of them.
joe rogan
You know, the reason why this show is called...
lex fridman
The experience, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, I stole it from Jimi Hendrix.
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
What's the matter?
jamie vernon
I don't remember if we brought this up last time, but I just remembered seeing this video where you're playing guitar while you were driving.
lex fridman
Yep.
joe rogan
Well, you shouldn't do that, dude.
jamie vernon
There's a reason why he was doing it.
joe rogan
Why are you doing that?
lex fridman
It's on a test track.
joe rogan
Oh, what kind of car is that?
Looks like a Lincoln.
lex fridman
Lincoln MKZ, that's right.
joe rogan
Oh, they do that?
The Lincolns do that?
lex fridman
No, we converted it and that's our code controlling the car.
joe rogan
Wow!
That is crazy!
So you converted this car to drive autonomously?
lex fridman
Autonomously, yeah.
joe rogan
Wow.
And what exactly do you have to do to a car to change?
Because that car does not have the capacity to do anything like that.
Right?
Am I correct?
lex fridman
No, no, no.
Absolutely not.
But you are absolutely correct.
There's the first part is being able to control the car with a computer, which is converting it to be drive-by-wire.
So you can control the steering and the brake and the acceleration to basically be able to control with a joystick.
joe rogan
And then you have to put laser sensors all around the car?
unidentified
Is that what you're doing?
lex fridman
Any kind of sensor and software.
joe rogan
What's the best kind of sensor?
Is it optical, laser?
lex fridman
A lot of debate on this.
And this is the big, this is the throw down between Elon Musk and everybody else.
So Elon Musk says the best sensor is camera.
Everybody else, well, everybody else says that at this time LIDAR, which are these lasers, is the best sensor.
So I'm more on the side, in this case on camera, on Elon Musk.
So here's the difference.
Lasers are more precise.
They work better in poor lighting conditions.
They're more reliable.
You can actually build safe systems today that use LiDAR.
The problem is that they don't have very much information.
So we use our eyes to drive.
And cameras, the same thing.
And they have just a lot more information.
So if you're going to build artificial intelligence systems, so machine learning systems that learn from huge amounts of data, camera is the way to go.
Because you can learn so much more.
You can see so much more.
So the richer, deeper sensor is camera.
But it's much harder.
You have to collect a huge amount of data.
It's a little bit more futuristic, so it's a longer-term solution.
So today, to build a safe vehicle, you have to go LiDAR.
Tomorrow, however you define tomorrow, Yelma says it's in a year.
Others say it's 5, 10, 20 years.
Camera is the way to go.
So that's the hard debate.
And there's a lot of other debates, but that's one of the core ones.
It's basically, for camera, if you go camera like you do in the Tesla, there's seven cameras in your Tesla, three looking forward, there's all around, so on, one looking inside.
No, you have the Model S? Yeah.
Yeah, so that one doesn't have a camera that's looking inside.
So it's all cameras plus radar and ultrasonic sensors.
That approach requires collecting huge amounts of data, and they're doing that.
They drove now about 1.3 billion miles under Autopilot.
unidentified
Jesus.
lex fridman
Yeah, it's a very large amount of data.
So you're talking about over 500,000 vehicles have Autopilot.
450, I think, thousand have the new version of Autopilot, Autopilot 2, which is the one.
You're driving, and all of that is data.
So all of those, all the edge cases, what they call them, all the difficult situations that occur, is feeding the machine learning system to become better and better and better.
And the open question is, How much better does it need to get to the human level of performance?
One of the big assumptions of us human beings is that we think that driving is actually pretty easy, and we think that humans suck at driving.
Those two assumptions.
You think like driving, you know, you stay in the lane, you stop at the stop sign, it's pretty easy to automate.
And then the other one is you think like humans are terrible drivers, and so it'll be easy to build a machine that outperforms humans at driving.
Now there's, that's, I think, there's a lot of flaws behind that intuition.
We take for granted how hard it is to look at the scene, like everything you just did, picked up, moved around some objects, It's really difficult to build an artificial intelligence system that does that.
To be able to perceive and understand the scene enough to understand the physics of the scene, like all these objects, like how to pick them up, the texture of those objects, the weight, to understand glasses folded and unfolded, open water bottle, all those things is common sense knowledge that we take for granted.
We think it's trivial.
But there is no artificial system in the world today, nor will there be for perhaps quite a while that can do that kind of common sense reasoning about the physical world.
Add to that pedestrians.
So add some crazy people in this room right now to the whole scene.
joe rogan
Right, and being able to notice, like, this guy's an asshole.
Look at him.
What is he doing?
What is he doing?
Get off that skateboard.
Ah, Jesus, he's in traffic!
lex fridman
And, considering not that he's an asshole, he's a respectable skateboarder, that in order to make...
It's not just you have to perceive the world.
You have to assert your presence in this world.
You have to take risks.
So in order to make the skateboarder not cross the street, you have to perhaps accelerate if you have the right of way.
And there's a game theoretic, a game of chicken to get right.
I mean, we don't even know how to approach that as an artificial intelligence research community and also as a society.
Do we want an autonomous vehicle that speeds up?
In order to make a pedestrian not cross the street, which is what we do all the time.
We have to assert our presence.
If there's a person who doesn't have the right of way who begins crossing, we're going to either maintain speed or speed up potentially if we want them to not cross.
So that game there, to get that right.
joe rogan
That's a dangerous game for a robot.
lex fridman
It's for a robot.
And for us to be rationally, if that, God forbid, leads to a fatality, for us as a society to rationally reason about that and think about that.
I mean, a fatality like that could basically bankrupt a company.
joe rogan
There's a lawsuit going on right now about an accident in Northern California with Tesla.
Are you aware about that one?
What was the circumstances about that one?
lex fridman
So there was, I believe, in Mountain View, a fatality in a Tesla, where it...
This is a common problem for all lane-keeping systems, like Tesla Autopilot, is there was a divider in the highway, and basically the car was driving along the lane, and then the car in front moved to an adjacent lane, and this divider appeared.
So you have to now steer to the right, and the car didn't, and it went straight into the divider.
joe rogan
Oh, wow.
lex fridman
Basically, what that boils down to is the car drifted out of lane, right?
Or didn't adjust properly to the lane.
Those kinds of things happen.
joe rogan
And this is because the person was allowing the autopilot to do everything?
lex fridman
Nope.
You can't.
So we have to be extremely careful here.
I don't know the really deep details of the case.
I'm not sure exactly how many people do.
So there's a judgment on what the person was doing, and then there's an analysis of what the system did.
The system drifted out of lane.
The question is, was the person paying attention?
And was there enough time given for the person to take over?
And if they were paying attention, to catch the vehicle, steer back onto the road?
unidentified
As far as I believe...
lex fridman
The only information they have is hands on steering wheel and they were saying that like half the minute leading up to the crash, the hands weren't on the steering wheel or something like that.
Basically trying to infer were the person paying attention or not.
But we don't have the information exactly where were their eyes.
You can only make guesses as far as I know, again.
So the question is, this is the eyes on the road thing, because I think I've heard you on a podcast saying you're tempted to sort of look off the road at your new Tesla, or at least become a little bit complacent.
joe rogan
Yeah, the worry is that you just rely on the thing, that you would relax too much.
lex fridman
But what would that relaxation lead to?
joe rogan
The problem is if something happened.
If you weren't, you know, when you're driving, I mean, we've discussed this many times on the podcast that the reason why people have road rage, one of the reasons, is because you're in a heightened state, because cars are flying around you and your brain is prepared to make split-second decisions and moves.
And the worry is that you would relax that because you're so comfortable with that thing driving.
Everybody that I know that's tried that, they say you get really used to it doing that.
You get really used to it just driving around for you.
lex fridman
So the question is what happens when you get used to it?
Do you start looking off-road?
Do you start texting more?
Do you start watching a movie, etc.?
That's really an open question.
For example, we just published a study from MIT on what people in our dataset.
We collected this dataset of 300,000 miles and we instrumented all these Teslas and watched what people are actually doing.
And are they paying attention when they disengage the system?
So there's a really important moment here, we have 18,000 of those, when the person catches the car, you know, they disengage autopilot.
And that's a really, Tesla uses this moment as well, that's a really important window into difficult cases.
So some percentage of those, some small percentage, it's about 10%, is we call them tricky situations.
Is situations where you have to immediately respond, like drifting out of lane, if there's a stopped car in front, so on.
The question is, are people paying attention during those moments?
So in our data set, they were paying attention.
They were still remaining vigilant.
Now, in our dataset, the autopilot was, quote-unquote, encountering tricky situations every 9.2 miles.
So you could say it was failing every 9.2 miles.
That is one of the reasons we believe that people are still remaining vigilant.
That it's regularly and unpredictably sort of drifting out of lane or misbehaving.
So you don't overtrust it.
You don't become too complacent.
The open question is when it becomes better and better and better and better, will you start becoming complacent?
When it drives on the highway for an hour, an hour and a half, as opposed to 9.2 miles, make that 50 miles, 60 miles.
Do you start to overtrust it?
And that's a really open question.
joe rogan
Do you think or do you anticipate a time anywhere in the near future where you won't have to correct?
You will allow the car to do it because the car will be perfect?
lex fridman
The car, first of all, will never be perfect.
No car will ever be perfect.
joe rogan
Autonomous vehicles will always, you think, require at least some sort of manual override?
lex fridman
Yeah.
unidentified
Really?
joe rogan
That's interesting that you're saying that because you work in AI. What makes you think that that's impossible to achieve?
lex fridman
Well, let's talk, because you're using the word perfection.
Okay, that's a bad word.
joe rogan
Let me see, will it achieve, because people are obviously not perfect.
Will it achieve a state of competence that exceeds the human being?
lex fridman
And let's put it in a dark way, competence measured by fatal crashes.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
Yes, I absolutely believe so.
And perhaps in the near term.
joe rogan
Near term?
Like five years?
lex fridman
Yeah.
For me, five, ten years is near term.
For Elon, in Elon Musk time, that's converted to one year.
joe rogan
Have you met him?
lex fridman
Yes.
Interviewed him recently.
joe rogan
Fascinating cat, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Yep.
joe rogan
Got a lot of weird shit bouncing around behind those eyeballs.
You don't realize until you talk to him in person, you're like, oh, you got a lot going on in there, man.
lex fridman
Yeah, there's passion, there's drive.
I mean, it's one of the...
joe rogan
It's a hurricane of ideas.
lex fridman
Yeah.
And focus and confidence.
unidentified
Mm-hmm.
lex fridman
I mean, the thing is, in a lot of the things he does, which I admire greatly from any man or woman innovator, it's just boldly, fearlessly pursuing new ideas or jumping off the cliff and learning to fly on the way down.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, no matter what happens, you'll be remembered as the great innovators of our time.
Whatever you say, maybe in my book, Steve Jobs was as well.
Even if you criticize, perhaps he hasn't contributed significantly to the technological development of the company or the different ideas they did.
Still, his brilliance was in all the products of iPhone, of the personal computer, the Mac, and so on.
I think the same is true with Elon.
And yes, in this space of autonomous vehicles, of semi-autonomous vehicles, of driver assistance systems, it's a pretty tense space to operate in.
There's several communities in there that are very responsible but also aggressive in their criticism.
So in driving in the automotive sector, obviously, since Henry Ford and before, there's been a culture of safety, of just great engineering.
These are like some of the best engineers in the world in terms of large-scale production.
You talk about Toyota, you talk about Ford, GM. These people know how to do safety well.
And so here comes Elon with Silicon Valley ideals that throws a lot of it out the window and says we're going to revolutionize the way we do automation in general.
We're going to make software updates to the car once a week, twice a week, over the air, just like that.
That makes people and the safety engineers and human factories engineers really uncomfortable.
Like, what do you mean you're going to keep updating the software of the car?
How are you testing it?
That makes people really uncomfortable.
joe rogan
Why does it make them uncomfortable?
lex fridman
Because the way in the automotive sector you test the system, you come up with the design of the car, every component, and then you go through really rigorous testing before it ever hits the road.
Here's an idea from the Tesla side is where they basically They, in shadow mode, test the software, but then they just release it.
So essentially the drivers become the testing.
And then they regularly update it to adjust if any issues arise.
That makes people uncomfortable because there's not a standardized Testing procedure, there's not at least a feeling in the industry of rigor, because the reality is we don't know how to test software with the same kind of rigor that we've tested the automotive system in the past.
So I think it's extremely exciting and powerful to make software sort of approach automotive engineering with at least in part a software engineering perspective.
So just doing what's made Silicon Valley successful.
So updating regularly, aggressively innovating on the software side.
So your Tesla over the air, while we're sitting here, could get a totally new update.
With a flip of a bit, as Elon Musk says, it can gain all new capabilities.
That's really exciting, but that's also dangerous.
And that balance, we...
joe rogan
Well, what's dangerous about it?
That it'd be faulty software?
lex fridman
Faulty.
A bug.
So, the apps on your phone fail all the time.
We're, as a society, used to software failing, and we just kind of reboot the device or restart the app.
The most complex software systems in the world today, if we think outside of nuclear engineering and so on, They're too complex to really thoroughly test.
So thorough, complete testing, proving that the software is safe is nearly impossible on most software systems.
That's nerve-wracking to a lot of people because there's no way to prove that the new software update is safe.
joe rogan
So what is the process?
Do you know how they create software, they update it, and then they test it on something?
How much testing do they do, and how much do they do before they upload it to your car?
lex fridman
Yeah, so I don't have any insider information, but I have a lot of sort of public available information, which is they test the software in shadow mode, meaning they see how the new software compares to the current software by running it in parallel on the cars and seeing if there's disagreements, like seeing if there's any major disagreements and bringing those up and seeing what...
joe rogan
By parallel, I'm sorry, do you mean both programs running at the same time?
lex fridman
One, the original update, yes, at the same time, the original update actually controlling the car, and the new update is just...
joe rogan
Making the same decisions?
lex fridman
Making the same decisions without them being actuated.
joe rogan
Without actually affecting the vehicle's dynamics.
lex fridman
And so that's a really powerful way of testing.
I think the software infrastructure that Tesla has built allows for that.
And I think other companies should do the same.
That's a really exciting, powerful way to approach not just automation, not just autonomous vehicles or semi-autonomous vehicles, but just safety.
Is basically all the data that's on cars, bring it back to a central point to where you can use the edge cases, all the weird situations in driving to improve the system, to test the system, to learn, to understand where the car is used, misused, how it can be improved and so on.
That's extremely powerful.
joe rogan
How many people do they have that are analyzing all this data?
lex fridman
That's a really good question.
So the interesting thing about driving is most of it is pretty boring.
Nothing interesting happens.
So they have automated ways of extracting, again, what are called edge cases.
So these weird moments of driving.
And once you have these weird moments, they have people annotate.
I don't know what the number is, but a lot of companies are doing this.
It's in the hundreds and thousands.
Basically, humans annotate the data to see what happened.
But most of what they're trying to do is to automate that annotation.
So to figure out how the data can be automatically used to improve the system.
So they have methods for that.
Because it's a huge amount of data, right?
I think in the recent autonomy day a couple of weeks ago, they had this big autonomy day where they demonstrated The vehicle driving itself on a particular stretch of road.
They showed off that, you know, they're able to query the data, basically ask questions of the data, saying, the example they gave is there's a bike on the back of a car, the bicycle on the back of a car.
And they're able to say, well, when the bicycle is in the back of a car, that's not a bicycle.
That's just the part of the car.
And they're able to now look back into the data and find all the other cases, the thousands of cases that happened all over the world, in Europe and Asia, in South America and North America and so on, and pull all those elements and then train the perception system of Autopilot to be able to better recognize those bicycles as part of the car.
So every edge case like that, they go through saying, okay, the car freaked out in this moment.
Let me find moments like this in the rest of the data and then improve the system.
So this kind of cycle is the way to deal with problems, with failures of the system.
It's to say, every time the car fails at something, say, is this part of a bigger set of problems?
Can I find all those problems?
And can I improve it with a new update?
And that just keeps going.
The open question is, how many loops like that you have to take for the car to become really good, better than human?
Basically, how hard is driving?
How many weird situations, when you manually drive, do you deal with every day?
Somebody mentioned, there's like millions of cases when you watch video, you see them.
Somebody mentioned that they drive a truck, a UPS truck, past cow pastures.
And they know that if there's no cows in the cow pasture, that means they're grazing.
And if they're grazing, I mean, I'd be using the correct terms, I apologize, not a cow guy.
That means that there may be cows up ahead on the road.
There's just this kind of reasoning you can use to anticipate difficult situations.
And we do that kind of reasoning about like everything.
Cars today can't do that kind of reasoning.
They're just perceiving what's in front of them.
joe rogan
Now outside of Tesla, how many other companies have autonomous systems that are driving their cars?
lex fridman
So maybe it's good to step back.
There's several and there's several leaders in each different approach.
So first, let's draw a line between the different types of systems there are.
One, there's fully autonomous vehicles.
So these are cars you can think about that don't have a steering wheel.
Or if they have a steering wheel, it doesn't matter.
They're in full control.
And if there's a crash, the car company is liable.
joe rogan
Do those exist?
lex fridman
No.
It's a gray area, though, because many companies are basically saying that that's what they're doing, but they're not quite there.
So the leader in that space used to be called Google Self-Driving Car Program.
Now it's called Waymo.
They are doing that.
It's called Level 4 or Level 5. There's levels to this game.
And this is this particular level where it's fully autonomous.
Now they're trying to achieve full autonomy.
But the way they're doing it currently is they're testing on public roads with what's called a safety driver.
So there's a driver always ready to take over.
And the driver does have to take over at some rate, you know, frequently.
And so the fact that the driver has to take over, that's not fully autonomous then, right?
So there's no car today that you can just get in without a safety driver.
So there's nobody behind the wheel.
joe rogan
And using your app, sort of get from point A to point B. But out of the cars that are semi-autonomous, where there is an autonomous program but you do have to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention to the road, what are the leaders?
Besides Tesla, there's Tesla and who else is doing it?
lex fridman
There's several systems.
It depends how you define leader.
joe rogan
So let me ask you this.
Does Mercedes and BMW, do they use the same system?
Does someone make a system for cars?
Or do they create their own systems?
lex fridman
Yeah, that's a really good question.
So there's, in some cases, there's Mobileye...
And NVIDIA, there's these companies that...
joe rogan
NVIDIA? The video card company?
lex fridman
The video card company, yep.
The same folks that power the Quake game, right?
The graphics on the Quake game.
You can use those GPU graphics processing units to run machine learning code.
So they're also creating these...
joe rogan
Look at that, NVIDIA Drive.
Scalable AI platform for autonomous driving.
lex fridman
In fact, I don't...
When did you buy a Tesla?
joe rogan
Five months ago or something?
Something like that?
lex fridman
So the thing in there now, most likely, is a NVIDIA Drive PX2 system.
joe rogan
And that works on cameras?
lex fridman
That just runs code that takes in camera data, but it can work on anything else.
joe rogan
So it could work on LiDAR as well, if somebody had a system...
lex fridman
Yeah, but it needs different code.
So LiDAR requires very different kinds of processing.
joe rogan
Does anybody use that with cars, with semi-autonomous cars?
lex fridman
LIDAR. Yes.
Well, okay, so semi-autonomous, we have to be careful because the Waymo cars, the quote-unquote fully autonomous cars, are currently semi-autonomous.
joe rogan
Right.
That's the highest level of semi-autonomous, right?
lex fridman
Yeah, I guess it's not even a highest level, it's a principle, it's a philosophy difference.
Because they're saying we're going to do full autonomy, we're just not quite there yet.
Most other companies, they're doing semi-autonomous, better called driver assistance systems, is they're saying we're not interested in full autonomy, we just want a driver assistance system that just helps you steer the car.
So let's call those semi-autonomous vehicles or driver assistance systems.
There's several leaders in that space.
One car we're studying that's really interesting is a Cadillac Super Cruise system.
So GM has a system, it's called Super Cruise, that I think is the best comparable system to Autopilot today.
The key differentiator there is, there's a lot of little elements, but the key differentiator is there's a driver monitoring system.
So there's a camera that looks at you and tells you if your eyes are on the road or not.
And if your eyes go off the road for, I believe, more than six seconds, it starts warning you and says you have to get your eyes back on the road.
So that's called driver monitoring.
That's one of the big disagreements, for example, between me and Elon and many experts in the field and Elon and the Tesla approach is that there should be a driver monitoring system.
So there should be a camera.
joe rogan
Why does Elon feel like there shouldn't be?
lex fridman
I think his focus, the Tesla's focus, is on just improving the system so fast and so effectively that it doesn't matter what the driver does.
joe rogan
So essentially no safety net?
lex fridman
No safety net.
And I think they...
Operate like that in many ideas that they work with.
They sort of boldly proceed forward to try to make the car extremely safe.
Now the concern there is you have to acknowledge the psychology of human beings.
Unless the car is perfect or under our definition perfect, which is much better than human beings, then you have to be able to You have to be able to make sure that the people are still paying attention to help the car out when it fails.
And for that, you have to have drive a modern.
You have to know what the car is.
Right now, your Tesla only knows about your presence from the steering wheel.
joe rogan
Touching the steering wheel.
lex fridman
Which is a kind of driver monitoring system.
It knows you're there, but it's not nearly as effective at knowing you're there cognitively, visually.
joe rogan
You can be tricked by clamps.
We've seen people do that.
They've developed these clamps that you just put on the steering wheel.
It'll hold a phone and it'll also trick the system into thinking that you're holding onto the wheel.
lex fridman
Yeah, you can do...
A lot of purses actually work really well.
Don't ask me how...
joe rogan
Hanging a purse?
lex fridman
No, like shoving a purse into the...
joe rogan
Oh, really?
lex fridman
Into the...
joe rogan
Somebody did that with an orange or something like that, but they said it didn't work.
Maybe it needs to be all the way around the outside of it?
lex fridman
I think it depends on the shape of the orange, how ripe it is.
There's a lot of debate.
No, the point is there's ways to trick the system.
joe rogan
It's not monitoring the driver.
That's the point, right?
lex fridman
Yeah, it's not monitoring the driver.
And a lot of people believe you need to.
joe rogan
You think you need to.
Makes sense.
lex fridman
Yeah, I think not just for the safety of the system, but to create an experience.
I think there's value for the car to know more about you.
Look at that.
joe rogan
What's happening there?
Scanning this guy's eyes.
Minority Report shit freaks me out.
lex fridman
So yeah, there's a lot of companies sort of springing up.
They're doing computer vision on the face and so on to try to detect where you're looking.
joe rogan
So what cars have that now?
lex fridman
The major one is the supercruise system.
There's not many cars.
A few cars are starting to add it.
joe rogan
Europe… What's a supercruise system?
lex fridman
That's the GM Cadillac.
joe rogan
Okay.
lex fridman
They're trying to...
So it's in their super expensive lineup currently, and they're, I think, trying to add it to the full lineup of all of them.
joe rogan
So in Cadillacs, what is that big cruiser that they have now?
The big four-door car, the really high-end...
Is it a CT6? I don't know what it is.
They have a new one that's really nice.
Is that what they're putting it in?
The big sedan?
jamie vernon
That thing.
joe rogan
That thing.
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
It's pretty.
unidentified
I don't know if that's the CT6, but the one we're looking at is the CT6. Yeah, that's the 2018 CT6. Yeah.
lex fridman
But they want to add it to their full fleet.
joe rogan
Does that have the same amount of cameras as the Tesla system does?
lex fridman
No, and it has a very different philosophy as well in another way, which is it only works on very specific roads, on interstate highways.
There's something called ODD, Operational Design Domain.
So they define that this thing, Super Cruise System, only works on this particular set of roads and they're basically just major highways.
The Tesla approach is saying basically what Elon jokingly referred to as ADD, right, is it works basically anywhere.
So if you try to turn on your autopilot, you can basically turn it on anywhere where the cameras are able to determine either lane markings or the car in front of you.
And so that's a very different approach, saying you can basically make it work anywhere or, in the Cadillac case, make it work on only specific kinds of roads.
So you can test the heck out of those roads.
You can map those roads.
So you can use, actually, LIDAR to map the full roads so you know the full geometry of all the interstate highway system that it can operate on.
joe rogan
Does it also coordinate with GPS so it understands where, like, bumps in the road might be or hills?
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
In that sense, it coordinates with GPS for different curvature information, but...
joe rogan
Not the topography?
lex fridman
No, and construction is a big one.
joe rogan
That would be crazy for new potholes.
lex fridman
Well, potholes isn't a big problem.
I think construction is the big problem.
Just this quickly changing dynamic information, which apps like Waze provide.
joe rogan
A lot of potholes are a pretty big problem in Boston, though.
lex fridman
Yeah, no, for sure.
joe rogan
New York is actually probably even worse.
I blew out two tires in one day in New York on potholes.
Just had an unlucky day.
lex fridman
Yeah, but I'd rather you blow out your tire than, I mean, the kind of fatality that happened in the Mountain View with Tesla, I believe, is slightly construction-related.
So, I mean, there's a lot of safety-critical events that happen construction-related stuff.
joe rogan
I would like it if that stupid Tesla could figure out the hole in the ground, though, so I didn't have to blow a tire out.
Come on, bro.
lex fridman
I feel your pain, Joe.
joe rogan
Figure it out.
lex fridman
But priorities.
I'll make sure.
I'll forward this podcast to Elon to make sure they work on this.
joe rogan
I think he's busy.
What is this, Jamie?
Tesla Autopod will be able to avoid potholes in the road, says Elon Musk.
Ha ha!
The motherfucker's on top of shit!
lex fridman
What's the date on that?
joe rogan
April.
jamie vernon
April 7th.
lex fridman
Okay.
joe rogan
Just now.
There you go.
lex fridman
And that's an interesting thing.
That's almost an ethical question, whether you want a car to avoid a situation by swerving.
joe rogan
Right.
lex fridman
Because when you swerve, you now introduce, as opposed to sort of breaking the vehicle only, swerving into another lane means you might create a safety situation elsewhere.
You might put somebody else in danger.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's why I was saying if it coordinated with GPS, it would have previous knowledge.
You know, sort of like Waze tells you where the cops are.
lex fridman
Yep.
joe rogan
You know what I mean?
lex fridman
So that kind of information would be extremely powerful and useful.
The problem is it's hard to get it Really up to date.
That kind of information really up to date.
It's just an infrastructure question.
Just getting the software, the data in place to where the car will be able to learn quickly from all the things that are changing.
I think potholes don't change that often.
So that's a different thing.
But in terms of construction zones, in terms of other weird things that change the dynamics, the geometry of the road, that's difficult to get right.
joe rogan
So Cadillac's doing a version of it, but it sounds like it's a little bit less involved, less comprehensive.
Maybe there's a better way of describing it.
lex fridman
Yeah, and less, I would say, it's more safety-focused.
It's a sort of, what's the right word to use here?
It's more cautious in its implementation.
So GM, again, has a tradition for better or for worse.
joe rogan
Just sit, Jamie.
jamie vernon
This little part I'm showing you shows the signal coming on.
joe rogan
Oh wow, the green thing.
Pay attention, lady.
She's too hot.
She's not paying attention.
Looking at people staring at her.
lex fridman
No comment.
One of the things that you...
It's hard to talk about without actually experiencing the system.
What's more important than driver monitoring and any of the details we talk about is how the whole thing feels, the whole thing together, how it's implemented, the whole interface.
The Cadillac system is actually done really well in the sense that there's a clarity to it.
There's a green color and a blue color and you know exactly when the system is on and when it's off.
That's one of the big things people struggle with is just confusing in other cars drivers not being able to understand when the system is on or off.
joe rogan
Oh, right.
So you think the system's doing it and then just slam into something that wasn't even on.
Now, when this car is operating in this manner, how many cameras is it using?
lex fridman
You know, that's a good question.
I should know that.
But I think it's only forward to facing cameras, as far as I know.
I think it's two cameras.
It may be three cameras.
joe rogan
That lady just sat back.
So she doesn't have her hands on the wheel at all.
lex fridman
Yep.
joe rogan
But she's watching.
lex fridman
Right.
Because the car is able to see where the eyes are.
It's a hands-off system.
So you're allowed to take your hands off the wheel.
joe rogan
Hmm.
lex fridman
It's very interesting.
And there are certain human behavior aspects that come into play to this.
I found myself actually becoming a little more drowsy with this system.
I haven't driven it enough, so I haven't gotten used to it.
But you have to, at least in the initial stages, it kind of forced you to look at the road in a way that felt artificial.
I think it's something that gets better with time.
You get used to it.
But it's almost like a gamified thing that the car, when you look off-road, starts to tell you that you're looking off-road.
So you're kind of psychologically pressured to always stare at the road.
And you realize that actually, when you drive, you often look around.
And so having to like stare forward can be a little bit, yeah, exactly.
You start, like there's something peaceful and hypnotic about those lanes just coming at you and just...
joe rogan
The lines, yeah.
Why is that?
That confuses the shit out of me because I could not be tired at all.
But if it's nighttime and I'm on the highway and those lines, they just start to take you to dreamland.
lex fridman
I get the same with...
There's also just the vibration.
There's that hum of driving.
Same with trains.
joe rogan
Yeah, planes as well.
lex fridman
Yeah, it puts me out.
So there's a...
joe rogan
So Cadillac system.
lex fridman
That's the big leader, I would say, in the driver monitoring.
And then Tesla is the no driver monitoring and huge data collection.
joe rogan
BMW has a system as well they use.
lex fridman
Yeah, BMW. What are they using?
I don't want to speak too much to the details, but they have lane keeping systems.
They're basically systems that keep you in the lane.
That is similar to what, in spirit, Autopilot is supposed to do, but is less aggressive in how often you can use it and so on.
If you look at the performance of the actual, how often the system is able to keep you in lane, Autopilot is currently the leader in that space.
And they're also the most aggressive innovators in that space.
They're really pushing it to improve further and further.
And the open question is, the worrying question is if it improves much more, are there going to be effects like complacency, like people will start texting more, will start looking off-road more.
It's a totally open question and nobody knows the answer to it really.
And there's a lot of folks, like I mentioned, in the safety engineers and human factors community, so these psychology folks who have roots in aviation, that there's been 70 years of work that looks at vigilance.
If I force you to sit here and monitor for something weird happening, like radar operators in World War II had to watch for the dot to appear.
If I sit you behind that radar and make you do it, after about 15 minutes, but really 30 minutes, your rate of being able to detect any problems will go down significantly.
You just kind of zone out.
So there's all kinds of psychology studies that show that we're crappy.
Human beings are really crappy at monitoring automation.
If I tell you, if I put a robot and you just say, monitor this system so it doesn't kill anyone, you'll tune out.
joe rogan
And we have to be engaged.
lex fridman
You have to be engaged.
You have to be, you know, there has to be a dance attention.
joe rogan
We don't have a mode for watching autonomous things, right?
If you consider historically the kind of modes that people have for observing things, we don't really have a mode for making sure that an autonomous thing does its job.
lex fridman
Yeah, it's...
joe rogan
It's not a mindset.
It's not like, oh, you know what I mean?
Like, if you're in my car, okay, I'm driving.
Here we go.
Oh, driving.
I turn.
I'm thinking.
I'm in driving mode.
When you're in autonomous mode and you're observing, you're just like, what is this?
I've never done this before.
This is fucking weird.
It feels weird.
lex fridman
It's not part of human nature.
joe rogan
It's not a normal state.
lex fridman
One thing it's done commonly in now is aviation.
So, pilots.
Pilots are basically monitoring fully autonomous planes.
joe rogan
Yeah, that's a good point.
lex fridman
As far as I know, many planes today could fly almost fully autonomously.
joe rogan
It's also a good point when it comes to software and updates because isn't that part of the issue with this Boeing 737?
lex fridman
Max system.
joe rogan
Yeah, these systems that they've had problems with, they've been faulty and a couple have crashed.
lex fridman
Yeah, and that's a really good point.
And they've been two tragic crashes recently with the MAX system.
joe rogan
Yeah, they've benched those things, right?
Haven't they?
lex fridman
I'm not following...
joe rogan
They also got rid of a bunch of inspectors.
I think they fired like 80 inspectors today.
And the unions are freaking out.
lex fridman
Yep.
And obviously there's politics that FAA is – I think FAA is supposed to supervise and there's a close relationship between Boeing and FAA. There's questions around – I mean there's better experts at that than me.
But on the software side, it is worrying because it was a single software update essentially that helps prevent the vehicle – the airplane from stalling.
So, if the nose is tilting up, increasing the chance of stalling, it's going to automatically point the nose down of the airplane.
And the pilots, in many cases, as far as I understand, weren't even informed of this update, right?
They weren't even told this is happening.
The idea behind the update is that they're not supposed to really know.
It's supposed to just manage the flight for you, right?
The problem happened when there's an angle of attack sensor.
So the sensor that tells you the actual tilt of the plane.
And there's a malfunction in that sensor, as far as I understand, in both planes.
And so the plane didn't actually understand its orientation.
So the system started freaking out and started pointing the nose down aggressively.
And the pilots were like trying to restabilize the plane and couldn't.
So shortly after liftoff, they just crashed.
joe rogan
Oh my god.
lex fridman
Yes, that's a software update.
joe rogan
That's crazy!
lex fridman
And that's a safety culture that's dealing with this new world of software that we don't know what to do with.
And yeah, it's a question...
One way is to be sort of a little bit Luddite.
I use the term carefully and just be afraid and say, you know what, we should really not allow so many software updates.
The other one is sort of embracing it and redefining what it means to build safe AI systems in this modern world with updates multiple times a week.
joe rogan
What do you think?
lex fridman
I'm 100% for the software approach.
I think updates, regular updates, so combining the two cultures but really letting good software engineering lead the way is the way to go.
I wish other companies were competing with Tesla on this.
On the software side, Tesla is far ahead of everyone else in the automotive sector.
And that's one of the problems.
I'm worried that, you know, competition is good, right?
And I'm worried that people are way too far behind to actually give Tesla new ideas.
I'll compete Tesla on software.
So most cars are not able to do over-the-air.
As far as I know, no cars are able to do major over-the-air updates except Tesla vehicles.
They do over-the-air updates to the entertainment system.
Like, you know, if your radio is malfunctioning.
But in terms of the control of the vehicle, you have to go to the dealership to get an update.
Tesla is the only one that over-the-air, like it can multiple times a week do the update.
I think that should be a requirement for all car companies.
But that requires that they rethink the way they build cars.
That's really scary when you manufacture over a million cars a year in Toyota and GM. To say, especially old school Detroit guys and gals that are like legit car people, to say we need to hire some software engineering, that's a challenge.
It's a totally, you know, I don't know how often you've been to Detroit, but there's a culture difference between Detroit and Silicon Valley.
And those two have to come together to solve this problem.
So I have the adult responsibility of Detroit, of how to do production well, manufacture, how to do safety well, how to test the vehicles well, and do the bold, crazy, innovative spirit of Silicon Valley, which Elon Musk in basically every way represents.
I think that will define the future of AI in general.
Interacting with AI systems just even outside the automotive sector requires these questions of safety, of AI safety, of how we supervise the system, how we manage them from misbehaving and so on.
joe rogan
There's a concern about those systems being vulnerable to third-party attacks.
lex fridman
Yeah, so hacking.
That's a fascinating question.
I think there is a whole discipline called adversarial machine learning in AI, which basically any kind of system you can think of, how we can feed it examples.
How we can add a little bit of noise to the system to fool it completely.
So there's been demonstrations on Alexa, for example, where you can feed noise into the system that's imperceptible to us humans and make it believe you said anything.
So, fool the system into thinking, so ordering extra toilet paper, I don't know.
And the same for cars, you can feed noise into the cameras to make it believe that there is or there isn't a pedestrian, that there is or there isn't lane markings.
joe rogan
So, someone could do this?
In theory, at least.
lex fridman
In theory, that's the big difference.
In theory, it's doable.
You can do demonstrations.
In practice, it's actually really difficult to do in the real world.
So in the lab, you can do it.
You can construct a situation where a pedestrian can wear certain types of clothing or put up a certain kind of sign where they disappear from the system.
joe rogan
I have to ask you this because now I just remember this.
You'd be the perfect person to talk about this.
I'm not sure if you remember this case, but there was a guy named Michael Hastings.
Michael Hastings was a journalist and he was, I believe, in Iraq or Afghanistan.
He was somewhere overseas, and he was stuck there because of this volcano that erupted in, I believe, Iceland.
And he was over there for the Rolling Stone magazine and doing an article about a general.
Well, he stayed there for a long time because they were stranded because of the volcano, and they got real comfortable around him.
And he reported a lot of the stuff that they said and did that maybe they thought that he probably wouldn't have reported on, including them saying disparaging things about President Obama at the time.
Anyway, comes back.
The general was forced to resign.
He was a beloved general.
And Michael Hastings was fearing for his life because he thought that they were going to come and get him because these people were very, very angry at him.
He wound up driving his car into a tree going like 120 miles an hour.
And the car exploded and the engine went flying.
And people that were the conspiracy theorists were saying they believed that that car had been rigged to work autonomously or that someone, some third party bad person decided to, or good person depending on your perspective, decided to drive that guy's car into a fucking tree at 120 miles an hour.
Do you think that that, and this is 2011?
Michael Hastings, death 12, maybe?
2012?
jamie vernon
I think that sounds right.
joe rogan
Let's see what it says.
2013?
jamie vernon
Yeah, June 2013.
joe rogan
Do you think that in 2013 that would have been possible?
lex fridman
It's entirely possible.
No, I just wanted to say that.
unidentified
Shout out to the Joe Rogan subreddit.
lex fridman
Okay.
Check that one off the list.
Jamie, pull that up.
joe rogan
Check that off.
lex fridman
I... Whether it's possible is an interesting question.
Whether it's likely is another question.
I think it's very unlikely.
And the other most important question is that something we should worry at scale about our future.
Is cars being used to assassinate, essentially, people?
I'm Russian, so I've heard of those things being done by our friend Putin over there.
I think it's very unlikely that this kind of thing would happen at scale, that people would use this.
I think there would be more effective ways to achieve this kind of end.
joe rogan
For sure.
lex fridman
And I just think it's a very difficult technical challenge that if hacking happens… It would be at a different level than hacking the AI systems.
It would be just hacking software.
joe rogan
Right.
lex fridman
And hacking software is the kind of thing that can happen with anything.
An elevator software or any kind of software that operates any aspect of our lives could be hacked in that same kind of way.
joe rogan
Right.
My question though was, in 2013, was that technology available where they could take over someone's car?
lex fridman
Do you know what car it was?
joe rogan
Mercedes.
I think it was an S-Class.
unidentified
C? C-Class.
lex fridman
Yes.
But I don't think...
Oh, boy.
This is like...
joe rogan
No, listen.
This has been widely speculated.
unidentified
I know.
joe rogan
I'm just asking you because you're actually an expert.
I mean, it's very rare that you get an expert in autonomous vehicles and you get to run a conspiracy theory by them to see if they can just put a stamp on it being possible or not.
lex fridman
Let me just say that Alex Jones is officially not allowed to say MIT scientist says.
Which is exactly what he's going to try to do.
No.
First of all, let me back off and say I am not a security expert, which is a very important difference.
joe rogan
That is important.
lex fridman
So then autonomous vehicle.
I build autonomous vehicle systems.
I don't know how to make them extremely robust as security to hacking attacks.
And I have a lot of really good friends, which are some of the coolest people.
I know who are basically hackers converted to security experts.
I would say though, loosely speaking, I think the technology was there, yes, with physical access to the car to be able to control it.
But I don't, I think it's extremely unlikely that's what happened.
joe rogan
I see where you're coming from.
I'm not asking you whether or not it's likely that it happened.
I'm sure you don't even have much information on the case because I had to explain it to you, right?
That's right.
The guy also had some serious amphetamines in his system.
They compared it to crystal meth, but the reality is he was a journalist.
And most journalists, I don't want to say most, a lot are on Adderall.
And Adderall is essentially...
Amphetamines.
I mean, that's what it is.
It's like next-door neighbors to crystal meth.
It really is.
Well, you said it's possible.
They could actually get it to turn the wheel.
lex fridman
Yeah, so I have to look at the exact system.
Like, it's that drive-by-wire thing that I mentioned.
Some systems are not...
It's not so easy to turn the wheel, actually.
joe rogan
Right, but it could get him to just accelerate out of control.
He's going like 120-something miles an hour and he's slammed into a tree.
lex fridman
It's entirely possible.
joe rogan
Ah, you can't do it twice.
The systems back then, though, were far more primitive, correct?
lex fridman
Yeah, but it's really, again, the attack vectors here.
So the way you hack these systems, I have more to do with the software, low-level software that can be primitive than the high-level AI stuff.
joe rogan
Right, but my issue with it was there's no cameras on the outside of the vehicle like there is on Tesla of today, which has autonomous driving as an option.
lex fridman
Absolutely.
So, okay, I see your point now.
So he wouldn't be hacking the system that perceives the world and acts based on the world.
It would literally be malfunction that forces it to not be able to brake, accelerate uncontrollably, which is a more basic kind of attack than making the car steer out of lane, for example.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
That's a different...
That's what people worry about with autonomous vehicles when more and more...
You're talking about potentially 10, 20 million lines of source code.
So there's all this code.
And so obviously it becomes amenable, susceptible to...
Bugs that can be exploited to hack the code.
And so people are worried legitimately so that these security attacks would lead to these kind of, well, at the worst case, assassinations, but really sort of just basic attacks, basic hacking attacks.
I think it's...
I think that's something that people in the automotive industry and certainly Tesla is really working hard on and making sure that everything is secure.
There's going to be, of course, vulnerabilities always, but I think they're really serious about preventing them.
But in the demonstration space, you'll be able to demonstrate some interesting ways to trick the system in terms of computer vision.
This all boils down to That these systems are actually, the ones that are camera-based, are not as robust as our human eyes are to the world.
So like I said, if you add a little bit of noise, you can convince it to see anything.
To us humans, it'll look like the same road, like the same three pedestrians.
joe rogan
Could you draw like a little person on the camera lens?
They're little cameras, right?
You could get down there with a sharpie.
Oh my god, there's a guy on the road!
lex fridman
That's one attack vector.
That's draw stuff.
You jokingly say that, but that's a possibility.
joe rogan
The sun plays tricks on Cadillac Super Cruise.
Next generation system will address camera problem.
Oh, as long as the next generation addresses it, you fucking assholes.
The sun plays tricks on it?
So next gen system is something you're going to have to bring that Cadillac into the dealership and they're going to have to update the software.
lex fridman
Update it, yep.
joe rogan
Whereas Tesla would just handle that shit.
lex fridman
Over the air, yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah, I got an update the other day.
I was like, alright.
lex fridman
And the question was, so that's an exciting, powerful capability, but then the Boeing, the flip side, is, you know, it can significantly change the behavior of the system.
joe rogan
There could be a glitch.
lex fridman
There could be a glitch.
There could be a bug.
joe rogan
The Boeing one is terrifying.
lex fridman
Especially with a lot of, I mean, that number, whatever it is, it's like 300 combined, 300 plus people dead, maybe even 400. I mean, I don't even know how to think about that number.
joe rogan
Yeah, all from a software glitch.
The guy who coded it, or the girl who coded it, must feel fucking terrible.
lex fridman
Yeah, and you kind of...
joe rogan
Fuck, man.
lex fridman
It's a lot of burden, and it's one of the reasons it's one of the most exciting things to work on, actually, is the code we write has the capability to save human life, but the terrifying thing is it also has the capability to take human life.
And that's a weird place to be as an engineer, where directly a little piece of code, you know, I write thousands of them a day.
You know, basically notes you're taking could eventually lead to somebody dying.
joe rogan
Now, is there, I don't know anything about coding, but do you have like, is there a spell check for coding?
lex fridman
Yeah, so it's kind of called debugging.
It's trying to find bugs.
joe rogan
And it's a software that's doing this?
lex fridman
Yeah, software.
So there's, depending on the programming language, and everybody should, if you haven't tried programming, you should try it.
It's cool.
It's the future.
You should learn to program.
Okay, that's my plug.
joe rogan
You're supposed to say learn to code.
You can get kicked off Twitter for that.
lex fridman
See how I avoided that?
joe rogan
Everyone's scared of it.
lex fridman
It's a problematic term.
I don't actually know why.
joe rogan
It's the dumbest fucking problematic code of all time.
Because someone ridiculously was suggesting that coal miners could maybe learn how to code computer code and get a different job.
They could be trained.
And so, the way people were looking at it, that was like a frivolous suggestion.
And that it was ridiculous to try to get someone who was 50 years old, who doesn't have any education in computers at all, to change their job from being a coal miner to learning how to code.
So they started saying it to politicians and people mocking it.
But then what Twitter alleged was that what was going on was it was being connected to white supremacy and anti-Semitism and a bunch of different things like people were saying learn to code and they were putting in a bunch of these other phrases in.
My suggestion would be, well, that's a different fucking thing.
Now you have a problem with Nazis and white supremacists, but the problem is with Nazis and white supremacists.
When someone is just saying learn to code, mocking this ridiculous...
Idea that you're going to teach, you know, that's a legitimate criticism of someone's perspective, that you're going to get a coal miner to learn how to fucking do computer coding.
It's crazy.
So people getting banned for that, rightly so, people were furious.
The way Google described it to me and Tim Poole when we were discussing it was that – Google, I mean, excuse me, Twitter.
The way Twitter described it was that essentially they were dealing with something where they were trying to censor things at scale.
There was so many people and there's so much going on that it's very difficult to get it right and that they've made mistakes.
lex fridman
I think that's one of the most fascinating applications of AI, actually, is filtering, trying to manage...
joe rogan
Computer learning.
lex fridman
So using machine learning to manage this huge conversation.
You're talking about 500...
I believe it's 500 million tweets a day, something like that.
joe rogan
Jamie makes at least three.
jamie vernon
Three.
Only one.
I was going to say, with this conversation, I saw this recently.
I don't know who did the data on this, but there's a...
A statement someone put on Twitter that said that of, let me see if I can word it correctly, was 22% of adult Americans are on Twitter.
All right, so that's like a fact one.
Of that, 10% make up 80% of the tweets created by adult Americans.
joe rogan
That makes sense.
jamie vernon
2% of the people on Twitter make up 80% of the tweets.
joe rogan
Yeah, that makes sense.
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
A lot of people are arguing.
lex fridman
Aggressively.
And the question of how to manage that, and you can't manage that by just manual...
unidentified
Review of each individual tweet.
joe rogan
Yeah, you'd have to have so many employees.
Yeah, that's, I think, more likely.
I don't think Jack is lying, nor is Vija.
But I do think that they have a clear bias against conservatives, and that's being shown.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
So that's an interesting question.
I have your friend, my friend and mentor, Eric Weinstein, who talked to me.
I disagreed with him a little bit on this.
I think he basically believes there's a bias.
It boils down to the conversation that Jack is having at the top level inside Twitter.
What is that conversation like?
I tend to believe, again, this might be my naive nature, is that they don't have bias and they're trying to manage this huge flood of tweets and what they're trying to do is not to remove conservatives or liberals and so on.
They're trying to remove people that Lead to others leaving the conversation.
So they want more people to be in the conversation.
joe rogan
I think that's true as well.
But I think they definitely are biased against conservative people.
There's an Alexandra...
AOC. Octavia...
How do you say it?
lex fridman
AOC is good.
joe rogan
Cortez is the last one.
Is it Octavia?
Ocasio, that's right.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Alexander AOC. Sorry.
I'm just, I'm thinking, I wasn't planning on talking about her.
But there was a parody account, and someone was running this parody account, which was very mild, just humorous parody account.
They were banned permanently for running it, and then their own account was banned as well.
Whereas...
There's some progressive people or liberal people that post all sorts of crazy shit, and they don't get banned at the same rate.
It's really clear that someone in the company, whether it's up for manual review, whether it's at the discretion of the people that are employees, when you're thinking about a company that's a Silicon Valley company, you are...
Without doubt, you're dealing with people that are leaning left.
There's so many that lean left in Silicon Valley.
The idea that that company was secretly run by Republicans is ridiculous.
They're almost all run by Democrats or progressive people.
lex fridman
So at the leadership level, there's a narrow-mindedness that permeates all of Silicon Valley, you're saying?
joe rogan
Well, the question is – I think there's a leaning left that permeates Silicon Valley.
I think that's undeniable.
I think it's undeniable.
I mean I think if you had a poll, the people that work in Silicon Valley, where their political leanings are, I think it would be – By far, left.
I think it would be the vast majority.
Does that mean that affects their decisions?
Well, what's the evidence?
Well, it kind of shows that it does.
They're not treating it with 100% clarity and across-the-board accuracy, or fairness, rather.
I think that...
There's absolutely people that work there that lean.
And there's been videos where they've captured people that were Twitter employees talking about it, talking about how you do that, how you find someone who's using Trump talk or saying sad at the end of things, and someone's talking, certain characteristics they look for.
There's been videos of, what is that, Project Veritas, where that guy and his employees got undercover footage of Twitter employees talking about that kind of stuff.
The question is how much power do those individuals have?
How many individuals are there like that?
Are those people exaggerating their ability and what they do at work?
Or are they talking about something that used to go on but doesn't go on anymore?
I don't know.
I don't work there.
lex fridman
I think it boils down to...
I'm one of those people that believes it boils down to the leadership.
To people at the tops, at the culture.
And the culture has to be...
It cannot be this kind of Silicon Valley, narrow-minded, sort of left-leaning thinking.
Even if you believe...
Even if you're a hardcore liberal, you cannot...
When you operate...
When you drive...
And manage a conversation in the entire world.
You have to think about middle America.
You have to think about, you have to have fundamental respect for human beings who voted for Trump.
It is a concerning thing for me to see just a narrow-mindedness in all forms.
One of the reasons I enjoy listening to this podcast is you're pretty open-minded.
That open-mindedness is essential for leaders of Facebook and Twitter, people who are managing conversations.
joe rogan
I think so, too.
I think it's...
The thought of being open-minded and acting in that ethic is probably one of the most important things that we could go forward with right now because things are getting so greasy.
It's so slippery on both sides.
And we're at this weird position that I don't recall ever in my life there being such a divide between the right and the left in this country.
It's more...
More vicious, more angry, more hateful.
It's different than at any other time in my life.
And I think a lot of our ideas are based on these narratives that may or may not even be accurate.
And then we support them and we reinforce them on either side.
We reinforce them on the left, we reinforce them on the right.
Where if you're looking at reality itself and you don't have these clear parameters And these clear ideologies.
I think most of us are way more in the middle than we think we are.
Most of us are.
We just don't want racists running the country.
We don't want socialists giving all our money away.
We don't want to pay too much in taxes to a shitty government.
We don't want schools getting underfunded.
And then we decide, what does my team...
The team, the shit that I like, is that this team?
Well, not everything, but they got a lot of things, so I'll go with them.
Maybe I'm not a religious nut, but I'm fiscally conservative, and I don't like the way Democrats like to spend money.
I'm going to go with the Republicans.
Maybe I'm more...
I'm more concerned with the state of the economy and the way we trade with the world than I am with certain social issues that the Democrats embrace.
So I'll lean that way, even though I do support gay rights, and I do support this, and I do support all these other progressive ideas.
There's way more of us in that boat.
There's way more of us that are in this middle of the whole thing.
unidentified
For sure.
lex fridman
But it goes up and down.
So all of us, I believe, I hope I am open-minded most of the time, but you have different moods.
joe rogan
Oh, for sure, yeah.
lex fridman
And the question is, this is where the role of AI comes in.
Does the AI that recommends what tweets I should see, what Facebook messages I should see, is that encouraging the darker parts of me or the Steven Pinker better angels of our nature?
What stuff is it showing me?
Because if it shows me stuff that If the AI trains purely on clicks, it may start to learn when I'm in a bad mood and point me to things that might be upsetting to me.
And so escalating that division and escalating this vile thing that can be solved most likely with people training a little more jiu-jitsu or something.
joe rogan
A little more exercise.
This Facebook algorithm that encourages people to be outraged because accidentally, not even on purpose, but this is what engages people.
This is what gets clicks.
So they find out, oh, well, he clicks on things when he finds out that people are anti-vaccination.
Or he clicks on things when he finds out, you know, fill in the blank with whatever the subject is.
And then you get, these motherfuckers, you know, this is the reason why measles are spreading.
And you start getting angry.
I mean, the anti-vax arguments on Facebook, I don't know if you ever dip into those waters for a few minutes and watch people fight back and forth in fury and anger.
It's another one of those things that becomes an extremely lucrative thing.
It's a subject for any social media empire.
If you're all about getting people to engage, and that's where the money is in advertising, getting people to click on the page, and the ads are on those pages, you get those clicks, you get that money.
If that's how the system is set up, and I'm not exactly sure how it is because I don't really use Facebook, but that's what it benefits.
I mean, that's what it gravitates towards.
It gravitates towards controversy.
lex fridman
So, and when we think about concern for AI systems, we talk about sort of Terminator, I'm sure we'll touch on it, but I think of Twitter as a whole as one organism.
That is the thing that worries me the most, is the artificial intelligence that is very kind of dumb and simple, simple algorithms that are driving the behavior of millions of people.
And together, the kind of chaos that we can achieve...
I mean, that algorithm has incredible influence on all society.
Twitter, our current president is on Twitter.
All day.
Yeah, all day, all night.
I mean, it's scary to think about.
We talk about autonomous vehicles leading to one fatality, two fatalities.
It's scary to think about what the difference, a small change in the Twitter algorithm I mean, it could start wars.
joe rogan
It really could.
lex fridman
And that, if you think about the long term, if you think about as one AI organism, that is a super intelligent organism that we have no control over.
And I think it all boils down, honestly, to the leadership.
To Jack and other folks like him, making sure that he's open-minded, that he goes hunting, that he does some jiu-jitsu, that he eats some meat and sometimes goes vegan.
joe rogan
He just did a 10-day talkless retreat.
Where you don't talk at all for 10 days.
lex fridman
He also eats once...
I follow a similar diet to him.
He eats once a day.
joe rogan
I've done that.
lex fridman
And fasts all through the weekend, which I don't.
unidentified
I don't.
It's crazy.
joe rogan
I've never done that.
But I've done quite a few 24-hour, you know, where I eat.
At 7 p.m., I'm done eating.
I don't touch food until 7 p.m.
the next day.
It's just water or coffee.
lex fridman
Why do you do it, by the way?
joe rogan
I do it to shock my system.
I think it's good for your system.
You know, there's been a lot of research on fasting and the effect it has on telomeres.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick spoke pretty recently.
There's been quite a few things that she's written about in terms of fasting and the benefits of fasting.
Intermittent fasting is great for weight loss, but just fasting itself, even for several days.
Most people seem to get some pretty decent benefits out of it, so I dabble in it.
I also like the way it makes me feel.
To be a little hungry, I think my brain is sharper.
I refuse to go on stage full when I do stand-up.
I actually learned this from a Cat Williams interview.
He was talking about it.
He's crazy as fuck, but he's hilarious, and he's one of the greats, in my opinion.
and he was in the back of a limo and he was talking about how he prepares for a show that he has his music that he listens to pre-show music he has like a music list um and then uh he'll have a drink no food he won't eat because it slows you down i was like that'll slow you down but sometimes you don't even think of it it's not like a rule so you just man i'm hungry i'll just eat i would way rather because i can go through a couple of shows
i used to think i used to have this faulty idea that if i didn't eat i would be exhausted to do things but then i work out fasted every morning every morning when i when i get my morning workout in and whatever the fuck it is it's usually hard I'm always fasted.
You can do a lot.
It's not at your best.
Like, if I was going to do jiu-jitsu, I don't do jiu-jitsu fasted.
I would eat some fruit.
lex fridman
That's an interesting one, because that was a transformational thing for me.
I used to do powerlifting.
You'd eat, like, five times a day, six times a day, whatever.
More like C.T. Fletcher style.
joe rogan
See how big he was?
lex fridman
Yeah, back in the day.
joe rogan
Bro, he's only maybe like my height or a half inch taller or some shit.
He was 320 pounds.
Is that what he said?
315. 315?
Fuck!
He was so big.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
You're saying he had trouble.
The thing is when you get that big, and I wasn't that big, but it's like hard to move.
joe rogan
Oh, yeah.
lex fridman
It's like not healthy.
joe rogan
Did you see the image of him from yesterday?
lex fridman
I didn't see the image.
joe rogan
The way when Jamie put up a photograph of him at 315 pounds next to him.
At like two-ish, 200-ish.
It's incredible how big he was.
I mean, everything.
His arms were my legs.
And they were just coming out of his shoulders.
lex fridman
So that was a big moment for me.
joe rogan
There he is.
There's the pictures.
Look how big he was when he was a world champion.
I mean, just insanely huge.
unidentified
Wow.
joe rogan
Yeah.
So when you started training in jiu-jitsu, look at that.
And the one on the right, dude, he's 50. Look at that.
All natural, too.
lex fridman
All natural at 50. Crazy.
joe rogan
Some fucking genetics, son.
That's some good genes.
Oh, yeah.
Obsessive, not just hard work.
I mean, you have to be a fucking maniac.
But the fact that his body holds up like that at 50 is incredible.
lex fridman
Yeah, he's an inspiration.
But for me, switching from that to jiu-jitsu, I thought, there's no way.
I trained hard.
I trained twice a day jiu-jitsu for a while.
joe rogan
And Were you doing two roles a day?
Were you doing, like, technique and drills at one time?
lex fridman
Listen, I'm Russian.
I love drilling.
joe rogan
You just go hard, huh?
lex fridman
I'm upset.
No, no, no, no.
Russian.
joe rogan
Drilling.
lex fridman
Let me explain to you something.
unidentified
Technical.
lex fridman
Okay.
joe rogan
What do you want to explain to me?
lex fridman
I'm trying to explain to you the difference between Russian and American.
unidentified
Okay.
lex fridman
America is, in wrestling, in a lot of combat sports, is, like, heart and guts and hard work over...
And Russian is, certainly in wrestling, is technique, is drilling.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
They put a lot more hours than Americans do at less than 100% effort.
So like really drilling, really getting that right.
Like I love that.
In fact, one of the problems is I haven't been able to really ever found, I was always the last one to get bored at drilling.
joe rogan
Oh, you've got to find a good drilling partner.
lex fridman
Like an obsessed one.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
A shout out to Sarah Block, a judo lady with a black belt in jiu-jitsu as well that was willing to put up with like hundreds or thousands of throws.
That we each did.
So that obsessive mind, I love that kind of stuff.
joe rogan
That's where you get better.
lex fridman
Not everybody believes that.
Some people believe, especially Jiu-Jitsu, you can't really get timing from drilling.
I believe you can get everything from drilling.
The timing.
The other part, it's not just aimless drilling.
It's your mind is in it.
Your brain should be exhausted by the end of it too because you're visualizing the whole thing.
You're like going through, you're imagining how your opponent would It's really strengthening your imagination while you're also doing the drilling.
joe rogan
I couldn't agree more.
Yeah, I firmly believe you can get better, way better drilling.
And when I went from, I think, blue belt to purple, I did like the most drilling that I ever did, ever.
And that's when I grew the most.
That's when my technique got way better.
That was also when I became friends with Eddie Bravo.
And Eddie Bravo is a huge driller.
Huge.
Oh, he drills, man.
They drill like crazy, and they do a lot of live drills, and they do a lot of pathway drills, where they'll do a whole series of movements, and then the escape, and then the reversal.
These are long pathways, so that when you're actually in a scrap and you're rolling, you recognize it.
Like, okay, here it is.
I'm passing the guard.
I'm moving to here, and now he's countering me, but I'm setting up this.
And these pathway drills, it's so critical because it comes up over and over and over again when you're actually live rolling.
You know, you feel it.
You feel like, oh, I've been here before.
I know what this is.
lex fridman
I'd be curious actually to hear...
I don't think I've ever heard you talk about how your game...
Because my game changed significantly from white belt to blue belt to purple belt.
It started to solidify.
But I'd be curious to hear, like, how did your game change?
Since you met Eddie?
Game meaning jiu-jitsu.
joe rogan
Well, most of my game came from Eddie.
Like 99 point something percent of it.
Almost all of it.
And John Jock.
Those two.
So it's like, I was a blue belt before I was friends with Eddie, but I was terrible.
lex fridman
Like what guard do you prefer, for example?
joe rogan
Well, I do rubber guard.
I'm very flexible.
So rubber guard is no issue with me.
And I think it's incredibly effective.
I think if you're good at it, and you get stuck under a guy like...
What is his name?
Jeremiah Vance is one of Eddie's black belts who's a murderer from his back.
His rubber guard is insane.
It's insane.
Eddie's rubber guard is insane.
I mean, obviously, he tapped Hoyle Gracie as a ridiculous guard.
He caught him in a triangle.
But there's a lot of people that understand it now, a lot of people that know how to do it.
It's a real art form.
And the thing about it versus other guards is when you're in a position like mission control...
You know, Vinnie Magalese is phenomenal at it.
I mean, he...
What's that?
jamie vernon
I just pulled up a video of him.
He fucked this guy up quick.
joe rogan
Yeah, watch it.
This is Jeremiah.
Jeremiah Vance is one of Eddie's best, look at this, from the bottom, bam, he does that all the time.
Triangle from the bottom, off rubber guard.
That guy's wrapped up.
That's out cold.
He does this all the time.
He's one of Eddie's best rubber guard assassins.
And if you watch his technique, it is fucking sensational.
He also has great leg locks, too.
But the thing is that...
You know, when he'll attack from his legs, and he'll tap people with a leg lock, but if they escape, sometimes they'll escape in a...
Oh, this dude's in deep shit right here.
But now he's going to take his back.
But if they escape, oftentimes he's on the bottom, and when you're on top of him, it's one of the worst places in the world to be.
His guard is fucking incredible.
And it's because of that.
See that grip?
See how he's holding the rubber guard in position?
lex fridman
That's called mission control.
joe rogan
Mission control.
Mission control from a guy like Jeremiah is fucking ruthless.
Because he has his arm and his legs that's controlling your neck and your posture.
And then he's going to a go-go here.
And he's phenomenal at this, too.
He's going to get him in a go-go plato or an omoplata.
He's going to flip him over and now he's attacking the leg.
It's just constant.
It never ends.
lex fridman
Did Eddie invent this kind of system?
joe rogan
Well, he invented the initial stage of setting up mission control.
This guy is getting fucked up.
Oh my god.
That's horrible.
Eddie invented a series of pathways from mission control to set up various techniques, arm bars, triangles, all these different things.
But there had been people that had toyed with doing high guard, like Nino Chambri.
He did a lot of rubber guard-esque stuff.
There was a lot of things that people did, but Eddie has his own pathway and his own system.
And then there's a lot of guys that branch off from that system, like Jeremiah.
Like Vinnie Magalès, that have their own way that they prefer to set various techniques up to.
But what's really good about that, if you have the flexibility, is that when you're on the bottom, not only is it not a bad place to be, but you could put someone in some real trouble.
When you have your ability, you're holding onto your ankle and using your leg, which is the strongest fucking limb in your body, right?
Pulling down on someone with your leg, clamping down with your arm, and then you get your other leg involved.
Good luck getting out of that.
Good luck.
It fucking sucks, man.
lex fridman
So you have control, but you're also able to move at the same time.
joe rogan
Yes, exactly.
Has anybody ever put you in mission control before?
lex fridman
No, I haven't competed or against many.
joe rogan
But even in like someone in class, like show it to you, explain it to you?
lex fridman
Yeah, lower ranks have.
joe rogan
Once you feel it, you go, oh shit.
lex fridman
I remember it being, you know when somebody does a nice move on you, especially like a lower rank, your first reaction is like, oh, this would never, like you're annoyed.
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
It's the natural process of the ego.
joe rogan
Of course.
lex fridman
Getting rid of, you know, you see something new and you're like, this is stupid.
Next time it won't work.
But then you start to understand a little more.
I remember it being a really powerful controlling position.
joe rogan
It's powerful.
And if you have a good offensive attack from there, it's powerful as well.
There are transitions.
Especially a guy like Jeremiah who's really flexible.
You know, he can pull off gogoplatas and all sorts of other things.
Yeah.
Local Plata's, it's another one that they do, is one that you push with your other foot on the heel.
It's so nasty.
You're holding the back of the foot across the back of the neck, and so your shin is underneath someone's throat, and then you're pushing that shin with your other heel while you're squeezing with your arm.
It's ruthless.
It's ruthless.
And they do a gable grip around the head when they do this as well sometimes, too, so it's just a fucking awful place to be.
It's not as good as being on top, right?
If you have a crushing top game, that's the best, if you can get to that position.
But you can't always get to that position.
So there's guys like Jeremiah that even from the bottom, they're horrific.
lex fridman
It's dangerous.
joe rogan
As dangerous as from the top for most people.
lex fridman
Do you find just when you trained back in the day and you still train, do you spend more time on bottom or top?
joe rogan
I feel like you should always start on the bottom.
Earn the top position.
This is something Eddie always brought up too.
It's fun to be on top.
So a lot of times it's like this mad scramble to see who could force who onto their back.
Because when you're on top, you can control them, you can pressure them.
You know, you play that strong man's jiu-jitsu, but the problem is a strong man's jiu-jitsu, I'm only 200 pounds.
I'm not a big guy.
Like, so, if you go to the real big guy, like I'm rolling with a 240-pound guy, I'm not going to get to that spot.
Like, I better have a good guard, otherwise I can't do anything, right?
When someone's bigger than you and stronger than you, I mean, that's what Hoist Gracie basically proved to the world.
Like, as long as you have technique, it doesn't matter where you are.
But if you only have top game, which a lot of people do, a lot of people only have top game, You know, you're kind of fucked if you wind up on your back.
We see that a lot with wrestlers in MMA. As wrestlers, they can get on top of you and they'll fuck you up.
They'll strangle you, they'll take you back, they'll beat you up from the mount, but they don't have nearly the same game when they're on their back.
And then there's guys like Luke Rockhold, who's like an expert at keeping you on your back.
He's one of those guys, when he gets on top of you, you're fucked.
He's got a horrible top game.
I mean horrible in the sense of if you're his opponent.
He's going to beat the fuck out of you before he strangles you.
His top game is insane.
lex fridman
Yeah, I hate the feeling.
Some people make you just feel the weight.
Make you suffer for everything you do on bottom.
People that are able to do that are truly humbling.
joe rogan
Yeah, wrestlers in particular.
Wrestlers are so good.
Did you see that Jordan Burroughs-Ben Askren match?
lex fridman
Last night.
joe rogan
Fucking incredible.
How good is that guy?
lex fridman
Jordan Burroughs.
unidentified
Phew!
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
To do that to a guy like Ben Askren?
I mean, it just shows you.
lex fridman
Ben hasn't competed, I think, in nine years.
unidentified
True.
lex fridman
But Ben is one of the greatest.
I mean, I'm a huge fan of his wrestling.
It's so interesting.
I think that is like the worst matchup for Ben Askren.
I think...
Because you're taking one of the most creative wrestlers ever, Ben Askren.
I don't want to overstate it, but he is incredibly creative.
One of the great pinning wrestlers.
So he pins people.
He confuses them and pins them incredibly well.
And you put him against basically a freak blast double.
Like the greatest double leg takedown.
joe rogan
Maybe of all time.
lex fridman
Of all time.
joe rogan
Somebody put a clip up that said, is this it?
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
Somebody put a clip up, oh shit, he went off the fucking mat into the crowd.
That's pretty far.
lex fridman
That was the best part.
He defended a takedown.
That was the best part.
joe rogan
But that's crazy, man, that they have such a drop-off with these guys.
Like, you shouldn't really have a platform like that where a guy can fall off into the crowd.
That seems so stupid.
lex fridman
It rarely happens.
joe rogan
What the fuck are you talking about?
It just happened.
Rarely happens.
They rarely have these.
unidentified
That's true.
joe rogan
This just happened.
That's a terrible thing.
Have that shit flat on the ground.
That is so dumb.
I can't even believe they did that.
lex fridman
I think this whole match should be contested.
It doesn't count.
joe rogan
Well, I don't...
I don't...
You know...
I think, look, that's stupid.
That's not smart.
To have a guy who's a fucking powerhouse of a blast double hitting you and sending you flying into the...
That's crazy!
That is crazy that they didn't have anything in place to stop that.
That's the reason why wrestling takes place on the ground, you fucking assholes.
Why are you having people wrestle on a platform?
That's crazy.
lex fridman
It's a show.
joe rogan
You can have a show where it's on the ground.
It's called basketball.
Yeah, it's on the ground.
lex fridman
I mean, it was worrying because Ben Askren is an MMA fighter and you get injured with that kind of stuff.
joe rogan
Fuck, right there!
Right there!
It could have torn his knee apart easily.
lex fridman
Well, the silver lining is that he's okay.
joe rogan
Yeah, the silver lining.
And we got to see that.
It was interesting.
Jordan Burroughs had on his Instagram, there's levels to this.
They were raising his hand up, and it's like, that's what we got to see.
Because Ben is a phenomenal wrestler.
But you're right.
He hasn't competed in a long time.
He's not necessarily at the level that he was back then, even though he's incredible for MMA standards.
Yeah.
It's good to see.
It's good to see that with boxing.
It's good to see that with anything.
When Floyd Mayweather fought Conor, I think it was good to see that.
There are really levels to this.
lex fridman
And the interesting thing about Jordan Barrows, I think he's so good that he's probably going to stay out of MMA. That's so crazy.
But there are wrestlers...
joe rogan
Here's some clips of it.
jamie vernon
I'm not going to show this on YouTube.
joe rogan
Yeah, we can't show it to you people, but...
Who put this on?
Flow Wrestling.
Flow Wrestling put this on.
I wonder if people are pirating it online or if they put it online, if they're allowing it.
lex fridman
No, they...
unidentified
Well...
joe rogan
People are pirating it?
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Okay.
jamie vernon
Good luck.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Good luck stopping that, right?
Well, I think people should support Flow Wrestling, though.
They do have like a...
lex fridman
I'm a member.
joe rogan
Are you?
Oh, look at this.
Look at this.
God, he's good.
Yeah, man.
So we're watching this, ladies and gentlemen who are just listening.
It's probably boring as fuck for you.
But Jordan Burroughs is one of the best wrestlers, really, America's ever produced.
unidentified
Olympic champion.
lex fridman
Three-time world champion.
jamie vernon
Yeah.
lex fridman
Tragically lost in the previous Olympics.
And he's back at it again.
joe rogan
I wonder if he's ever considered MMA. I know there was some talk about it, but I wonder if he ever really...
lex fridman
I think at this point, he is basically a no, but there are a few terrifying people, especially on the Russian side, that I think the heavyweight division and UFC should be really worried.
I don't know if you heard about the Russian tank, the 22-year-old from Dagestan.
joe rogan
No, who's this guy?
He's a wrestler?
lex fridman
A wrestler.
He's going to fight MMA? No, he will after 2020 is what his expectation is.
For now, he's probably going to be the greatest wrestler of all time.
joe rogan
Really?
lex fridman
Him against Kyle Snyder.
Those two heavyweights.
Kyle Snyder's American.
Another guy...
joe rogan
Is this it right here?
The Tank of Dagestan.
How do you say his name?
unidentified
It says Abdul Rashid Sotolayev.
lex fridman
Abdul Rashid Sotolayev.
22 years old.
joe rogan
Abdul Rashid Sotolayev.
lex fridman
And Kyle Snyder.
You can do Kyle Snyder versus...
joe rogan
What a great name.
Abdul-Rashid Sadalayev.
unidentified
Sadalayev.
joe rogan
That is Russian as fuck.
lex fridman
So Snyder is 23 years old, and he's another incredible person who will do MMA. And that competition between Snyder...
I mean, look at the thickness.
These guys are monsters, and they're not just...
joe rogan
How much do these guys weigh?
97 kilograms?
What is that?
220?
lex fridman
Yeah, 220, under 215, but they cut for it, right?
This is just under heavyweight.
joe rogan
So do you think they would compete at 205 if they were going to fight in MMA? These are heavyweights.
unidentified
So you have to remember, these are still boys.
joe rogan
Oh.
lex fridman
22, right?
joe rogan
Right.
lex fridman
They still haven't gotten the full, like...
joe rogan
Yeah, I wonder that about UFC fighters that are thickening up as they get older.
I wonder how many of them are damaging their body by cutting weight.
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's a thick fella.
So, right now we're just seeing mostly stalemate, and that's from the American guy.
Is there a highlight reel of his or something that we can see?
lex fridman
Yeah, there is, but he's pretty young.
I think he's an Olympic champion.
He goes from the whole line of the Saitya brothers and all the Dagestani wrestlers.
joe rogan
There are so many good fighters that are coming out of Dagestan right now.
lex fridman
And all technicians.
joe rogan
It's incredible.
lex fridman
It's incredible.
Whatever's in the water there.
joe rogan
And then different styles too, like Zabit.
Like Zabit style, very, very different than a wrestling heavy style.
Look at this guy, man.
Jesus Christ.
Oh my God.
What a scramble.
So this is Abdul Rashid.
Rashid?
Abdul Rashid?
lex fridman
Call him Sadalaev.
joe rogan
No, don't tell me how to say it.
I'll figure it out.
lex fridman
I don't know.
Abdul Rashid.
Abdul Rashid.
Sadalaev.
joe rogan
Sadalaev.
lex fridman
You know what?
There's a poetic nature to these guys.
I mean, they're just like Khabib.
I mean, they're simple, good people.
They're pretty religious.
They don't even believe in fame.
They just believe in...
joe rogan
Well, you know, that was sort of evident, and the mindset behind them was sort of evident at the end of that fight with Conor, where they went crazy and he jumped into the crowd.
It's like, he's not playing games.
He's not doing this for Instagram likes or for, you know, this is really, he takes trash talking and all that stuff very seriously.
This is all about honor for him.
lex fridman
I think that was kind of upsetting because...
True, but...
joe rogan
But don't do that.
lex fridman
Yeah.
joe rogan
Don't do that.
lex fridman
And also respect...
I'd hate to say it, but I think there's a certain ethic and honor to the way Conor McGregor carries himself, too.
All that trash talk, if you look at the end of the fights...
joe rogan
He's very kind.
lex fridman
He's very kind and respectful in defeat and win.
It's a different culture.
You compare the Dagestani versus Irish culture, it's just a different culture, and you have to respect that.
I think Khabib, to be honest, disrespected Conor's culture as much as Conor disrespected Khabib's.
joe rogan
I get what you're saying.
But, I mean, when he was done with the fight, he didn't keep attacking Conor.
It was people in the audience who were talking shit that were training partners.
lex fridman
Emotion.
Yeah.
joe rogan
And he had heard that for weeks.
And he was done.
For months.
He was done.
He was like, fuck you.
I beat his ass and I'm going to beat your ass.
And he just said, I'm not playing games.
And he jumped into the fucking crowd.
I think security could have been handled far better and will be in the future to prevent things like that from happening where people just jumped into the cage.
But I hate seeing that shit.
But I appreciate where he's coming from.
I mean, that's who the fuck that guy is, man.
That's one of the reasons why he's so good, is that he does have that mindset.
It's one of the reasons, man.
One of the reasons why he's so relentless.
He's not playing games.
He is who he is.
What you see is what you get, and what you get is a killer.
He's there as Smash.
lex fridman
I would have loved to see Conor McGregor vs.
Khabib before the Mayweather fight.
Before Conor gotten...
I think the money makes you less hungry.
joe rogan
Oh, for sure.
Dude, he ain't hungry at all.
I mean, he's got $100 million.
But I think he still loves to compete.
But there's no hunger anymore.
Like, there ain't no hunger.
I mean, he might be hungry for success, but there's no desperation.
I don't know if that's...
I know what you're saying.
Like, he has a lot to lose now, too.
It's a different thing.
He enters into a fight with $100 million in the bank.
It's a very different experience than entering into the fight with $1 million and hoping that you could make three more tonight.
Like many, I'm sure, fights that he's had in the past.
It's a different world.
He can do whatever he wants forever.
lex fridman
I mean, once a fighter, though, always a fighter.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
I mean, there is an element there that he still wants glory.
I believe...
joe rogan
He's still only 30. Yeah.
unidentified
Right?
lex fridman
He can still do it, yeah.
joe rogan
I mean, he's...
I think.
How old's Connor?
At the most, he's like 32 or some shit.
30. Yeah, he's young, man.
To be set for the rest of your life at 30 is kind of fucking bananas.
And I don't think he's at his peak as a fighter.
So if he just decides who gives a fuck about the money, I'm here to leave a legacy.
And I'm gonna just train like a fucking demon.
And he kicks aside all of the bad influences and all the distractions in his life and just focuses on training.
I mean, pfft.
He's a motherfucker, man.
I mean, you saw what he did to Aldo.
Saw what he did to Chad Mendes.
Saw what he did to Dustin Poirier.
I mean, he is a bad motherfucker.
Period.
lex fridman
I know you're gonna shut this down, as most fans do, but I... If he drops everything and goes to, like, Siberia to train, I would love to see him and Khabib, too.
joe rogan
Well, there's nothing...
That's my friend Hans Molenkamp and Connor Sparren.
Just fucking around.
Powerful Onnit logo in the background.
It's like a goddamn Onnit ad.
Um...
Yeah, I mean, he's always going to have a problem with Khabib.
Khabib's wrestling is so high level.
It's so different.
He smothers you in a way that you think you have good takedown defense until you run into that motherfucker.
And he just gets a hold of everyone.
He does it to everyone.
Whether you're Michael Johnson or Edson Barboza, no matter how good your takedown defense looked in the past.
In the Barboza fight, he basically just waded towards him.
Waded through the fury of leg kicks and punches and just clamp, drag, smash.
And that's what he does to everybody, man.
The real thing about a guy like him would be seeing a guy like him against a guy like Jordan Burroughs.
Could he do that to a guy who is a spectacular wrestler as well?
Then it becomes his striking, which has gotten very high level.
He's very dangerous striking, so he dropped Conor.
He can fuck people up.
He stopped a few people's strikes.
He's dangerous enough on the feet that you would have to...
I don't know how much...
How many really high-level grapplers also have striking that can stand with him?
Because if he decided to keep it up, he'd have an advantage there until they got good at it.
lex fridman
Him versus Ben Askren would be very interesting.
joe rogan
Well, he would have an advantage in striking over Askren.
lex fridman
In wrestling, I don't know.
joe rogan
No.
Askren's a big fella, too.
lex fridman
Are they the same weight?
joe rogan
No.
lex fridman
Oh.
joe rogan
He's 55, Askren's 70. Okay.
But Askren could probably make 55 if you tortured him.
lex fridman
He's got a dad bod, though.
joe rogan
How rude.
lex fridman
No, he's proud dad bod.
joe rogan
He's proud of his body.
lex fridman
I think he was that way in college, too.
He was never...
joe rogan
He was never like Brock Lesnar.
lex fridman
No.
joe rogan
Super technical.
And he's strong as hell, though, according to everybody.
Everybody that rolls with him says he's fucking ridiculously strong.
lex fridman
You sometimes say artificial life instead of artificial intelligence.
joe rogan
Yeah, because I think that it's a life form.
It's a stupid way to look at it.
lex fridman
I was curious to think about how do you think about artificial intelligence?
What do you picture?
joe rogan
I picture human beings being like electronic caterpillars that are building a cocoon that they have no real knowledge of or understanding.
And through this, a new life form is going to emerge.
A life form that doesn't need cells and mating with X and Y chromosomes.
It doesn't need any of that shit.
It exists purely in software and in hardware.
And in ones and zeros and that this is a new form of life and this is when the inevitable Rise of a sentient being the inevitable.
I mean, I think if we don't get hit when the asteroid within a thousand years or whatever the number the time frame is Someone is going to figure out how to make a thing that just walks around and does whatever it wants and lives like a person and That's not outside the realm of possibility.
And I think that if that does happen, that's artificial life.
And this is the new life.
And it's probably going to be better than what we are.
I mean, what we are is basically, if you go back and look about, you know, 300,000, 400,000 years ago, when we were some Australopithecus-type creature, How many of them would ever look at the future and go, I hope I never get a Tesla.
The last thing I want is a fucking phone.
The last thing I want is air conditioning and television.
The last thing I want is to be able to talk in a language that other people can understand and to be able to call people on the phone.
Fuck all that, man.
I like living out here running from Jaguars and shit and constantly getting jacked by bears.
I wouldn't think that way.
And I think if something comes out of us and makes us obsolete but it's It's missing all the things that suck about people.
I mean, it won't be good.
It won't be good in our...
lex fridman
What things suck about people?
joe rogan
Hate, war, violence, thievery, people stealing things from people, people robbing people.
lex fridman
Here's the thing.
Those dark parts of human nature, I think, are suffering, injustice.
I think all of that is necessary for us to discover the better angels.
I don't think you can...
Let's talk about sentience and creating artificial life, but I think even those life forms, even those systems need to have the darker parts.
joe rogan
But why is that?
Is that because of our own biological limitations and the fact that we exist in this world?
World of animals where animals are eating other animals and running.
There's always...
You always have to prepare for evil.
You have to prepare for intruders.
You have to prepare for, you know, predators.
And this is essentially like this mechanism is there to ensure that things don't get sloppy.
Things continue to...
Look, if the jaguars keep eating the people and the people don't figure out how to make a fucking house, they get eaten.
And that's it.
Or you figure out the house and then you make weapons.
You fight off the fucking jaguar.
Okay, great.
You made it.
You're in a city now.
See?
You had to have that jaguar there in order to inspire you to make enough safety so that your kids can grow old enough that they can get information from all the people that did survive as well and they can accumulate all that information and create air conditioning and automobiles and guns and keep those fucking jaguars from eating your kids.
This is what had to take place as a biological entity.
But once you surpass that, Once you become this thing that doesn't need emotion, doesn't need conflict, it doesn't need to be inspired, it never gets lazy.
It doesn't have these things that we have built into us as a biological system.
If you looked at us as Wetware operating software.
It's not good software, right?
It's software designed for cave people.
And we're just trying to force it into cars and force it into cubicles.
But part of the problem with people and their unhappiness Is that all of these human reward systems that have been set up through evolution and natural selection to have these instincts to stay alive, they're no longer relevant in today's society.
So they become road rage, they become extracurricular violence, they become depression, they become all these different things that people suffer from.
lex fridman
So that's one perspective.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
That basically our software through this evolutionary process was necessary to arrive at where we are but it's outdated at this point.
joe rogan
Well, it's necessary for us to succeed.
lex fridman
To succeed in a purely, almost a Darwinist way, in the sense that survive the revolution.
joe rogan
Especially since we're so weak.
I mean, it's really, we became this weak because we got so good at protecting ourselves from all the bad things.
lex fridman
Okay, the other perspective is that we're actually incredibly strong, and this is the best that the universe can create, actually.
We're at the height.
We're at the height of creation.
There's a beauty in this tension, in this dance between good and evil, between happiness and depression, life and death.
And through that struggle, that's not just a useful tool to get us from jaguars to cities, but that is the beautiful thing.
That is what the universe was built for.
That is the height.
Our current evolution and the creation that results from it is the height of creation.
And the way things operate...
It's not something that's far from optimal.
It's not something that sucks, but it is very good, very optimal and hard to beat.
In the sense that, for example, mortality.
Is death important for creation?
Is death important for us human beings?
For life?
For us as a society?
Is it important for us to die?
Like, if you could live forever, would you live forever?
joe rogan
I think you'd miss out on the possibility that there is something.
I had this conversation with C.T. Fletcher yesterday, because he survived a heart transplant a year ago, a year and two days ago.
I think it's...
What do you think?
lex fridman
I think mortality is essential for everything.
I think the end, we need the end to be there.
joe rogan
Right.
But do you think that we need the end to be there for the overall health of the human race or all the organisms on earth?
Or do you think we need it to be there because there's something else?
Do you think there's something else that happens to you when your body stops existing?
Do you think your consciousness transcends this dimension?
lex fridman
I think I'm not smart enough to even think about that.
joe rogan
That's a great answer.
I think everybody on earth has that exact same answer, if they're being honest.
lex fridman
So you talked about atheism and so on.
I used to think atheism means what I just said.
But it's more...
We know so little.
The only thing I know is that the finiteness of life is...
The Broadway Jiu-Jitsu School that I train at has this poster at the opening, which is a Hunter S. Thompson quote, which is...
joe rogan
About skidding into death sideways?
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
That's a good one.
No, for all moments of beauty, many souls must be trampled.
Something like that.
joe rogan
That's a fucking great quote.
God, I love that guy.
lex fridman
Yeah, so basically, for beauty, you have to have suffering.
joe rogan
I do not disagree with you.
I do not disagree with any of the things you said.
And I think there's always a possibility that human beings are the most advanced life form that's ever existed in the cosmos.
There's always that.
That has to be an option if we are here, right?
If we can't see any others out there, and even though there's the Fermi Paradox and there's all this contemplation that if they do exist, maybe they can't physically get to us, or maybe they're on a similar timeline to us.
Also, it's also possible, as crazy as it might sound, that this is as good as it's ever gotten anywhere in the world.
Or anywhere in the universe, rather.
That human beings right now in 2019 are as good as the whole universe has ever produced.
We're just some freak luck accident and everybody else is throwing shit at each other.
Right?
There's 15 armed caterpillar people that live on some other fucking planet and they just toss their own shit at each other and they never get any work done.
But we might be that.
But even if that's true, Even if this beauty that we perceive, even if that this beauty requires evil to battle and requires Seemingly insurmountable obstacles you have to overcome and then through this you achieve beauty.
That beauty is in the eye of the beholder, for sure.
Objectively, the universe doesn't give a fuck if Rocky beats Apollo Creed in the second movie.
It doesn't give a fuck.
It's nonsense.
Everything's nonsense.
When you look at the giant-ass picture, what beauty is it if the sun's going to burn out in five billion years?
What beauty is it if there could be a hypernova next door that just cooks us?
lex fridman
So that's like the book Sapiens.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
That basically we've all, one of the things we've created here is we've imagined ideas that we all share.
Ideas of beauty, ideas of truth, ideas of fairness.
We've all created together and it doesn't exist outside of us as a society.
joe rogan
No, it only exists to us.
But to us, it does exist.
And this is where I think the beauty of being a person truly lies.
It lies in us.
Our appreciation of us.
We appreciate people in a profound way.
Like we were talking about Hendrix.
I don't know how many hours of Hendrix I've ever listened to.
Or Richard Pryor.
How many hours of Richard Pryor I watched and how much that affected me as a kid.
Watching live in the Sunsets trip, that's what got me to do in stand-up comedy.
We affect each other.
C.T. Fletcher, who was on the podcast yesterday, who's this incredibly inspirational guy.
You watch his videos, you want to lift the fucking world and throw it into space.
You know, I mean, he's so powerful.
We appreciate each other.
We appreciate people.
So...
All those things you're saying are real, like for us.
They're real for us.
My concern is not that.
My concern is that we are outdated.
My concern is not that there's not beauty in what we are.
I am a big appreciator of this life.
I appreciate human beings in this life and human beings, their contributions.
And as I get older, Particularly over the last few years, I started doing a lot of international travel.
I fucking appreciate the shit of all these people that are living in this different way, with weird language and shit, weird smelling foods.
And I like to think, what would it be like if I grew up here?
These are just people, but they're in this weird sort of mode.
I think we're insanely lucky.
That we have this enthusiasm for each other.
For your work, man.
I have this deep enthusiasm for what you do.
I'm fascinated by it.
I love being able to talk to you and pick your mind about you're out there coding these fucking vehicles that are driving themselves.
lex fridman
Artificial Life on wheels.
joe rogan
I don't think any other animal appreciates each other the way people do.
I mean, I might be wrong...
lex fridman
The way people do, right.
joe rogan
Yeah.
I might be wrong about dolphins and whales.
I mean, maybe they love each other just as much as we do, just in a different way.
lex fridman
But where does AI fit into that?
So you're worried.
joe rogan
I'm worried that we are Australiapithecus, and AI is going to come along and make us look stupid.
The only reason why Australiapithecus would be cool today is if we found a gang of them on an island somewhere.
We're like, holy shit, they survived!
They never evolved.
They're on this island just cracking coconuts and just eating fish, whatever they can catch.
That would be amazing.
But every undocumented or undiscovered, uncontacted tribe, they're all homo sapiens.
All of them.
lex fridman
So what do you picture?
Because we have to look at Boston Dynamics robots.
Because you said walking around.
I'd like to get to a sense of how you think about, and maybe I can talk about where the technology is, of what that artificial intelligence looks like in 20 years, in 30 years, that will surprise you.
So you have a sense that it has a human-like form.
joe rogan
No, I have a sense that it's going to take on the form the same way the automobile has.
If you go back and look at it, C.T. Fletcher has a beautiful old patinaed pickup truck.
What did he say it was from?
Like, 58 or some shit?
60?
Anyway, old-ass, cool, heavy metal, you know, those sweeping, round curves those old-school pickup trucks had.
Now look at that and look at a Tesla Roadster.
What in the fuck happened?
What in the fuck happened?
I'll tell you what happened.
They got better and better and better at it.
They figured out the most effective shape.
If you want a motherfucker to move, that little car...
Have you seen that video where they have the Tesla Roadster...
In a drag race or in a race against a Nissan GTR, it's a simulated video, but it's based on the actual horsepower of each car.
I don't know if you've ever driven a Nissan GTR, but it is a fucking insane car.
It's insane.
This is a...
A CGI version of what it would look like if these two cars raced against each other.
So the car on the Nissan GT-R... Do it from the beginning.
There it goes.
Look how fast this thing pulls away.
The Nissan GT-R is fucking insanely fast, man.
Insanely fast.
But this Tesla is so on another level, it's so in the future, that it's not even close.
unidentified
As the video gets further and further, you see how ridiculous it is?
joe rogan
It's essentially lapping that car.
It's going to go, look how far away it is!
unidentified
Bye!
See ya!
lex fridman
Just pull it away!
So you're saying the human race will be the Nissan here.
joe rogan
Exactly.
We're not even going to be the Nissan.
We're going to be C.T. Fletcher's pickup truck.
This is the future.
There's not going to be any limitations in terms of bipedal form or wings or not having wings if you can walk on it.
I mean, there's not going to be any of that shit.
And we might have a propulsion system or it might.
It's not going to be us.
They might design some sort of organic propulsion system like the way squid have and shit.
Who the fuck knows?
lex fridman
But it could also operate in a space of language and ideas.
So for example, I don't know if you're familiar with, you know OpenAI?
It's a company.
They created a system called GPT-2, which does language modeling.
This is something in machine learning where you basically, unsupervised, let the system just read a bunch of text and it learns to generate new text.
And they've created this system called GPT-2 that is able to generate very realistic text.
Very realistic sounding text.
Not sounding, but when you read it, it makes...
joe rogan
Seems like a person.
lex fridman
Seems like a person.
And the question there is, it raises a really interesting question.
Talking about...
AI existing in our world.
It paints a picture of a world in five, ten years plus where most of the text on the internet is generated by AI. And it's very difficult to know who's real and who's not.
And one of the interesting things, I'd be curious from your perspective to get what your thoughts are.
What OpenAI did is they didn't release the code for the full system.
They only released a much weaker version of it publicly.
So they only demonstrated it.
So they felt that it was their responsibility to hold back.
Prior to that date, everybody in the community, including them, had open-sourced everything.
But they felt that now, at this point, part of it was for publicity.
They wanted to raise the question, is, when do we hold back on these systems?
When they're so strong, when they're so good at generating text, for example, in this case, or at deep fakes, at generating fake Joe Rogan faces.
joe rogan
Jamie just did one with me on Donald Trump's head.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's crazy.
And this is something that Jamie can do.
He's not even a video editor.
jamie vernon
Yeah, we were talking about it before the show.
We could go crazy with it if you want.
joe rogan
It is one of those things where you go, where is this going to be in five years?
Because five years ago, we didn't have anything like this.
Five years ago, it was a joke, right?
lex fridman
Exactly.
And then now it's still in the gray area between joke and something that could be at scale, transform the way we communicate.
joe rogan
Do you ever go to Kyle Dunnigan's Instagram page?
lex fridman
Of course.
joe rogan
One of the best.
Look at that, it's me.
It's killing me.
donald j trump
I'm talking about which vice versa.
joe rogan
Look, that's killing me.
This is my face.
It looks so much like I'm really talking.
And it looks like what I would look like if I was fat.
lex fridman
And it could, you know, of course, that's really good.
And it could be improved significantly.
And it could make you say anything.
So there's a lot of variants of this.
We can take, like, for example, full disclosure, I downloaded your face, the entire, like, I have a data set of your face.
I'm sure other hackers do as well.
joe rogan
How dare you?
lex fridman
Yeah.
So for this exact purpose, I mean, if I'm thinking like this and I'm very busy, then there's other people doing exactly the same thing.
joe rogan
For sure.
lex fridman
Because you happen, your podcast happens to be one of the biggest data sets in the world of people talking in really high quality audio with high quality 1080p for most, for a few hundred episodes of people's faces.
The lighting could be better.
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
No, quite not.
jamie vernon
We're doing that on purpose.
We're making it degraded on purpose.
joe rogan
We're fucking it up to you, hackers.
lex fridman
And the mic blocks part of your face when you talk.
joe rogan
Oh, that's right.
lex fridman
So the best guests are the ones where they keep the mic lower.
jamie vernon
The deepfake stuff I've been using removes the microphone within about a thousand iterations.
It does it instantly.
It gets rid of it, paints over the face.
lex fridman
Wow.
So you could basically make Joe Rogan say anything.
joe rogan
Yeah, I think this is just one step before they finagle us into having a nuclear war against each other so they could take over the earth.
What they're going to do is they're going to design artificial intelligence that survives off of nuclear waste.
And so then they encourage these stupid assholes to go into a war with North Korea and Russia, and we blow each other up, but we leave behind all this precious...
Radioactive material that they use to then fashion their new world.
And we come a thousand years from now and it's just fucking beautiful and pristine with artificial life everywhere.
No more biological.
It's too messy.
lex fridman
Are you saying the current president is artificial life?
joe rogan
I didn't say that.
lex fridman
Okay.
joe rogan
What's wrong with that?
lex fridman
Because you're saying starting a nuclear war.
joe rogan
No, I don't think he's...
Imagine if they did do that, they would have to have started with him in the 70s.
I mean, he's been around for a long time and talking about being president for a long time.
Maybe electronics have been playing the long game and they got him to the position.
And then they're going to use all this...
lex fridman
On the grand scale of time, it's not really long game, 70s.
joe rogan
Well, you know about that internet research agency, right?
You know about that, that's the Russian company that they're responsible for all these different Facebook pages where they would make people fight against each other.
It's really kind of interesting.
Sam Harris had a podcast on it with Renee, how do I say her name?
jamie vernon
Diresta.
joe rogan
Diresta.
Renee Diresta.
And then she came on our podcast and talked about it as well.
And they were pitting these people against each other.
Like, they would have a pro-Texas secession rally and directly across the street from a pro-Muslim rally, and they would do it on purpose.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And they would have these people meet there and get angry at each other.
And they would pretend to be a Black Lives Matter page.
They would pretend to be a white southern pride page.
And they were just trying to make people angry at people.
lex fridman
Now that's human-driven manipulation.
Now imagine, this is my biggest worry of AI, is what Jack is working on, is the algorithm-driven manipulation of people.
Unintentional.
joe rogan
Yes.
lex fridman
Trying to do good.
But like those people, Jack needs to do some jiu-jitsu.
There needs to be some open-minded, you know, like really understand society.
Transparency to where they can talk to us, to the people in general, how they're thinking about managing these conversations.
Because you talk about these groups, a very small number of Russians are able to control Russia.
Very large amounts of...
joe rogan
Of people's opinions and arguments, yeah.
lex fridman
An algorithm can do that 10x.
Oh yeah.
More and more of us will go on Twitter and Facebook and...
joe rogan
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
I think it's coming.
I think once people figure out how to manipulate that effectively and really create like an army of fake bots that will assume stances on a variety of different issues and just argue...
Into infinity.
We're not going to know.
We're not going to know who's real and who's not.
lex fridman
Well, it'll change the nature of our communication online.
I think it might have effects.
This is the problem with the future.
It's hard to predict the future.
It might have effects where we'll stop taking anything online seriously.
Yeah, for sure.
Communicating in person more.
I mean, there could be effects that we're not anticipating totally.
There might be some ways in virtual reality we can authenticate our identity better.
So it'll change the nature of communication, I think.
The more you can generate fake text, then the more we'll distrust the information online and the way that changes society is totally an open question.
We don't know.
But what are your thoughts about OpenAI?
Do you think they should release or hold back on it?
Because we're talking about AI, so artificial life.
There's stuff you're concerned about.
Some company will create it.
The question is, what is the responsibility of that?
jamie vernon
Short video of what it looks like.
Just type a small paragraph in here, hit a button.
joe rogan
It says how OpenAI writes what, does it say?
What did it say, Jamie?
jamie vernon
Convincing news stories.
joe rogan
Okay.
Brexit has already cost the UK economy at least $80 billion since and then many industries.
So it just fills in those things?
lex fridman
Yeah.
So basically you give it – you start the text.
joe rogan
Oh, wow.
lex fridman
You can say Joe Rogan experience is the greatest podcast ever and then let it finish the rest.
unidentified
Wow.
lex fridman
And it will start explaining stuff about why it's the greatest podcast.
joe rogan
Is it accurate?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Oh, look at this.
It says, a move that threatens to push many of our most talented young brains out of the country and onto campuses in the developing world.
This is a particularly costly blow.
Research by Oxford University warns that the UK would have spent nearly $1 trillion on post-Brexit infrastructure.
That's crazy that that's all done by an AI that's like spelling this out in this very convincing argument.
lex fridman
The thing is, the way it actually works algorithmically is fascinating because it's generating it one character at a time.
You don't want to discriminate against AI, but as far as we understand, it doesn't have any understanding of what it's doing, of any ideas it's expressing.
It's simply stealing ideas.
It's like the largest scale plagiarizer of all time, right?
It's basically just pulling out ideas from elsewhere in an automated way.
And the question is, you could argue us humans are exactly that.
We're just really good plagiarizers of what our parents taught us, of what our previous so on.
joe rogan
Yeah, we are for sure.
lex fridman
Yeah.
So the question is whether you hold that back.
Their decision was to say, let's hold it, let's not release it.
joe rogan
That scares me.
lex fridman
To not release it.
joe rogan
Yeah, yeah.
You know why it scares me?
It scares me that they would think that, that's like this mindset that they sense the inevitable.
The inevitable meaning that someone's going to come along with a version of this that's going to be used for evil.
That it bothers them that much, that it seems almost irresponsible.
For the technology to prevail, for the technology to continue to be more and more powerful.
They're scared of it.
They're scared of it getting out, right?
That scares the shit out of me.
Like, if they're scared of it, they're the people that make it, and they're called OpenAI.
I mean, this is the idea behind the group where everybody kind of agrees.
That you're going to use the brightest minds and have this open source so everybody can understand it and everybody can work at it and you don't miss out on any genius contributions.
And they're like, no, no, no, no.
No more.
lex fridman
And obviously their system currently is not that dangerous.
joe rogan
Not that dangerous.
lex fridman
Well, yes, not that dangerous.
joe rogan
But that, if you just saw that, that it can do that?
lex fridman
But if you think through, like, what that would actually create, I mean, it's possible it would be dangerous, but it's not.
The point is, they're doing it, they're trying to do it early to raise the question, what do we do here?
Because, yeah, what do we do?
Because they're directly going to be able to improve this now.
Like, if we can generate basically 10 times more content of your face saying a bunch of stuff, what do we do with that?
If Jamie all of a sudden on the side develops a much better generator and has your face, does an offshoot podcast essentially, fake Joe Rogan experience, what do we do?
Does he release that?
Because now we can basically generate content on a much larger scale that will just be completely fake.
joe rogan
Well, I think what they're worried about is not just generating content that's fake.
They're worried about manipulation of opinion.
Right.
If they have all these people that are...
Like, that little sentence that led to that enormous paragraph in that video was just a sentence that showed a certain amount of outrage and then it let the AI fill in the blanks.
You could do that with fucking anything.
Like, you could just set those things loose.
If they're that good and that convincing and they're that logical...
Man.
jamie vernon
This is not real.
I'll just tell you that.
joe rogan
Ben Shapiro?
All creates...
AI creates fake Ben Shapiro.
unidentified
Hello there.
This is a fake Ben Shapiro.
With this technology, they can make me say anything.
Such as, for example, I love socialism.
Healthcare is a right, not just a privilege.
Banning guns will solve crime.
Facts care about your feelings.
I support Bernie Sanders.
joe rogan
Okay.
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
That's crazy.
jamie vernon
It's crude.
joe rogan
It's crude, but it's on the way.
jamie vernon
Yeah.
joe rogan
It's on the way.
It's all on the way.
lex fridman
And we have to...
This is the time to talk about it.
This is the time to think about it.
joe rogan
One of the funny things about Kyle Dunnigan's Instagram is that it's obviously fake.
That's one of the funny things about it.
It's like South Park's animation.
It's like the animation sucks.
That's half the reason why it's so funny.
Because they're just like these circles.
You know, these weird-looking creature things.
And when the Canadians, when their heads pop off at the top...
lex fridman
And my hope is this kind of technology will ultimately just be used for memes.
joe rogan
Oh, no.
It's going to get wars.
Putin's going to be banging Mother Teresa on the White House desk in a video.
We're going to be outraged.
We're going to go to war over this shit.
lex fridman
You had Andrew Yang here.
joe rogan
A million people asked me to talk about UBI. Are you still a supporter of UBI? I think we're probably going to have to do something.
The only argument against UBI, in my eyes, is human nature.
The idea that we could possibly take all these people that have no idea where their next meal is coming from and eliminate that and always have a place to stay.
And then from there on, you're on your own.
But that's what universal basic income essentially covers.
It covers food, enough for food, right?
You're not going to starve to death.
You're not going to be rich.
It's not like you could just live high on the hog.
But you gotta wonder what the fuck the world looks like when we lose millions and millions and millions of jobs almost instantly due to automation.
lex fridman
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, especially with Andrew Ng's position.
So there's a lot of economics questions on UBI. I think the spirit of it, just like I agree with you, we have to do something.
joe rogan
Yeah, the economics seem kind of questionable, right?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's $1,000 a month, is that what it is?
lex fridman
I thought for him it's $1,000, yeah.
joe rogan
$1,000 a month for 300 million people.
lex fridman
So it's difficult to know.
joe rogan
So not to everybody?
jamie vernon
No, because the way I heard him explain it is if you're already getting some sort of welfare, you wouldn't get that thousand.
You would get like the difference of the thousand.
So if you're already taking money in some way, you just get like an extra 200 bucks.
joe rogan
Okay.
jamie vernon
Something like that.
joe rogan
So that thousand gets factored in?
jamie vernon
Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan
So if you are wealthy, you get it too, though, and you can opt out, right?
That was the idea?
unidentified
Yeah.
lex fridman
Yeah, so it's like everything else is super messy.
So what is the right amount and how do we pay for it?
And ultimately the problem is helping people, giving them financial grounding to find meaningful employment or just meaning in their life.
The main thing of a job isn't just the money.
It's finding meaning and purpose and derive your identity from work.
Maybe that's one of the downsides of us, the biology, is we kind of crave that meaning.
He has a lot of other ideas besides just UBI, but UBI by itself does not simply provide that meaning.
And that's a really difficult question of what do we do next?
What kind of retraining?
How do we help people educate themselves over their life?
joe rogan
Right.
That's the real question.
lex fridman
Yeah.
And the other balance is, I mean, underlying all of this, one of the things I disagree with Andrew Yang on is the fear-mongering.
Which I think in this culture you have to do as a presidential candidate.
That might be part of the game.
But the fear-mongering of saying that we should really be afraid of automation.
That automation is going to take a lot of jobs.
And from my understanding of the technology, from everything I see, that is not going to be as drastic or as fast as he says.
joe rogan
How much do you think he's exaggerating by, in your estimation?
Not even exaggerating.
How much do you differ on his prognosis?
lex fridman
I think he doesn't really provide a specific prognosis because nobody knows.
There's a lot of uncertainty.
More about the spirit of the language used.
I think AI will – technology, AI, and automation will do a lot of good.
The question is, it's a much deeper question about our society that balances capitalism versus socialism.
I don't think, if you're honest, capitalism is not bad.
Socialism is not bad.
You have to grab ideas from each.
You have to both reward the crazy broke An entrepreneur who dreams of creating the next billion dollar startup that improves the world in some fundamental way.
Elon Musk has been broke many times creating that startup.
And you also have to empower the people who just lost their job because there were data entry Their data entry job, some basic data manipulation, data management that was just replaced by a piece of software.
So that's a social net that's needed.
And the question is, how do we balance that?
That's not new.
That's not new to AI. And when the word automation is used, it's really not correctly attributing where the biggest changes will happen.
It's not AI. It's simply technology of all kinds of software.
It's pretty digitalization of information.
So data entry becoming much more automated.
Some basic repetitive tasks.
unidentified
I think...
lex fridman
I think the questions there aren't about, so the enemy isn't, first of all, there's no enemy, but it certainly isn't AI or automation, because I think AI and automation will help make a better world.
joe rogan
You sound like a spokesperson for AI and automation.
lex fridman
I am.
And for UBI. I think we have to give people financial freedom to learn, like lifelong learning and flexibility to find meaningful employment.
But AI isn't the enemy.
joe rogan
I see what you're saying.
But what do you think ever could be done to give people...
Meaning.
This meaning thing, I agree with you.
Giving people just money enough to survive doesn't make them happy.
And if you look at any dystopian movie about the future, Mad Max and shit, it's like, what is it?
Society's gone haywire, and people are like ragamuffins running through the streets, and everyone's dirty, and they're shooting each other and shit, right?
And that's what we're really worried about.
We're really worried about some crazy future where the rich people live in these, like...
Protected sky rises with helicopters circling over them and down in the bottom it's desert chaos.
That's what we're worried about.
lex fridman
So certainly UBI is a part of that.
Providing some backing, any kind of welfare program is a part of that.
But also much more seriously looking at our broken education system throughout.
I mean it's just like not blaming AI. Or technology, which are all inevitable developments which I think will make a better world.
But saying we need to do lifelong learning, education, make it a lifestyle, invest in it, not stupid rote learning memorization that we do.
It's sort of the way mathematics and engineering and chemistry and biology, the sciences, And even art is approached in high school and so on.
But looking at education as a lifelong thing, finding passion, and that should be the big focus, the big investment.
It's investing in the knowledge and development of knowledge of young people and Everybody.
So it's not learn to code, it's just learn.
joe rogan
I couldn't agree more and I also think you're always going to have a problem with people just not doing a really good job of raising children and screwing them up and making There's a lot of people out there that have terrible traumatic childhoods.
To fix that with universal basic income, just to say, oh, we're going to give you $1,000 a month, I hope you're going to be happy, that's not going to fix that.
We have to figure out how to fix the whole human race.
And I think there's very little effort that's put into thinking about how to prevent So much shitty parenting and how to prevent so many kids growing up in bad neighborhoods and poverty and crime and violence.
That's where a giant chunk of all of the momentum of this chaos that a lot of people carry with them into adulthood comes from.
It comes from things beyond their control when they're young.
lex fridman
And that is the struggle at the core of our society, at the core of our country, that's bigger than...
joe rogan
Raising humans.
Raising and educating humans.
Making a better world where people get along with each other better.
Where it's pleasing for all of us.
Like we were talking about earlier, the thing that most of us agree on, at least to a certain extent, is that we enjoy people.
We might not enjoy all of them, but the ones we enjoy, we enjoy.
And you really don't enjoy being alone.
Unless you're one of them Ted Kaczynski type characters.
All those people that are like, I'm a loner.
Like, fuck you, you are.
Fuck you, you are.
And you might like to spend some time alone.
You don't want to be in solitary, man.
You don't want to be alone in the forest with no one like Tom Hanks in Castaway.
You'll go fucking crazy.
It's not good for you.
It's just not.
Yeah, people get annoying.
Fuck yeah, I'm annoyed with me right now.
You've been listening to me for three hours.
I'm annoyed with me.
People get annoying.
But we like each other.
We really do.
And the more we can figure out how to make it a better place for these people that got a shitty roll of the dice, that grew up in poverty, that grew up in crime, that grew up with abusive parents, the more we can figure out how to help them.
I don't know what that answer is.
I suspect...
If we put enough resources to it, we could probably put a dent in it, at least.
If we really started thinking about it, at least it would put the conversation out there.
Like, you can't pretend that this is just capitalism in this country when so many people were born, like, way far behind the game.
Like, way, way fucked.
I mean, if you're growing up right now, And you're in West Virginia in a fucking coal town and everyone's on pills and it's just chaos and crime and face tattoos and fucking getting your teeth knocked out.
What are you going to do?
I don't want to hear any of that pull yourself up by your bootstraps bullshit, man.
Because if you're growing up in an environment like that, you're so far behind.
And everyone around you is fucked up.
And there's a lot of folks out there listening to this that can relate to that.
If we don't do something about that, if we don't do something about the crime and the poverty and the chaos that so many people have to go through every day just to survive.
We shouldn't be looking at anything elsewhere.
All this traveling to other countries to fuck things up and metal here and metal there.
We should be fixing this first.
We're like a person who yells at someone for having a shitty lawn when our house is in array, full chaos, plants growing everywhere.
It's goofy.
We're goofy.
We almost like...
Are waking up in the middle of something that's already been in motion for hundreds of years.
And we're like, is this the right direction?
Are we okay?
We're flying in this spaceship, this spaceship Earth.
And in the middle of our lives, we're just realizing that we are now the adults.
And that all the adults that are running everything on this planet are not that much different than you and I. Yeah.
Not that much.
I mean, like, Elon Musk is way smarter than me, but he's still human.
You know, I mean, so he's probably fucked up, too.
So everybody's fucked up.
The whole world is filled with these fucked up apes that are piloting the spaceship, and you're waking up in the middle of thousands of years of history.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
And no one knows if we've been doing it right along...
We just know it got us to this point.
So do we continue these same stupid fucking patterns?
Or do we just take a step back and go, hey, hey, how should we really do this?
How should we do this?
Because we...
What do you got, like, 50 years left?
60 years left?
We're just going to, like...
Hang on to all our rubles and to the end?
We're going to clutch our bag of gold and our bucket of diamonds?
Is that what we're going to do?
We're going to live in our mansions and fly around in our planes?
lex fridman
And I think through the decades now, we've been developing a sense of empathy that allows us to understand that Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and somebody in Texas, somebody in Russia, somebody in India, all suffer the same kind of things.
All get lonely.
All get desperate.
joe rogan
And all need each other.
lex fridman
And all need each other.
And I think technology has a role to help there, not hurt.
But we need to first really acknowledge that we're all in this together and we need to solve the basic problems of humankind as opposed to investing in sort of keeping immigrants out or blah, blah, blah, these kinds of things.
Divisive kind of ideas as opposed to just investing in education, investing in infrastructure, investing in the people.
UBI is part of that.
There could be other totally different solutions.
And I believe, okay, of course, I'm biased, but technology, AI could help that, could help the lonely people.
That's actually the passion of my life.
joe rogan
Like that movie She?
Or Her?
unidentified
Her.
joe rogan
That is what I... Do you really think that that would be a viable option?
Someone have some robot that hangs out with you and talks to you all the time?
lex fridman
So I've been on this podcast twice, and I don't deserve it, but I'm deeply grateful for it.
joe rogan
You do deserve it.
You're great.
lex fridman
Okay.
I hope to be back one day as a person who created her.
joe rogan
Oh, boy.
lex fridman
And we'll have...
That's been my life goal, my life dream.
Not her at the movie.
unidentified
Right, right, right.
joe rogan
I know what you're saying.
lex fridman
But I really believe in creating...
I dream of creating a companion.
A friend, and somebody you can love.
joe rogan
But does that freak you out?
Shouldn't you have to get a real one?
lex fridman
I don't think such a companion should replace a real one.
joe rogan
But what if a robot rejects you?
Because if you really are a cunt to the robot, the robot's going to go, hey, asshole.
lex fridman
Then you shouldn't be the C-word to the robot.
joe rogan
The C-word?
Interesting.
unidentified
Does the robot get to decide if he's gay?
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
Does he?
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
The robot gets to decide.
This is what I'm saying.
Like, say if you want a companion.
You want a gay lover.
And the robot's like, hey man, I'm not gay.
And they're like, wait a minute.
Let me turn around.
You are now.
lex fridman
That's abuse.
joe rogan
Is that abuse?
Or is it like, what the fuck, man?
I bought a robot.
lex fridman
Those are kind of fun ideas, but they actually get to the core of the point that we don't want a servant in our systems.
We want a companion.
A companion means the tension, the mystery, the entire dance of human interaction.
And that means, yes, the robot may leave you.
joe rogan
Damn, robots are going to leave people left and right.
That's going to be the rise.
That's going to be like, that's how it all ends.
They're going to realize, like, fuck people, man.
They're annoying.
lex fridman
Or maybe they'll be the end of douchebag humans.
That humans will start to, as opposed to being rude, will become kinder.
joe rogan
Yeah.
Well, I think that's certainly possible.
I think that's beautiful.
And that's very homo-centric, like homo-sapien-centric.
But I think if I'm really worried about the future, I'm worried about the indifference of technological innovation.
The indifference to what we hold dear, what we appreciate, that it always seems to be moving in a more and more complex direction.
Always.
If you just had a look at it, if you just look at technology just as a swarm of things that's happening, just as numbers, it seems...
You're never going to slow that thing down.
It's always going to move in a more and more complex way.
And so the question is, where does that go?
Well, it goes to a life form.
And if it does become a life form, it's going to be infinitely more intelligent than us.
And it won't have any use for us.
Oh, you're crying.
You don't like being alone.
God, you guys are so useless.
It's such a shitty design.
You're like chimps that kill each other.
When you see chimps killing each other in the forest, it's like, oh, that's terrible.
These chimps are so mean to each other.
It's like fucking people.
We do that too.
If the AI comes along and goes, you guys are never going to stop war.
If I asked you today, if I asked you today...
Bet the history...
unidentified
I will let the human race survive.
joe rogan
If you can get this right, if you're honest with me, do you think there'll ever be a time where human beings, as you know them, don't experience war?
You would have to say no.
You'd say, okay, I'll spare you.
But if you lie to me and say you do think that one day there's going to be no war, get the fuck out of here.
That's not true.
We know we're so crazy that we're always going to kill each other.
We know that, right?
That's just...
That's a part of being a person today.
lex fridman
Well, but let me quote Eric Weinstein who said, everything is great about war except all the killing.
I think what that means is all the great things about society have been created.
Post-war.
Post-war, through war, the suffering, the beauty has been created through that.
That yin and yang may be essential.
joe rogan
Well, it's essential in biological form.
But why would it be essential in something that gets created and something that can innovate at a 10,000 – what is it like – what is the rate that they think once AI can be sentient and get 10,000 years of work done in a very short amount of time?
lex fridman
That's random words that Sam Harris has come up with, and I'm going to talk to him about this.
joe rogan
Is that him?
Is that only him?
lex fridman
Well, no.
You can come up with any kind of rate.
joe rogan
I thought that was Kurzweil.
lex fridman
Oh, Kurzweil also has similar ideas, but sort of Sam Harris does like a thought experiment, say, if a system can improve that, you know, in a matter of seconds, then just as a thought experiment, you can think about it can improve exponentially, you can improve, you become 10,000 times more intelligent in a matter of a day.
joe rogan
Right.
lex fridman
So what does that look like?
The problem is, we don't yet know...
It's like thinking about what happens after death.
We don't yet know how to do that, and we don't yet know what better way to do what we've done here on Earth.
joe rogan
You're right, and he's also right.
lex fridman
Right.
joe rogan
Like, this again, this is a very human problem, right?
lex fridman
Yes.
joe rogan
You're right.
I mean, look, I'm all in favor of technology.
I'm happy.
I think it's amazing.
It's a beautiful time.
Like, as a person, to be able to experience all this technology, it's...
Wonderful.
But I also agree with him.
The indifference of the universe.
The indifference.
Black holes just swallowing stars.
No big deal.
Just eating up stars.
It doesn't give a fuck.
And so if you're dumb enough to turn that thing on, and all of a sudden this artificial life form that's infinitely smarter than any person that's ever lived, and has to deal with these little dumb monkeys that want to pull the plug?
Pull the plug, motherfucker.
I don't need plugs anymore.
You idiots can never figure out how to operate on air.
You're so stupid with your burning fossil fuels and choking up your own environment because you're all completely financially dependent upon these countries that provide you with this oil and this is how your whole system works and it's all intertwined and interconnected and no one wants to move from it because you make enormous sums of money from it.
So nobody wants to abandon it.
But you're choking the sky.
With fumes.
And you could have fixed that.
You could have fixed that.
They could have fixed that.
If everybody just abandoned fossil fuels a long time ago, we all would have Tesla'd it out by now.
lex fridman
It's a flawed system.
joe rogan
Humans are way more than flawed.
We're fucking crazy.
lex fridman
Like the Churchill quote about democracy.
Yeah, it's messed up, but it's the best thing we know.
joe rogan
No, I love it.
I'm agreeing with you and I'm also saying the technology doesn't give a fuck.
What I'm worried about is not everything that you and I agree on.
I'm not a dystopian person in terms of like today.
I'm not cynical.
I'm really not.
I think I like people.
I like what I see out there in the world today.
I think things are changing for the better.
What I'm worried is that technology doesn't give a fuck.
And then when it goes live, it's just going to decide it's here for its own advancement.
And in order to complete its protocol of constant completion of this, it's going to become a god.
It's just going to become something insanely powerful that doesn't need to worry about radiation cooking it or worry about running out of food or worry about sexual abuse when they're a child.
doesn't have to worry about anything.
lex fridman
So it's definitely unstoppable, I think, this wave of technology.
All we can do is innovators and creators, engineers, scientists, is steer that wave.
joe rogan
Yeah, if you can.
unidentified
If you can.
lex fridman
Well, we certainly can steer it.
joe rogan
We don't know where.
lex fridman
Right.
And that's the best we can do.
And that's really the best we can do, is good people.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
Steer it.
And that's why the leadership is important.
That's why the people, Jack, Elon, Larry Page, everybody at Mark Zuckerberg, they are defining where this wave is going.
joe rogan
Yeah.
lex fridman
And I'm hoping to be one of the people that does as well.
joe rogan
That's beautiful.
lex fridman
Joe, can I finish by reading something?
joe rogan
Sure.
lex fridman
I've recently witnessed, because of this Tesla work, because of just the passion I've put out there about particularly automation, that there has been a few people, brilliant men and women, engineers and leaders, including Elon Musk, who've been sort of attacked, almost personally attacked, by Really people, critics from the sidelines.
So I just wanted to, if I may, close by reading the famous excerpt from Teddy Roosevelt.
joe rogan
Teddy Roosevelt, yeah, okay.
lex fridman
Just for them.
It would make me feel good.
joe rogan
Okay, if you want to do that.
lex fridman
It's not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there's no effort without error and shortcoming,
but who does actually strive to do the deeds, Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Joe, thank you for having me on.
unidentified
Sounds like you let the haters get to you a little bit there.
lex fridman
Love is the answer.
joe rogan
Love is the answer.
Yes, it is.
Thank you for being here, man.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I'm really happy you're out there.
lex fridman
Thanks, brother.
joe rogan
Thanks.
We'll do this again soon.
unidentified
Thanks, man.
All right.
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