Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan debate free speech, comparing TERFs’ exclusionary tactics to cancel culture’s stifling of fringe ideas like AI consciousness critiques. Rogan dismisses Wikipedia’s reliability for nutrition but credits it in physics, while Fridman admires Comanche resilience and Black Elk’s Lakota suffering account. Both critique factory farming’s ethics despite their carnivore diets, warning of unchecked AI algorithms’ influence over human thought—far riskier than lab-grown meat or Star Wars rides. Progress, they argue, emerges from complexity, but unmoderated platforms may distort it, leaving society trapped in either misinformation or rigid dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
If you're a fucking, if you're a Secret Service guy and you're supposed to be protecting the president, I guarantee you, a bunch of those guys are savages.
Anywhere you can grab a dog collar, if you get your hand in there, if you're strong enough and you have good technique, you know how to go knee on belly, and then you twist it.
It's a very nice side effect, but it's a weird gig, man.
It's a gig that became what it is.
Slowly, without me understanding what was happening, why it was happening, which makes it weirder and weirder.
And with it has come increasingly stronger levels of responsibility.
To where, you know, now I have to actually vet guests and think about what they're saying, whereas before I would have someone on if they're crazy, I was like, let that crazy motherfucker on, let's hear what he has to say.
And people would say a lot of crazy shit, and then they would say, oh, you know, you didn't push back, or you had this person on, and they said something irresponsible, and I had no idea what they were going to say.
There's a lot of people that have said some pretty outrageous things that I had no idea they were going to say.
Yes, because they were mad that I didn't talk to him about censorship.
My take on it was...
It was certainly irresponsible on my part, the first podcast.
Because my take on it was, I just want to see what it's like to be a guy that starts this thing and it becomes probably one of the most important conversation tools the world has ever known.
And also along the way, it becomes something weird.
So the pushback that people get, it's almost like they're taking specific anecdotal pieces of evidence.
Or look, this person said this and it's...
It's not that problematic in our eyes, but they somehow got censored from the platform, removed from the platform.
And they don't look at the bigger picture of how challenging the entirety of it is and how incredible...
First of all, how incredible the platform is to have a conversation, like a global conversation like this, and how hard it is to do to achieve the goal of having...
It sounds like cheesy, but having a healthy conversation, a healthy discourse.
Because...
You want an algorithm and a platform that removes the assholes from the scene because it's a really difficult challenge because one person who's really loud, who's screaming in the room, comes to the party.
You have a cool party, a bunch of cool people, some communists, some right-wingers, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
They can all disagree.
But they're not assholes.
They're there to have an interesting debate, conversation, and so on.
And then there's somebody that comes and just starts screaming one slogan or something like that.
Or is trolling, is completely non-genuine in their way of communication.
They're destroying the nature of the conversation.
And then, of course, that person, if they get, you know, the bodyguards come in and say, can you please leave the party, sir?
Then they get extremely, that's exactly the kind of personality that's extremely upset.
And sometimes they almost look for that.
So what are you supposed to do as Jack Dorsey, as a leader of that kind of platform?
It's a very good question and I really think that there's no real answer.
It's one of the reasons why it's so frustrating.
You know, if you just let people say whatever they want whenever they want to, there's gonna be a lot of people that get turned off to that kind of a platform because you're gonna have a lot of people yelling out racial slurs, ethnic slurs, gender slurs, homophobic slurs, There's going to be a bunch of people that are trolling.
There's going to be a bunch of people that just say things to rile people up and that's all they do.
There's going to be a bunch of people that just want to shit stir and they want to dox people.
So then you have to set parameters.
Like what are the parameters?
You can't dox people.
You can't – don't say racial slurs.
Don't say ethnic slurs.
It's you're managing at scale and you're managing an insane amount of people.
But then there's legitimate criticism that they lean towards progressive people and liberal people and they have woke politics.
Like, for instance, you can get banned from Twitter.
For life if you dead name someone so Lex if you became a Female and you change your name to Ally and I just said fuck you man, you're Lex Banned for life.
That's what a dead name That's dead naming like if you wanted to call Caitlyn Jenner if you want to call Caitlyn Jenner Bruce on Twitter You would get dead named or you would be dead naming her and you would get banned for life a woman named Megan Murphy Who is a TERF? Do you know the TERF is?
That there's women and women's issues and these feminists that have been female their whole life dealing with women's issues do not want trans people coming in and in many cases what you find is that trans people come in and then the conversation changes and it becomes about trans issues and they want these conversations to be about women's issues in feminist movements.
It's complicated, right?
She got banned from Twitter for life for saying a man is never a woman.
They made her take the tweet down, so she took a screenshot of it, took it down, and then put the screenshot back up, and then they banned it for life.
No, she shouldn't, because biologically she's correct.
If there's an argument there, if there's an argument, a scientific argument, a man is never a woman, but can a man identify as a woman, and should you respect him I'm not too deep into thinking about these specific issues, but the question is whether you should get banned for being an asshole or you should get banned for lying.
The insult thing, that's where it gets, it's the party thing.
If you have the asshole douchebag, whatever term you want to use, they show up to the party.
And then if a person shows up to the party and a lot of people leave because they're annoying or whatever, that should be, like we should do something to discourage that behavior.
Yes, and I'm a dirty comedian, and I make fun of everything, including sacred cows, like gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality, my own kids, my wife, my mom, everybody.
I make fun of everybody.
And if you take that stuff out of context and just publish a bunch of it, it makes you look like a moron, or it makes you look like an asshole.
That's, you know, what is the left, right?
What is the left?
In my mind, the left, when I was a child, I always thought of the left because I grew up, my parents were hippies, right?
My stepdad was an architect and before that he was a computer programmer.
He had long hair until I was, I think I was 20 years old when he cut his hair.
I mean long, like down to his ass like a Native American.
And he, you know, they always, he smoked pot when I was little.
I mean, he...
I was always around hippies.
I lived in San Francisco from the time I was seven till I was eleven.
And my family was very left-wing.
They were always pro-gay marriage, pro-gay rights, pro-racial equality, pro...
Just name it, man.
Pro-welfare, pro...
The idea was open-mindedness, education, all these things are good.
And war was bad.
There's a lot of things that maybe they had very strong beliefs on that maybe they weren't entirely nuanced on as well.
You find that about people on the left as much as you find that about people on the right.
But it's...
The radicals on both sides.
There's nothing wrong with being conservative, right?
There's nothing wrong with valuing hard work.
There's nothing wrong with someone who values fiscal frugality or someone who is, you know, you have a conservative view on economics or on social policies.
Instead of just shut them out, that's the problem with this idea of kicking people out of the party.
You kick people out of the party, guys like Daryl Davis never get to convert them.
There's been people from Twitter that have been converted.
You know, Megan Phelps is a famous one.
She was a part of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Her grandfather was Fred Phelps, that fucking famous crazy asshole who was like super rude, like who, you know, would make them...
Take those signs that say God hates fags and literally go to soldiers' funerals and say that soldiers died because God is angry that people are homosexual.
So Megan was completely entrenched in this toxic ideology.
Well, she was indoctrinated into it from the time she was a child.
And, you know, for her, it was the only life she knew, right?
Her family is in that.
And for her, she just, I mean, by whatever, for whatever grace of the grand universe plan, she had enough open-mindedness to take into consideration some of these other things that people were saying.
It's a gray area when you start to drift away from the...
I have the same thing in my...
That's the focus I have in the academic setting of science.
That's the inspiration of your podcast that you gave me, is to talk outside the people that are sort of conventionally accepted by the scientific community.
Like a little bit on the fringes.
On the quote-unquote fringes.
So you have the same thing in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
There's people that are working on specific, it's called deep learning, these learning methodologies that are accepted.
There's conferences and we all kind of accept the problems we're working on and there's people a little bit on the fringes.
There's people in neuroscience, actually anybody thinking about working on what's called artificial general intelligence is already on the fringes.
If you even raise the question, okay, so how do we build human level intelligence?
That's a little bit of a taboo subject.
The consciousness is called the C word for a while.
It's exploring, you know… She's one of the young minds exploring sort of the role of the United States, the foreign policy in the world, militarily, in terms of trade and so on.
So she has an excellent mind who I don't think is on the fringe.
I listen to a lot of radio on the left and the right to try to take in what people are thinking about.
I used to listen to this program, I think it's called the Tom Hartman program.
He's like a major lefty.
But he had this segment called Brunch with Bernie.
And he would invite Bernie Sanders like every Friday or something like that.
And just sort of the intellectual honesty and curiosity that Bernie exhibited was just fascinating.
Sort of like, as opposed to being a political thing that just repeats the same message over and over, which actually what it kind of sounds like when you listen to him now publicly, he's actually a thinking individual and somebody who's open and changing his mind, but within that has just completely been consistent.
I think as a community, if we're looking at the United States as a community, one of the things that, you know, look, it's great to support business.
It's great to have a strong economy.
It's great to give business the confidence to take chances, and a lot of people think Donald Trump does that.
It's also great to take care of our own and I don't think we do that enough.
I don't think we take care of our own enough in terms of we have the same problems in the same inner cities that we've had for decade after decade after decade and there's no significant attempt to change that but meanwhile we do these nation-building projects in other countries and we have the interventionalist foreign policy where we go and invade these countries and try to prop up new New governments and try to support them and we spend insane amounts of money doing that and along the while we don't do
anything to our inner cities that are the exact same fucked up places that they were in the 70s and in the 60s.
His experience was, first of all, he found a piece of paper that showed a crime docket from the 1970s, all the stuff like drugs, crime, robbery.
It was all the same issues in the same neighborhoods that he was patrolling in today.
And he was like, holy shit.
And he realized like, oh, this is a quagmire.
And then he found out about the laws that were in place from way back in the day where you literally, if you were an African American, you couldn't buy a home in certain areas.
They had, what is that term?
Is it redlined?
Is that what the term is?
Where they designate certain areas where they literally won't sell homes to black people.
And he was becoming aware of this shit as he was a cop.
And, you know, in the beginning, he was all gung-ho.
He was like, I'm a cop.
You know, I'm here to bust bad guys and do the right thing.
And then along the way, he kind of recognized, you're dealing with systemic racism.
That's the main thing is like people say democratic socialist and so on is going to...
He's going to make a slight move into whatever direction he's trying to advocate, which in this case is more investment into the infrastructure and so on into our at home.
But like, you know, he's just one human being.
There has to be a Congress that represents the people.
And if there's anything, I think Congress is probably the most hated entity in all of the universe.
Like you look at all the polls of what people like and hate.
Like rats are above in terms of favorability ratings.
So Congress is really the broken system.
Bernie won't be able to do much, except take a little...
The role of the president, as I see it, is to...
One, the terrifying one, is to start wars.
And so it's a very serious responsibility you have to take.
And the second is to inspire the population.
In terms of executive power of enacting laws, there's not much power.
All you can do is...
What our current president is doing, sort of...
Inspiring, in that case, the Republicans in Congress to sort of work together to work on certain legislations.
So you can inspire the Congress and you can inspire the people, but you don't have actual direct power.
So Bernie is not going to turn America into a socialist He's going to take a small step into maybe focusing on one aspect, like healthcare or something like that, like President Obama did, and try to make a little change.
So in that sense, people that are genuine and have ideas, like Andrew Yang is another one.
He has a ridiculous number of ideas.
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I don't know if you've seen He thinks all cops should be purple belts in jujitsu.
Well, I disagree with him on his evaluation of the state of artificial intelligence and automation in terms of its capabilities and having an impact on the economy.
But I also want to be careful sort of commenting on that because I think for him it's a tool to describe the concerns, the suffering that people go through in terms of losing their job, like the pain that people are feeling throughout the country.
It's like a mechanism he uses to talk to people about the future.
You know, there are people that are well off, like the different tech companies that should also contribute to investing in our community.
I mean, the specifics, I want to kind of sit back and relax a little bit.
It's like when you watch a sci-fi movie and the details are all really bad.
I want to just suspension a disbelief or whatever and just enjoy the movie.
In the same way, the stuff he says about AI, he's not very knowledgeable about AI and automation.
So it touches me a little bit the wrong way.
We're not as far along.
The transformative effects of artificial intelligence in terms of replacing humans in trucking, autonomous vehicles, something I know a couple of things about, is not going to be as...
I can speak relatively confidently.
The revolution in autonomous vehicles will be more gradual than Andrew is describing.
But that's okay.
He has a million other ideas.
And UBI, nevertheless, the universal basic income or some kind of support structure of that kind, nevertheless, could be a very good idea for people that lose their job, for people to be mobile in terms of going from one type of job to another type of job, so continually learning throughout their life.
It's just that artificial intelligence, in this case, I don't think will be the enemy.
There could be other things that are a little bit sort of neighbors of artificial intelligence, which is sort of the software world eating up some of the mechanization of factors and so on.
Maybe the fact that...
The kind of way that Tesla and Elon Musk are approaching the design and engineering of vehicles, they're a little bit more software-centric.
We'll change, we'll sort of move some of the job from Detroit, Michigan in terms of cars to the Silicon Valley.
Not necessarily location-wise, but sort of a different type of person would need to be hired to work on cars.
A little bit more software-engineering, software-centric versus the sort of hardcore mechanical engineers, more sort of traditionally called car guys or car gals.
Right.
Yeah, so there'll be some job replacement and so on, but it's not this artificial intelligence, trucks will completely replace your job.
And in the case of trucks, you know, it's not...
There's a lot of complicated aspects about the impact of automation.
Sort of trucking jobs, there's actually a lot of need for jobs.
Like, there's not the truck...
That job, there's already people leaving that job sector.
It's a really difficult job.
It doesn't pay as well as it should.
It's really difficult to train people and so on.
So the impact that he talks about in terms of AI is a little bit exaggerated.
Like I said, a million really good ideas.
He's open-minded.
So in terms of, I think, the nice role of a president is to have ideas, like the Purple Belt one, to inspire people and inspire Congress to implement some of those ideas and be open-minded and not take yourself seriously enough to think that you know all the right answers.
Andrew Yang, Bernie is like that.
Although Bernie is like 78 years old, so he's getting up there.
Do you think that Andrew Yang is off, but ultimately will be correct in terms of the automation timeline?
Do you think that maybe...
He doesn't know clearly as much as you know about automation and artificial intelligence.
But do you think that it's possible that, you know, I think he's looking at a timeline, I think he was thinking within the next 10 years, millions and millions of jobs are going to be replaced.
Do you think that it's more like 20 years or 30 years?
But I think the timeline is much – the timescale is more stretched out.
So 20, 30 years.
And it will continue.
There will be certain key revolutions.
And those revolutions, it's an incorrect word to use, but they will be stretched out over time.
I think the autonomous vehicle revolution is something – To achieve a scale of millions of vehicles that are fully autonomously navigating our streets, I think is 20, 30 years away.
And it won't be like all of a sudden.
It'll be gradual.
It'll be people like the former Google self-driving car, Waymo company who's doing a lot of testing now, incredible engineer.
I visited them for a day.
It'll be expanding their efforts slowly.
They're doing also way more trucks, autonomous trucking.
They're already deploying them in Texas, I think.
And then, of course, Tesla, who's this year going to approach a million vehicles, and they're trying to achieve full self-driving capability.
In fact, there's a lot of people, including myself, think we're quite a few years away, but also on the podcast, just like you, got a chance to talk to Elon Musk, meet him, talk to him in person, and realize that there's people in this world that can make the impossible happen.
So, you know, it's quite incredible in the sense that he is a legit engineer and designer, which is like a pleasure for me.
I've talked to a few CEOs, talked to Eric Schmidt, just CEOs, and they're a little bit more business oriented.
Elon is really, really focused on the first principles to the physics level of the problems that are being solved, whether that's SpaceX with the fundamentals of reusable rockets and going into deep space and colonizing Mars, whether that's in Neuralink, getting to the core, the fundamentals of what it's like to have a computer communicate with the human brain.
And with Tesla, on the battery side, sort of saying...
He threw away a lot of the conventional thinking about what's required to build, first of all, an appealing electric car, but also one that has a long range.
That's something I don't know as much about.
But on the AI side, just...
I mean, he boldly said, from scratch, we can build a system ourselves in a matter of months, now a couple of years, that's able to drive autonomously.
I mean, most people would laugh at that idea.
Most roboticists that know from the DARPA challenge days, most of them know how hard this problem is.
He said, no, no, no, we're not only going to throw away LIDAR, which is this laser-based sensor, we're going to say cameras only, and we're going to use deep learning, machine learning, which is a learning-based system.
So it's a system that learns from scratch, and we're going to teach it to drive from eight cameras and so on.
So just talking to somebody like that was not – the fact that he thinks like that, I think it's just fun to talk to people like that.
I don't meet them often that say, no, no, no, stop this bullshit of thinking that this task is impossible.
Let's say, why is it impossible?
What you find out when you start to think about most problems from first principles is that it's not actually impossible.
And then you have to think, okay, so how do we make it happen?
How do we create an infrastructure that allows you to learn from huge amounts of data?
So one of the most revolutionary things that Tesla is doing and hopefully other car companies will be doing is the over-the-air software updates.
Just like the update that you got, the fact that just like on your phone you can get updates over time It means you can have a learning system, a machine learning based system that can learn and then deploy the thing it learned over time and do that weekly.
That sounds like maybe trivial, but nobody else is doing it and it's completely revolutionary.
So cars, once you buy them, they don't learn.
Most cars.
Tesla learns.
That's a huge thing.
Forget about Tesla Autopilot, all this stuff.
Just the fact that you can update the software, I think it's a revolutionary idea.
And then they're also doing everything else from scratch.
This is the first principles type of thinking.
The hardware.
So the hardware in your car, I don't know when you got the Tesla, but it should be hardware version 2. But that hardware performs what's called inference.
So it's already trained, it's already learned its thing, and it's just taking in the raw sensory input and making decisions.
Okay.
They built that hardware themselves from scratch.
Again, ballsy move.
Now they're building what they're calling, again, he's such a troll, but they're calling Dojo is the name of the specialized hardware for training the neural networks or training the models.
It's the same thing as the more general NVIDIA has graphics processing unit GPUs that all the nerds, all the people like me have been using for machine learning to train neural networks.
It's what most gamers use to play video games, right?
But they have this nice quality that you can train huge neural networks on them.
TPU is a specialized hardware for training neural networks.
GPUs allow you to play video games and train neural networks.
TPUs clean some stuff up to make it more efficient, energy efficient, more efficient for the kinds of computation neural networks need.
Google has them.
A bunch of other companies have them.
You know, most car companies would be like, okay, let me partner with somebody else with Google to use their TPUs or use NVIDIA's GPUs.
Tesla's building it from scratch.
So that kind of from scratch thinking is incredible.
And the other two things that I really like about Musk is the hard work.
We live in a culture, like so many people, like I often don't sleep.
I do crazy shit in terms of just focus, stay up night sometimes.
And often people recommend to me that balance is really important.
Taking a break is important.
That you rejuvenate yourself, you return to it with fresh ideas.
All those things are true.
Sleep is important.
You had people on the podcast tell you how important sleep is.
But what most people don't Don't advise me.
Hard work is more important.
Passion is more important than all of those things.
That should come first.
And then sleep empowers it.
Rest empowers it.
Rejuvenation empowers it.
Especially in engineering disciplines.
Hard work is everything.
And he's sort of unapologetically about that.
It's not like a...
Come to us.
Come work with us.
It'll be a friendly environment with free snacks.
It's like you're going to work the hardest you've ever worked on, whether you agree with him or not, on the most important problems of your life.
I like that kind of thinking because it emphasizes the hard work.
The other part In terms of meeting him in person, I don't know if you got to interact with that off, because when he was on mic with you, he was very kind of...
But the problem with a lot of guys like him is, first of all, it's very difficult to find a replacement for the way he thinks, right?
So if he's a CEO of these companies and he's the one who's the mastermind behind all these things and then he wants to step back, finding a commensurate replacement is insanely difficult.
Because most people who would be Yeah, and there's not many people like him.
I joke around about it, but I think there's a spectrum of evolution.
And his mind is clearly way more advanced than my mind.
There's something going on in his mind in terms of his attraction to engineering issues, solutions to global problems, solutions to traffic problems, pollution problems, all the things that he's...
the Internet.
I mean, he's trying to give the world Internet.
I mean, he's got all these things going simultaneously.
And one of the things that I got out of him when I was talking to him...
Was that he almost has a hard time containing these ideas that are just pouring out of his head like a raging river like he's trying to catch handfuls of water and this raging river of ideas is going through his head You know and when he described his childhood that he thought that everybody was like that and then as he got older you know thought he was insane and Yeah.
It's just sad that you can't celebrate that currently.
But I do think there's one particular aspect of his personality that I also share that pisses people off really bad, which is, like you said, he had a plan, but he's late on that plan.
He keeps promising things and he keeps being like a year or two or three late.
And that really, I don't know if it actually angers people or if people that already don't like you use that as a thing to say why they don't like you, but it's certainly a thing that people say a lot.
But I think that's an essential element of doing extremely difficult things is over-promising and trying to over-deliver.
That's the whole point.
Is to say, to make all the engineers around you believe that it's doable in a year.
And so you trying to say you're an expert in investing in the stock market, I blocked, I removed those people from my life because they don't say any interesting ideas.
I said it.
But, you know, when you're doing legitimate investment, yes, that's a really important service to society.
But if you're commenting on the fundamentals of engineering problems that real engineers are trying to solve, that's not interesting to me.
So that kind of stuff upsets, I think, financial folks.
But the beautiful thing is when you have people buy vaporware And you bring that vaporware to reality.
Well, on that tiny little tangent, I've gotten, I joked about Flat Earth and Space is Fake a little bit, almost like saying that's an interesting way to being open-minded.
And then I realized that's not something to joke about.
That there is a community of people that take it extremely seriously.
And then some of them thank me for acknowledging that the possibility of Oh.
Because even though there is a lot of misinformation in it and there's a lot of, you know, falsehoods, There's a lot of really good information as well, particularly about historical figures and interesting stuff.
If you want to find facts on things, it's great research.
He lived through the transition of them battling with the U.S. soldiers to them being on the reservation.
Fucking insane poverty.
Insane.
Just the stories of people, the illnesses and the deaths, how many people's children died, malnourishment, starvation, abuse, and then just how much they hated where they were living and how they were living.
It's hard to imagine when you're reading that this just happened.
He's talking about the really horrible parts at the end were in the early 1920s, 1930s.
It's hard to imagine.
It's hard to imagine that this tribe from 100 years prior, in the 1820s, We're living wild and free and we're, you know, we're living the same way they've lived for hundreds of years and had this incredible relationship with the land and these incredible religion that they practiced where they worship the earth and the animals and the sky and they had all these concepts
for the way you should live your life and how to Guarantee prosperity and how to guarantee success.
Man, they had a fascinating culture.
And it's gone.
It was wiped off the face of the map.
There was nothing like it anywhere else on Earth.
There was no culture anywhere on Earth that was like the Native American culture in the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s.
But in that period of time, they had this spectacular way of life.
And it was often very cruel and very ruthless, and they warred on each other.
This idea that Native Americans were living in peace and harmony with each other is nonsense.
I mean, they essentially rode with the buffalo, killed buffalo, hunted buffalo, and then raided other tribes.
And then until the white man came, and then they started raiding the white man and killing the white man.
But they were, you know, at war with white people for hundreds of years.
I mean, they were the reason why the West was hard to settle.
I mean, the sneaky shit, I don't know if you've gotten to the point where they were giving people these big swaths of land in Oklahoma, and they essentially set them up to be killed by the Comanche.
They will say, hey, go out here.
We'll give you 1,600 acres.
It's all yours.
And they're like, oh, terrific.
Let's get our family and get in a wagon.
And no one let them know that the wildest motherfuckers that have ever lived on this continent were running that place.
And they would go there and just get slaughtered.
And one after another, families were wiped out that way and people were kidnapped.
And that lady that I have on the wall outside...
- Cynthia Ann Parker, who was adopted by the Comanches.
Her family was murdered in front of her when she was nine years old.
And she became the wife of a great Comanche chief.
And her son became the last Comanche chief, Quanah Parker.
But I think that if you had real jiu-jitsu skills...
You know, what you know now today, particularly because jiu-jitsu has evolved so much.
I mean, even the jiu-jitsu of 2020 is so radically different from the jiu-jitsu of, you know, 1990. It's radically different, like almost unrecognizable in a lot of ways.
Clearly, though, the basics are still the most important, and they're some of the greats of all time who just operate with the basics, whether it's Harder Gracie or Hicks and Gracie.
There's a lot of great, great jiu-jitsu players that just have those solid basics that are just honed to a razor-sharp edge.
Krohn, Krohn Gracie, he's got...
And when I say basic, it is a compliment.
I mean, arm bars, triangles, guillotines, renegade chokes, those types of things, but perfected to a level that is, they don't participate in a lot of the more modern, there's a lot of crafty, weird stuff that a lot of guys try today.
And some of the greats, even the greats that participate in jiu-jitsu matches today and are effective at it, don't really have that kind of style.
Like, I think my favorite thing to do is on YouTube, just watch Roger Gracie matches.
Like, he looks like he's half asleep.
And he demolishes the greatest black belts in the world slowly by just, like in a half-asleep way, taking them down, passing their guard, going to mount and doing a choke.
I got off that diet for this weekend, because I did the month, and then once Saturday came around, I ate Italian food, I had Girl Scout cookies, pasta, and then yesterday I went to Disneyland.
So yesterday I went way, way off the diet and I had ice cream and I ate all kinds of shitty food and I was getting back pains and knee pains and all these kind of weird pains that went away when I was on the diet.
Now, this is not a testament against plant-based diets, because I was eating shit, shitty food, and pasta, which is a lot of bread.
But it's interesting to have this great month where basically two weeks in after the diarrhea died off, I had two solid weeks of no aches and pains and feeling great.
I was like, this is wild.
This is really wild.
I feel amazing.
And then two days of eating shit and like my back hurts right now.
Well, the nice thing about the Joe Rogan effect is that you're trying this diet and you're talking about keto a lot, that's become more socially acceptable to do.
Because I've been eating keto or low carb for many years and doing fasting, like 24, 48 hour fasts.
And I always kind of keep it more in the low down.
But even...
This time, I like traveling.
What I like to do when traveling is I'm trying to be, given my current situation, not spend much money.
One of the best ways to go, either carnivore or keto, is to go to McDonald's and just order beef patties.
I think it's irritable, but you also see things more clearly.
I don't know.
I'll talk to my parents or something like that.
When I'm more well-fed, I'll be like, just enjoy having fun with them.
And if I'm fasted, I'll be like...
Why are you always judging me kind of thing, right?
Like, you realize the thing, the aspects of the interaction, which are problematic, and you want to sort of highlight them.
I'm just sort of noticing it, which is problematic when you're in a working environment, especially sort of deliberating, discussing with other engineers how to solve a problem.
I'm more likely, especially, you know, lead a team to say that somebody is a little bit full of shit.
When I'm fasting, as opposed to being a little bit more kind and eloquent about expressing why they're full of shit.
But I ultimately feel like the direction it's moving in, the reason why it's happening is for good.
I think there's a lot of people that are complaining about things and they're trying to cancel people and all that stuff.
And it's, you know, ultimately, some of it's misguided.
But I think the ideas behind it, like the primary push, like the gravity behind it, is people want less racism, less discrimination, less of a lot of things.
But then along the way you have Hypocritical human behavior that gets involved in this and you have people that are, you know, deeply flawed themselves but pointing out minor flaws in other people and then they get exposed and they feel horrible.
For every person who participates in this cancel culture, it's like… The wave is coming back at you.
I mean, it comes in and it comes out.
And if you go too far out on that fucking pier, it's gonna get you.
And this is part of it that we're learning.
And I think...
What people are today, like, if you look at humanity from, like, the 1930s, it was hard, man.
People lived in a hard way.
It was ruthless.
If you watch films from the 1900s, early 1900s, First of all, the domestic violence was so normal.
Like heroes in movies in the 50s and 60s just smacked women in the face.
Like, it's one of the things that ButcherBox does very well, is they make sure that they have relationships with ranchers who have a commitment to ethically raised animals and ethically killed animals.
And what that means is, you know, they don't participate in anything that has anything to do with factory farming, no antibiotics, no added hormones ever.
And that is possible.
I mean, people have been eating animals from the beginning of time, literally.
97% of the world eats animals.
And this idea that the only way to do it is through factory farming, I don't think that's correct.
The idea is, if you eat meat, you participate in factory farming, and that's horrific.
I don't think that's true.
But I do think it is true when it comes to fast food for the most part.
And that's unfortunate.
And I think if they could, I mean, we need more transparency for sure when it comes to that stuff.
And that's one of the reasons why those ag gag laws, agricultural gag laws where people, there's laws that prevent people from working in these factory farming situations to expose.
There's laws that prohibit them from exposing the horrors of these environments.
That's a real problem.
That's a real issue that's clearly designed to protect that industry and allow them to commit these crimes.
Most people say my voice is very boring, and I talk slowly.
To those people, I say, go fuck yourself, Chomsky.
I love you.
I love you.
You're right.
I'm trying to actually...
It's very difficult to express thoughts, like Sam Harris struggles with this too, to express thoughts with the kind of humor and eloquence that they are in your brain, like to convert them.
As a comedian, you're essentially a storyteller.
So you probably don't even know how you did it.
You're like Haja Gracie.
You've probably developed this art of storytelling, of being able to laugh and make other people laugh, of bouncing back and forth.
To me, most of my life has been spent behind a book or computer, thinking interesting thoughts, but not connecting with other people and doing that dance of conversation.
So learning that dance...
While also thinking is really tough.
So Wachomsky was like a pleasure because we can both be robots.
So, you know, there's all that political stuff that I don't pay attention to.
I mean, he's a major sort of activist.
But he's also a linguist that thinks that language is at the core of everything, of cognition.
Right.
So it's at the bottom.
Everything starts with language.
Cognition, reasoning, perception, all of that is things built on top of language.
So it's a brilliant sort of seminal research.
But at 92 years old, he still looked in my eyes and really listened and really thought and really sharp ideas came out.
You do the same thing.
People ask me, like, meet Joe Rogan.
You don't take yourself too seriously.
Even with your celebrity, with the popularity of the podcast, that's a huge thing.
And with Chomsky, what was really surprising to me is while he's pretty stubborn on his ideas and so on, people criticize him, he's so stubborn in his ways, he didn't take himself too seriously.
I sat there, I'm just some kid talking to him.
He really listened.
The stupid questions, the interesting questions, he really listened.
At 92 years old, to have that kind of curiosity, I was like, I'm so happy when I see that kind of thing.
And especially when you become popular, you get really good at explaining.
So you get like, you do these talks, you do these lectures, you start saying the same thing over and over, and you forget to listen.
Because of this podcast, the Artificial Intelligence podcast, but also Joe Rogan, two different groups of fans whom I both love, people come up to me and start a conversation, and I love it, just listening to them.
And I hope I never lose that.
I'm younger than Chomsky, but I hope you stay that way.
For people who don't know, there's a YouTube channel where people...
I think it's a single YouTube channel that does visual effects, like fake humanoid or robot dog robots that kind of resemble something like Boston Dynamics.
Because I know how dumb it is, but the experience of it like...
It's not even a head.
It's supposed to be a hand, but it looks like a head.
And it, like, looking up at me with that hand, I felt like I was like...
It was magic.
It was like a...
It was like Frankenstein coming to life.
It was this moment of creation.
And what I realized is my own brain sort of anthropomorphizing.
The same way you're, like, looking at these robots and you're thinking, these things are terrifying...
In 10, 20 years, where are we going to be?
That's our brain playing tricks on us.
Because the key thing that's a threat to humanity or an exciting possibility for humanity is the intelligence of the robots, the brains, the mind.
And these robots have very, very little intelligence.
So in terms of being able to perceive and understand the world, very importantly, very importantly, to learn about the world.
From scratch.
So the terrifying thing is, you talked often like with this philosophical kind of notion that Sam Harris talks about, sort of exponential improvement, be able to become human level intelligence, superhuman level intelligence, in a matter of days become more intelligent than that.
That's all learning process.
That's being able to learn.
That's the key aspect.
We're in the very early days of that.
There's an idea of, you know, Big Bang is a funny word for one of the most fundamental ideas in the nature of our universe.
Same way, self-play is a term for, I think, one of the most important powerful ideas in artificial intelligence that people are currently working on.
So self-play, I don't know if you're familiar with a company called DeepMind and OpenAI, so Google DeepMind, and a game.
I know you're a first-person shooter guy, but StarCraft and Dota 2. So last year, these are, what do you call them, real-time strategy, I guess, in people who won millions of dollars in e-sport competitions.
And so OpenAI separately had OpenAI 5, which took on Dota 2. Dota 2 is the computer game based on Warcraft 3. That's the most popular esport game.
And then DeepMind took on StarCraft with their AlphaStar system.
And the key amazing thing is they're similar to AlphaGo and AlphaZero that learn to play Go.
It's the mechanism of self-play.
That's the exciting mechanism that I think if you can figure out how to have an impact on more serious problems than games would be transformative.
Okay, what is it?
It's learning from scratch in a competitive environment.
Thinking of you have two white belts training against each other and trying to figure out how to beat each other without ever having black belt supervision and structures and slowly getting better that way, inventing new moves that way.
Eventually, they get better and better by that competitive process.
that's the machine playing itself without human supervision.
The interesting thing is there's a lot of cases in which if you set up the competitive environment well enough for those two white belts, they'll learn to be black belts.
They'll learn to be not only black belts, they'll learn to be better than – like exactly the kind of evolution that's happening in MMA right now, if you put that in a digital space and speed it up a million-fold, it'll continue to improve.
Let me pause you here because this is one of the things that I think probably translates to AI as it does to Jiu Jitsu.
You need more than one opponent.
Like you can't have one input.
One person training with one person specifically and singularly, you're not going to develop the type of game that you need to become a real black belt in Jiu Jitsu.
What you find is Jiu-Jitsu might be simpler than the general problem of different kinds of StarCrafts and so on.
But there is sets of strategies in this giant space.
There are these complex hierarchical strategies, like high-level strategies and then specifics of different moves that emerge, some of which you didn't even realize existed.
And that requires that you start with the huge amounts of random initial states, like the fat person, the skinny person, the aggressive person, and so on.
And then you also keep injecting randomness in the system, so you discover new ideas.
So even when you reach purple belt, you don't continue with those same people.
You start your own school.
You start expanding to totally random new ideas and expanding in this way.
And what you find out is there's totally surprising to human beings, like in the game of chess or in the game of Go, in the game of Starcraft.
This self-play mechanism can do what sort of AI people have dreamed of, which is be creative.
Create totally new behaviors, totally new strategies that are surprising to human experts.
The second astounding thing about both chess and Go is it's able to create...
Totally new ideas.
I'm not good enough at chess or go to understand the newness of them, but grandmasters talk about the way Alpha Zero plays chess, and they say there's a lot of brilliant, interesting ideas there.
Very counterintuitive ideas.
And that's such a...
And that's all.
The first breakthroughs didn't have as much self-play.
They were trained on human experts.
But AlphaZero and AlphaStar and OpenAI5, these systems are all fundamentally self-play, meaning no human supervision, starting from scratch.
So no black belt instructor.
And that means...
So learning from scratch, that's exceptionally powerful.
That's a process from zero, you can get to superhuman level intelligence in a particular task in a matter of days.
That's super powerful, super exciting, super terrifying if that's kind of what you think about.
The challenge is we don't know how to do that in the physical space, in the space of robots.
There's something fundamentally different about being able to perceive, to understand this environment, to do common sense reasoning.
The thing we really take for granted is our ability to reason about the physics of the world, about the fact that things weigh things, that you can stack things on top of each other, the fact that some things are hard, some things are soft, some things are painful when you touch them.
All that like there seems to be a giant Wikipedia inside our brain of like common sense dumb logic that's very tough to build up.
That's, yeah, it seems to be an exceptionally difficult learning problem that Boston Dynamics will have to solve in order to achieve even the same kind of physical movement behavior that we saw in those videos.
And then on top of that, to have the ethical behavior, not the ethical, sort of the objective, the complex strategies involved in first following orders and then getting frustrated and then shooting everybody.
That's an exceptionally difficult thing to arrive at because ultimately these systems operate on a set of objectives.
And what a lot of people that think about artificial general intelligence say, the objectives we need to inject in these systems that they're trained on need to have one uncertainty.
So they should always doubt themselves.
Just like if you want to be a good blackball you should always be sort of Always open-minded.
Sort of relax.
Always learn techniques.
It's okay to get submitted.
So always have a degree of uncertainty about your world view.
The kind of thing we criticized Twitter outrage mobs for not having.
So having uncertainty.
And the other thing is always have a place where there should be human supervision.
And I think we have good mechanisms for that in place.
I'm very optimistic about where these kinds of learning systems...
The exciting thing is, Boston Dynamics is not opening up their platform.
So they're working with a few people.
I'm trying to make time to make it happen.
To work with them to build stuff on top of the platform.
Sorry, I'm referring to Spot Mini as a platform.
So this robot is this dumb...
It's like a Roomba.
It's a dumb mechanistic thing that can move for you.
But you can add a brain on top of it.
So you can make it learn.
You can make it see the world and so on.
That's all extra.
That's not what Boston Dynamics offers.
So they want to work with people like me to add that kind of capability.
And that's exciting because...
Now you can have hundreds of people start to add interesting learning capabilities.
So I may have to retract my words about how far away we are with the capabilities of these robots once you now open up to the internet.
So I was speaking to Boston Dynamics.
I think they're solving the really hard robotics problem.
But once you open it up to the huge world of researchers that are doing machine learning and doing computer vision and doing AI research, the kind of capabilities they might add to these robots might surprise us.
Wasn't there, there has been research done on making artificial insects that have like little cameras inside of them that look like a dragonfly or some sort of bug and they fly around and they can film things.
And the thing that terrifies a lot of people is going more microscopic than that, more like robots inside the body that help you cure diseases and so on, certain things, even at the nanoscale.
So the real question about this artificial intelligence stuff that everybody seems to – the ultimate end of the line, what Sam Harris is terrified of, is it becoming sentient and it making its own decisions and deciding that we don't need people?
I think that's a story that's the most compelling, the sexiest story that the philosopher side of a Sam Harris is very attracted to.
I am also interested in that story, but I think achieving sentience, I think that requires also creating consciousness.
I think that requires creating the kind of intelligence and cognition and reasoning abilities That's really, really difficult.
I think we'll create dangerous software-based systems before then.
They'll be a huge threat.
I think we already have them.
The YouTube algorithm, the recommender systems of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, from everything I know, having talked to those folks, having worked on it, The challenging aspect there is they have the power to control minds, what the mass population thinks.
And YouTube itself and Twitter itself don't have direct ability to control the algorithm exactly.
One, they don't have a way to understand the algorithm.
And two, they don't have a way to control it.
Because...
But what I mean by control is, control it in a way that leads to, in aggregate, a better civilization.
Meaning like, sort of the Steven Pinker, the better angels of our nature, sort of encourage the better sides of ourselves.
It's very difficult to control a single algorithm that recommends the journey of millions of people through the space of the internet.
It's very difficult to control that.
And I think that intelligence instilled in those algorithms will have a much more potentially either positive or detrimental effect than sentient killer robots.
I hope we get to sentient killer robots.
Because that problem I think we can work with.
I'm very optimistic about the positive aspects of approaching sentience, of approaching general intelligence.
There's going to be a huge amount of benefit and I think there will be...
There's a lot of mechanisms that can protect against that going wrong.
Just from knowing the...
We know how to control intelligent systems.
When they are sort of in a box, when there are singular systems, when they're distributed across millions of people and there's not a single control point, that becomes really difficult.
And that's the worry for me is the distributed nature of dumb algorithms.
On every single phone, sort of controlling the behavior, adjusting the behavior, adjusting the learning journey of different individuals.
To me, the biggest worry and the most exciting thing is recommender systems, what they're called at Twitter, at Facebook, at YouTube, YouTube especially.
That one has just like I think you mentioned, there's something special about videos in terms of educating and sometimes indoctrinating people and YouTube.
Has the hardest time...
I mean, they have such a difficult problem on their hands in terms of that recommendation because they don't...
This is a machine learning problem, but knowing the contents of tweets is much easier than knowing the contents of videos.
Our algorithms are really dumb in terms of being able to watch a video and understand what's being talked about.
So all YouTube is looking at is the title and the description.
And that's it.
Mostly the title.
It's basically keyword searching.
And it's looking at the clicking, viewing behavior of the different people.
So it figures out that the Flat Earth Well, YouTube in particular, they're trying to do something about the influx of conspiracy theory videos and the indoctrination aspect of them.
One of the things about videos is, say if someone makes a video And they make it on a very particular subject, and they speak eloquently and articulately, but they're wrong about everything they're saying.
They don't understand the science.
Say if they're talking about artificial intelligence.
They're saying something about things that you are an expert in.
They could, without being checked, without someone like you in the room that says that's not possible because of X, Y, and Z, without that, They can just keep talking.
So one of the things they do, whether it's about flat earth or whether it's about dinosaurs being fake or nuclear bombs being fake, they can just say these things and they do it with an excellent grasp of the English language, right?
So they say it They're very compelling in the way they speak.
They'll show you pictures and images, and if you are not very educated, and you don't understand that this is nonsense, especially if you're not skeptical, you can get roped in.
You can get roped in real easy, and that's a problem.
And it's a problem with some of the people that work in these platforms.
Their children get indoctrinated, and they get angry.
Their children get indoctrinated.
Now, what's interesting is They get indoctrinated also with right-wing ideology, and then people get mad that they're indoctrinated by Ben Shapiro videos.
And to be fair, so the cash they have, they spend like Facebook AI research groups, some of the most brilliant.
It's a huge group that's doing general open-ended research.
Google Research, Google Brain, Google DeepMind are doing open-ended research.
They're not doing the ad stuff.
They're really trying to build...
That's the cool thing about these companies having a lot of cash is they can bring some of the smartest people and let them work on whatever in case it comes up with a cool idea.
Like autonomous vehicles with Waymo.
It's like, let's see if we can make this work.
Let's throw some money at it even if it doesn't make any money in the next 5, 10, 20 years.
Let's make it work.
That's the positive side of having that kind of money.
Do you feel like that line is getting more blurred with the access to all those MIT courses that are online and the extreme amount of data that's available to people, that there are going to be a lot of people that, even though they might not be classically trained, they have a massive amount of information?
First of all, shout out to Jamie for being an incredible mastermind of audio production.
The reason I'm giving a shout out is because I suck so badly, I didn't have to do it.
I do it all myself.
But I do it pretty good.
When you learn it yourself from scratch, just like with Jiu Jitsu or with music and so on, I learn guitar from scratch.
You can learn with the online materials they have now.
You can become really good.
And the journey you take is not the traditional conformist journey through that education process.
You take your own journey.
And when you have millions of people taking their own journey through that process, There's going to be brilliant people without a PhD or without ever having gone to college.
I mean, it's difficult to know what to do with that, especially about political questions like economists.
There's these, you know, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner...
Economists, Harvard economists, you know, they're supposed to be the holders of the truth and the fundamentals of our economy and when is there going to be a crash, what's good for the economy is the left, the right, what taxation system is good for the economy.
But nobody really knows.
Same with like nutrition science, psychology, economics, anything that involves humans is a giant mess that expertise can come from anywhere.
Posted that, you know, Conor's gonna be cowboy before that happened.
I'm also a huge fan of the different styles of fighters in MMA. And I'm surprised how much shit actually Conor gets.
Even though he brought...
Besides...
Besides sort of all the...
All the mess that came with him.
He also brought an interesting style, an interesting way of approaching fights, an interesting style of thinking and also philosophizing about fighting, which I think is amazing.
It clashes with the ideas of Khabib.
To me, Khabib Nurmagomedov, It'd be...
So I posted that Conor would be Cowboy, and...
Well, I didn't know Dana was going to say what he was going to say, but he would face Masvidal, and I thought he could beat Masvidal.
And then the biggest fight ever, 30,000 people in Moscow against Khabib.
Dude, I mean, he's a slow starter in terms of his career, being recognized for the kind of fighter that he is now, and also being recognized publicly as a superstar.
But his time has come.
He is here.
He is a fucking star.
When that camera went on him...
And the audience saw him, that crowd went bananas.
What George St. Pierre told me about training with Russian nationals in Montreal, he said they're so technical in that you get a lot of Americans that are definitely technical, but they emphasize that Being hard and tough and grueling training routines and grinding, butting heads in practice.
And he said, whereas the Russian nationals are far more committed to drilling, far more committed to the technical aspects of exchanges and going through one technique after the other, chaining these techniques together, understanding the paths.
Also, one of the, at least to me, one of the differences, it could be similar to Yael Romero's actually philosophy, but the philosophy of the Dagestani, the Russian people, the Soviet Union, is that recognition, fame, money, all that stuff doesn't matter.
Even winning doesn't matter.
The purity of the art is what matters.
unidentified
At least with the Sayetiev brothers is what they stood for.
The Cowboy fight, his coaches were saying he's never looked better.
That he just was on fire and so focused and so...
So accurate and and precise in training and that he was just on fire and that just seemed to be that all of the Bullshit and the distractions and all the things that sort of come with being the kind of global superstar that Connor is He managed to figure out a way to get away from those and to just really concentrate on his craft and and pull everything to a Championship level again and god damn it.
I mean, he didn't in this fight with Cowboy at all.
He didn't do any trash talking.
I wonder if maybe he has learned.
And I wonder if, you know, his desire to beat Khabib...
It eclipses his desire to get inside of his head and play all the games that he usually plays and the promotional games that ultimately probably won't be necessary.
But I think, you know, the UFC is trying to push for it right now.
They're pushing for it right now, a rematch with Khabib, but they're ignoring Tony Ferguson in a lot of ways, in my eyes.
Dude, the way he ragdolled Rafael Dos Anjos, the way he steamrolled, like, I mean, he's beaten top-flight competition and made them look like they have no business being in there with him.
So, Bovaysar Saitiev would read Boris Parstanak, which is a famous Russian poet, won the Nobel Prize before every match, and he kind of captures that ethic.
I know there's a bunch of Russian people that appreciate that.
The translation is a bit crappy.
It's very difficult to translate the Russian language.
But it's...
The others, step by step, will follow the living imprint of your feet.
But you yourself must not distinguish your victory from your defeat.
And never for a single moment betray your credo or pretend.
But be alive.
Only this matters.
Alive and burning to the end.
So this is the end of a poem that represents the fact that most of the poem says that fame, recognition, money, none of that matters.
The winning and losing, none of that matters.
What matters is the purity of the art.
Just giving yourself completely over to the art.
So like others will write your story.
Others will tell whether you did good or bad.
Others will inspire using your story.
But as the artist, so in the case of Pasternak, he's a poet, writer, wrote Dr. Zhivago, is the art, you should only think about the art and the purity of it and the love of it.
And so when you look at Bouvasir Saiteyev and the brothers and the whole Dagestan region, They shunned fame.
So the thing that Khabib is thrust into this MMA world, which is fundamentally, I mean, it's a popular sport.
It's an interesting thing.
I mentioned, I think last time I was on here, the most terrifying human being.
You know investors when they like buy a penny stock seeing it's gonna blow up to me the most terrifying human being in the heavyweight division the the Russian tank I mentioned last time the Sadolayev who now just continues destroying everybody and it looks like he's already won the gold medal one bunch of world championships he's a heavyweight the heavyweights in the UFC should be scared.
I think what's going to happen is once likely wins gold at this Olympics, he's going to, you know, this titanic ship, a 23-, 24-year-old ship is going to start thinking and turning.
Maybe there is artistry.
Maybe there is skill and courage in mixed martial arts.
The direction of the vehicle, the way the vehicle moves, it's very complex.
There's no tracks.
So you're riding around in this vehicle, and the vehicle, like, they're shooting at you, the vehicle has to back up, you go into this new door, the vehicle knows how to go around a corner, and what's that guy's name?
Darth Maul is trying to cut through the wall.
Spoiler alert.
Fucking, this new ride is amazing.
It's crazy how intricate and complicated it is and how far off the deep end Disneyland went to create this thing.
I mean, it looks so crazy.
I mean, you're like, how much money did this cost?
This is it right here.
So you're riding around in these things and stormtroopers are shooting at you.
So I think there's some, like there's very minimal AI in this because AI creates uncertainty and uncertainty is very undesirable in situations like this.
Bostrom relies on, I mean, he was relying on theories in terms of like mathematical theories of probability to say that he thinks it's more likely that we're in a simulation.
I think there's going to—the three paths that he highlighted, it makes it sound like it's so clear that it's just three, but I think there's going to be a huge amount of possibilities of the kinds of simulations.
Like to me, I keep asking, you know, to ask Elon Musk about the simulation where he said— What's on the other side?
What's outside the simulation.
Yeah, I think I asked, what would you ask an AGI system?
You said, what's outside the simulation is the question.
Because it's a ridiculous notion if you think of it literally because it's not a testable thing.
We don't know how to test.
Why are you talking about this?
Why do you sit down with Elon Musk and talk about the simulation when you're sitting with a world expert in particular aspects of rockets or robotics?
I'm an expert.
I can't believe I just said that.
I'm not an expert in anything.
But I know a few things about autonomous vehicles.
I like to think of it as...
How would we build a simulation?
What would be a compelling enough virtual reality game that you want to stay there for your whole life?
That's a first step there.
That's useful to think about what is our reality?
What aspects are most interesting for us humans to be able to perceive with our limited perception and cognitive abilities, interpret and interact with?
And then the bigger question then is how do you build a larger scale simulation that would be able to create that virtual reality game, which I think is a possible future.
We're already creating virtual worlds for ourselves on Twitter and social networks and so on.
I really believe that virtual reality...
We'll spend more and more of our lives in the next 50 to 100 years in virtual worlds.
And the simulation hypothesis and simulation discussion is part of that.
I think there's...
The question of what's outside simulation is really interesting.
That's the other way of...
Because what created us?
What started the whole thing?
It's the modern version of asking...
What is God?
What does God look like?
It's asking, what does the programmer look like?
I think that's a fascinating question.
But arguing that we're already living in a simulation, I think you've got stuck on that little point.
And so he's been fighting battles in the philosophy game.
Like, you ask them, does somebody disagree with him on these hypotheses?
And there's a bunch of philosophers that disagree with him, including Sean Carroll on the philosophical level.
And a lot of the arguments are in philosophy and they're sort of technical and they're about language and about terms and so on.
But I think, yeah, it's very possible that we live in a simulation.
I think...
One of the constructs of physics, theoretical physics, with many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, as Sean has talked to you about, reveals some interesting fundamental building blocks of our reality.
There's something I don't think people have talked to you about, which is the coolest thing to me, the most amazing thing that nobody can explain.
Yeah, things called cellular automata.
And there's a guy, a mathematician named John Conway who came up in the 70s with a thing called Game of Life.
And cellular automata are these two-dimensional, one-dimensional, but Game of Life is a two-dimensional grid Where every single little cell is really dumb and it behaves based on the cells next to it.
And it's born when there's like a certain number, like three cells alive next to it and it dies otherwise.
So it's like a simple rule for birth and death.
And all it knows is its nearby surrounding and its own life.
And if you take that system with a really dumb rule and expand it in size, arbitrary complexity emerges.
You can have Turing machines, so you can simulate perfect computers with that system.
And it can grow, and all these behaviors grow.
Like if you watch, if people Google Game of Life, and you can watch this extremely dumb, simple system just grow arbitrary complexities.
And what you start to realize that from such incredibly simple building blocks that don't know anything about the bigger world around them, you can build our entire universe.
You can build the kind of complexities we see in us.
So we think that God...
It's like designing every little aspect or whatever of our world or a simulation hypothesis.
The simulation is designed by hand, like I'm going to craft these things.
What you realize is all you need to do is just set some initial conditions, set some really basic rules, And allow the system to grow.
As long as it can grow arbitrarily, just crazy stuff, amazing stuff can happen.
From simplicity, complexity can emerge.
If you study this a little bit closer, just watch it.
People can watch Game of Life on YouTube and think about what it's showing for 10 minutes.
It'll blow your mind.
The fact that from...
Simplicity, arbitrary complexity, beauty can emerge.
It's incredible.
For the simulation, the creator of the simulation is probably some 13-year-old nerd living in his mom's basement.
It's probably just set some rules in this video game and press play.
And then arbitrary complexity can emerge.
It can have a Joe Rogan, it can have an Elon Musk, all the technologies that we've developed, and probably millions of other alien species that are living throughout our universe.
So the, yeah, that to me, the cellular automata reveals that the simulation is much easier to create than we might think.
But there's a lot of variability in the kinds of simulations we'll create.
I think the simulation hypothesis thinks there's one.
But I think there's going to be a lot of varieties.
There's a lot of possible different rule sets.
There's a lot of different physical mediums in which these simulations could be created.
It can be a completely virtual world.
The role of consciousness, whether you make most people conscious or not, whether most of them are philosophical zombies, they're just like non-player characters and it's just you or you have, or is your mind simulated, like the role of suffering.
So consciousness brings with it this idea of basically, you know, subjective experience.
A subjective experience comes with the idea of pain and fear and so on.
The thing, again, my Russian romanticization of it, but I think fear of death is essential.
Scarcity is essential for beauty, for life.
And that's a nice feature of this little simulation we've got going on.
That there could be a lot of different alternatives, I think.
It could be less individualistic, less consciousness can be present in different kinds of forms.
So I see there's a lot more options than those three that he highlights.
And we can destroy ourselves in a lot of interesting ways.
The entire civilizations from AI to nuclear weapons to biological, to all kinds of weapons.
The conflict, by the way, also, I don't know if you're even aware, you're kind of, even though you were thrust into politics, you're not aware of politics, but there is the Iowa caucus going on today.
Oh, there's always going to be conflict with all groups of people, with everything.
I mean, there's conflict in the comedy community.
I'm sure there's conflict in the AI and autonomous vehicle community.
There's conflict.
I mean, and those things are critical.
You know, you learn from conflict.
If everything was just simple and easy, and there was no resistance whatsoever, nothing would get done.
And also, your own personal systems would never get tested.
I feel like every adversity that you experience is really a gift, because on the other end of that adversity, there's an opportunity for massive growth.
What was that Think and Grow Rich quote that...
Lovato said the other day every adversity carries the seed of an equivalent advantage.
One of the things in this book that I'm in the middle of, I'm actually towards the end of this Black Elk book, is it details the invention of the automobile and the implementation of it and how the world changes.
So during this time where Black Elk was a young boy, sees Custer get killed, takes his first scalp, remembers the sound of the man gritting his teeth as he's cutting his hair off, like cutting his scalp off.
And then later on in his life, as he's an older man, the world goes from very few automobiles to most people have an automobile during his lifetime.
Not scary, but I don't know what it would feel like to...
Be born in this natural world to see the kind of suffering in the U.S. military and then see the technology of the Industrial Revolution kind of propagate and be faced with that.
I mean, progress seems to be inevitable complexity.
Inevitable, never-ending complexity.
And then there's this push towards that.
And I've always wondered...
If, I mean, Elon has this saying that human beings are the biological bootloader for AI. And I've always thought that if you paid attention to the human being's desire for materialism, like materialism seems to be like a constant.
Throughout cultures, people want things.
And when they have things, they want better things.
They want newer things.
Well, that generates a consistent level of innovation inside that civilization, that culture.
People are going to make better stuff because people are going to want better stuff.
So they're going to improve upon things.
Well, if you just scale that and you keep going, improving, improving, what do you get to?
Well, you get to something like artificial intelligence.
You get to something like some sort of...
Some sort of an event, some sort of a thing where the world changes.
And I think technology will help us ride that wave.
I'm an optimist in that sense.
We haven't talked about much, but I'm an optimist on Neuralink.
I think there'll be a few exciting developments there.
So Neuralink, Brain Computer Interfaces, I think it's a really exciting possibility there.
That Nick Bossom was too also skeptical about.
I'm more positive about it.
Increasing the bandwidth of our brain, being able to communicate with the internet, with the information.
It doesn't necessarily need to be through brain-computer interfaces, but increasing that bandwidth to expand our ability of our mind to reason.
Not to expand the ability to reason, sorry.
To take the mechanism of our mind's ability to reason and expand it with access to a lot of information.
And increase that bandwidth to be able to reason with facts.
Just like we can look up stuff on Wikipedia now, increasing the speed at which we can do that can, I think, fundamentally transform our ability to think.